Another way to approach this same ambiguity and tension in the relationship between fantasy and the Real would be via Heidegger's theme of errancy/untruth as the innermost feature of the event of truth itself. The very opening paragraph of John Sallis's remarkable essay on the monstrosity of truth tackles this difficult point directly:

What if truth were monstrous? What if it were monstrosity itself, the very condition, the very form, of everything monstrous, everything deformed? But, first of all, itself essentially deformed, monstrous in its very essence? What if there were within the very essence of truth something essentially other than truth, a divergence from nature within nature, true monstrosity? [Deformatives: Essentially Other Than Truth]

Before jumping to hasty psuedo-Nietzschean conclusions, let us ponder briefly on what these statements are getting at. Sallis's point is not the psuedo-Nietzschean 'deconstructionist' notion that 'truth' is a fixed, constraining order imposed by some Power on to the free thriving of our life-sustaining imagination -- that the 'monstrosity' of truth resides in the fact that every 'regime of truth' deforms and stifles the free flow of our life-energy. For Sallis, as a Heideggerian, Nietzsche, with his famous notion of truth as 'the kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live', remains within the metaphysical opposition between truth and its other (fiction, error, lie), merely accomplishing the anti-Platonic inversion of the relationship between truth and illusion, praising the life-enhancing potential of fictions. Sallis, rather, follows to the end Heidegger's move from truth as adequatio [adequatio rei et intellectus, the correspondence of reality and mind] to truth as disclosedness: prior to truth as adequatio (either adequatio of our statements to 'the way things really are'--'There is a screen in front of me' is true only if there actually is a screen in front of me -- or adequatio of the things themselves in their essence -- 'This is a true hero' if he or she in fact acts as befits the notion of a hero), the thing itself must be disclosed to us as what it is. 'Truth' is thus, for Heidegger, the (historically determined) 'clearing', where things appear to us within a certain horizon of meaning -- that is, as part of a certain epochal 'world'. Truth is neither 'subjective' nor 'objective': it designates simultaneously our active engagement in and our exstatic openness to the world, letting things come forth in their essence. Furthermore, truth as the epochally determined mode of the disclosure of being is not grounded in any transcendental ultimate Foundation (divine Will, evolutionary laws of the universe...) -- it is in its innermost being an 'event', something that epochally occurs, takes place, 'just happens'. The question is now: how does this notion of truth involve an untruth (concealment, errancy, mystery) at its very heart, as its 'essential counter-essence' of 'its proper non-essence'? How are we to think this untruth without reducing it to one of the metaphysical modi of the untruth qua negative/privative version of truth (lie, illusion, fiction...) and, as such, already dependent on truth?

P. 78-80

¶ 8:21 PM