Event

Abstract:

"In this presentation, I challenge the widely accepted discourse of post-truth politics, which finds support in what I will refer to as the ‘antinomy hypothesis’ – the belief that politics and truth are opposites and external to one another, where one exists the other disappear; truth is abstract and absolute, while politics is a theater of appearances with no room for truth. In contrast, I would like to explore the conditions of possibility for thinking that we inhabit a world of post-truth politics, by proposing the concept of the ‘politics of truth’ – the struggle at the most general level of society where the true is separated from the false and where what gets to count as truth and reality is decided. If truth only has value in so far as it serves life then the central problem in the politics of truth, I will argue, is to establishes the socio-political limits of thought: how and by what practices is it possible for thought to test its own truth in politics? It is by erecting the epistemological space that sets out possible answers to this question that thought became the master of truth, which today has taken form of hyper-real politics of truth. I will thus ask the genealogical question: what will or wills have shaped the politics of truth, so that it today has become hyper-real? Previously, I would note, the politics of truth has been problematized in thought through the concepts of parrhēsia, exhortation, and public critique. The challenge that faces us in the present, it seems to me, is that in hyper-real politics of truth – where the real is in the process of being replaced by its copy – there is no space for the difference of thought, only the positive mode of thought that affirms and produces more truth."

Chair is Research Director at NUPI, Ole Jacob Sending.