Propaganda in the History of the Lie: a Human Condition

This paper is divided into two parts. First, it is analytic. I will illustrate Derrida’s arguments as a case of deconstruction par excellence in “The History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” whose conclusion is that there is no such history of the lie if the lie is specified in a traditional way, explicitly advocated by Arendt and Koyré in their discussions of the use of propaganda in modern politics and allegedly assumed by Kant in the moral context. For Derrida, the complexity of the lie as a performative keeps evolving. Its never-ceasing mutations demand a new interpretation, facilitated by the term “counter-truth.” Counter-truths in political controversies keep destabilizing any classical understanding of the lie. The repercussions extend to the interpretations of truth and veracity. Witnessing the downfall of the lie/veracity binary classically interpreted, Derrida reassures us that “a deconstructive genealogy of the lie” is still in place when its possibility is qualified and contextualized. Noteworthy is Derrida’s thesis of the instability inherent in the interplay of the lie and the formation of history as such. Derrida’s deconstruction without destroying the very idea of the lie exemplifies his philosophical treatment at its best. The second part of my paper is speculatively constructive. By appealing to Joseph Campbell’s anthropological resources and other philosophers’ views of language, I construct a deconstructive perspective on the reasons why, to begin with, one, with Derrida, may consider bogus the “Arendtian certainty of a final victory and of a certain survival of the truth (and not merely of veracity) over the lie” in the political arena, and why one, again with Derrida, need not object to the use of lies in political propaganda as radical evil simpliciter. Above all, as speculation, I will explain why there is a perennial instability in the interplay between lying and veracity in politics, especially in the propaganda of various sorts, given the human condition as it is.