Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

The theoretical structure and historicity of this phenomenon can be fully grasped by zoning in on the axial moment in the history of European modern philosophy that mediates ethicist conceits. Kant’s critical philosophy, the idea of philosophy as a science, constitutes such moment. Kant’s transcendental philosophy abstracts from all given objects in order to grasp cognition itself, as well as the apodictic conditions of possibility for practical activity. Thought is thus autonomized in hitherto unprecedented ways. Indeed, autonomy is the crucial category in the form and content of the critical philosophy Kant inaugurated, which reconceived questions of obligations and duties. If, historically, ethics was the domain of knowledge that made practical-moral questions its object—its domain of inquiry—within the context of Kant’s critical philosophy, ethics became further autonomized from the historical conditions and concrete situations that are inexorably constitutive of the practical-moral problems ethics generally reflects upon. There is, of course, something deeply paradoxical about this autonomization of ethics as moral philosophy: the more dirempted ethics becomes from ethical activity, the more it seeks to determine, even colonize it. It is as if the autonomization of the ethical self has led to a severance of ethical activity from political action that nevertheless conflates ethical activity with ethics and colonizes political action by way of philosophical conceits about the primacy of ethics over politics.

For Kant, morality ties autonomy and duty to the rational laws emerging out of universalizable maxims of moral behavior. Kant laid out a sense of duty in which the form of a moral law is more important than its content and is also indifferent to the locus of action in which it occurs. Unlike previous moral philosophies—including those in the tradition of eighteenth-century British moralists, for whom virtue and vice are always measured in response to others rather than being defined by solipsistic acts—the solipsism of Kantian formalist duty is striking.³ If the argument of the Critique of Pure Reason is taken as a point of departure, the precondition of the autonomous moral self that rigorously follows the precepts of the categorical imperative resides in the interstices of the antinomy of freedom and necessity.⁴ In the universe laid out by the Critique of Pure Reason, only as a noumenal self can one be free, and thus held responsible for acting out of duty and not out of inclination—this is where the autonomy of the self resides. And, for this autonomy and its corollary duties to be actualized, a radical diremption of the realms of pure and practical reason was required. But it is precisely this diremption, which salvaged autonomy, that created a gulf, making its actualization almost impossible.⁵ A severance not easily extricated. It rests on a distinction crucial for his epistemology.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant presents a rigorous distinction between two senses of the self. On the one hand, the phenomenal self—the one that an “I” closely identifies with its experience—is the empirical storage of the manifold experiences that it apprehends. On the other, there is the “I’s” truer self, which is noumenal. The empirical self is regulated by the laws governing other physical bodies and hence incapable of being autonomous and free. If the empirical self seems to be the storage of experience, the noumenal self is the self that is rational, the one in which all the formal rational qualities reside. Though solipsistic, the self is split: the noumenal self makes the moral rules that the phenomenal self follows. These two selves, the noumenal and the phenomenal, and their two distinct realms, correlate with another crucial distinction built into the architecture of Kant’s argument. Concepts, herein cast as binding rules, are acquired through factual experience, but their transcendental status is deduced by means of establishing their “objective validity.”⁶ In a way, the burden of the argument in Critique of Pure Reason is to close the gap between the two selves and establish a unity of apperception in which the ultimately unknowable noumenal self provides the categories for understanding that organize and make sense of the manifold experience collected through the phenomenal self. And, ever since its publication, commentators on the Critique of Pure Reason have pondered the exact relation between the two selves.⁷ But this elusive intersection bears on more than matters of epistemology. It has consequences for Kantian moral theory: duty is the province of noumena, but inclination is part of the phenomenal self. Even so, duty prevails over inclination, and for the empirical self—that is, that self which is experiencing inclinations—to behave ethically it has to be subjected to the imperative of duty, whose formal contours have a content and an impact on it, despite Kant’s disavowal of the content of this formalism. Perhaps the most important aspect of the centrality of duty is the sharp demarcation between acting out of duty, which is moral, and acting according to duty, which in the strictness of Kantian ethics is not.

The relationship between selves is clearly asymmetrical, since for the noumenal self the content of the empirical self, mediated by the texture of everyday life, its memories and predicaments, is morally irrelevant. And the form of the categorical imperative has a content that is indifferent to that of one’s empirical self. Consequently, the end result of Kantianism is dehistoricized formalism that asserts the autonomy of the rational subject as a precondition of freedom and moral responsibility; here responsibility pivots on the idea of ascribed actions to the autonomous subject. Herein autonomy displaces heteronomy as a source of morality; intrasubjectivity supplants intersubjectivity. All of this reflects Kant’s concern with establishing the binding authority of principles and practices deployed ordinarily in everyday life, while bulking the binding legitimacy of the concepts of freedom and agency that these moral considerations presuppose.⁸ For instance, in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals this is formulated as part of the idea of duty and the moral law that are the necessary corollaries to his quest for “the supreme principle of morality,” a quest that is cast as necessarily binding for all rational agents; meanwhile, in The Metaphysics of Morals, ethics not only deals with formal conditions but “goes beyond this and provides matter (an object of free choice), an end of pure reason which it represents as an end that is also objectively necessary, that is, an end that, as far as human beings are concerned, it is a duty to have.”⁹

Necessity is, accordingly, an intrinsic component of his ethics of imperatives. It entails following rules, which, in turn, are the form of the norm, or imperative. Being bound to and by rules is constitutive of normativity in Kant’s critical philosophy: the ideal of necessity (Notwendigkeit) that underwrites his critical epistemology demands an obligation to act in accordance with a rule, the same sense of necessity supporting his morality of duty. Autonomy thus resides in being bound by rules that one gives to oneself and is responsible for, a sense of bindingness that is already at work in Kant’s theory of mental activity. As Robert B. Brandom has shown, Kantian judgments are not only “minimal units of responsibility,” which are already at work in the synthesizing act that the unity of apperception carries on, but these units already express commitments, thus enacting epistemological responsibilities antecedent to the formulations found in Kant’s practical philosophy.¹⁰ These epistemological variations of responsibility—integrative, critical, ampliative—already render the Kantian self “responsible for doing something” and take place outside of history.¹¹ Herein responsibility emerges as a fundamentally intrasubjective category.¹² But if this idea of responsibility is historicized and brought to bear outside of that noumenal “realm of ends,” and considered embedded in political situations constituted by binding historical processes characterized by continuities and discontinuities, this imperative of necessity fares unevenly, to put it mildly.

