Strong Truths by Slavoj Zizek

When we are dealing  with ‘strong truths’ (les veritas fortes), shattering insights, asserting them entails symbolic violence. When la patrie est en danger, Robespierre said, one should fearlessly state the fact that ‘the nation is betrayed. This truth is known to all Frenchmen: ‘Lawgivers, the danger is immanent; the reign of truth has to begin: we are courageous enough to tell you this; be courageous enough to hear it.’ In such a situation, there is no place for a neutral position. In his speech celebrating the dead of 10 August 1792, Abbe Gregoire declared: ‘there are people who are so good that they are worthless; and in a revolution which engages in the struggle of freedom against despotism, a neutral man is a pervert who, without any doubt, waits for how the battle will turn out to decide which side to take.’ Before we dismiss these lines as ‘totalitarian’, let us recall a later time when the French patrie was again en danger, the situation after the French defeat in 1940, when none other than General de Gaulle, in his famous radio address from London, announced to the French people the ‘strong truth’: France is defeated, but the war is not over; against the Petainist collaborators one must insist that the struggle goes on. The exact conditions of this statement are worth recalling: even Jacques Duclos, the second-strongest person in the French Communist Party, admitted in private conversation that if, at that moment, free elections had been held in France, Marshal Petain would have won 90 per cent of the vote. When de Gaulle, in his historic act, refused to acknowledge the capitulation to the Germans and continued to resist, he claimed that it was only he, not the Vichy regime, who spoke on behalf of the true France (on behalf of France as such, not only on behalf of the ‘majority of the French’!). What he was saying was deeply true even if, ‘democratically’, it was not only without legitimization but also clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. (And the same goes for Germany: it was a tiny minority actively resisting  Hitler that stood for Germany, not the active Nazis or the undecided opportunists.)

This is not a reason to despise democratic elections; the point is only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth – as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideology. There can be democratic elections which enact  an event of Truth - elections in which, against sceptic-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily ‘awakens’ and votes against the hegemonic ideological opinion – the exceptional status of such a surprising electoral result proves the elections as such are not a medium of Truth.


This position of a minority which stands for All is more than ever relevant today, in our post-political epoch in which a plurality of opinion reigns: under such conditions, the universal Truth is by definition a minority position. As Sophie Wahnich has pointed out, in a democracy corrupted by media, what ‘freedom of the press without the duty to resist’ amounts to is ‘the right to say anything in a political relativist manner instead of defending the ‘demanding and sometimes lethal ethics of truth.”[*] In such a situation, the uncompromising insistent voice of truth (about ecology, about biogenetics, about the excluded . . .) cannot but appear as ‘irrational;’ in its lack of consideration for the opinions of others, in its refusal of the spirit of pragmatic compromise, in its apocalyptic finality. Simone Weil offered a simple and poignant formulation of this partiality of truth:

There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, and who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody’s opinion, of the specific human dignity itself – and these are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All others lie.

The slum dwellers are indeed the living dead of global capitalism: alive, but dead in the eyes of the polis.


The term ‘eternal Truth’ should be read here in a properly dialectical way, as referring to eternity grounded in a unique temporal act (as in Christianity, where eternal Truth can only be experienced and enacted by endorsing the temporal-historical singularity of Christ). What grounds a truth is the experience of suffering and courage, sometimes in solitude, not the size or force of a majority. This, of course, does not mean that there are infallible criteria for determining the truth: its assertion involves a kind of wager, a risky decision; one has to cut  out its path, sometimes even enforce it, and at first those who tell the truth are as a rule not understood, they struggle (with themselves and others), looking for the proper language in which to express it. It is the full recognition of this dimension of risk and wager, of the absence of any external guarantee, that distinguishes an authentic truth engagement from  any form of ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘fundamentalism.”[**]

But, again: how are we to distinguish this ‘demanding and sometimes lethal ethics of truth’ from sectarian attempts to impose one’s own position on everyone else? How can we be sure that the voice of the minoritarian ‘part of no-part’ is indeed the voice of universal truth and not merely that of a particular grievance? The first thing to bear in mind here is that the truth we are dealing with is not ‘objective’, but a self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of the enunciation. In his (unpublished) Seminar 18 on ‘a discourse which would not be that of a semblance’, Lacan provided a succinct definition of the truth of interpretation in psychoanalysis: ‘Interpretation is not tested by a truth that would decide by yes or no, it unleashes the truth as such. It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.’ There is nothing ‘theological;’ in this precise formulation, only an insight into the properly dialectical unity of theory and practice in (not only) psychoanalytic interpretation: the ‘test’ of the analyst’s interpretation lies in the truth-effect it unleashes in the patient. This is how one should also (re)read Marx’s Thesis XI: the ‘test’ of Marxist theory is the truth-effect it unleashes in its addressees (the proletarians), in transforming them into revolutionary subjects.

