the genealogy of responsibility that nietzsche refers to in
the genealogy of morals as 'the long history of the origin of
responsibility' also describes the history of moral and religious conscience –
a history of cruelty and sacrifice, of the holocaust even (these are
nietzsche's words), of fault as debt or obligation, a history of the economy of
'the contractual relationship' between creditors and debtors. These relations
appear as soon as there exists subjects under law in general, and they point
back in turn 'to the primary forms of purchase, sale, barter, and trade.'
/////
god is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret
that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior. Once such a
structure of conscience exists, of being-with-oneself, of speaking, that is, of
producing invisible sense, once I have within me, thanks to the invisible
words as such, a witness that others cannot see, and who is therefore at
the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself, once I
can have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there
is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call god exists, (there
is) what I call god in me, (it happens that) I call myself god – a phrase that
is difficult to distinguish from 'god calls me,' for it is on that condition
that I can call myself or that I am called in secret. God is in me, he is the
absolute 'me' or 'self', he is that structure of invisible interiority that is
called, in kierkegaard's sense, subjectivity. And he is made manifest, he
manifests his nonmanifestation when, in the structures of the living or the
entity, there appears in the course of phylo- and ontogenetic history, the
possibility of secrecy, however differentiated, complex, plural, and
overdetermined it be; that is, when there appears the desire and power to
render absolutely invisible and to constitute within oneself a witness of that
invisibility. That is the history of god and at the same time secret and
without any secrets. Such a history is also an economy.
//////
The smooth functioning of such a society, the monotonous
complacency of its discourses on morality, politics, and the law, and the
exercise of its rights (whether public, private, national or international),
are in no way impaired by the fact that, because of the structure of the laws
of the market that society has instituted and controls, because of the
mechanisms of external debt and other similar inequities, that same 'society' puts
to death or (but failing to help someone in distress accounts for only a
minor difference) allows to die of hunger and disease tens of millions
of children (those neighbors or fellow humans that ethics or the discourse of
the rights of man refer to) without any moral or legal tribunal ever being
considered competent to judge such a sacrifice, the sacrifice of others to
avoid being sacrificed oneself. Not only is it true that such a society
participates in this incalculable sacrifice, it actually organizes it.
//////
the concept of responsibility, like that of decision, would
thus be found to lack coherence or consequence, even lacking identity with
respect to itself, paralyzed by what can be called an aporia or an antimony.
That has never stopped it from 'functioning', as one says. On the contrary, it
operates so much better, to the extent that it serves to obscure the abyss or fill
in its absence of foundation, stabilizing a chaotic process of change in what
are called conventions. Chaos refers precisely to the abyss or the open mouth,
that which speaks as well as that which signifies hunger. What is thus found at
work in everyday discourse, in the exercise of justice, and first and foremost
in the axiomatics of private, public, or international law, in the conduct of
internal politics, diplomacy, and war, is a lexicon concerning responsibility
that can be said to hover vaguely about a concept that is nowhere to be found,
even if we can't go so far as to say that it doesn't correspond to any concept
at all. It amounts to a disavowal whose resources, as one knows, are
inexhaustible.
/////////////
I am responsible to any one (that is to say to any other)
only by failing in my responsibilities to all the others, to the ethical or
political generality. And I can never justify this sacrifice, I must always
hold my peace about it. Whether I want to or not, I can never justify the fact
that I prefer or sacrifice any one (any other) to the other. I will always be
secretive, held to secrecy in respect of this, for I have nothing to say about
it. What binds me to singularities, to this one or that one, male or female,
rather than that one or this one, remains finally unjustifiable (this is
abraham's hyper-ethical sacrifice), as unjustifiable as the infinite sacrifice
I make at each moment. These singularities represent others, a wholly other
form of alterity: one other or some other persons, but also places, animals,
languages. How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats
in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas
other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention other people? How
would you justify your presence here speaking one particular language, rather
than there speaking to others in another language? And yet we also do our duty
by behaving thus. There is no language, no reason, no generality or mediation
to justify this ultimate responsibility which leads me to absolute sacrifice;
absolute sacrifice that is not the sacrifice of irresponsibility on the altar
of responsibility, but the sacrifice of the most imperative duty (that which
binds me to the other as a singularity in general) in favor of another
absolutely imperative duty binding me to every other.
//////
paradox, scandal, and aporia are themselves nothing other
than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, at its
death and finitude. As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the
gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can
respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me
to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others. I
offer a gift of death, I betray, I don't need to raise my knife over my son on
mount moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the mount
moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and
must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably.
////////
mysterium tremendum. A frightful mystery, a secret to make
you tremble.
Tremble. What does one do when one trembles. What is it that
makes you tremble?
A secret always makes you tremble. Not simply quiver
or shiver, which also happens sometimes, but tremble. A quiver can of course
manifest fear, anguish, apprehension of death; as when one quivers in advance,
in anticipation of what is to come. But it can be slight, on the surface of the
skin, like a quiver that announces the arrival of pleasure or an orgasm. It is
a moment in passing, the suspended time of seduction. A quiver is not always
very serious, it is sometimes discreet, barely discernible, somewhat epiphenomenal.