Once cast in historically constituted scenes of action, the intersections between acting out of duty and according to it are significantly muddled.¹³ Here, in the realm of ethical activity, the mediations of law, institutions, and political forms are ineludible. Indeed, Kantian responsibility equivocally oscillates between moral obligation and legal constraint, both of which are necessarily binding, albeit on different grounds.¹⁴ Even duty may be internal and external: “The very concept of duty is already the concept of necessitation (constraint) of free choice through the law. This constraint may be an external constraint or a self-constraint”; yet duty is thus “not merely a self-constraint…but also a self-constraint in accordance with a principle of inner freedom, and so through the…representation of one’s duty in accordance with its formal law.”¹⁵ The objective obstacle against which responsible autonomy is measured is not unknowable noumena, but inclinations. It is in the interstices of these antinomian constraints, and the eminently intrasubjective dialectic of internalization and externalization defining them, that Kantian ideas of responsibility are formulated. The grounds of responsibility are ultimately found in the “normativeness of the conceptual” and the forms of action it inaugurates.¹⁶ Hence we are responsible for the acts that follow from our sense of fidelity to behaving in accordance with the rules of the categorical imperative. Within Kant’s ethics, despite the immersion of the individual in a web of institutionalized and intersubjective relations, responsibility necessarily remains an individual moral endeavor autonomous from these conditions. Kant’s is the most cogent philosophical articulation of the modern idea of individualized intrasubjective responsibility.

After Kant, questions of intrasubjective responsibility were replaced by ideas of freedom-in-necessity.¹⁷ Even so, the many facets of the problem of subjectivity—cognition, self-knowledge, autonomy, and phenomenological experience—that triggered and mediated these philosophical discussions, were inherited from Kantian philosophy. In Robert B. Pippin’s lucid rendering, what is at stake are “the conditions under which one could be said ‘to actually lead a life,’ wherein one’s deeds and practices are and are experienced as one’s own”; namely, subjectivity is the extent to which freedom and responsibility are possible: the former defined as “being able somehow to own up to, justify, and stand behind one’s deeds (reclaim them as my own), and that involves (so it is argued) understanding what it is to be responsive to norms, reasons.”¹⁸ If in Kant such understanding involves owning up to actions that are the outcome of obedience to self-legislating, rational laws, an obedience that is grounded in acting correctly in accordance with duty, Hegelian accounts of responsibilities and duties incorporate as central the historical dilemmas of institutionality and predicaments of power that mediate action and the dialectic of independence and dependence that is constitutive of freedom. For Hegel, action, like the self, is historical, and what binds the two are complex webs of institutions that mediate the texture of collective life. In this conception, to borrow Terry Eagleton’s lucid formulation, “institutions are how others are constitutive of the self even when they are unknown to us.”¹⁹ Intersubjective relations are thereby thoroughly mediated by social and historical relations.

That owning up to one’s actions and their consequences is a constitutive tenet of a rational concept of responsibility is uncontroversial enough from an ethical or political perspective. But how to precisely conceive this idea became one of the challenges that post-Kantian Germany philosophy had to face, as it had also to reckon with new social and political dimensions, the modern imperatives of institutionality and power mediating them, and the collective dimension of many actions. In this context, Kant’s unresolved philosophical questions and problems were inherited and recast in a context thoroughly mediated by these political and social questions. One prominent heir was Hegel. Brandom has offered a discerning formulation of his inheritance of the Kantian problematic:

In this way, Hegel grants the Kantian problematic an Aristotelian dimension by emphasizing the social nature of responsibility and how determinations and institutional mediations are crucial for freedom and for both ethical and political accountability. For Hegel, accordingly, institutions provide a crucial mediation for the actualization of freedom and responsibility. This leads him to conceive freedom in terms of different degrees of realization and determination, depending on the texture of institutional and other imperatives mediating one’s scene of action. Unlike Kant, Hegel proceeded historically in order to retrace the different moments of self-constitution that authorized collectively over time, as well as the emergence of binding norms for which one is responsible; hence the centrality of memory as recollection in Hegel’s account of Geist’s unfolding in history and its consciousness of freedom as recounted in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1804). Indeed, in this vein Hegel rearticulated the role of necessity in ethical life by casting freedom in determination and in his insight that the realization of freedom relies on historical and institutional determinations.

For all its notorious abstraction, Hegel’s philosophy takes as its point of departure actuality, the existence of situated concrete historical agents in history, thus portending a realism in which the dialectic of rationality and actuality is at work. Hegel’s philosophy speculatively formulates the identity and nonidentity of rationality and actuality in the widely misunderstood formulation of the identity and nonidentity of the real and the rational.²¹ This realism is important for his account of ethical life, an account of the historical world that addresses the collective nature of ethics and the forms of interdependence that defined the lives of individuals in the historical, social, and political world. It is the world of freedom actualized in relations of reciprocity whose concrete actualization is the purpose of ethical life, its end. Certainly, there is more than a tinge of Aristotle in Hegel’s account of ends, even if his notion is irreducible to a belated Aristotelianism. Rather, it is as part of conceptualizing this externalization of action that he reworks and speculatively renders the intersections between intentionality, responsibility, and purpose.

Hegel thus complicates and sublates the Kantian account of duty and offers an account of duty that externalizes it as activity.²² In it, the individual re-cognizes her or his relationship to the law comprehensively; namely, she or he is conceived as responsible for the law, whose corollaries, not preconditions, are, then, responsibility to and before the law. Ethical life is thus conceived as collective. And it is along these lines that Hegel’s dialectic debars moralizing and abstract critique. Instead, it registers contradictions in the situation, which is thus soberly confronted as contradictory and as mediated by the different institutional imperatives in the actualization of freedom. It also offers a novel account of the interdependence of means and ends in the externalization and actualization of political and ethical responsibilities.²³

Central to this account of ethical responsibility is a dialectical formulation of the idea of will, which is the driving principle of Hegel’s account of ethical life. Indeed, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right traces the conceptual unfolding and concretization of the will, whose development he situates in conjunction with three analytically distinct stages: abstract right, morality, and ethical life. The last is the realm of the realization of freedom as the end of ethical life, end here understood as purpose. Thus the central insight at work in Hegel’s political thought is the notion of freedom as a result whose determinations are actualized in the context of “ethical life,” in the world that spirit (Geist) has immanently created for itself as a second nature (§§ 4, 151; cf. § 272).²⁴ This is an eminently historical world whose conceptualization and comprehension is always a form of self-knowledge.²⁵ A core idea of the Philosophy of Right is precisely how “recognition” and “right,” notions that are central for his account of civil society and the state, “come into effect through the mediation of the arbitrary will,” an activity that is “the more precise definition of what is primarily meant by the universal idea of freedom,” an ideal whose actualization is thoroughly mediated (§ 206; cf. §§ 104, 121).²⁶ The Philosophy of Right takes the reader through the path of these mediations in the sphere of the family, civil society (where a collective sense of responsibility initially crystallizes), and the state.

