Deception Theory:
Movements of the Liar

Instructor: Jason Mohaghegh Date & Time: Sundays February 2, 9, 16, 23, March 1, 8, 15, 22 2 - 4:30 PM ET

DESCRIPTION: This seminar explores Deception as a philosophical art-form of the highest order, one requiring intricate mastery of the varying states of unreality: the dream, the nightmare, the mirage, the fantasy, the hallucination, the simulation, the vision, the memory, the enigma, the story, the wish, and the apparition (ghost, shadow). Along these axes, we will also unravel the particular techniques of distortion, riddle, and encryption that make up the vast arsenal of the liar. To diagram such chimeric possibilities, a series of philosophical, literary, poetic, and aesthetic works will be summoned to the seminar’s forefront, each rendering acute insight into the performativities of stealth, manipulation, seduction, and intelligence behind acts of great deceit.

For Deception radically alters our understanding of knowing, sensation, desire, body, and imagination through carefully-designed prisms of intimacy and betrayal, play and violation, enchantment and disenchantment. Following the supposed last words of a medieval Persian assassin (the Old Man of the Mountain)—“All is illusion, thus all is permitted”—we will seek those typologies of artifice that bring thought to their extreme limits. For what are the most subtle procedures of insinuation (and its delicate interplay of proximity and distance)? What images induce curiosity, entrancement, infatuation, obsession, or self-destruction? What are the strange ethics of transformation, vulnerability, and subversion held by the charlatan, the trickster, or the saboteur? So it is that we will study the captivating dimensions of the lie, its obscure codes of concealment and unveiling, in all their complex manifestations.

Image: René Magritte (1898-1967) | La corde sensible

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