PHILOSOPHY OF RESPONSIBILITY
I will try to answer three questions:
1 What is philosophy?
2 What is responsibility?
3 Who is the subject of responsible philosophy?
1 What is philosophy?
Philosophy means the 'love of wisdom'. To philosophize is to love. To philosophize is to desire, to want something, to desire, to love or to want sophia, 'wisdom', the truth of reality. Philosophy loves truth; it demands truth; it desires the reality of the real. It is the desiring of reality. Philosophy is realism in this sense. In desiring wisdom, philosophy desires the real. It desires the real in its truth. At no point is philosophy a ‘flight from reality’. On the contrary, philosophy can be a movement of flight but what it flees is not reality. Philosophy flees the ghosts and phantasms that step in front of the appearance of the real. It flees the consolations, illusion, mere appearances, naked phantasm into reality. It flees opinion, doxa, sound common-sense into knowledge, episteme. It flees the morality of society and history into responsibility. It withdraws from the dictatorship of memory, the systems of guilt and conscience in order to become without guilt and without conscience in a radical sense. It is a movement of freedom and self-liberation. To philosophize means to love freedom, to desire and to want it. Philosophy is the love of freedom. Philosophy is 'romantic' in a rigorous sense. The romanticism of philosophy holds thinking in its elementary restlessness. Philosophy is restless. It is without measure and without rest. It does not find any end. Its desire accelerates into the infinite, is unstoppable and excessive.
Philosophy expends itself in the invention of a New Reality. It is the hyperbolism of the real. To philosophize is to love in an exaggerated, restless and excessive way by fleeing from the ghosts of unfreedom into reality for the sake of freedom. Philosophy does not flee reality. It flees into reality. It is a movement of flight in the Deleuzian sense: deterritorialization, ceaseless becoming, constant excess. The philosophical subject is the subject of a deterritorializing self-acceleration of a subject that is barely still a subject. The subject pushes itself to its limit; it over-stimulates itself at this limit; it pushes itself beyond the limit. The self-over-stimulation of the subject makes the philosophical subject into the locus of an absolute restlessness, complete nervousness. Philosophy is nervous, turbulent and unbalanced. It overtaxes and exaggerates itself at its own limit in order as philosophy to become responsible, in order to be a Philosophy of Responsibility.
2 What is responsibility?
Responsibility is an overtaxing of oneself. To be responsible means to be restless like philosophy. It means to overtax oneself in the midst of reality, in the times in which one lives, i.e. in the here and now. Nietzsche is the thinker of this overtaxing. Nietzsche knows the exertions of the responsible subject. Responsibility overtaxes the 'self', it unbalances the 'subject' insofar as the self and the subject resist Quietism.
The subject of responsibility is an arhythmic and disharmonious subject. It is not 'in plumb'. It risks itself incessantly. It plays with itself as its essential input. It mobilizes all its energies and forces to be responsible. It even activates those forces not available to it. It grasps the impossible. To be responsible means to desire the impossible as a possible impossibility. Responsibility, like philosophy, is a desiring. It is an absolute love and passion. It is a catastrophe and an overtaxing. It exists only as excess. To be responsible, the subject of responsibility must risk a certain degree of freedom. Responsibility exists only as long as there is freedom. Freedom is the freedom to choose, to decide in the here and now. To be free in the midst or in view of the real — that is the desire of philosophy. The freedom to decide is at the same time the abyss of decision. Schelling, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and others have formulated it. To be free means to be abyssal, without ground. The subject of responsibility wants to and must decide in view of this abyss. It must choose. It chooses by reeling over the abyss of its own impotence. It reels in view of a freedom that transcends its objective status (of being this or that historical, gendered, socio-political subject) as the condition of possibility of its breakthrough, i.e. as the transcendental Abyss of responsibility. The subject reels and is frightened as the subject of this abyssal responsibility and freedom. But it remains a 'subject' more or less. It assumes responsibility as a subject. It risks making the wrong choice by assuming responsibility and deciding, that is, it risks compromising its freedom and its desire for freedom.
