Why is there truth? Foucault in the age of post-truth politics
Prozorov, S. (2019). Why is there truth? Foucault in the age of post-truth politics. Constellations : An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 26(1), 18-30. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12396
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2019Copyright
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Contemporary debates about post‐truth politics have raised the question of the complicity of Michel
Foucault’s thought in the apparent decline of the authority of truth in Western democracies. In this article
we probe this question in the analysis of Foucault’s theory of true discourses developed in his 1980‐1981
lecture course ‘Subjectivity and Truth’. In this course Foucault argues for non‐necessary and supplementary
character of truths in relation to the reality of which they speak. This argument leads him to abandon the
familiar approaches to truth as reflecting, concealing or rationalizing reality and look for the effects of truth
in the processes of subjectivation. We explore the affinities of this concept of truth with Alain Badiou’s theory
of truth procedures, which was developed as an alternative to Foucault’s alleged empiricism. Finally, we
discuss the way Foucault constructs the relation between truth and democracy and highlight its differences
from contemporary truth denialism.
...


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