"My Tongue Swore To, But My Heart Did Not": Responding to the Call of Sincerity

Abstract

My thesis examines the “New Sincerity,” a recent movement in contemporary fiction, which relies upon and reclaims the ethical concept of sincerity. Rather than accept sincerity at face value, however, I outline a historical trajectory of the concept in order to understand the reasons for its decline and the current attempts to resituate it. Contrasting sincerity with its ancient Grecian root of parrhēsia, I argue that sincerity has been historically mobilized as a mechanism of oppression. Since the traditional conception of sincerity was founded upon the depth model of subjectivity, certain individuals were denied the possibility of professing sincerity; rather, their outward appearances marked them a priori as being deceitful, hypocritical and insincere. Despite the recent theoretical decline of the depth model of subjectivity, I claim that the model has persisted in an afterlife that continues to govern who is given the license and freedom to speak. As such, sincerity has had a significant role in how marginalized subjects, who are often denigrated for being overly emotional, have been categorized as insincere and sentimental. For this reason, my thesis rejects the alleged return of sincerity in favor of a reconceptualization of it. Drawing from the “performative turn,” I claim that sincerity must be continually at risk for it to draw its affective potential. If sincerity with intention is insincere, sincerity is an impossible event that cannot be claimed in advance. Rather, we must bind ourselves to the truth similar to the parrhēsiates of Ancient Greek and take care to question the other. In doing so, sincerity becomes a truth-telling based on actions instead of judgments.