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Chapter 2

BLIND FAITH AND THE BINDING OF ISAAC—THE AKEDAH

[F]aith is a privative concept: it is destroyed as faith if it does not continually display its contradistinction to, or conformity with, knowledge…The paradoxical nature of faith ultimately degenerates into a swindle, and becomes the myth of the twentieth century; and its irrationality turns it into an instrument of rational administration by the wholly enlightened as they steer society toward barbarism.

—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps…/ And stretched forth the knife to slay his son. / When lo! An Angel called him out of heaven, / Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, / Neither do anything to him, thy son. / Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns, / A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead. / But the Old Man would not so, but slew his son. / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

—Wilfred Owen, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”

All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. “I don't care what is written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat.”

—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

In this chapter I examine certain a priori or primordial features of Western thought, in effect, aspects of the reality that this thought takes for granted. I do so by scrutinizing closely a story at the center of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This story, the Akedah or binding of Isaac (chapter 22 of the book of Genesis), has the theme of sacrifice. I intend to show that while it is instructive and positive in vital respects, this story bears at heart a terrible and consequential malevolence, what I have come to think of as a profound stupidity. Despite all the various thinkers, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim alike, who have managed, often with subtle and exceptional intelligence, to save for the good the figures of both Abraham and God in the story, the divine command to kill Isaac and Abraham's obedient response strike me as unacceptable, even by other-worldly standards.

In the case of a narrative like the Akedah, Gerhard von Rad asserts that “one must from the first renounce any attempt to discover one basic idea as the meaning of the whole. There are many levels of meaning, and whoever thinks he has discovered virgin soil must discover at once that there are many more layers below that” (1972a: 243). My interpretation directs itself to this multi-layered character, holding that there is no “one basic idea as the meaning of the whole” and accentuating the ambiguous nature of the story.

I read the story as an admonitory attempt to deal with the problem of how one can truly sacrifice oneself without at the same time defeating the existential purpose of the act of sacrifice, namely, to ensure life. The story's solution of a perfect gift (the gift of death), on which a lesson in faith is thought to hang, is the most pronounced but not, I think, the only solution that the story has to offer. This solution entails by logical contrast the idea of a perfectly imperfect gift, which is to say, a purely economical act or counter-sacrifice, where the other alone is ‘given’. But both perfect and perfectly imperfect sacrifice, as the two principles of a dualism, lead, at least logically, to the same end—death. For this reason, following the tribulation of Abraham and Isaac, the story's final (‘humanistic’) substitution of beast for man presents another less harrowing and dramatic solution, an economy of sacrifice, but one that is itself economized or attenuated: the self is given, surrogatively and only in part to be sure, but nonetheless truly, thus ensuring the continuity of humankind.

There can be no doubt that continuity of life is an emphatic burden of the story.¹ But beyond the substitution of beast for man, the story implies an even more ingenious and saving solution to this problem, a substitution of spirit for matter—i.e., bloodless sacrifice. Here, I maintain, is the crux of the solution of perfect sacrifice, the demand apparently imposed on Abraham of total obedience or blind faith. The progressive shift away from bloody to spiritual sacrifice disposes a redefinition of ‘faith’ from a social and behavioral phenomenon to an interior idea. But by the same token, here too the story's approach to the problem seems to come to grief, since the willing total abdication of one's will to the other has, paradoxically, the dialectical force of self-aggrandizement. As is developed transparently in the sacrifice story of Jesus, a perfect gift implies the capacity of perfect election and therewith of perfect (i.e., godly) selfhood. The god-given command to man for a perfect gift actually sets him up for a fall, into the dire imperfection of self-aggrandizement. This imperfection is ‘dire’ because it disregards the vital significance of man's finitude, to wit, the significance of continuing or imperfect sacrifice as the very dynamic that is human existence. In which case, should we not question the figure of God in this story, as well as Abraham's utterly compliant response to this figure's lethal command? Accordingly, I argue that this story's figure of God has been (unduly) informed with an all too human desideratum of perfection, and that, in light of this chiastic reversal, whereby the flow of identity from God to man backs up, Abraham's blind compliance with God's terrible command amounts to an act of self-aggrandizement; it is an unwitting pretence by virtue of which Abraham appears to others and to himself as a reverential servant of God while his conduct describes nothing less contrary than godlike presumption. Thus, we may describe Abraham's murderous behavior toward his son as a kind of idolatry, perhaps the worst kind, whereby he is worshipping himself—that is, his self.

