The Anti-Corruption Platform and Its Fictitious Object

The paper presents a critique of the anti-corruption paradigm in the global policies over the last 20–25 years. Anti-corruption programs unfolded globally as universal platforms for fight against corruption as such, in most general terms. They thus imply a corresponding object, namely, a generalized object of corruption. The perspective in which the phenomenon of corruption is reconstructed and interpreted is the question of the character of such an object, corruption per se. The analysis proposed in the paper is skeptical with respect to the possibility of such an unified object, even if its heterogeneous expressions get recognized afterwards. The result of the critique could be summed up in a short formula as follows: To the extent the anti-corruption policies are efficient and successful, they are not specific for this particular object, i.e. corruption as such. And, as far as they are specific for it, they are not real policies but rather fictions, rhetorical figures and actions whose meaning could be disclosed in through reconstruction.