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

I considered coming all the way here to Singapore² from Deer Isle, Maine, standing up before you, and saying, “I’m sorry if it seems irresponsible of me, but I regret to say that I have not succeeded in preparing a paper for this conference”. I would then have left the podium. Doing that was a big temptation. It would have saved me the bother of writing a paper. Moreover, it would have performatively manifested irresponsibility. It would have been performative in two senses: as speech act and as a staged performance. Instead of that, I have ended up, irresponsibly, with a manuscript twice too long to be read in an hour. I shall, you will be relieved to hear, read only the second part of it.³

My goal is to show how one gets irresponsible, how one irresponsibilises oneself. I shall get help from Jacques Derrida, especially his The Gift of Death.⁴ I need all the help I can get.

Is it irresponsible of me to use Derrida in this way, to speak for myself by way of using, as though they were my own, Derrida’s words and argument? How can I responsibly, in conscience, as we say, sign with my own name an essay that owes so much to his thought and writing? I answer that my excuse is that I am only following Derrida’s own practice. All that he says so eloquently and persuasively about irresponsibilisation in Donner la mort is said in commentary, often more or less in paraphrase, of what had already been said by the contemporary Czech philosopher Jan Patočka in his Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History⁵ and by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling. It is as though Derrida were possessed by their ghosts and speaks for them, like a spirit medium. Derrida is so dependent on Patočka and Kierkegaard that at one point he feels obliged to draw himself up and assert his heretical difference from Patočka’s heresy: “What I have said might seem faithful to the spirit of Patočka’s heresy at the same time that it is heretical with respect to that very heresy” (Gift of Death 27). This is an odd moment. Does Derrida protest too much? Does he reveal in Donner la mort, perhaps inadvertently or unconsciously, his own irresponsibility? At the end of the paragraph from which I have just cited, Derrida relates this “heresy” in relation to Patočka to the necessity of an odd sort of irresponsibility in the heart of responsibility: “there is no responsibility without a dissident