Unassumable Responsibility:

New Perspectives on Freedom, Justice and Obligation

Catherine Mills & Fiona Jenkins
University of New South Wales/Australian National
University

Ethics, politics and religion have been able to define

themselves only by
seizing terrain from juridical responsibility not in order
to assume another kind
of responsibility, but to articulate zones of nonresponsibility. This does not, of course,
mean impunity. Rather, it signifies at least for ethics a
confrontation with a
responsibility that is infinitely greater than any we could
ever assume. At the
most, we can be faithful to it, that is, assert its
unassumability.
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz
1. In the past several decades, a number of contemporary
philosophers and political thinkers have raised fundamental
questions about the concept of responsibility, to suggest
that responsibility is ultimately unassumable. In broad
terms, this means that responsibility is not sought in terms
of the attribution of causality and guilt to a singular agent
for their acts or failure to act. Rather, the notion of an
unassumable responsibility demands that responsibility be
thought apart from the attribution of causality and guilt,
apart from the ready identification of an agent, to recognize
that responsibility both exceeds and precedes the individual
subject.
2. Hence, the idea of unassumability in responsibility takes
up the problem of responsibility after the subject. Given
the critique of the subject that has taken centre stage in
European philosophy throughout the twentieth century (at
least), questions of responsibility must be grappled with in
the absence of a readily identifiable acting subject. Rather
than attributing responsibility on the identification and

formalisation of relations of agency and causation, the

notion of unassumability opens the question of
responsibility to a broader concern with the obligation that
all subjects bear in relation, in their being in the world with
others. As such, responsibility may be taken as the ethicoontological condition of appearance in the world with
others, rather than as the end effect of the confluence of
intentionality, causation, harm and guilt.
3. These theorizations and conditions provoke key
questions about responsibility. Who is to be held
responsible if not the subject? What does responsibility
mean in relation to the event? Who decides and what,
ultimately, is the nature of the decision? What is the
relation of ethics and politics? Can one speak of collective
responsibility without determining the collective in such a
way that collectivity is metaphorically construed on the
figure of the subject? Can responsibility be thought apart
from the relation of sponsor that underpins legal
culpability? Indeed, can responsibility be thought apart
from the law?
4. Addressing these questions through the theme of
unassumable responsibility promises to yield a conception
of responsibility irreducible to the determination of
individual or legal culpability. As such, it may enlighten
considerations of historical responsibility, the ethical
responsibilities of a people, and responsibilities that obtain
in conditions of economic and political globalization.
Furthermore, as legal institutions struggle to deal with
moral questions raised by bio-technology and with
definitions of life and death and of the human, the theme of
unassumable responsibility responsibility after the subject
may provide new ways of thinking about life,
embodiment and obligation.
5. However, to raise fundamental questions about the
character of responsibility has also been thought by some
to be risky to legal institutions and to the strength of moral
claims. If one no longer speaks of intentionality or
autonomy, of rules and their infraction, of rights and duties,
then is not responsibility simply destroyed altogether? Can
these terms be turned to new meanings without occluding
all that is valuable in the concept of responsibility? Can the
concept of responsibility be thought beyond this apparent
impasse, to provoke, perhaps, a responsibility before the
law?
6. The essays in this issue address the possibility of a

