The truth : before, after

Post-truth is the word of the year, but does it designate a moment or a regime? What does it mean to live post-truth, and how can a historical reflection on the forefront of truth shed light of intelligibility on our contemporary hauntings? We take as our starting point an analysis by Michel Foucault, who, in Du gouvernement des vivants, establishes five historical articulations between the art of governing and the manifestation of truth. Turning this genealogy on its head, whose moments overlap rather than follow one another, we look beyond the threshold of Machiavellian repulsion to examine medieval doctrines of truth: making the pope a "doctor of truth", the Gregorian reform reinforced the transcendental theory of truth as a hypostasis of Christ. But this did not prevent the parallel development, especially from the ^14th century onwards, of rational procedures for approximating truth through "probable certainties", building a logical definition of truth. For the power of the learned is founded on "the orthodoxy of the implausible" (Catherine König-Pralong), in other words, the weakness of belief. The lecture concludes with a return to Machiavelli and an analysis of his demand forandar drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa.

Contents

• "The raison d'être of this lecture? Just open your eyes - those who would be reluctant to do so will find themselves there in what I have said" (Michel Foucault, November 24 1971, Theories and penal institutions)
• Abstract from the previous lecture: on the threshold of a history of the effects of the true
• Post-truth, word of the year according to the Oxford Dictionary - Post-factual politics and the "post-truth era": three ambiguities
• Parrêsia and truth-telling, Demosthenes versus Aeschines
• Something other than the political lie ("the art of convincing the people by necessary falsehoods", Jonathan Swift, 1733)
• "The character of the republic is to conceal nothing, to walk straight to the point, in the open, to call men and things by their names" (Camille Desmoulins, quoted by Pierre Rosanvallon, Le bon gouvernement, Paris, 2015)
• Post-truth, fact-checking and bullshit
• "The deliberate denial of reality - the ability to lie - and the possibility of altering facts - that of acting - are intimately linked; they both proceed from the same source: imagination" (Hannah Arendt, From Lies to Violence)
• Five ways of relating the art of governing to the manifestation of truth, according to Michel Foucault(Du gouvernement des vivants, first lesson): raison d'État, principle of evidence, age of expertise, unveiling and reversal, terror
• "Terror is not an art of governing that hides its aims, its motives and its mechanisms. Terror is precisely governmentality in its naked, cynical, obscene state. It is the truth that freezes, the truth that makes itself obvious, that obviousness that is everywhere, that makes itself intangible and inevitable
• Five moments that overlap rather than follow one another: taking archaeological effort beyond the threshold of Machiavellian repulsion
• Before raison d'État, credulity imposed by the Church? Autour de Jean-Philippe Genet dir, Vérité et crédibilité : construire la vérité dans le système de communication de l'Occident (^XIIIe-XVIIe siècle), Paris, 2015
• Ego sum via veritas et vita (John, 14, 6): truth as a hypostasis of Christ and the Gregorian reform making the pope a "doctor of truth" (Florian Mazel)
• The transcendental theory of truth in Thomas Aquinas: "even if the human intellect were not, things would still be said to be true in their ordering to the divine intellect" (Florian Mazel)
• From the logical-semantic problem to the analysis of knowledge: when the proposition itself becomes the locus of truth (Joël Biard)
• Probable certainties" and rational procedures for approximating truth (Christophe Grellard)
• When doctrines defend "an orthodoxy of the implausible", laypeople oppose them with the robustness of experience (Catherine König-Pralong)
• Quentin Skinner, Truth and the historian : interpreting beliefs that the actors of the past believed to be true
• Shakespeare's fictions: understanding "what he'sup to when he says what he says"
• Machiavelli's fables: the prince, the lion and the fox
• Extending Skinnerian analysis to facts of language, context and actualization
• The "philosophy of as if", from Derrida(The Beast and the Sovereign) to Freud(The Future of an Illusion)
• Machiavelli and the verità effetuale della cosa (chapter 15 of The Prince)
• What is a cosa for Machiavelli? Les cose d'Italia
• What is verità ? Keeping a safe distance from the sweet words of adulators and the hateful words of haters
• Claude Lefort, the actual truth of the thing and the critique of the imagination: "Rather than being a dreamer, is he not reproached for yielding to the allure of the omnipotence of thought?"(Écrire. À l'épreuve du politique)
• Vedere : the truth of politics and truth in painting
• Andar drieto alla verità effetuale della cosa : going straight, the prose of politics
• Politics as the effective truth of things, against the politics of things (Jean-Claude Milner)
• Transforming speaking beings into things in the name of what things want: things don't want anything; what do we want?