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?

On Friendship and politeness

Friendship as well as politeness would enjoin a double duty: would it not precisely be to avoid at all cost both the language of ritual and the language of duty? Duplicity, the being-double of this duty, cannot be addes up as 1+1=2 or a 1+2, but on the contrary, hollows itself out in an infinite abyss. A gesture “of friendship” or “of politeness” would be neither friendly not polite if it were purely and simply to obey a ritual order. But this duty to eschew the rule of ritualized decorum also demands that one go beyond the very language of duty. One must not be friendly or polite out of duty. We venture such a proposition, without a doubt, against Kant. Would there thus be a duty not to act according to duty: neither conformity to duty, as Kant would say (pflichtmässig), nor even out of duty (aus Pflicht)? […]

Doubtless it would be impolite to appear to be making a gesture, for example, in responding to an invitation, out of simple duty. It would also be unfriendly to respond to a friend out of duty. It would beno better to respond to an invitation or to a friend in conformity with duty pflichtmässig (rather than out of duty, aus Pflicht, and we cite once more the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals of Kant, our exemplary “critical reader”, indebted as we are, as his heirs, to the great philosopher of critique). […] It is insufficient to say that the “ought” (il faut) of friendship, like that of politeness, must not be on the order of duty. It must not even take the form of  a rule, and certainly of a ritual rule. As soon as it yields to the necessity of applying the generality of a prescription to a single case, the gesture of friendship or of politeness would itself be destroyed. It would be defeated, beaten, and broken by the ordered rigidity of rules, or, put a different way, of norms. An axion from which it is not necesarry to conclude further that one can only accede to friendship or politeness (for example, in responding to an invitation, or indeed to the request or the question of a friend) by transgressing all rules and by going out against all duty. The counter-rule is still a rule. […]

Its rule is that one knows the rule but is never bound by it. It is impolite to be merely polite, to be polite out of politeness.  (7-9)

Jacques Derrida - On the name