"Des engins à donner la mort:" Technical Responsibility in The Gift of Death, 4

(Continued from last time...) Now, surprisingly, Derrida thinks that this condemnation can completely disrupt the tradition of the condemnation of technics (even as it is continued uniquely through Heidegger), because in its unheard-of virulence and pessimism it thinks what this tradition is unable to think: “a machine that would work,” as Derrida says elsewhere. That is, what ironically remains unthought in this tradition is a form of technics or tekhne that operates with complete indifference towards being, or (what is the same thing) takes the form of “a machine defined in its pure functioning, and not in its final utility, its meaning, its result”—the most basic utility, meaning, and result remaining to continue needing to be in order to operate. A machine or form of tekhne “that would work without… being governed by an order of reappropriation” to being would be that in which “philosophy would see… a nonfunctioning, a non-work; and thereby philosophy would miss that which, in such a machine, works.” As we said, even Heidegger thinks this order, this most basic utility is necessary for technics: indeed, the fact that technics still needed to be in order to determine and account for things became the most essential aspect for him concerning its danger. We see then how much Patočka differs from Heidegger: far from making technics into an attempt at the replacement of being which is dangerous in how it is condemned to fail, technics is dangerous for him precisely because it is what escapes being condemned to fail at replacing being. It does this because it already has replaced it.
But if Patočka disturbs the history of technics because he condemns the unthinkable, he also disturbs it because what he thinks ends up working against his own condemnation of it within his history of responsibility. This is because at the same time as there is more dissimulation in Patočka’s conception of technics than in Heidegger, being itself is dissimulated less and even can be preserved. Precisely because technical dissimulation in Patočka no longer has a relationship to being or is no longer an expression of it—or, as we can now say, precisely because it allows the thinking and (what is more) the operation of a machine that works—being itself is left by itself: we indeed “approach it only by letting it be what it is in truth.” Of course, what it is in truth is, like in Heidegger, “veiled, withdrawn, dissimulated;” so, as we said, technical dissimulation does not bring being to the fore as a wholly present thing but dissimulates doubly, “not in the name of a revelation or truth as unveiling, but in the name of another dissimulation” (GD, 37). But what is important about this double dissimulation is that it makes being so unable to be seen again underneath it that being itself is not dissimulated by a metaphysics of force. Being can be protected or preserved in its mystery by the second dissimulation of technics; it can be left to dissimulate itself on its own. Out of the supposed impossibility of responsibility in a technical world, then, there issues forth a possibility: if responsibility is what Patočka calls this preservation of being, this mode of letting being be what it is in truth, then this technical double dissimulation can be just as responsible as any other responsible relation to being. In other words, what is signified by “responsibility” must be extended beyond the sphere of being to encompass the possibility that technics, in its utter indifference to being, can be just as responsible towards it.