"Des engins à donner la mort:" Technical Responsibility in The Gift of Death

I'll be posting a paper I wrote for a class last semester in several installments. Here is the first:

In the third section of The Gift of Death Derrida explains how the Biblical sacrifice of Issac, the paradigmatic event of responsibility, takes place every day. He also explains that the three monotheisms’ war over its interpretation, “themselves sites of bloody, holocaustic sacrifice,” also continues every day. As if to sum up this last point, he says the following: “Countless machines of death wage a war that has no front.” The sense here seems straightforward, precisely through the intervention of the figure or concept of the machine: David Wills’ translation preserves the gift as a mark of responsibility and the machine as a mark of a lack of responsibility. That is, the word “machine” is used in a pejorative, condemnatory sense. Death occurs mechanically in the waging of war over how responsibility (the sacrifice of Issac) is to be interpreted, or rather over how it is to be reduced to dogma. The machine of the dogmatic interpretation of responsibility kills everywhere and recklessly; that is, in a place “without front,” without any place of opposition or recognition between those that kill and those that are killed. As a result, though this machine causes death, it does not give death or have a relation to death as a gift. This gift, in the sense that Derrida gives it—as we shall see, it is what exceeds any “machinated” program of exchange or retribution, any act of “mechanistic” or rule-governed calculation that would reduce it to something that another act of donation could set to rights—this gift would be a call precisely for the responsible suspension of the machines of dogma, and so could not be related to them. According to this translation, then, the sentence articulates a condemnation of the machine just as much as a condemnation of a dogmatic “interpretation” of responsibility.
Derrida’s French, however, is more complicated: “Des engins à donner la mort sans compter livrent une guerre sans front” (DM, 70). The gift is in fact integral to the operation of machine: “machines of the gift of death” wage this war without front. Thus, rather than renouncing the gift of death, the violent struggle in the name of dogma over the interpretation of responsibility is precisely an instance of death existing in relation to the gift. “Machine” therefore is not being used pejoratively, but in a more complicated way; a way that does not strictly oppose the mechanical to the responsible. But how is this possible? The problem here exceeds that of whether Wills translates the sentence correctly or not, for much more is at stake in the possibility that it can be rendered differently. If the machine itself is not being condemned here, how can Derrida still denounce the mechanical death in this sentence, as he seems to be doing? Furthermore, how would he not contradict the numerous critiques he levies elsewhere of historical atrocities abhorrent precisely in their deployment of gigantic mechanized systems of murder. Only a problem concerning how to register Derrida’s most basic understanding of the machine would bring such questions into play. Thus we must look within The Gift of Death for his interpretation of that more fundamental concept which constitutes what is peculiarly mechanical about the machine: techne—that is, craft or skill, as well as the whole sphere of work, production, and technology.
Derrida explicitly discusses techne or (as we will call it) technics at the beginning of the second section (“Au-delà: donner à prendre, apprendre à donner—la mort”), where he recalls the question posed in the title of the text of Jan Patočka that he is in the process of reconstituting: “as the title of his essay indicates, Patočka asks why technological civilization is in decline” (GD, 35). Though this reflection seems more like a digression or an afterthought (stuck as it is in the small space between the political meditation that concluded the first section and the thought concerning apprehending one’s death and the death of the other that makes up the majority of the second) Derrida here makes quite an expansive claim: far from being what most threatens the history of responsibility that Patočka is in the process of narrating, technics must constitute it. That is, according to the logic of Patočka’s discourse, responsibility only becomes possible alongside and through technics. If we can reconstruct Derrida’s reading of Patočka, we can perhaps locate where and how this possibility functions, and how it encompasses the operation of the machine in his own statement, “des engins à donner la mort sans compter livrent une guerre sans front.” In other words, we might be able to see how a particular form of technical responsibility is the only kind condemned here and, for Derrida, is the only kind that can (and must) be condemned in general.