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

(Continued from last time... Note: the end of this is all mushed up--I had to finish it some time to turn it in. In further posts I'll probably work out what is going on in the last few paragraphs. Enjoy!)

Something in this metaphysics is not working: as we said, the purported goal of this technical metaphysics is to expose and to calculate so as to account for the entirety of the thing that it is adding to the circulation of forces in calculated rationality. It proceeds then to render everything calculable, dissimulating the dissimulation of being. However, with the possibility that, in its double dissimulation of being, the technical metaphysics of force can let being be as well as do violence to it, we encounter the fact that something always would be left undetermined or uncalculated for this technics: the possibility that through its protection there could be being that it has not calculated. If the technical metaphysics of force was simply violence to being, annihilating being in its reduction of things to calculability, then nothing could escape its calculation—because if it were not calculated it simply would not be. However, because Patočka asserts that this metaphysics makes everything so calculable that all relationship to being gets dissimulated, this violence is not the same as technics itself. Thus, there is a possibility that being could be protected and, with this, a possibility that calculation would still have something to calculate. And since this possibility does not come from a metaphysics of force that remains dependent for its functioning on being or is an expression of it, like in Heidegger, this incalculable element comes always from the calculation of forces itself in its operation. Technics’ possibility of doing more than just violence to being—the possibility that in its double dissimulation of being it lets being dissimulate itself—not only protects being, but also does so precisely through the disruption of the operation of its own technicity. The protection would come through technics, then, but in a form that would, at the same time as it worked, interrupted its operation or did not work.
This is what we mean when we say that something in this metaphysics is not working: what is not working is the machine that works, precisely in its working. We see now that the form of tekhne finally thought by Patočka through his extreme extension of Heidegger’s metaphysics of force and its dissimulative capabilities is further extended and further (in fact, completely) theorized by Derrida. This is because, though Patočka may have thought of a machine that works, Derrida thinks a machine that, while “defined in its pure functioning, and not in its final utility, its meaning, its result,” also is not defined by the last item in this list that we until now have omitted: “its work.” Not even the working of the machine can serve to define the working of this machine: not even its own pure (or mere) operation can add the possibility of meaning or being to it, since that possibility rests outside the maintenance of that purity. Its externality to the order of reappropriation into the possibility of meaning or being makes it impossible for it to acquire even the possibility of meaning or being that it itself generates in just remaining as pure working. So the working must interrupt itself. Or rather, out of the space of its own interruption beyond the order of being, there would issue forth a space in which work would work. This makes sense: if there is a machine that works, in order to be working it must at some point not even be that working that it is. Thus, the machine must already be somewhere outside and beyond that working, in a working that is still purely working, just working, for as soon as its operation is reduced to the working that it brings about it ceases to be a machine that purely operates or works. The machine must always be in that space where there is working still to be done, which is a space that it itself must generate by failing. It thus would perhaps be more accurate to say that the machine must work right at this interruption, at the point at which there takes place the reinstitution of working beyond where there is working, rather than saying that the machine must work through this—if only because this working right at work’s interruption is what allows us to think wholly, completely, or rather further than any order of reappropriation to being the working that takes place through work.
This should make it clear that in this work of disruption there lies the potential for a form or responsibility through (or right at) this technics that would move beyond Patočka’s sense of the word “responsibility.” The responsible act, in this other sense, would take place through this disruption, in act of technical calculation that ensures through its failure that it will never be able to determine or calculate enough: never enough, since it must always calculate more elsewhere than where it has calculated, precisely in that space where being could possibly be protected by the calculation that it is doing, in that space in which it has already interrupted itself and out of which it must interrupt itself again. In other words, there is never enough determination of things as calculable forces for this new responsibility, because the particular form of technics in which this determination takes place insists on engendering the undetermined or the incalculable existing just beyond it through its own operation of determination. This is because, if we recall, technics simultaneously has already and yet still wants to completely replace and remain indifferent to being. Thinking about it this way, this form of technics that disrupts itself in working could constitute a demand that being remain respected through or at the point at which there is the possibility that it may be harmed by calculating indifference. This indifference could not help but also be its opposite, because it is an indifference that fails to be indifferent or calculating enough to eradicate the possibility that it might indeed also be protection. In other words, one could say that technical calculation, through and as this demand, dedicates itself to the possibility of preserving being not because being is what must be properly respected—because this technical form preserves being as being—but merely because this preservation is possible there at the limit of its possibility.
