The way Lacan talks about "truth"
Speaking about the structure of truth Lacan says,
We must not take the term "fictions" here as referring to something illusory or deceptive [...] but as covering precisely what I highlighted aphoristically by emphasizing that truth [...] by its very essence [...] in ad of itself, has a fictional structure.
I'm making note of this because I've been interested in how Lacan articulates what truth is throughout his teaching. My interest is in this comes from two things I've noticed:
- That the way Lacan talks about truth, the way he describes what it is and how it functions, changes over the course of his teaching. (In summary: In the beginning of his teaching, it seems to me, that Lacan thinks that psychoanalysis can reveal some kind of Truth with a capital T. We might call this the Truth of desire. However, by the end of his teaching, as this quote shows, Lacan sees truth as something that is a semblance, that it is a kind of fiction we create via the imaginary and symbolic in response to the real which can't be rendered into a thinkable thought. In effect, we move from The Truth to the lying truth.)
- I think this version of truth (as it is being discussed here as a fiction) is at odds with the idea of truth as "factually accurate." I see this play out a lot in political things and stuff nowadays, where people can feel as if something that is factually inaccurate is true. When this happens, regardless of the accuracy of what someone says, people will act as if it is true. This shows how a truth being a fiction does not prevent people from taking it seriously...
Lacan, Jacques, From an Other to the other: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVI. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink., p. 164