It is a truth universally acknowledged that truth is itself in crisis. Commentators and politicians who once bemoaned the rise of “alternative facts” and the proliferation of conspiracy theories now support narratives and news organizations that downplay the genocide unfolding in Gaza. Deepfakes and AI-generated videos—once feared for proliferating “misinformation”—have proven to be a form of infotainment in that people understand very well they are watching fiction or even propaganda, but they still find the fiction compelling. This is so because the information (or truth) such manipulated reels offer is not in the order of a proposition or assertion, but in figuring a latent feeling, or expressing a belief already held. This is as true for the lurid AI propaganda videos released by MAGA influencers as it is for the more globally popular LEGO® videos released by Iran’s propaganda campaign. So, a part of what people deem to be a crisis of truth has to do with feeling and belief guiding the constitution of truth. Another part is the sheer inefficacy of truth itself, whose manifestation seems to have no consequences anymore, whether it is yet another exposure of Donald Trump’s corruption, racism, or sexual predation or another report from a global institution that has concluded that Israel—with the assistance of the United States—is committing genocide. Indeed, where Gaza is concerned, even the term “ceasefire” has become a mere marketing slogan since the fire does not cease. In this instance, power manifests in its most authoritarian form as the ultimate truth.
Truth as a problem for critical thought has always entailed the twin issues of power on the one hand and human passions on the other. Plato’s allegory of the cave stages the dangers faced by the philosopher who dares to challenge a belief held in common by stating the truth. In this account collective belief militates against truth, and so Plato already discerned an opposition between politics and truth. For Georg Hegel truth is forever unfolding and changing in relation to historical contradictions; it exists fluidly because of these movements—rather than an unchanging element that cannot be negated, truth precipitates through a process of negation and transformation. Because he considered such historical-conceptual resolutions as themselves indicative of truth, Hegel famously claimed that “The True is the whole” (11). Friedrich Nietzsche deemed truth to be “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike people as firmly established, canonical, and binding” (146). In other words, what we often take to be the truth is not some revelation that troubles politics, but the very means for practicing politics, beliefs, and emotional investment—as Nietzsche notes, “truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (146).
It is in the wake of Nietzsche’s caution about lies and falsehoods rendered in the guise of truth that more recent theoretical traditions have pursued their investigations into truth. In psychoanalysis, truth necessarily has the structure of a fiction, whether in the form of fantasy (because it makes the world appear coherent) or in the misrecognition of oneself and others that underlies social relations. For Theodor Adorno, truth is aligned with those elements that are not captured by a social order’s concepts or reigning explanations, and so for Adorno, “the whole is the false” (50) because any system of thought or of social organization excludes or dominates some other element and represses the fact of such domination. Michel Foucault similarly concerned himself with the political and ethical implications of the problem of truth, but rather than emphasizing the disjuncture between regnant truths and the violences on which they are based, he was interested in the presumed synchrony between any given truth and one’s conduct and comportment in relation to that truth. Foucault’s central investigation concerned the unspoken effects of truth, one of which is the way one imagines oneself as beholden to the truth. Such a compulsion is the surest sign, for Foucault, of an operation of power. Notably in his account, truth is not synonymous with power, but always includes a relationship to it, ranging from support to contestation.
As this brief sketch of Western critical thought about truth suggests, the question of truth necessarily conjures the problems of politics, feelings, and power. Foucault’s work takes these problems up directly, and since contemporary discourses on the crises of truth concern the place of feelings and politics in the domain of truth, it is in Foucault’s work that we can find resources for limning our crisis of truth. His oeuvre offers less a grand theory of Truth than an analysis of truth as a matter of social, historical, and political representation. Foucault was a philosopher centrally concerned with the way truth was established: the procedures for apprehending it, its embeddedness in institutional and bodily practices, and its regulation of social relations. For Foucault truth was far more than a problem of knowledge, information, or facts. The operations of truth extend to domains that at first appear oblique: statecraft and governance, secular and religious practices of self-cultivation and self-improvement, the forms of life that are enshrined under specific historical conditions. Foucault radically raises the stakes for any inquiry into the problem of truth, expanding it into the domains of politics, ethics, and history. He was interested in the contexts and conditions through which truth is adduced by specific procedures, protocols, or rituals—be they scientific experimentation, the confessional, or Delphic divination. He was then further concerned with how political, economic, religious, and ethical practices and forms of life came to be based on that adduced truth and how these varied practices and forms of life were construed by their practitioners as a necessary and inexorable consequence.
