The everyday experience of responsibility

“In terms of the moral of morality, let us here insist upon what is too often forgotten by the moralising moralists and good consciences who preach to us with assurance every morning and every week, in newspapers and magazines, on the radio and on television, about the sense of ethical or political responsibility. Philosophers who don’t write ethics are failing their duty, one often hears, and the first duty of the philosopher is to think about ethics, to add a chapter on ethics to each of his or her books and, in order to do that, to come back to Kant as often as possible. What the knights of good conscience don’t realise, is that ‘the sacrifice of Isaac’ [Derrida has been expounding Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling] illustrates – if that is the word in the case of such nocturnal mystery – the most common and everyday experience of responsibility. The story is no doubt monstrous, outrageous, barely conceivable: a father is ready to put to death his beloved son, his irreplaceable loved one, and that because the Other, the great Other asks him or orders him without giving the slightest explanation.”

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, Trans. David Wills, p.67

Filed under: Derrida, Kierkegaard, The Gift of Death, ethics, responsibility

Derrida: On Religion

Check out Ubu, where they have a great recording of Derrida speaking with Kevin Hart, John Caputo and Yvonne Sherwood on the topic of religion. It’s a fascinating conversation, visiting such topics as Kierkegaard and sacrifice, prayer and the name of God, Derrida’s relationship to Judaism, deconstruction and its relationship to Christianity.

In particular, I was struck by Derrida’s (‘Who rightly passes for an atheist’) discussion of prayer, and how, in prayer, the difference between an atheist and believer disappears.

Filed under: Derrida, Kierkegaard, links, theology

The dizziness of freedom

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose that he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizzyness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this psychology cannot and will not go.
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p.61

An unsettling thought.

Filed under: Kierkegaard