Jean-Michel RABATE

Text originally published in: Jean-Michel Rabaté, From the Afterword to The Ethics of the Lie, The Other Press, New York, 2007, p. 359-381.

The origin of this book was an invitation to discuss the interrelated themes of “Language, Lies and Ethics” for a conference organized by the American University of Paris around Jacques Derrida. The conference took place on May 21st, 2003. Derrida was scheduled to be the main orator. Sadly, he had to cancel two days before—the conference’s date overlapped with a series of biopsies that revealed to him the incurable pancreatic cancer from which he was to die a little more than a year later. Thinking of the dialogue to come, I had reopened a difficult and complex essay of his on the “History of the Lie,” which by then only existed in an English version ¹. I had heard this talk as Derrida delivered it at the Tuscaloosa conference that was devoted to Futures in 1995. In that talk, Derrida had gone back to Hannah Arendt’s 1967 article on “Truth and Politics” to query some of her assumptions. In order to give a sense of the discussion, I will quote Arendt’s sentence by itself: “The famous credibility gap, which has been with us for six long years, has suddenly opened up an abyss. The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to prove this material, which, unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of United States foreign and domestic policy.” ² The relevance of this sentence to contemporary American politics has been emphasized by Eric Alterman in his attempt at reconstructing an American “history of the lie.” I have alluded to Alterman’s When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and its consequences ³ in the Introduction. Going back to Kant and Hannah Arendt, Alterman points out the dangerous consequences of state lies and official deceptions< ⁴. He offers his own “ethics of the lie” in a Conclusion entitled “George W. Bush and the Post-Truth Presidency.” ⁵

Derrida’s point was more foundational and also more elusive, and to limn his position I will now quote the remark that he inserted within brackets in Arendt’s sentence: “The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions _I emphasize “self-deceptions”, which will be one of our problems later on: Is “self-deception” possible? Is it a rigorous and pertinent concept for what interests us here, that is, the history of the lie? In strictest terms, does one ever lie to oneself?—J.D._, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material, which, unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of United States foreign and domestic policy.” ⁶. Thus, as he did in the “Wounding Truth” essay that I have quoted earlier, Derrida asserted here that one can never be caught lying: since one can always say: “I was wrong but I did not mean to deceive; I am in good faith.” ⁷ If the lie is restricted to an intention to deceive, it may well be that the undecidability persists and seals off any possibility of verification. The only “proof” will hence have to come from the subject, especially when he falls under the category of “suspect”—which is why for centuries torture has been considered a logical way of extracting the confession, of forcibly breaking into the locked room prohibited to others in which the secret of perjury or deceit lay. As Derrida notes, in Greek “pseudos can mean lie as well as falsehood, cunning, or mistake, and deception or fraud as well as poetic invention, which increases the possible misunderstanding about what is meant by “misunderstanding”… ⁸

While I wanted to remain at some distance of Derrida’s aporias that multiply undecidable conceptual knots, I found in that same essay a very useful hint. At one point, Derrida engages with recent controversies concerning President Chirac’s official recognition of the responsibility of the French State in the deportation and assassination Jews during the Nazi occupation. He mentions the contested “truths” about boundaries and borders in the ex-Yugoslavia, in Israel and Chechnya and notes wryly that generally the performative violence of those who make the laws, who decide upon legitimacy and public consensus. He comments: “Who tells the truth and who lies in those areas? For the better and for the worse, this performative dimension makes the truth, as Augustine says. It therefore imprints its irreducibly historical dimension on both veracity and the lie.” ⁹ Noting that neither Kant nor Hannah Arendt were able to take into account the performative dimension of the lie, just as they failed to pay attention to the unconscious dimension of the phenomenon, Derrida outlines a program that comes very close to that of psychoanalysis, not of course, without qualifications and reservations: “Such phenomena _the performative violence of law-givers and the impossibility of knowing whose truth we face then_ cannot be approached without, at the very least, the combination of a “logic of the unconscious” and a theory of the “performative.” This does not mean that the current and currently elaborated discourse of psychoanalysis or of speech-act theory is sufficient to the task. It means even less that there is a ready articulation between them—or between them and a discourse on politics or the economy of the tele-technologiucal knowledge and power.” ¹⁰ Derrida’s prudence is necessary and should warn us not to follow blindly the post-Foucaldians who assert that truth is just the manifestation of political or ideological power.