The story affords a deep mythic insight on the basis of which human existence may be construed as a sacrificial dynamic, a special point I develop in the next chapter (using Derrida's brilliant commentary on Kierkegaard's profound reading of the Akedah). Thus, the ‘choice’ in every primordial choice becomes an ethico-existential question of what is owing to the self and what to the other.

Blind Faith or Sacrificial Economy?

Perhaps the most famous intellectual interpretation of the Akedah is Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1985). In it, the great Danish thinker directs himself to the deep religious sense behind both God's murderous command and Abraham's devout conformance. By ordering Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, God means to test Abraham's faith, and Abraham, suspending all the creaturely laws by which men ordinarily set store, aces the test, proving himself to be a veritable knight of faith. No matter how unspeakable the content and unintelligible the purpose of God's immediate command, it must be just and therefore cannot but obligate the one to whom it is addressed.

In light of Kierkegaard's profound interpretation, together with the comparison to the Akedah implied in the name for the Nazis’ colossal murder, the Holocaust (whole burnt offering, in the Greek), J.-F. Lyotard asks (1988: 107), rhetorically but with stunning provocation, what, then, is the difference between the command to Abraham to destroy his son and the order to the Nazis to exterminate the Jews? That is, is there a difference that makes a difference between the divine command through which the Jews began their life as a people and Hitler's order to extinguish those same people forever? Both constitute prescriptions for unthinkable violence. And, by their very nature as matters of faith rather than reason or even ethics, neither means to leave room for refusal of any kind: if one is to count as a member of the faithful, one is obliged simply to comply, in fear and trembling, and in the darkness of basic rational and ethical impenetrability. Of course, in the case of Hitler, it is tempting simply to dismiss the leap-of-faith argument on the grounds that he was a raving lunatic. But how do we know that Abraham (whether a historical figure or simply a theological construct), likewise, was not a certifiable paranoid schizophrenic or, say, a sociopath?

Lyotard does find significant differences between the two cases. For present purposes, the key difference bears on the relationship (which for me, as will be seen, is a question of identity) between the slayer and the victim. Lyotard (1988: 109) asks, “[D]id the SS love the Jew as a father does his son? If not, how could the crime have value of a sacrifice in the eyes of its victim? And in those of its executioner? And in those of its beneficiary?” Lyotard is at pains here to show that the tendency to construe Auschwitz death’ as ‘beautiful death’, along the lines of the story of Isaac, in which death has been associated with a knightly intrepidity and made to signify life and resurrection, is a regrettable misapprehension. As Lawrence Langer (1991, 1995) has made plain, this tendency toward palliation is deeply rooted in the Western imagination and betrays a psychological disposition to avoid coming to grips with the utterly nihilistic reality of the Holocaust.

Of course, the differences between the story of the Akedah and what took place in the Nazi death camps are profound. But they can be allowed to prescind the possibility of any continuities whatsoever only at cost of our self-understanding. The trouble with Lyotard's position is that his use of the differences to show that one of the two cases does not qualify under the Kierkegaardian religious picture leaves the leap-of-faith argument intact. In so doing, Lyotard continues to endorse the possible soundness of acts of unintelligible orderings and blind followings and therefore, notwithstanding his disqualification of the case of the Nazis, manages to make room for Hitlers yet to come.²

