call constitutes subjects as responsive and responsible negotiators of normative claims. I give the name \u201ctranscendental conscience\u201d to that which speaks in this founding, constitutive voice. The role of transcendental conscience is not \u2013 or not merely \u2013 to normatively bind the sub- ject, but to constitute the possibility of the subject\u2019s being bound by any particular, contentful normative claims in the first place. I explore the ontological and temporal status of transcen- dental conscience, using Heidegger\u2019s account of conscience in Being and Time as my textual touchstone. I ask what performative structure the call of conscience might have that would enable it to constitute normative responsiveness, and I raise some temporal conundrums sur- rounding this structure. I argue that it is incoherent to attempt to give a literal, chronological account of the origin of normative grip and response. I suggest that we can best understand the founding calls of conscience, not as literal events occurring in regular time, but as events that can only show up retrospectively, as occurring in an ever-receding, unlocalizable past, and that these calls can only be figured mythically and metaphorically. Appropriating a Derridean term, I claim that the voice of transcendental conscience must be that of a \u2018ghost,\u2019 whose call binds us by haunting us \u2013 a haunting that is no less transcendentally necessary for its inability to be translated into a literal historical event.

Philosophers interested in the metaphysics of normativity have often posited a foundational calling voice, such that hearing its call constitutes subjects as responsive and responsible negotiators of normative claims.2 This voice has taken the form of God\u2019s word, reason\u2019s categorical imperative, and the inter- nalized law of the father, among others. I will give the name \u2018transcendental conscience\u2019 to that which speaks in this founding or constitutive voice. The role of transcendental conscience, as I am using the term, is not \u2013 or not merely \u2013 to normatively bind the subject, but to constitute the possibility of the sub- ject\u2019s being bound by any particular, contentful normative claims in the first place. Thus I call such conscience \u2018transcendental\u2019 for orthodox Kantian rea-

to explain how it is that we can hear and be bound by particular calls of ordi- nary conscience. All philosophical appeals to transcendental conscience share an orientation towards questions concerning the nature of normativity, in contrast, for instance, to the orientation of those that try to tell a naturalized story about the genesis or structure of normative force and response. By found- ing normative responsiveness in a voice that calls and binds, such transcen- dental accounts eschew any reductionism that tries to explain the normative by building it out of non-normative nature or mechanism. Instead, these ac- counts try to explain the everyday grip of the normative by reference to a relationship that is itself ineliminably normative, between the call of con- science and the subject it calls \u2013 a relationship that enacts the conditions for the possibility of everyday normative responsiveness. My project here is not to explicate, defend or criticize a specific transcendental theory of the force of norms; rather, I wish to explore the structure that theories that implicitly or explicitly make use of such an explanatory strategy must have, as well as the philosophical commitments and difficulties that attend a commitment to tran- scendental conscience.

There are many philosophers, from Kant, Hegel and Heidegger to Lacan, Levinas and Derrida, who can be read as giving accounts of transcendental conscience. In order to provide some textual focus and specificity to my dis- cussion, I will use Heidegger\u2019s account of conscience in Being and Time II.ii as my touchstone example of an appeal to transcendental conscience. In the first half of my paper, I treat Heidegger\u2019s account as a test case for the prob- lems and potentials raised by such theories in general, and in particular I will take the philosophical framework he provides as a forum for revealing the tem- poral complications that haunt the phenomenon of transcendental conscience. Regardless of whether or not Heidegger was willing to identify himself as a \u2018transcendental philosopher\u2019 \u2013 a label with which he notoriously had a vexed relationship \u2013 I think that it will become clear that his account of conscience is transcendental, in the sense in which I am using the term, remaining true to the Kantian methodology of beginning in experience (in this case, our expe- rience of recognizing and responding to normative claims that bind us) and seeking out the conditions for the possibility of this experience. In the second half of the paper, I will turn to a less textually specific analysis of the neces- sary structure of transcendental conscience and its attendant ontological and temporal complexities. With the help of Derrida\u2019s recent work on the foun- dations of authority, I will argue that it is incoherent to attempt to give a lit- eral, chronological account of the origin of normative grip and response.

Instead, I will claim that we can best understand the founding calls of con- science, not as literal events occurring in regular time, but as events that can only show up retrospectively, as occurring in an ever-receding, unlocalizable past, and that these calls can only be figured mythically and metaphorically.

In this section, I want to reveal some general philosophical sticking points that arise when we explore what is required in order for agents and actions to count as responsive to normative force and responsible to the claims of norms. I will do this via a brief reading of Heidegger\u2019s picture of Dasein as ineliminably and primordially a normatively responsive and responsible being. My goal is to cast the project and some of the key moves of Being and Time in terms that will make perspicuous the suitability of this text as an exemplar for my broader examination of the ontology and temporality of transcendental conscience.

In the vocabulary of Division I of Being and Time, the determinations that particularize Dasein are not inherent properties, whether mental or physical, butexistentials, or things Dasein is up to. These existentials make up the ontic character of Dasein, while it is an ontological fact about Dasein that its exist- ence is determined in this way. But in order for Dasein to be existentially determined, or in order for it to be up to anything, the upshot of its projects mustm a t t e r to it. What I am up to cannot be articulated merely in terms of a description of what static properties I have or even how I am moving about in Newtonian space; instead, such an articulation requires a reference to thefu-

standard and take responsibility for doing so. Without such a future, my move- ments are not actions at all. To be an individuated case of Dasein, we thus must inhabit normative space, in the sense of negotiating the world through con- cerned dealings, rather than mere causal interactions, and recognizing the binding force of the claims of norms. Hence the study of how Dasein can occupy normative space is not extractable from the general study of the on- tology of Dasein, as this normative responsiveness is a condition for the pos- sibility of Dasein\u2019s individuated existence.3 For this reason, Heidegger writes that \u201cour view is too shortsighted . . . if one limits oneself \u2018initially\u2019 to a \u2018theo- retical\u2019 subject, and then complements it \u2018on the practical side\u2019 with an addi- tional \u2018ethic.\u2019 \u201d4