Faking It

This book explores identity, and our engagement in everyday roles, alongside doubts over identity and authenticity.

William Ian Miller (Author)

9780521613705, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 January 2005

304 pages
22.6 x 15 x 2.5 cm, 0.45 kg

'… a fascinating and highly entertaining account of the small and not so small deceptions, hypocrisies and downright fakes through which we live our lives … Miller's jargon-free style, with its heavy reliance upon his own experiences of all these situations and more, is charming and immediately persuasive … it is as a literary critic that Miller is most impressive … he draws upon an ambitious range of names from across literature … Miller's pithy contribution to the ongoing debate surrounding T. S. Eliot and anti-Semitism, in a chapter on the historically recurring fear that a Jew might 'pass' as Christian, is particularly insightful. There is plenty that is amusing and playful about the arguments presented in this book … he has an eye for the seriousness of attempts to fake it too … These short examples can do little justice to the massive scope that Miller sets out for this book … Miller's demonstration of our dependence upon acts of fraud is invaluable in this field.' Manuscript

This book is about the intrusive fear that we may not be what we appear to be, or worse, that we may be only what we appear to be and nothing more. It is concerned with the worry of being exposed as frauds in our profession, cads in our love lives, as less than virtuously motivated actors when we are being agreeable, charitable, or decent. Why do we so often mistrust the motives of our own deeds, thinking them fake, though the beneficiary of them gives us full credit? Much of this book deals with that self-tormenting self-consciousness. It is about roles and identity, discussing our engagement in the roles we play, our doubts about our identities amidst this flux of roles, and thus about anxieties of authenticity.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: split in two
2. Hypocrisy and Jesus
3. Anti-hypocrisy: looking bad in order to be good
4. Virtues with natural immunities to hypocrisy
5. Naked truth: hey, wanna …?
6. In divine services and other ritualized performances
7. Say it like you mean it: mandatory faking and apology
8. Flattery and praise
9. Hoist with his own petard
10. The self, the double, and the sense of self
11. At the core at last: the primordial Jew
12. Passing and wishing you were what you are not
13. Authentic moments with the beautiful and sublime?
14. The alchemist: role as addiction
15. 'I love you': taking a bullet vs. biting one
16. Boys crying and girls playing dumb
17. Acting our roles: mimicry, makeup, and pills
18. False (im)modesty
19. Caught in the act
Afterword.

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH], Cultural studies [JFC], Social & political philosophy [HPS], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ]