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

Chapter 1:  Derrida’s Ethics of “Irresponsibilization”; or, How to Get Irresponsible, in Two Easy Lessons
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around, in extraordinary arabesques or flourishes, what Kierkegaard says in Fear and Trembling:

The ethical involves me in substitution, as does speaking. Whence the insolence of the paradox: for Abraham, Kierkegaard declares, the ethical is a temptation [l’éthique est la tentation]. He must therefore resist it. He keeps quiet in order to avoid the moral temptation which, under the pretext of calling him to responsibility, to self-justification, would make him lose his ultimate responsibility along with his singularity, make him lose his unjustifiable, secret, and absolute responsibility before God. This is ethics as “irresponsibilization” [irresponsibilisation] as an insoluble and paradoxical contradiction between responsibility in general and absolute responsibility. Absolute responsibility is not a responsibility, at least it is not general responsibility or responsibility in general. It needs to be exceptional or extraordinary, and it needs to be that absolutely and par excellence: it is as if absolute responsibility could not be derived from a concept of responsibility and therefore, in order for it to be what it must be it must remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible. “Abraham cannot speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything … that it is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation.” (Kierkegaard 115)8 The ethical can therefore end up making us irresponsible. (Gift of Death 61; Donner 89)

The reader will note that Derrida’s thinking here, like Kierkegaard’s, depends on a kind of super-Protestantism. Derrida insists on the absolute singularity of each person, his or her incommensurability with any other person, and therefore his or her eternal inscrutability or secrecy. Each person is “exceptional or extraordinary”, therefore inconceivable, unthinkable, and, strictly speaking, unspeakable. That is because language deals in concepts and generalities, whereas “absolute responsibility” has to do with “uniqueness, absolute singularity, hence nonsubstitution, nonrepetition, silence, and secrecy” (Gift of Death 61). Ordinary language involves the possibility of substitution and repetition. Any apple can in speech be substituted for any other apple, and each apple