The problem, of course, is that today there is no revolutionary discourse able to produce such a truth-effect – so what are we to do? The quintessential text here in Lenin’s wonderful short essay “On Ascending a High Mountain, written in 1922, when, after winning the Civil War against all odds, the Bolsheviks had to retreat into the New Economic Policy, giving a much wider scope to the market economy and private property. Lenin uses the simile of a climber who has returned to the valley after his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak in order to describe what a retreat means in a revolutionary process, i.e., how one retreats without opportunistically betraying one’s fidelity to the Cause:

Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He find himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible. He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more  difficult for our imaginary traveler than the ascent – it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not the exhilaration that one feels going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. . . .The voices from below ring with malicious joy. They do not conceal it; the chuckle gleefully and shout: ‘He’ll fall in a minute! Serves him right, the lunatic!’ Others try to conceal their malicious glee and behave mostly like Judas Golovlyov. They moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: “It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! But did we not, who have spent all our lives working out a judicious plan for scaling this mountain, demand that the ascent be postponed until our plan was complete? And if we so vehemently protested against taking this path, which this lunatic is now abandoning (look, look, he has turned back!) He is descending! A single step is taking him hours of preparation! And yet we were roundly abused when time and again we demanded moderation and caution!), if we so fervently censured this lunatic and warned everybody against imitating and helping him, we did so entirely because of our devotion to the great plan to scale this mountain, and in order to prevent this great plan from being generally discredited!’

After enumerating the achievements  of the Soviet state, Lenin goes on to focus on what was not done:


But we have not finished building even the foundations of socialist economy and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions ( and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes).And there is nothing absolutely terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism – that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. We are still alone and in a backward country, a country that was ruined more than others, but we have accomplished a great deal. More than that –we have preserved intact the army of the revolutionary proletarian forces; we have preserved its maneuvering ability; we have kept clear  heads and can soberly calculate where, when and how far to retreat (in order to leap forward); where, when and how to set to work to alter what has remained unfinished. Those Communists are doomed who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epoch-making undertaking as completing the foundations of socialist economy (particularly in a small-peasant country) without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done. Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility ‘to begin from the beginning’ over and over again in approaching n extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability will not perish).


This is Lenin at his Beckettian best, echoing the line from Westward Ho: ‘Try again. fail again. Fail better.’ Lenin’s conclusion – ‘to begin from the beginning over and over again’- makes it clear that he is not talking merely of slowing down in order to defend what has already been achieved, but precisely of descending back to the starting point: one should ‘begin from the beginning;’, not from where one managed to get to in the previous effort. In Kierkegaard’s terms, a revolutionary process is not a gradual process, but a repetitive movement, a movement of repeating the beginning again and again. This is exactly where we are today, after the ‘obscure disaster’ of 1989. As in 1922, the voices from below ring with malicious joy all around us: “Serves you right, you lunatics who wanted to enforce their totalitarian vision on society! Others try to conceal their malicious glee, raising their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say; ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! How noble was your vision of creating a just society! Our heart beats in sympathy with you, but our reason told us that your noble plans could end only in misery and new forms of servitude!’ While rejecting any compromise with these seductive voices, we certainly now have to ‘begin from the beginning’, not ‘building  on the foundations of the revolutionary epoch of the twentieth century (from 1917 to 1989 or precisely, 1968) but ‘descending to the starting point in order to choose a different path.

[*] in his essay “The Biographical Fashion”, Leo Lowenthal writes that it [biographical literature]  “takes on almost mystical traits in which anything and everything merges into a great gray sameness. This is the mystique of relativism, which is shared by victims and masters alike. To the latter it is the appropriate expression for the conservation of power at any price, the former confess almost masochistically how little they value their own thoughts or the application of their minds to serious intentions.”

[**] For those for whom God exists (in the guise of the big Other of History whose instruments they are), everything is permitted . . .However, the theological reference can also function in the opposite way: not in the fundamentalist sense of directly legitimizing political measures as an imposition of the divine will, whose instruments are the revolutionaries, but in the sense that the theological dimension serves as a kind of safety valve, a mark of the openness and uncertainty of the situation which prevents political agents from conceiving of their acts in terms of self-transparency -  ‘God’ means that we should always bear in mind that the outcome of our acts will never fit our expectations. This imperative to ‘mind the gaps’ refers not only to the complexity of the situation in which we intervene; it concerns above all the utter ambiguity of the exercise of our own will.- ‘Afterword’, page 174-5