3 What is the 'wrong choice'?
The wrong choice chooses unfreedom. It decides against decision, against the condition of possibility of decision, by refusing freedom and the will to freedom. It selects options, arranges offers. It subordinates itself. It is the expression of fear, convenience, passivity or indifference. The subject of responsibility is not indifferent. It is a passionate, an impassioned subject. It wants to be neither fearful, nor convenient nor indifferent. It demands of itself a certain Courage. This is the courage to be free, the courage to be responsible. The capitalist machine today produces a lack of courage. It lays down what the subject has to desire. It relieves the subject of its will, its desire, its freedom and responsibility. It decides in place of the subject. By controlling its desire, it constitutes the subject's passivity as a receiver of decisions. There is no active consumption. In the objectivity of the consumer, the subject becomes controllable. It is disciplined, calmed down, tranquillized and put out of action. The subject of capitalism as this receiver-subject is a subject reduced and restricted to its capacity to consume. It does not decide for itself because it decides only for decisions offered by others. Its decisions are passive syntheses. They are prefigured by the interests of capital. The subject of capitalism does not assume any responsibility and it is not supposed to assume any responsibility. It is expected to fulfil its role. It is supposed to consume. It does not even desire what it consumes. It desires nothing but its desire, the passivity of a desire that is almost indifferent to what it desires as long as it is New. The wrong choice chooses its own lack of choice. It withdraws from the horror of a genuine decision. It no longer expects anything of itself.
4 What is to be done?
God is dead. The human being or the subject must decide and act. The subject's responsibility is Indivisible and Absolute. To act in freedom means to deal responsibly with one's responsibility, i.e. with one's freedom. There is no binding morality, no secure rules, no unshakeable laws on which the subject, assuming it wills still be a responsible subject, could orient itself. The subject has to give itself its own law; it is sentenced to freedom, as Sartre says. It is sentenced to beíng responsible for everything it does. Sartre's philosophy is a philosophy of freedom and indivisible responsibility. It is a philosophy of strength. It respects the human being by thinking it in its responsibility. It is an ethical philosophy. It despises morality. It demands of the subject in view of its history to overtax itself in the here and now of its political, social, cultural, etc. situation. It is a matter of this subject transcending and transgressing its Factical Situation, i.e. of it transcending itself as the subject of this situation without ignoring the Facticity of the Real. The subject has the capacity to transcend, to break through what is merely factical. It transcends its determinations. In the moment of genuine decision, it steps forward from history as a kind of absolute subject. It overflies itself, as Deleuze says, paraphrasing Kant. It overtaxes itself because it transcends and bursts the boundaries of its conditions. It thus transcends and goes beyond itself. It bursts itself. It loses itself as subject in the moment of intensified subjectivity. It puts itself at risk. It plays with the highest stakes. It acts by respecting nothing but its freedom.
5 My freedom is also the freedom of the other
Philosophy is love of the real. It is a love of freedom and responsibility in view of the real and the other. Philosophy is intensified subjectivity. The other obliges me as subject to be a subject for it and for myself, i.e. to be free. The freedom of the other must be the intention of my desire for freedom. I will, in willing to be free and responsible, that the other can be free and responsible. The subject of responsibility wills Indivisible Responsibility. It wills that each subject in its singularity grasp the possibility of freedom and responsibility.
The ethics of freedom is not merely an ethics of the other. It is not an ethics in the sense of Levinas. It is an ethics of free, responsible and passionate subjectivity. It respects the other as a subject. It respects its freedom, that is, its subjectivity. It loves the other’s desire to be free and responsible for itself and the others. It supports the other subject in its moments of helplessness, of impotence and weakness. It proclaims its solidarity with the weak, the neglected, the humiliated and dispossessed. But at no point does it declare its solidarity with impotence and weakness itself. The subject of responsibility fights against weakness and impotence. It wills that the weakened and limited subject regains its strength. It helps the weakened subject by fighting against its unfreedom and weakness. It does not fight against the weak. It demands of itself a Courage to Freedom, the courage to withstand what is discouraging in the midst of beings in their totality.
