Contenu du sommaire : La vérité

In The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville, the pursuit of truth emerges as an endless self-cancelling process, resting ultimately on the will to believe, thus heralding Charles S. Peirce's and William James's insights. The final scene, the would-be moment of truth, brings confusion to a climax by pointing to baffling paradoxes such as the potential advent of the Savior under the guise of a crook. The paradoxes inherent in such a dubious revelation call into question the usual definition of truth in terms of logical consistency and adequacy to facts.

This article addresses the following questions : At the end of World War II, what techniques were used to convince Americans and Congress of the merits of an international propaganda program ? How did President Truman transform the journalistic paradigm into one of truth as propaganda ? From 1945 to 1947, the United States and the Soviet Union went from being wartime allies to international rivals. In this fight, the United States wished to be seen as waging an ideological battle. But by the end of WWII, its propaganda apparatus had been dismantled. Private press propaganda, considered to be more acceptable in peacetime, would replace the wartime program. Yet this journalistic propaganda had little impact abroad. Truman responded with the “Campaign of Truth.” Again, the private press—not the U.S. government—was supposed to be its international vector. However, in spite of the insistent rhetoric on transparency and truth, the practices of the CIA remained secret.

Since his debut as a poet, Paul Auster has pursued his metaphysical investigations in a semiotic world where signs are everywhere to be read, where doubts about authenticity and forgery are ubiquitous. In The Brooklyn Follies (2005), the multiplicity of originals and facsimiles, the silence/speech duality and the architectural metaphors lead to the final vision of the attacks on the World Trade Center. As the reminiscences of the confusio linguarum contribute to the novel's plot, Paul Auster represents 9/11 “obliquely” and reaffirms the role of language and the imagination in the rebuilding of truth.

In 1995, the American intelligence community released thousands of highly confidential documents, the so-called Venona cables. These documents have been used by “traditionalist” historians to claim that Soviet espionage was more widespread than it was believed. “Revisionist” historians do not deny this claim but nevertheless argue that the Venona decrypts should not be interpreted as gospel. This article explores this often heated historical debate which illustrates how genuine primary sources may not tell the whole truth.

Moral conservative organizations use scientific discourse in order to legitimize their ideological and policy options. In this article, the author examines specific publications on sexuality from four Christian right organizations (American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family) to show how these discourses manipulate scientific truth, and to determine the political significance of such flawed science. It is argued that these Christian conservative organizations aim less at claiming actual scientific expertise, than at developing frames which encourage and support collective action.

“True,” “precise,” “exact,” “genuine,” “original,” “raw” or “natural”—the words which qualify Marianne Moore's work are recurrent as well as ambiguous. It would seem that her epistemological quest keeps wavering between two poles: Is truth to be seized in the object under study or in the way conscience(s) perceive(s) the world? Indeed the precision of the scientific method—whose purpose it is to observe, collect, describe, classify—often conceals, behind multiplying details and quotations, the essayist's voice confronting various perspectives. Between the accuracy of sight and the authenticity of the voice, objective “observation” and subjective conversation, Marianne Moore's poems are all the more impossible to classify as she herself refused to attribute them to a specific genre. And her texts are endlessly remodeled, expanded or condensed, as Moore's truth searches for its true form, between prose and prosody.

This article looks at three contemporary artists who question the possibility of saying the truth. Through a comparative study of the works of Jenny Holzer, Joseph Kosuth and Carl Andre, this article concentrates on the way ordinary language intrudes within the frame of art. The three artists associate their minimalist practices with an absolutist vision of ordinary language (through aphorisms, dictionary entries or absolute notions) where the presence of language within the frame of the artwork allows for a reflection on language's truth potential. In so doing, they show us the poetic potential of ordinary language and unite the spectator's visual experience to a philosophical enquiry where the question at stake is that of the very possibility of telling the truth.