Technics in The Gift of Death

At the beginning of the second section of The Gift of Death, Derrida recalls us to the question posed by 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” (The Gift of Death [GD], 35). Perhaps Derrida recalls this because we might expect the analysis within “Is Technological Civilization Decadent and Why?” not to depart from an explicit questioning of technology or technics and how it affects civilization. But this is precisely what it does: it quickly becomes the relation of a history of responsibility and religion that instead will only answer the question of what might be “a criterion, a standard by which we could judge something decadent” or not (Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History [HE], 97). Thus by the end of the essay, if the question as to the decadence or decline of civilization still remains to be asked, the question as to the decadence or decline of specifically technological civilization seems barely posed. However, Derrida soon begins to alert us to how this history of responsibility and religion is dominated throughout by something that secretly acts as a proxy for technics.
As Derrida points out immediately after recalling Patočka’s title, this proxy can be localized in Patočka’s discussion of the rise of a “metaphysics of force” (HE, 119). He recounts that with this phrase Patočka is referring to the understanding of being that according to Heidegger supports the essence of modern technics (GD, 37). In many of his texts Heidegger outlines how, with the rise of reason as the privileged way of access to beings (reaching its peak with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution), these beings come to be understood or disclosed in their being only as units of power always already available to be calculated and then distributed across space and time. Technics takes this determination of beings and extends it rapidly: first, in machinery specifically, but also more importantly in the setting up and challenging of the world to exist in conformity with this principle of reason and this determination of beings. Technical reason as this setting up and challenging thus ontologically determines everything as infinitely calculable or quantitative as well as infinitely transformable—in short, everything exists as a force. What is crucial is that this specific determination is precisely coordinated to conceal any need for ontological determination at all: since all beings are set up in advance as quantities exchangeable with each other, it no longer matters what and how anything is.
Derrida stresses that this concealing in the metaphysics of force is what is important to Patočka, and that his handling of it is what distinguishes him from Heidegger. If, as we just said, force does not merely render everything calculable; if it does so in opposition to the ability to determine what a being is outside of calculation, it does not just eradicate the possibility for ontology: the metaphysics of force dissimulates it. Being is not only unnecessary, all access to it is covered up. Now, Heidegger would call this event of dissimulation another crucial destining of being—and thus in a sense a necessary dissimulation, a dissimulation in conformity to the essence of being itself as what mysteriously conceals itself. Thus, for Heidegger, this dissimulation would essentially not be a dissimulation. For Patočka, however, this event is of itself, by being constituted by dissimulation, “fictitious and inauthentic” (HE, 116). Thus, what conceals in the metaphysics of force is more thoroughly concealing for Patočka than for Heidegger. At the same time, it is also less concealing, for it turns being’s mere representation as a force as such into this very concealment. As Derrida says, Heidegger would never have claimed this: “Heidegger would never have said that metaphysical determinations of being or the history of the dissimulation of being in figures or modes of beings developed like myths or like fictions” (GD, 38, translation modified). The history of being for Heidegger is never purely reducible to the history of the representation of being in or as beings. For Patočka, however, force as a determination of being keeps being dissimulated merely in showing itself as force. If this is the case, then the mystery or concealment Heidegger places in the essence of being itself, which for Patočka does not govern the dissimulation present in the manifestation of beings, would be itself dissimulated: dissimulation would dissimulate itself. As Derrida says, according to the logic of Patočka’s discourse, “the mystery of being is dissimulated by this inauthentic dissimulation that consists of exposing being as a force, showing it behind its mask, behind its fiction or its simulacrum” (GD, 39).
In other words, through a reference to a metaphysics of force, which is at its center a technical metaphysics, Patočka constructs “a logic of secrecy” whereby, as Derrida says, what is concealed “is never better kept” concealed “than in being exposed. Dissimulation 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). For Patočka, then, any and all secrecy depends essentially on the presence of a relation to a technical understanding of being. Now, throughout The Gift of Death, Derrida tries to demonstrate how Patočka’s history of responsibility and religion cannot escape being a history of secrecy. For Derrida, then, Patočka’s history of secrecy must also be a history of a rise of a technical metaphysics of force in the logic of that secrecy. Thus, the proxy that secretly acts within the history of secrecy for technics is secrecy itself.