The End of Truth: Five Essays on The Demise of Neoliberalism

What seems to be happening throughout the last decade is the gradual invalidation and dissolution of what we used to call ‘Truth’, and hence the disruption and gradual dissolution of what Foucault had called the existing hierarchical “Regime of Truth”. What remains is not what Marx had hoped to be a more egalitarian regime in which “the educator{s themselves are also] educated”, but rather a ‘Humpty Dumpty Regime’, where ‘Truth’ is whatever the Humpty-Dumpty in power wants it to be. This book argues that this is an unmediated outcome of the profound social, cultural and economic crisis of neoliberal capitalism, and its political corollary, the meteoric rise of populism and authoritarianism, not only in the so-called ‘developing’ countries, but throughout the entire globe.

CONTENTS

PREFACEINTRODUCTION: AFTER NEOLIBERALISM, THE FLOOD?CHAPTER 1. ON RADICAL AMBIGUITYCHAPTER 2. THE MIDAS BLESSING: TURNING COMMODITIES INTO GIFTSCHAPTER 3. THE END OF TRUTH AS WE KNOW IT – THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE UNIVERSITY DISCOURSECHAPTER 4. THE GAME OF THRONES AS A FAILED ATTEMPT AT UNIVERSAL POPULISMCHAPTER 5. THE PSYCHOPOLITICS OF THE ENTITLED VICTIM – THE COMING OF AGE OF CONTEMPORARY POPULISM