Being Jacques Derrida

Without Alibi, a collection of five essays written by Jacques Derrida in response to various provocations both in France and in the United States, is not without its own alibis. It is, first of all, a book that came into being at the suggestion of Peggy Kamuf, one of Derrida’s most reliable American translators, and, in this case, also his editor, compiler, and virtual collaborator. As Derrida tells us in his foreword—or alibi of a foreword, sandwiched as it is between the editor’s preface and the translator’s introduction—the book is “more and other than a translation” since it is “countersigned” by Kamuf. In her own telling, the collection seeks to trace the “movement of response and engagement” that characterizes the reception of Derrida’s work in the United States and his own critical reaction to that reception. Kamuf’s collection is, in this sense, Derrida’s American alibi, or “elsewhere” (“alibi” in Latin), an apt description of the act of translation and a compelling prescription for an ethics of authorship, or of countersignature as performance, that the book can be said to be enacting. It is in this regard tempting to group Without Alibi together with other collaborative works Derrida published late in his life. I am thinking here of the very different and very differently conceptualized collaborations he performed with a number of French women, Elizabeth Rudinesco (For What Tomorrow...), Catherine Malabou (Counterpath), Hélène Cixous (Veils and Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint), and Anne Dufourmantelle (Of Hospitality).

Unlike these books, Without Alibi is a peculiarly American product, and not only because it is, as Derrida puts it, a “native” of “America,” referring no doubt to the fact that the book was published in America by an American university press without, as it were, a French alibi. Indeed, there is no “French original” to this book, even if all five essays were written in French and four were delivered, in French, as lectures before audiences in both France and the United States. The fifth, “‘Le Parjure,’ Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying,” which was the only piece originally destined for publication, was written for a volume commemorating the work of his “friend and eminent colleague” J. Hillis Miller. Two of the lectures (both of which have appeared in print elsewhere) were also delivered with a specifically American alibi: “Typewritter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)” was first read at a conference held in 1998 at the University of California, Davis, on Paul de Man’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, and “History of the Lie: Prolegomena” was presented at the New School for Social Research in New York as part of a series commemorating the work of Hannah Arendt. To use a designation elsewhere explored by Derrida, the book has thus been thoroughly “copyrighted” in America (and copyrighted, at least materially in this instance, by the trustees of Stanford University, which Kamuf calls a “great university” and which, incidentally perhaps—a professional alibi?—sponsored the conference at which Derrida delivered “The University Without Condition,” the only essay in Without Alibi not to have appeared in print before). America is thus, in this collection, one of the most persistent alibis for the labor of translation and editing and collaboration and even copyright Kamuf so ably performs. Being Jacques Derrida’s “elsewhere,” Kamuf does an admirable job of bringing together five texts that, in their different ways, trouble the conditions of production that have brought them together in the first place. And if, as Kamuf writes in the introduction, the “essential trait” shared by all five essays is the notion of sovereignty, then we can say that it is American insofar as, today, sovereignty can be given the name “America” even as it actively, and without alibi, claims it as its own copyright.

The book is peculiarly American for another reason. Its “essential trait” may well be a different sort of collaboration or about a different sort of copyright. Derrida’s complex, often critical, at times openly hostile, and ultimately fruitful collaboration with the...