| Chapter 1: | Derrida’s Ethics of “Irresponsibilization”; or, How to Get Irresponsible, in Two Easy Lessons |
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and inventive rupture with respect to tradition, authority, orthodoxy, rule, or doctrine” (Gift of Death 27). He says more or less the same thing in Specters of Marx about his reading of Marx: “This dimension of a performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets, will play an indispensable role in what I would like to say this evening” (51). Though I do not lay claim to anything at all like Derrida’s inventive rigor, I am prepared to say the same thing as Derrida says, about his heresy in relation to Patočka, concerning my saying again in my own words what Derrida already has said about what Patočka and Kierkegaard have already said about what the Bible (in the case of Kierkegaard) has already said. I am, I claim, inevitably speaking for myself, however hard I try to be no more than faithful to what Derrida said.
Is it unforgivably irresponsible of me to speak about Derrida, Patočka, Kierkegaard, and the Bible in claiming to speak for myself, or can I, or anyone else for that matter, perhaps never do otherwise? Are we perhaps condemned to speak for ourselves by respeaking the words of the other, or the words of an interminable string of others, going back to vanish somewhere near the “things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world”, that Jesus claimed to expose (Matt. 13.35)? I shall therefore cheerfully and somewhat defiantly, responsibly and irresponsibly at once, sign this essay with my own name.
It is this double bind that Derrida perhaps alludes to in the first of my epigraphs: “My signature is the moment of highest responsibility in a deep irresponsibility”. As the surrounding context in A Taste for the Secret makes clear, signing my name to a contract or to something I have written is the moment of highest responsibility because it is a way of saying, “I wrote this, and I take responsibility for doing so, along with all its consequences, whatever they may be, and however unpredictable and unintended they may be”. At the same time, because my signature implicitly claims, falsely, that I am one unified person, or ego, or consciousness, and that I go on perdurably remaining the same person from moment to moment, day to day, month to month, year to year, throughout my whole life, my signature is an act of “deep irresponsibility” because it makes