(Continued from last time...) We seem, then, to have reconstructed how responsibility is only possible alongside technics. Right from the beginning, as soon as there is being and as soon as there is responsibility as an act of letting being show itself, this technics that effectuates a double dissimulation beyond appropriation by being—realizing itself in the working of a machine (that works)—would also be possible. This not only implies that Patočka’s modern form of technics always already exists, but it also means that the history of responsibility takes on a completely different emphasis. It could not be seen any longer only as a series of attempts at resisting the dissimulation of the dissimulation of being, failing in a civilization where only this second dissimulation, this complete and continual erasure of a relationship to being, is possible. Instead, it would also have to be a history of integrations or refusals of this technical double dissimulation along with each act that claimed to purely, without technics, let being be. Responsibility thus would never be able to escape the possibility that it could be equally brought about through technics—that is, through a determination or calculation of the other as a force that could, underneath that determination, be respecting her. This would seem to make sense, though it may open itself up into what Patočka would call “decisionism:” the history of responsible actions is also a history of possible calculations or decisions that could account for the occurrence of the same acts. Indeed, it is precisely this other history that, throughout the other portions of The Gift of Death than the one we are reading, Derrida tries to bring into relief from out of that one narrated by Patočka with constant assurances that Patočka’s history cannot escape or “break” (GD, 2) with secrecy: this is Derrida’s name for the double dissimulation of being—considered to be just as protective of being as any act of letting it be.But can this other history—a “history of secrecy” (GD, 7)—still be called a history of responsibility? In other words, does responsibility happen through technics as well as alongside it as we claimed? Throughout his text Patočka insistently answers these questions in the negative. We must not forget that while technics may protect being in rendering it secret through a metaphysics of force, its indifference to being does not lessen. When responsibility gets conceptually extended to encompass the possibility of technical secrecy, it also extends itself beyond remaining only constituted by the commitment to letting being be. In other words, responsibility would exist also precisely at that point where it is equally possible for it to be doing violence to being, and therefore a history of responsibility would be a history of acts that are unable to be distinguished from this violence. The reason for this is apparent if we recall the technicity of the dissimulation through which this new secret responsibility is constituted: because it dissimulates through the determination of all things as reserves of energy or forces, technics preserves being only by claiming to account for it—in claiming to expose and reveal through calculation all that can be understood in the being of the other or of oneself or anything else. In its mere registering of the fact that is most superficial—that is, “that there is one to be responsible for”—it pretends to be a comprehensive response to the fullness of a situation. And yet, since it still can protect being, this act of calculation would not be merely the derivative aspect of a more profound act of letting being be that happened alongside it, but would be able to be passed off as this responsibility itself. This is the unavoidable “logic” of this secrecy, as Derrida puts it: the “dissimulation” in being “is never better dissimulated by means of this particular kind of dissimulation that consists in making a show of exposing it, unveiling it, laying it bare.” (GD, 38-39). We then could say that responsibility is possible only through technics but, as soon as this step through it is taken, responsibility as Patočka formulates it would be lacking. The constitution of responsibility through technics is what Patočka must have responsibility incorporate and repress, always refusing to think it explicitly except in the form of a condemnation of the civilization in which this repression is unable to be carried out.
So if this other history is a history of responsibility, it must also imply a different or other sense of what the word “responsibility” means than Patočka, even as it employs the logic of his discourse. Given that for Patočka a responsibility constituted through technics remains impossible, we could describe this sense as what comes from a faith in “another experience of the possible:” a belief that the possible is what is only possible through the impossible. And indeed, at this point in the reconstitution of the possibility of responsibility alongside technics in Patočka, Derrida is provoked to ask an impossible question (from Patočka’s point of view) that puts this other sense to work: does not this secrecy, this possibility of the protection of being, accomplish precisely the opposite of what it intends as a technical metaphysics of force?
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