responsibility before, or indeed, beyond the law, through

varying philosophical approaches Levinas, Girard,
Derrida, Arendt, Deleuze, Agamben, Ricouer - and
contemporary phenomena, from new reproductive
technologies through to the terrorist attacks of September
11. All of the selected papers were initially presented at a
conference on the theme of 'Unassumable Responsibility' in
September 2003, at the Australian National University.
Sponsored by the National Institute for the Humanities, the
conference sought to provide an interdisciplinary forum for
considerations of the questions and problems indicated
above. It included speakers from the disciplines of
Philosophy, Political Science, Cultural Studies, English,
and Law amongst others. The papers collected here have
been extended in response to referees comments from their
original presentation as conference papers. However, we
have also sought to retain the moment of the conference in
the process of transformation.
7. The diversity of perspectives taken toward the notion of
an unassumable responsibility is reflected in the papers
collected here. An especially strong thematic within the
conference presentations and ensuing discussions was that
of responsibility and political violence, a theme addressed
by several papers within this collection. In her provocative
analysis of the aftermath of terror post-September 11,
Rosalyn Diprose uses Nietzsches characterisation of the
sovereign subject and Levinass conception of ethical
obligation to argue for a more responsible democratic
politics than we currently have as an antidote to the
disabling of the future that characterises terror. Of the
particular responsibility of governments, especially as
evinced in their response to 9/11, Diprose claims that these
contribute to terror rather than oppose it, since they
generate an auto-immunitary implosion. However, rather
than simply mounting a Derridean critique of governmental
responses through the concept of auto-immunity, Diprose
attends most closely to a personal responsibility that
involves the open-ness of bodies to a future and to sensemaking in community with others.
8. Fiona Jenkins also argues for a reconsideration of the
responses that were possible to the violence of 9/11, with
the particular aim of destabilizing the strong distinction
between good and evil that has marked official and state
responses so far. Beginning by exploring the claim made by
many at the time that the attack against the US amounted to
a violence incommensurable with any other, Jenkins
questions the terms of this apparent asymmetry of

victimhood, which also finds resonance in the

asymmetrical authority of some and not others to perpetrate
violence. She takes up the distinction made by Ren Girard
between sacrificial victimage and juridical responsibility to
ask whether it was in fact possible for the United States, as
the injured party, to follow a strictly juridical response to
an attack upon it. In conclusion, she proposes an alternative
response based upon Jacques Derridas reflections on
forgiveness without a correlative claim to sovereignty.
9. While Diprose and Jenkins thus affirm the possibility of
a responsibility beyond the law, two other authors argue for
the necessity of maintaining juridical categories, and
especially the categories of human rights, in confronting
political violence. Thus, Jean-Philippe Deranty considers
Giorgio Agambens challenge to the normative theories of
Jurgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, which is expressed
most clearly in his controversial rejection of the concept of
human rights. Undertaking a detailed analysis of the
political and philosophical theses developed by Agamben,
especially in Homo Sacer, Deranty agrees that it is
necessary to heed his warning to question the normativity
of modernity after Auschwitz. Nevertheless, a full
rejection of the language of rights comes at the expense of
understanding the importance of past future struggles, for
as Honneth reminds us, struggles for political and social
emancipation have always privileged the language of
rights (11). Working between the options of normative
theory and an Agambenian rejection of rights and
normativity, Deranty concludes with a sketch of an
affirmative political agonism, based on the recognition that
politics is only the name of the contingency that strikes at
the heart of systemic necessity (50).
10. Frances Dalys discussion is also critical of Agambens
treatment of rights and law and finds little in his body of
work that could contribute to much needed political
transformations today. She argues that although Agambens
identification of the refugee as a key political figure for our
times is insightful, his broad critique of the mutual
implication of human rights and biopolitics remains oddly
ineffectual and indeed risks further victimizing refugees by
making them representative of a suffering allegedly
experienced by us all. In Agambens framework the
interpretation of rights becomes reduced to a function of
absolute politics and a leviathan state, ignoring the
potential rights bear to carry forward our responsibility to
ideals of dignity, equality and freedom.