6 Philosophy of freedom
The philosophy of freedom needs the 'human being'. It requires the figure of a certain Subject. Only as long as subjectivity exists, i.e. a minimum of freedom to decide, is there responsibility and respect. The subject of freedom is in danger of making itself secure in its passivity, of reducing itself to its status as mere object. It must fight for its subjectivity and defend it. Its autonomy is that of a subject which is objectively not autonomous. The will to autonomy is the condition of possibility of responsibility. Responsibility is always indivisible and non-postponable. To restrict its autonomy means to lessen its responsibility. It means being less responsible. The morality of the postponement of autonomy and self-consciousness is a morality of guilt and infinite debt, a morality of the court, as Deleuze calls it, following Artaud and Nietzsche. The court sentences the subject to being guilty forever, irreversibly. The court's memory is infallible. The court itself is nothing but memory. It administers the catalogue of virtues and misdemeanours. It compiles a register of prohibitions. It punishes without forgetting. It extinguishes the presence of the new and it prevents the presence of the impossible. It notices the slightest misdemeanour. It damns the subject "to an endless subjugation". The court wants a weak, non-autonomous subject. The minimum of autonomy that the court concedes to the subject is the capacity for guilt. The court constitutes a guilty subject.
The subject of responsibility is innocent. It is autonomous, but at no point in time does it have a commanding overview. It is the subject of an unavoidable precipitancy. It is an hyperbolic, deranged, errant subject. It is a subject of self-acceleration and exaggeration. Nietzsche speaks of self-overcoming as its essential quality. Responsibility is thinkable only as self-overcoming — the subject reaches beyond itself. This reaching beyond itself constitutes its self. Responsibility is self-responsibility. It is never anonymous. To be responsible means to be infinitely tough and resilient, to overtax oneself in order to be a subject of responsibility. Responsibility exists only as a surplus event and as excess. The subject transcends itself and its limits in order to risk itself in the hyperbolic whirl of freedom, for every responsibility is directed toward its freedom. Freedom is its only authority. The subject assumes responsibility in view of and in favour of its freedom to be responsible. It assumes an obligation before itself. This self-obligation implies a certain degree of authorization. The subject of responsibility authorizes itself to be free and responsible. Responsibility is an achievement. It is not something dictated by God. It does not follow the pleas of conscience. It transcends God and conscience, morality and theology, so that the subject becomes responsible only to itself. The responsible subject is auto-affective: it demands of itself to be responsible. Its bends its freedom and responsibility, the will to freedom and the force of responsibility back onto itself. It insists on itself by insisting on the authority of the freedom to decide. It relates itself to an irreducible moment of freedom which makes it into a subject — an hyperbolic subject insofar as its freedom is always infinite ("Philosophy wants to save the infinite," say Guattari and Deleuze).
7 Self-authorization
A certain courage is an essential part of a philosophy of responsibility. It is the courage to authorize oneself. The subject of responsibility grasps itself as a responsible subject by authorizing itself to freedom and responsibility. The philosophy of responsibility remains a philosophy of freedom. And yet, to be free does not mean to renounce every authority. Freedom begins with the Courage to Authority, which does not mean that the subject of freedom is an 'authoritarian' or 'dictatorial' subject. The dictatorial subject wills the unfreedom of the other. It says to him or her, it says to the other subject what it is should do. The subject of freedom desires the freedom of the other, of the other who thinks differently. It shows it what it can do. For the subject of responsibility, it is always a matter of respecting itself and the others in their capacity to decide for Themselves. The philosophy of responsibility is a philosophy of undivided respect.
8 Love, respect, compassion
The subject of responsibility is a loving subject. Instead of loving itself, it loves the other. It loves the otherness of the other, that is, it loves the other self. It loves the selfness of the other, the other self which for its part, for love of the other, is concerned with its self.
"In reality there is no love other than the love which is lived," says Sartre. This means that love only exists as a real concretion, as a full concretion for which the subject of love is responsible. To love means to love the other subject, to love him or her as a subject. The subject of love loves the subject status of the loved 'object'. Such a love, real love, as Clément Rosset says, "demands the reality of the loved person". Love as real refuses the temptations of the imaginary. It withdraws from the phantasms which transfigure the loved object.
