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The Social Critic as Liar: Wilde, Adorno, and the Crisis of Post-truth Politics
- Theory & Event
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 26, Number 1, January 2023
- pp. 128-153
- 10.1353/tae.2023.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
How does one speak the truth in a “post-truth” polity? This article turns to Oscar Wilde and Theodor Adorno to develop an account of critique as mendacious truth-telling that mobilizes the aesthetically pleasing, world-reconstructing power of lying embraced by contemporary neofascists on behalf of democratic social transformation. Rejecting demystification and empirical truth-telling as incapable of responding to the post-truth predicament, the critic as liar combats the “false lies” of neofascism by devising “fine lies” that imagine new, more egalitarian modes of social organization.