This paper addresses Hannah Arendt’s approach in “Truth and Politics” to the use of lies in the public and political spheres. Considering Derrida’s review in his lecture History of the Lie: Prolegomena, we will attempt to resolve questions of greater importance: How can a lie be politically effective? What does that efficiency imply? We will see that in politics lies do not consist, as Arendt and her tradition have argued, in the intentionality of the message or in self-deception ; but (...) rather that lying produces “effects of truth”, generating, producing and sustaining new truths and realities by virtue of the speech acts themselves. However, just as not every performative utterance is mendacious, we will also see in what sense the effectiveness of the political lie is deeply related to who is the agent of that saying. (shrink)