The theme of this special issue is Post-truth. No doubt it was my exasperation with the terminological state of our collective situation that incited me in the spring of 2017 to settle upon it. What, exactly, does the hyphenated couplet mean or to what does it refer? What is its significance or sense? How is it being used, by whom, for what purpose, and with what consequences—for whom? And if, as was being asserted on nearly every side, we currently find ourselves in post-truth, how might we ever get out, presuming we may one day want as much? The original contributions by Sarah Burgess, James Crosswhite, Jason David Myres, Bradford Vivian, and Eric King Watts published herein go a long way toward answering these questions. In the pages that follow, readers will encounter five different takes on what post-truth is: a dangerously normative scene of address, a contemporary communicative environment and a series of historical philosophical movements, the discourse of the masculine hysteric, an insidious mode of governance, racism's latest word. Readers also will happen upon five different estimations of post-truth's (ab)uses and effects: the depoliticization of #MeToo, babble and echo chamber, the impotence of truth, the rationalization of authoritarian impulses and the death of democracy, and zombie relations and tribal war. As for an exodus, over the course of these pages readers will be gifted words that trace an open: kairos, apophasis, desire, pluralistic deliberation, and ideological critique.For all their significant differences—both substantive and stylistic—there is, however, at least one point on which all of the issue's contributions converge: today we do not suffer a shortfall of truth. Quite to the contrary, we are witness to its excess(es), enabled by a circuitous slippage between facts or alt-facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth. Indeed, few to none today openly profess a brazen and callous disregard of truth; instead, truth tellers all! In view of that fact, I will use the remaining pages of this introduction to briefly develop a thesis and deliver a wager. Thesis: post-truth is a distinct regime of truth singularly suited to late neoliberal governance. Wager: Derrida's deconstruction of the philosopheme truth offers invaluable instruction in the possible undoing of the post-truth regime.“Each society,” Michel Foucault famously noticed, “has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth” (1994, 131). I submit that post-truth is the name for a distinct mutation in the “‘political economy’ of truth” in the United States that has been in the making at least since the 1980s, a crucial decade during which neoliberalism began to function as a normative order of reason in public, private, and personal life. Now with other modern regimes of truth, it seems to me, post-truth shares four of five “important traits” to which Foucault attributes their truth effects: “Truth” is subject to constant economic and political incitement (the demand for [it], as much for economic production as for political power); it is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption (circulating through apparatuses of education and information whose extent is relatively broad in the social body, notwithstanding certain strict limitations); it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media); finally, it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation (“ideological” struggles). (1984, 131) To wit, post-truth as cash cow for print and electronic media and fodder for year-around political campaigning and fund-raising; English Dictionary 2016 Word of the Year; interminable open- and closed-door House and Senate hearings on Russian interference in U.S. elections; the internet, Ken Ham's Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, Breitbart, and the presidential bully pulpit; the birther movement, deep state conspiracy theory, global warming and New Creationism debates, and free speech controversies on university campuses across the country.But there is, according to Foucault, a fifth feature of all modern truth regimes that is conspicuously missing from post-truth. Whereas in all the others “‘[t]ruth’ is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions that produce it” (1984, 130), in the post-truth regime, the form of scientific discourse is displaced by a discourse very different in form and in kind. Of course, what sets scientific discourse or truth claims formally apart from other modes of address is, above all else, the disappearance of the enunciative subject as well as the universalization of its audience. In other words, there is a clear correlation between the value of any scientific claim to truth and the erasure of any and all traces of the “I,” on both ends of the exchange. Not incidentally, that is not the case in the post-truth regime wherein truth value pivots on the degree to which any claim or utterance comports or resonates with individuals' affectively imbued investments, attachments, and identifications. Per the Cambridge English Dictionary, post-truth is “an adjective relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” According to the Economist, post-truths are “assertions that ‘feel true’ but have no basis in fact” (2016). The point is amplified by C. G. Prado in the introduction to his edited collection of essays titled America's Post-truth Phenomenon: When Feelings and Opinions Trump Facts and Evidence: Post-truth is the final step in the misguided move away from objective truth to