Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 136

124. For related arguments in recent critical theory, see Jacques Derrida, The Gift
of Death , second edition, and Literature in Secret , translated by David Wills
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 82-116; the essays by Slavoj
Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard collected in The Neighbor: Three
Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006);
and Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding . Such discussions emphasize the
demand to love others beyond all thought of merit or return, but they do
not consider the unprecedented ethical challenges posed by climate change,
including that of enacting justice even without a future. On the need to
extend Derrida's thinking in response to climate change, see Tom Cohen,
“Anecographics: Climate Change and 'Late' Deconstruction,” in Impasses of
the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, volume 2, edited by Henry
Sussman (MPublishing, University of Michigan Library; Open Humanities
Press, 2012), htp://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/10803281.0001.001/1:3/--
impasses-of-the-post-global-theory-in-the-era-of-climate?rgn=div1;view=fu
lltext.
125. Compare the account of how the subject can assume responsibility for state
of things, thereby converting substance into subject, in Slavoj Žižek, he
Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 217, and how, by working
through the fundamental fantasy that sustains one's being, “the subject
accepts the void of his [sic] nonexistence,” Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The
Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 281.