>On Mon, 04 Jun 2001 04:42:02 -0700 Peter Kosenko <kosenko at netwood.net> wrote:
>
>> 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.
To imagine that one is infinitely responsible for everything is already to excuse oneself from all earthly & finite responsibility. The logic of Christianity: if everyone is a sinner, no one strictly speaking is one, and we all get redeemed through the death of the lamb.
Or the logic of capitalism: Too much investment in responsibility = overproduction of responsibility or underconsumption of responsibility = deflation of responsibility = a neoliberal call to "liquidate responsibility" or a Keynesian call to reflate the economy of responsibility & to enable individuals to consume more responsibility. And beyond the logic of capitalism there is a Marxist call to abolish the production of responsibility for the sake of production of responsibility (an ethical equivalent of M-C-M').
Yoshie