Jacques Derrida: “History of the Lie.” In Without Alibi. Peggy Kamuf translation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Hannah Arendt: “Lying in Politics.” In Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972.
Derrida wants to defend ‘deconstructionism’ from Plato, lurking in the guise of Hannah Arendt. But, for political purposes, he also wants to be able to say, ‘J’Accuse!’ from time to time. This is a dilemma.
The sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity did not find this to be (how-you-say?) problematic until Socrates came along and spoiled the party. Now that Socrates has come along, his spirit lingering despite his execution, he pesters word-manipulators and world-manipulators like, well, a gadfly. Not Athenian poison, not Machiavellian stilettos, not the heavy artillery of Hegel or Nietzschean firebombs can quite transport the old boy’s shade to the Blessed Isles.
Derrida wants to historicize, first, the concept of lying—contrast it with non-Western traditions—and, second lying itself—its genesis and peregrinations within the Western tradition. Together, these historicizations will amount to “a true history” of the lie, for which his essay will serve as prolegomena. This may of course turn out to be an unfinished work.
He discusses Arendt, who discusses a new kind of lie, “the absolute lie,” the lie used deliberately to erase and replace what everyone knows to be true. ‘Image’ no longer refers to ‘Original’ but destroys and replaces it like a Social-Darwinian survivalist. Derrida worries that the Absolute Lie might merely shadow Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, and be equally vulnerable to Nietzschean ripostes.
On the other side, Arendt also discusses the Kantian absolute—not cognitive but moral—never to lie. The truth is “the trace of fugitive gods,” original and sacred. A lie is always harmful, polluting the spring of right, ruining the social bond. Lying is not universalizable (if you want society—a point Kant elides, in his attempt to dump teleology). Derrida, with Arendt, prefers not to be so severe.
Getting down to cases, Derrida looks at France’s then-president Jacques Chirac’s public acknowledgment of French guilt for the deportation of Jews under the Vichy regime. Derrida rightly sees that Charles de Gaulle, in studiously ignoring this French crime, refused to recognize the Vichy regime as genuinely French. (To be sure, it was headed by no less a French hero than Marshall Pétain, de Gaulle’s former mentor, but it was forced upon France by the Nazi conquerors.) In light of this, who is lying? De Gaulle or Chirac? Derrida makes a Socratic move by means of a French proverb: “It is not good to tell every truth.” Truth-telling is not always good because the knowledge of the truth may in some circumstances dispirit citizens, make them incapable of getting on with their lives in a none-too-friendly world, a world that might use not ideas but truth itself as a weapon, injuriously. This means that truth-telling is not always good. It may also mean that the truth itself is not always good—that, contra Nietzsche, Socrates is neither a nihilist nor an optimist. Derrida wants an idea of the good, but as a historicist he knows no stable one, and as a deconstructionist he wants no such stable good to await us at ‘the end of History.’ Therefore, he is forced, reluctantly, to treat what he calls “performative truths—conventions settled by force—as truths simply, rather than as facts. With no real idea of nature, much less of natural right, for Derrida conventions become more formidable. By what can one call for their change? And was not the Vichy regime a “performative truth,” as long as the Nazis made it so?
(Before leaving this topic, Derrida makes the eminently Socratic (and also Hegelian) point that the city risks “perverting” the truth into “dogmatism or orthodoxy.” Now there is a legitimate target for deconstructionists: but only in the sense that the city is perverse and not necessarily in the sense that the city necessarily lies. Again, Derrida offers no transhistorical—and, therefore, no genuinely transconventional criterion with which to criticize conventions. Is he left with the triumph of the will, as is Nietzsche? Or must he wait for Godot, at some Heideggerian station?)
Derrida’s next move is to settle a score with his critic, Tony Judt. He may be said to be motivated by the Socratic quest for justice, although, unlike Socrates, he is demanding justice for himself, and, also unlike Socrates, he can point to no stable definition of justice. Judt had accused Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida himself of failing to protest against the longtime ‘ignoring’ of Vichy’s crimes by subsequent French authorities. Calumny! Derrida charges. He had signed a petition in 1992 calling upon then-president Mitterand to come clean. Judt stands convicted not of lying but of another kind of moral failure: lack of assiduousness in seeking the truth. This failure is related to self-deception, so-called, which rests on an unconscious aversion to the truth. Judt’s soul is insufficiently—or at least inadequately—erotic, Socrates would say.
