Political Fable

The wiki's concept page for the fable as Derrida deconstructs it in BS-I: not as a literary genre external to political reason but as the internal mode of operation of political discourse itself. Valéry's late aphorism — "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE FABLE. It always will be" — is the seminar's recurring epigraph (S7 p. 190; S8 p. 207). The thesis (S2): "every seminar does begin that way... by some fabulous 'As we shall shortly show'"; and political discourse and political action (war, terrorism, declarations of sovereignty) are constitutively fabular. The fable is irreducibly faire savoir — both "to make known" (impart information) and "to make-like knowledge" (simulate knowledge without it). The political event is conditioned by its technical reproducibility as image-archive: the 9/11 Twin Towers had their political force not despite but through their indefinitely-reproducible image-circulation. The fable allied with the as-if, the feint, the feigned-feint, the quasi-concept (Ronell) names what political-sovereign discourse is and does: it operates under the as-if of the fabulous — and the operation is the operation regardless of the fictionality.

Key Points

  • The fable is internal to the political, not external decoration. "Every seminar does begin that way... by some fabulous 'As we shall shortly show'." The pedagogical-institutional discourse, the political discourse, the sovereign decree all share this fabular structure of deferred performative — a "we shall shortly show" that has already done its work in the deferral. BS-I S1 p. 1; S2 pp. 33–38.
  • Valéry's epigraph: "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE FABLE." From "Au sujet d'Eureka": "Not in the beginning was the Act, or the Verb, or the Word, or the Logos, but the Fable." The fable is, as its name indicates (fari = to speak, fabula = something said), first of all speech — but speech of a particular kind: a mythical narrative without historical knowledge, a legend, a fiction that claims to teach by simulating knowledge.
  • Faire savoir — equivocal verb at the seminar's heart. "To make known" carries two operations simultaneously: (1) bringing knowledge to the awareness of the other (informing); (2) "making like" knowledge — giving the impression of knowing where there is no knowing. The political-sovereign always performs both. BS-I S2 pp. 33–38.
  • 9/11 as the contemporary fabular-political event. The Twin Towers' destruction has its political force only as an indefinitely-archivable, instantly-globally-circulated image. The trauma is conditioned by the affabulatory score — the looped repetition of the disaster-movie image, the making-known of the event. Without the deployment of image-effects, the blow would have been "massively reduced." BS-I S2 pp. 36–39.
  • The as-if / comme si carries the whole burden of pedagogical and rhetorical import in politics. Machiavelli's prince must behave "as if" he were both man and beast (S3 pp. 85–88). The epistemic conditional is grafted onto a performative; the result is the as-if logic that runs every sovereign claim.
  • Quasi-concepts share the as-if's structure. Bêtise, the marionette, différance, pharmakon, supplément — Derrida's family of quasi-concepts operates under the as-if. They name what cannot be conceptualized in the standard way because their instability is essential. See betise for the fullest BS-I example.
  • Fox-cunning vs. lion-force: the contemporary sovereign is fox. Machiavelli's fox dominates over the lion (S3 pp. 79–91) because cunning is knowing-how-not-to-make-known, a second-degree power. The fox can pretend not to be a fox. Contemporary sovereignty operates through dissimulation-of-power (mediatic narrative-shaping, faire savoir) more than through brute force.
  • The fable that is sovereignty. Sovereignty as auto-position of the ipse (see sovereignty) is structurally fabular: it operates as-if the autoposition succeeded, as-if the indivisibility held, as-if the right-not-to-respond were grounded. The seminar's whole reading of sovereignty depends on identifying its fabular character — and identifying that character is not the same as denouncing it. Fable is what makes sovereignty practically operative despite its structural incoherence.

Details

Faire savoir and the political event (Session 2)

The seminar opens its second session by displacing the term faire savoir ("make known") into philosophical visibility. Derrida hears two operations in the French verb at once: to make the other know something (information-transfer) and to "make-like" knowing (simulation, give the impression of knowing where there isn't necessarily any knowing). The fable is the genre where both operate together.

"There must be a technique, there must be a rhetoric, an art of the simulacrum, a savoir-faire [know-how] to faire savoir [make-known] where it is not a matter of knowing, where there is no knowing worthy of the name" (S2 p. 35).

