La grammatica della menzogna

Why do we lie? Not to distort reality, but to make it compatible with our own limits of acceptability. We lie whenever the truth would result in a loss, a rupture, or harm. A lie is expressed in its fullest form only in language, where falsehood becomes verifiable: Omissions, downplaying, rephrasing, and alternative constructions prove to be common ways in which the subject intervenes in reality. Extralinguistic manifestations can only expand upon this phenomenon. The false, therefore, does not replace the true in order to deny it, but to correct its effects.
This gives rise to the book’s central thesis: lying is, at its core, a survival strategy, adopted to prevent the truth from bringing about consequences that the individual is unable to bear.
The author confirms this through an analysis of a broad corpus of diverse false texts that, in various ways, revolve around a fiction—false testimonies, delusions, simulations, role-playing—examined not for their deviant nature, but for their ability to reveal the processes involved in constructing falsehoods.
The same procedures recur in them time and again: reducing what is excessive, replacing what is missing, constructing what might have been, and deviating from what would be harmful. The book thus shifts the focus from deception to necessity: the lie emerges as a fundamental means by which the subject reshapes reality to conform it to what could have been or should have been—the ultimate tool that language provides when truth, on its own, is not enough.