Without Alibi (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) - Softcover

Derrida, Jacques

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804744114 ISBN 13: 9780804744119

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2002

Synopsis

This book brings together for the first time five recent essays by Jacques Derrida, which advance his reflections on many issues: lying, perjury, forgiveness, confession, the profession of faith, and, most recently, cruelty, sovereignty, and capital punishment. Strongly linked by their attention to "performatives" and the "as if," the essays show the necessity of thinking beyond the category of acts that are possible for a subject. Derrida argues forcefully that thought must engage with the im-possible, that is, the order of the unforeseeable event, the absolute future still to come. This acute awareness of the limits of performative programs informs the essays throughout and attunes them closely to events of a world undergoing "globalization."

The first essay, "History of the Lie," reviews some classic and modern definitions of the lie (Augustine, Rousseau, Kant, Koyré, Arendt), while renewing questions about what is called lying, as distinguished from other forms of nontruth. This inventive analysis is followed by "Typewriter Ribbon," which examines at length the famous lie recounted by Rousseau in his Confessions, when he perjured himself by accusing another of his own crime. Paul de Man's reading of this textual event is at the center of Derrida's patient, at times seriously funny analyses. "Le parjure, Perhaps" engages with a remarkable novel by Henri Thomas that fictionalizes the charge of perjury brought against Paul de Man in the 1950s. Derrida's extraordinary fineness as a reader and thinker of fiction here treats, to profound effect, the "fatal experience of perjury." The two final essays, "The University Without Condition" and "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul," address the institutions of the university and of psychoanalysis as sites from which to resist and deconstruct the nontruth or phantasm of sovereignty. For the university, the principle of truth remains at the core of its resistance; for psychoanalysis, there is the obligation to remain true to what may be, Derrida suggests, its specific insight: into psychic cruelty. Resistance to the sovereign cruelty of the death penalty is just one of the stakes indicated by the last essay, which is the text of a keynote address to the "States General of Psychoanalysis" held in Paris, July 2000.

Especially for this volume, Derrida has written "Provocation: Forewords," which reflects on the title Without Alibi while taking up questions about relations between deconstruction and America. This essay-foreword also responds to the event of this book, which Peggy Kamuf in her introduction presents as event of resistance. Without Alibi joins two other books by Derrida that Kamuf has translated for Stanford University Press: Points . . .: Interviews, 1974-1994 (1994) and Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998).

About this title

About the Author

Jacques Derrida was Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Stanford has published twelve of his books, most recently Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001 (2002) and Who's Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy 1 (2002)

From the Back Cover

This book brings together for the first time five recent essays by Jacques Derrida, which advance his reflections on many issues: lying, perjury, forgiveness, confession, the profession of faith, and, most recently, cruelty, sovereignty, and capital punishment. Strongly linked by their attention to "performatives" and the "as if," the essays show the necessity of thinking beyond the category of acts that are possible for a subject. Derrida argues forcefully that thought must engage with the im-possible, that is, the order of the unforeseeable event, the absolute future still to come. This acute awareness of the limits of performative programs informs the essays throughout and attunes them closely to events of a world undergoing "globalization."
The first essay, "History of the Lie," reviews some classic and modern definitions of the lie (Augustine, Rousseau, Kant, Koyré, Arendt), while renewing questions about what is called lying, as distinguished from other forms of nontruth. This inventive analysis is followed by "Typewriter Ribbon," which examines at length the famous lie recounted by Rousseau in his Confessions, when he perjured himself by accusing another of his own crime. Paul de Man's reading of this textual event is at the center of Derrida's patient, at times seriously funny analyses. "Le parjure, Perhaps" engages with a remarkable novel by Henri Thomas that fictionalizes the charge of perjury brought against Paul de Man in the 1950s. Derrida's extraordinary fineness as a reader and thinker of fiction here treats, to profound effect, the "fatal experience of perjury." The two final essays, "The University Without Condition" and "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul," address the institutions of the university and of psychoanalysis as sites from which to resist and deconstruct the nontruth or phantasm of sovereignty. For the university, the principle of truth remains at the core of its resistance; for psychoanalysis, there is the obligation to remain true to what may be, Derrida suggests, its specific insight: into psychic cruelty. Resistance to the sovereign cruelty of the death penalty is just one of the stakes indicated by the last essay, which is the text of a keynote address to the "States General of Psychoanalysis" held in Paris, July 2000.
Especially for this volume, Derrida has written "Provocation: Forewords," which reflects on the title Without Alibi while taking up questions about relations between deconstruction and America. This essay-foreword also responds to the event of this book, which Peggy Kamuf in her introduction presents as event of resistance. Without Alibi joins two other books by Derrida that Kamuf has translated for Stanford University Press: Points . . .: Interviews, 1974-1994 (1994) and Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998).