Derrida's example is 9/11. The Twin Towers' political-affective force depended not on the number of deaths (smaller than many under-reported catastrophes) but on the indefinite reproducibility of the disaster-image. The image was instantly globally circulated, indefinitely looped, archived in a way that conditioned the event-as-political-event. "The technical reproducibility of the archive does not come along after the fact to accompany [the event], but conditions its very putting-to-work, its efficacy, its scope and its very meaning" (S2 p. 38). The political event IS its faire savoir. (Cf. Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," not cited by Derrida directly but in the background.)

This is not Derrida-as-Baudrillard (the political event reduced to simulation). The bodies are destroyed; the deaths are real. But the political-force-of-the-event is conditioned by the fabular-mediatic dimension irreducibly. Without the faire savoir, the destruction would have been "if not nothing, at least massively reduced."

"IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE FABLE" (Valéry, Sessions 7 + 8)

Valéry's epigraph — from "Au sujet d'Eureka" — is the seminar's recurring formula. "Not in the beginning was the Act, or the Verb, or the Word, or the Logos, but the Fable." The fable is, as its Latin name indicates (fari = to speak, for = to say), first of all speech. Then: speech of a particular kind — fabula, "something said," a familiar piece of speech, a conversation, a mythical narrative without historical knowledge, a legend, sometimes a theatrical play, in any case a fiction that claims to teach something. The Latin fabula names what is said before it names what is told as story or taught as moral.

The political-pedagogical implication: every discourse that claims to make-known operates under the structure of the fable. The seminar itself, Derrida notes (S2 p. 34), should be the opposite of fable — it is "discourse of teaching" that "ought not to be fabular." But the seminar's own opening — "we shall shortly show" (drawn from La Fontaine's "Le loup et l'agneau") — IS already fabular. Every claim to know-and-make-known performs the structure of the fable.

The as-if / comme si and the quasi-concept

The fable's operative logic is the as-if. Politics operates as if the sovereign's indivisibility held, as if the right-not-to-respond were grounded, as if the contract were accepted by all parties (against the structural impossibility shown by Hobbes's double exclusion of God and beast). This as-if is not optional decoration; it is the only way a structurally-incoherent operation (sovereignty) can be practically implemented.

Derrida's earlier work on différance, pharmakon, supplément anticipates BS-I's bêtise and fable as quasi-concepts. The quasi-concept is a "category that transcends all categories and thus does not belong to the series or table of categories" — a transcategorical category, a quasi-transcendental. BS-I makes the as-if / quasi-concept connection explicit at S5 p. 151; S6 pp. 171–173. The fable is allied with the quasi-concept because both operate by the as-if: they name what can't be conceptualized in the standard way because their structural instability is essential.

Machiavelli's fox: the contemporary sovereign is fox-cunning (Session 3)

Machiavelli's Prince ch. 18 introduces the fox-lion composite: the prince must combat by both law (proper to man) and force (proper to beasts); the half-man / half-beast Chiron (centaur) is the dual-pedagogue. But Machiavelli prefers the fox-lion composite over Chiron — and within that, the fox dominates.

Derrida's reading: fox-cunning (knowing-how-not-to-make-known, dissimulation, the lie of cunning) is a second-degree power that even lions and wolves lack. The fox can pretend not to be a fox. The lion's Diktat is brute force; the fox's cunning is the structural inversion of force into knowledge-management. This is already the Nietzschean priest's move (will-to-power as deceit).

The contemporary-political implication: contemporary sovereignty operates as fox, not as lion. State sovereignty rules through faire savoir (mediatic narrative-shaping, image-archive-control, plausible deniability) more than through direct brute force. The fox is the fabular sovereign: rule by dissimulation, by as-if, by simulated-knowledge. (Connect to BS-I S1 pp. 19–20 on Chomsky's Rogue States: the Stratcom doctrine of "pretending to be out of control" as deliberate strategy.)

Sovereignty as fabular operation

The seminar's most consequential thesis on fable: sovereignty itself is structurally fabular. Sovereignty as auto-position of the ipse (see sovereignty) is structurally incoherent — the ipse presupposes the self-sameness it claims to ground. But it operates practically because it operates as-if. The "as if" is not Kantian regulative-idea as-if (the als ob that organizes inquiry without ontological claim); it is the operational as-if that makes the structurally-impossible practically actual.

This identification — sovereignty IS the fabular operation — has two consequences:

  1. Deconstruction of sovereignty does not abolish it. As long as the fabular operation continues to operate, sovereignty has real effects. Derrida's "slow and differentiated" deconstruction (S3 pp. 76–77) works at the level of the fable, not above it.
  2. Identifying the fabular character is not the same as denouncing it. Some fables are operationally indispensable. Derrida flags an "honest fiction" / "dishonest fiction" distinction (S3 p. 76) but does not develop it. (See Pass 3 Silent Keys at extraction note for this flagged distinction.)

