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What is truth if not true opinion?1 An apparition of the apparent?2 That which others seem to like the most? Such truth is often nothing of the sort, propaganda, fake news, a party line. But does this then mean that there can be no truth where opinion holds sway? Or does it mean that truth here is not a thing?
Truth is nothing. It is a memory always on the verge of oblivion — a momentary shining forth of what is destined to be forgotten again. It is an aesthetic phenomenon that slips away like the sand beneath our feet. A nothingness that shimmers across the surface inviting us to dive in.
But even if it amounts to nothing, it is not immaterial. It is something that must have been present enough at some point in time to leave its histories scrawling forward into the future.3
If we wanted to approach this truth it in a rigorous, systematic, scientific, manner we would need to chart the vectors of its disappearance beyond the horizon of this event, into a singularity we cannot see directly but may, at the very least, attempt to trace. This is what we call reading.4
Footnotes
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Cf. the classical problem of δόξα, its foundational role in Platonism and virtually every ‘post’-Platonic branch of western philosophy. We might cite Plato’s Meno and Theaetetus as metonymic abbreviations or entry points. ↩
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Cf. Hegel’s formulation of the aesthetic as “das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee” and its role in phenomenology since Hegel. See also its interrogation by Derrida in White Mythology and in the later seminar’s of Heidegger in which he proposes a paradoxical “phenomenology of the inapparent.” ↩
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Cf de Man et al on the material inscription ↩
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Cf Text Machines :: Mnemotechnical Infrastructure as Exappropriation ↩