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

from calling irresponsibility the quality of being irresponsible, or calling irresponsible the quality of an act, to making irresponsibility the result of an act, sometimes perhaps a speech act, an act that is in any case explicitly defined as ethical. I make myself irresponsible by acting responsibly, in an act of auto-irresponsibilisation. What in the world does this mean? How does it happen that I irresponsibilise myself in the act of making an ethical choice or behaving ethically?

The word or the concept of irresponsibilisation appears in four related registers or strata or sediments in The Gift of Death. All derive from, or are at least apparently special to, Occidental culture, with its twin roots in Greece and Palestine. These four forms of irresponsibilisation appear to come in historical sequence from pre-Platonic mystery or Dionysiac religions, religions that seek or endure spirit possession, to the daylight of Platonic dialectic and the birth of individual human ethical responsibility in the West, to the Biblical disqualification of Greek and Roman philosophy, to present-day, everyday, ordinary, post-Enlightenment, acts of taking responsibility or performing apparently ethically responsible acts that may not, at least in appearance, have or need any religious sanction at all for their validity, for the way I have “done the right thing”. An example, a scandalous example to some, that Derrida proffers, is feeding and caring for my pet cat, surely an innocently responsible way of doing the right thing.

Nevertheless, in spite of this four-stage historicity in Western ethical history, Derrida indicates that the first stage does not disappear in the next stage, the Dionysiac in the Platonic, nor any of the previous stages in any of the later ones, but that all the previous ones are shadowily, mysteriously, secretly, and perhaps disastrously or ruinously, perhaps happily, present in each successive stage after the first. Derrida, following Patočka, puts this afterlife, this survival, under the psychoanalytical aegis of the terms “incorporation” and “repression”, and under the aegis of the Platonic, Christian, political, and Heideggerian term “conversion”. “The word ‘conversion”’, says Derrida, “is regularly rendered [by Patočka] by such words as ‘turning back’ (obrácení 114) or ‘about turn’ (obrat, 115).⁶ The history of secrecy, the combined history of responsibility and of the