Truth, Illusion, and Their (Dis)Contents


 This article returns to Freud’s 1927 The Future of an Illusion in order to explore and elaborate the relations among identity, belief, and affect. Reading the competing authorial and opponent voices in the text, I ask whether realism about illusion is consistent with a belief in the ultimate victory of reason in human civilization. I return to Future of an Illusion for two reasons: first, we can see in this work the ambiguous and tumultuous intersection between “group psychology” and “political epistemology,” the way that the formation of community is bound up with the formation of epistemic anchors for belief; and second, the text offers a demonstration of the complex relations among science, scientism, and the critique of scientism that is itself worth engaging with, given the ways that epistemic and political authority are bound together, and both are bound to the variable authority of reason that post-truth seemingly puts under question.