Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary Studies
Powered By Xquantum

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
Read
image Next

an illicit claim that I am one I. “The other is in me before me: the ego (even the collective ego) implies alterity as its own condition” (84), says Derrida in the sentences in A Taste for the Secret leading up to the citation I have made.

There is no ‘I’ that ethically makes room for the other, but rather an ‘I’ that is structured by the alterity within it, an ‘I’ that is itself in a state of self-deconstruction, of dislocation. … I am not the proprietor of my ‘I,’ I am not proprietor of the place open to hospitality. Whoever gives hospitality ought to know that he is not even proprietor of what he would appear to give. The case of the signature is analogous: usually interpreted as one’s very own mark, it is instead what I cannot appropriate, cannot make my own. (Derrida and Ferraris, Taste 85)

Then follows the sentence I have cited as an epigraph. If Derrida is right, then who do I think I am, at this moment, to claim to be signing responsibly for all that congeries of heterogeneous other people I am from time to time, as I speak through, or am spoken through, ventriloquised, by a swarm of others: the Bible, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Patočka, and, especially, Derrida. Speaking or writing at all is a way to get irresponsible.

Well, just what in the world does Derrida mean by “irresponsibilization”, or by saying, as my second epigraph from Derrida puts it, “L’éthique peut donc être destinée à irrresponsibiliser” (Donner 89)? I return once more to that initial question. Irresponsibiliser and irresponsibilisation are not French words, at least not in my Petit Robert: Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, though Derrida uses both words. Their English cognates also do not exist in any dictionary I know, not even in the Oxford English Dictionary, though “irresponsibleness” is given in the latter and defined as “the quality of being irresponsible, irresponsibility”. Is using those words irresponsible of Derrida? Does he commit an act of irresponsibility toward the French language that he so often claims so much to respect, as the only language that is his, though, as he also says, it is not his, but that of the French colonisers of Algeria? The reason Derrida needs these words must be that he wants to move