Derrida and the Extraordinary Responsibility of Inheriting the Future-to-come

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's account of the paradoxical structure of responsibility from two perspectives. First, in terms of the temporal dimension of responsibility as a responsiveness that affirms but also disrupts and critiques one's cultural heritage, and thereby constitutes the self as futural. Second, responsibility is examined in terms of its political dimension as a deconstruction of the opposition between determinism and absolute freedom. Against assumptions that deconstruction implies political quietism, the paper argues that it is necessary to assume what Derrida understands by “responsibility worthy of the name” in order to counter the closure of futurity that accompanies both terrorism and political conservatism.