From the ethical perspective I take here, the argument leading to a leap of faith ought not to be trusted, at least not in respect of the biblical paradigm concerning what transpired in the land of Moriah. Kierkegaard was right to reject as decisive the Enlightenment promise of objective thought and Hegel's rationalistic universalism, whether in philosophy or religion. But he was wrong to think that the only alternative is to take a dauntless leap into immaculate subjectivism and blind faith. To be sure, we always find ourselves beholden to something we take for granted, on ‘faith’; to adapt to my purposes Lyotard's Freudian idiom of repression, there is something always already forgotten (1990: 26–28). This finding, pertaining to an existential sense of faith other than Kierkegaard's, alerts us to the way in which our selves are fundamentally uncertain and limited, the sense in which they are abidingly other to themselves. But while our considered thoughts ever rest on other thoughts, unconsidered and in this sense built on faith, and may well inspire having faith and even a faith, this scarcely constitutes an argument for leaping into it—not in the unthinking way in which Abraham leapt to extinguish the life of his own child. At the end of the day, every faith-bound foundation amounts to a particular certainty, an a priori that is synthetic, which fact constitutes a pretty good argument not to leap but instead to step gingerly, with all the circumspection one can muster. Every particular certainty is necessarily a conditional certainty, and therefore ultimately an uncertain one subject to critical deconstruction.

As becomes clear in the course of the analysis to follow, my argument is not an attack on faith when this term is used in connection with openness to what is new, different, and other. Rather, I mean to question the common doctrinal conception of faith, as when the term is used, dualistically, in absolute contrast to ‘reason’. This is the case when we speak, for example, of a ‘faith-based’ initiative and of the determinable religions as faiths. It is also the case when Kierkegaard interprets the Akedah, regardless of his express emphasis on act as opposed to belief and on the ineffable otherness of the figure of God. It is the dualistic opposition of faith to reason that makes possible a faith so complete as to be ‘blind’, a faith the perfection of which constitutes the measure of the damage it can do no less than of the devotion it demands.³ But this notion of faith goes well beyond the existential sense set out in the preceding paragraph. Indeed, considered in terms of our constituting limitedness, simply as a condition of human existence, faith defines self-hood as ever open and uncertain. It thus betokens a patently creative state of being, and so gives reason to welcome the otherness of difference and what is yet to come.

But blind faith seems scarcely welcoming in this way; on the contrary, it privileges closure. By juxtaposing Abraham's choice to rational decision-making, Kierkegaard, eminently an existential thinker, manages to paint the choice as exquisitely free. But in so doing he covers over the truth of a choice taken in response to a command that is no less determinable than it is utterly inexplicable, and he averts the gaze away from the telling fact that Abraham's zealous choice has served for centuries, in three different monotheisms, as the very model of dogmatic faith. With all due respect to Kierkegaard's genius, it seems to me that while Abraham's choice must count as horribly trying, it was not truly authentic: it did not exactly issue from ‘inside’ himself and ‘outside’ any rule. Rather, whether or not through a deep and ulterior motive of his own, his choice was in critical part born of a veritable rule of rules, an instituting power that could not be more sovereign and the patriarchal closure of which is as exemplary as can be.

Even if Kierkegaard's religious lesson betokens a sound interpretation of the biblical story, I must refuse the lesson as it stands. There is, though, a way to read the point of the story without having to take on faith this lesson about faith. This reading holds that, broadly in line with Shalom Spiegel's (1993) finding concerning an epochal shift from human to animal sacrifice, the story is most pointedly about the linkage between sacrifice and surrogation. In other words, it is basically concerned to bring into relief prescriptively the vital human significance of sacrificial economy. If this reading is sound, then the sacrificial ‘imperfection’ of surrogation is, rather than a basic design flaw, the very thing that makes sacrifice effective and good.

