The age of ‘post-truth’ has shifted the grounds of the debate around fact and fiction. As fact-checking is not proving an adequate antidote to post-truth politics, the need emerges for new modes of... Show moreThe age of ‘post-truth’ has shifted the grounds of the debate around fact and fiction. As fact-checking is not proving an adequate antidote to post-truth politics, the need emerges for new modes of critique. This essay probes the political force of the fictional in new languages of protest. It centers on recent demonstrations in Madrid, Seoul, and Toronto that used holograms to oppose the criminalization of protest, increasing state control of public space or violation of people’s land. The hologram protests fostered a spectral space, in which the oppositional hierarchy between fiction (as non-serious, trivial) and reality was contested and redrawn, but differently. They thereby issued a critique of neoliberal governmentality that also posed an unexpected challenge to post-truth politics. If post-truth rhetoric invites people’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ by simulating facticity to produce ‘felt truths,’ the hologram protests used the virtual and the fictional to pierce through this illusion. Functioning as Freud’s ‘literary uncanny,’ they reintroduced the conflict between fiction and reality as a condition for critique in a post-truth era. Show less