Like the subject of responsibility, the subject of love is a subject that keeps silent, a solitary subject. It wants someone to listen to it, that it is listened to and heeded by the other (God, society, the loved one, etc.). It needs Witnesses. It wants to be witnessed. The desire to be witnessed is irreducible. It cannot be refused. It is an essential part of the subject's subjectivity. But the subject loses its self as a subject as soon as it mirrors itself in the wrong Medium. Neither God, nor society, nor even the loved one say to it What or Who it is. By making a choice of loved object, it must choose the authentic medium whose testimony is legitimized by it through the act of this choice. We Must Love in this dimension of free decision, without being heard by God, recognized by society or understood by the loved co-subject. At least there is No Guarantee. Otherwise it would not be love. One must remain alien to each other in order to love. At the same time, one must be Really there for one another. At the bottom of the loving subject’s heart, this silence of the real must rest. It rests and it weighs down. It gives the movement of love toward the other, which is always ebullient, excessive and improbable, a certain weight. Or a depth which it requires to be more than a mere breath, a fleeting ecstasy. In loving love, I do not love myself as the subject of ebullience. That would be naked narcissism. Anyone who loves love loves this silence at the bottom of his or her own desire which, without robbing love of its lightness and its dancing optimism, makes of it an Event of Truth from whose singularity he or she is nourished for an entire life.
The responsible subject is a loving subject which respects freedom and responsibility in general. And yet it seems that it has a certain lack of compassion. To gather the Courage to Decide always means risking a certain degree of passion, of violence and aggression. "Everything that acts is cruel," says Artaud. The declared aim of the pragmatist ethics of Richard Rorty is "to minimize cruelty". Perhaps one must try to bring Artaud and Rorty — and why not Europe and America, France and America? — together in thinking. Perhaps the effort to prevent violence and cruelty never excludes the hazarding of a certain violence and cruelty. Perhaps there is justice only as this Fuzzy Equation America-Europe, as the irreducible Conflict between an invariably precipitant will to act and concerned diplomacy. To speak of the subject, whether it be to deconstruct its modern form and its traditional predicates (self-consciousness, freedom, autonomy, etc.) by demonstrating its transcendental derangedness, or to confront it with the irrefutable obligation to judge, to resolve and argue rationally for its resolution, requires reflection on the subject as the Theatre of the irreducible and undecidable conflict between decisiveness and undecidability, autonomy and heteronomy, precipitancy and postponement. I call this conflict the war of différance.
With the term, différance, Derrida does not articulates the simple postponement of decision, the limitedness and finiteness of the horizon of knowledge. Différance names the conflict between this postponement and the non-postponability (of decision) so that one can say that the postponement itself is its own non-postponability, and that non-postponability implies its own postponement. A very widespread misunderstanding, whose traces can be seen even in the works of Badiou and Zizek, has led to Derrida regularly being declared to be a philosopher of simple hesitancy and post-modern depoliticization. This misunderstanding, which is the result of a too hasty reading of Derrida, can be (mis-)used as an argument for the deconstructive ethics of reading associated with the motif of postponement. At the same time it should not be forgotten that urgency, non-postponability and precipitancy in all phases of Derrida's thinking do not appear merely as a 'necessary evil', but, as structural features, mark the vectorial tension, i.e. the hyperbolic nature of the (philosophical and deconstructive) subject (Derrida does not speak of the 'subject'). Deconstruction, the thinking of the perhaps, of vibrating undecidability is itself an act of precipitancy, even when, or precisely when it appears as a 'theory' of deceleration or braking, i.e. as a general policy of postponement, of irreducible hesitancy. In order not to be a method or theory, deconstruction hurries itself, surpasses itself toward the indeterminacy and openness of the future. It exists only as a desire for the future and its indeterminacy. Deconstruction expends itself as this desire for the future which includes also the desire for a new responsibility and justice; it falls over itself in the expectation of that which no expectation accommodates. It exists only as this somersault, as an ebullient movement into the unknown, as excess, for deconstruction, like any genuine philosophical movement, has to do with the unknown as such.
