The reports on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction decided that the US invasion of Iraq could start. Today, we know that these weapons were fiction, an image produced to justify the war. Discussing Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war, Cathy Caruth shows that this type of political imagery has a long tradition in the US. (This essay was also published in Roger Berkowitz (et al) Thinking in dark times: Hannah Arendt on ethics and politics; (2010)
‘(Hannah) Arendt enables a rethinking of the very nature of history around the possibility of its political denial. What does it mean, she asks, for political history to be fundamentally linked, at certain points in modern times, to its erasure or lack of witness?’
I would like to address the problem of violence in the political realm by focusing on a question that, I believe, emerges out of several late works by the twentieth-century political thinker Hannah Arendt: What is history in the time of what Arendt calls “the modern lie”? In “Truth and Politics” (1967) and “Lying in Politics (1971), Arendt reflects on what she considers a profound philosophical conundrum at the heart of politics and the political: an intimate and foundational relation between politics and the lie that, I would suggest, has momentous implications for the way we think about political history (and more widely, I would argue, about history as such). Beginning from a reflection on the nature of political action in the context of lying, Arendt ultimately, I will argue, enables a rethinking of the very nature of history around the possibility of its political denial. What does it mean, she asks, for political history to be fundamentally linked, at certain points in modern times, to its erasure or lack of witness? And how might it be possible to witness from within this history?
Politics and the lie
The question of history arises, in “Truth and Politics,” in the context of Arendt’s concern with the pervasive role of lying that she perceives, in the modern world, taking place within the political sphere. As Arendt suggested in her earlier work, The Human Condition, the sphere of politics is important because it is the exemplary place in which man displays his essential capacity, as man, to act and thus to bring into the world “something new […] which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before.”1 This concept of political action arose specifically in the Greek polis, she says, when words and deeds replaced the mute force of violence and created a public sphere in which men appeared before each other and created the world anew in unpredictable and unexpected ways.
But the political sphere maintains itself, Arendt adds, not only as the site of action but also as the site of its remembrance, for “speech and action […] possess an enduring quality of their own because they create their own remembrance.”2 More specifically, they create political bodies that establish the conditions for remembrance, “that is, for history.”3 History thus seems central to the functioning of the political world, both as its memory and as the ground upon which the political world builds a future.
In the modern world, however, Arendt will point out in “Truth and Politics,” the public realm has become a realm of deception, a place dramatizing, in effect, the “clash of factual truth and politics, which we witness today on such a large scale.”4 Arendt draws on a number of examples, remarking, for instance, on the disappearance of Trotsky from the history books of the Soviet Union, and the German and French representations of their actions during World War II. Unlike the ancient world in which the notion of politics first appeared, she suggests, the public realm in the modern world is not only the place of political action that creates history but also, and centrally, the place of the political lie that denies it. Focusing on the ubiquity of the lie in the modern world, then, Arendt ultimately, in my interpretation, asks the following question: what kind of politics is possible in a world in which history is regularly and systematically denied?
The topic of the denial of history emerging after the great wars had been analysed, in the work of another great writer, Sigmund Freud, in terms of the psychological forms of denial in the face of catastrophic events, and especially those of the First World War.5 But Arendt’s explicit concern in her essay is of another nature, a form of deliberate political deception that also emerges after WWI but, in a surprisingly brazen way, arises directly and consciously in the political sphere and attacks the fundamental facts of history that had previously been considered indestructible:
During the twenties, so a story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar Republic on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. “What, in your opinion,” Clemenceau was asked, “will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?” He replied, “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.” We are concerned here with brutally elementary data of this kind, whose indestructibility has been taken for granted even by the most extreme and most sophisticated believers in historicism.6
The responsibility for the outbreak of WWI – a matter of profound political significance between the wars – is a factual truth that, in an earlier period, might have seemed unassailable even in the contested world of politics. But in the political world that emerged in the ensuing period, even this crucial and well-known fact had come under debate:
It is true, considerably more than the whims of historians would be needed to eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium; it would require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world. But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable, and it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power interests, national or social, had the last say in these matters.7
In her allusion to the totalitarian states that arose after WWI, Arendt suggests that the world in which facts could be agreed upon is in danger of changing forever and that not only individual facts, but the fate of “factual truth” as such is in danger in this new and emergent reality. The danger to the political world in modern times is the loss of the factual world that emerges, paradoxically, at the heart of the political realm that ordinarily creates, and depends upon, historical remembrance.
