Kierkegaard and Death

12. Derrida, Judge William, and Death

derrida, judge william, and death 219 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 12. Derrida, Judge William, and Death Ian Duckles In this chapter, I attempt to take seriously Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard ’s Fear and Trembling in The Gift of Death.1 In particular, I focus on Derrida’s claim that all universalizing ethical systems involve an evasion of responsibility for one’s actions. As Derrida sees it, this has important connections with mortality, since (following Heidegger)2 it is through developing the correct attitude toward my own mortality—and consequently my singularity as this particular individual—that I am able to lead an authentic life. In effect, I take Derrida to be suggesting that pursuing ethical considerations is an attempt to avoid confronting one’s own mortality and thus avoid the demands of an authentic existence. Having developed this reading of Derrida I then read it back into Kierkegaard’s conception of the ethical, particularly as it is articulated by the Judge William pseudonym in Either/Or part 2 and Stages on Life’s Way. In so doing I argue that Derrida’s articulation of the ethical is an acceptable gloss on these two works. More specifically, I will suggest that this is how Kierkegaard intended the Judge William pseudonym to be interpreted. In this way, I use Derrida to aid in understanding what I take to be Kierkegaard’s position and criticism of the ethical, as well as bring out issues related to human mortality that are not explicit in these texts. Derrida’s Account of the Paradox of Responsibility and Death There are three major claims that Derrida makes in The Gift of Death that are relevant to the issues I want to discuss. First, Derrida claims that, contrary to our ordinary understanding of the issue, ethics and a commitment to ethical norms involves a loss of personal responsibility and autonomy. Derrida writes, “The ethical can therefore end up making us 220 ian duckles irresponsible” (The Gift of Death [hereafter GD], 61). The second claim, connected to the first, is that the story of Isaac and Abraham as recounted by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de silentio (the author of Fear and Trembling) can and should be read as a parable, the moral of which is the first claim. Quoting again from Derrida, “The account of Isaac’s sacrifice can be read as a narrative development of the paradox constituting the concept of duty and absolute responsibility” (GD, 66). In effect, Derrida argues that the story of Abraham and Isaac amounts to a literary depiction of his philosophical claim about the irresponsibilization function of ethics. Lastly—and this is the third claim—the first two claims are related to issues of mortality in that it is the fact of my mortality that makes me a responsible agent in the first place, and a commitment to a universalizing ethical system is an attempt to evade this responsibility and the implications of one’s mortality. I will now examine each of these claims in turn. In our ordinary understanding of the nature of ethics we tend to say that an individual is most responsible and most in control of her actions and her self when she submits to universalizable ethical norms. This certainly appears to be the view of figures as diverse as Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Mill, each of whom (in very different ways) argues that the best sort of human existence—the most authentic way to live—is through a commitment to universalizable norms.3 Connected to this is the idea that an individual is most responsible for her actions when she can give a rational justification, a reason understandable to others, for her behavior. As Derrida writes: For common sense, just as for philosophical reasoning, the most widely shared belief is that responsibility is tied to the public and to the nonsecret , to the possibility and even the necessity of accounting for one’s words and actions in front of others, of justifying and owning up to them (GD, 60). That is, what makes me a responsible agent who is in control of and accountable for my actions is my ability to justify my actions and behaviors to others, to give a reason for what I do. This is the...