Foucault distinguished two distinct aspects of the operations of truth: one concerns the context-specific ways of arriving at and apprehending truth, and the other entails the ways people are bound to the truth—that is, the self-evident, unthinking, or “obvious” ways in which individuals feel obligated to the truth and submit to its consequences. The first he calls “games of truth,” and the second he refers to as “regimes of truth.” “Games of truth” are the domain of veridiction in which the distinction between truth and falsity is arrived at through rules, procedures, and demands internal to the game itself. As such, any game of truth produces verities that are autonomous with respect to those produced in other games: scientific truth and literary critical truth are mutually autonomous, for example. Yet the autonomy of truth produced in any game of truthing is not total because all games of truth occur in the context of what Foucault called a “regime of truth,” which allocates and prioritizes the truths that have been variously produced.[1] Critically, it is the regime of truth that also determines what obligations one has to the truth.[2] These obligations may be spelled out or assumed, espoused willingly or unwillingly, be conscious or unconscious. Regardless, they bind a person to the truth, requiring that once a truth is made manifest, one must submit to it. Foucault explains it thus:
To put things very simply, in an almost or completely infantile way, I shall say the following: in the most rigorously constructed arguments imaginable, even in the event of something being recognized as self-evident, there is always, and it is necessary to assume, a certain assertion that does not belong to the logical realm of observation or deduction [i.e., to the game of truth itself], in other words, an assertion that does not exactly belong to the realm of the true or false, that is rather a sort of commitment, a sort of profession. In all reasoning there is always this assertion that consists in saying: if it is true, then I will submit; it is true therefore I submit; it is true, therefore I am bound. (97)
Importantly, according to Foucault, this form of obligation, submission, and acceptance—in short, the form of the self’s binding to truth—has nothing to do with the truth itself (whether the truth concerns scientific deduction or a sense that one is a sinner) but with the form of power that links the self’s life and practice to the truth.
This form of power, or regime of truth, is historically contingent, and it mobilizes truth in the service of producing subjects and of governing the social order. Both of these projects are grounded on the same generative logic, which Foucault expresses as the proposition “X is true, therefore I submit.” To give some examples: since modern secular existence requires the separation of state and religion, therefore prayer in public schools should not be permitted; or, democracy requires political equality, therefore everyone must be enfranchised and encouraged to vote. Both secularism and democracy are associated with modernity’s valuation of reason, and reason’s regime of truth becomes consequential for each. Both entail cultivating a self whose values, field of action, and practices of subjectivation are oriented in relation to the truth. The point of interface between governing power and the self is the “therefore” that links the understanding that “X is true” with “I submit”—that is, as Foucault puts it, “you have to submit” (97). By articulating the oft-unspoken “therefore” that links the expression of truth with the self’s submission to it, Foucault underscored the capacious and world-making effects of truth claims.
It is testament to the stability of any regime of truth that the “therefore” is accepted without question. Juridical truth must rely on the force of this acceptance if it is ever to deliver justice. When a regime of truth is well-established and supple, this “therefore” is assumed rather than stated. The force of a tacit “therefore” is all the more powerful for being invisible, especially in some games of truth like science. As Foucault points out, “this ‘therefore’ goes so much without saying that it is as if it is transparent and we do not notice its presence, [but] it nevertheless remains the case that standing back a bit, and when we take science as precisely a historical phenomenon, the ‘it is true, therefore I submit’ becomes much more enigmatic, much more obscure” (97). In contemporary cultural politics, scientific truth—whether about climate change or vaccines—is increasingly questioned, denied, or even more perniciously, disavowed. For Foucault, the mechanisms that are adduced in any game of truth and that make us submit to the truth—in effect, one of the operations of authority—are historically specific to a regime of truth. And yet, such mechanisms seem to fail regularly now. The binding force of an overarching and shared regime of truth has weakened, and people seem to have lost faith in the “therefore” that signals the stability (i.e., the internalized acceptance) of a regime of truth.
In this sense, the contemporary “crisis of truth” may not primarily consist in the disappearance of facts or the triumph of falsehood, but in the erosion of the binding force that once linked truth to collective action, ethical obligation, and political consequence. Foucault’s account helps clarify why exposing lies, documenting atrocities, or demonstrating corruption no longer necessarily compels submission to the truth or transformation in conduct. What has weakened is not simply confidence in expertise, but the tacit “therefore” that connected the recognition of truth to the demand that one respond to it. Competing regimes of truth now fragment the social field, each producing its own obligations, affects, and forms of attachment, while power increasingly operates through the management of belief and feeling rather than through persuasion alone. Under such conditions, truth persists, but its efficacy becomes uncertain: truths circulate endlessly without guaranteeing responsibility, justice, or change. The contemporary problem of truth, then, is inseparable from a consideration of power itself—of how subjects are formed, what they are compelled to accept, and why the revelation of truth no longer appears sufficient to transform the world.
Zahid R. Chaudhary is Professor of English at Princeton University. His most recent publication is Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth (Fordham 2025).
WORKS CITED
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. New York: Verso, 2005.
Foucault, Michel. On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Lorenzini, Daniele. The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2023.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, 139–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[1] For the best account of how Foucault conceives of the relations between games and regimes of truth, see Lorenzini (33–53).
[2] The word “regime” not only keeps in view the political and juridical connotations of the mechanism by which truth is adduced, but it also links up Foucault’s later discussion of truth to his earlier lectures on state rationalities like liberalism and neoliberalism, and the differing relationship of each to biopolitical regulation.
