Difficulties of Ethical Life

12. On Deception: Radical Evil and the Destruction of the Archive

12 On Deception Radical Evil and the Destruction of the Archive P E G B I R M I N G H A M Of course, this question of a politics of the archive is our permanent orientation here. . . . This question will never be determined as one political question among others. It runs through the whole of the field and in truth determines politics from top to bottom as res publica. There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (translated by Eric Prenowitz) It is not often noted that the problem of deception occupies a central place in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism. At the outset of The Origins of Totalitarianism, prior to her analysis of anti-Semitism, imperialism , or radical evil, she raises the issue of deception, considering the difference between ancient and modern sophists and their relation to truth and reality: Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their ‘‘universal art of changing the mind by arguments’’ (Phaedrus 261) had nothing to do with truth, but aimed at opinions which by their nature are changing, and which are valid only ‘‘at the time of the agreement and as long as the agreement lasts’’ (Theatetus 172). . . . The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing 195 victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.1 In these early pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt claims that the characteristic that sets totalitarianism apart from tyrannical and dictatorial regimes is precisely the sophistic victory at the expense of reality , which she argues institutes a ‘‘lying world order’’ or what also might be deemed ‘‘radical deception.’’ Indeed, her discussion of radical evil cannot be understood apart from her continuing preoccupation with the problem of this particular kind of deception. When Arendt writes in 1945, ‘‘The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe,’’2 she is indicating in the strongest terms possible that the problem of radical evil is by no means eradicated with the defeat of totalitarianism, in large part because of radical evil’s inseparable link to radical deception, which for her has nothing to do with what we understand by falsehood, error, or even the deliberate lie—the ways in which deception in all its guises is traditionally distinguished from truth. Falsehood and error are the opposites of truth, whereas a deliberate lie is the intentional dissimulation of the truth. Radical deception is something else altogether. Conflating reality with truth, Arendt argues that philosophy itself opens the door to the possibility of ‘‘a lying world order.’’ In her 1945 essay titled ‘‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism,’’ she writes, ‘‘If Western philosophy has maintained that reality is truth—for this is of course the ontological basis of the adequatio rei et intellectus—then totalitarianism has concluded from this that we can fabricate truth insofar as we can fabricate reality: that we do not have to wait until reality unveils itself and shows us its true face, but we can bring into being a reality whose structure will be known to us from the beginning because the whole thing is our product.’’3 Arendt makes the same point in another 1945 essay, ‘‘The Seeds of a Fascist International’’: It was always a too little noted hallmark of fascist propaganda that it was not satisfied with lying but deliberately proposed to transform its lies into reality. . . . For such a fabrication of a lying reality no one was prepared. The essential characteristic of fascist propaganda was never its lies, for this is something more or less common to propaganda everywhere and of every time. The essential thing was that they exploited the age-old Occidental prejudice which confuses reality with truth, and made that ‘‘true’’ which until then could only be stated as a lie.4 196 On Deception: Radical Evil and the Destruction of the Archive For Arendt this introduces a mutation into the history of the lie: ‘‘One can say that to some extent fascism has added a new variation to the old art of...