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

repeats all the others, at least in the sense that it is yet another apple, whereas absolute responsibility is like a singular apple that is unlike any other apple that is now or ever was, like the apple Eve offered to Adam. I am, according to Derrida, an eternal secret to my fellows, and they are eternal secrets to me, even those closest to me, my wife or my children, for example. I have elsewhere discussed⁹ a passage in A Taste for the Secret that defines this presumption or basic Derridean presupposition as a Leibnizian monadism without God as guarantee of harmony between one monad and another.¹⁰ “Derrida Enisled” also cites a remarkably intransigent passage in Derrida’s last seminars. This passage asserts that there is no passage. It categorically asserts that each of us is marooned, like Robinson Crusoe, on an island that is my singular world, separated by “the space and time of an infinite difference, of an interruption incommensurable with all the attempts at passage, of bridge, of isthmus, of communication, of translation, of trope, and of transfer”, from any other island world (Miller 265–266). For Derrida, it is “Every man is an island”, not Donne’s cheerful and hopeful, conventionally Christian, appeal to the human community: “No man is an island unto himself”.

The reader will also note that the long passage I cited above must use the same words to describe two kinds of responsibility and irresponsibility. What is irresponsible in general ethics is responsible in absolute ethics, and vice versa, but we do not have special words for these two uses. Absolute responsibility is “indeed unthinkable”. This means also that ordinary language, French or English, stumbles and stutters in trying to express it. Derrida stammers and contradicts his word usage in trying to say how the highest responsibility, Abraham’s before God, is also the most unforgivable irresponsibility. Responsibility is irresponsibility, and irresponsibility is responsibility, in a whirling that boggles the mind, like being caught in a revolving door.

The reader will also note, finally, that, in a way characteristic of Derrida, what he says here depends not only on a rhetoric of paradox, even “insolent” paradox, but also on what might be called an “all or nothing” rhetoric. That contributes to making it a rhetoric of aporia and impasse, in which you have “had it” whichever way you turn. This impasse results to