k-punk's take (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007016.html)
is quite close to my own here:
"What troubles me about Pinter's recent, well-discussed Nobel address
is what usually troubles me about Chomsky: surely he is telling us
nothing that we don't already know. The problem is not the denial of
facts - who, after Guantanamo, 'extraordinary rendition' and Abu
Ghraib, cannot be unaware that America engages in torture? - but
denial in that other sense: a disavowal of practical and libidinal
complicity in those facts. It is not that, as Pinter says, 'these
things never happened'; these things, whilst the subject of endless
official denials, are well-known to have happened, which is worse.
Pinter's address, after all, was a kind of answer to the question 'is
a politics of truth still thinkable?' What was most noticeable about
the lecture was the glaring fissure between the first and the second
half; the first half, which corresponded to the 'writer's truth' that
'there are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is
unreal', the second to the 'citizen's truth', which demands a firm
demarcation between real and unreal, the true and the false. What was
disappointingly absent from Pinter's lecture - but thankfully is
present in his drama - was the Lacanian thesis that truth can only
appear as a fiction. A shame, surely, if the political role of
literature is reduced to offering brute (and brutalized) tracings of
the empirical."
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