CHAPTER 1

History of the Lie: Prolegomena

Before even a preface or an epigraph, allow me to make two confessions.Which I must therefore ask you, without waiting, to believe.

Two confessions, also two concessions that, although they are sincere,will nonetheless say something about the fabulous and the phantasmatic,more precisely, about what we understand by fable and phantasm,namely, the return of some specter. As we know, phantasma also namedfor the Greeks the apparition of the specter, the vision of the phantom, orthe phenomenon of the revenant. The fabulous and the phantasmatichave a feature in common: stricto sensu, in the classical and prevalent senseof these terms, they do not pertain to either the true or the false, the veraciousor the mendacious. They are related, rather, to an irreduciblespecies of the simulacrum or even of simulation, in the penumbral lightof a virtuality that is neither being nor nothingness, nor even an order ofthe possible that an ontology or a mimetology could account for or subduewith reason. No more than myth, fable and phantasm are doubtlessnot truths or true statements as such, but neither are they errors or deceptions,false witnesses or perjuries.

The first conceded confession touches on the proposed title: "Historyof the Lie." By a slight displacement, by slipping one word in beneath another,it seems to mimic the famous title of a text that some years ago verymuch interested me. In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche gives the title"History of an Error" ("Geschichte eines Irrtum") to a sort of narrative insix episodes that, on a single page, recounts, in effect, and no less, the trueworld, the history of the "true world" (die wahre Welt). The title of thisfictive narrative announces the narration of a fabrication: "How the 'trueworld' finally becomes a fable" ("Wie die 'wahre Welt' endlich zur Fabelwurde"). It is not, then, a fable that is going to be told, but rather thestory of how a fable fabricated itself, so to speak. The teller is going toproceed as if a true story were possible on the subject of the history of thisfabrication, a fabrication that produces, precisely, nothing other than theidea of a true world—which risks hijacking the supposed truth of the narration:"How the 'true world' finally becomes a fable." "History of anerror" is only a subtitle. This fabulous narration about a fabulation, aboutthe truth as fabrication, is a coup de théâtre. It puts on stage some characterswho will remain more or less present, like specters, in the wings: firstPlato, who says, according to Nietzsche, "I Plato, I am the truth," thenthe Christian promise in the form of a woman, then the Kantian imperative,"the pale Koenigsbergian idea," then the positivistic cock's crow,and finally the Zarathustrian midday. We will call upon all these spectersagain, but we will also call on another, whom Nietzsche does not name:Saint Augustine. It is true that the latter, in his two great treatises on lying(De mendacio and Contra mendacium), is always in dialogue with SaintPaul, Nietzsche's most intimate enemy and the privileged adversary of hisferocity.

Although the memory of this fabulous text will remain with us, the historyof the lie cannot be the history of an error, not even an error in theconstitution of the true, in the very history of the truth as such. InNietzsche's polemical and ironic text, in the vein of this fable about a fabrication,the truth, the idea of a "true world," would be an "error." Evenin his "Theoretical Introduction to Truth and Lie in an ExtramoralSense," a text to which we will return later, Nietzsche continues to poseor to suppose some continuity between the error and the lie, thus betweenthe true and the veracious, which allows him to treat the lie in the neutralityof an extramoral sense, as a theoretical and epistemological problem.This gesture is neither illegitimate nor without interest, but we willcome back to it only after having taken account of the irreducibly ethicaldimension of the lie, where the phenomenon of the lie as such is intrinsicallyforeign to the problem of knowledge, truth, the true, and the false.This evening, I would like to take a few steps toward the abyss that opensbetween this ethical dimension and a certain political history of the lie.

In principle and in its classical determination, a lie is not an error. Onecan be in error or mistaken without trying to deceive and therefore withoutlying. It is true, however, that lying, deceiving, and being mistaken areall three included in the category of the pseudological. In Greek, pseudoscan mean lie as well as falsehood, cunning, or mistake, and deception orfraud as well as poetic invention, which increases the possible misunderstandingabout what a misunderstanding may mean—and does not simplifythe interpretation of a "refutative" dialogue as dense and sharp as theHippias Minor (e peri tou pseudous, anatreptikos). The common translationof the subtitle, e peri tou pseudous, by "On the Lie" is, to be sure, neithera lie nor an error but already a reductive decision, and thus it falsifies.Pseudos does not mean merely "lie," and, what is more, this extraordinarydialogue complicates rather a lot the question of the relation betweenlying and the doubles, analogues, or false friends that it might hide in itsfolds, at least virtually, everything that I am getting ready to say thisevening, including all that refers to the most modern political history.Distinguishing between several senses of the word pseudos, at least three ofthem (in things, pragma; in the utterance, logos; and in man, anthropos—and this is the lie), Aristotle already contested, in the Metaphysics (Δ, 29)many of the theses of the Hippias Minor, including the one according towhich the liar (pseudes) is the one who has the faculty to lie. Aristotlespecifies, and this is the essential thing as far as we are concerned, that theliar is not only whoever can lie but the one who prefers to lie and, beingso inclined, does it by choice, intentionally (ho eukheres kai proairetikos),for which reason—and this is another objection to Plato—he is worsethan the involuntary liar, if such a thing exists.

To this kind of Aristotelian pseudography, and under the title "TheAristotelian...