Postscript: responsibilities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 August 2009
Summary
The latest work which (to my knowledge) Derrida has written in dialogue form engages with the issue of responsibility, a recurrent concern of Blanchot's and of Derrida's publications of the 1980s. It is urgent to elaborate a notion of responsibility, either in ethics, politics or (dare one say) literary criticism, that does not rest upon a discredited notion of subjectivity or representation.
The minimalist setting of Heidegger's Conversation and Blanchot's L' attente I' oubli (the country path, the featureless room) give way to no apparent setting at all in Derrida's dialogue upon these issues, ‘En ce moment mȇme dans cet ouvrage me voici’ (1980). This lack, however, is merely apparent; the ‘setting’ (as was implici t before) is ‘you’ (tu) the reader in the process of reading ‘now’. This is something witnessed by the recurrence of token reflexives (‘here’, ‘I’, ‘now’) throughout the dialogue or in its title itself.
As we will see, the dialogue concerns aspects of Levinas' thought such as were already of concern in the reading of L' attente l' oubli. It takes place between two voices, marked with masculine and feminine traits respectively, and ends with a lapidary inscription in capital letters which embodies their mutual contamination.
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- Information
- Derrida, Heidegger, BlanchotSources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature, pp. 181 - 191Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992