Thus, since I wanted to write a book on lies that would analyze the historical positivity of the lie, with sections on American presidents like Clinton and Bush, but that would also engage with literature, film and popular culture, I needed to bridge the gap between the possibility of a history of the lie and the paradox of a logical and ethical undecidability lodged in the darkest recesses of the human psyche. To follow Derrida’s suggestion, I had to take into account the undecidability of the lie, and all its attendant legal or religious offshoots, like confession and perjury, while moving beyond a strictly phenomenological mode of analysis. Finally, this entailed that I had to allow room for the possibility of a self-lie or of self-deception, even though Derrida seemed to prohibit this. Such phenomena had been analyzed at length, as we have seen, by Pascal, Nietzsche, the French moralists, Schopenhauer and of course Freud. My wish was to cover the ground from the “intention to deceive” (which condenses the essence of the lie for a long tradition going back to Plato and Augustine) to the perfomative loop that makes us forget that we lie when we do in order to be better liars, so that often we don’t even know that we have lied. The unconscious circularity of lying derives no doubt from the “Machiavellian brain” that makes us lie to ourselves in order to be better liars. Even Nietzsche was conflicted on these issues. If one accepts to work with a “logic of the unconscious” and a theory of the performative, there will be a point at which one will have to engage with Lacan’s discussion of truth and lies, a discussion predicated on the concept of the Freudian unconscious.

Thus in Freud’s Project one can see the importance of the concept of proton pseudos as the first logical error which is also the first lie. The perverse circularity of the process prevents any stable distinction between lies and errors, between good and bad intention, between “white lies” and “black lies”. This is perhaps why the failure of president George W. Bush politics in Irak tends not to be attributed to his “lies” any more but is more systematically condemned as a “big mistake.” That this mistake has Freudian features is undeniable—Bush the son wanted to do better than Bush the father who behave cynically but cautiously facing a disreputable dictator. Both had been warned by Billy Graham not to take themselves for God. ¹¹ The circularity between lies and mistakes in this case is underpinned by an Oedipal logic. From a psychoanalytic point of view, recent American politics have shown history to repeat itself in reverse, the tragedy following the farce; we have seen how president Clinton could be described as a Lacanian president (when he urged that “there was no sexual rapport”) whereas president George W. Bush has been a thoroughly Freudian president.

I have referred to the end of the cold war as the moment when the myth of a big Other ceased to play its role in American politics. This is the time to examine the psychoanalytical and philosophical of this Other. As Lacan repeatedly claimed, the Other had been invented not by Freud, not even by Hegel (although this sia central concept in the Phenomenology of Spirit) but by the first truly “modern” philosopher, René Descartes. The obvious passage to look at is the ending of the first meditation, when Descartes attempts to doubt everything that is not certain, especially the teachings of past thinkers. In order to do this, he invents the fiction of an “evil genius” whose mission would be to deceive him all the time: “Accordingly, I will suppose not a supremely good God, the source of truth, but rather an evil genius, supremely powerful and clever, who has directed his entire effort at deceiving me. I will regard the heavens, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things as nothing but the bedeviling hoaxes of my dreams, with which he lays snares for my credulity.” ¹² Such hyperbolic doubt is the absolute weapon of Descartes metaphysics, a metaphysical system that aims less at dialoguing with theologians than at laying down the foundations for a new science. The dialectical pivot or reversal will thus come from the discovery that his own mind, or consciousness, has been made all the stronger and irrefutable by the exercise of universal deceit: “But there is some deceiver or other who is supremely powerful and supremely sly and who is always deliberately deceiving me. Then too there is no doubt that I exist, if he is deceiving me. And let him do his best at deception, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I shall think that I am something. Thus, after everything has been most carefully weighed, it must finally be established that this pronouncement “I am, I exist” is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind.” ¹³

