The Notion of Responsibility and the Poetic Revolution in Derrida’s Thought

Abstract

This paper delves into the deconstruction of the notion of responsibility, drawing a correlation with the process of decomposition of the concept of sovereignty as discussed by Derrida in his last research works. We explore Derrida’s consideration of absolute responsibility as no longer passing through the figure of the sovereign. Derrida’s thought takes its distance from the philosophical and hegemonic determination of the notion of responsibility, for the conceptual system of its axiomatic defines responsibility based on the sovereign individual’s freedom and makes responsibility the effect of his power. Yet, this definition condemns ethics to failure, since it does not account for the other supposed in the idea of response. Derrida incorporates absolute singularity, and consequently secrecy, into the structure of responsibility, enabling thought to encounter the absolute other. The text outlines the influence of Nietzsche and Celan in Derrida’s thought and develops an approach that sees in his work the effort to create a poetic revolution in the history of philosophy and knowledge by opening thought to radical alterity.

Keywords:

• Derrida
• decision
• deconstruction
• poetic revolution
• responsibility
• sovereignty

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As Nicole Andersen points out (19), in The Ethics of Deconstruction Simon Critchley claims that deconstructive “ethical thinking” can only be understood through a parallel reading of Levinas's work (xiv–xv), which is a widely accepted idea in the Anglo-Saxon reception of Derrida’s thought.

2 We modify the translation proposed by Stierle who translates “pouvoir” as “right” instead of “power.”

3 The term “liability without fault” in juridical theory serves as an illustration of the process of decomposing sovereignty, that calls for a different determination of this concept. This term is marked by the disconnection between the state’s liability and blame, along with the incapacity to establish a causal relationship between blame and a private person presumed to be responsible for it. As Gary Berger observes, “The court distinguished the long line of cases in which specifically state that liability cannot be imposed upon the sovereign unless it could be imposed upon a private person over the same facts” (765).

4 Following the arguments exposed in “The University without Condition,” we use the French version of this term to keep the reference to the world “which is not the globe” (203). As the translator’s comment in “Faith and Knowledge” points out, the translation of this term as “globalatinization” is not a mere problem of translation (into English) but a symptom of the problem this term refers to (50n52).

5 Although they don’t explicitly connect Derrida’s work to the idea of poetic revolution, two key texts are indispensable for comprehending the relationship between Derrida’s corpus and Celan’s work: Ginette Michaud’s Derrida, Celan. Juste le poème, peut-être (an English version of the third chapter discussing sovereignty in Celan’s “The Meridian” was published as: “Singbarer Rest: Friendship, Impossible Mourning (Celan, Blanchot, Derrida)”; and a recent and untranslated work by Guillaume Artous-Bouvet: Derrida, le poème. De la poésie comme indéconstructible.

6 For instance, one possible interpretation of Derrida’s Life Death, leads us to the conclusion that the definition of living being proposed by Jacob from the final criteria of self-reproduction is aligned to a Christian logic and inscribes self-sufficiency, therefore sovereignty, as a necessary condition of this definition.