Of course, we still could not tell whether being ends up preserved or not by this technical calculation, as it is indeed indifferent to and outside of the acts of explicit concern for and protection of being. And so we still could not distinguish between a responsible act and one that lacked responsibility by looking at the act. Indeed, if this calculation is also the dissimulation of the dissimulation of being that takes place in calculating, we could say that it insists on dissimulating the possibility for its own dissimulation as this second dissimulation—in its operation as what Derrida calls secrecy. Technical dissimulation does not just make being secret, it makes secret for calculation, for this process of technical dissimulation, precisely what it would need to determine or dissimulate. Thus if it is responsible, the act of technical dissimulation in calculation is responsibility that actively makes it impossible for it to take hold of or assert the name of responsibility. But at the same time it is this lack of distinction, this making the result of its own operation secret for it, that, for the responsible act, demands responsibility again; that is in itself the failure of this technics to be enough to be a replacement of being and thus a calling to be more. There, where it could just as well be doing violence to being as preserving it, there is responsibility in this other sense, because at this point this incalculability itself is what makes the responsible dedicate itself again to ensure, through calculation, further incalculability and thus the further possibility of being remaining preserved. And indeed, if there is no form of responsibility that takes place without technics being possible alongside it, if there is no form of responsibility that is not equally able to be attributed to a technical act of calculation or a series of decisions, then this would be the only way in which letting being be could take place through that calculation or through those decisions. In other words, if we could not distinguish between a technical act and an act of respect for being or a letting of it be, this form of technical calculation would be the only one by which being could be respected—that is, if technics was its breaking down. It is precisely the technicity of this act, its calculative expansion as a metaphysics of force into that area where it has disrupted and will always, as technics, disrupt itself, that makes this structure of responsibility respect being right at the very limit of or through the pure, mere possibility for this respect.
Because responsibility is constituted both alongside and through technics, Derrida says elsewhere in The Gift of Death, when he is isolating the instant in which responsibility is possible, that instant at which there is a decision or a calculation to be responsible, that it takes place in secret—or, we may now say, alongside secrecy—and is itself the possibility of keeping a secret—that is, takes place through secrecy. This means that the mere technical registration of the situation in the calculating assessment that “there is one to be responsible for,”—the dissimulation thoroughly divorced from maintaining a relationship to being’s dissimulation that it—would not, precisely in the fact that it could protect being, ever be enough to exhaust that situation. One’s responsibility takes place in secret, beyond that calculation of the other, of the thing, of whatever, in a space that must still be calculated. And in fact, because this calculation is not enough, there can be this protection: thus it is constituted by the possibility of keeping a secret. Thus, must be more than one to be responsible for within this “one” that is registered. The situation itself must be unaccountable, infinitely unaccountable or wholly other than the possibility of calculation, but at the same time, only wholly other because it has not yet been calculated, because what can be registered is calculable, is a bit or a “one” that can be brought before technical—in other words, because it is every bit other (cf. GD, 82-84). Indeed, this is why Derrida must have recourse to work and to the work of a machine that works to describe this instant or this situation: the instant “suspends both the work of negation and work itself, perhaps even the work of mourning” (GD, 65).
The work of mourning, indeed, because this work, this calculation, of a form of tekhne that can assume or be represented by the figure of a machine that works is always a work connected to the possibility of accounting for death, the fact that being is not preserved. We thus return to Derrida’s sentence, regarding machines of death and the machine of the gift of death: “Des engines à donner la mort sans compter livrent une guerre sans front,” he says. Does this sentence condemn when it relates the machines, the engines, to death as a gift or a giving? We can see now that this machine, as much as one that relates itself to being or is a machine that is responsible, would have to be responsible, for it (and us along with it) could not tell whether it was indifferent to being or not—that is, whether it were not already this machine that was responsible. But it would also be lacking in responsibility as this machine, because it would be a machine that worked. We seem to be left only with a demand, then, that it be made responsible, just like anything else. The machine cannot be condemned because it is a machine.
But what now might jump out at us from this sentence is not the phrase “donner la mort,” the gift or giving of death, but the phrase “sans compter:” innumerable, unexpectedly—or, a bit more literally, without counting, without calculation. These machines, that are incalculable in number, do not calculate. This play of Derrida’s on sans compter announces precisely how the calculation is going about: without calculation. Indeed, this means that there is not calculation enough. But it also means that the machines of dogmatic interpretation seek to do away with the calculating that they do, with the technicity of their own acts of responsibility. This, too, means that they do not calculate enough, but in a different way, in a way that can be most condemned, because it has the possibility to be most heinous. The machines that give death are like any other giving of death: they relate to death as something that cannot be calculated, simply because, like any other thing, it can not be or have being beyond calculation just as much as it can. But at the same time they announce that they are not calculating, that they are giving death in the name of a religion. They thus do not seek to calculate again, to bring death into the sphere of what must be calculated in the sense that it must be beyond calculation with the equal possibility that it may be—that is, what must be a gift. For the gift—and this is what we did not outline above—must also be calculated in order to be incalculable or beyond calculation or exchange, in order to be what we call a gift. They thus refuse to bring death into the double demand that technics allows responsibility to answer to: that one must calculate and calculate beyond technical calculation. And indeed, every act is guilty of the same lack of responsibility. But these machines of dogma explicitly set themselves against their own calculation in order to refuse the possibility that death may be the gift beyond calculation that they say it is. Indeed, this is precisely what is sought by those mechanized systems of murder that Derrida condemns: they seek to calculate, and yet destroy the traces of their own calculation—that is, not to be responsible, but to evade the possibilities of the calculation that they employ and of which they take advantage, such as numbers, registers, archives that render the individual or the animal or anything simply what is to be exterminated. It is this way, in their acting sans compter, in their claiming that they work when working can only mean to fail, to renounce its own name and any name in its incalculability in the possibility that it would not be as much as be, that the machines are condemned by Derrida. But this act of condemnation is no different than or is merely an extension of a demand for it to be technical more or enough—which will be only more or, in other words, never enough. Derrida with all of us can only condemn these acts such that we force them to be more responsible: the work does not stop with condemnation but in the work of a machine that works.

