Torquato Accetto. ON HONEST DISSIMULATION. Essay — 102 pages — Éditions de la Reine Rouge, 2026. Translated from the Italian and with a preface by Frederika Abbate.
Information and orders: HERE
Written by the secretary to a Neapolitan aristocrat during the Spanish occupation of the Kingdom of Naples in the seventeenth century, this treatise, intended for Italian men of letters living under the yoke of the Empire, proposes to transform an expedient attitude into a moral virtue.
Dissimulation is a necessary stratagem for the survival of any individual or group living under domination, yet in principle it conflicts with the ethics of truth, which forbids us to lie. In order neither to compromise oneself through falsehood, thereby betraying one’s own values, nor to expose oneself recklessly to the violence of a tyrannical power, those who are dominated must learn to advance behind a mask, so as to distract and subjugate the enemy and ultimately defeat him.
Dissimulation is not the distortion of reality, but the art of preventing things from being seen as they truly are.
“To dissimulate is nothing other than a veil woven from honest shadows and precautions imposed by necessity: it does not produce falsehood, but grants truth a certain repose, so that it may be revealed at the proper moment.
And just as nature ordained that, in the order of the universe, there should be day and night, so too, in the course of human affairs, there must be light and shadow—that is, one must act openly or in secret, according to the reason that governs life and the events that occur within it.”
Far from being opposed to courage, honest dissimulation, although it may appear passive, sometimes demands greater effort than speaking out or openly revealing one’s designs. Moreover, it can afford a certain pleasure to those who practise it intelligently.
Introduced and translated by Frederika Abbate, this manual, inspired by the wisdom of the ancients, offers a method that could hardly be more relevant today, in the face of an increasingly ubiquitous and inquisitorial power.
Strategic dissimulation is as indispensable as courage in an age of enforced transparency and pervasive control, when systems of mass surveillance are making our civil liberties more fragile than ever.
