Abstract

Derrida often writes that responsibility is and can only be the undergoing of an aporia, an “experience of the impossible,” as if responsibility became possible from its own impossibility: “The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible”. Heidegger develops an important thought of responsibility, developed in the early works as well as in the later writings. Responsibility will thus have to find another origin than that of the free autonomous subject. Ethical responsibility is thus a matter of invention, an invention of the impossible, as it were, and not the application of a rule. In fact, there are no rules, no technique, for such responsibility. As we saw, for Derrida, responsibility is and can only be an experience of the impossible. Responsible decision is thus assigned to a “secret.”.