Notes on Derrida, Gift of Death

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:09 am by Peter Leithart

Notes on Derrida, Gift of Death 2017-09-07T00:09:19+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Some of the summaries below were previously posted on my site, and are reproduced to help my students.

1) Derrida begins the book with a discussion of Jan Patocka’s treatment of the distinction between “enthusiasm” or the “demonic” and “responsibility.” The former “confuses the limits among the animal, the human, and the divine” and “retains an affinity with the mystery, the initiatory, the esoteric, the secret or the sacred.” Patocka’s distinction lends itself, Derrida thinks, to a theory of religion: Religion exists only “after the demonic secret, and the orgiastic sacred, have been surpassed.” Thus, “Religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all. Its history derives its sense entirely from the idea of a passage to responsibility.” (This seems to be simply a reworking of the tired evolutionary view of religion found in Wellhausen, Weber, and many others.)

2) The demonic is the sphere prior to the subject, prior to the call to explain oneself, to give an account, to “respond” responsibly. The genesis of responsibility is thus also “a genealogy of the subject who says ‘myself,’ the subject’s relation to itself as an instance of liberty, singularity, and responsibility, the relation to self as being before the other.” Responsibility arises from the relation to the other, an other of “infinite alterity,” who “regards without being seen” and who also “gives in an experience that amounts to a gift of death.” Responsibility thus arises as a form of self-sacrifice before the other.

3) Derrida probes the question of the historicity of responsibility: Is it something that has a history? Classically, he argues, history must remain “extrinsic” to responsibility, and the experience of responsibility must consist “precisely in tearing oneself away from one’s historical conditions . . . the classic concept of decision and responsibility seems to exclude form the essence, heart, or proper moment of responsible decision all historical connections.” Yet, Patocka implies that historicity must be admitted to. This suggests that there is a difficulty in the admission, some reason why one resists admitting to the historicity of responsibility, and this resistance arises because “historicity must remain open as a problem.” As soon as it’s resolved in “totalizing closure,” it is the end of history and we are faced with the “verdict of nonhistoricity itself.” (As so often, Derrida’s thought turns on the rigorous denial of eschatology, of a final judgment.)

4) History cannot be a “decidable object” or a “totality capable of being mastered” because “it is tied to responsibility, to faith, and to the gift. To responsibility in the experience of absolute decisions made outside of knowledge or given norms, made therefore through the very ordeal of the undecidable; to religious faith through a form of involvement with the other that is a venture into absolute risk, beyond knowledge and certainty; to the gift and to the gift of death that puts me into relation with the transcendence of the other, with God as a selfless goodness, and that gives me what it gives me through a new experience of death.”

5) The history of responsibility is traced through orgiastic mysteries through Plato to Christianity: “Plato breaks with orgiastic mystery and installs a first experience based on the notion of responsibility, but there remains something of demonic mystery and thaumaturgy, as well as some of responsibility’s corresponding political dimension, in Platonism as in Neoplatonism. Then comes the mysterium tremendum of Christian responsibility [before which we tremble in the “experience of the sacrificial gift”], second tremor in the genesis of responsibility as a history of secrecy, but also . . . a tremor in the figures of death as figures of the gift, or in fact as gifts of death.”

6) Derrida explores the “figure of the gift of death” by raising a series of questions about the French phrase for putting to death (la mort donne) and killing oneself (se donner la mort): “How does one give [death] to oneself in the sense that putting onself to death means dying while assuming responsibility for one’s own death, committing suicide but also sacrificing oneself for another, dying for the other, thus perhaps giving one’s life by giving oneself death, accepting the gift of death, such as Socrates, Christ, and others did in so many different ways? . . . How does one give oneself death in that other sense in terms of which se donner la mort is also to interpret death, to give onself a representation of it, a figure, a signification or destination for it? . . . What is the relation between se donner la mort and sacrifice? Between putting oneself to death and dying for another? What are the relations among sacrifice, suicide, and the economy of this gift?”