Lacan has always tried to reconcile this well-known point of departure, a point to which Edmund Husserl came back with his own Cartesian Meditations, with the Freudian notion of the Unconscious. Descartes posits the subject as a point, one might say a period or a common if we rewrite the famous “cogito ergo sum” as “cogito: “ergo sum.”” The utterance becomes a performative which is true every time that I say these words. Without engaging here with the nuances of Lacan’s theory of utterance as opposed to the statement, I will look for an example that might illustrate the relations between truth and lies when they are made more complex because of the performative and the unconscious. In order to combine the analysis of the performative power of the lie and of its determination but unconscious motivations, I will read a text in which a lie is confessed (hence, we will not have to doubt its being a lie). It derives from a context that is not primarily literary (it is presented as a true autobiographical account) and that is not political either (therefore we do not have to worry about skewed or partisan interpretations).

My example comes from one of these well-written and stylish chronicles published weekly in the New York Times under the heading of “Modern Love.” This particular story, signed by Amy O’Leary, is entitled “When the Thunder Rolls In, My Lie Rolls Out.” ¹⁴ The narrator explains that in her youth she would play the role of tomboy, pretending to be afraid of nothing, the only girl who would watch gory horror movies with the boys. Later, it was driving fast cars or occasionally sky-diving with male colleagues. Her partners had a hard time adjusting to this, which was the case when she lived with a boyfriend who, resenting her independence, was drifting away. She hit upon the idea of inventing a fiction that would rekindle his interest. During a thunderstorm in rural Minnesota, she suddenly pretended that she was terrified of the thunder. Extemporizing on that invented fear was painless; this was the “best kind of lie: tender and considerate.” For a while, the lie was effective and managed to attract the boyfriend’s attention. The lie offered a new lease of life to the flagging relationship, although it was short-lived and soon collapsed again. As she writes, “crafty fiction can buttress only so much reality,” and after a few months they separated. Here is the beautiful epiphany that the well-meaning lie generated. One night after the break-up, Amy was contemplating a rather frightful storm from a window without any trace of fear. Then she saw the ex-boyfriend rushing under the rain to her apartment in a well-meaning effort to comfort her. This show of courageous altruism granted them an extra night of tenderness, after which he left town and joined the army.

Two years elapsed, the narrator was then living in Saint Paul where she had a series of bad dates and unexciting boyfriends. One among them only looked more promising, a drummer in a rock band who wanted not to get too involved. In order to come closer to him, she tried the same ploy, but this time it didn’t work. The drummer boyfriend retorted blandly that thunderstorms “can be freaky” and spoke of other things. Amy learned that night that “vulnerability ha(d) a limited currency.” Two or three years later, she seemed to have found Mr. Right. She is now living in Chicago where she shares an apartment with Brian. One night a violent storm shakes the high tower where they live, it strong winds buffet it, the flashes of lightning seem aimed at her. Fearing for her life, she wakes up trembling. Here is her description of the scene:

“Drowsily, dreamily, I imagined the building had been blown apart, and there was nothing to do but fall to the ground with the skinny red bricks that held me inside that room. In my half-asleep state this loop played again and again: lightning, thunder, explosion, slipping, falling, bricks, bruises, more bricks, the flat slap of concrete, the end of my life. // With each fresh thunderclap; the terrifying movie began again. Even as I slept I was hyperventilating. Yet the storm was no bigger than the storm in Minnesota. The only difference was Brian. He was already awake, holding me as I finally startled out of sleep. // Immediately he said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t wake up. (…) I didn’t want you to be afraid.” // I felt so scared and grateful.” ¹⁵

On the surface, the story seems to present a perfect case of “true word spoken in jest.” Indeed, one of the effects of the story is that it can be read as a joke played on Amy by herself. The tough woman who pretended to be afraid in order to interest reluctant males ended up suffering from the invented phobia, in a typical case of dramatic irony. I have insisted earlier on the links between jokes and lies. We can see here a commonality in the logic: a lie twists the truth to create a new and hopefully more favorable reality whereas a joke twists reality to create a new truth or a new formulation of old truths. One of these old truisms is that one should never lie for fear of having the lie come true—such was the moral lesson of the apologue of saint Julian that we encountered in the Conclusion.

