Lying appears to be ubiquitous, what Franz Kafka called "a
universal principle”; yet, despite a number of recent books on
the subject, it has been given comparatively little genuinely
systematic attention by philosophers, social scientists, or even
literary theorists. In The Habit of Lying John Vignaux Smyth
examines three forms of falsification—lying, concealment, and
fiction—and makes a strong critique of traditional approaches to
each of them, and, above all, to the relations among them. With
recourse to Rene Girard, Paul de Man, Theodor Adorno, Leo Strauss,
and other theoreticians not usually considered together, Smyth
arrives at some surprising conclusions about the connections
between lying, mimesis, sacrifice, sadomasochism, and the sacred,
among other central subjects. Arguing that the relation between
lying and truthtelling has been characterized in the West by
sharply sacrificial features, he begins with a critique of the
philosophies of lying espoused by Kant and Sissela Bok, then
concludes that the problem of truth and lies leads to the further
problem of the relation between law and arbitrariness as well as to
the relation between rationality and unanimity. Constructively
criticizing the work of such philosophers as Bertrand Russell,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and Nelson Goodman, Smyth shows
how these problems occur comparably in fiction theory and how Paul
de Man’s definition of fiction as arbitrariness finds
confirmation in analytic philosophy. Through the novels of Defoe,
Stendhal, and Beckett—with topics ranging from Defoe’s
treatment of lies, fiction, and obscenity to Beckett’s treatment
of the anus and the sacred—Smyth demonstrates how these texts
generalize the issues of mendacity, concealment, and sacrificial
arbitrariness in Girard’s sense to almost every aspect of
experience, fiction theory, and cultural life. The final section of
the book, taking its cue from Shakespeare, elaborates a sacrificial
view of the history of fashion and dress concealment.
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