relativization of truth. If truth is objective, assertions or propositions are true depending on how things are. If truth is relative, assertions or propositions are true depending on how people take things to be. Post-truth is an extreme form of relative truth because in being subjective, it makes assertions or propositions true depending only on how individuals take things to be. (2018, 2) For the time being I wish to defer the complicated issue of the “relativization of truth” in the declared interest of not being distracted from two others. That truth has been individualized or that individuals have become, to borrow a turn of phrase from Foucault, the primary and principal points of the production, application, and adjudication of truth is one important point. That emotion and personal belief are able now to outflank even objective facts and scientific knowledge is another (the claim that literature, for example, has truths to tell has long fallen on deaf ears). Their articulation is decisive: with the regime's inflection, even inflation, of the indefinitely pluralized and individualized enunciative I who, by virtue of strong feeling, is able at any moment not only to recognize or know but, also, to tell or speak the truth, truth is privatized and immanitized, its universal and transcendental dimensions nullified altogether. Hence, what is true for any one person need not be true for everyone or anyone else; what is true for anyone now need not necessarily be true later.This thinking about post-truth as a distinct and consequential mutation in the political economy of truth in the United States prepares one to appreciate an occurrence that easily could be dismissed as insignificant, not worthy of studied reflection. In June 2017 the Fox News network dropped its wildly successful marketing tagline “Fair and Balanced.” Now how is this anything more than a trivial change in—or, for consumers who never bought it, a long overdue giving up on—appearances? “A functional change in a sign-system is,” Gayatri Spivak explained some years ago, “a violent event. Even when it is perceived as ‘gradual,’ or ‘failed,’ or yet ‘reversing itself,’ the change itself can only be operated by the force of a crisis” (1987, 197). It is from this angle that the Fox News network's erasure of “Fair and Balanced” is grasped as indicative of a crisis that may be summarily described as the epistemic drift to post-truth. Telling, too, is the network's new motto, “Most Watched. Most Trusted.” The sequence of the two syntagms is curious in the least, as conventional wisdom would have them reversed for reason of causality: because Fox delivers trustworthy news, it is the most watched network. But that is not the case here: instead the motto reads, because Fox delivers the most watched news, it is (to be) trusted. Even more, conventional wisdom would suggest that when it comes to reporting the news, “most trusted [by its viewers]” (a verb) would be rephrased as “most trust-worthy [for any viewer]” (an adjective modifying the noun or the news content delivered). The movement from one marketing tagline, “Fair and Balanced” (even if only for the purpose of keeping up the appearance of disinterestedness), to the next, “Most Watched. Most Trusted,” intimates the usefulness of the post-truth regime to late neoliberal governance. It is to this relation that I now turn.Elsewhere and on more than one occasion I have written at relative length about late neoliberalism, aspiring to lend specificity to this overused and, all too often, undefined term that typically is asked to carry the considerable weight of an overdetermined context functioning as source, origin, or ground for some phenomenon in question. In the brief compass that is the special issue editor's introduction, a short and schematic summary of it will have to do.One, I follow Foucault's lead by using the term “neoliberalism” as the name for a distinct rationality and corresponding mode of governance that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century. At its most basic, I understand any rationality to be something like a mind-set or habit of thought in accordance to which persons of every sort make sense out of and conduct their daily lives, and I understand governance as the “conduct of [that] conduct,” “at a distance” and carried out by more than juridical means (Gordon 1991, 2). Despite its actually being a complex construction, neoliberalism feels natural or given by nature to those groomed in it. Like other modes of governance, neoliberalism's (soft) power to shape human activity is secured by a whole host of institutions, apparatuses, and knowledges.Now as Foucault explains in his 1979 lectures published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, twentieth-century American neoliberalism as a rationality materializes as the effort “to use the market economy and the typical analyses of the market economy to decipher non-market relationships and phenomena which are not strictly and specifically economic but what we call social phenomena” (2008, 240). Even more specifically, then, neoliberalism is to be understood as a rationality inaugurated by a migration of economic sense making (for example, the calculus of profit and loss and the principle of laissez-faire) from the private or corporate sphere to the public sphere, from consumer relations in the strict sense to social relations in the general sense. Foucault delivers an illustrative example: In their analysis of human capital … the neo-liberals tried to explain, for