The Promise of Facts

"You are to be in all things regulated and governed . . . by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact”

Charles Dickens 

Hard Times

In this book, (I think) I am trying to do four things.

First, I explore the genealogy of the notion of the modern fact and examine how this notion gave rise to a constellation of political imaginaries, logics, and practices organized around a particular promise:

The promise that facts can perform political work for us by establishing an unappealable and objective ground capable of bridging unbridgeable gaps between divergent beliefs, emotions, and opinions that keep us artificially apart, and thereby, move us from dissensus to consensus.

Second, I demonstrate how blind belief in this promise has trapped contemporary political projects in an endless and sterile search for facts that can resolve political conflicts and gradually pave the way for building a common world.

Third, I defend the urgent need to abandon this promise and to develop new political and ethical vocabularies that start from the recognition that facts will never be able to deliver on their promise because they are irreparably fragile——always susceptible to being debated, questioned, ignored, buried, denied, and disavowed, regardless of how immutable, universal, and self-evident their truth might be.

And fourth, I argue for the need to rethink the relationship between politics and facts, moving away from conceptions of politics as the task of seeking facts to ground the possibility of a common world, towards a conception that understands politics as the task of confronting the irreparable fragility of facts.