ABSTRACT This article investigates the formal dimensions of “post-truth” as a discourse. Specifically, I read post-truth as symptom, not as an “era” or “world.” The emergence of this symptom, the post-truth signifier, directs our attention to an anxiety regarding the desire for truth, rather than its presence or absence in public discourse. Based on Jacques Lacan's theory of discourse in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, I argue that the emergence of the term “post-truth” in the popular vernacular epitomizes a masculinized discourse of hysteria. To outline the formal features of post-truth discourse, I draw upon an early use of the term “post-truth” in a 1992 article of the Nation written by screenwriter and playwright Steve Tesich. The article concludes by consulting the critical psychoanalytic writings of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray to better specify the uniquely masculine form of post-truth hysteria and its implications for public discourse.

This essay argues that the mechanical voice of Stephen Hawking requires theorizing the public as a voice object. I contend that Hawking’s mechanical voice threatened his audience with what Jacques Lacan called the object voice, a voice in excess of bodies and languages that functions as an elusive object-cause of desire. Upon showing how the psychoanalytic account of voice and rhetorical scholarship on publics may mutually inform one another, I argue that, due to the role of publics as an objet petit a, the strange qualities of Hawking’s synthesizer were rhetorically surmounted. In sum, this essay considers whether Hawking’s mechanical voice was really all that different from our own.