The victims in front of the abyss of truth: a question of justice after the weakening of Gianni Vattimo

Abstract

The 21^st century opens the post-Truth era as a visual spectacle that favors appearances above everything else. But in a schizophrenic way, the social acceptance of the lie directly clashes with the continued idealization of the Truth as an objective mirror of the facts, which continues to be the regulatory road map of the West and its Eurocentrism. The victims seem thus to be trapped in between the precipice of the objectifying mirror and the abyss of the spectacularized post-Truth, two forms of absolutization of the Truth swinging from one the wills to powers of interest. This article starts from this contemporary paradoxical bipolarity, in order to, through the epistemic weakening of the Truth proposed by the philosopher Gianni Vattimo, address the question of dignity and justice of the victims. The epistemic weakening of the Truth that Vattimo raises effectively opens the possibilities for a democratic transformation, but nothing guarantees what or who will take advantage of that debolist opening. In order to be transformative, Truth ceases to be absolute, even to claim it, but it cannot loose the reference of criteria that inhabit worthy human lives as a corporal source.