It is in this dialectical journey that Hegel introduces the discussion of purpose and responsibility, which had occupied him at least since the Jena System of Ethical Life (1802–1803), within the context of Morality, the realm of the individual.²⁷ Rightly so, Hegel relegates questions of guilt and criminal liability to the realm of Abstract Right, and discusses responsibility within the context of Morality’s higher but still abstract actualization of freedom (§§ 104–5). Therein, he lays out the formal aspects of his conceptualization of responsibility, even if these only become fully actualized as part of ethical life. As in the Jena version, responsibility is linked with intentionality or, to be more precise, with purpose (§§ 115–18). At this stage, by way of the externalization of its activity, the subject is the corollary of the legalism that defined the discussion of abstract right. It thus conceptualizes and comprehends the relationship between actions and intentions as partial, one defined by motives and intentions, but not by consequences. This, to be sure, constitutes a more superior conceptualization of responsibility than the solipsism of abstract right, but one still riven by antinomies. Responsibility, for long-term aftereffects, or structural effects that go beyond the immediate purpose, is severed from the agent: “The will thus has the right to accept responsibility only for the first set of consequences, since they alone were part of its purpose” (§ 118).²⁸ The moment of truth in this formulation, of course, resides in the awareness this conceptualization of responsibility betrays of the gaps between intention, action, and effect; namely, the distinction between necessary and contingent consequences, even if at this moment these are abstracted from concrete social relations. Only as part of ethical life can a comprehension and conceptualization of the circumstances mediating the consequences of actions, the necessity of contingencies, and the mediations of the actualization of freedom as a historical process, be comprehended as part of a dialectical conceptualization of responsibility encompassing both internal and external determinations.

The culmination of this conception of responsibility is found in the idea of citizenship as a productive activity whose actions are the basis for freedom and responsibility and where the gap between intention and effect would be more comprehensively staged without disavowing the centrality of consequences for an ethics of activity.²⁹ Responsibility, moreover, relies on a realist reckoning with actuality that resists abstract autonomizations and equally abstract Sollen. Hegel’s is an account of responsibility that avows the structuring role of imperatives that constrain choices and the possibility of action, which always happens in history and within a historically constituted situation. Ends, means, and circumstances are all contained in the situation, as apprehended by the subject, and in the action itself. Here are, in toto, the different moments of the dialectical externalization of responsibility. Its ultimate locus of action for the actualization of freedom is collective political life. “According to Hegel,” in Max Horkheimer’s formulation, “rationality consists concretely in the unity of objective and subjective freedom: that is, in the unity of the general will and the individuals who carry out its ends,”³⁰ provided this unity is speculatively conceived. Formally, Hegel’s was a move in the direction of mediations that allowed for a critical mapping of the ways in which freedom and necessity intersect politically; political freedom requires equality and political literacy. Hegel’s Sittlichkeit thus develops Kantian themes of autonomy and freedom and seeks to render them concrete, as part of a historically situated social process.³¹ However, in a world of dualisms, of dirempted reason and market rationality, this conception of freedom became increasingly difficult, not to say aporetic. Even so, out of the post-Kantian tradition, Hegel remains the best expositor of dirempted reason and its contradictions and an indispensable point of reference for attempts to retrieve the dialectical legacy and conceptualize responsibility qua ethical activity outside Ethics, beyond methodological individualism and other liberal conceits. Indeed, it was by reflecting on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that the young Marx was able to conjure an obvious corollary of Hegel’s ideas of sovereignty and responsibility: “the subject” as the “self-incarnation of sovereignty,” the “becoming a subject” of the revolutionary citizen.³²

Unsurprisingly, Hegel’s dialectical formulations of ethical life, let alone anything like a Hegelian-Marxist political ethic, have had little ascendance in North Atlantic scholarly circles. The dominant strategy has been to formulate versions of ethical politics, which seek to preemptively anchor, and curb, political commitments in ethical principles. In its analytical guises, the afterlives of the Kantian legacy largely consist of efforts to set up in advance an imperative, however heteronomous, without consideration of how the space of action, its locus, is constructed by a regulatory matrix, and what forms of response it enacts and forecloses. And when abstractions are left behind—and history is let in—the entrance of historical determinations and contingencies has a loosening effect: once historicized, these seemingly chiseled moral principles quietly unravel, which is perhaps why their proponents so zealously seek to autonomize them. Yet, before examining contemporary autonomizations of moral responsibility within analytical philosophy, it is worth considering Nietzsche’s significant contribution to intrasubjective ideas of responsibility.

And yet little if any of this could be surmised by looking at current aseptic interpretations of Nietzsche.³⁴ These interpretations read Nietzsche, as the jargon of Theory would have it, as a thinker bent on overcoming modern forms of domination, either committed to a generalized overcoming of the leveling tendencies of mass society for the sake of a new individual freedom and responsibility beyond the pieties of the day (his and today’s, that is) or as an ambiguous aesthete mostly committed to a cultural overcoming that, while allergic to liberalism, socialism, and Christianity, miraculously remains politically indeterminate.³⁵ Likewise, a well-nigh infinite malleability disavowing conceptual and historical determinants is present in these metaphorical and allegorical readings. It is in connection with the prevalence of politically aseptic interpretations of Nietzsche, and his allure in contemporary theoretical discussions, that Malcolm Bull has polemically asked, “Where is the Anti-Nietzsche?”³⁶ An invocation that brings into view the paradox of embracing a body of work forged at the high pitch of politicization during the nineteenth century in the name of reinvigorating democracy in contexts largely defined by modalities of depoliticized politics—embraces that are either historically naive, at best, or perverse, at worst.

Consider the following interpretations of Nietzsche’s critique and conceptualization of responsibility: for Robert Pippin, Nietzsche is best understood as “one of the last great ‘French Moralists’” whose critique of responsibility as accountability urges readers “to give up another remnant of the Christian system,” which consists in “our belief in the ontologically distinct subject as agent, separable from, supervising, willing into existence, and individually responsible for her particular actions”—an interpretation that leads Pippin to ask: “should not Nietzsche be aware that, by eliminating as nonsensical the idea that appears to be a necessary condition for the deed to be a deed—a subject’s individual causal responsibility for the deed’s occurring—he has eliminated any way of properly understanding the notion of responsibility, or that he has eliminated even a place for criticism of an agent?” In contrast, and preempting this sort of questioning, Bonnie Honig has identified two senses of responsibility at work in Nietzsche’s critique: first, the critique of responsibility as accountability for actions, which pivots on the idea of guilt, and, second, a “recovery” of responsibility that entails overcoming “the need to make sense of misfortune by linking it to blameworthy agents, to move beyond the self-destructive agency of moral responsibility,” thus “severing the resentful ties that bind the subject to his past but also the tie that binds the subject to his fellows”: an account that reverberates in Vanessa Lemm’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s “agonistic politics of responsibility,” which consists of “a continuous resistance to the institutionalization of freedom,” since “neither what one has by virtue of an instituted right nor what one is given by virtue of a mutual agreement, but always only what one fights for, what one conquers”—responsibility thus recovered “reflects a power that results from the overcoming of the need to dominate others” as well as “the privilege of those who give and promise to the other and who see in this gift and giving the greatest extension of their power.” Meanwhile, less sanguinely but no less aseptically, David Owen glosses Nietzsche’s account of responsibility in reference to Machiavelli and Emerson and writes that “Nietzsche allows for degrees of ethical virtù” and his “figure of the sovereign individual dramatizes an attitude, a will to self-responsibility (in Emerson’s language: self-reliance), which is manifest in the perpetual striving to increase, to expand, one’s powers of self-government such that one can bear, incorporate and, even, love one’s fate—one’s exposure to chance and necessity,” while “committed to a processual (i.e., non-teleological) perfectionism.” If Owen offers a Nietzsche where Machiavelli meets Emerson, Christian Emden strikes a Weberian note when he argues that “Nietzsche’s ethic of responsibility seeks to address that, virtually in every case, the world of ethical action is simply gray,” as a thinker that scorned “the moralization of the political” and posed a “double-bind of autonomy and responsibility” that defines his free spirits—which are also the heralds of “autonomous individuals” able to coolly “avoid the effects of demagogy and political fanaticism”—and whose “political realization” is to be sought in “Nietzsche’s idea of Europe.” Meanwhile, for Robert Gooding-Williams, self-overcoming emerges as the conditions of possibility for assuming political responsibility: “In the wake of the demise of peoples, the creator’s responsibility for transforming humanity into a people must fall to individuals.…This responsibility is a political responsibility.” Finally, Paul Franco has suggested that after the death of god “we must become our benevolent gods and take responsibility for all the things that we have hitherto left to chance”—by the time of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra what is at stake is “the transition from the apolitical free spirit to the responsibility to rule” that demands “self-cultivation.”³⁷