Identity and Substitution

Beast for Man

In view of the divine promise of Abraham's continuity as embodied in his son, the identity between Abraham and Isaac is even fuller than that between Abraham and himself. In other words, given the story's central emphasis on Abraham's mortal immortality in the generations to issue from his son, the meaning of identity in the story is defined by a relationship before it is defined by reference to either the one or the other of the two individual parties to that relationship. In effect, identity or selfhood in this story is defined primarily by difference or multiplicity rather than sameness or unicity—the logical scandal on which postmodern thought might be said to turn.⁴ In this light, from the standpoint of Abraham's worldly existence (in the main, the only kind of human existence Judaism has to offer), if God had allowed Abraham to proceed as originally instructed, then the act would surely have been in vain. Only in a religion that projects resurrection or ‘human’ life after death could such a sacrifice have proved life-giving. Indeed, the Akedah or the binding of Isaac is the biblical act of which the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus are surely meant to count as a recursive perfecting.⁵

But in the case of the Akedah, by providing a beast in the place of Isaac, God at once makes the act of sacrifice as humanly vital as it is destructive and issues the warrant for surrogation. In doing so, God designedly identifies Isaac with the surrogate victim. On the one hand, because the victim is in fact a proxy, and thus truly victimized, there is reason for further sacrifice: guilt and indebtedness remain. On the other hand, the sacrifice works as sacrifice precisely because the victim is authoritatively identifiable with Isaac, and therefore with Abraham. In overall effect, the victimizing substitution of other for self is thematically incomplete. As a result, although murder takes place, abnegation remains the name of the rite. The story seems basically about how, in spite of the surrogation, the self is truly given.

Obviously, though, this sacrifice remains imperfect in that in the end what is given is not the self in the form of the son, but the son in the form of a beast. As a result, while it ensures the continuity of Abraham's seed and human life, it fails to put an end to guilt and the need for further sacrifice. By making the Son of God the Son of Man, and thus the Lamb of God, the sacrifice on Mount Golgotha seeks to redress this very imperfection.

The Son for the Father

There is yet another apparent imperfection in the logic of this paradigmatic scene of sacrifice from the Hebrew Bible, an imperfection that is, I think, no less deep and even more troubling—that in order to warrant the end of human sacrifice, God finds it necessary to command Abraham to take the life of another human being, his very own son no less, and that Abraham, although doubtless infinitely vexed by the contemplation of this horrible deed, sets out with unwavering determination to execute it. I speak here of imperfection because it is as hard to imagine any father in his right mind paying heed to such a filially violable order⁶ as it is to imagine a god, who is defined in terms of perfection, having recourse to it. Put another way, in ordering Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, God is demanding from Abraham—who, as the creature rather than the creator, is definitively imperfect—the gift of perfection.⁷ One might wish to take care here with the idea of perfection, and say that, in light of Isaac's part as the figure of Abraham's immortality, he is only the best Abraham has to give. But as such, from Abraham's perspective, a perspective that God's commandment to Abraham implicitly assumes, the gift of Isaac's death is indeed absolute, and in this sense the gift of perfection.

One evident explanation for this disturbing imperfection is that the warrant for surrogation presupposes the identification of Isaac as victim. This identification constitutes an indispensable condition for the establishment of sacrificial identity between the boy and the ram, such that the latter can take Isaac's place on the altar. And this identification cannot be made save for God's order to Abraham to kill his precious son and Abraham's active willingness to carry out the order, thus consecrating the boy. Indeed, in view of what Isaac undergoes in the story—bound stepwise to the altar, only to have his father's raised arm, knife blade in hand, stayed by the Lord at the moment of truth—it is no exaggeration to say that in a terribly meaningful sense the boy's life is taken and given at the same time.

This interpretation is generally consistent with Shalom Spiegel's classic Judaica study, in which the principal purpose of the Akedah narrative is seen as in all likelihood the establishment and justification of a great change in the character of ritual sacrifice, from a ‘pagan’ norm, according to which the victim is human, to a humanistic norm, in which a beast is substituted for a human (Spiegel 1993: 64). If this interpretation is correct, one might reasonably conclude (with Rad 1972a: 239; and Rabbi Leiner of Izbica, in Gellman 1994: 24ff.) that although Abraham and Isaac were made to suffer a terrible ordeal, God's order was a necessary deception (or, in Rabbi Leiner's usage, an “appearance”), and he never intended to allow Abraham to follow it to its final end. Of course, while this interpretation can thus clarify God's doings in the story, it leaves the motivation of Abraham's seemingly unconscionable conduct still to be comprehended.

