"Des engins à donner la mort:" Technical Responsibility in The Gift of Death, 2

(continued from last time...) Derrida shows that, despite some earlier references to work or labor as it functions within the opposition of the sacred and the profane (HE, 99-100), technics begins to figure significantly in Patočka’s history of responsibility through the rise of its modern, technological form; a form sustained by the spread of an understanding of the world in terms of what Patočka calls a “metaphysics of force” (HE, 119). Derrida recalls that the determination of this “metaphysics of force” as the essential support of modern technics is a “schema that is analogous to that employed by Heidegger” (GD, 37). According to Derrida, this schema belongs to a “tradition” older even than Plato and his dismissal of hypomnesis. It consists of the “denunciation of technology in the name of an originary authenticity” in the understanding of being—i.e. what allows things to have meaning—that modern technics or technology is supposed to contaminate (GD, 36).

Heidegger explains that with the rise of reason as the privileged standpoint from which things in the world are viewed, being comes to be understood in terms of what can be immediately apprehended or presented with certainty to a consciousness. That is, what allows things to have meaning becomes what allows an object to come and stay before rational thought. Science and industry, with the help of the machine (which is not yet technical in a modern way, as we shall see), take this determination of being and extend it rapidly on a planetary scale: they set up all things in the world to exist and to mean only in conformity with this conscious reason in front of which being gets revealed. Things thus become raw material that produces particular effects for reason, while the revealing of being becomes this productive work. In other words, something is seen as understood in its being when it is being accounted for, stored, exchanged or transformed—in short, calculated—by reason, whether by man or by the network of rational devices and systems with which he surrounds himself (culture, law, the economy, as well as stockpiles of resources, potencies, etc.). Eventually, this understanding gets so rigidified that the thing itself is seen as having its being only as the amount of calculating work necessary for this production. In other words, it only has meaning as a reserve of energy for rational action no different from any other except perhaps in the amount of energy also involved in the calculating effort of gathering or releasing it. In short, the thing is only a suspended moment in the circulation of reason. This narrows down the aspects produced or brought out of it to one: what guarantees the maintenance and expansion of the circulation itself. In other words, the thing has its being or its possibility of meaning only as what is calculated by this rational circulation so as to power its constant, boundless expansion. Now, this thing determined in its being is what Heidegger calls force, and this calculating rationality by which force is determined is what he designates as modern technics—thus, as we said, modern technics supports a determination of the being of things (or, a metaphysics) as force, and force, in turn, supports a process of technical calculation. Now, what is crucial about force is that it is precisely coordinated by this calculating technics to replace any need for the determination of a thing in its being at all. In other words, since the entire world is set up in advance through technics as wholly determinable quantities for technical reason; since everything will exhaust its meaning only as a force, being or what makes meaning possible no longer matters. Setting itself up more and more to understand only itself and make only itself understandable, technical reason will interpret itself by itself without regard for being: it will make decisions about how and even whether it should be without being able to see or understand anything concerning why it is instead of not.

Derrida stresses that this inability to see that Heidegger locates in the technical metaphysics of force is what will be especially important in Patočka’s rendering of this schema (which Derrida is here paraphrasing): “man, instead of relating to the being that is hidden under this figure of force, represents himself as quantifiable power” (GD, 37). Derrida emphasizes “hidden under” because if, as we just said, technical force does not merely make everything calculable or fit for processing by technics but also does so in opposition to the ability to determine anything outside of calculation, it does not just simply render the possibility for ontology unavailable for our sight or understanding in any way whatever: according to Heidegger the metaphysics of force specifically dissimulates this possibility, or makes any attempt to rediscover being underneath force’s prevalence almost impossible. We can now see fully why Derrida says Heidegger falls into a tradition of denouncing technics in the name of authenticity: technics, taken to its extreme in its modern form, disturbs our proper relationship to being or our proper ability to see why things mean—to the extent that the proper cannot be recovered except through an extreme effort. We must begin to ask whether Patočka cannot help but duplicate this fall if he grants even more importance to dissimulation...