Post-Hakikat’in İzleri: Adorno’da Hakikat ve Politika

Abstract

This study, drawing on Adorno’s reflections on truth and politics, aims to examine the concept of post-truth and to explore a historical-utopian understanding of truth in response. It centers around questions such as: In the face of the crisis of truth, can critique still open a path to utopia? and Is the idea of truth becoming an instrument of ideological domination and epistemological fragmentation? The first part will present Hegel’s and Marx’s conceptions of history and dialectics, which provide the historical and intellectual background for Adorno’s critique of ideology. Subsequently, Adorno’s critiques of Hegel and Marx, along with his conception of the culture industry developed within the framework of ideology critique, will be addressed. In the second part of the study, in order to understand the relationship Adorno establishes between truth and society, central themes in his philosophy will be examined. This section will interpret Adorno’s notion of utopia, which points beyond a merely hypostatized concept of truth, revealing social tensions and contradictions. The final part will engage with Adorno’s warnings concerning the threat posed by fascist tendencies to democracy in the aftermath of the Second World War. It will demonstrate how economic uncertainty and social anxieties feed populism, and how populism is connected to post-truth. The study will then propose Adorno’s utopia-based conceptualization of truth as a response to the replacement of collective utopias with privatized fantasies of desire, within the nexus of post-truth, the alt-right, populism, and their shared foundation in neoliberalism.