Until that moment, Amy believed that she was lying only to get care and attention from absent-minded lovers while she could keep her inner cool, her reserve of strength. In fact, the pretence might have betrayed her deeply hidden and successfully repressed fear of thunderstorms. Her lie would thus be not a lie but the admission of a repressed anxiety—such would be the most conventional Freudian reading. However it is not very convincing as one might conversely argue that there was no repressed fear; it was that Amy ended up believing her own lie because of the performative nature of the lie: after a few fake rehearsals, the mask had become a second nature, the grimace tried out in jest was imprinted durably on the face. How can we solve this hesitation, go beyond this antinomy? Surely not be having recourse to undecidable intentions of deceiving or telling the truth by way of lies.

Amy herself points out the undecidable nature of a series of reversals between truth and lies in her elegant conclusion; she writes that in her panic, the only words she can utter are: “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Because if anyone else had been there, I’d still be pretending not to be afraid of anything, which would force me to pretend to be afraid of something, so I could pretend to trust someone finally to take care of me. // And when the thunderstorms come, as they have this summer, when the sky flashes angry, it’s good to be reminded again that I am both strong and afraid. It is a good time to fall asleep next to Brian and hide from the window.” ¹⁶

This scene stages the Lacanian interaction between love, demand, desire and the symptom. The first “lie” was clearly produced in the name of an unlimited demand for love, protection being just a cover for the wish to be totally cared for. Facing demand, lies are normal—anything is good to elicit a kiss, a compliment or a pardon, as we have seen in Carver’s story. Amy discovers that some people are more receptive to this kind of demand than others, and that it cannot stop the erosion of desire. The difference with the last scene is that there she feels love for Brian. Being in love allows her to release the symptom as a creative construction. Brian too seems to be in love with her since he has perceived the storm before her and tries to shield her from it in advance, as she is still sleeping. When she wakes up; she is as immersed in the thunderstorm as in his protective attitude facing her. Because he has perceived the threat of a trauma even before she was aware of it, Brian has materialized the function of an Other. She is caught unaware, already late in the pathos of the elements, already overcome physically by a tempest raging outside. As he warns her of the danger in advance of her fear, he symptomatizes her “lie” for her.

Amy is then caught up in the truth of her lie mainly, it seems, because she is in love. Love, which always partakes of the structure of delusion (as Freud and Lacan both agree), but is a true delusion as well, makes her lose the tenuous grasp on the divide between truly felt emotion and mere pretence. Her fear, which had been so far without an object, once it has found one, becomes a symptom of her “true love.” Looking for the limit by often playing the man, like a good hysteric, Amy has finally found her master, and here is the condition for love: “The surprise about Brian was discovering how he is strong in ways that I have never imagined for myself, ways I have now come to rely on. He drives my car faster than I do. He plays a solid game of pool. He knows how to win a fight in a bar.” ¹⁷ If Brian is in a position of mastery, it is above all because he can see through Amy’s lies, and more importantly know intimately when she is true or “faking it”: “Most of all, he always knows when I’m lying or faking it or just not being honest with myself.” ¹⁸ Thus the thunder phobia manifests her dependence upon a strong man in touch with elemental nature while tying up a knot between her “true” love, a love that makes her spin pleasant fictions for both of them, and her sudden discovery that she is played upon, that is, fundamentally determined as a plaything by the locus of the big Other.

The Other or the concept of the Unconscious as “the discourse of the Other” inevitably calls up the ghost of the Freudian unconscious revisited by Lacan. The usual idea in that connection is that the Unconscious does not know of time and negation, and that it cannot lie. However, we have seen that things were more complex with the “proton pseudos” of hysteria, and another Freudian case throws more light on the presence of deceit very close to the Unconscious. This surfaces in a late case treated by Freud, the 1920 treatment of a young homosexual woman. She had attempted to commit suicide after her father had looked angrily at her companion, a disreputable cocotte whom she was infatuated with. During the treatment, the young woman would narrate to Freud reassuring dreams depicting marriage and heterosexual felicity. Freud soon suspected these dreams were lies; in fact, the young woman simply wanted to end the cure as fast as possible. He told her that he suspected these dreams of being too “obliging.” She agreed and after a while, such “hypocritical” dreams stopped. His account of the case is interrupted by a question that turns into a passionate digression:

