Post-Truth, Postmodernism and the Public Sphere

Abstract

This chapter explores the epistemic and political challenge of post-truth discourse to the idea of the liberal democratic public sphere—a challenge that has been intensified in the time of right-wing populism and COVID-19. However, I also take this as an opportunity to rethink the notion of the public sphere, pointing to the way that emancipatory social movements disrupt the institutions of the liberal democratic state through their claims for social and environmental justice. In this context, I examine the controversy around the relationship between post-truth and ‘postmodernism’, arguing that, so far from being hostile to truth, poststructuralist theory may serve as an antidote to post-truth. Here I focus on Foucault’s idea of parrhesia as an agonistic way of speaking truth to power that at the same reinvigorates the democratic space.