Thus Derrida suggests, both that truth-telling is not always good, and that truth-telling about Derrida is. He holds journalists not to higher standards than politicians, but to more rigorously factual ones. How, then, can deconstructionism give a history of veracity and the lie without collapsing the distinction between them?
He begins (as Arendt did, years before) with a consideration of modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism.’ Totalitarianism (as Dostoevsky foresaw) is utilitarianism or pragmatism absolutized. Totalitarians use ideas as weapons, call upon us not to understand the world but to change it. (Thus Derrida silently rejects the core of Marxism, while applauding, later on, Marx’s critique of ‘ideology.’) Derrida evidently sees that ‘deconstructive’ techniques might easily serve a ‘totalizing’ agenda, and that’s one ‘prolegomena’ he’d rather not see written. Similarly, Nietzsche sees that the bland demi-relativism or soft nihilism of late nineteenth-century Europe might easily be kayoed by some forthright nihilism, itself the prelude to some ‘totalizing’ superman. Derrida differs honorably from Nietzsche in not licking his chops at this prospect. “Ethical, juridical, or political responsibility, if they exist [!], consists in deciding on the strategic orientation to give in this problematic….” (emphasis added). It sure does. It even burdens ‘totalizing’ tyrants with the problem Arendt sees: You can’t utterly reconstruct the world without deceiving everybody, at lest initially. So how will you keep your story straight?
Insofar as he acknowledges the need for an orientation (strategic or otherwise), Derrida rediscovers a Platonic thought. The remedy for the Absolute Lie cannot be the Absolute Truth. Given the inevitable dogmatization of Absolute Truth in politics, a ‘totally’ transparent society would leave no place to hide. (Unless the philosophers were kings, in which case they could hide behind the purple, in the Nocturnal Council. This is a highly unlikely outcome.) Derrida very sensibly objects to Alexandre Koyré’s lumping-together of the Marranos with Spartan and Indian warriors, and with Jesuit warriors-of-the-Spirit. The transparent society, perhaps in contrast with the ‘open society,’ would make the self-defense of the heterodox impossible.
In order to vindicate the truth, one should not expand the political realm but delimit it. In this enterprise Derrida holds the solitary philosopher on the one hand and (following Arendt) such institutions as the judiciary and the universities on the other. Judging from his occasional hints, he knows very well that these institutions cannot be apolitical, and that even the solitary philosopher must understand politics well enough to know how to govern his solitude (and perhaps his dialogues, with philosophers living and dead).
For all his (somewhat surreptitious) Platonizing, Derrida wants to hold onto his anti-Platonic ontology. As a historicist, Derrida denies the stability of truth. To believe in the stability of truth is to be too optimistic, he writes, following Nietzsche. To believe in the stability of truth “makes of history, as history of the lie, the epidermic and epiphenomenal accident of a parousia of truth.” But (in truth) Plato never makes much of “history.” History, in the sense of a pattern of events rather than an account of events, does not exist in Plato. Plato makes myths, not histories. Further, if lies are as enduring as Derrida says (and maybe they are), might that not mean that they track the truth, like a shadow, and thus bespeak the stability of truth? Or, alternatively, might such perdurable lies not have some truth mixed in with them—and therefore not be lies at all, but myths or fables? Without examples, it is hard to judge.
Well, after all, it’s only a draft of a prolegomena to a history of the lie. I solemnly swear not to treat Derrida as Tony Judt does, or to behave like a captious book reviewer who complains that a 400-page book doesn’t tell ‘the whole truth.’ Surely ‘the whole truth’s’ very wholeness suggests limits? Truth may be ‘tyrannical’ in the sense that it dictates to us, telling us that such-and-such is so, like it or not. But it cannot be ‘totalitarian’—else there would be no need for the notion—of truth, of totalitarianism, or of any other notions, which after all require definition.
Recent Comments