Without Alibi

This volume brings together five essays by Jacques Derrida that advance his reflections on many issues: lying perjury, forgiveness, confession, the profession of faith, and cruelty, soverignty, and capital punishment. Strongly linked by their attention to "performatives" and the "as if", the essays show the neccessity of thinking beyondthat category of acts that are possible for a subject. Derrida argues that thought must engage with the im-possible, that is, the order of the unforseeable 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 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 centre of Derrida's patient analyses. "Le Parjure, Perhaps" engages with a novel by Henry James that fictionalizes the charge of perjury brought against Paul de Man inthe 1950s. Derrida's extraordinary fineness as a reader and thinker of fiction here treats the "fatal experience of perjury". The two final essays, "The University without Condition" and "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of its Soul", and 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 is one the stakes indicated by the last essay. 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.