죽음과 책임의 계보학

Genealogy of Death and Responsibility: Rereading Derrida’s The Gift of Death

In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida assesses Jan Patočka’s fundamental and original thesis of Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy, namely, that the Platonic motif of the care of the soul is the embryo of European life and the starting point of the genealogy of responsibility in the history of Europe, and that only in Christian Europe the motif of the care of the soul is transformed into a true principle of responsibility. According to Patočka, in Christianity, the responsibility of the self or the soul does not derive from knowledge of the Divine, the cosmos, or the Good but from the soul’s exposure to the gaze of an other, ultimately the gaze of God as a Person, a gaze that constitutes the soul as a person and, for that, as a irreplaceable singular responsible self. Christian responsibility is also tied to a gift of death, because only death can give the irreplaceability on whose basis one can speak of a responsible subject, of the soul as conscience of self. Derrida, by the Blanchotian reading of death as im/possibility of impossibility in Heidegger’s Being and Time, explores the aporetic relationship between my irreplaceable and impossible responsibility for the Other. After establishing the aporetic relationship, Derrida continues to mark a decisive break with Kierkegaard and Levinas in an analysis of their Protestant interpretation of the Abrahamic story of the aborted sacrifice of Isaac, namely, that there is no convenient distinction between Kierkegaard’s the ethical (of generality) and the religious (of absolute singularity). He further discusses the aporetic structure of responsibility where the absolute and the general meet. Responsibility demands faithfulness to the general with its insistence on answering for oneself, public accounting for decision making, in a word, substitution, and at the same time requires silence and secrecy, in a word, singularity. Derrida seeks to establish the matrix that at once makes their undeniably distinct positions on responsibility possible between Patočka, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Levinas, but also limits their range, distinctiveness, radicality, and even their originality. By inquiring into the various modalities of giving (oneself) death and of taking death (upon oneself) between these four philosophers, Derrida develops an economic model that accounts for the different positions on responsibility, their mutual contamination and passage into one another－in particular, as regards their overdetermination by themes of Christianity, Platonism, and deliberate de-Christianization as well as of Judaism.