Subject to truth

The chapter elaborates the notion of regime of equivalence by addressing it in a more philosophical context. Firstly, it discusses the attempts to present postmodern or post-structuralist philosophers as somehow complicit in the rise of post-truth due to their sceptical or relativist approach to truth. We argue that the philosophical problematization of particular truth claims or entire theories of truth must necessarily presuppose their existence, which differentiates these approaches clearly from the post-truth disposition that renders truths indistinct from opinions. Moreover, we shall demonstrate how the philosophical critique of truth, undertaken by such authors as Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben actually helps us understand what is at stake in the post-truth condition. In their own different ways these authors are concerned less with the epistemological questioning of truths than with illuminating their ethico-political functioning in our subjectivation. If the meaning and function of truth consist primarily in the way it participates in the subjectivation of speaking beings, then the effects of the post-truth disposition are even more thoroughgoing than we have hitherto imagined, since they destabilize the very core of our subjectivity.