Welcome to the Civilization of the Liar’s Paradox

The Liar Paradox, an ancient impasse between the veracity and performative contradiction of statements like “I am always lying,” dissolves—according to Lacan—when we distinguish between the enunciated (content of speech) and the enunciation (the subjective position from which one speaks). This distinction reveals that authenticity is not guaranteed by sincerity at the level of content, but depends on the unspoken stance implied in the act of speaking. Thus, a politician’s outright lies or inconsistencies may, paradoxically, signal authenticity to supporters who value perceived candor over factual accuracy. This dynamic is particularly salient in contemporary populism, where the erosion of trust in institutions leads voters to valorize the “honest liar” over the “dishonest truth-teller.” The performative gap between what is said and how it is said has thus become a critical lens for understanding political subjectivity in the post-truth era.

Drawing on psychoanalytic categories, Žižek contrasts the hysteric’s truth-in-lie—wherein a manifestly false statement encodes a latent, authentic grievance—with the obsessional’s lie-in-truth—whereby factual accuracy serves to mask a deeper deception. This schema maps onto contemporary political strategies: Rightist populists and liberal-Left advocates of Political Correctness both deploy factual lies in service of their respective ideological “Truths,” as well as instrumentalizing fragments of truth to lend credibility to larger falsehoods. The Right displaces social anxieties onto scapegoated others, while the Left, despite accurate critiques of systemic oppression, often deploys moralizing discourse to forestall substantive socio-economic transformation. Both poles exemplify the structural instability of truth-claims in late modernity, where ideology operates precisely through the strategic management of this instability.

Historical and social “facts” are never neutral but are always assembled within a hermeneutic horizon that privileges certain data while eliding others. Anti-Semitic historiography, for instance, can marshal accurate statistics about Jewish professional representation in Weimar Germany, yet such “truthful” narratives serve an underlying lie. The point is not that all perspectives are equally valid, but that some are more adequate to the social totality—they grasp more of the interconnected dynamics that produce events. A history told from the standpoint of universal emancipation, for example, is immanently “truer” than one that naturalizes oppression. This is not relativism, but a recognition that all knowledge is perspectival and that some perspectives, by virtue of their emancipatory impetus, disclose more of the real.

Against the classical Marxist valorization of revolutionary agency, Žižek introduces “interpassivity”—the outsourcing of passivity (enjoyment, mourning) to others, while the subject remains hyperactive. This is the inverse of Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” where activity is delegated to external forces. In contemporary politics, pseudo-activity—incessant, often meaningless engagement—masks a deeper inertia, as when academics compulsively debate while avoiding substantive action. Progressive movements, too, risk substituting critical participation for genuine intervention. The true political act, paradoxically, may be a strategic withdrawal from such pseudo-activity, clearing the ground for a rupture with the existing symbolic order.

The structure of apology exemplifies the logic of fetishistic disavowal: a formal admission of guilt (“I’m sorry”) can function to forestall deeper accountability, especially when the apology is immediately dismissed as unnecessary. This mechanism is operationalized at the political level—for instance, the Chinese Communist Party’s selective acknowledgment of Maoist “errors” serves to inoculate the system against more radical critique. Similarly, media coverage of violence often neutralizes horror through clinical detachment, reducing suffering to a “neutral fact.” Rumors, meanwhile, circulate not as factual claims, but as symbolic objects that mobilize affect regardless of their truth-value, occupying an ambiguous space between sustaining and subverting power.

The proclaimed “death of truth” in our era is less the collapse of epistemic standards than the disintegration of the ideological Master-Signifier—the big Story that previously organized social reality. What is mourned is not truth per se, but the loss of a hegemonic narrative that provided “cognitive mapping” for the social order. Today’s proliferation of competing local “truths” reflects the failure of the ruling establishment to maintain its symbolic hegemony. The danger is not relativism, but the potential for a new, even more virulent Master-Signifier to fill the vacuum. In this liminal space, the possibility of authentic truth emerges—not as a return to a lost plenitude, but as the contingent outcome of a genuine act that reconfigures the coordinates of the real.

---

WORDS TO BE NOTED-

1. Enunciation – The act of stating or uttering something, involving not just content but the subjective stance from which one speaks.

2. Enunciated – The explicit content or propositional meaning of what is said.

3. Authenticity – In the Lacanian sense, the perceived genuineness of a subject’s position, often contrasted with mere sincerity of content.

4. Performative – Relating to speech acts or actions that enact (perform) what they declare.

5. Post-truth – A modern condition in which objective facts are less influential than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

6. Populism – A political approach that seeks to represent the interests of ordinary people, often via charismatic leadership and anti-elitism.

7. Hermeneutic – Pertaining to interpretation, especially of texts, beliefs, or social phenomena.

8. Ideological Hegemony – The domination of a society by a ruling class whose ideas, values, and beliefs are accepted as common sense.

9. Interpassivity – The process by which one delegates passivity (enjoyment, mourning, etc.) to others while remaining actively engaged.

10. Fetishistic Disavowal – The psychological mechanism in which one consciously knows a painful fact but continues to disbelieve it at an unconscious level.

11. Neutralization – The process of rendering an emotionally or politically charged fact emotionally inert, often by framing it clinically.

12. Master-Signifier – A central, organizing term or ‘quilting point’ that gives stability to a discourse or ideological field.

13. Cognition Mapping – The mental process of situating oneself within a social or ideological structure.

14. Emancipatory – Relating to liberation from oppression, restriction, or false consciousness.

15. Symbolic Order – In Lacanian theory, the domain of language, law, and culture through which subjects navigate social reality.

PARA SUMMARY- 

The passage explains how, in today’s politics, what matters is not just what is said, but who is saying it and why. Using ideas from Lacan and psychoanalysis, it shows that people often judge politicians more by whether they “sound real” than by whether their facts are true. Both right-wing populists and left-wing activists sometimes use lies, half-truths, or carefully chosen facts to support their views. History and facts are never neutral—they are always told from a certain point of view. The article also talks about “pseudo-activity,” where people appear very busy or outraged but avoid real change. It points out that formal apologies or admissions of guilt can sometimes be used to avoid deeper responsibility. Finally, the passage argues that the so-called “death of truth” is really about the collapse of one big story that held society together. Now, with many competing stories, there’s a risk of even bigger lies—or a chance for real, new truths—to emerge.

SOURCE- PHILOSOPHY NOW

WORDS COUNT- 650

F.K SCORE- 16