"Des engins à donner la mort:" Technical Responsibility in The Gift of Death, 5

(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?

"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.

"Des engins à donner la mort:" Technical Responsibility in The Gift of Death, 3

(Continued from last time...) Derrida recognizes, however, that it is precisely because of the unique way in which Heidegger denounces technics that Patočka may end up saying something different, something “Heidegger would never have said” (GD, 38). For Heidegger, dissimulation is conceived with respect to being, and not with respect to the things that get determined by being when being is interpreted as force. In other words, the existence of things that implement this metaphysics of force—technical machines—is not what dissimulates. What dissimulates is being itself. The disturbance or danger in this dissimulation, then, comes from how the technical setting up of everything as force—as we said, as if force wanted to completely replace being—is condemned to fail. Being loses its dominance over the world because force seems to account for or calculate everything that is but being. Yet, because being cannot be eradicated without all these forces ceasing to be, being keeps this dominance still. Indeed, a technical metaphysics of force still needs being in order to be calculating, both in the sense that it need to exist to calculate and it must calculate forces that are—it cannot calculate nothing. And as long as this is the case, force’s dissimulation dissimulates in vain. This constitutes the core of the problem because technics, in reaction, challenges things to exist in conformity with force with more and more violence, with greater and greater risk of annihilating everything so as to carry out force’s replacement of being. Technical reason would rather have itself be calculable as nil rather than allow something to remain uncalculated or indeterminate for it. This is what constitutes the uniqueness of Heidegger’s consideration of technics: when technics dissimulates being, it is dangerous precisely because, except through extreme nihilistic violence, it cannot overcome the fact that beyond any ability of it to dissimulate being, being would have to be already dissimulating itself. In other words, it cannot overcome the fact that, since force needs to be, it is still not essentially a dissimulation, but an expression of being. So technics is not improper or inauthentic because it dissimulates being: it is inauthentic to the extent that it disturbs the possibility of the proper as a process of letting being dissimulate itself by itself.
Patočka subscribes to all that Heidegger says, except he also claims that this act of letting being relate to itself as its proper, dissimulative self is an act of responsibility: “the civilization… produced by techno-scientific objectivity hides mystery,” or the self-dissimulation of being precisely when, in opposition to this, “authentic mystery must remain mysterious, and we should approach it only by letting it be what it is in truth—veiled, withdrawn, dissimulated” by itself (GD, 36-37). That is, responsibility consists of a letting being “bear” itself as itself or letting being become visible in things properly, as what grants existence and the possibility of meaning to things and yet hides itself (HE, 97-98). As such, it is not the mere response to situations through an act of deciding between equal possibilities that bring themselves forward prior to how responsibility is enacted. Before deciding, there is letting being be: responsibility does not include the decision or accounting that would, upon the choice of a possibility, then bring it about (HE, 98). This sort of “decisionism” is, as Patočka says, “from the start a false, objectified, and objectivistic perspective” that only accounts for that deciding which is a derivation from the act of letting being be (HE, 98). Put a different way, responsibility is an overcoming of what, within oneself and within one’s relationship to the other, would obscure or dissimulate the ability of meaning to “break into” those relationships as itself, as a mystery that should continue to be respected (HE, 98). Guarding the possibility of being’s self-dissimulation in our lives: that is responsibility, and its history is the history of the different ways the dissimulation of being is allowed through these acts of guarding or protection to show itself in different determinations of things or entities.