What is, indeed, of interest to Arendt is that the lie comes not from without, but precisely from within, the realm of political action, and is in fact tied to it by a fundamental similarity between action and lying. Facts are fragile in the political sphere, she says, because truth-telling is actually much less political in its nature than the lie:
The hallmark of factual truth is that its opposite is neither error nor illusion […] but the deliberate falsehood or lie. Error of course is possible. […] But the point is that with respect to facts there exists another alternative, and this alternative, the deliberate falsehood, does not belong to the same species as propositions that, whether right or mistaken, intend no more than to say what is or how something that is appears to me. A factual statement – Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 – acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context. But the opposite proposition, which Clemenceau, still unacquainted with the art of rewriting history, thought absurd, needs no context to be of political significance. It is clearly an attempt to change the record, and as such it is a form of action.8
If the lie “changes the record” of history, it does so, Arendt suggests, not as a falsehood that negates a truth (a falsehood that could be a mere error without being a lie), but as an act of speech intended, like political action, to make a change in the world. The liar thus prevails in the political world because, like the actor, he is exercising freedom:
While the liar is a man of action, the truth teller […] most emphatically is not […] The liar needs no accommodation to appear on the political scene; he has the great advantage that he always is, so to speak, already in the midst of it. He is an actor by nature; he says what is not so because he wants things to be different from what they are – that is, he wants to change the world. He takes advantage of the undeniable affinity of our capacity for action, for changing reality, with this mysterious faculty of ours that enables us to say, “The sun is shining,” when it is raining cats and dogs […] In other words, our ability to lie – but not necessarily our ability to tell the truth – belongs among the few obvious, demonstrable data that confirm human freedom. That we can change the circumstances under which we live at all is because we are relatively free from them, and it is this freedom that is abused and perverted through mendacity.9
Like the political actor, the political liar wishes to change the world, to be free from things as they are given. Since his denial of the world is also a form of action, the act of lying is, in itself, a demonstration of freedom. The lie does not appear in the political realm only as the denial of the historical acts of the past, then, but also as a kind of action of beginning that, potentially, has its own political and historical unfolding.10
It is this independent historical unfolding that, in fact, Arendt describes as the site of the danger of the lie when she narrates the passage of the lie from its traditional role, within politics, as another means of effecting true political action, to a wholly independent and all consuming activity that replaces action (and its history) altogether. Thus at first, Arendt argues, lying serves the interest of politics: it is used by and aimed at individuals; it concerns particular facts and serves specific political ends. In this sense the lie works within political history and is subordinated to particular political purposes. But over time a fundamental change takes place. The lie is now aimed at facts everyone knows, it deceives not only particular individuals but also everyone in society (including the liars themselves), and is aimed not at particular facts but at the entire framework of factuality as such.
The lie moves out of its subordinate position, in other words, to become an absolute framework in which nothing but the creation of the lie acts in the world.11 In this sense, Arendt appears to suggest, there is a certain reversal in the course of political history, in the relation between the lie and politics: if the traditional lie worked within the realm of action defined by politics – -and thus served to confirm and further its history as freedom – politics now works within (and serves) the modern lie. At this point the lie is no longer limited to traditional acts of lying by individuals but rather takes over and exceeds individual intention, driving forward a political process no longer serving purely political ends.
The danger of the lie is thus not a covering over of history but a substitution of its own action (and history) for that of true political beginnings. Indeed, in totalitarianism, as Arendt suggests in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the “mass rewriting of history” not only denies the history of the past but also moves forward as the creation of an “entirely fictitious world.”12 (This world is made to be fictitious both in the sense that its fictions are enforced upon reality and in the sense that through “organized” propaganda and terror it eliminates the capacity for human beings to act and makes a world of marionettes acting in entirely predictable and mechanical ways.) The action of lying is thus not simply a covering over of reality (as in traditional deception) but a replacement of reality altogether with the fiction of an overarching lie:
All these lies, whether their authors know it or not, harbour an element of violence: organized lying always tends to destroy whatever it has decided to negate, although only totalitarian governments have consciously adopted lying as the first step to murder. […] In other words, the difference between the traditional lie and the modern lie will more often than not amount to the difference between hiding and destroying.13
The violence of the modern lie consists in the absolute loss of the reality that it denies. But we could also say that the violence of the lie, in this process, consists in substituting the action of destroying the facts of reality for the action of beginning, replacing a history of beginnings with a history of their total erasure….
https://www.eurozine.com/lying-and-history/
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Alexandre Koyré: The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1943)
Evil: The Crime against Humanity. Hannah Arendt’s confrontation with totalitarianism
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Reading 1919 in 2019
Hannah Arendt: pariah and 21st-century cosmopolitan
Book review – The Philosopher’s Trail: On Samantha Rose Hill’s “Hannah Arendt”
After the truth-shower 