7) Derrida captures the aporia of responsibility very nicely in this passage: “Saying that a responsible decision must be taken on the basis of knowledge seems to define the condition of possibility of responsibility (one can’t make a responsible decision without science or conscience, without knowing what one is doing, for what reasons, in view of what and under what conditions), at the same time as it defines the condition of impossibility of this same responsibility (if decision-making is relegated to a knowledge that is content to follow or to develop, then it is no more a responsible decision, it is the technical deployment of a cognitive apparatus, the simple mechanistic deployment of a theorem).” Responsible action is always an act of faith. And perhaps this also shows that there is an aporia here only on the basis of some kind of modern (Kantian?) account of responsibility.

8) What Christianity introduces, Derrida and Patocka argue, is the asymmetrical gaze of an infinite other, a gaze that reduces the object of the gaze to terror. This is what makes Christianity a “tremor” in the genealogy of responsibility. Yet, Christianity’s effect has been, Patocka argues, only partial. Drawing from Patocka’s claim that “Christianity represents to this day the most powerful means . . . by which man is able to struggle against his own decline,” Derrida writes: “What has not yet arrived at or happened to Christianity is Christianity. Christianity has not yet come to Christianity. What has not yet come about is the fulfillment, within history and in political history, and first and foremost in European politics, of the new responsibility announced by the mysterium tremendum. There has not yet been an authentically Christian politics because there remains this residue of the Platonic polis. Christian politics must break more definitively and radically with Greco-Roman Platonic politics in order to finally fulfill the mysterium tremendum.”

Responsibility is possible “on condition that the Good no longer be a transcendental objective, a relation between objective things, but the relation to the other, a response to the other, an experience of personal goodness and a movement of intention.” This requires a Platonic rupture with orgiastic systems and a Christian rupture with Platonism, toward a Christian affirmation of a “goodness . . . beyond all calculation,” which in turn requires that “goodness forget itself, that the movement be a movement of the gift that renounces itself, hence a movement of infinite love.” A mortal comes to sense responsibility on the basis of impending death, which gives him the experience of irreplaceability, but to this must be added the demand that “he concern himself not only
with an objective Good but with a gift of infinite love, a goodness that is forgetful of itself.” Yet, the very thing that makes me responsible also makes me guilty, since “one is never responsible enough because one is finite.” And, it renders guilty because, on the one hand, it demands that I respond in all my uniqueness and, on the other, that I efface myself in the responding.

There you have it: The Gospel According to Levinas: A responsibility that comes with unatoneable guilt.

9) What does “the secret of a Europe emancipated from both Athens and Rome” look like? Derrida describe this in part by reference to the gift, the “gift that is not a present, the gift of something that remains inaccessible, unpresentable, and as a consequence secret. The event of this gift would link the essence without essence of the gift to secrecy. For one might say that a gift that could be recognized as such in the light of day, a gift destined for recognition, would immediately annul itself. The gift is the secret itself, if the secret itself can be told.” Patocka himself says, “Christianity has not been able to surpass this Platonic solution except by yet another reversal. Responsible life itself was conceived in that event as the gift of something that, in the end, while having the characteristics of the Good, also presented traits of something inaccessible . . . to which man is forever enslaved – the traits of a mystery that has the last word. Christianity understands the good in a different way from Plato, as goodness that is forgetful of itself and as love (in no way orgiastic) that denies itself.” Hence responsibility is introduced by Christianity because Christianity offers a new “significance for death, a new apprehension of death, a new way in which to give oneself death or put oneself to death.” Christianity demands a gift that “involves renouncing the self, this abnegation of the gift, of goodness, or of the generosity of the gift that must withdraw, hide, in fact sacrifice itself in order to give.” Thus, the genealogy of responsibility is interwoven with the history of gift and of death: “in short of the gift of death. The gift made to me by God as he holds me in his gaze and in his hand while remaining inaccessible to me, the terribly dissymmetrical gift of the mysterium tremendum only allows me to respond and only rouses be to the responsibility it gives by making a gift of death . . . , giving the secret of death, a new experience of death.”

In Patocka’s work, “The Christian themes can be seen to revolve around the gift as a gift of death, the fathomless gift of a type of death: infinite love (the Good as goodness that infinitely forgets itself), sin and salvation, repentance and sacrifice.” This occurs according to a logic that “has no need of the event of a revelation or the revelation of an event.”