Knightly Faith or Unholy Desire?

Like all stories, the Akedah has at least two sides, each of which serves the other as a deconstructive mirror-image, that is, one that reflects so acutely as to occasion critical self-reflection, the sort of prying reflection that opens oneself to question. In the present case, what is an imperfection from the creational side of the story—namely, surrogate or incomplete sacrifice—proves a perfectly vital force from the creatural side. The lesson seems to be something to the effect that humanity as such depends for its livelihood on a constitutive incapacity to complete itself or do things in the absolute, and that insofar as humanity seeks to transcend altogether this condition of conditionality, as is its wont, it courts destruction. A familiar story. Indeed, this tale of an infanticidal father whose devoutly murderous conduct is transmuted into the life of the generations by a salvific act of God may be seen to recall the life-disseminating properties of a great tree whose fruit remains immortalizing only so long as it stays beyond the reach of mortals. The fruit, of course, is the originary power over life and death, the fruit of the Edenic tree of life, and, as the story goes, at the end of the day it simply is not ours for the taking.

This reading follows from construing the highlight of the Akedah to be the substitution of an animal for a human in sacrifice. It is this substitution that realizes the story's theme as a turning movement from death to life. In light of reading the story from its endpoint of surrogation, the story's principal burden of instruction is to make the substitution of beast for human, and thus life for death, sensible in terms of the logic of sacrifice. The story performs this task by establishing vicarious identity between Isaac and the ram of God. The command by God to offer up Isaac, and Abraham's dutiful conduct in doing so, may be explained, then, simply as functions of the story's narrative task: the establishment of identity between Isaac and the sacrificial ram depends on the establishment of Isaac's identity as victim.

However, while God's command and Abraham's response may be readily understood in this way, when these two figures are seen as subjectivities or persons rather than simply as agents of the narrative, their actions inevitably raise questions of motivation. These are the questions that Kierkegaard addressed. And if I am right about the story's principal purpose as a demonstration of the vital significance of surrogation in sacrifice, these questions of subjectivity must have vexed the story's redactors too.

In point of fact, as one might expect if the story's main thrust lies elsewhere, the narrative provides precious little to go on in answering these questions. When God issues his command, he provides no reason for it, and Abraham appears to be as much in the dark about his own conduct as he is about the order from above. Indeed, Abraham's response to the command is so immediate that it seems very much like one's response to an ‘order’ issued practically by oneself to oneself: While carving the Thanksgiving turkey, I ‘tell’ myself to raise my arm, knife in hand, and my arm goes up. Although we take for granted self-movement of this kind, in fact it exhibits all the mystery surrounding the connection between mind and body, or, more appropriately in the present context, between spirit and matter. For in truth, as I argued (on Wittgenstein's philosophical authority) in chapter 1, the connection is neither exactly immediate nor mediate.

The sort of response Abraham gives to God's order, not instinctual but nonetheless more bodily than mindful, is what one might expect of a time and place in which the existence of God (or of gods) is not quite yet a matter of belief but constitutes the implicit certainty on the basis of which any belief whatsoever takes flight. In other words, insofar as ‘faith’ implies ‘belief’ in the sense of facultative acceptance (as it plainly does in Kierkegaard's Pauline usage), Abraham's behavior seems to be both more and less than a matter of faith. Put another way, his behavior may be thought of in terms of a sense of faith other than the one in question here, a pre-predicative and fundamentally social sense. Indeed, his movement is so automatic it might almost be described as motivationless.⁸

