Abstract
Philosopher Jacques Rancière asserts that today ‘real politics appears to be the implementation of a fiction: the fiction that decides who is legal and who illegal on a territory and the thresholds of tolerance that ensure security and harmony in a country’. Through his ‘political poetics’, Behrouz Boochani’s own distinctive use of language also expressly challenges this fiction, as well as the competitive (neoliberal) register of present-day politics. Alert to historical injustice, contemporary political struggle, and the uncertain future of humanity, Boochani rebuts the claim that some lives matter less than others, or that some lives do not matter at all. His writing ruptures the seeming coherence of dominant truths, producing alternative narratives – structures of fiction – to inform the possibility of critical social change....