Writing as capitulation : the shelter of being-responsible

This paper explores the notion of writing and its relationship to an always-existing responsibility. It asks the question of whether writing might necessarily be a kind of biographical undertaking, and then drawing on Heidegger, it inquires into how writing might provoke an ontological encounter for the writer. Via a close investigation of the definitions and etymologies of the word ‘capitulate’, the paper links the concepts of Derridean violence, Hellerian freedom and (post)modernity, non-infinite temporality and assumptions of a metaphysics of presence to a practice of reading/writing. By taking up the Heideggerian concept of Being’s as ex-istence and porosity, it attempts to argue that post-modernity, in coming to terms with the consequences of freedom, offers the subject the opportunity for an ontological encounter with responsibility, and subsequently how an acknowledgement of this thrownness might function in itself as a kind of shelter, albeit an open one.