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    Review of:
    Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi. Ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.

  1. 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).

  2. 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.

  3. 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 work of J.L. Austin (particularly How to Do Things with Words, the lectures Austin delivered at Harvard), and speech act theory more generally, becomes a compelling alibi for the choice of essays in this collection. I may be seen to be using the term "collaboration" somewhat loosely here: Derrida's critique of Austin, whose performativity as an intervention is too often allowed to go unnoticed, could hardly be said to entail a working together, or co-labor. In addition, the far from collaborative, and, indeed, belabored, debate that took place in the 1970s between Derrida and John R. Searle, who seemingly took upon himself the task of responding for and in the name of Austin to Derrida's initial critique, revolved on one of its axes around the question of copyright and the incorporation of various collaborators, real or virtual, into a single legal identity, a "Limited Inc," as it were. Yet, as the essays in Without Alibi demonstrate with their citational and iterative use of performativity, the term "collaboration" can be understood in the active sense of "working with" others, a joint intellectual labor that, to use Austin's catchy phrase, does things with words. In the spirit of Derrida's treatment of ethics and responsibility in his later work, this co-labor may be said to entail an engagement with or response to the call of the other as the horizon of performative force. The word "collaboration," of course, trembles under the weight of its political history and, especially, of that of Paul de Man's wartime writings, an act that remains categorically "without alibi," no matter what revanchist purposes they have served his detractors. Derrida's patient, arduous, and no doubt painful response to de Man's wartime writings--one of whose moments or occasions is the essay "'Le Parjure,' Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying" that appears in this volume--is, at least in part, articulated by his understanding of what it is to do things with words: a co-labor responsive to the other's call. Indeed, de Man's own reading of Austin--a reading to which Derrida returns in "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)"--has so many points of contact with Derrida's reading that one can only imagine it as a collaborative effort, an act of interlocution that was in no small measure responsible for initiating or inaugurating what came to be "deconstruction" in America. Derrida's long-standing engagement with the United States critical scene and with the reception of his work by the American academy can in this same sense be profitably thought of as a collaborative critique of performativity.

  4. It is this general critique of performativity, I want to suggest, that makes the Kamuf/Derrida collaboration in Without Alibi particularly valuable at a time of increased resistance to theory and perhaps to non-coercive forms of collaboration. At one level, many of the topics or themes Derrida pursues in his essays pertain to explicit performative speech acts of the sort Austin isolated, such as lying, promising, making excuses, professing, confessing, and producing alibis of all sorts, and, at another, many of the concepts Derrida treats, such as the signature, responsibility, the event, citizenship, the death penalty, and mondialisation, are formulated from within his critique of Austin. At yet another level--and this is where collaboration nears performative efficacy--the collection itself encapsulates the history of Derrida's engagement with the United States critical scene, a history that, in Kamuf's selection at least, is linked to a general critique of the performative. Two of the essays in Without Alibi, for instance, look back upon the work of some of Derrida's most important collaborators (as in co-workers or sometime colleagues) in the United States (whether American or not): "'Le Parjure,' Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying" is written for a collection of essays for J. Hillis Miller, but deals with a fictional account (Henri Thomas's novel Le Parjure) of what may be read as Paul de Man's life before arriving in the United States; "Typewritter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)" traces some of the most salient motifs of de Man's reading of Rousseau's Confessions as an occasion to revisit Derrida's reading of Austin and Searle's critique of this reading as it appeared originally in "Limited Inc a b c."

  5. All five essays, in fact, perform or enact this critique, such that, more than the "essential trait" of the collection, one could say that performativity is its "alibi" since performativity, in Derrida, never really achieves the systematicity of a method nor even the thematic density of a concept metaphor. A discursive modality that categorically resists allegorization, the performative precipitates, prompts, and provokes narrative effects through discrete acts of speech but never itself becomes a central organizing principle. In her illuminating introduction, "Event of Resistance," Kamuf characterizes Derrida's return to Austin in the essays as a response to the tendency (perhaps especially, but not exclusively, evident in the United States) of taking "performativity" to be a transformative empowerment. Precisely because these cultural theories of performativity rely on the conventionality of speech acts to create the appearance of social inevitability, Derrida asks us to reconsider and resist the all-too-neatly reflexive notion that the performative produces the event of which it speaks. As he writes in "The University Without Condition": "where there is the performative, an event worthy of the name cannot arrive" (234).

