Gatherings. Politics and visibility beyond the contemporary urban phantasmagorias

The city as metaphor, as set forth in the famous statement of Le droit à la ville, reveals itself as a strange theoretical object, marked by a circularity with no escape. As far as we must intend it as a projection of the society on the ground, we cannot rely on State or Enterprise, still the two matrices by which contemporary societies have been structured, as valid models of ratio nality to understand the city itself. Beyond this paradoxical outcome, we can read in embryo in Lefebvre’s analysis, the necessity to recon sider the conditions in which a city achieves its own visibility, as well as such a visibility as framework in which performativity of citizens’ urban forms of life can or cannot deploy. Start ing from Lefebvrian concept of habitat, as ex ample of such reductive and normative frame, further questions on the relationship between visibility and performativity in the urban con text will be taken in account, considering the epistemological contribution provided by Fou cault and Fanon strategies, up to Judith But ler’s latest analysis on contemporary forms of phantasmagoric inversion and on public gath erings as a possible way to subvert the current regimes of visibility.