Abstract

Responsibility has traditionally been associated with a project of appropriation, understood as the securing of a sphere of mastery for a willful subject, and enframed in a metaphysics of will, causality and subjectivity. In that tradition, responsibility is understood in terms of the subjectum that lies at the basis of the act, as ground of imputation, and opens onto the project of a self-legislation and self-appropriation of the subject. However, one finds in Heidegger and Derrida the reversal—indeed, the deconstruction—of such a tradition, and responsibility is approached instead as an exposure to an inappropriable: assumption of an inappropriable thrownness and finitude for Heidegger, ‘experience of the im-possible’ for Derrida. I will explore how responsibility can be thought from such inappropriable, in an experience that Derrida called ‘ex-appropriation.’ In the process, I will engage the very complex and tortuous relation of Derrida to Heidegger