What are Facts? And what do facts have to do with the Truth? “What kind of description is intended here? Surely it is not a realistic description of the situation, but a description which extracts from the confused reality its own inner form, in the same way that, in his atonal music, Schoenberg extracted the inner form of totalitarian terror. At this level, truth is no longer something that depends on the faithful reproduction of facts. One should introduce here the difference between (factual) truth and truthfulness: what makes a report of a raped woman (or any other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual unreliability, confusion, inconsistency. If the victim were able to report on her painful and humiliating experience in a clear way, with all the data arranged into a consistent order of exposition, this very quality would make us suspicious. The same holds for the unreliability of the verbal reports given by Holocaust survivors: a witness who was able to offer a clear narrative of his camp experience would thereby disqualify himself. In a Hegelian way, the problem is here part of the solution: the very deficiencies of the traumatized subject’s report on the facts bear witness to the truthfulness of his report, since they signal that the reported content has contaminated the very form in which it is reported.” Žižek. Less Than Nothing Chapter 1 paragraph 3.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 20:44:50 +0000