Abstract
As Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘no one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other’ and by now it is practically a commonplace that truth is a matter of discursive negotiation and cannot always be fully distinguished from fiction. Even so, controversies have recently arisen about remarks made by the likes of pro-Brexit British politicians, American President Donald Trump, and right-wing European populists. One of the media’s attempts to characterize this new feature of political discourse has been the concept of the ‘post-factual’. Yet among the tools of post-factual political discourse, it is not obvious false statements but half-truths that stand out most clearly. These can take various forms, such as statements whose facticity can be hard to pin down objectively; statements based partly on facts but also on fictive content; and statements in which real events are exaggerated, reinterpreted, or put in misleading contexts. In my chapter, I will take a closer look at (1) the characteristics of post factual discourse in general and (2) the function, construction, and ‘success’ of half-truths within this discourse in particular, proceeding from the assumption that they can be effectively analyzed with concepts from narratology and fiction theory.