It prepares for, rather than follows the event. One would say that water
quivers before it boils; that is the idea I was referring to as seduction: a
superficial pre-boil, a preliminary and visible agitation.
On the other hand, trembling, at least as a signal or
symptom, is something that has already taken place, as in the case of an
earthquake or when one trembles all over. It is no longer preliminary even if,
unsettling everything so as to imprint upon the body an irrepressible shaking, the
event that makes one tremble portends and threatens still. It suggests that
violence is going to break out again, that some traumatism will insist on being
repeated. As different as dread, fear, anxiety, terror, panic, or anguish
remain from one another, they have already begun in the trembling, and what has
provoked them continues, or threatens to continue, to make us tremble. Most
often we neither know what is coming upon us nor see its origin; it therefore
remains a secret. We are afraid of the fear, we angish over the anguish, and we
tremble. We tremble in that strange repetition that ties an irrefutable past (a
shock has been felt, a traumatism has already affected us) to a future that
cannot be anticipated; anticipated but unpredictable; apprehended, but
and this is why there is a future, apprehended precisely as unforeseeable,
unpredictable; approached as unapproachable. Even if one thinks one
knows what is going to happen, the new instant of that happening remains
untouched, still unaccessible, in fact unlivable. In the repetition of what
still remains unpredictable, we tremble first of all because we don't know from
which direction the shock came, whence it was given (whether a good surprise or
a bad shock, sometimes a surprise received as a shock); and we tremble from not
knowing, in the form of a double secret, whether it is going to continue, start
again, insist, be repeated: whether it will, how it will, where, when; and why this
shock. Hence I tremble because I am still afraid of what already makes me
afraid, of what I can neither see nor foresee. I tremble at what exceeds my
seeing and my knowing although it concerns the innermost parts of me, right
down to my soul, down to the bone, as we say. Inasmuch as it tends to undo both
seeing and knowing, trembling is indeed an experience of secrecy or of mystery,
but another secret, another enigma, or another mystery comes on top of the
unlivable experience, adding yet another seal or concealment to the tremor.
Where does this supplementary seal come from? One doesn't
know why one trembles. This limit to knowledge no longer only relates to
the cause or unknown event, the unseen or unknown that makes us tremble.
Neither do we know why it produces this particular symptom, a certain
irrepressible agitation of the body, the uncontrollable instability of its
members or of the substance of the skin or muscles. Why does the irrepressible
take this form? Why does terror make us tremble, since one can also tremble
with cold, and such analogous physiological manifestations translate
experiences and sentiments that appear, at least, not to have anything in
common? This symptomatology is as enigmatic as tears. Even if one know why one
weeps, in what situation, and what it signifies . . . that still doesn't explain why the lachrymal
glands come to secrete these drops of water which are brought to the eyes
rather than elsewhere, the mouth or the ears. We would need to make new inroads
into thinking concerning the body, without dissociating the registers of
discourse (thought, philosophy, the bio-genetico-psychoanalytic sciences,
phylo- and ontogenesis), in order to one day come closer to what makes us
tremble or what makes us cry, to that cause which is not the final cause
that can be called god or death . . . but to a closer cause; not the immediate
cause, that is, the accident or circumstance, but the cause closest to our
body, that which means that one trembles or weeps rather than doing something
else. What is it a metaphor or figure for? What does the body mean to say
by trembling or crying, presuming one can speak here of the body, or of saying,
of meaning, and of rhetoric?
/////////////
everyone must assume his own death, that is to say the one
thing in the word that no one else can either give or take: therein resides
freedom and responsibility. For one can say, in french, that at least in terms
of this logic, no one can either give me death or take it from me. Even if one
gives me death to the extent that it means killing me, that death will still
have been mine and as long as it is irreducibly mine I will not have received
it from anyone else. Thus dying can never be taken, borrowed, transferred,
delivered, promised, or transmitted. And just as it can't be given to me, so it
can't be taken away from me. Death would be this possibility of giving and
taking that actually exempts itself from the same realm of possibility that
it institutes, namely, from giving and taking. But to say that is far
from contradicting the fact that it is only on the basis of death, and in its
name, that giving and taking become possible.
//////////
I can give the other everything except immortality, except
this dying for her to the extent of dying in place of her and so freeing
her from her own death. I can die for the other in a situation where my death
gives him a little longer to live, I can save someone by throwing myself in the
water or fire in order to temporarily snatch him from the jaws of death, I can
give her my heart in the literal or figurative sense in order to assure her of
a certain longevity. But I cannot die in her place, I cannot give her my life
in exchange for her death. Only a mortal can die, as we said earlier. That
should now be adjusted to read: and that mortal can only give to what is mortal
since he can give everything except immortality, everything except salvation as
immortality.
///////////
in order to understand in what way this gift of the law means
not only the emergence of a new figure of responsibility but also of another
kind of death, one has to take into account the uniqueness and irreplaceable
singularity of the self as the means by which – and it is here that it comes
close to death – existence excludes every possible substitution. Now to have
the experience of responsibility on the basis of the law that is given, that
is, to have the experience of one's absolute singularity and apprehend one's
own death, amounts to the same thing. Death is very much that which nobody else
can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred,
delivered, “given,” one can say, by death. It is the same gift, the same
source, one could say the same goodness and the same law. It is from the site
of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that
I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be
responsible.
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