Abstract

Human beings, after all, provide for each other the most ingenious obstacles to what partial knowledge and minimal rationality they can hope to command.We tend to have a romantic view of liars, or rather of those who lie, and of how and of why they and we lie. A romantic view in the sense in which Girard uses that term in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, whose French title was Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, that is, "Romantic lie and novelistic truth." Our common paradigm of the lie is willful deceit. We think the liar knows the truth, but he or she willfully hides it. The liar misrepresents what is the case to manipulate others to his or her own advantage. The liar knows something that we do not know;...