Post-truth politics and indebted sovereignties.

Abstract

Moving from a critical reading of Hannah Arendt’s view of the relationship between truth and politics, this essay reframes the relationship between post-truth and politics within contemporary democracies, where a) truth acquires the same status of radical immanence as neoliberal governmentality and the same status of equivalence and exchangeability as commodities and the market, b) the imperative of transparency redefines the public sphere, c) the theatre of representation transforms into the set of presentification, without any border between the visible and the invisible, the sayable and the unsayable. Within such a framework the parresiastic practice of saying one’s own truth must be reconsidered, alongside and beyond the foucauldian proposal, as a relational and political practice rather than an individual and ethical style of life.