"To my knowledge, but I don't know everything and it is not too late, Professor Judt has not yet acknowledged publicly that he did not tell the truth. You will have noticed that, in speaking of the contre-vérité of his article, I never said that Professor Judt had lied. Everything that is false cannot be imputed to a lie. The lie is not an error. Already Plato and Augustine insisted on this in unison. If the concept of lie has some resistant specificity, it must be rigorously distinguished from error, from ignorance, from prejudice, from faulty reasoning, and even from failure in the realm of knowledge or still again-and this is where things will soon have to get more complicated for us-from failure in the realm of action, practice, or technique. If the lie is neither the failure of knowledge and knowhow, nor error, if it implies ill will or bad faith in the order of moral reason, not of practice but of pure practical reason, if it addresses belief rather than knowledge, then the project of a history of the lie should not resemble in the least what could be called, following Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols, the history of an error [Geschichte eines Irrtums]."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Historians from EnglandEssayists from EnglandJews from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyEducators from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Jacques Derrida, "History of the Lie: Prolegomena", published in Futures of Jacques Derrida, ed. Richard Rand (2001)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tony_Judt
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Tony Judt
Tony Robert Judt (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history.
129 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Tony Judt →
Related Quotes
"Some people, myself included, advocated foreign intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo while opposing our adventure in Ira…"
"My concern tonight is the following: Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining …"
"What, then, is to be done? We have to begin with the state: as the incarnation of collective interests, collective pu…"
"I was brought up on English food. But not fish and chips, spotted dick, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pud, or other del…"
"We don’t live in a world of fixed historical laws that says the—as you describe it—liberal state was born at a partic…"
"What’s missing from public conversation and public policy conversation is precisely a sort of moral underpinning, a s…"
"One of the very few things that I know I believe strongly is that we must learn how to make a better world out of usa…"
"Where does that leave me? Trying, as usual, to square general truths with particular circumstances. That’s the differ…"
"God knows I can think of enough things that I did wrong both personally and as part of my cohort. But I never abandon…"
"It is the liberals, then, who count. They are, as it might be, the canaries in the sulphurous mineshaft of modern dem…"