book | Thinking About Responsibility

"The unceasing calls for responsibility in contemporary culture are always calls to such agency, to the position of a subject-cause. And this insistence as such deserves scrutiny. One might ask at the outset: What concept of responsibility does it seek to reinforce? What lack does it aim at supplementing? What shortcoming is it trying to compensate? What irresponsibility is it trying to suppress, exclude or negate? From what danger does it aim at protecting it? These questions already take us to the heart of the matter. And thus the concept of a 'subject-cause' (along with its unavoidable accompaniment, a system of control and punishment), this 'ready-made,' guiding metaphysical interpretation of the concept of responsibility--namely, accountability as indication of the power of a masterful and willful subject--is left to rule exhaustively over the hermeneutic domain of responsibility."

François Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility, 6.