The Machine Is/In Us: Kelly Oliver’s Derridean Ethics

Kelly Oliver’s Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment addresses an interconnected set of issues around life and death, birth and genetics, gender and power, animality and the death penalty. It does this largely by way of Derrida’s later work, especially the seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (which appeared in French in 2008 and in English translation in 2009) and parts of For What Tomorrow … (published in 2001 in French, 2004 in English) that bear explicitly on cloning, reproductive technologies, and the death penalty.¹ In her introduction Oliver states that “this is not a book on Derrida per se” (Oliver 4), and this is true in the sense that the book’s main task is not to present direct readings of Derrida’s texts. But it is thoroughly inspired by Derrida’s thought, and one could say that it is essentially a book on Derridean ethics, providing a cogent articulation of what constitutes such an ethics, particularly with respect to certain “real world” problems that continue to sharpen their demands on our thinking, and on our lives as such.² In texts and discussions from the last twelve years or so of his career, Derrida brought his work more overtly than ever into social, political, and historical domains that had always been a part of deconstructive reflection but had not up to then been addressed at length in a “frontal” or pragmatic fashion. In Technologies of Life and Death, Oliver takes up the challenge of elaborating certain aspects of Derrida’s thinking as it was inflected by notions of technology, technical structures, or what might be considered the inherent technicity of all natural phenomena.

The broad purpose of Oliver’s book, then, is to bring the intensified ambiguities of Derridean deconstructive analyses to bear on questions whose social and pragmatic dimensions often tend to foreclose discussion of their more elusive conceptual implications—the moments where the stability of these very concepts and presuppositions falters—and thereby to insist on the peculiar ethical responsibility these issues call for, and call for now. Deconstruction, especially as a mode of analysis that foregrounds ambiguity and unstable grounds, has long been associated with deferral and undecidability; Oliver shows that this aspect of Derrida’s thought is accompanied by an urgency in confronting problems that sharply impinge on our lives and deaths—and on our politics, in the present moment, in the very shape of the world we live in—and that it does so in a way that goes far beyond the mere cultivation of theoretical finesse. Indeed, it is rather a question of a very weighty and concrete form of ethical responsibility that Oliver, following Derrida, calls a “hyperbolic responsibility” and a “hyperbolic ethics”—or simply a “deconstructive ethics” (14). Articulating, and bearing, this ethics is no simple task, in that such an ethics distinguishes itself sharply from any form of ethical or moral thinking that would provide the basis for a moral stance that would somehow dictate a position on a given issue. As Oliver writes, “Hyperbolic ethics insists on an infinite responsibility beyond morality insofar as morality is a matter of calculation and rules” (48). To complicate matters, such an ethics requires that responsibility itself be continually placed in question, or at least never placed beyond question. “On the one hand,” writes Derrida (in a decisive formulation quoted by Oliver), “casting doubt on responsibility, on decision, on one’s own being-ethical, seems to me to be—and is perhaps what should forever remain—the unrescindable essence of ethics: decision and responsibility. Every firm knowledge, certainty and assurance on this subject would suffice, precisely, to confirm the very thing one wishes to disavow, namely the reactionality of the response” (Derrida 2008, 126, emphasis in original; qtd. by Oliver, 48). The distinction between reaction and response is one that Derrida continually returns to in his discussions of animals, as a hinge around which the animal/human distinction is supposed to turn; one can see here that, in its terms’ mutual coimplication, it also points toward the very...