11. Taking a historically responsive approach, Andrew

Schaap critically interrogates Agambens conception of an
unassumable responsibility in relation to debates on
reconciliation. Against Agamben, Schaap argues that what
is necessary in reconciliation is not a conception of
responsibility as unassumable, but a recognition of the
necessity of accepting responsibility in an unassuming way.
He points to the importance of understanding reconciliation
politically, which means that reconciliation should not
take for granted a social harmony to be restored or a
reciprocity of interests to be secured (11). Instead,
reconciliation requires a sense of the fragility and
contingency of the reconciled community, brought about
through an open-ended, agonistic process of political
engagement, rather than through any kind of 'settling of
accounts'.
12. Also addressing the inter-relation of history and
responsibility, Ann Murphy discusses the political and
ethical importance of shame. She seeks to resuscitate a
sense of shame in thinking about historical responsibility,
particularly through reference to Levinass formulation of
shame as guiltless responsibility. Murphy shows that
Levinass conception of shame leads to a formulation
wherein responsibility exceeds even the finitude that
history would give it. This does not, however, lead to an
exoneration or denial of complicity in past wrongs; instead
it shows that the problem is not that we cannot be
responsible for history, but rather that we cannot be
responsible enough (24).
13. Paul Miller turns Levinas to a practical concern with
the Children Overboard affair that took place in Australia
in 2001, just prior to national elections in which the
conservative Howard government was returned in a
campaign that many have seen as driven by a politics of
fear. Addressing the problem of lying in politics, Miller
argues against a sovereign formulation of responsibility in
relation to political lies, wherein the lie is attributed to a
speaker then held responsible for it. This, he suggests,
actually entails an act of violence insofar as it obfuscates
and avoids the greater responsibility at stake in the
constitution of political community and correlative issues
of exclusion and hospitality. He argues that while a
Levinasian conception of unassumable responsibility
cannot give us a prescriptive ethics, it can nevertheless help
in re-orienting our response away from ourselves as
egoistic sovereign subjects and towards the Other (48).

14. In his analysis of Agamben and Debord, William

McClure discusses the difficult task of producing
situations that expose the conditions of the absolute
spectacle that reigns today. As a participant in and creator
of various events inspired by situationism, McClure
elaborates on the way in which such situations may
undermine the identity of the subject based on individual or
sovereign will, particularly through the practices of drive
and dtournement. Drawing on Agamben, McClure argues
that the driviste would fulfil the messianic task in an act
of accomplished nihilism wherein he or she would summon
all her or his potential not to be, constructing the situation
on [the] point of indifference between potentiality and
impotentiality (25). In this way, then, the driviste is cast
as a figure of political futurity, in whom the poetic
reception of being (31) is operationalized as a counterforce
to the deadening weight of the bourgeois market-driven
spectacle.
15. Both Robyn Ferrell and Jack Reynolds are also
concerned with the importance of ethical and political
futures in their contributions. Ferrell takes up these
questions through a reflection on the implications of new
reproductive technologies that challenge our distinctions
between the natural and technological. She argues that
eugenics is a logical extension of reproductive
technologies insofar as they aim to reproduce a social
world by producing subjects in its own image (42). As
such, eugenic reproduction amounts to an attempt to
capture the future, though it is an attempt that necessarily
fails since the future is by definition beyond our reach, as
that which is yet to be determined (42). In a sense, then,
the future presents us with a responsibility beyond what we
could take on as our own, since it exceeds the
circumstances over which we may be said to have control.
16. Reynolds helpfully explores differences and affinities
between the evocations of futural dimensions of time that
we find in the work of Derrida and Deleuze. Both accord a
central ethico-political impetus to the interruption of
temporal order that opens onto the future, Derrida speaking
here of messianicity and the to come which structures his
account of democracy and friendship, and Deleuze imaging
a futural experience of time from which subjectivity is
radically absent. Reynolds connects the crucial difference
between imagining futurity as a disruption in the
metaphysics of presence that would open subjectivity to
alterity (Derrida) and imagining it as the experience of pure
difference (Deleuze) to the contrasting politics of resistance

and of political radicalism that we find in these thinkers.

