ABSTRACT
If such a thing as a grammar of truth existed, one would be hard pressed to find a more basic principle for that grammar than the bold assertion made by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra when he proclaims, ‘Whoever is unable to lie does not know what truth is’.1 The funny thing about lying, however, is that unlike telling the truth, lying – by most definitions of the term – is marked by a much more complex level of intentionality than is normally associated with most forms of telling the truth. Indeed, the philosopher David Simpson not only defines lying as an act of deliberate untruthfulness and of ‘intentional deception’, but he emphasizes that lying is something that we ‘do […] to someone’ (1992: 624–5).2 Every liar, Simpson argues furthermore, ‘assumes the possibility of [falsely] representing some state of affairs and of presenting him or herself as believing that representation’ (634). There is an undeniable aura of performance hovering about this kind of assumption and self-presentation, and hence hovering about lying itself. Not only does the assumption cited by Simpson require the kind of self-reflexivity that performance studies scholars have long associated with performance as a concept; inasmuch as lying is something one does ‘to someone’, the presentation of one’s self as ‘believing that representation’ is a unique kind of performance because it also works on an audience or public that ultimately does not remain unaffected by the lie done to them.
