Perjury and Pardon, Volume II by Jacques Derrida & Nicholas Cotton

Author:Jacques Derrida & Nicholas Cotton [Derrida, Jacques & Cotton, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000 PHILOSOPHY / General, PHI005000 PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy, PHI019000 PHILOSOPHY / Political
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Here reigns “Absolute Knowing” [in quotes, “Absolute Knowing”: that’s the theme of this seminar, no?]. Everyone is satisfied. There is nothing left to do.

The unsurpassable is reality.

[234] In that sense, as a citizen of the universal homogeneous State, I am any man, other and the same, subject to the supreme law that I incarnate, invisible and faceless, beyond dispute because everything that disputes me confirms me.

But now comes someone—a woman no doubt—who exempts me from what I am and recognizes the Most High in this me that dissolves.

The Most High cannot be but its own negation. In a perfect society, when the plague breaks out, in such a way that those infected become the only rebels, when AIDS puts supreme law in danger, the Most High, beyond all divinity, is but a patient who dies without dying, unless he become the “Thing” itself, the terrifying nothing, the truth that always deceives and is deceived, the ultimate word that immortal death alone can finally have heard. [Hear Saint Augustine there, or what we were saying about Saint Augustine on the impossibility of dying, the possibility and impossibility of dying. And when he says: “the truth that always deceives and is deceived,” the truth is what deceives, one is referred, as it were, to the book’s epigraph, which says, in quotes, a text that I think is quite famous: “I’m a trap for you. Even if I tell you everything—the more loyal I am, the more I’ll deceive you: it’s my frankness that’ll catch you.” / “Please understand: everything that you get from me is, for you, only a lie—because I’m the truth.”52 Well, “I am the truth,” it’s Christ who says that, “I am the truth and the life.” And that’s perjury, the lie, it’s proffered by, it proceeds from one who says, “I am the truth.” One who says “I am the truth” cannot but lie.]

But you, reader, forget all that, for it is also Antigone, the pure virgin, uniting with her dead brother so that the incest taboo, henceforth suspended, subverts as much ideal law as natural law. Abjection is love, just as absolute freedom is absolute servitude.53

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