ABSTRACT
Reading “J’Accuse” today is an homage to the ideal of living decently and truthfully through the exercise of critical reason. For his part, Zola’s courageous stand in the Dreyfus affair can be hailed as a victory of truth-telling over lying in human affairs. In an essay entitled “Truth and Politics” and written after the so-called Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, Hannah Arendt came back to the old question of “lying in politics”. By reading “J’Accuse”, we can place ourselves in Zola’s experience of truth-telling and quest for justice, both crystallized in the two questions: who are we? and, what kind of a world do we live in? This awareness and questioning, like the search for truth that is associated with it, might never be achieved, but they must never be abandoned. It is time for intellectuals to express the toughest truths publicly in order to turn the mental state of voluntary servitude into a philosophical liberating experience. Who knows, maybe we will encounter, once again, the mysterious power of ideas in the making of human history?
