(the) American (Novel of)

Odysseus Lies
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out another sort of lie familiar to modern political theory, at least since
Locke. Faced with the task of reestablishing order in his own land,
Odysseus cannot adopt the naive vocabulary of divine sanction and
pristine origins (the preferred lie of, say, Europeans in the New World)
precisely because Odysseus’s task takes itself to be the reconstitution of
a prior order. 3 Or, to put the point polemically, in the archaic political
logic at work in Odysseus’ return to Ithaca the pernicious self-denying
mendacity of appeals to divine or natural origins, of god-given rights
and self-evident truths so characteristic of modern political theory, gives
way to a different sort of lie.
The modern political theoretical gesture (Rawls, Habermas) 4 is to
attribute to the human agents in political discourse a set of rational
norms that they “counterfactually” presuppose simply insofar as they
plan or plot a political transformation or engage in political discourse.
Faced with the need for a radical political/domestic reordering, Odysseus
reaches for a lie. And a lie, of course, is not presuppositionless. Indeed
this is the critical point. While the lie, too, harbors a logic of presupposition,
the logic of the lie does not require the active presupposition
of the very same rational norms that it is the purpose of the discourse
to discover and test. The logic of the lie does not have to presuppose
that the very same rational precepts or rules it is the purpose of political
discourse to discover are already actively presupposed to be at work,
counterfactually, behind the backs of the participants, who believe that
they are debating what counts as a rational precept or rule. Rather, in
the logic of the lie, the active presuppositions function not at the same
level as the expected outcomes (political norms themselves) but at the
level of the preliminaries, let’s say at the level of an etiquette of political
action. The appeal of an etiquette is its appeal to a compelling order
governing human action, which order is neither merely conventional
nor a universal law of nature or human reason.
Representation
The key to employing the notion of an etiquette in the realm of
political theory is to note (without embarrassment) that every political
affirmation involves an appeal to a prior affirmation. Yet this sort of
circularity need not be vicious because it need not presuppose what it
claims to justify. The key is to remember that the rationality of human