“I can imagine that to point out the existence of lying dreams of this kind, ‘obliging’ dreams, will arouse a positive storm of helpless indignation in some readers who call themselves analysts. ‘What!’ they will exclaim, ‘the unconscious, the real centre of our mental life, the part of us that is so much nearer the divine than our poor consciousness—it too can lie! Then how can we still build on the interpretation of analysis and the accuracy of our findings!’ To which one must reply that the recognition of these lying dreams does not constitute any shattering novelty. I know, indeed, that the craving of mankind for mysticism is ineradicable, and that it makes ceaseless efforts to win back for mysticism the territory it has been deprived of by The Interpretation of Dreams, but surely in the case under consideration, everything is simple enough. A dream is not the ‘unconscious’; it is the form into which a thought left over from preconscious, or even from conscious, waking life, can, thanks, to the favouring state of sleep, be recast.” ¹⁹

Although attacking the temptation of treating the Unconscious as a god-like source of Truth, Freud is nevertheless quick to save the core of the unconscious from pure lying: “With our dreamer, the intention to mislead me, just as she did her father, certainly emanated from the pre-conscious, and may indeed have been conscious…” (p. 166) He then explains that the young woman’s intention to mislead him was probably conscious but found a connection with the unconscious wish to please her father. As Lacan noted, Freud’s syntax gets quite involved here: “The two intentions, to betray and to please her father, originated in the same complex; the former resulted from the repression of the latter, and the latter one was brought back by the dream-work to the earlier one.” ²⁰ Freud points to the Oedipus complex as the root in the woman’s desire; once repressed, it led to a conscious deception facing the paternal substitute in Freud. Then the dream-work brought the wish to please the father closer to a position of deception facing the substitute father. What matters for Freud is to save his domain from the suspicion that he himself has created: “There can be no question of any devaluation of the unconscious, nor of a shattering of our confidence in the results of analysis.” What follows is a lush evocation of the most varied forms of delusion and self-deception whose rhetorical sweep makes readers forget the danger of a theoretical aporia when the unconscious seemed threatened in its truth-making function.

“I cannot neglect this opportunity of expressing for once my astonishment that human beings can go through such great and important moments of their erotic life without noticing them much; sometimes even, indeed, without having the faintest suspicion of their existence, or else, having become aware of these moments, deceive themselves so thoroughly in their judgments of them.” (p. 166) This seems a universal phenomenon that is not limited to neurotics. He sums up the case of the young homosexual as if it had been a comedy of errors, nobody doing exactly the right thing. Men who come out of a casual love affair apparently unconcerned realize later that this was the love of their lives. Our erotic lives are of course the domains of predilection for the host of errors that pertain to blindness and self-deception: “It must be admitted that poets are right in liking to portray people who are in love without knowing it, or uncertain whether they do love, or who think that they hate when in reality they love. It would seem that the information received by our consciousness about our erotic life is especially liable to be incomplete, full of gaps, or falsified. Needless to say, in this discussion I have not omitted to allow for the part played by subsequent forgetting.“ (p. 167)

For his part, Lacan refuse to be swayed by the eloquent appeal to the powers of deception, to a deception principle common to all humanity, and takes a rather severe view of Freud’s attitude facing the young homosexual. He notes that Freud terminated the cure as soon as he realized that the young woman was lying to him. Immediately, Freud handed her over to a female analyst, as if he was aware of his own limitations, and has shrunk from the “dark continent” of a femininity known for its ruses and guiles ²¹. Indeed when Freud chose to see in these lying dreams less a logical paradox than a failure of transference, he should have used this very failure as a new lever to reach the hidden desire and its repetition. Failing this, Freud repeats in a sense the acting out of the young homosexual who had attempted to commit suicide by letting herself drop from the street onto railway tracks: he drops her! Lacan comments: “Here is the point where Freud refuses to see in truth, which is his passion, the structure of fiction that is at its origin.” ²² Freud had not been able to see what the patient had meant by lying to her analyst. For Lacan, contrarily, desire deploys itself in the paradox of Epimenides, the famous “I lie but I tell the truth.”

