Edinburgh University Press Indirectness: A Plea for Truth in Times of Post-Truth

Challenges some of today’s most renowned Western thinkers to reconsider truth under 21st-century conditions Built around the original concept of indirectness to illuminate a neglected dimension of truth Challenges 20th-century relativisms (postmodernism, historicism) and 21st-century denigrations of truth (post-truth), aiming to rehabilitate a strong concept of truth as evental, logically reconstructible, historically irreversible, and non-arbitrary in relation to reality Develops the philosophical concept of indirectness, arguing that truth does not arise through direct alignment with its object, but through mediated displacements that open the space of the Real Applies the concept of indirectness to contemporary phenomena such as political emancipation, new forms of subjectivity, aesthetic experience, film theory, and popular culture Reconstructs the subject as the necessary effect of the logical space of indirectness, defending the integrity of subjectivity against post-humanist tendencies that risk dissolving the Self as the bearer of freedom and interiority Brings together leading researchers from philosophy, psychoanalysis, political thought, and cultural studies, including Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek and Frank Ruda We are said to live in a ‘post-truth’ era, yet our time is equally marked by an obsession with reality. From new realism in philosophy to the cult of authenticity in culture and the hyper-technological tracking of bodies and minds, countless efforts seek ever more direct access to what is supposedly ‘most real’. This volume challenges the crisis-ridden formula of truth striving to grasp reality directly – forever approaching it, yet always falling short. Instead, it rethinks truth through the lens of indirectness and allows it to unfold in the here and now. Drawing on philosophical, political and aesthetic perspectives, the essays examine how erring is inherent to genuine insight, how fictions reveal facts, how illusions can enable emancipatory struggles, and how strategies of indirectness in literature, cinema and popular culture produce the effect of truth.