Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu
Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Critical Theory at the University of Western Ontario

 

vs. myth:

                                                                                                a rule of none scorches the earth to hold it up with cunning flaw

 

Myth’s entanglements with truth have by and large been superseded by its longer lasting covenant with the narrative. Since the exhaustion of the Enlightenment paradigm has crystallized, the hope that truth – whether factual, analytic, or historical – sets us free from the cunning of myth, has been tamed. The older expressions of truth have been overwhelmed by the other epistemic operative of the reality principle: probability. Probability is truth’s postEnlightenment safeguard against mythical perversions: in postmodernity, truth fashions itself as unmyth. But as truth extricated itself from its murky cohabitation with myth-the-Bogeyman, the liberating function of truth-as-unmyth receded to merely instrumental levels, where one’s being freed from a certain subjection remained one’s only recourse to freedom. One’s probabilistic freedom from is mirrored unmythically into the realm of abstract possibilities, where the freedom to translates essentially as the freedom to abstract oneself. As postmodernity exacerbates the temptation of the real by the possible, truth comes to matter less (and less). This strange thinness of truth, furthered by inconsequential undecidables, abstracts truth from its historical entanglement with myth. By distancing itself from myth, the ideology of truth will force truth into a new mythological cast.