The Necessity of Fiction

All representation proceeds from the periphery to the center, but all representation is not fiction. Fiction is not content to designate a central object; it creates its own. Thus, for the philosopher, the poet is a liar. Some centuries ago, it was suggestd that the poet's lie preceded truth, which was only invented by philosophers. But neither the anthropologies of the Enlightenment nor those of the Romantic era could give rigor to the notion of a language anterior to the claim of truth. The truth of fiction is what no metaphysics can encompass. What intuition lies behind Vico's paradox that the first language was that of poetry? Surely, in the original scene the representation of the center cannot lie. But neither can it tell a verifiable truth about the object whose very centrality requires it to be inaccessible to verification. What is represented in the scenic imagination is endowed with significance, and for that very reason transfigured. In the first moment of this transfiguration, when the only intelligible difference is that between center and periphery, no distinction can be made between truth and fiction. This is the moment of the sacred. Significance is sacrality; the center is not a locus within a scene but a being both local and absolute. We may reconstruct the periphery of the scene, but the periphery has no part in significance. The peripheral is the human; the significant is the divine. Here man, in Hegelian terms, is wholly alienated from his essence; being is of the Other. But the Hegelian vocabulary cannot define man's role in the creation of this alienated essence. The originary sacred was no benighted mystification; the first linguistic sign designated what, for all practical purposes, was the only object worth designating, and for this reason designated this worth as infinite. From the standpoint of anthropological pragmatics, this first designation is more indubitably true than any succeeding statement, which would no longer have to bear the burden of permitting man's very existence. Truth requires declarative sentences. That such sentences could not

Classical Philosophy and Thought · History · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism