show, first, how rhetorical tropes “seem to make... responsi-
bility impossible” but in fact “give it a chance.”
Derrida knows exactly what he wants to do here, and it
is something crucial to his treatment of the de Man affair. He
had always been a skeptic about human intention, conscious
meaning, and empirical evidence. Now, however, he is trou-
bled, to a much greater degree than before the revelations
about de Man, by the pervasive skepticism he had advocated: a
skepticism that would deprive us of the ability to assign re-
sponsibility, to judge others and ourselves.
A call to a new kind of responsibility, Derrida suggests
here, occurs to those immersed in deconstructionist skepti-
cism. He asserts, as usual, that the difficulty of assigning au-
thorship and stable meaning to a text makes our individual
burden for saying, writing, and doing what we do also very
hard to assign—in fact, impossible. But Derrida then implies
(and this is the innovation) that the recognition of this impos-
sibility makes it all the more imperative to acknowledge the
“irreducibility of the other.” And this acknowledgment means
embracing true responsibility—toward the unknown self of
the other, which remains invisible to those who read and live
without exercising the sympathetic imagination of the friend.
If Derrida, in his pain, sidesteps the effort of pronounc-
ing a judgment on Paul de Man, he undertakes this avoidance
out of respect for the inexhaustible enigma of another human
being. It is this sense of the necessary unknownness of the
other person that torments the survivor, the Algerian Jew who
loved Paul de Man. The problem is that the obscurity of de
Man’s motives becomes in Derrida grounds for assigning to
him a heroic inner life—an effort that must be seen as an eva-
sion of the difficulty that de Man’s example presents.
As the Critical Inquiryessay goes on, agitated, perturbed,
210 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger