How does one articulate, enunciate, or deliberate about an ethic or ethical system without using excessive, exaggerated concepts such as "love" or "alterity?" It seems to me that for a truly beneficial discussion about ethics, one must engage in a practice and language of excess and exaggeration.
Of course, I am identifying hyperbole as more than a stylistic flourish in this instance. I am viewing it as a complex tropological expression within discourse able to express possibility through impossibility by re-orienting one's perspective through the disorienting heights of ethical vertigo. Can one interact with any ethic or ethical system unless they are properly and fully disoriented?
What I am suggesting is that a concept such as "love" is so extravagant that the attempt to truly apprehend the ideal is so confounding and so paradoxical that it is both enriching and disorienting to the point of fear and trembling. Yet, through the difficulty of this frightening impossibility, one may arrive at other possibilities of ethical expression and action. The subversion and transgression of a hyperbolic ethic is a necessity if one desires to enter into the paradoxical and dialogical space of ethics, responsibility, and otherness.
"The Christian themes can be seen to revolve around the gift as gift of death, the fathomless gift of a type of death: infinite love (the Good as goodness that infinitely forgets itself), sin and salvation, repentance and sacrifice. What engenders all these meanings and links them, internally and necessarily, is a logic that at bottom (that is why it can still, up to a certain point, be called 'logic') has no need of the event of a revelation or the revelation of an event. It needs to think the possibility of such an event but not the event itself" (Derrida, Gift of Death, 49).
Derrida is pointing here towards an ethic that is also a hyperbole, a responsibility that is infinite in its sacrificial impulse or gesture that is a gift in and of its own goodness that is also its own effacement. What "logic" is operating here but the logic of hyperbole? For, only through such a trope can one express the inexpressible necessity of such an impossible project. Hyperbole is the signal or thinking "the possibility" of that which cannot be thought, that which is properly inexpressible and unthinkable...aporiatic and extra-ordinary.
"This is ethics as 'irresponsibilization," as an insoluble and paradoxical contradiction between responsibility in general and absolute responsibility. Absolute responsibility is not a responsibility, at least it is not general responsibility or responsibility in general. It needs to be exceptional or extraordinary, and it needs to be that absolutely and par excellence: it is as if absolute responsibility could not be derived from a concept of responsibility and therefore, in order for it to be what it must be it must remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible" (61).
Expressing the inexpressible and ineffable, hyperbole's heights propel one into the realm of responsibility even as that ethic is always already unthinkable, it is always already "thrown beyond" (as all good hyperboles do). And that is precisely the point for any ethic that hopes to take seriously and be taken seriously; to attempt the unattainable. I consider the hyperbolic nature of ethics to be the impossibility of possibility, the difficult work of impossibility, that so disorients one's perspective that they are forced beyond reason and rationality towards a re-oriented stance that is another disorientation. That is, a hyperbolic ethic, a responsibility that must always be a hyperbolic responsibility (that is also a deliberative ethic), is, of necessity, absolute and infinite repetition....
