Responsibility

Responsibility, as it emerges across these two occurrences, names the ontological burden that falls upon the for-itself as the sole sustaining power of what is. In the Sartrean formulation (source: jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological), responsibility is not a moral predicate assigned from outside but follows directly from the structure of the for-itself's relation to the in-itself. Because the for-itself is what it is not and not what it is, it cannot offload its past onto some impersonal substrate: the past only persists as past because the for-itself continuously nihilates it and carries it forward as facticity. At death, when the for-itself is wholly converted into in-itself, the living subject is paradoxically the last remaining locus of transcendence for the deceased — the only being that, through free projection, can still hold the dead Other's being in relation. Responsibility here is therefore not guilt but an ontological fact: freedom is the very condition under which anything can be "mine," including the existence of another who no longer exists for themselves.

In the Žižekian extension (source: slavoj-zizek-sex-and-the-failed-absolute-bloomsbury-academic-2019), this structure is radicalised through the psychoanalytic framework and the figure of the barred subject ($). If traditional morality limits responsibility to what falls within conscious control, psychoanalysis — read through the logic of the big Other — removes that consolation. Because the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, and because the Other is structurally incomplete (barred, S(Ⱥ)), no appeal to an exterior symbolic authority can absorb what the subject enacts beyond conscious intention. The subject is responsible precisely for the gap, for what escapes the conscious will — for its symptom, its drive, its desire. This is not an expansion of moral blame but a structural claim: the position of enunciation is irreducible, and freedom cannot be quarantined to the domain of deliberate acts.

In the Sartrean source (jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological), Responsibility appears as a direct consequence of the ontological architecture built around For-itself, In-itself, Facticity, and Temporality. Because the for-itself sustains the past in being through an internal nihilating relation — and because facticity and past are identified as the same ontological thing — there is no external depository for one's being. Freedom is not a liberation from responsibility but its ground: only the being that is never fully what it is can be held to what it has been. Death intensifies this by converting the for-itself wholly into in-itself, leaving the living as the sole free subject who can still relate to the dead's being. Responsibility is thus an extension of the concept of facticity, specifying what it means for freedom to be the custodian of its own unchosen givenness and of the givenness of Others.

In the Žižekian source (slavoj-zizek-sex-and-the-failed-absolute-bloomsbury-academic-2019), Responsibility is repositioned within the Lacanian topology of the big Other and the barred subject. Where the big Other is structurally incomplete — unable to provide a meta-guarantee for meaning or to absorb the subject's surplus — the subject cannot delegate responsibility to the symbolic order. Psychoanalysis, on this reading, is not exculpatory but hyper-obligating: it extends the domain of responsibility beyond consciousness precisely because the unconscious is not an excuse but a further dimension of the subject's own structure. This makes Responsibility a specification of the logic of the barred subject ($): the very incompleteness of the Other that bars the subject is what bars the subject from escaping accountability for its own desire and symptom.

Sex and the Failed AbsoluteSlavoj Žižek · 2019 (p.393)

psychoanalysis makes me even more responsible than traditional morality, it makes me responsible even for what is beyond my (conscious) control.

The phrase "even for what is beyond my (conscious) control" is theoretically loaded because it refuses the standard exculpatory reading of the unconscious — instead of the unconscious functioning as an alibi, it becomes an extension of the subject's burden; the parenthetical "(conscious)" signals that the classical boundary separating responsible agency from blind mechanism is precisely what psychoanalysis dissolves, aligning with the Lacanian principle that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other and therefore always already the subject's own.