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

story of Abraham, another biblical figure, as the occasion of his inquiry into the meaning of responsibility, presents a significant challenge, then, to traditional ethics. One conclusion of Fear and Trembling is that for Abraham, ethical responsibility is in fact a temptation to be avoided. To be tempted by ethics is to be tempted in a peculiar way—a peculiarly harrowing way for Abraham—by irresponsibility. Being responsible to the highest authority here means, not only sacrificing the irreplaceable son Isaac, but also ethical responsibility itself, the responsibility, in particular, to present a public account of one’s actions. “The ethical”, says Kierkegaard (three times) “is the universal” (54, 68, 82), hence the possibility that the story of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac teaches the possibility of a religious responsibility that would be murderous only (!) from the universal, ethical point of view it transcends. Jacques Derrida takes the Kierkegaardian analysis a step further in The Gift of Death. For Derrida, every decision is a decision between competing responsibilities, and every responsible act, whether provoked by God or not, implicates the agent in an ineluctable abrogation of his or her responsibility to others, and is therefore always wholly irresponsible. “There is no front between responsibility and irresponsibility”, says Derrida, “but only between different appropriations of the same sacrifice, different orders of responsibility, different other orders: the religious and the ethical, the religious and the ethico-political, the theological and the political, the theologico-political, the theocratic and the ethico-political, and so on” (70). Given the provocations of such thinking, it will not surprise the reader that Derrida’s work looms large in the pages of the present book, from the penetrating analysis of The Gift of Death in our opening essay by J. Hillis Miller, which ponders Derrida’s enigmatic idea of ethics as possibly destined to “irresponsibilize”, and Eugene O’Brien’s encounter with the same text where Derrida’s ideas are put to work in considering the history of America’s continuing war in, or on, Iraq, to Suzie Gibson’s reading of the allegories of responsibility and irresponsibility in Coetzee’s Disgrace. (It is perhaps worth noting at this point that the working title of Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary Studies was Irresponsibility: Essays on Ethics and Literature. The new title has