Unquestionably, these are serious interpretations that capture important aspects of Nietzsche’s reflections on responsibility. But, in their prudishness, each interpretation distorts one fundamental aspect of Nietzsche’s theorization, and certainly not an expendable one: namely, how his overcoming of responsibility as accountability, and his emphasis on a different sense of responsibility, are conceived as a political response to the threat of equality that affirms a form of sovereignty predicated on hierarchy, war, and an order of rank. All of which is part and parcel of the quasi-transcendental argument about valuation that he formulates to defend and ultimately hypostatize inequality.³⁸ In the effort to conceptualize Nietzsche’s avowal of a different kind of responsibility, not only are his own historically informed pronouncements evaded, silenced, or perfunctorily adduced, but other figures, either prior or posterior—Machiavelli, Weber, Sartre—are brigaded to elucidate the political import of Nietzsche’s recovery of responsibility without dealing with the explicit and implicit political content as it is expressed in his writings: his deliberate responses to historical political situations and predicaments and how ruling and ruled are built into this account.

This is not to say that Nietzsche’s views are negligible and are irremediably shackled to his formulations. Nietzsche’s account of responsibility amounts to a body of work of immense intelligence and polemical intensity, which conjures illuminating insights on the intersections among responsibility, critique, memory, and the future.³⁹ Thus the critical import of Nietzsche’s critique of responsibility as accountability has been amply noted, either in terms of the ways in which it paves the way for late modern critiques of liberal subjectivity, of an accountable yet powerless subject who resentfully reacts rather than acts, and moralizes, or in terms of the ways it challenges the idea of the docile political subject, one who is “calculable” and whose regularized behavior is predictable.⁴⁰ What is often brushed aside, however, is the rather solipsistic and ultimately intrasubjective nature of Nietzsche’s recasting of responsibility, along with the politically reactionary nature of his disavowals of collective action and his avowal of an aristocratic “party of life.”⁴¹ All of this is predicated on a political ecology of value in which domination and exploitation figure as necessary for genuine valuation.⁴² Peter Dews has offered an accurate formulation when he writes: “Nietzsche knows as well as Walter Benjamin that ‘there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ It is just that he thinks the pact is well worth it.”⁴³ It is this key valuation that constitutes the generative matrix of his political thought.

Politically, Nietzsche was responding to the advent of mass politics and revolution in post-Napoleonic Europe, a context that saw the Paris Commune—a traumatic experience for both him and Marx: for Marx because of the repression of workers, for Nietzsche because of the supposed burning of the Louvre by the Communards—the emancipation of slavery across the Atlantic, women’s suffrage, anarchism, and socialism. And all this he contemptuously derided in his published works and private letters.⁴⁴ With historical and philological acuity, Domenico Losurdo has painstakingly shown how many of the concepts and categories of Nietzsche’s political thought—order of rank, pathos of distance, party of life, war, rabble, annihilation, aristocracy—need to be understood in relation to philosophical, intellectual, cultural, and political contexts. This carefully teases out the level of embeddedness of Nietzsche’s ideas in the political and intellectual discussions of his times.⁴⁵ A critical reckoning that leaves room for an accurate discernment of that which Losurdo calls the “theoretical excess” (eccedenza teorica) that emerges by carefully interpreting Nietzsche’s thought. Such a critique demands breaking free from what he sardonically calls the “hermeneutics of innocence” in mainstream Nietzsche scholarship:

There is a touch of anachronism in Losurdo’s contention about the immediate connection of nineteenth-century exterminatory violence and Nazism, but the overall historical judgment holds, as does his larger interpretative point.⁴⁷ Or, as he later states, in conjunction with his interpretation of the dogmatic and nondogmatic moments in Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism, a differentiated account adept at discerning the contradictions found in this body of work, including the moments with a potential emancipatory import: “Underlining the character totus politicus and consistently reactionary of Nietzsche’s thought hardly means indulging in reductionism and losing sight of the theoretical excess.”⁴⁸ As such, this eccedenza needs to be scrupulously pondered and recast without disavowing the obdurate sedimentations from the situation in which it emerged and the contents Nietzsche accorded it. For Nietzsche’s “grand politics” portended fantasies of “breaking in two” the history of humanity that invited radical rupture. But his was a plea for rupture that was hardly politically indeterminate. Rather, the content of this formal hypostatization of rupture is profoundly counterrevolutionary, as is his account of the responsibility of “free spirits,” whose fidelity is geared as it is for a form of politics of hierarchy. Any “theoretical excess,” as it were, needs to be critically reconstructed without whitewashing his political thought.

The intuitive appeal of Nietzsche’s critique of ethics and retrieval of responsibility has something to do with the bidirectionality of Nietzsche’s critique: while opposing the coldness of Kantian duty, he is equally contemptuous of Hegelian ideas of ethical life. A double-edged critique that, nevertheless, has tended to conceal the ways in which Nietzsche hypostatizes an intrasubjective solipsism as part of his retrieval of responsibility. In Nietzsche’s thought, responsibility is largely a surrogate for the creative destruction that he avows: the creation of new values by wiping out the sedimentation of the old in radical acts of solipsistic defiance. Responsibility thus figures largely in his mature philosophy, from the so-called middle period on, where a radical ethos of critique meets a politics of memory and both are folded into a longing for a hierarchical politics of mastery in the sphere of culture that, nevertheless, is firmly supported by an order of rank hostile to any form of egalitarianism (liberal, socialism, anarchist, democratic, let alone Christian).⁴⁹

