Perjury and Pardon, Volume I

Jacques Derrida

2022년 9월 · The Seminars of Jacques Derrida 1권 · University of Chicago Press

eBook

368

페이지

적용 가능

검증되지 않은 평점과 리뷰입니다. 자세히 알아보기

eBook 정보

An inquiry into the problematic of perjury, or lying, and forgiveness from one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.

“One only ever asks forgiveness for what is unforgivable.” From this contradiction begins Perjury and Pardon, a two-year series of seminars given by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in the late 1990s. In these sessions, Derrida focuses on the philosophical, ethical, juridical, and political stakes of the concept of responsibility. His primary goal is to develop what he calls a “problematic of lying” by studying diverse forms of betrayal: infidelity, denial, false testimony, perjury, unkept promises, desecration, sacrilege, and blasphemy.

Although forgiveness is a notion inherited from multiple traditions, the process of forgiveness eludes those traditions, disturbing the categories of knowledge, sense, history, and law that attempt to circumscribe it. Derrida insists on the unconditionality of forgiveness and shows how its complex temporality destabilizes all ideas of presence and even of subjecthood. For Derrida, forgiveness cannot be reduced to repentance, punishment, retribution, or salvation, and it is inseparable from, and haunted by, the notion of perjury. Through close readings of Kant, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Plato, Jankélévitch, Baudelaire, and Kafka, as well as biblical texts, Derrida explores diverse notions of the “evil” or malignancy of lying while developing a complex account of forgiveness across different traditions.

저자 정보

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Several of his books have been published in their English translation by the University of Chicago Press. Ginette Michaud is professor emerita in the Département des littératures de langue française at the Université de Montréal. She has coedited several texts on Derrida. Nicholas Cotton is professor of French literature at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit. David Wills is a professor of French studies at Brown University and the translator of a number of works by Derrida.