17. Paula Keatings discussion elaborates one aspect of
Derridas politics of resistance through an exploration of
his thought on hospitality. This couples the conditioned
laws of hospitality proper to politics with the
unconditional ethical claim of hospitality. In such a
thought of the unconditioned there is clearly a reference to
Kants formulation of the moral law; yet if for Kant ought
implies can, for Derrida the unconditional ethical claim
proposes that it is necessary to do the impossible. Here
Keating demonstrates the relation between Kants
assumable responsibility as orientation towards action and
Derridas unassumable responsibility which is no less
practical, but insists upon a relation between the possible
and the impossible that is at once nurturing and corrupting.
Derrida here goes further than Kant in making clear that
when we act morally, we do so beyond the possibility of
calculating consequences, so that our decisions and
responsibilities belong to the time of risk and the act of
faith.
18. Also working with the differentiation of infinite and
calculable responsibility, Stan van Hooft discusses a key
distinction in Paul Ricoeurs work between the juridical
notion of responsibility and the kind of responsibility that
is tied to ethical identity. In the latter case, a responsibility
beyond the law is theorized as a response which, on one
side, is delimited by our finite capability and our finite
knowledge but is, on the other side, infinite and limitless the dialectical product of the global call of innumerable
others which comes to us from the future (23). Van Hooft
shows how Ricoeurs treatment of ethical responsibility
can help us to understand that responsibility is concerned
not only with what I can do (or be held culpable for on the
basis of capacity) but also with whatever or whoever is
precious or vulnerable and thus makes a claim upon me
(sometimes, perhaps, exceeding my capacity). A further
question then arises as to how far I may be held responsible
for my own incapacities, as Aristotle held we may be
responsible for our ignorance. Van Hooft explores the
applicability of the claim that we can, in a meaningful way,
be considered ethically responsible for our ignorance and
its harmful consequences in the context of the tragedy of
the Stolen Generations. Accepting responsibility for what
happened here would, on this account, be a way of attesting
to an ethical identity and of concerning ourselves with the
demands and reasons of virtue.

19. Finally, Stephen Muecke takes an ethnological

approach to the question of responsibility, in his discussion
of sex tourism in Madagascar. Muecke approaches the
distinction between different forms of responsibility
which he couches in the terms of moral versus ethical
responsibility through a radical anthropology of
contingency. He argues against a theological conception of
law and morality, to re-affirm the necessity of an
autonomous and non-moral conception of law and an
ethical responsiveness based on contingent decisions made
in situ. In doing so, he draws upon the methodological
resources of ficto-criticism to foreground contingency as
both the guiding concept of ethnological research and the
foundation for a new elaboration of ethical responsibility
over and against transcendental moralism.
20. In a brief response to Muecke, Catherine Mills raises
critical questions about the valorisation of the law that she
finds in his argument. While agreeing with the claim that a
viable conception of law and ethics should be nontheological in its foundation, Mills argues that recourse to
the affirmation of a morally neutral law avoids the
question of nihilism so provocatively taken up by Agamben
and others. Instead of these symmetrically opposed options,
she suggests instead that more might be done in elaborating
an ethics of contingency over and against recourse to a
nave conception of the procedural rule of law as the nonmoral arbiter of political and moral conflicts.
21. The conflict over the status of the law that takes centrestage in the exchange between Muecke and Mills, and
which is also key to a number of other papers, indicates the
stakes of reconceptualising responsibility in the early days
of the 21st century, when wars are being fought with the
explicit aim of extending liberal democracy, including the
procedural rule of law, in regions where it is not evidently
autochthonous. That these critical questions can be asked
of the law in liberal democracies surely indicates one the
greatest virtues of this political system. That they must be
asked indicates one of its weaknesses. Whatever the case,
what all the papers in this volume make evident - as did
many discussions at the conference from which they have
developed - is that thinking through responsibility, in terms
of both the juridical and ethical claims made upon us,
ought to be one of the key tasks of our intellectual times.
Catherine Mills is Lecturer in Philosophy at the
University of New South Wales. She specializes in

Ethics, Feminist theory and contemporary European

Political Philosophy. Email:
catherine.mills@unsw.edu.au
Fiona Jenkins is a lecturer in Philosophy at the School
of Humanities, Australian National University, teaching
on subjects in contemporary French philosophy, on
Nietzsche, on film, and on radical aspects of democratic
theory. Email: Fiona.Jenkins@anu.edu.au

borderlands e-journal 2004