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.

 

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.
 

Foreword to the English Edition
General Introduction to the French Edition
Editors’ Note
Translator’s Note
First Session
Second Session
Third Session
Fourth Session
Fifth Session
Appendix, Fifth Session—Discussion Session
Sixth Session
Appendix 1, Sixth Session
Appendix 2, Sixth Session
Seventh Session
Eighth Session
Ninth Session
Tenth Session
Appendix, Tenth Session—Restricted Session
Notes
Index of Proper Names