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

in the “gap between the adult autobiographer and the previous self of childhood, the unified, responsible subject of canonical autobiography is called into question”. “The child is simultaneously imagined as a kernel of identity”, O’Mahony continues, “and a figure of radical alterity”, with consideration of the latter leading to an exploration of the “intricate connections between discourses of selfhood, childhood, and colonialism… in the narratives of Coetzee and Conway”. In this context, however, the reader may want to return again to Miller’s reflections on Derrida’s notion of the “deep irresponsibility’” of every signature, not only those appended to memoirs: “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”’,

A final question of responsibility explored here concerns responsible reading, the guiding question of The Ethics of Reading and raised anew here by Stephan Laqué, where it is put to work in the reading of Martin Amis’ Money, and by J. E. Elliott, who uses the question to probe the precarious state and continuing responsibilities of the discipline of literary studies itself. In this respect, Elliott’s “Responsible Irresponsibility in the Institutions of Reading” is doubtlessly an appropriate if not always reassuring investigation with which to conclude this collection.

It may prove inauspicious to have begun to introduce such a collection as this by reflecting on the increasing modes of theoretical and scientific resistance to ethics, to responsibility, and to the idea of human freedom. But if we are approaching the end of the age of responsibility, the approach may be as tortuous and long as the history of that age has been. For it is the age of civilisation itself, whether we think that begins with the abandonment of natural existence and freedom by way of a Hobbesian social contract or with an act of aggression against the father of the primal horde, the crime that for Freud exposed humanity to the rigors of law and the pains of enduring guilt. The end of the age of responsibility will doubtlessly not return humanity to nature or to the guiltless primal horde. Indeed, it is impossible to know where it might