On Imposture

"In this incisive and decisive book, Serge Margel brilliantly diagnoses a founding aporia at the heart of Rousseau's thinking and writing, both political and literary.  With rare acuity, he demonstrates that the parallel figures of the legislator and the reader in Rousseau establish an originary and unresolvable scene of imposture which both allows for and simultaneously undermines all final legitimacy in what we call politics and literature.  In so doing, Margel both provides a strikingly original reading of Rousseau, and opens up some still burning philosophical questions about the fundamental possibilities and impossibilities of truth and lies, power and fiction in the space of democracy."—Geoffrey Bennington, Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought, Emory University

"This brilliant essay ushers the reader (that is to say: ourselves, since we are implicated in the exemplary figure of the legislator and impostor) into the heart of Rousseau's intricate paradox of the "innocent lie." In defining the archaic scene of imposture, where the literary and the political prove to be inseparable questions, Serge Margel gives us invaluable insight into our own out-of-joint times, which are marked by a crisis of authority and legitimacy, false facts, and outright lies. On Imposture reconstructs—and deconstructs—the very conditions of the body politic: is there a more pressing task?"—Ginette Michaud, Université de Montréal