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Articles

Welcome to the Civilization of the Liar’s Paradox

Slavoj Žižek uncovers political paradoxes of lying.

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.

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