Presentation
Cold Showers, Horror Movies, and Violence: The Limitations of Truth in an Age of Trumpism
Rhetoric Society of America
(2024)
Abstract
In The Politics of Truth, Michel Foucault recounts an anecdote of a doctor administering a “truth-therapy” wherein “the mad could be cured if one managed to show them that their delirium is without relation to reality” (148). These therapies operate under revelatory logic, which presupposes individuals can change their thinking when presented with the truth. Nonetheless, Foucault argues such truth-therapies are ineffective (148).
In a time of economic, social, environmental, cultural, political, and environmental crises, Foucault’s anecdote offers a timely frame of intelligibility to test our collective assumptions about contemporary truth-therapies aimed at countering pervasive Trumpism, which privileges madness, if you will, over truth. It might be easy to dismiss Trumpism’s perversion of truth-therapy as a simple Platonic indictment against rhetoric, which reinforces its subordinate role to philosophy, which Plato characterized as true knowledge. Plato, for example, argues that for the rhetorician, “there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know” (Gorgias 95). In other words, appearance and belief over truth might be the rhetorical tools of Trumpism — or what some might call post-truth. Trumpism might even evoke rhetoric’s post-truth, artistic function of language, and yet, this occurs only in the form of a disaster artist.
Nonetheless, Trumpism has nothing to do with philosophy, post-truth, or art. Something else is at work when Trumpism resists truth-therapy, perverts revelatory logic, rhetoric, and ethics — a violence of rhetoric that erodes democracy and perpetuates everyday suffering. As a counter to the negative nihilism of Trumpism, I argue for a just rhetoric. Fixating on truth-therapy is no panacea for political struggle, but perhaps collective empathy of a just rhetoric may open new possibilities of ethical governmentality.
Keywords
- rhetoric,
- truth,
- ideology,
- philosophy,
- politics,
- foucault
Disciplines
Publication Date
Spring May 24, 2024
Location
Denver, Colorado
Citation Information
Talitha May. "Cold Showers, Horror Movies, and Violence: The Limitations of Truth in an Age of Trumpism" Rhetoric Society of America (2024) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/talitha-may/13/
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY International License.