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

leave us. What is certain, and what this collection in its way also points to, is that this end will be resisted tooth and nail. It is telling that many of those who are most sceptical of the traditional ideas of responsibility are also among the most ethically committed. (I testify to the complications that attend one sceptic’s commitment in “The Responsible Eiron” in what follows). That is perhaps a symptom of the depth of human fascination with responsibility. The collection as a whole of course testifies to that fascination, just as it testifies to the necessity of posing questions of responsibility as questions of ethics and literature, the necessity of recognising, in other words, that “responsibility” names a concept whose only ground is the history of those fictional narratives of responsibility and irresponsibility that culture and civilisation both would do well to continue inventing.