Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary St ...

gift, has the spiral form of these turns [tours], intricacies [tournures], versions, turnings back, bends [virages], and conversions. One could compare it to a history of revolutions, even to history as revolution” (Gift of Death 8). But as the historical line spirals back on itself in continual revolutionary conversions, each new turn does not lose entirely the previous ones. Each new ring carries within itself all the previous ones, in either incorporation or conversion, as Derrida eloquently asserts:

What does it mean for my question about irresponsibilisation to say that the orgiastic is nevertheless retained as incorporation in the Platonic turning from the dark cave of the mystery religions to the sunlight of the soul’s gathering itself into itself responsibly and ascending to the sun of the Good? What does it mean for irresponsibilisation to say that the Platonic, including its incorporated orgiastic remnant, is retained as repression in the mysterium tremendum of the Christian mystery? It means that an element of irresponsibility is present in all these historical turns. What irresponsibility? It is the irresponsibility of orgiastic ecstasy. In the orgiastic, I am taken out of myself, am put “beside myself”, as we say, and am no longer responsible for what I say or do. I get irresponsible. Who can blame me for what I do when I am in a trance, or am possessed, or am in a Dionysiac frenzy? Socrates had his daemon, who (Or which. Which is it?) gave him orders in dreams: “’socrates,’ it [the dream] said, ‘make music and work at it”’ (Plato 211).⁷ Abraham was ordered by Jehovah to do the most irresponsible and hideous act imaginable, to kill his beloved only son, in a return of the repressed