From the Inside Flap

This book brings together for the first time five recent essays by Jacques Derrida, which advance his reflections on many issues: lying, perjury, forgiveness, confession, the profession of faith, and, most recently, cruelty, sovereignty, and capital punishment. Strongly linked by their attention to "performatives" and the "as if," the essays show the necessity of thinking beyond the category of acts that are possible for a subject. Derrida argues forcefully that thought must engage with the im-possible, that is, the order of the unforeseeable event, the absolute future still to come. This acute awareness of the limits of performative programs informs the essays throughout and attunes them closely to events of a world undergoing "globalization."
The first essay, "History of the Lie," reviews some classic and modern definitions of the lie (Augustine, Rousseau, Kant, Koyre, Arendt), while renewing questions about what is called lying, as distinguished from other forms of nontruth. This inventive analysis is followed by "Typewriter Ribbon," which examines at length the famous lie recounted by Rousseau in his Confessions, when he perjured himself by accusing another of his own crime. Paul de Man's reading of this textual event is at the center of Derrida's patient, at times seriously funny analyses. "Le parjure, Perhaps" engages with a remarkable novel by Henri Thomas that fictionalizes the charge of perjury brought against Paul de Man in the 1950s. Derrida's extraordinary fineness as a reader and thinker of fiction here treats, to profound effect, the "fatal experience of perjury." The two final essays, "The University Without Condition" and "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul," address the institutions of the university and of psychoanalysis as sites from which to resist and deconstruct the nontruth or phantasm of sovereignty. For the university, the principle of truth remains at the core of its resistance; for psychoanalysis, there is the obligation to remain true to what may be, Derrida suggests, its specific insight: into psychic cruelty. Resistance to the sovereign cruelty of the death penalty is just one of the stakes indicated by the last essay, which is the text of a keynote address to the "States General of Psychoanalysis" held in Paris, July 2000.
Especially for this volume, Derrida has written "Provocation: Forewords," which reflects on the title Without Alibi while taking up questions about relations between deconstruction and America. This essay-foreword also responds to the event of this book, which Peggy Kamuf in her introduction presents as event of resistance. Without Alibi joins two other books by Derrida that Kamuf has translated for Stanford University Press: Points . . .: Interviews, 1974-1994 (1994) and Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Without Alibi

By Jacques Derrida

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2002 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-4411-9

Contents

Preface: Toward the Event PEGGY KAMUF.....................................
xi
Provocation: Forewords JACQUES DERRIDA....................................
xv
Introduction: Event of Resistance PEGGY KAMUF.............................
1
1. History of the Lie: Prolegomena.........................................
28
2. Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)......................................
71
3. "Le Parjure," Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying...........................
161
4. The University Without Condition........................................
202
5. Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond 
of a Sovereign Cruelty.....................................................
238
Notes......................................................................
281

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

History of the Lie: Prolegomena

Before even a preface or an epigraph, allow me to make two confessions.Which I must therefore ask you, without waiting, to believe.

Two confessions, also two concessions that, although they are sincere,will nonetheless say something about the fabulous and the phantasmatic,more precisely, about what we understand by fable and phantasm,namely, the return of some specter. As we know, phantasma also namedfor the Greeks the apparition of the specter, the vision of the phantom, orthe phenomenon of the revenant. The fabulous and the phantasmatichave a feature in common: stricto sensu, in the classical and prevalent senseof these terms, they do not pertain to either the true or the false, the veraciousor the mendacious. They are related, rather, to an irreduciblespecies of the simulacrum or even of simulation, in the penumbral lightof a virtuality that is neither being nor nothingness, nor even an order ofthe possible that an ontology or a mimetology could account for or subduewith reason. No more than myth, fable and phantasm are doubtlessnot truths or true statements as such, but neither are they errors or deceptions,false witnesses or perjuries.

