ABSTRACT
At its worst, in social theory and political life alike, unmasking inverts people’s statements and makes them look foolish. It reduces a concept or a theory to the ideological position of the writer. It trades on a mistaken concept of illusion. And, more generally, it burdens theoretical enquiry with a radical agenda of emancipation that people of different views have no reason to accept as valid. In some revolutionary situations unmasking weaponization is the rhetoric of mass murder. And beyond these extremes, unmasking stokes mutual contempt. To unmasking practitioners, a disagreement can never by principled, let alone rational or nuanced. It can only be right and wrong, in both the epistemological and moral senses.
Theories of “monitory democracy” (John Keane) and “spectorial democracy” (Jeffrey Edward Green) buttress the culture of unmasking. So does identity politics. Richard Rorty’s and Jordan Peterson’s criticisms of these currents is examined.
This chapter suggests that while unmasking cannot be eliminated, it can be avoided by speaking and writing in a non-unmasking manner; by drawing inspiration from writers (for instance, Albert Camus, Chateaubriand, Montaigne and Simone Weil) whose work offers a cautionary view of human affairs; and by understanding politics through the lens of “conflictual pluralism,” a realistic assessment of our political and moral dilemmas.
