Miss Liberty, take one

Give me your desolate, your destitute, your destructed; 

give me, you're desolate, you're destitute, you're destroyed. 

Sooth, to give is apparently what it necessary

and yet

one must do the taking also. 

Give me better the desolators, the destituters, the destroyers. 

De literatura y textos

I have often found myself insisting on the necessity of distinguishing between literature and belles-lettres or poetry. Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secure in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.). No democracy withouth literature; no literature without democracy. One can always want neither one nor the other, and there is no shortage of doing without them under all regimes; it is quite possible to consider neither of them to be unconditional goods and indispensable rights. But in no case can one dissociate one from the other. No analysis would be equal to it. And each time that a literary work is censured, democracy is on danger, as everyone agrees. The possibility of literature, the legimitation that a society gives it, the allaying of suspicion or terror with regard to it, all that goes together – politically – with the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism, to analyze every presupposition, even those of the ethics or the politics of responsibility. (28)  

Jacques Derrida - On the name

De la responsabilidad y cosas peores

Furthermore, would it be moral and responsible to act morally because one has the sense (the word emphasized above) of duty and responsibility? […] All this, therefore, still remains open, suspended, undecided, questionable even beyond the question, indeed, to make use of another figure, absolutely aporetic. What is the ethicity of ethics? The morality of morality? What is responsibility? What is the “What is?” in this case? […]

So the nonrespone. Clearly, it will always be possible to say, and it will be true, that nonresponse is a response. One always has, one always must have, the right not to respond, and this liberty belongs to responsibility itself, that is, to the liberty that one believes must be associated with it. One must always be free not to repsond to an appeal or to an invitation – and it is worth remembering this, reminding oneself of the essence of this liberty. Those who thing that responsibility or the sense of responsibility is a good thing, a prime virture, indeed the Good itself, are convinced, however, that one must always answer (for oneself, to the other, before the other, or before the law) and that, moreover, a nonrepsonse is always a modality determined in the space opened by an unavoidable responsibility. Is there nothing more to say about nonresponse? On it or on the subject of it, if not in its favor?