Indirectness
A Plea for Truth in Times of Post-Truth
Edited by Jela Krečič, Jure Simoniti
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.
Notes on contributors
Introduction
1. Truth and Indirectness, Jela Krečič and Jure Simoniti
Part 1. Theories of Indirectness
2. Why True Atheism Has to Be Indirect, Slavoj Žižek
3. Desire, Hysteria and the Indirectness of Truth, Alenka Zupančič
4. Alexandre Kojève: A Philosopher in the Age of Post-Truth, Boris Groys
5. Untruth and Directness, Agon Hamza
Part 2. Practices of Indirectness
6. The Shibboleth of Indirectness, Robert Pfaller
7. The Political Void of Contemporary Realism, or of the Coming Anarchy, Catherine Malabou
8. Comrade: A Body for Politics, Jodi Dean
Part 3. Aesthetics of Indirectness
9. Being and Punning, Mladen Dolar
10. Adorno’s Exotic Girls of Language, or, The Verfremdworteffekt, Frank Ruda
11. Crever dʼesprit: On Matter Directly Incarnating Ideas in Sci-Fi Literature, Miran Božovič
12. Tarantino’s Cinema: Fiction against Ideology, Jela Krečič
13. Image and Narrative. Indirectness and the Difference between American and European Cinema, Jure Simoniti
In these desperate times, perhaps the greatest threat comes to our belief in the idea of truth. In Indirectness, Jela Krečič and Jure Simoniti come to the rescue. They have assembled a collection of essays that show exactly how the commitment to truth can be rediscovered and even strengthened—not by clinging to the old conceptions but by recognizing the centrality in indirection for arriving at truth. It’s a game-changing work not to be missed if we are to escape the horrors of the post-truth world.
The unruly unity in the authors’ different interpretations of the concept of indirectness represents a magnificent answer to the widespread demand to “simply say it as it is”. They all digress and make use of art, politics, psychoanalysis, everyday psychopathology, and puns – and thereby collectively create a surprising and inspiring truth-event.
Is philosophy the true enemy or the perfect accomplice of contemporary hegemonic ideology? Through the concept of indirectness, this collection attempts to separate critical from complicit philosophy. Indirectness - introduced as a new concept in this volume by Jela Krecic - can be seen as the shibboleth of our time (as Robert Pfaller puts it in his contribution). If we can recover the ability to be indirect - to take a detour through the other - we can save ourselves from the psychosis of a capitalist world that seeks to turn us into pure individuals and isolated identities.
The topic of directness is approached by the greatest living philosophers in this volume. From Mladen Dolar’s careful analysis of the indirectness present in wordplay, punning and humour that reminds the subject of the social nature of subjectivity to Catherine Malabou’s proposal for a new political subject of indirectness to Alenka Zupancic’s provocation that truth is indirect, the contributions to this volume use indirectness to blow open everything you thought you knew about philosophy, psychoanalysis and reality.
By ranging from punning to Christian atheism – using psychoanalysis, art, cinema and politics – “Indirectness” gives body to its philosophical impetus: the claim that reality is not complete but imbued with a negativity that fantasy tries to fill.