The first conceded confession touches on the proposed title: "Historyof the Lie." By a slight displacement, by slipping one word in beneath another,it seems to mimic the famous title of a text that some years ago verymuch interested me. In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche gives the title"History of an Error" ("Geschichte eines Irrtum") to a sort of narrative insix episodes that, on a single page, recounts, in effect, and no less, the trueworld, the history of the "true world" (die wahre Welt). The title of thisfictive narrative announces the narration of a fabrication: "How the 'trueworld' finally becomes a fable" ("Wie die 'wahre Welt' endlich zur Fabelwurde"). It is not, then, a fable that is going to be told, but rather thestory of how a fable fabricated itself, so to speak. The teller is going toproceed as if a true story were possible on the subject of the history of thisfabrication, a fabrication that produces, precisely, nothing other than theidea of a true world—which risks hijacking the supposed truth of the narration:"How the 'true world' finally becomes a fable." "History of anerror" is only a subtitle. This fabulous narration about a fabulation, aboutthe truth as fabrication, is a coup de théâtre. It puts on stage some characterswho will remain more or less present, like specters, in the wings: firstPlato, who says, according to Nietzsche, "I Plato, I am the truth," thenthe Christian promise in the form of a woman, then the Kantian imperative,"the pale Koenigsbergian idea," then the positivistic cock's crow,and finally the Zarathustrian midday. We will call upon all these spectersagain, but we will also call on another, whom Nietzsche does not name:Saint Augustine. It is true that the latter, in his two great treatises on lying(De mendacio and Contra mendacium), is always in dialogue with SaintPaul, Nietzsche's most intimate enemy and the privileged adversary of hisferocity.

Although the memory of this fabulous text will remain with us, the historyof the lie cannot be the history of an error, not even an error in theconstitution of the true, in the very history of the truth as such. InNietzsche's polemical and ironic text, in the vein of this fable about a fabrication,the truth, the idea of a "true world," would be an "error." Evenin his "Theoretical Introduction to Truth and Lie in an ExtramoralSense," a text to which we will return later, Nietzsche continues to poseor to suppose some continuity between the error and the lie, thus betweenthe true and the veracious, which allows him to treat the lie in the neutralityof an extramoral sense, as a theoretical and epistemological problem.This gesture is neither illegitimate nor without interest, but we willcome back to it only after having taken account of the irreducibly ethicaldimension of the lie, where the phenomenon of the lie as such is intrinsicallyforeign to the problem of knowledge, truth, the true, and the false.This evening, I would like to take a few steps toward the abyss that opensbetween this ethical dimension and a certain political history of the lie.

In principle and in its classical determination, a lie is not an error. Onecan be in error or mistaken without trying to deceive and therefore withoutlying. It is true, however, that lying, deceiving, and being mistaken areall three included in the category of the pseudological. In Greek, pseudoscan mean lie as well as falsehood, cunning, or mistake, and deception orfraud as well as poetic invention, which increases the possible misunderstandingabout what a misunderstanding may mean—and does not simplifythe interpretation of a "refutative" dialogue as dense and sharp as theHippias Minor (e peri tou pseudous, anatreptikos). The common translationof the subtitle, e peri tou pseudous, by "On the Lie" is, to be sure, neithera lie nor an error but already a reductive decision, and thus it falsifies.Pseudos does not mean merely "lie," and, what is more, this extraordinarydialogue complicates rather a lot the question of the relation betweenlying and the doubles, analogues, or false friends that it might hide in itsfolds, at least virtually, everything that I am getting ready to say thisevening, including all that refers to the most modern political history.Distinguishing between several senses of the word pseudos, at least three ofthem (in things, pragma; in the utterance, logos; and in man, anthropos—and this is the lie), Aristotle already contested, in the Metaphysics (Δ, 29)many of the theses of the Hippias Minor, including the one according towhich the liar (pseudes) is the one who has the faculty to lie. Aristotlespecifies, and this is the essential thing as far as we are concerned, that theliar is not only whoever can lie but the one who prefers to lie and, beingso inclined, does it by choice, intentionally (ho eukheres kai proairetikos),for which reason—and this is another objection to Plato—he is worsethan the involuntary liar, if such a thing exists.