example, how the mother-child relationship, concretely characterized by the time spent by the mother with the child, the quality of the care she gives, the affection she shows, the vigilance with which she follows its development, its education, and not only its scholastic but also its physical progress, the way in which she not only gives it food but also imparts a particular style to eating patterns, and the relationship she has with its eating, all constitute for the neo-liberals an investment which can be measured in time. And what will this investment constitute? It will constitute a human capital, the child's human capital, which will produce an income. What will this income be? It will be the child's salary when he or she becomes an adult. And what will the income be for the mother who made the investment? Well, the neo-liberals say, it will be a psychical income. (2008, 243–44) Summarily put, neoliberalism is a rationality that lends market sense even to so-called interpersonal relations and the micro-practices of everyday life.It is crucial to notice, however, that with neoliberalism also comes a determined and determining critique of the state. That is to say, whereas in nineteenth-century classical liberalism laissez-faire functioned as “a principle of government's self-limitation,” in post–World War II America “it is a principle turned against it” (2008, 247). Foucault elaborates: Faced with excessive governmental action, and in opposition to it, the nineteenth century sought to establish a sort of administrative jurisdiction that would enable the action of public authorities to be assessed in terms of right, whereas here we have a sort of economic tribunal that claims to assess government action in strictly economic and market terms. (2008, 247) The application of market analysis to government is the opening onto the ensuing and, to this day, incessant demand that the social safety net be unraveled and government departments and agencies—from the Department of Education to the Department of Energy, from the CDC to the NEA and NEH—be downsized or eliminated altogether. It also is the rationality by which the privatization of prisons, the paramilitary, and primary health care is able to make (good) sense. In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown examines additional entailments of the neoliberal recalibration of the state at length, perspicaciously calling out the regularity with which it cunningly off-loads the responsibility and, of course, cost of human well-being and development onto individuals and private institutions. Neoliberal states, such as the United States, she writes, “substitute individually debt-financed education for public higher education, personal savings and interminable employment for social security, individually purchased services for public services of all kinds, privately sponsored research for public research and knowledge, fees for use for public infrastructure” (2015, 42).It is precisely neoliberal governmentality's recentering of a certain kind of subject that is my second point. Here I again follow Foucault in taking population to be neoliberal governance's primary datum (hence, the dramatic growth of the actuary sciences during the mid-twentieth century and the data mining today). I also take a particularly determined—which is to say, individuated—subject as the primary point of application of neoliberal governance. The name Foucault gives to that individuated point of application of power is homo oeconomicus, “the interface of government and the individual” (2008, 253). Strictly with respect to neoliberal governance, Foucault explains, The subject is considered only as homo oeconomicus, which does not mean that the whole subject is considered as homo oeconomicus. In other words, considering the subject as homo oeconomicus does not imply an anthropological identification of any behavior whatsoever with economic behavior. It simply means that economic behavior is the grid of intelligibility one will adopt on the behavior of a new individual. It also means that the individual becomes governmentalizable, that power gets a hold on him to the extent, and only to the extent, that he is homo oeconomicus. That is to say, the surface of contact between the individual and the power exercised on him, and so the principle of the regulation of power over the individual, will be only this kind of grid of homo oeconomicus. Homo oeconomicus is the interface of government and the individual. But this does not mean that every individual, every subject is an economic man. (2008, 252–53) As Foucault explains later in the series of lectures, homo oeconomicus is a subject of interest for the state only to the extent that its conduct is intelligible in market logic and terms. Furthermore, Foucault points out that intelligible conduct always takes place in what he carefully terms “an indefinite field of immanence which, on the one hand, links [homo oeconomicus], in the form of dependence, to a series of accidents, and, on the other, links him, in the form of production, to the advantage of others, or which links his advantage to the production of the advantage of others” (2008, 277, emphasis mine).Three, linked on the one side to forces over which neoliberal subjects have no control and on the other “to the advantage of others” they neither will nor intend, in their activity they tender a doubled necessity into an imminent ethics. That is to say, in bringing the market principles of calculation, efficiency, and enterprise to