However, Patočka distances himself from this last, most unique point of Heidegger’s—that technical dissimulation can never escape being reappropriated back to a process of dissimulation within being itself—precisely in using it to be more condemnatory of technics. According to Derrida, he does this in saying that the rise of a metaphysics of force is, of itself, beyond being a dissimulation of being, “fictitious and inauthentic” (HE, 116). This is what Derrida claims that “Heidegger would never have said” (and we now understand how he is able to claim it): “Heidegger would never have said that metaphysical determinations of being or the history of the dissimulation of being in figures or modes of entities developed like myths or like fictions” (GD, 38, translation modified; cf. DM, 43). That is because saying this means the determination of being as calculable force in a technical metaphysics is so dissimulative that its expression or relation to being as dissimulation is itself dissimulated. In other words, it suggests that force is not even an expression of being, because it is a form of dissimulation that completely escapes all reappropriation into being’s process of self-dissimulation. This means that while Heidegger holds out the exceptional possibility that being can explicitly be understood again by some effort to reach underneath this technical determination of everything, Patočka thinks that with the rise of force in the history of the ways of relating to being—that is, in the history of responsibility—being, and responsibility with it, is completely lost. Being no longer has any dominance over force because it releases itself into a dissimulation that, beyond being’s own dissimulative expression, operates on this very expression. With Patočka, “the mystery of being is dissimulated” (GD, 39).
Technics, then, does not just threaten the proper and the responsible: a world determined by technics announces the impossibility of responsibility, the impossibility of the possibility of letting being relate to itself. One’s relationship to oneself and to the other is so calculable, so much a matter of completely understandable forces, that meaning cannot be possible in it. The other, instead of showing up as a “profound individuality” (HE, 112), is at most a fact one must momentarily register only in order to dispense with and move on to other facts or forces, other things to be calculated. One’s achievements are to be accounted for only in terms of their output into the flow of rationality, and one’s sins only matter perhaps insofar as they hinder this flow. In short, responsibility would devolve into the most basic assessment of or decision about the situation—that “there is one to be responsible for”—which, as we have seen Patočka already say, is merely a derivative phenomenon of responsibility and is thus not itself responsible. Any real attempt at responsibility going beyond this ends up in either in self-annihilation or in war—the full utilization of all technically determined energies (HE, 113-114). With the rise of technical reason, one cannot even see there is such a dissimulation of being that being cannot be seen...

"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...

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.

The thrust of The Gift of Death

The fundamental thesis of the Gift of Death is that the experience of the apprehension of death is inseparable from an experience of responsibility. This in itself is nothing new: among the people Derrida himself discusses in his book, Patočka, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger all explicitly say the same thing. Fundamentally, the finitude of existence conditions existence itself. However, Derrida shows, using all these thinkers, that this finitude also implies a certain structure of a relation to infinitude: that is, the apprehension of death is also inseparable from responsibility because infinitude intrudes in this apprehension and in this responsibility.

