Responsibility—Of the Sense to Come (2002)

The chapter is the transcription of a conversation between Derrida and Nancy that took place at a conference devoted to Nancy's work—once again at the International College of Philosophy—on 18-19 January 2002. The conversation begins with the question of the relationship between responsibility and the event, the question of whether one can ever bear or assume responsibility for an event, that is, for something that happens in some sense without or before any subject, without or before anyone's decision. This question provides the terms for then rethinking a whole host of other questions, from that of the gift and of debt to questions of the relationship between philosophy and Christianity, the meaning of revelation, sense, and guilt, the commonly assumed philosophical distinction between the human and the animal, and so on.