bear directly upon conduct, laissez-faire makes itself felt as the practices by which individuals capitalize (on) their own existence and, in doing so, promote the common interest. Indeed, what Foucault rightly identified as “the inversion of the relationships of the social to the economic,” that is, the sine qua non characteristic of neoliberalism is the historical condition of possibility for care-of-the-self also to function as, indeed to operate in the place of, care for others: care-of-the-self-as-care-for-others.1 The cruel irony, of course, is that insofar as homo oeconomicus is by definition a subject-function in a situation Foucault calls “doubly involuntary, with regard to the accidents which happen to him and with regard to the benefit he unintentionally produces for others” (2008, 277), it is not to the neoliberal subjects as such but to the system that virtue accrues. Therein resides one of the pernicious effects of the neoliberal recentering of the subject.Four, I use the term “late” to mark a relatively fresh but nonetheless decisive alteration in neoliberalism. Although I am quite certain that shifts in other discourses, practices, and technologies (I am, for example, particularly interested in taking full measure of data mining's role in what, momentarily, I will be obliged to call late neoliberal molecular biopolitics and governance) have had their part to play, here I attend to late twentieth-century neoliberalism's attunement to and productive integration of developments in biomedicine and the biosciences. On this expressly biopoliticized iteration of neoliberal governance, Nikolas Rose has opened the way, his book-length genealogy of today's “vital politics” persuading me that biomedicine's synchrony of positivities has effected a general transmutation in how human beings think and conduct themselves in the twenty-first century. As he puts it, “Our very understanding of who we are, of the life-forms we are and the forms of life we inhabit, have folded bios back onto zoë. By this I mean that the question of the good life—bios—has become intrinsically a matter of the vital processes of our animal life—zoë” (2007, 83). My point is to show that “vital but otherwise unqualified human life” has begun to operate as a statement (in the Foucauldian sense of the word) in the political realm. Put differently, vital but otherwise unqualified human life now functions as a new “modality of existence” of signs in the political domain, reconfiguring what is sayable, seeable, and doable in them.2Five, coincident with this statement (vital but otherwise unqualified human life) has been a modification in neoliberal political rationality: the market's logic and its terms of analysis have been newly tethered to the biosciences' modeling of molecularization. Within the biosciences, Bruce Braun observes, has emerged the figure of the “post-genomic body” that is grasped at the molecular scale but “considered … in terms of its displacement within wider molecular fields” (7). This valuable elucidation follows: Bodies are understood less in terms of their intrinsic genetic essence—the fantasy of one's genetic code carried around on a CD—and more in terms of a global economy of exchange and circulation, where the body is thrown into a chaotic and unpredictable molecular world filled with emergent yet unspecifiable risks. Far from a stable molecular life internal to the bounded body, to be managed and potentially improved, this account gives us a precarious body immersed in what Bernard Vallat, Director General of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), has called the “great biological cauldron” of the twenty-first century, where biology is virtuality, and where the future is less about “care of the self” than it is about immanent catastrophe. (2007, 7–8) Hence, by molecularization I mean to point to a modified sociopolitical rationality that renders the bounded categories (say, class, race, gender or sexuality, ethnicity or nationality) by which groups or collectivities are made recognizable to themselves and to others unintelligible and discursively ineffectual. With those identity categories rendered moot and, thus, no longer constrained by the normativity of any antecedent social order or historical frame, the molecularized social body is virtually poised for continual remaking.3At this point I expect the post-truth regime's compatibility with and usefulness to late neoliberal molecular biopolitics and governance is apparent to the reader. A regime of truth whose efficacy is predicated on the pluralization and individualization of the enunciative I and whose cumulative effect is the privatization and immanitization of truth facilitates a mode of governance whose primary datum is populations but whose primary point of application of (soft) power is individuals. Indeed, at this point I might simply put it this way: post-truth is the economization of truth.It has been asserted by more than one individual and on multiple occasions that it is thanks to the likes of Foucault and Derrida or the postmodern and deconstructive turns that we find ourselves in this quagmire we call post-truth. I recall one example, although several have presented themselves: [T]hose holding the form of relativist truth most prevalent today have no time for epistemology or ontology and are indifferent to claims about relative truth's conceptual origins, other than occasionally acknowledging Friedrich Nietzsche's major contribution to its promulgation. This current form of relativistically