Veracity and disimulation

Abstract

The aim of the article is to interrogate about the efficacy of lies and of a set of neighboring speech acts, such as perjury, false accusation, slander, pretense, demagoguery, deceit, and negationism, which have lately acquired new power by virtue of the uncanny reach of the post-truth fictions with which the media and social networks construct the world (or replace it), and about the ways to resist such becomings. The theoretical thread chosen to answer these interrogations begins with the consideration, by Koyré (and Arendt) of the modern totalitarian lie, and then searches for a few classical motives in philosophy reviewing what becomes enunciated through “veracity” and “dissimulation”, for which the Kant-Constant controversy is taken into consideration. Finally, the motives for dissimulation are reviewed as a mode of resistance and self-protection against the powerful through 17th century texts that come from the “School of Prudence”, recovering a sense of resistance as “invention”, a dissimulation as an “art of obscurity”, as it was practiced by our women who were detained in clandestinity.