"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 Of course, what it is in truth is, like in Heidegger, “veiled, withdrawn, dissimulated;” so, as we said, technical dissimulation does not bring being to the fore as a wholly present thing but dissimulates doubly, “not in the name of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...

Notes on Derrida and politics

Without the opening of an absolutely undetermined possible, without the radical abeyance and suspense marking a perhaps, there would never be either event nor decision. Certainly. But nothing takes place and nothing is ever decided without suspending the perhaps while keeping its living possibility in living memory... In the order of law, politics or morality, what would rules and laws, contracts and institutions indeed be without steadfast... determination, without calculability and without violence done to the perhaps, to the possible that makes them possible? We insist on the decision in order to introduce the aporia in which all theory of decision must engage itself, notably in its apparently modern figures--for example, that of Schmittian decisionism, of its "right-wing" or "left-wing" or even neo-Marxist heritage... Such a decisionism, as we know, is a theory of the enemy. And the figure of the enemy, condition of the political as such, takes shape in this century against the backdrop of its own loss: we would be losing the enemy, and thereby the political.

-The Politics of Friendship, 67-8

Whether or not this is a valid reading of Schmitt (and Derrida's reading of him is extremely rigorous) is not as important here as the link established between calculability, decision, and the figure of the enemy. Calculating or establishing a political decision for Derrida cannot be the calculating of who it is made against: it is the undermining of precisely this setting-up of an enemy, which means that, since all calculation inevitably fixes and determines and thereby always heads in the direction of establishing an enemy, is the interruption of calculation or decision-making itself. I'll elaborate on these notes later, but one can already see that the insistence of Derrida is against establishing a space in opposition to decisionism, but rather that interrupts decisionism from within it--that is, is always a call for more calculation (there is never enough of it in the political). How would anything get done? This is also a question, of course, but Derrida is emphasizing that no political decision ever takes place such that only after it there is action on it or that brings it into effect. Deciding is already bringing about its results. But, at the same time, this pre-decision never is itself the real, authentic locus of the deciding: we do not jump into a sphere where all that matters is the condition of the possibility of deciding--this essentially constitutes Derrida's opposition to (and faithfulness to) Marxism.