irresponsibility. For Heidegger, irres ponsibility consists in what Anaximander called adikia, injustice.43 So long as responsibility is construed as the meting out of charges and discharges , irresponsibility amounts to an infraction against one of the various principles of order: law, conscience, custom, power, father, other, God, people, reason , progress, classless society , etc. The entities so represented summon another entity, the actor, to render an account of his actions ; not to answer that summons is to be irresponsible . It is to depart from the given principial constellation of concealment and unconcealment. Irresponsibility is always a breach of the mode in which presencing occurs and calls upon us. But that mode can be epochal or non-epochal. At the hypothetical end of metaphysics , irresponsibility therefore does not consist in the same kind of breach as it does under the sway of epochal principles.
That change in the nature of irresponsibility follows from the very hypothesis that there remains no referential order of presence to transgress. In the age of closure, to be irresponsible is to contravene the network of systemic presencing. And what is it that so contravenes by definition the multiple event of phuesthai, of showing-forth? It is any entity and any act that "becomes set on fixing itself in its stay," that seeks "pure persistence in duration, "that "holds fast to the assertion of its stay."44 That description fits anything that closely or remotely resembles an epochal principle. The hubris of staying, of permanent presence, arises only under and through the rule of those principles . They are what is irresponsible essentially. With Heidegger's step back to another time, a time other than duration, what is irresponsible for man is any practical a priori that calls for persistence against flux and thereby contributes to the survival of the principial economy.
The break that appears with the (possible) end of metaphysics destabilizes both that for which and that to which one can be held accountable. It dissolves the former because it subverts the latter. With the turn, responsibility therefore undergoes a displacement not only toward the economies but also toward anarchy. This radical shift lifts the phenomenon of responsibility out of the regency of ultimate representations and situates it in another space, the in-between of presence and presencing. By the same stroke, it situates existence within its originary locus where it lives by the sole event of mutual appropriation among the things that make up a historical world. The shift of responsibility toward economic an-archy is the practical condition for thinking the difference between world and thing as temporal. In an economy deprived of any epochal principle, responsorial existence—responsible action—will be a response to the ever new modes in which things unite in a world and differ from it. One answers the 'call of the difference' by inscribing one's acts within the play of identity and difference between world and thing.45 Whatever the difficulties raised by Heidegger's deconstruction of responsibility, one will always be able to respond only through praxis to the question, What do you make of the difference?