In Nietzsche’s writings there are at least two senses of responsibility: the critique of it as accountability and a radical retrieval of responsibility as central to the critical ethos of the philosopher of the future, the philosophy of the “dangerous perhaps,” that acts and responds to a predicament of power largely defined by leveling historical forces. Nietzsche’s is a new philosopher whose spiritual fortitude is the provenance of the few, but who soberly and fiercely confronts nihilism and acts in the face of it by means of the creation of new values.⁵⁰ These are themes that in the early twentieth century would certainly resound in Max Weber’s plea for a political hero in “Politics as a Vocation.” But, in contrast to Weber, what Nietzsche longs for in On the Genealogy of Morality is a tabula rasa, a clean slate, “to make room for new things,” that entails the sort of forgetfulness “memory” impairs. Its correlate: the “memory of the will,” which defines the responsible individual, his ability to make promises, and his presumed capacity to foresee the consequences of his acts.⁵¹ Here we see the radical critique of responsibility as accountability and the fetters it imposes on the will. The critique of responsibility thus yields a critique of memory, which in Nietzsche’s one-sided view is the antipode of forgetting.⁵² But something akin to this memory of the will defines “the new philosopher,” whom Nietzsche conjured in Beyond Good and Evil, albeit in recast form; this figure, “the man of the most comprehensive responsibility,” is a lawgiver for whom the past is “a means, an instrument, a hammer” for the enactment of new values and whose responsibility resides in creating these new values and an ensuing “order of rank.”⁵³ The new philosopher has to discern what is life-affirming and life-denying and have a fidelity to the former. That a memory of a usable past is presupposed by this reactionary ethos goes without saying. The past is not there just to be abolished tout court; it is there to show instances of life-affirming hierarchies, orders of rank that serve as a model and yardstick to criticize, say, the egalitarianism of Christianity and the French Revolution.⁵⁴

Even so, this is a far less straightforward account than most interpreters make it out to be. Roberto Alejandro has perceptively shown how “in the first essay [of On the Genealogy of Morality], free will is invented by the slaves, but in the second essay, free will, along with self-mastery, is one of the defining features of the sovereign individual.”⁵⁵ Moreover, in his characterization of the origins of free will and of responsibility as accountability, Nietzsche conflates any sense of equality with sameness, and his retrieval of responsibility aims to go beyond the forms of guilt that have defined and ultimately subdued powerful communities by way of the moralization of duty.⁵⁶ While the “the origins of responsibility” reside in the processes of “making man to a certain degree necessary, uniform, a peer amongst peers, orderly and consequently predictable,” it bears an unpredictable aspect that is discernable once looked at retrospectively:

Mastering “circumstances” and “all creatures with a less enduring and reliable will” is thus not ancillary to Nietzsche’s retrieval of responsibility; a recovery that explicitly disavows any collective connotation of responsibility and rather anchors it in an elite capable of self-overcoming. As such, it requires mastery, something only accessible through an unspecified but decidedly hierarchical political order, an order that serves as a political condition of possibility for the kind of cultural creation he defends, which he hopes to keep undefiled by the rabble, the masses.

Two contrasting passages shed further light on the political import of Nietzsche’s critique and retrieval of responsibility: first, a statement twice repeated in Beyond Good and Evil: “every great philosophy has hitherto been…a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir”; second, an assertion in On the Genealogy of Morality: “there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought,—the doing is everything.”⁵⁸ Here it is worth parsing out what is implied in these passages: on the one hand, how the avowals and disavowals, conceits and rhetorical maneuvering on the part of an author are as important to understand an oeuvre as is its manifest content; on the other hand, however, he posits the diremption of “doer” from “deed” in ways that resonate with modern philosophical concerns about agency. It is because of the latter that Nietzsche is interpreted as a critic of sovereign agency. In the context of the section in question (On the Genealogy of Morality: essay 1, section 13), the critique of an objective and transcendental substratum of meaning is put forward as part of a larger displacement of responsibility. This displacement is in sync with Nietzsche’s ontology of innocence and the moral indifference of nature, and is equally homologous to his debunking of the transcendental structures of meaning associated with German idealism. Conversely, these passages at once link ideas, concepts, and doctrines to the subjective, even psychological, dispositions of the type of individual that would formulate them, but also chasten any sense of sovereignty of the doer over the deed, thus undermining the connection that would ascribe responsibility for an action in the context of a collective ethical life.⁵⁹ Attribution, and, by extension, accountability, are thus severely weakened, but not effaced. These are both affirmed and denied.

Something like a dialectic of imputation is at work here, one frequently construed as the cornerstone of Nietzsche’s critique of accountability as docile calculability or as a critical affirmation of the constitutive gap between agent and action in human predicaments. Yet, for all their attractiveness, these constructions are, at best, the theoretical excess of Nietzsche’s thought, not its actual content. For the weakening of attribution and imputation is part and parcel of a radically aristocratic quest for unfettered creation, a retrieval of a new futurist sense of responsibility, a recasting of responsibility that paradoxically assumes a burden without any strong sense of attribution. This is an eminently intrasubjective idea of responsibility that nevertheless pivots on an ecology of values from which it is insulated and thus unaccountable, even if its actions reverberate in the forms of domination and exploitation that are its condition of possibility. That such ecology of values cannot but find institutional expression in profoundly hierarchical cultural and political orders goes without saying—and assuming this new form of intrasubjective responsibility is predicated on the disavowal of responsibility qua imputation and accountability vis-à-vis the predicaments of power it both sustains and inaugurates.

Evidently, not every act has an agent immediately behind it, nor is every form of violence traceable to an intention or will. That is the moment of truth in Nietzsche’s critique. Even so, violent predicaments of power and suffering are not always directly constituted and sanctioned by the classes and groups benefiting from how particular situations are structured. And sometimes those presiding over the social order in question do not intend such predicaments. But, by virtue of their role in their social reproduction, such predicaments can be attributed to the orders these actors preside over and sanction. Therein lies their responsibility qua political actors. Assuming responsibility beyond an imputable will demands forms of attribution and accountability, along with ascertaining degrees of responsibility. And that is precisely what Nietzsche’s account sets out to exclude. In contrast, his retrieval of a new responsibility largely consists of a quest for a life-affirming culture and its institutional conditions of possibility, which include an order of rank whose attainment is paved by ennobling suffering, violence, and war. Its explicit locus and end is the cultivation of this new order and the process to achieve it; implicit is the ecology of values it presupposes and the hierarchical Macht politics required to sanction and sustain it. Achieving these orders requires undermining older notions of responsibility, including severing the constitutive mediation between doer and deed, and the forms of imputation and accountability these avow, for the sake of the self-responsibility that defines the unfettered overcoming of oneself.

That the foregoing are not arbitrary deductions of the political valences, or import, of Nietzsche’s account of responsibility, but rather textually anchored, can be ascertained by considering a remarkable formulation found in Twilight of the Idols titled “My conception of Freedom.” Here Nietzsche asserts that the value of a thing often resides in what it takes to attain it, the process itself rather than the outcome. Still, what is ultimately at stake in Nietzsche’s account is the possibility of a concept of freedom that carries the forms of struggle associated with war at its center in an inhospitable world, as a world constituted by ideas of equality, freedom and fraternity, communism and abolitionism, fetters the instincts for hierarchical orders of rank and their constitutive forms of domination.⁶⁰ War is a “training in freedom,” but freedom not understood in the chimerical sense of the party of movement, let alone in the Kantian and Hegelian accounts—one ethereal in its rationality, while the other is frustratingly anchored in collective institutions. Rather, for Nietzsche freedom rests on the solipsistic determinations of “self-responsibility” involving struggle.⁶¹ Struggle is thus hypostatized in a no less reified idea of overcoming whose tragic dimension is secluded in the new aristocracy of free spirits.

