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50 3 ‘Ça’ me regarde” Regarding Responsibility in Derrida Dieu me regarde et je ne le vois pas. [God looks at me, concerns me and I don’t see him.] Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death Le fantôme, toujours, ça me regarde. [The ghost, always, is looking at me, is my concern.] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx [D]epuis ce lieu infiniment autre je suis regardé, aujourd’hui encore cela me regarde. [From this infinitely other place, I am watched. Still, today, it looks at me, concerns me.] Jacques Derrida, Echographies of Television Three texts and three looks; three scenes of repetition—the repetition of a spectral regard whose look cannot be returned—and three singular instances of the relation to the other—Abraham’s relation to God, the relation to Hamlet’s Ghost in Shakespeare’s eponymous drama, and the relation to the otherworldly gaze of a recently departed actress—in which responsibility is instituted toward that which cannot be seen yet demands a response.1 In what follows, it is my suggestion that an important dimension of what Derrida has called “spectrality” has to do with this look or gaze of the other.2 To explore the ramifications of the regard of and for the other in Derrida’s writings, I would like to juxtapose three texts: The Gift of Death (1992), Specters of Marx (1993), and Echographies of Television (1996). What all three texts give us to read, I believe, is that responsibility and inheritance are brought about by and through an asymmetrical spectral regard beyond any exchange, where I receive an injunction from the other, the other that is before me yet is not “present” and cannot be seen.3 This being before the other’s gaze, before the spectral someone other, I will claim, broadens the scope of responsibility immeasurably, extending it well beyond the realm Regarding Responsibility in Derrida ■ 51 of the “living” or the “actually present,” to every other. I would like, then, to let my entire reading of responsibility in Derrida be oriented by a phrase repeated in a number of Derrida’s writings, a phrase that—although its complexity cannot be fully captured in translation—perfectly encapsulates the instance of the spectral look: “ça me regarde.”4 I God looks at me, concerns me [me regarde] and I don’t see him and it is on the basis of this regard that regards me [ce regard qui me regarde] that my responsibility comes into being. Thus is instituted or uncovered the “it concerns me” [le “ça me regarde”]: that leads me to say “it’s my business [“c’est ma chose”], my affair, my responsibility .” (DM 126/91)5 This is Derrida’s description of the relation of the gaze or regard to responsibility , which is first broached in “Donner la mort,” a text originally given as a lecture in 1990 and published in 1992 in the collection L’éthique du don, a year before Specters of Marx. Through a reading of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History6 and the biblical account of Abraham’s “sacrifice of Isaac,” Derrida traces the genesis or genealogy of responsibility in the Western tradition from its Platonic and Christian origins to the works of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Levinas (DM 93/64).7 Responsibility, Derrida writes, has always been understood as being grounded in freedom, that is, in the apprehensive approach to (one’s own) death. Further, since responsibility in all of its various conceptions has always necessitated public disclosure, openness, frankness, a necessity to answer for and justify one’s actions, and an ability to give an account of them before others, it has always forbidden secrecy and silence. According to Derrida, Patočka believes that all true, binding responsibility or obligation is issued from “someone, from a person such as an absolute being who transfixes me, takes possession of me, holds me in his hand and in his gaze [sous son regard] (even though through this dissymmetry I don’t see it; it is essential that I don’t see it)” (DM 54/32). Derrida remarks that in this genesis of responsibility proposed by Patočka, what takes on greater importance is “the relation to self as being before the other [devant l’autre]: the other in its infinite alterity, one who regards [celle qui regarde] without being seen” (DM18/3). Thus responsibility is what “exposes me dissymmetrically” to the other ’s regard [au...

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