This too is not unique, though: Kierkegaard and Patočka also include this explicitly--not to mention the passages from the Bible that Derrida discusses. Where Derrida is perhaps unique is in his elaboration of this dual structure of responsibility and apprehension as a double bind: that is, as a dual structure that, extended to encompass both the implications of finitude and infinitude that split it, in fact rends it apart (i.e. makes the dual structure incompatible to itself) in its being constituted thus. In other words, Derrida rigorously thinks the space between the determining forces of finitude and infinitude qua between, qua difference. And, as he shows, in order for this difference to be rigorously sustained, it must be conceived as différance.

This différance is manifest in the trembling both before God (the infinite) and before death (the finite), in the experience of what Derrida calls a gift of death.

The movements of Donner la mort

The Gift of Death (Donner la mort) perhaps can be interpreted as having four movements, each named roughly by the title of each section (chapter in the English edition).

1. Les secrets de la responsabilité européenne ("Secrets of European Responsibility"). Here Derrida insinuates that (a logic of) a secret is present in Jan Patočka's narration of the history of (European, Christian) responsibility, against his wishes to eradicate this secret through a passage of this history into Christianity.

2. Au-delà: donner à prendre, apprendre à donner -- la mort. This section's title gets rendered in English as: "Beyond: Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death." This understands the play going on here but perhaps brings to the fore the language of the classroom and instruction too much. For the subject of this movement is how this secret intrudes as or appears as the gift of death. The emphasis thus falls on the word that is being played upon, apprehénder: how is one going to anticipate (Heidegger) or intuit (Husserl) the phenomenon of this secret if it comes forth as (and in) the experience of death--i.e. if the secret of responsibility is in every case a way of grasping (almost in the German sense of begreifen) this dreadful experience? Furthermore, grasping it as it is given, in the Husserlian sense of what is there before us phenomenally, as a given?

3. A qui donner (savoir ne pas savoir). "Whom to Give To (Knowing Not to Know)" excellently captures the sense of this movement, except that "savoir ne pas savoir" can also be rendered to better accommodate the play on "ne pas," that we find throughout Derrida's work, so as to elucidate the thing known as opposed to the knowing involved (David Wills again emphasizes the "learning" perhaps too much, even though his translation is in most respects just unbelievably good, given Derrida's extremely fuzzy phrasing of things in this particular text). The remark in the parenthesis would then be closer to "knowing not-knowing." This is important because the name of this section gets at the experience of that apprehension featured the last section. Furthermore, upon traversing this section's content we see that this "not-knowing" is the precise experience of the responsible subject that Derrida finds in Kierkegaard. The movement here, then, seeks to show via the secret in the gift of death that Patočka's responsible Dasein can be interpreted (if he is reshaped a little) as a responsible knight of faith. However, we then find that this Knight, in order to accommodate the secret of responsibility Derrida has already wrested from Patočka, gets reshaped precisely to encompass the "formula" named in the title of the last movement:

4. Tout autre est tout autre ("Every other (one) is every (bit) other"). Responsibility can only be constituted if it comports itself towards the other (and this implies towards the gift of death) as an infinitely recursive or already-othered other, an other that is other than its alterity. This other then is finally interpreted and reintegrated within the history determined by secrecy that was elaborated in the first movement or chapter, to ask the question as to whether this history is still as determined by secrecy as Christian secrecy or not. The answer is that it remains between both determinations, being an evangelist as well as a heretical history. The history does not show us merely this, however, but brings out how we must think the giving in the gift of death in more than one way. The gift of death is an offering, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it (somewhere, I think in "The Sublime Offering"): it withdraws itself as it proffers itself in order to continue giving itself, that is, in order to never be reducible to what is given or to the act of giving itself. But two ways of this withdrawal are here constituted, which means that two ways of giving also simultaneously are implicated if the gift is an offering. First, the withdrawal of what is given, and, second, the withdrawal of the giving in favor of the what. One can formulate this in the following statement that reduces to one gift: giving is always to give all (one has) and to give (one's) all--the first instance withdrawing the giving, offering the what, the second withdrawing the what and offering the giving.

