ABSTRACT
For a long time, philosophy needed fiction, roughly speaking, only when figments of the imagination were called for. Sometimes this would be for arbitrarily combined characteristics, and sometimes for a self-contradictory non-entity. Just how fundamental the status of fiction for contemporary philosophy actually is, can be ascertained with a certain prominence. In contrast, for more than half a century now, the philosophy of dissent has untiringly stressed that at the very root not only of politics but also of language itself as people use it-a conflict is present which cannot be appropriately resolved. In the context of politics and aesthetics, a specific term is interesting, namely that of "parasocial interaction", in which a person first feigns a social relationship to another person in order, then, to form that relationship: a fiction with real consequences. In general terms, the as-if structure therefore only characterises the fictitious element in everyday, political or aesthetic judgements and actions.
