Gift of death/derrida notes

sacred mystery vs responsibility

religion vs sacralization
religion presumes access to the responsibility of a free self.
demonic vs responsibility
this therefor amounts to a thesis on the origin and essence of the religious
one can only speak of religion after the sacred has been outmaoded.
religion exists once the secret of the sacred, orgiastic or demonic mystery has been
destroyed, at least integrated and finally subjected to the sphere of responsibility.
(2)
Religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all.
based on a response
The genesis of responsibility that P. proposes will not simply describe a history of
religion or religiousness. It will be combined with a genealogy of the subject who
says myself, the subjects relation to itself as an instance of liberty, singularity,
and responsibility, the relation to self as being before the other: the other in its
relation to infinite alterity, one who regards without being seen but also whose
infinite goodness gives in an experience that amounts to a gift of death (donner la
mort).
.
the abyss within history. Pg.4
we refuse to admit to historicity, and first and foremost to the abyss that
undermines ones own historicity.
why?
1. History of responsibility is tired to a history of religion. It is risky.
responsibility must remain extrinsic. It must not touch the essence of an experience
that consists precisely in tearing oneself away from ones own historical conditions.
What would responsibility be if it were motivated, conditioned, made possible by a

history?
2. Historicity must remain open as a problem that is never to be resolved. The
moment the problem were to be resolved, that same totalizing closure would
determine the end of history: it would bring in the verdict..
history can be neither a deecidedable object nor a totality capable of being
mastered, precisely because it is tied to responsibility, to faith, to the gift.
responsibility and faith go together, however paradoxical that might seem to some,
and both shouldexceed mastery and knowledge. The gift of death would be this
marriage of responsibility and faith.
This becoming.responsible, this becoming historical of human kind seems to be
intimately tied to the properly Christian even of another secretthe mysterium
tremendum.
this passage from exteriority to interiority.from accessible to inaccessible assures
the transition from Platonism to Christianity.

it doesnt fail to note in passing that Christianity has perhaps not yet thought
through the very essence of the self whose arrival Itnevertheless records, Christian
has not yet accorded such a self the thematic value it deserves.
pg. 7??????? Wtf
Is he saying that Christianity is a breaking with Platonism through responsibility. Or
a development of platonic resspobility
Thus history will never come to a close. WHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHY
Because of the mysterium tremendum?
historyas a series of tremors
platonic vonersion does not provide a passage from mystery to non mystery. It is
the subordination of one mysery by another, the conversation from one secret to
another. For patocka calls the platonic conversation that turns an eternal gaze
towards the good a new mystery of the soul.

Repression.
Double versionthat which turns away from orgiastic mystery towards platonic or neoplatonic
mystery as well as that which converts the latter into the Christian mysterium
tremendum it is true that the earlier mystery is subordinated by that which follows,
but it is never elimeated.

thisfacing up to a loss in the sense of keeping within oneself that whose death
must dendure. And what on keeps inside at the very moment that there comes into
paly a new experience of secrecy.

. the incorporation of one mystery by the other also amounts to an incorporation of

one immorality within another, of one eternity within another,
this enveloping of immortality also corresponds to a transaction between two
negation r or two disavoweals of death.