The Origins of Responsibility

Eight. Derrida: The Impossible Origins of Responsibility

282 eight Derrida: The Impossible Origins of Responsibility From the very heart of the im-possible one would hear the pulse or the beat of a “deconstruction.” Papier Machine There is no responsibility without a dissident and inventive rupture with respect to tradition, authority, orthodoxy, rule, or doctrine. The Gift of Death How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? Or the will to truth out of the will to deception? Or selfless deeds out of selfishness? Or the pure and sunlike gaze of the sage out of lust? Such origins are impossible. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil The Aporias of Responsibility What Heidegger’s thinking with respect to responsibility has revealed is thattoberesponsiblesignifiesthetaking-onofaninappropriable:Thecall of conscience manifests an irreducible being-guilty; being properly one’s Derrida: The Impossible Origins of Responsibility · 283 own is projecting oneself resolutely toward such being-guilty; the call of Ereignis is from a withdrawal, indicating an expropriation or Enteignis at theheartofappropriation.Ineveryinstance,responsibilityprovestobean experience of an inappropriable. For Heidegger, as for Derrida, responsibility cannot be conceived of as the imputation or ascription of an act to a subject-cause, but rather as the encounter and exposition to an event as inappropriable (which Derrida will seek to grasp as aporia). In Being and Time, these limits appeared in the notion of thrownness as it determines the phenomenon of moods and birth, in the finitude of Dasein as mortal being, and in Dasein’s being-guilty. What is most striking in these phenomena is the fact that, far from preventing the possibility of ethical responsibility , they constitute what eminently obligates Dasein, and calls it to its ownmost being as finite (a finitude that Derrida would understand in terms of impropriety or impossibility). These limit-phenomena representtheoriginsofresponsibility ,andthesiteoftheethicalityofethics.The origin of responsibility is here a paradox. Jean-Luc Marion in fact claims that the call “always arises from a paradox,” in his interpretation of the paradox of the “saturated phenomenon.”1 Our return to the origins of responsibility has revealed constitutive aporias in the very structure of responsibility ,asiftheseoriginsweresitesofaporia.AlreadywithNietzsche, we noted that it was out of the affirmation of an unaccountability of all thingsthatanothersenseofresponsibility,whichwasstilltobefleshedout, emerged. In Sartre, one finds the aporia of having to decide without the possibility of relying on an a priori table of values, of having to choose without knowing how to choose, or the paradox of a responsibility for everything arising out of (the) nothing. In Levinas, the origin of ethics as responsibility for the other is at the same time the possibility of violence againsttheother.Furthermore,responsibilityistheresponsetoaninfinite demand, a demand which necessarily and originarily exceeds the capacitiesofafiniteresponsible /respondingsubject.InHeidegger,aswesaw,one finds the aporia of having to make oneself the basis of a nullity, i.e., of appropriating the inappropriable. Derrida will read these paradoxes as aporias , insisting that ethical responsibility (“if it exists,” as he often adds) must be the experience, the undergoing or enduring, of an aporia, of a certain impossible.2 And this formulation is all the more troubling as it is stated,precisely,intheperspectiveofareturntotheconditionsofpossibility of ethics and responsibility. 284 · the origins of responsibility A clarification is necessary at the outset, regarding Derrida’s relation to ethics.3 Although he underlines that ethical issues have never been absent from the work of deconstruction that he undertook from the early 1960s(albeitinan“oblique,”non-thematicmanner),Derridaconcedesthat his more explicit texts on ethics—whether those on justice, the right and thelaw,responsibility,ethicaldecision,forgiveness,hospitality,thegift,the secret, hospitality, etc.—do not propose a system of morality, a normative ethicsinthereceivedsenseoftheterm.InaninterviewfromJanuary2004, he explains: “Inaway,ethicalquestionshavealways been present,butifby ethicsoneunderstandsasystemofrules,ofmoralnorms,thenno,Idonot propose an ethics.”4 It would rather be an issue for him of problematizing (and in fact not just making it a problem but rendering aporetic!)5 what he calls, following Levinas, the ethicality or ethicity of ethics (l’éthicité de l’éthique), that is, its very possibility. We recall that in his Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida mentioned how Levinas had confided in a conversation that what interested him was not ethics but the holy. We will discover that Derrida’s aporetic ethics is not very distant from this thinking of the holy, and that he would claim for himself the notion of an unconditional ethics as Levinas developed it, beyond ontology but also beyond ethics. As Derrida clarifies in the same text: “Yes, ethics before or beyondontology...