Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary Studies
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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
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of irresponsibility. About the fourth, I shall speak in a moment. Here is Derrida’s most succinct account of the first three as Patočka (and Derrida as ventriloquised by Patočka) sees them:

The history of the responsible self is built upon the heritage and patrimony of secrecy, through a chain reaction of ruptures and repressions that assure the very tradition they punctuate with their interruptions. Plato breaks with orgiastic mystery and installs a first experience based on the notion of responsibility, but there remains something of demonic mystery and thaumaturgy, as well as some of responsibility’s corresponding political dimension, in Platonism as in Neoplatonism. Then comes the mysterium tremendum of Christian responsibility, second tremor in the genesis of responsibility as a history of secrecy…. (Gift of Death 7)

The third and fourth turns, however, are investigated most extensively, in The Gift of Death, not by way of Patočka’s Heretical Essays, but, in the last two chapters of the book, by way of the Abraham and Isaac story in Genesis and by way of Kierkegaard’s reading of that story in Fear and Trembling. Derrida reads Kierkegaard reading Genesis. I read Derrida reading Kierkegaard reading Genesis. It is in these chapters that Derrida discovers or invents the word “irresponsibilization”. I focus on chapter 3, “À qui donner (savoir ne pas savoir)”, translated by Wills as “Whom to Give To (Knowing Not to Know)” (Gift of Death 53–81; Donner 79–114). The word “irresponsibilization” appears in that chapter. To whom should I give this essay? To Jacques Derrida? To the memory of Jacques Derrida? It isn’t much of a gift. At least it would be a true gift, since I could expect no compensating return. It was difficult to give Derrida gifts. He always, or almost always, for example, insisted on paying for lunches we shared. Now that he is dead, I can at last give him a gift, such as it is, that he cannot pay back in return.

The word “irresponsibilization” appears in the section of “À qui donner (savoir ne pas savoir)” that comes after Derrida has been reading Kierkegaard’s focus on Abraham’s silence. That silence is not simply an unwillingness to hear his wife Sarah’s reproaches, nor to