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

respond to his son Isaac’s horror at being the victim of filicide, nor is it simply a desire to keep the secret (a secret that he absolutely does not understand) of Jehovah’s command to him to sacrifice his son. No, Abraham’s silence is based on his recognition of an absolute incommensurability between absolute ethics and the language of universal ethics. Universal ethics can be publicly expressed and publicly shared. I can, do, and often must justify what I do by showing that it is based on a responsible response to my universally acknowledged obligations to my fellow human beings. Absolute ethics, on the contrary, Abraham’s saying yes or “Here I am” to God’s command, his one-sided compact with God, could not be expressed in any language, even if Abraham were willing to try to do so. He could not explain himself if he would. He can only express himself in ironic riddles that speak without saying anything, as in what he says to Isaac: “God will provide himself a lamb for the burnt offering” (Gen. 22.8). As long as he is faithful to Jehovah’s terrible command, Abraham is condemned to silence, however much he speaks. “Tyrannically, jealously, it [this absolute responsibility] refuses to present itself before the violence that consists of asking for accounts and justifications, summonses to appear before the law of men” (Gift of Death 62).

It follows that acting according to absolute responsibility is a process that leads straight to irresponsibility by a temporal sequence that can be named in the neologism “irresponsibilization”. First, you are responsible, and then, you do something, saying yes to God’s incomprehensible and secret demand, for example, and by doing that you get irresponsible. Here is the sequence in which the word “irresponsibilisation” appears, in an act of inauguration. I mean by this that Derrida uses a word unheard of before and not in any dictionary. This happens as if in response to a demand made by Derrida’s process of thinking or writing on Derrida himself, or on his fingers as they type. He needs the word, though up to that moment it did not yet exist. A fairly long extract is necessary in order to show the tendons and sinews, so to speak, of Derrida’s robust thought process, as he thinks again in his own words what Kierkegaard has thought, or, to tell the truth, thinks beyond or