Perhaps there is justice only as a calculus of cruelty or, as Derrida and Balibar call it, in the form of an "economy of violence". I propose that compassion be associated with the 'wrong choice' in order to replace the thinking of compassion with a thinking of responsible Mercy. Mercy means to refuse the economy of punishment by renouncing revenge or any kind of retribution and repressive discipline. Mercy is not the same as compassion. Compassion damns its victim to being and remaining a victim. Mercy turns to the subject at the moment of its decay and weakness and saves by trying to help it in the vanishing moment of its subjectivity. Compassion knows only the subject of weakness; it weakens the subject by desubjectivizing it. It wants the subject to be primarily an object, or sub-ject, subiectum in the sense of something subjected, that is, a victim of 'destiny' or some other enchaining authority. Mercy fights against the nihilistic culture of impotence. It fights against the Europeanism that celebrates weakness, the ideology of "good-naturedness", as Nietzsche says, i.e. the "popular superstition of Christian Europe that the characteristic of moral action is proven in being selfless, self-denying, self-sacrificing, or in sympathy and empathy".
The philosophy of responsibility has to risk all these misunderstandings that necessarily arise as soon as, once again, in the so-called post-metaphysical, post-modern, secular or post-theological age, Dignity, Mercy, or even Shame and Grace are spoken of. Perhaps it is indispensable to expose oneself to the accusation of the restitution of religious categories or concepts in order, in the space of these misunderstandings, to risk one's own precise positioning of the chosen concepts and conceptual arrangements. The subject I am thinking of would be a subject of grace and mercy by refusing to renounce its freedom and responsibility, i.e. its authentic subjective activity.
9 Autonomy, affirmation, emancipation
The subject of responsibility is an affirmative subject. It affirms itself as a subject. It affirms its freedom to decide and the responsibility which goes along with this freedom. The affirmative subject wants to be free and responsible for its actions and decisions. It frees itself for its freedom instead of withdrawing into its factical impotence and unfreedom. The affirmative subject does not step back; it steps forward. It affirms itself as the authority for actions which it can never completely control. It assumes responsibility for the risk-value of action which resides in its ultimate incalculability. There is responsibility only in view of the incalculable. If decisions and actions were completely calculable, no responsibility would be needed, not even a subject. The subject is an authority in incalculability. It grasps itself as an authority in the midst of contingency. In this grasping, it begins to depend on itself alone, as Nietzsche says. It is a subject of an elementary improvisation for which the subject is responsible. To improvise means to affirm oneself as an autonomous subject. Autonomy is to give oneself one's own law. By improvising, the subject confirms itself as its own, self-determined authority. To improvise means to risk all the hazards of the freedom of self-determination. The subject improvises by suspending the laws which are not its own. Autonomy does not mean to depend on nothing but oneself. The subject as autonomous subject is necessarily heteronomous. It remains to a certain degree determined by what is other. But heteronomy does not prevent the subject from affirming its freedom to self-determination. There is for the subject as subject this irreducible remainder of freedom which enables it to affirm itself as the agent of its decisions. As a determined, contextualized and situated subject, it still has the freedom to go beyond and ignore its determination by something other. Precisely when it affirms itself as the author of this final freedom, of the freedom to be its self, it shows that it bears up under the objectification of itself by circumstances. Even in the most extreme passivity and determination by an other instance, the subject experiences within itself the freedom to realize its (absolute) self as the object of an objective captivity. For this reason, the heteronomous self is already the self of self-determination. It experiences heteronomy as a plea for self-liberation. It breaks out by affirming its possible autonomy, its passive self of irreducible freedom which guarantees it an active self-validation and self-esteem. The self is only self in the act of this breaking out. It manifests itself at the moment of freedom to be free as the authority of this freedom, i.e. as the subject of a certain rage.
The subject is enraged. It experiences within itself an absolute rage. To be enraged means to be appalled in view of the cruelty of being. It means to have transcended oneself toward this cruelty and to be made distraught by it. The subject's distraughtness does not weaken it. It gives it its energy. It strengthens the subject in view of what appals it. It gives the subject a sense of its freedom, to be responsible in view of what is appalling. The rage is an essential part of responsibility. There is responsibility only for an enraged subject. Antigone is enraged. She has a mission. She wants to be responsible to herself and to her desire. No one can take her rage away from her. Nothing can stop it or calm it down. Those who attempt to stop her are themselves the ones who have been calmed down and are no longer borne by any rage. One can say that Antigone wills to be enraged. The will to rage is the will to responsibility. The enraged subject is an unredeemed, innocent subject. It transcends the limits of its capacities and understanding; it collapses. It disappears as a subject and returns as a subject. It squanders itself for its rage. Responsibility is a squandering of oneself. The responsible subject must be free for its self-dissolution and re-orientation. Rage is therefore free of resentment and revenge. Revenge and resentment are reactive moods. They enclose the subject in a dependency. Rage breaks through the dependency. It is at least the will to this breakthrough. To be enraged means to be free.