Freud repeats the young homosexual’s acting out because the pattern of delusion and deception from which she comes is not thematized and worked through as such in the analytic situation. The young woman had the impression that she would never be given her father’s child. She then replaced the object a of desire (the symbolic child) with the phallus: she becomes a phallus for the woman whom she adores and also phallicizes. Then she acts out by staging a dramatized suicide: she jumps into railroads, thus niederkommt or “gives birth” to her symptom. When Freud abruptly cut off the treatment, he dropped her and perhaps dropped the riddle femininity as well.

Lacan sends back his audience to earlier texts of his, and one among these develops the paradox of the liar. In one passage of the seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan meditates on the Biblical commandments and then singles out the prohibition of lying as exemplary of the law:

“”Thou shalt not lie” is the commandment in which the intimate link between desire, in its structuring function, with the law is felt most tangibly. In truth, this commandment exists to make us feel the true function of the law. And I can do no better job than to place it beside the sophism in which is manifested most strikingly the type of ingenuity that is furthest from the Jewish or talmudic tradition, namely the paradox of Epimenides, he who affirmed that all men are liars. (…) “Thou shalt not lie” as a negative precept has as its function to withdraw the subject of enunciation from that which is enunciated. (…) It is there that I can say “Thou shalt not lie” – there where I lie, where I repress, where I, the liar, speak. In “Thou shalt not lie” as law is included the possibility of the lie as the most fundamental desire.” ²³ The perspective of, a divide between Greek tolerance for the sophisms of the liar opposed and Jewish reprobation for the lie would chime in well with the work of Emmanuel Levinas who was elaborating more or less at the same time an original system of ethics, not from psychoanalysis of course, but coming out of the phenomenological tradition of Husserl. If ethics is the domain of a radical openness to the alterity of the “face”, it follows that it cannot admit the equivocation of the lie. Even if the concept of the Other is not the same for Levinas and Lacan, they overlap somewhat. For Lacan, fundamentally, the lie cannot lie but must tell the truth—this truth concerns the dispossession or the decentering of the subject, just as for Levinas one is always ethically responsible for the other to such a point that we are the hostages of such radical otherness; the only condition of an ethics of total openness and hospitality.

Fearing to get lost in such lofty preoccupations, I will evoke a more homely character, Pinocchio. Pinocchio is perhaps the most popular character identified with lying. The wooden puppet with an extensible nose has become a striking visual icon for our mendacious times. Even if Collodi was not always consistent in his narrative (at times Pinocchio lies without seeing his nose grow), or somewhat ambivalent facing his hero (the first version of the story ended sadly with the death of Pinocchio, a tragedy that was refused by his enthusiastic readers), he has left us a very powerful image that has been reactivated at the time of president Clinton’s sexual scandal. The Los Angeles Times could describe contemporary culture as a “Pinocchio culture” in June 2003. ²⁴ Those who have read Freud did not fail to point out the sexual overtones of the tumescent nose or age-old links between noses and penises—besides, the nose often grows in the direction of the fairy, described as a beautiful and powerful young woman. From a Lacanian point of view, one might say that the lie always keeps something of the structure of the phallus, because the phallus is always like a joke, shares its mythical origin with the ludicrously inflated prosthesis carried on the stage in Aristophanes’ theatre. ²⁵ Pinocchio enacts the phallic comedy of the liar caught enjoying the act of lying lies too much.

Collodi reminds us, if we had ever forgotten it, that children grow and mature by discovering lies, first by indulging them freely when, around the age of three, they enjoy a newly found power to deceive other people. A year or two later they understand how to use these ruses and subterfuges more rationally, which often means more discretely. What does the fairy tell Pinocchio when he is caught lying? “There are lies with short legs, and lies with long noses.” ²⁶ The fairy who not always entirely reliable (when Pinocchio meets her in chapter fifteen, she tells him that she is dead) is here twisting an old proverb, still quite current in Spanish: “La mentira tiene patas cortas y la verdad tien brazos largos” (lies have short legs and truth has long arms.) Alas, this gnomic optimism fades away in front of Collodi’s modern skepticism, a skepticism deepened by our own brazen epoch. Now, all we usually hope for is to be able to distinguish between the big lies that one can see like a turgescent nose planted in the middle of our faces, and the many little legs of the legal, political, technological, commercial and administrative centipedes that keep on trotting all the time under the tables of the law. One can guess, given the double-edged nature of the paradox, that like Zeno’s Achilles never overtaking a tortoise, these legs will never reach the final line.

