2.88
Attending to something means you’re slighting something else. — We can’t respond to everything that calls.
Though we may tell ourselves stories to heal and harmonize existence, and though gods to cooperate, the gods also war amongst each other: you cannot satisfy them all.
“How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every day for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant?”[1]
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attend to that to which you’re attending, nor that you could even always know what (or that) you’re slighting. But it does mean that being attentive and responsive means attending to attending.
It’s not that Oedipus should’ve had more information in his situation. His responsibility stems from what he had done. ‘He had no way of knowing what he did!’ It doesn’t matter. He did it. We put credence in intentions, in what someone ‘meant’ to do; but Oedipus did something horrendous. He feels responsible, reprehensible, in a way that responsibility isn’t beholden to what he has in his control.
The Dene are Indigenous peoples in the Great Bear Lake area in Canada’s Northwest Territories. During World War II, they were employed to mine uranium on their land without knowing for what it was being used. Some time after the war, they learned that this uranium had gone into the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan. In response, they sent a delegation on a boat trip to Japan to try to make amends to the Japanese on behalf of their land. Even though they never knew the purpose of the mining, they apologized for the use their land had been put to and their involvement in it. They apologized on behalf of themselves, their people, their land.[2]
In both cases, we sense a different sense of responsibility, one that doesn’t adhere to what is or should be in one’s control. We often do—nay, we always do—wrong without knowing — we always slight others. We can apologize for situations out of our control, on behalf of our land, as though we’re responsible for our relations; or, rather, our responsibility is, and can be, constituted only by our relatedness: we precisely are our relations.
Responsibility involves responding to calls regarding how it is we should respond: i.e., responsibility involves being responsive to responsibility; we are a responsibility to responsibility. This means that we cannot know in advance what it means to respond, let alone to respond adequately.
[1] Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 71.
[2] Peter Blow, director, Village of Widows: The Story of the Sahtu Dene and the Atomic Bomb, Lindum Films, 1999, 52 min; Julie Salverson, Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir (Hamilton, ON: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd., 2016); Peter C. Van Wyck, The Highway of the Atom (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), p. 38–49, 160, 180–8, 204; Canada-Déline Uranium Table, Final Report: Concerning Health and Environmental Issues Related to the Port Radium Mine, August 2005; Dene First Nation of Déline, They Never Told Us These Things, July 1998.