The misunderstandings of Christianity in this genealogy are profound. Isn’t Christianity precisely about the accessibility of a God who comes in human flesh, who tears the veil, before whom we stand with unveiled face? And, of course, this whole line of argument deletes the center of the apostolic gospel – resurrection.

10) Derrida is perhaps best known for his assault on self-presence, but in The Gift of Death he is eager to find out some place where the self is in absolute possession of something. Following Heidegger, for instance, he insists that death is always my death and no one else. Even if I am murdered, my death is my experience: “The sameness of the self, what remains irreplaceable in dying, only becomes what it is, in the sense of an identity as a relation of the self to itself, by means of this idea of mortality as irreplaceability . . . . The identity of the oneself is given by death, by the being-towards-death that promises me to it. It is only to the extent that this identity of the onself is possible as irreducibly different singularity that death for the other or the death of the other can make sense.” It is thus death that founds the ethical, because in death we are unique, and thus called to responsibility.

Again, “Everyone must assume his own death, that is to say the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility . . . . 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.” But why not? Why is there no possibility of substitutionary atonement? It appears that Derrida’s only reason is that without this moment of singularity and sameness, this one single possession of the self, there would be no sameness to the self. If substitutionary atonement were possible, the self would be truly decentered, which is apparently something Derrida wants to avoid. Paul’s anthropology is thus more radically decentered than Derrida can imagine – for even the singularity of death is not my own; I am not my own in my death, but Christ’s; and Another has taken death upon Himself to that I can live.

Similarly, Derrida says that the instant of decision is likewise a moment of singularity, of the sameness of the self to the self, the moment where the self has something that is exclusively his own: “Just as no one can die in my place, no one can make a decision, what we call ‘a decision,’ in my place. But as soon as one speaks, as soon as one enters the medium of language, one loses that very singularity. One therefore loses the possibility of deciding or the right to decide. Thus every decision would, fundamentally, remain at the same time solitary, secret, and silent.” Substitutionary atonement is impossible, and so, apparently, is election – a decision that is not my own solely but also, and primarily, someone else’s. Why is election impossible? Apparently, Derrida excludes the possibility of a decision that is not my own; if election were possible Derrida would lose the one place where the self is self-possessed.

In short, Derrida still wants to find a core of autonomy that is only mine. But that is wholly unnecessary for theology. Whether theology has ever recognized how radically it inverts anthropology is, of course, another question.

11) The ethical is an evasion of responsibility, not its fulfillment, because the ethical involves substitution, generalization, universalization, and thus erases the responsibility that I have as an absolutely singular, unique, unsubstitutable person. Responsibility only comes in the religious sphere, an absolute responsibility beyond ethics. To fulfill my duty, I must not act of out duty. Citing Kierkegaard, Derrida says that acting out of duty is “a dereliction of one’s absolute duty.” Absolute duty to God, in the singularity of faith, “implies a sort of gift or sacrifice that functions beyond both debt and duty, beyond duty as a form of debt. This is the dimension that provides for a ‘gift of death,’ which, beyond human responsibility, beyond the universal concept of duty, is a response to absolute duty.”

In this way, responsibility is ultimately undermined by alterity and singularity: “the concepts of responsibility, of decision, or of duty, are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal, aporia. 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 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 others.” Response to one can only happen “by sacrificing the other to that one. I am responsible to any one (that is to say any other) only by failing in my responsibility to all the others, to the ethical or political generality.” I can take my daughter to the park, but that sacrifices time I could spend with my son. Every decision is a sacrifice, a gift of death. Every choice is a tragic choice: “every one else asks us at every moment to behave like knights of faith.”

12) Because Christianity perverts the gift with promises to heavenly rewards, Derrida argues for a purer non-economy than Christianity offers: “It begins by denouncing an offering that appears to calculating still; one that would renounce earthly, finite, accountable, exterior, visible wages . . . , one that would exceed an economy of retribution and exchange . . . only to capitalize on it by gaining a profit or surplus value that was infinite, heavenly, incalculable, interior and secret. This would be a sort of secret calculation that would continue to wager on the gaze of God who sees the invisible and sees in my heart what I decline to have seen by my fellows.”

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