Coda

A brief Coda wrestles with the scope of the claims made for a strategic cynicism. It begins with the uncomfortable play between sceptical cynicism and much more impoverished cynicisms in Dinaw Mengestu’s novel How to Read the Air (2010). It then turns to Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness, a book that sought to clarify the virtues of truthfulness as our main resource against cynicism. It takes Williams’s reworking of the Nietzschean genealogy as a prompt to think critically about the strengths and limitations of cynicism’s corrective or recalibrating role for today.