This is the most important positive thesis BS-I gives the political-theoretical register: the question of sovereignty is not "is it real?" (answer: no — auto-position is incoherent) or "can we abolish it?" (answer: probably no, given the double bind with liberty); the question is "how does the fabular operation work, and what makes its work better or worse?" The seminar does not answer this last question; it sharpens it.

What the Concept Does

  • Identifies the fabular dimension of political discourse and political action — as constitutive, not external. Political reason operates under the as-if of the fabulous.
  • Names the faire savoir / savoir-faire equivocation as the central operation of the political event. The know-how (savoir-faire) of making-known (faire savoir) IS the operation of the political event.
  • Connects the political event to its technical-mediatic reproducibility (9/11 as exemplar). The political event IS conditioned by the archive-condition.
  • Provides the operational link between the political and the fabular through the as-if / quasi-concept genre. Bêtise and the marionette are quasi-concept instances; sovereignty itself is the master quasi-concept whose operations the seminar tracks.
  • Recasts Machiavelli's fox/lion as the genealogy of the contemporary fabular-sovereign — rule by dissimulation rather than brute force.

What It Rejects

  • The Habermasian-rationalist reading that takes political discourse as ideally non-fictive deliberation. Derrida's counter-thesis: every claim to sovereignty performs a fictive moment; the fable is constitutive.
  • The pure-debunking reading that takes identifying the fabular character as sufficient to abolish sovereignty's effects. The fable operates as long as it operates; deconstruction works at the level of the fable, not above it.
  • The Baudrillardian reading that reduces the political event to pure simulation. The bodies in 9/11 are destroyed; the deaths are real. But the political-force is conditioned by the fabular-mediatic dimension irreducibly. (Derrida does not name Baudrillard but rejects the reduction.)
  • The genre-segregation of literary fable and political reason as separate domains. Literary genre and political reason both operate the structure of the fable.

Connections

  • is the operative mode of sovereignty — sovereignty operates under the as-if of the fabulous; the seminar's whole reading depends on this connection
  • anchors the derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i reading of 9/11 (S2 pp. 36–39); the political event as technical-mediatic affabulation
  • shares logic with betise — both bêtise and fable are quasi-concepts; both operate under the as-if
  • shares logic with marionette — the marionette is the quasi-concept-in-figure; the fable is the quasi-concept-in-discourse
  • extends the Derridean différance / supplément / pharmakon family by giving an explicit name to the quasi-concept genre
  • is figured in jean-de-la-fontaine's "Le loup et l'agneau" — the operative fable of sovereign right; "we shall shortly show" is the seminar's opening citation from La Fontaine
  • connects to paul-valery's "Au sujet d'Eureka" — "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE FABLE" is the seminar's recurring epigraph
  • connects to niccolo-machiavelli's The Prince ch. 18 — the fox-cunning that dominates the lion-force; contemporary fabular-sovereign as fox
  • connects to Chomsky's Rogue States (cited at BS-I S1 pp. 19–20) — the contemporary Stratcom doctrine of "pretending to be out of control"
  • is anchored in derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i — Sessions 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8 are the fable-sessions

Open Questions

  • The "honest fiction" / "dishonest fiction" distinction (S3 p. 76, silent key): Derrida deploys this distinction in the context of reading Schmitt but does not develop it. What is an honest fiction in politics? What makes a fable operationally indispensable vs. operationally dishonest? Open.
  • The Benjamin reference: Derrida's 9/11 analysis (the technical reproducibility conditioning the event-as-event) echoes Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" without citing it. Open as a Benjamin-comparison thread.
  • The Habermas confrontation: the seminar's thesis (fable is constitutive of political reason) directly contradicts Habermas's communicative-rationality program; Derrida does not engage Habermas explicitly. Open.
  • Cross-source corroboration: BS-I is currently the wiki's sole source on this concept. Other Derrida texts (Politics of Friendship, Force of Law, Voyous) extend the analysis; corroboration would come from those ingests when they happen.

Sources

  • derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i — Sessions 1 (opening fable), 2 (faire savoir + 9/11), 3 (Machiavelli's fox), 6 (quasi-concept), 7 (Valéry's "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE FABLE"), 8 (La Fontaine "Le loup et l'agneau" + Cixous "L'amour du loup"). Full extraction at .extraction-derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i.md.