Nietzsche casts this constant overcoming, which has ethical implications for the free spirit, in a more explicitly political vein:

The order of castes, order of rank, only formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary for the preservation of society, for making possible higher and higher types—inequality of rights is the condition for the existence of rights at all. A right is a privilege. The privilege of each is determined by the nature of his being. Let us not underestimate the privilege of the mediocre. Life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights—the coldness increases, the responsibility increases. A high culture is a pyramid: it can only stand on a broad base, its very first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity.⁶³

Nietzsche’s contempt for equality largely stems from an aristocratic cast of mind that avowed struggle and war and rebukes liberal neutralizations not for revolutionary purposes but for counterrevolutionary ones. Other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European figures shared a similar aristocratic cast of mind: Tocqueville, Weber, and Ortega y Gasset readily come to mind. But, unlike any of the aforementioned thinkers, Nietzsche was uncompromising with the democratic forces of the masses as political actors, and toward the end of his productive life, during his period of “reconciliation,” he insisted on actualizing this cast of mind into the “party of life:” That new party of life, which would tackle the greatest of all tasks, the attempt to raise humanity higher, including the restless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical, would again make possible that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state would have to awaken again. “I promise a tragic age; the highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, which will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it.”⁶⁴ In the face of it, this is a rather inscrutable formulation. But, once interpreted in light of his severance of responsibility from a collectively shared predicament of power, a shared fate between rulers and ruled, this lack of suffering could be possible in the context of wars that, while presided over by the party of life, have consequences that are not assumed by it: namely, wars whose initiators and instigators are accountable to no one and only responsible to themselves, wars that are the means and ends of their self-overcoming. The party of life is insulated from imputability and severed from any community of fate between its members and the casualties incurred in its violent endeavors.

This is, at any rate, what a nonarbitrary interpretation of the meaning of Nietzsche’s invocation of a “party of life,” and its tenets of destructive creation in the context of his diremption of doer and deed, might yield, but an interpretation that, however tenuous, is truer to the textual evidence than the starchy euphemisms of many a hermeneut of innocence. Clearly, in light of Nietzsche’s objections and disavowals, this party of life is hardly a mass party, even if his account of the “ascetic priest” in On the Genealogy of Morality raises questions about the prospects of analogous elites at the service of life.⁶⁵ It is no plain metaphor either. Rather, it foreshadows an eminently intrasubjective sense of self-responsibility embedded in the will to power. It is in the conjuring of the party of life where his recovery of responsibility is most clearly politically cast. In the summer of 1885 Nietzsche was very forthcoming about the political content of his transmogrification of responsibility:

Inexorable, hesitating, terrible as fate, the great task and question is approaching: how shall the earth as a whole be governed? And for what shall “man” as a whole—no longer just one people, one race—be raised and bred? The legislative moralities are the main means of fashioning out of men whatever a creative and profound will desires, assuming that such an artistic will of the highest rank holds power and asserts its creative will over long periods of time, in the shape of laws, religion, and customs.

That these statements are uttered in the age of the Berlin conference, as European powers engaged in their scramble for Africa, which offered plentiful opportunities for European mastery of the world, albeit not in the terms Nietzsche advocated, is seldom acknowledged. Better still, equally unacknowledged are how rhetorical strategies that precisely involved “starting from the existing moral law and sheltering under its words and forms” had, by the late nineteenth century, become a trademark of the counterrevolutionary right in its subversion and resignification of values, something of which this avid observer of the political processes unfolding of his present would not have been unaware.⁶⁷ Similarly, Nietzsche’s unabated and unwavering contempt for liberalism, democracy, and socialism rests on a largely imagined and thus idealized aristocratic past that is invoked not out of restorative impulses but rather as a way to prefigure a world to come. And Nietzsche’s vaunted recovery of responsibility is part of this vision. Herein, intrasubjective responsibility is conceptualized as a response to a situation that needs to be redressed by a return to an earlier moment, a reversal that is nonetheless projected to a future, and reckoning with that future demands discipline, fortitude, and fidelity to the party of life in order to face unscathed the suffering and violence that seeking it involves, something that only a free, self-responsible spirit can truly stomach.⁶⁸

Nietzsche’s account thus deflates any sense of responsibility for existing suffering and dismisses it as nothing more than a chimera of the weak, thus debarring any consideration of political responsibility for superfluous forms of suffering, both those traceable to an agent and its structural variations, at the heart of which there may not be an imputable will, but certainly many a beneficiary of an order that is nevertheless politically sanctioned. But, in Nietzsche’s estimation, “the revolt of the man who suffers, against God, society, nature, forebears, educations, etc., imagines responsibilities and forms of will that do not exist.”⁶⁹ Even if philistine and delusional, the revolts seeking to redress superfluous forms of suffering were not ineffective. And Nietzsche knew it and thus galvanized his considerable intellectual powers to debunk the ideas of responsibility sustaining these mass mobilizations. The self-overcoming, which he associated with the new sense of responsibility of the party of life, demands emancipation from the fetters exacted by older ideas of responsibility.

Within analytical philosophy, responsibility is overwhelmingly cast in terms of individual accountability for actions and/or answerability to moral duties or principles.⁷⁰ Unfortunately, much in these discussions is either so deadening, or marred by stunting commonplaces that symptomatize anodyne platitudes about the afflictions supposedly besieging present-day liberal democracies, as to make one cringe. If at all, the political dimension of responsibility is only perfunctorily avowed.⁷¹ But not every account in the analytical tradition reverts to these fatuities. Consider, for instance, Thomas M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other. While Scanlon explicitly avows the Kantian lineage of his project, he forcefully avers the heteronomous nature of his version of contractualism, an avowal that grants the work an admirable sense of theoretical sobriety, and this without dwelling on how the book’s title already portends his concern with the collective dimension of ethical life.⁷² These concerns are elegantly exhibited in his treatment of the question of “moral responsibility” in a series of formulations that rival, and in some respects surpass, many of the formulations found within continental philosophy. For instance, although he anchors responsibility in individualist terms and his account bears an ethereal relationship to culture and market imperatives so characteristic of analytical moral philosophy, Scanlon takes seriously the existence of “background conditions” as mediating factors in determining responsibility.⁷³ Similarly, in his Moral Dimensions, he allows for variation in the ways that one’s ethical commitments and responses are mediated by different imperatives and stakes, depending on the scene of action in which one acts, for example, the extent to which the “permissibility of an action” does not rest solely on intentionality but also on how the situation is structured.⁷⁴ In considering these, and in pointing out one’s ability to do otherwise as a central component of responsibility, his account allows for more politically robust conceptions of responsibility. For one either responds or not to a predicament of powers and, by extension, one is responsible for such a response or lack thereof.

