Welcome to the Civilization of the Liar's Paradox

Slavoj Žižek uncovers political paradoxes of lying.

- Slavoj Žižek

The so-called Liar Paradox - statements like 'everything I say is false' - has been endlessly debated by philosophers from Ancient Greece and India to the twentieth century. The paradox is that if this statement is true then it is false (everything I say is not false), and vice versa. Instead of getting lost in the endless network of arguments and counter-arguments, I will turn to Jacques Lacan (1901-81), who offers a unique solution by way of distinguishing between the content of an enunciation and the subjective stance implied by this enunciation: between the content of what you are saying and the stance implied by what you are saying. The moment we introduce this distinction, we immediately see that a statement like 'everything I say is false' can itself be true or false. 'I am always lying' can either correctly or incorrectly render the subjective experience of my entire existence as inauthentic, a fake. However, the opposite also holds: the statement 'I know I am a piece of shit' can in itself be true in its content, but false at the level of the subjective stance it pretends to render, since even saying it implies that I somehow demonstrate that I am NOT fully 'a piece of shit' - that I am at least honest about myself... But our reply to this should be a paraphrase of the well-known Groucho Marx line: "You act like a piece of shit and admit that you are a piece of shit, but this will not deceive us - you are a piece of shit!"

Why lose time with such endlessly debated paradoxes? Because in our 'post-truth' era of Rightist populism, the practice of relying on this paradox has reached its extreme. So today's political discourse cannot be understood without the distinction between the enunciation and the enunciated.

Let's