  6. As these examples illustrate, Without Alibi forcefully reminds us why Derrida was initially drawn to Austin's formulation of the performative and why he found the various attempts at formalizing the latter's discovery highly problematic. First of all, insofar as Austin's isolation of the performative was the formalization of an always already existing force of language that, while operative, had never been named, we can consider the confusion between constative and performative utterances (that is, between statements that can be said to be true or false and locutions that actually do something by being uttered) as a particularly significant instance of the sort of ideological obfuscation Derrida termed "logocentrism" and whose critique--call the necessary course it took "deconstruction"--was in itself as "great" an "event" as he claims Austin's discovery of the performative to have been. For Derrida, Austin's formulation of the performative shatters the traditional concept of communication since the performative is found to be, as act, a nonreferential force of language that categorically resists the notion of speech as the transference of a given semantic content oriented towards truth. And it is precisely the nonreferential aspect of performative speech acts that was initially of most interest to Derrida and can even be said to have set the conditions of the possibility of his critique of Austin since it is the latter's failure to take account of the general applicability of his own discovery that destabilizes the oppositions he wishes to formulate (constative vs. performative; parasitic vs. non-parasitic uses of language; happy vs. unhappy performatives; etc.).

  7. The political and intellectual stakes of Derrida's critique of performativity are certainly very high. In the "History of the Lie: Prolegomena," for instance, he speaks of the "performative violence" of state law:

    When performatives succeed, they produce a truth whose power sometimes imposes itself forever: the location of a boundary, the installation of a state are always acts of performative violence that, if the conditions of the international community permit it, create the law . . . . In creating the law, this performative violence--which is neither legal nor illegal--creates what is then held to be legal truth, the dominant and juridically incontestable public truth. (51)

    The very real events that performative speech acts can and do effect within institutional frameworks rely for their efficacy on a particular misreading or, in a vocabulary Derrida seldom has any use for, ideology, both in the sense that the performative is often confused with the constative (insofar as an act is read as a true or false statement) and in the sense that it is naturalized as an evident or obvious fact with no history of its own. For Derrida, it is not enough to identify the force of the performative and formalize its features (a task, in any case, undertaken with admirable clarity by Austin himself). One must also be alert to the instability of the performative/constative distinction and be ready to live with the constant oscillation between the two as the condition of possibility of responsible action.

  8. In "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Culture," the last essay in Without Alibi, Derrida explores this oscillation within the institutional confines of psychoanalysis, proposing nothing less than a new revolution in psychoanalytic reason in the spirit of a States General of Psychoanalysis. Of the three states or orders he isolates, it is the performative to which he ascribes the role of "inventing and reinventing" the institutional, normative, procedural "laws" of psychoanalysis in contradistinction to the theoretical or descriptive order of knowledge we associate with the constative. But it is only when psychoanalysis begins to contemplate the impossible coming of an event worthy of its name that the distinction falls apart and, in the face of unpredictable alterity, the orders of power (constative) and of the possible (performative) are "put to rout." In practical, should we say academic, terms, the stakes of this form of deconstructive practice are also taken into account, not least because the "event" of Austin's originary formulation is, as Derrida reminds us, an "academic event" in the first place. Thus, in the sixth of the seven theses or "professions of faith" with which Derrida concludes "The University Without Conditions" (in a manner, one need perhaps not add, that is itself performative), he has this to say concerning the humanities of tomorrow: "It will surely be necessary, even if things have already begun here or there, to study the history and the limits of such a decisive distinction [between performative acts and constative acts] . . . This deconstructive work would not concern only the original and brilliant oeuvre of Austin but also his rich and fascinating inheritance, over the last half-century, in particular in the Humanities" (233).

  9. Without Alibi has the great merit of exposing us to a significant part of that inheritance through Derrida's specific engagements with Austin and through the rich history of what I have called these essays' "collaboration." Derrida's reading of Austin and the many debates, commentaries, and countersignatures this reading has inspired over the years can, I think, be singled out as one of the events that helped launch and entrench deconstruction in America. Its force as event might serve as a reminder or emblem of the stakes involved in conceptualizing the performative: it can revolutionize the intellectual landscape. To call Derrida's critique of performativity "American" is then also to point towards a certain performative violence that, in the service of institutional truth or of legal expediency (read: copyright), has been done to the humanities, generally making them less hospitable to collaboration, countersignature, deconstruction--in short, to theory.

  10. It would therefore be naïve to characterize Peggy Kamuf's countersignature in Without Alibi as a "performance" of Derrida or of deconstruction. Naïve because it is not a matter of choice or intention to utter certain speech acts, and, in so doing or saying, to transform ourselves into an "other." We do not have that choice, since the performative/constative distinction turns out to be, more than a discursive modality, the very condition of possibility of language doing or saying anything at all. Being Jacques Derrida, one realizes after reading Without Alibi, is a far more difficult task than performing a critical role (that would be, perhaps, just an alibi for responsibility); it is an impossibly collaborative event towards which Kamuf bravely makes the leap as though to salute a stranger who only gets stranger with each subsequent exposure.

    11. Department of English
    University of Wisconsin, Madison
    mortizrobles@wisc.edu

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