What is the inversion of truth against the abolition of its possibility?
However, those who abolish differences and create ambivalence are not (no longer) only replacing facts and truth with alternative facts, fake news and lies, but also making the distinction between ‘truth and untruth’ or ‘structure and anti-structure’ itself impossible.
Csapo writes: “[The principle that destroys differences] confuses structure and antistructure to indistinguishability. The argument of antistructure may well be the same as structure. But the [...] [Dionysian] product is not [...] the negation of structure, but a denial of the possibility of affirming or negating it, not inversion, but confusion.”99
It is precisely this impossibility of distinguishing between affirmation and negation or subversion, and the resulting confusion, that characterizes Trump’s Dionysian behaviour in this sense. He is not, as has sometimes been said, his own caricature. For he can be neither exaggerated nor ironized.
Notes
- 99Ibid, p. 287.