The Social Critic as Liar: Wilde, Adorno, and the Crisis of Post-truth Politics

How does one speak the truth in a “post-truth” polity? This article turns to Oscar Wilde and Theodor Adorno to develop an account of critique as mendacious truth-telling that mobilizes the aesthetically pleasing, world-reconstructing power of lying embraced by contemporary neofascists on behalf of democratic social transformation. Rejecting demystification and empirical truth-telling as incapable of responding to the post-truth predicament, the critic as liar combats the “false lies” of neofascism by devising “fine lies” that imagine new, more egalitarian modes of social organization.