Blogtrotting: When is a Truth not a Truth?
From Jodi Dean
When is a Truth not a Truth?
When it has to be excessively enforced.
This is how Zizek responds to Stavrakakis’s siding with Badiou on the matter of totalitarian danger.
Badiou warns of the totalitarian danger of enforcing a truth on a situation and ignoring the nameless or multiplicity of reality that resists subsumption under a truth-procedure. Zizek criticizes Badiou on this point on the grounds of an incompatibility between truth and excessive enforcement. He writes:
a Truth is never enforced, because the moment the fidelity to Truth functions as an excessive enforcement, we are no longer dealing with a Truth, with fidelity to a Truth-event.
This doesn’t strike me as convincing, particularly insofar as Truth is determined retroactively. For this determination to be made, ruthless enforcement may well be necessary. Perhaps the better way to put this is to say that ‘excessive’ has a termporal characteristic. What may seem excessive at one point is later determined to have been just right, even measured as a response. The indeterminacy here is unavoidable.
Zizek’s example of Stalinism is particularly problematic. He says that the truth that was not a truth that Stalinism enforced was the vision of a centralized planned economy. This is a problem for a number of reasons.