From ‘authenticity’ to iThenticity – The quest for ‘truth’ in a post-patriarchal world

Alessio Pisci

doi:10.4396/202201MC

Alessio Pisci

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4396/202201MC

Keywords: authenticity, certification, hegemony, différance, binary oppositions, undecidability, iThenticity

Abstract

For centuries, the concept of ‘authenticity’ has been central to Western culture. In patriarchal Indo-European societies, the father had to certify that his paternity was ‘authentic’. This was the unavoidable precondition to hand down power to the next male generation and preserve patriarchal supremacy. Nowadays, patriarchy is slowly being substituted by a more egalitarian social structure and all those voices which for centuries had to remain silent (women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, etc.) are challenging the former hegemonic monophony of ‘impartial truths’. However, the multiplicity of contrasting points of view coexisting in this new emerging global polyphony clashes with the old logic of binary oppositions, leaving the post-patriarchal human being ‘stranded’ in a world of Derridian undecidables. To tackle this problem, we could resort to the concept of iThenticity (‘i’ = ‘interactivity’). Within this framework, individual discourses are not regarded as independent entities but rather as interacting constituents of a larger system which assimilates each single ‘authenticity’ into a polyphonic negotiation of new meanings that heterogeneously merge into a multifaceted iThentic macro-discourse. By its mere existence, each single sub-discourse (biased by default) proclaims the partiality of every ‘authenticity’ within the system and, thus, the inevitably partial nature of all the other sub-discourses. In the iThentic macro-discourse, the individual sub-discourses conflate into bigger super-signs capable of ‘storing’ more meaning. This partially narrows the distance between signifieds and their referents, it undermines binary oppositions and, consequently, makes undecidability easier to deal with

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