To this kind of Aristotelian pseudography, and under the title "TheAristotelian Determination of the Logos," Heidegger devotes a few pagesin a Marburg seminar from 1923–24. Perhaps I will return to it, but I notein the meantime that if the theme of the lie as such was not subsequentlygiven a major place, for example, in the analytic of Dasein in Being andTime—for reasons that it would be interesting and necessary to analyze—well,in 1923–24, no doubt already beyond a simple anthropology, a theoryof the ego or of consciousness, a psychology or a morality, Heideggersays of Dasein that it "bears within itself the possibilities for deceit andlying [Das Dasein trägt in sich selbst dies Möglichkeiten der Täuschung undder Lüge]." Before that he had written: "The Dasein of speech—of speaking[das Dasein des Sprechens] bears within it the possibility of deceit."

It is also true that Nietzsche seems to suspect Platonism or Christianity,Kantianism and positivism of having lied when they tried to get us to believein a "true world." But the fact remains that, if we limit ourselves, as wemust do to start, to what ordinary language as well as philosophy mean tosay, if we rely on this meaning-to-say, to lie does not mean to say in general tobe mistaken or to make an error. One can be mistaken, one can be in errorwithout lying; one can communicate to another some false informationwithout lying. If I believe what I say, even if it is false, even if I am wrong,and if I am not trying to mislead someone by communicating this error,then I am not lying. One does not lie simply by saying what is false, so longas one believes in good faith in the truth of what one believes or assents toin one's opinions. It is the question of faith and of good faith that we musttreat this evening. Saint Augustine recalls this at the opening of De mendacio.He proposes there, moreover, a distinction between belief and opinionthat could still have great pertinence for us today, in a new way. To lie is towant to deceive the other, sometimes even by saying what is true. One canspeak falsely without lying, but one can also say what is true with the aimof deceiving someone, in other words, while lying. But one does not lie ifone believes what one says even if it is false. By declaring that "the personwho utters a falsehood does not lie if he believes or, at least, is of the opinionthat what he says is true," Saint Augustine seems to exclude the lie tooneself, the "being-mistaken" as "lie to oneself." Here is a question that willstay with us from now on out and that later we will have to evaluate for itsproperly political sense: Is it possible to lie to oneself, and does every kindof self-deception, every ruse with oneself, deserve to be called a lie? In aword, how is one to understand the expression se tromper, whose idiom isso rich and equivocal in French? Lie to oneself or error?

It is difficult to believe that the lie has a history. Who would dare to tellthe history of the lie? And who could promise to tell it as a true story?Even supposing, concesso non dato, that the lie has a history, one wouldstill have to be able to tell it without lying. And without giving in tooquickly, too easily, to a conventionally dialectical schema whereby the historyof error, as history and work of the negative, would be made to contributeto the process of truth, to the verification of the truth in view ofabsolute knowledge. If there is a history of the lie, that is, of false witnessand of perjury (for every lie is a perjury), and if this history touches onsome radicality of evil named "lie" or "perjury," then, on the one hand, itcannot let itself be reappropriated by a history of error or of the truth inthe "extramoral" sense. On the other hand, although the lie supposes, orso it seems, the deliberate invention of a fiction, nevertheless not allfiction or fable amounts to lying—and neither does literature.

In the "Fourth Reverie" of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which isanother great "pseudology," another abyssal treatise on lying and fictionthat we should consider with infinite patience, Rousseau proposes awhole taxonomy of lies (imposture, fraud, calumny, which remains theworst), and he recalls that a lie that hurts neither oneself nor another, aninnocent lie, does not deserve to be called a lie; it is, he says, a "fiction."Such a "fiction" would no more be a lie, according to him, than the dissimulationof a truth that one is not obligated to divulge. This dissimulation,which includes a simulation, poses other problems for Rousseau.If instead of being satisfied with not divulging, with silencing a truth thatis not owed, someone also said the contrary, "Is he then lying or not?"Rousseau asks this before replying: "According to the definition, we couldnot say that he lies; for if he gives counterfeit money to a man to whomhe owes nothing, he undoubtedly deceives this man, but he does not robhim." Which means that the definition that would exempt him fromlying is no good. If he deceives, even if he does not steal, he lies, Kantwould say, for according to him truth is always owed as soon as one addressesothers. We will get to this is a moment, but we should extend thisfiduciary association, if I can put it that way, between lying and money oreven counterfeit money. I am not speaking only of all the discourses oncounterfeit money that are ipso facto discourses on lying, but of the counterfeitmoney that often arises in definitions of the lie. This association issignificant and constant, from Montaigne to Rousseau and even to Freud,who eroticizes it in a striking way in a little text from 1913 titled "ZweiKinderlügen": one of his patients identifies, not by chance, with the figureof Judas, who betrayed for money.

