Aporias of Responsibility: Sacrificing Others in the Name of the Other

This chapter aims to demonstrate the paradoxical or ‘aporetic’ nature of moral responsibility through Derrida’s reading of the biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in The Gift of Death. One cannot be ethically responsible to one or more particular others without simultaneously becoming ‘irresponsible’ to another other or more others. To fulfill my absolute responsibility to the singular other, I must sacrifice another or many other singularities or a general ethics. I can respond to the call of the other only by sacrificing the call of all others, by neglecting my responsibility to all others. For example, every time I open my door or rush to help a particular other, I am sacrificing all others who also need my hospitality or help. I will never be able to justify this sacrifice. In this sense, ethical responsibility paradoxically contains at its core its opposite, namely, a non-ethical element that cannot be shaken off. It is impossible for ethics to harmoniously combine responsibility toward the singular other with universal responsibility in order to escape this ethically painful paradox or ‘aporia.’ Ethics cannot be constituted as such, that is, as untainted and unadulterated by its opposite; on the contrary, it constantly carries its opposite within it as a constant trial, which for Derrida is the very condition of the possibility of a decision and of the responsibility that results from such a decision.