conceived truth is definitive of postmodernism and is paradigmed in the writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Taking their cue from Nietzsche's rejection of Cartesian/Kantian objectively conceived truth, philosophers like Foucault and Derrida rejected objective truth and relativized truth to consensus among groups. Relativization of truth was the predominant factor in the transition in philosophy's historical development from modern to postmodern. (Prado 2018, 4) Dare I say it simply? Nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, I will bring my introduction to this special issue to a close with a rejoinder that doubles as a wager: Derridean deconstruction already will have had something important to teach us about how to knock post-truth off balance, well in advance of its emergence. Indeed, the lesson had been there from the start: in the thinking on the trace and the defense of the quasi-transcendental, the universal dimension of truth is irreducible, albeit also neither sovereign nor unconditional. Today, these days, the task is to insist on it.What is the trace? It is the fundamental “unit” of the grammatological inquiry, which is to say, the sign “under erasure,” the sign-structure not “taken as a homogeneous unit bridging an origin (referent) and an end (meaning), as ‘semiology,’ as the study of signs would have it” but, instead, as “always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such” (Spivak 1974, xxxix). A “writing,” then, that is not to be grasped in the narrow sense as fully legible marks on a page but appreciated in the general sense as a structure of difference and deferral. Derrida perhaps made the clearest case for writing in the general sense in “Linguistics and Grammatology.” I allow myself the luxury of quickly cutting to the chase: On the one hand, the phonic element, the term, the plentitude that is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which gives them form. Such is the most evident significance of the appeal to difference as the reduction of phonic substance. Here the appearing and functioning of difference presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity. Such would be the originary trace. Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear. (1972, 62) Here, as elsewhere, the force of Derrida's argument is not against objectivism and for subjectivism, as Prado and others would have us believe. Still caught within a metaphysics of presence, the mere inversion of that classical metaphysical binary will not suffice. Instead, the strenuous effort is to at once avoid the trap of both empiricism and relativism, be it with respect to meaning or truth. Always already unconditioned and conditioned, there is no concept of meaning or truth without the notion of pure meaning or pure truth, even if all instances of the concept of meaning or of truth are corrupted.This will also have been the point of Derrida's engagement with Husserl's phenomenology, a meticulous meditation on the subordination of writing to intention. There Derrida has this to say about the irreducible imbrication of the ideal and the material, the transcendental and the empirical: Writing is not only the worldly and mnemotechnical aid to a truth whose own being-sense would dispense with all writing-down. The possibility or necessity of being incarnated in a graphic sign is no longer simply extrinsic and factual in comparison with ideal Objectivity; it is the sine qua non condition of Objectivity's internal completion. As long as ideal Objectivity is not, or rather, can not be engraved in the world … then ideal Objectivity is not fully constituted. (1989, 89) The situated, contingent, and empirical practices—writing, in this instance—are not merely the concrete expression of ideas; they “make free, self-identical idealities possible in general” (Doyon 2014, 138). But, insofar as that is the case, ideality also is subject to distortion, even catastrophic loss. As Maxime Doyon explains, The whole point of Derrida's analysis is thus the following: being historically determined and conditioned, ideal objects—or universal truths—are in an imminent sense vulnerable and precarious. They are vulnerable and precarious, not because they are not truly universal, but because the very opening of the universal sphere can only be accomplished in history through specific contingent practices like writing. Because of this ineliminable contingency, the opening constantly threatens to close itself off, the possible constantly threatens to turn into its opposite, the impossible, and the validity of the universal threatens to fall into forgetfulness. (2014, 139) This precarious relation that obtains between truth and its inscription also applies to the relation of justice and the law, democracy and the given state of our situation. In this particular historical conjuncture, the urgent task at hand is to hold against the fall, to rise to the occasion of the defense of the quasi-transcendental in the face of (the violence of) post-truth.What follows, then, are five very different meditations on the state of our post-truth situation. Taken as a collection, the articles call us to notice that any responsible act in our dizzying post-truth present necessitates our thinking about it both philosophically and rhetorically. I want to thank all of the scholars for their contributions to this issue and express my deep gratitude to Erik Doxtader for his intellectual generosity, extraordinary patience, and courageous stewardship of the journal.