In this vein Scanlon presents a dualist account of responsibility: he distinguishes “responsibility as attributability” from “substantive responsibility.”⁷⁵ Such a distinction resides in what he calls “the value of choice,” and Scanlon ultimately distinguishes blame from responsibility on the basis of it. He thus summarizes the distinction: “When we ask if a person is responsible in the first of these senses [responsibility as attributability] what we are asking is whether that person is properly subject to praise or blame for having acted in that way. To say that someone is responsible in the second sense [substantive responsibility] for a certain outcome is, in the cases I have been concentrating on, to say that the person cannot complain of the burdens and obligations that result.”⁷⁶ The “cases” that Scanlon’s formulation alludes to range from an injury at an excavation site, to establishing agreements with others or criminal punishment. But it is his rendering of the case of the “willing addict” that illustrates the stakes in the distinction. As a willing addict, a person is responsible for his actions in a substantive sense, but not so in the case of an unwilling addict, who is responsible for his acts as these are attributable to him, but is not responsible in the second, substantive sense. The actions are attributable in both cases, but Scanlon regards the unwilling addict as not free and thus not responsible in the substantive sense that involves punishment. Even if, at times, he seems to collapse responsibility with guilt, his dualist conception of responsibility militates against such collapsing.⁷⁷ And, while his examples are stereotypically prosaic, the political import of his theorization of responsibility goes beyond them. Indeed, his distinctions echo Arendt’s famous differentiation of responsibility and guilt in the Third Reich: “There are many who share responsibility without any visible proof of guilt.”⁷⁸ That is, ordinary Germans who supported the regime may be held responsible in the first sense identified by Scanlon, but not in the second.

By separating these two senses of responsibility, and including the forces mediating the predicaments of power one inhabits, one can undercut the solipsistic bent of this moral theorization of responsibility. Similarly, unlike treatments of responsibility that present it as a commandment antecedent to action, or even as preontological as in Levinas and his disciples, Scanlon’s dualist perspective has the sobering effect of considering the socially constituted conditions impairing substantive responsibility. It also considers the mediations that at once enable and constrain one’s choices and one’s ability to assume responsibility for actions.⁷⁹ Yet fully accounting for these mediations militates against an individualist sense of responsibility, as it opens up the possibility of spatially and temporally mapping the predicaments of power in which one acts and the mediating imperatives of, say, processes of racialization, which mediate and further constitute the situations in which would-be responsible agents act.

Indeed, the thorny question of racialization is a theme that Scanlon takes on, even if he does so in a partial way. It actually shows both the promise and the limits of his account. In a discussion of the first “Cosby controversy,” which, at the time, constituted the most recent instance of how, under the guise of “personal responsibility,” the ever alluring practice of bashing the poor rears its ugly head, Scanlon shows how his dualist concept of responsibility offers a nuanced formulation of individual responsibility. For Scanlon, ever the liberal, it is a question about striking a centrist position: “It is possible that many poor blacks are properly criticized for behaving in self-destructive ways and also that the government should, as a matter of justice, do more to improve their condition—in particular that it should do more to ensure that people are not placed in conditions that generate this kind of self-destructive behavior.”⁸⁰ Scanlon’s conclusion is predictably ambivalent, and it is tempting to sneer at him for it, not to mention the tropes at work in his formulations. Better still, he hardly acknowledges the ways in which systematic, modern, and postmodern forms of power, including but not reducible to capitalism, constitute not just the predicaments of power in which agents act but also forms of political subjectivity consonant with it. Even so, his theorization of responsibility opens up a way to conceptualize some of the constitutive elements of any genuine sense of political responsibility: a clear distinction between responsibility and guilt, substantive responsibility and blame, the need to recast accountability, and the mediation of historical formations and discourses of power in one’s scenes of action.

But arguably the most influential account of responsability within the parameters of analytical philosophy is found in Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity.⁸¹ In contrast to the aseptic and individualist conceits of philosophical ethics, Williams famously offered a rendering of what he considered the four constitutive elements of responsibility: cause, intention, state, and response.⁸² These “universal materials” are for him the defining elements of any concept of responsibility, however different any given configuration of them may be: namely, any concept of responsibility is a constellation composed of these pole stars, and what varies is the relative weight that is placed on each element in different situations. Different emphases yield different formulations. But Williams’s account places considerable emphasis on the elements of the configuration adjudicating accountability. Blameworthiness is thus emphasized. And while the need to respond is still theorized, it mostly plays a subordinate role to the question of accountability, of guilt and blameworthiness. Stated differently, the ethical response is framed in terms of an action imputable to an agent, namely, an identifiable action that antecedes any sense of response. Accordingly: “The first of these elements, cause, is primary…. Without this, there is no concept of responsibility.”⁸³

The need to elicit a response is thus cast in terms of answerability, as an answer to a wrong that an agent caused, even if she did not intend to do so. Intentionality is rightly described as ambivalent in this context, and the need for a response is thereby avowed. Yet, even as the connotation of response is theorized, for Williams its role is such that rather than playing off the intersubjective dimension of responsibility, what emerges is an account still confined to individual responsibility in a situation brought about by her. Besides, the centrality of response is not cast in terms of responding to a situation, its contradictions, fissures, and imperatives; rather, the sense of response is projected inwards and reduced to “what is expected, demanded, or required of the agent, or what is imposed on him.”⁸⁴ Williams’s examples, from Homer to Sophocles, attest to this preference. But Williams qualifies his argument in two important ways: first, from the perspective of modern-day legal discourse, where people are held accountable and “criminally liable not only for outcomes they did not intend…but in some cases for outcomes they did not even cause”; second, in what amounts to a corollary of the previous qualification, he acknowledges that in “any complex society” the allocation of causality is often problematic and difficult.⁸⁵ But Williams’s perfunctory invocation of complexity reveals the inadequacies of his theorization of responsibility when considered from the perspective of scenes of power constituted by historically entrenched patterns of domination: “There are, of course, particularly in any complex society, endless problems that arise about this point, such as the allocation of causality between several agents who have between them brought about some effect. There are issues, too, about collective responsibility. But these are difficulties in applying the primitive idea I am discussing.”⁸⁶ By placing so much emphasis on causality and individual answerability, Williams comes close to surrendering to the conceit of enmeshing responsibility with guilt. Although sorely lacking in the literary cadence and grace of Williams’s prose, Scanlon’s dualist perspective precisely allows for such distinctions.