Philosophy is affirmation. It is the power of affirmation. It affirms the self and its innocence as an agent and object of this power. It affirms freedom and responsibility. It affirms the subject's will to emancipation. Emancipation is liberation from the established powers by means of the power of affirmation. By willing the subject's freedom and responsibility, affirmation puts the established powers into question insofar as they compromise the subject's freedom and responsibility. Established power is a power of order. It wants to stabilize the present state of affairs. It systematizes the forces and counterforces. It regulates their speed and intensity. It allocates names and functions. It defuses the penetrating power of subjectivity. It is a power of negation because it negates the subject in its singular intensity, i.e. in the affirmation of its freedom. It allows the subject only the freedom it requires to legitimate the established status through a false (reactive) affirmation. Philosophy cannot express itself in an order. It includes a moment of unruly disorder, resistance against the negating power of political, juridical, cultural, social, etc. institutions. Philosophy affirms resistance as such. Philosophy is resistant. But it is not negative. It can only negate the systems of control and disciplinary restriction by resisting, in an act of life-affirming decision, the reduction of freedom to the right to choose between predetermined options.
Philosophy is progressive and emancipatory; otherwise it would not be philosophy. Philosophy wills the freedom and responsibility of all. It wants everyone to have the chance to be responsible. That is the will and resoluteness of philosophy, that the will to responsibility become a matter of course. Resoluteness is always a resoluteness to decide, accepting the consequences of the decision. It is active will. The first thing it wills is freedom, because freedom is the ground that makes freedom itself possible. Freedom is a conquest; it does not fall from the sky. Emancipation is the name for this practice of struggle of a subject that wills to be free. The subject struggles for its freedom. It struggles in the knowledge that, as Nietzsche says, "Everybody who wants to become free must become so through himself, and freedom never falls into anybody's lap like a miraculous gift".
Emancipation is therefore divided into two moments: Hope and violence. There is no philosophy without hope, and hoping is not day-dreaming. It is the principle of action and change. One acts because one hopes. What is the highest hope according to Nietzsche? That human beings free themselves from the spirit of revenge. Freedom begins where the will to revenge and punishment turns into the will to responsibility, i.e. to freedom. To want to revenge oneself means to want to be unfree and irresponsible. With the will to responsibility, the subject has emancipated itself from the violent logic of the counter-blow, from the logic of equivalents, of enforced symmetry, of reciprocal retribution. Hope is always concerned with a lessening of violence. And yet there is no locus beyond violence. To see this does not mean to be in favour of violence (whatever that may mean). It means not to flee the irreducibility of a certain violence, that is, to take a stand in the midst of the cruelty of being. Emancipatory freedom is not only that which withdraws from established power; at the same time, in order to be a powerful withdrawal, it is will to power.
10 The Antigonal subject
The challenge to philosophy today consists in thinking Freedom, Pride, Dignity, Beauty, Shame and Love under the conditions of the critique of ideology and deconstructive contextualism: to will to be free amidst unfreedom. The Antigonal subject, which is dignified, beautiful and proud, is a subject of Truth. It is the subject of the truth of its will, its freedom, its subjectivity. Everyone knows the pride of the oppressed, resisting subject and its shame in view of the sadistic fear of the oppressors. The oppressing subject, the subject of power, reacts in exercising oppression by trying to take away the freedom of the wretched, the damned underprivileged subjects. For fear of its own freedom, without doubt. The oppressing subject is cowardly. It does not have any courage. It injures others in order to overcome its own injuredness. Through oppression it lives out its fear. The subject of resistance is the victim of this fear, without wanting to remain a victim. It does not reduce itself to its role in the momentary situation. It raises itself as the subject of its own will. It is an auto-erective subject. It erects itself in defeat. It begins to hover above circumstances. It is as light as a feather. It is mindful of its freedom, which is absolute and cannot be impaired by the objective situation. Nothing seems to me to be more relevant, that is, more necessary today than to insist on this dignity and on the pride and beauty of the Subject of Freedom.