ABSTRACT
Responsibility is an ethical term; it implies an "ought". It may be objected that this use of terms like "responsibility" and "ethics", lumping together kindness to other people, artistic creation, and acts of reading, is so broad in its compass as to empty them of any useful meaning. The ethical responsibility for the other that is at the heart of creativity has often been articulated, in different terms and different contexts, more or less fully and coherently, many times in human history. Responding responsibly to a work of art means attempting to do justice to it as a singular other; it involves a judgment that is not simply ethical or aesthetic, and that does not attempt to pigeonhole it or place it on a scale of values, but that operates as an affirmation of the work's inventiveness.