Ultimately, Williams is fundamentally committed to an urbane individualism and only vaguely concerned with sociological realities and contexts, and his vaunted invocations of history and realism are equally innocent of history as an obdurate process of continuities and discontinuities, and to the historical realities of capitalist accumulation and imperialism, racialization and gendering, constituting contemporary predicaments of power in both their temporal and spatial specificities.⁸⁷ In the caustic formulation of an otherwise very sympathetic critic, “he felt as naturally comfortable in paddling about in the tepid and slimy puddle created by Locke, J. S. Mill, and Isaiah Berlin as he did in most other places.”⁸⁸ Indeed, for all the talk about historical sense, and his acute sensibility to the thought forms found in Thucydides and Greek tragedy, Williams was mostly unable to come to terms with the actual political meaning of the “primacy of the situation,” its impossible but ineluctable predicaments, and the necessary “economy of sympathy” constitutive of a genuinely political ethic of collective life. Like most analytical moral philosophers, his account remained uncritical about the liberal-democratic capitalist states structuring the spatial and sociological realities it took for granted.

What, then, is the political import of this formulation? Williams’s formulation is better suited for personal responsibility, for responsibility understood as an ethos, as a virtue of character, which is a necessary but insufficient condition of political action. It is thus instructive that while Williams refers to “any complex society” he nowhere satisfactorily theorizes such complexity or how it produces a specific subject, an agent and a habitus that is culturally mediated, even if it presents itself as not.⁸⁹ Williams’s analytical dissection of the “universal materials” of responsibility is best reformulated in terms of Hegel’s elucidation of the different aspects of the problematic of responsibility. This reformulation consists of articulating the dialectical mediation and interdependence of Williams’s materials: these can be reworked by conceptualizing responsibility as “being committed to, responsible for, and authoritative about” collectively shared ethical and political ends and the means needed to attain them.⁹⁰ But accounts like Williams’s abstractly posit the individualization and autonomization of responsibility. The concrete sense of space and limits that characterize political conceptions of responsibility are disowned, or fundamentally slanted, as is any collective significance of the idea of ethical responsibility.

Beyond question, conservative sectors are using the notion of individual responsibility with the thinly disguised aim of draining all content from the notion of collective responsibility—a notion which makes them uncomfortable, as it means a costly commitment to the most disadvantaged sectors of society. These sectors prefer not to speak of society’s responsibility to the unemployed, the sick, refugees, and, in general, all those who are marginalized; rather, they propose making it the individual responsibility of the unemployed to obtain a job, of the sick to take their medicine, of the active workforce to provide for their own pensions, and so on.⁹²

But to speak of social and political responsibility entails re-cognizing how vulnerability is historically mediated, systematically constituted, and politically sanctioned. For natural and historical modalities of vulnerability are thoroughly mediated by imperatives of power.⁹³ And political responsibility, as historically embedded in the domain of collective action, needs to transcend the intrasubjective model of action and not only avow intersubjectivity but also incorporate reflection on external imperatives, limits, and constraints. More important, whereas responsibility as a philosophical concept has tended toward individuation, it cannot be treated as an exclusively individual attribute. Rather, just like the content of one’s behavior, one’s responsibility is largely impersonal and thoroughly mediated by the situation, its institutions, and the social and historical processes one is responding to. Intentionality and individual responsibility is not only constituted in reference to external, impersonal institutions but also in relation to the historically constituted, material situation, along with its immanent principles and imperatives, in which the subject is embedded. What Vincent Descombes has written apropos of the concept of intention equally holds for that of responsibility: “The concept of intention seems to call for us to locate the intentional subject (in his head) but it quickly becomes apparent that that is not its place. It is rather that the subject, in order to acquire a mind, must be situated within a milieu that would have been described in classical French as ‘moral’ or in German as ‘spiritual’ [geistig]. This moral milieu is formed by institutions as providers of meaning that individual subjects can make their own.”⁹⁴ Indeed, if one casts the invocation of “moral” and “spiritual” along more materialist lines, these formulations stand, mutatis mutandis, for the social dialectic of intra- and intersubjectivity at the core of a properly dialectical concept of responsibility. The subject of responsibility is, by extension, also a socio-cultural object in historically constituted and politically sanctioned predicaments of power. It is a materialist subject—in the dual sense of that word: subject qua agent, subject qua object—with its own natural history, along with the sediments that emerged out of the way in which subjective habitus and practices are objectively mediated.⁹⁵

One of the challenges, accordingly, consists of forging a concept and practice of political responsibility able to respond to and rein in—to the extent that it may be realistically possible—the forms of power structuring and mediating political life. Another challenge is to recast answerability politically. For answerability can be interpreted in a variety of ways: one can answer to the moral law, the civil law, the rules of order and the imperatives of the market, and to a transcendental ethical other; or, less solipsistic and more politically, one can answer to the law of the state or else respond out of fidelity to a political identity and the principles and institutions that promote it. Political responsibility, to be sure, cannot be just answerability. The emphasis needs to be placed on the response by virtue of inhabiting scenes of power, where one’s responsibility resides precisely by virtue of the political form at stake and on one’s position in the situation to which one responds within a structure of power. Ideas and practices of commitment and responsibility for and to predicaments of power, along with relations of authority, thus constitute enabling conditions based on limits and constraints, which are constitutive of a political ethic of responsibility; or, stated differently, these are determinations that form the concept of political responsibility that is constitutive of a political ethic, an ethics of the collective life. These enabling conditions are the external determinants that mediate the concrete articulation of “causality” and “intention,” but also “state” and “response.” For “state” is hereby considered as the locus in which political action in a demarcated and, by extension, limited predicament of power becomes possible, predicaments of power that are the occasion concretely demanding a response.

Yet for these notions to gain political import, for these to have political traction and teeth, as it were, they have to be conceptualized as always-already eventuating in situation, as operative in historically structured and politically sanctioned predicaments of power. At the very least, political responsibility requires assuming one’s actions, reflecting on their nature and consequences, and giving an account of them. Political responsibility thus entails a reflective response to the actions done in one’s name as part of a political order in which historical practices and processes of, say, racialization or capitalist relations, often render individuals either as structural beneficiaries, subordinated or dominated denizens, or bystanders, all of which is irreducible to assuming responsibility, let alone attributing causes for individual responsibility. Furthermore, the dilution of intentionality and agency in contemporary predicaments of power needs to be incorporated into any conception of responsibility that seeks concreteness, something that can only be encompassed by mapping the ways that imperatives of power mediate the present. Such cognitive mappings cannot be offered as later additions, but need their role to be adequately theorized. Equally ineluctable are accounts of the constitutive gap between intention and act and the concrete configuration of a political situation in which action eventuates and becomes concrete. For one always already acts in situations whose historicity thoroughly mediates both the internal moment of intentionality and its externalization, the moment of actualization. Conversely, these mappings and accounts demand an acute sense of what constitutes the limits, spatial and temporal differentiations, and economic and political imperatives impinging on both moments of intentionality.⁹⁶

That is, at any rate, one mode of conceptualizing responsibility politically. It is a way for political responsibility, which by virtue of its historical specificity is always limited, to become politically viable and concrete. A sense of political responsibility that is central for a robust sense of political life. And that entails fidelity to its binding political forms, in which intentions, causes, and responses are determinations that are always temporally and spatially located in historically mediated and politically constituted situations.