> But I have no clue what Derrida's lingo gets us or how the writer of the
essay thinks that he has got some priviledged insight into ethics from it.
JD is setting up an "ethics of responsibility" ... the idea of 'infinite' responsibility based on Levinas's idea of the inherent vulnerability (death) of the other, a kind of political 'handle with care, life is deadly.' However much one gets out of JD depends on what one is willing to invest. Most people aren't willing to invest much, which is probably a shame to some degree. As much as Habermas is a posterboy for modernity, Derrida is a posterboy for all that's bad in academia today. I supsect we are in need of better targets. The real problem with Derrida is that he's not Hegelian enough. Derrida tends to argue that excessive attachments take place within a closed economy, wherein everything that is outside is absorbed through a violent incorporation. From the sounds of it, JD on death is no different. The problem is, JD isn't Derridian enough, because it isn't only with our excessive attachments that we absorb the other, it is *every* attachment that absorbs the other. Every clearing already entails a synthesis (in the Kantian sense). But... back to ethics... and let's take Derrida seriously for a moment. Let's look at Fight Club for example (spoilers ahead). Near the end Jack (Ed Norton) is talking with Tyler Durden who accuses him of not taking responsibility. Jack replies, "I accept that. I take responsibility for everything." The logic, of course, is that when one accepts responsibility for everything, even those things which we never had a part in... we end up in the suicidal position of Jack at the end of the film; who puts a gun to his head an pulls the trigger. Of course, Jack survives... which betrays the truth about ethics. The successful completion of an ethical act - taking responsibility for everything - brings one to the point of death. The weight of infinity crushes us - literally. An ethics of infinity brings us to the point of madness (the irrationality of reason?). What is comical - and Fight Club is a romantic comedy - is that Jack survives. This is precisely what is problematic about the film - its anti-Derridian point. In surviving, the film portrays ethics as possible - we can eat lead salad, eat the other, and survive - and get the girl to boot. The properly Derridian point here is that this is precisely what is impossible. One cannot commit oneself to an ethical act and get away with it. In ethics, success (in the Kantian sense) is lethal. Ethics is only 'possible' at a distance from ethics. Of course, I prefer looking at this through a Lacanian/Zizekian lens... JD turns this into an ontology which is a logical error more than anything else. The other isn't always vulnerable... Lacan is more consistent on this point. The other is always that which does not ex/ist (in the sense of existing for us - not in the 'existential' sense). To say that this gap in our horizon is vulnerable - which entails that we already know what the other is - is inconsistent with a deconstructive approach. The other 'already in us' is precisely the remainder of our conceptual / perception synthesis, what cannot be accounted for. This cannot be called vulnerable in a rigorous sense. In Lacanian terms, this is none other than the object petit a, the sliver in our eye. The idea of responsibility for the other, then, is not necessarily a responsibility to the vulnerable other, but to the other in the gap, the other that is lacking within our own viewpoint. The appropriate attitude is not submissive, subjecting oneself to the other ('an opening to otherness') but a fidelity to this very gap, which says nothing about the other. It is the inherent 'emptiness' within our political field that is our ontology, the absence of the other. Depicting the other as weak or vulnerable is part and parcel of a project to 'save' the other. The other doesn't need to be saved. On the contrary, the other is the ground of any possible politics, the inherent lack that makes (unsuccessful) relations possible to begin with.
ken