Fragilité et Responsabilité

Summary

The fragility of public human action is — in spite of the profound features they share and which should be kept in mind — to be distinguished from the tragical by the intrinsic relation between fragility and responsibility. In the first section this relation is explained. The fragility that lies at the origin of responsibility is discovered in a primordial feeling: it is I who have to take care of someone, who has put his trust in me. This sense of responsibility underlies the retrospective responsibility of being able to designate oneself as the author of one’s own acts. The second section outlines a typology of the fragile, related to the permanency of conflicts within and between different spheres of civil society. This is done in a brief reflection on the models presented in M. Walzer’s The Spheres of Justice, and in De la justification: les économies de la grandeur by L. Boltanski and L. Thevenot. The third section considers the sources of fragility and the way in which fragility is countered on the level of political society. In the exercise of political power three sources of conflict are designated, the last one being characteristic for the modern democratic state. At the end of this section it is shown how intellectual and civil responsibility have to reply to the fragility of political, and therefore rhetorical, discourse between rational and sophistical forms of argumentation. The fourth and last section reflects on the completely new type of conflict generated by post-national political and civil society. The author outlines briefly three models in order to meet with the conflicts on this level; the first model (of translation) concerns the differences of languages; the second implies the openness, required for the exchange of different histories; the last one refers to the fragility involved in asking and rendering ‘pardon’ and to the patience required to give and to receive this pardon.