Book Review: Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling, by Lida Maxwell

Published date01 December 2021
Date01 December 2021
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211006875
Subject MatterBook Reviews
Book Reviews 1057
6. For more on this point, see Martin Shuster, “Levinas and German Idealism:
Fichte and Hegel,” in The Oxford Handbook of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Michael
Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). I note some possible common-
alities between Levinas and German idealism, but Herzog truly “cashes in” such
intuitions, pursuing strands I hadn’t even considered.
7. For readings that prioritize such a dimension, especially by drawing connec-
tions to the work of Stanley Cavell, see Michael Morgan, Discovering Levinas
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 273–77; “Emmanuel Levinas a
Philosopher of the Ordinary,” in Totality and Infinity at 50, ed. Diane Perpich and
Scott Davidson (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012); Martin Shuster,
“On the Ethical Basis of Language: Some Themes in Davidson, Cavell, and
Levinas,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 14, no. 2 (2015).
8. For an argument against reading Hegel in this way, see Terry Pinkard, Does
History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2017).
Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling, by Lida
Maxwell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, 224 pp.
Reviewed by: Sina Kramer, Women’s and Gender Studies, Loyola Marymount
University, Los Angeles, CA, USA
DOI: 10.1177/00905917211006875
I received Lida Maxwell’s bracing and provocative Insurgent Truth: Chelsea
Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling in the strange days that
marked the end of the Trump presidency, in the midst of the COVID-19 pan-
demic’s deadly third wave. The “post-truth” world we carried with us into the
new year continues to tilt, buffeted by what were once quaintly called con-
spiracy theories, now weaponized by algorithmic virality, with deadly conse-
quences. The politics of truth—of what is true and who is authorized to speak
it—has made the abstract field of epistemology a dizzyingly concrete experi-
ence for many of us.
Maxwell’s book is rooted in the epistemological territory of the United
States in the midst of the war on terror, which seems both like a decidedly
different era and one entirely continuous with the post-Trump era we now
inhabit. If, as Maxwell argues, insurgent truth-tellers offer a kind of portal to
another world, Maxwell’s book is itself one such portal that opens up a future
by opening a door on past—into what became the 21st century, an era not of
hope but of fear, an era that bent both the traditional media as well as the
utopian democratic tool of the internet to propaganda, mass deception, and
radicalization. If we are living in a post-truth era, this era began long before

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