After having proliferated distinctions that are as subtle as they are necessary,after having insisted on the fact that, in his profession of "veracity,""forthrightness," and "fairness," he had followed the "moral directions" ofhis "conscience" more than "abstract notions of true and false," Rousseaunevertheless does not consider his account closed. He still confesses, headmits that these conceptual distinctions unfold their theoretical subtletyonly to exonerate him from a more inadmissible lie, as if the theoreticaldiscourse on lying was yet one more lying strategy, an unavowable techniqueof disculpation, an unforgivable ruse by which theoretical reasondeceives practical reason and silences the heart: "I do not, however, feelmy heart to be sufficiently satisfied with these distinctions as to believemyself entirely irreprehensible." But this last, this next-to-last remorsedoes not concern only the inexhaustible duty to be truthful with others;it also turns in the direction of a duty to oneself. Rousseau as well seemssensitive to this possibility of lying to oneself, which will define todayboth the magnetic field and the line of division of our problematic. Isthere a lie to oneself? Is it possible to lie to oneself, that is, at the sametime to tell oneself intentionally something other than what one knowsone thinks in truth—which seems absurd and impracticable—and to doso in order to hurt oneself, to damage oneself by acting thus at one's ownexpense, which supposes a duty to oneself as to another? Rousseau doesnot exclude this madness because at the point at which he says he is notsatisfied, in his "heart," with these "distinctions," he adds: "In weighingso carefully what I owed others, have I sufficiently examined what I owedmyself? If it is necessary to be just to others, it is necessary to be true tooneself: that is an homage an honest man should render to his own dignity."Rousseau goes even further in the confession of the inexcusable. Hedoes not end up merely confessing this or that lie, or even this or thatfiction, invented, he says, to "supplement" the sterility of his "conversation";he judges himself "inexcusable" by reason of the very motto that hehad chosen, a motto that is so inflexible that it should have excluded notonly lying but also fable and fiction. And this, no matter what the cost tohim, for this ethics of veracity is always a sacral ethics of sacrifice.Rousseau speaks of it, in fact, in a code of consecration and a sacrificiallexicon.

But one can already imagine countless fictive histories of the lie, countlessinventive discourses devoted to simulacrum, to fable, and to the productionof new forms on the subject of the lie, which nevertheless wouldnot be deceitful histories, that is, if we may rely on the classical and dominantconcept of the lie, untrue histories or stories, but innocent, inoffensiveones, simulacra unsullied by perjury and false witness. Why nottell histories of the lie that, without being true, do no harm? Fabulous historiesof the lie that, doing harm to no one, might give pleasure here orthere, or even do some people some good?

You might ask me why I invoke here, with so much insistence, a classicaland dominant concept of the lie. And why, as I do so, I orient reflectionas much toward what "classical and dominant" may mean, in theirconcept, as toward the stakes, singularly the political stakes, today, ofwhat we continue to call by this old name, the "lie." Is there, practicallyand theoretically, a prevalent concept of the lie in our culture? Why recallright away the features of this concept? I am going to formalize these features,in my own fashion, which I hope is true, correct, and adequate—forthe thing is not so simple, and if I am wrong, it would not be a lie unlessI did it on purpose, unless I said deliberately something other thanwhat I think I think, and especially unless it hurt someone in some way,myself or another. It will be difficult, I will even venture to say impossibleto prove that I did it on purpose. I underscore this merely to announceright away a hypothesis, namely: for structural reasons, it will always beimpossible to prove, in the strict sense, that someone has lied even if onecan prove that he or she did not tell the truth. One will never be able toprove anything against the person who says, "What I said is not true; Iwas wrong, to be sure, but I did not mean to deceive; I am in good faith,"or, alleging the always possible difference between the said, the saying,and the meaning-to-say, the effects of language, rhetoric, and context: "Isaid that, but that is not what I meant to say; in good faith, in my heartof hearts, that was not my intention; there has been a misunderstanding."One will never be able to prove anything that overturns such an allegation,and we must draw the consequences of this. They are formidableand without limit.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804744114
• ISBN 13: 9780804744119
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352