Patočka and Heidegger, or, towards Donner la mort

Jan Patočka's interpretation of some of the basic concepts within Being and Time in the fifth of his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History explores and exploits a point (one point of many) on which the whole of that treatise turns: the relationship of everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) to authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). Recently in America, this point (again, it is one of many crucial points, however) is only explored explicitly with comparable depth by Bill Blattner in his work on Heidegger's notion of temporality (though Hubert Dreyfus' entire presentation of Heidegger could be said to stem from or be founded upon the implicit exploration of this distinction, specifically his conviction that the first division of Being and Time is actually wider in philosophical import than the second: such an assertion can only arise from a move similar to Patočka's and actually needs to be seen as this). The problem revolves around how there is no term that Heidegger opposes to everydayness that easily bridges the gap between everydayness and authenticity: the only mediator is inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit). So it is here that Patočka must begin (that is, it is here that any analysis of this problem in depth must begin: so while many people analyze the relationship between authenticity and everydayness, it is only with respect to clarifying the relationship of inauthenticity to everydayness in with a view to explicating authenticity that we can have an explicit, in depth analysis of the real unity or lack of unity of the treatise at this point--this is just to clarify the above).
Patočka first makes inauthenticity and authenticity a parallel movement to the movement of everydayness. He then introduces a distinction within everydayness that seeks to clarify the second division's movement towards authenticity in being-towards-death. Put simply, he introduces another distinction in opposition to everydayness, the exceptional or the holiday ("holiday" of course seems a little too playful at first, but it becomes interesting when one reads Heidegger within a more Marxist framework, focused as it is on leisure and the work in leisure capitalism creates--see Adorno especially for this). Saying that Patočka merely introduces another distinction is indeed putting it simply, however, because this fundamentally understands the care-structure with more clarity than Heidegger himself understood it in the text. Whether Heidegger would have subscribed to this interpretation is of course questionable, but that is what makes Patočka's reading as much of an expression of a unique philosophy of his own as it is a reading of Heidegger--thus we had to begin with the vague expression that this is an "interpretation of some of the basic concepts" within the Heidegger's book. The specific alteration of the care-structure accomplished here is a clarification of the component of "falling" (verfallen) and its relationship to everydayness, which remains hazy in the book (even though one can piece together what Heidegger might be getting at, it lacks the same phenomenality as mood and understanding, for example). But I'll leave this only as a suggestion for now: the important thing is to outline how Patočka's distinction then allows for two binaries (inauthenticity/authenticity, everydayness/exceptionality) to set themselves up in relation to each other.

Exceptionality allows for a transition between everydayness and the authentic/inauthentic distinction because it retreats from the everyday without yet placing itself within the authentic/inauthentic dichotomy. That is, it suspends, as it were, the relation of everydayness to authenticity and inauthenticity only to have it be the place where this relation becomes most pressing as to how one is disposed in it already. In Heidegger, this becomes the space of being-towards-death. But whereas Heidegger quickly articulates this moment so that it seems to fall within the sphere of everydayness, Patočka sees it as a sort of comportment all in itself distinct from the everyday and its temporal orientation. Patočka explains this in the following way:

The exceptional, the holiday also unburdens [like everydayness], though not by escaping from responsibility [Patočka often calls authenticity "responsibility"], but rather by revealing that dimension of life in which the point is not the burden of responsibility and the escape from it but where, rather, we are enraptured, where something more powerful than our free possibility, our responsibility, seems to break into our life and bestow on it meaning which it would not know otherwise.

-"Is Technological Civilization Decadent and Why?", Heretical Essays, 98-99.

Patočka here is actually showing that there can be two senses of authenticity if one accepts a link between everydayness and inauthenticity/authenticity that is more distinct. The transformed everydayness of the exceptional itself is a form of authenticity that escapes the thrust within the authenticity/inauthenticity dichotomy, which is an existential potentiality for one's possibilities, and moves towards a type of authenticity that focuses or places the accent upon the ek-static nature of this potentiality. While Heidegger brings them together (and perhaps rightly), Patočka tries to assert that authenticity and everydayness can be understood more coherently if we understand them to be linking up with each other within a specific, delimited situation whose style is slightly different than either. Authenticity still bears upon this sphere, and in fact bears upon it all the more because of its distinctness, but its constitution has less to do with this authenticity conceived of as potentiality, or ek-stasis conceived as a standing out of oneself towards possibilities (existential facticity/factical existentiality). This ek-stasis simply stands out of itself to stand out of itself, and while Heidegger would like this experience to precisely be that authenticity he speaks about, Patočka asserts that this overlooks something: namely, religion.

