Perjury, promising, and the ethical fife

This article aims to initiate a discussion of the concept of perjury in Derrida's later writing by engaging with some of his 1997-99 seminars on Le parjure et le pardon and placing them in relation to a number of works he published around the same time. It shows how, on Derrida's account, perjury is not secondary to or parasitic upon truthful expression but an inexpungeable animating condition of the truth. It draws out the ethical and legal implications of this claim and suggests that it is integral to understanding what is sometimes presented as Derrida's "ethical turn."Finally, in a more critical moment, it suggests taking issue with Derrida's characterization of the ethical life as a staccato series of isolated, discrete, even incommensurable situations or encounters, and proposes to supplement his emphasis on the ethics of the other with an equally robust ethics of the self.