On Turns

For a thinker, or whatever term you prefer, a fundamental category is “turn.” In 20th century philosophy, the classic example is “the turn” (or, “the Turn”) which occupies so many pages of scholarship about Martin Heidegger. (If you’re unfamiliar, here’s the TL;DR: Heidegger is generally considered the Nazi philosopher, and is best known for his unfinished tome Being and Time, or in the much more epic German, Sein und Zeit.) “The turn” in this context means a number of interrelated things; it is an example of what Slavoj Zizek would call a short-circuit: between Heidegger’s most prominent engagement in the Nazi counter-revolution, and the manifold changes in his philosophy from before to after; for Heidegger himself, between the latter conceived as an injunction into the history of philosophy–more precisely, the shift in analytical perspective from the “Dasein” or existence of humans and the “History of Being” or Seinsgeschichte—and a process within that History, distinguished, in more nuanced Heidegger scholarship/translation, from the previous short-circuit as “turning”. That is, a turn is a lane-change or even an exit ramp on the self-building highway of history, regardless of whether you focus on the initial paver or the more normal automobiles that often follow. A prime example is what’s known as the Linguistic Turn.

Real Truth

One of the important contributions which Slavoj Žižek has made to contemporary philosophy is his reconceptualization of the category of truth. For decades, there have been two irreconcilable positions regarding this category (and which unsurprisingly line up with the analytic/continental divide): those who hold to the classical correspondence theory of truth, and those who hold to a relativist/perspectival position (usually connected to postmodernism). The former is quite familiar, even commonsensical: truth is a property of statements (by a subject) in relation to (objective) reality, namely whereby they accurately represent it. (In line with this, knowledge is usually defined as justified true belief, where a belief is basically a statement, such that knowledge is not simply true statements but statements whose truth is justified by some argument.) The latter is no less familiar, at least in the academic domain of theory: the truth of a statement is understood to be inseparable from its context, that is, the set of conditions (the “discourse” or “dispositif” or even the “episteme“, even though in Foucault these are not the same) which is the background that allows the statement to be meaningful (the point being that this process of becoming-meaningful precedes that of becoming-true). Žižek occupies a third position with regards to these two, defining a notion of truth which on the one hand avoids the subject/object dualism of the former position while not abandoning truth to the relativism of the latter. We can understand this as a dialectical triad: if the perspectival position is an abstract negation of correspondence, then Žižek’s connection of truth with the Lacanian category of the Real serves as a determinate negation. First, we have objective reality and a multitude of subjective positions which can be true or false; second, we have only this panopoly of subjective positions, insofar as objective reality is inseparable from them (i.e. insofar as such a notion of objective reality is an example of the “metaphysics of presence”); finally, we have the re-definition of truth as connected with that position which can account for this very multiplicity, with that Real antagonism which generates this multiplicity in the first place. Žižek’s classic example is class struggle: we have a multiplicity of positions on this fact which structures our economy (reactionary, conservative, liberal, social democrat, marxist, anarchist, etc.), but only one of these positions (for him, marxist, for us, “communist” in a broader and yet more esoteric sense beyond the marxist/anarchist feud) is true, insofar as it can (here, through [a specifically “intersectional”] class analysis) account for the range of possible positions we encounter.