For it is the origin of religiosity traditionally conceived (the experience of the sacred and profane) that enters into this experience of impending responsibility/authenticity that is not an authenticity proper (which will be seen as an overcoming of this sacred and profane sphere and constituting actual religion proper). Patočka calls this pre-religious experience of impending responsibility/authenticity "the dimension of the demonic and of passion:"

In both, humans are placed at risk, however, they are not simply escaping from themselves into the "public realm," into the ordinary everyday...

-"Is Technological Civilization...", 99

It is the experience of being-towards-death ripped from out of its context in Heidegger as an experience of authenticity as potentiality towards possibilities (existential facticity/factical existentiality). It makes possible this authenticity only by refusing its hold which impends on it all the more, and this makes it all the more dangerous:

Face to face with this phenomenon, we tend to forget the entire dimension of the for ourselves [authenticity proper], forget responsibility and escape, letting ourselves be drawin into a new, open dimension as if only now true life stood before us, as if this "new life" had no need to care for the dimension of responsibility.

-"Is Technological Civilization...", 99

Here we get a strict active forgetting (a la Nietzsche) precisely towards that openness to the there in authenticity--a forgetting that brings us away from our potentiality, alethia--and which precisely constitutes our possibility to enter into this openness, this authenticity. It is the unheimlich pure and simple (Heidegger uses the phrase "face to face" famously, like Hegel, with regard to death), seen as resistant to that authenticity which in Heidegger it is swept up into. As the last clause states, this is care without care for the dimension of responsibility/authenticity (thus something like falling without falling, within the phenomenon of falling in care, as it is brought up out of falling). In other words, the demonic constitutes a retreat not from responsibility/authenticity itself, but a retreat from the demand of taking up a relationship to authenticity or inauthenticity. To be a little more clear at the expense of possible reiteration: the demonic is the space created outside of the everyday as it becomes exceptional which refuses, even as it relates to them already, to be authentic or inauthentic, or, in other words,

the demonic [is what] needs to be brought into a relation with responsibility [authenticity] as [i.e. because] originally it is not.

-"Is Technological Civilization...", 100

The demonic thus is not reducible to inauthenticity or a strict experience of falling, and thus not able to be yoked together with the everyday as it is included in the experience of being-towards-death that Heidegger describes. The demonic is being-towards-death all by itself, without ethical or existential/factical relationship, because it is the exceeding of any relation of existentiality/facticity to mine-ness, which constitutes existentiality/facticity proper. This is a crucial point, but we can't elaborate on it now--all that can be be noted is that authenticity is the authenticity of a Dasein that is in each case my own because its possibilities stem from a finite potential. Thus, Dasein, and its being-towards-death, is for Heidegger non-relational, and it is this mine-ness that gets suspended in Patočka's demonic being-towards-death. Perhaps to put another, more interesting way, the demonic is a ek-stasis beyond ek-stasis (if we consider ek-stasis in a Heideggerian way as the ek-stasis directed towards possibilities).

In the end, the demonic and passionate get opposed to work, and constitute for Patočka the sacred, while work remains the profane. Thus he is able to read into Heidegger's Being and Time an experience of pre-religiosity (insofar as this pre-religious world is composed of the sacred and profane), which he then proceeds to show becomes religious when it overcomes itself and reconnects to responsibility and authenticity. Religion then is the re-establishing of this demonic to the authentic, the overcoming of the vertigo of a being-towards-death beyond itself, beyond its heedless non-relationship to authenticity and inauthenticity. We will not get into this theory of religion. However, we will let its contours be suggested by the beginning of Derrida's The Gift of Death (Donner la mort: the French is much more suggestive), which we should now in a sense be able to somewhat understand, as well as understand how it proceeds in its development (its explication and modification of Patočka) with high Heideggerian stakes:

...Jan Patočka relates secrecy, or more precisely the mystery of the sacred, to responsibility. He opposes one to the other; or rather underscores their heterogeneity. Somewhat in the manner of Levinas he warns against an experience of the sacred as an enthusiasm or fervor [or forgetting, mj] for fusion, cautioning in particular against against a form of demonic rapture that has as its effect, and often as its first intention, the removal of responsibility, the loss of the sense or consciousness [conscience] of responsibility. At the same time, Patočka wants to distinguish religion from the demonic form of sacralization.

-The Gift of Death, 1-2