We are indeed like Pinocchio: we only learn from our lies and errors, and from the lies and errors of other people. Pinocchio becomes a little boy step by step, first when he lies, then when he stops lying. His good heart saves him again and again, catastrophe after catastrophe: each time, he repents, that is he decides to put an end to what never stops lying in him (and in us). Such an end is necessary and in that necessity lies the need for ethics. As Wittgenstein famously remarked, we have the experience of ethics when we hit upon the limits of our language; one can add “language in so far as it lies”. Such a process derives as well from the foundational paradox of the lie. We are always lie visibly and invisibly, in other words we lie to ourselves and to the others while interpreting the world by making sense of other people’s lies. We will progress on the journey to adulthood and full humanity by a constant self-education via deceit, by a heightened awareness of the ubiquitous nature of lies. Like Athena facing Ulysses as he spins his yarns, when the kind blue fairy looks at us with our distended nasal appendages, she will laugh at first, and then, hopefully, will not withhold the healing power of her magic.

Notes

1 - Jacques Derrida, “History of the Lie”, in Futures of Jacques Derrida, edited by Richard Rand, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 65-98. For the French original, see “Histoire du Mensonge: Prolégomènes,” Cahier de l’Herne Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, Paris, Editions de l’Herne, 2004, p. 405-520.
2 - Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics”, in Crises of the Republic, New York, Harcourt and Brace, 1972, p. 3-4.
3 - Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and its consequences, Viking, 2004.
4 - When Presidents Lie, p. 8.
5 - When Presidents Lie, p. 294-314.
6 - Jacques Derrida, ‘History of the Lie”, in Futures—of Jacques Derrida, edited Richard Rand, Stanford, 2001, p. 71.
7 - “History of the Lie,” Futures, p. 68.
8 - “History of the Lie,” Futures, p. 66.
9 - “History of the Lie”, Futures, p. 81.
10 - “History of the Lie”, Futures, p. 82.
11 - See the amusing anecdote told by Mark Crispin Miller of G. W. Bush’s mother suddenly calling Billy Graham during an argument about whether only Christians go to heaven, The Bush Dyslexicon, op. cit, p. 148.
12 - René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald Cress, 3rd ed, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1993, p. 16-17.
13 - Ibid., p. 18.
14 - Amy O’Leary, “When the Thunder Rolls In, My Lie Rolls Out,” New York Times, Sunday September 10, 2006, Style Section, p. 21.
15 - Ibid.
16 - Ibid.
17 - Ibid.
18 - Ibid.
19 - Sigmund Freud, “A Case of Homosexuality in a woman”, Standard Edition, vol. XVIII, p 165-166.
20 - Ibid. p. 166. For the original text, see “Ueber die Psychogenese eines Falles von weiblicher Homosexualität”, in Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, Zwang, Paranoia und Perversion, Band VII, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1973, p. 275.
21 - Jacques Lacan, L’Angoisse, Séminaire X, Seuil, 2004, p. 152.
22 - Jacques Lacan, L’Angoisse, p. 152.
23 - Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter, New York, Norton, 1992, p. 81-82.
24 - Quoted by Sandra L. Beckett, “Recycling Pinocchio for Contemporary Audiences”, in Approaches to teaching Collodi’s Pinocchio and its adaptations, ed. Michael Sherberg, New York, Modern Language Association of America, 2006, p. 118;
25 - This is one of the points made forcibly by Lacan in Seminar V on The Formations of the Unconscious. See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire Livre V, Les Formations de l’Inconscient, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris, Seuil, 1998, p. 261-286.
26 - Carlo Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio / The adventures of Pinocchio, trans. Nicolas J. Perella, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986, p. 211.