Nevertheless, the story does not want for certain contents that betray a subjectivist perspective. The stunning horror of what Abraham is asked to do could not but introduce the wrench of self-consciousness into the automated works of the divine structure of command. Doubtless, like Kierkegaard, the story's redactors, in their capacity as readers, felt the need to arrive at some understanding of what God and Abraham could have been thinking. Hence, when Isaac, a pious son but no fool, seeing the sacrificial appurtenances asks his father as to the whereabouts of “the lamb for a burnt offering,” Abraham answers “God will provide.” This answer is truthful, prophetically so. And yet it is also exquisitely ironic, concealing the awful truth from Isaac. From this one may infer that Abraham was hardly acting in all innocence, but was only too conscious of the horrifying nature of what he was about to do. (Harking back to Lyotard's jarring comparison between God and Hitler, Abraham's answer could be seen to find a parallel in the well-documented attempt of the Nazis to conceal [e.g., Lang 1990: 41ff.], from both the victims and the world at large, what they were doing in the death camps.)⁹ Much the same may be said of Abraham's words to his two young helpers, when he instructs them to wait while he and Isaac go off to “worship.” Notwithstanding its plain truth, the statement does more to conceal than reveal what is about to happen. And when he appends to this instruction (my emphasis) “we will come back to you,” he is telling the servants (what had to appear to him) an outright lie, but which in fact proves to be yet another prophetic truth. Finally, in connection to the question of Abraham's and God's intentionality, the words of “the angel of the Lord” seem to leave no room for doubt. The angel informs Abraham (twice, no less) that he has been let off the hook because he did not withhold his son, “thine only son, from Me.” These remarks certainly give truth to the interpretation that in this story God is out to try Abraham's faith, and Abraham means to prove that his faith is more than equal to the trial.

Still, there is something off-center about this strand of the story. The theme that what is on trial is Abraham's faith is somehow not quite in keeping with the more immediate theme of the story—that of the trial of Isaac's life. From the perspective of human law, as Kierkegaard stressed, Abraham's conduct must be judged repugnant. But, strikingly, Abraham's great and blind faith may be seen to constitute a threat even from the perspective of his maker. Given the nature of God's final intervention, it is logically implicit in the story's upshot that in a substantial sense Abraham's behavior was dreadfully wrong. The sort of gift Abraham set out to give is simply not for humankind to offer. The gift of perfection or death, as is the theme of Golgotha, is God's prerogative, not man's. Hence, at the end of this story, God has to step in to make things right. All this follows from taking the story principally as, rather than a rationalization of blind faith, a warrant to economize when sacrificing.

A Perfect Sacrifice

Because it is our habit to think of substantive identity in terms of singular individuals, it has been usual to see Abraham's action as simply homicidal, the attempted murder of another, albeit his own son. But if I am right about the way in which identity is defined in the story, as a matter of the relationship between Abraham and his son before it is a matter of the (non-)relationship between Abraham and himself (“non-relationship” only because we mistakenly tend to conceive of the self in entitative rather than relational terms), then Abraham's act should be understood in terms of self-sacrifice. In which case, we are talking about a selfless act of attempted suicide.

As a rule, selflessness is a good thing. But, and this is the point that I want to develop here, the act seems so perfectly selfless that it registers as the ultimate suicide. In binding Isaac to the altar, Abraham sets out to do himself in, but so completely as to prescind even the possibility of living on in the supreme manner in which, according to the biblical imagination, it is given to humankind to do so: through the generations that issue from Abraham's seed. Moreover, in light of the fact that these are the generations of God's promise, a promise of great and mighty nationhood (Genesis: chaps. 17 and 21), it might be said that Abraham intends to give himself a death so round as to be matchlessly complete. To attempt such global perfection is to presume the exercise of total control in matters of life and death, and thereby to arrogate to oneself godlike powers. If we choose to say (with Wittgenstein 1971: 35) that “nothing is so dead as death,” then Abraham appears to be casting himself as the very substance and pure figure of death. In light of this picture, in acting as he did, Abraham exhibited not knightly faith but unholy desire.

One might be tempted to conclude, therefore, as against all received wisdom, that insofar as the command from God was a test, Abraham failed it alarmingly. As a god-fearing person, that is, one respectful of the infinite difference between humans and the Other, Abraham should have refused to comply with the command to offer his son as a holocaust, a perfect gift.¹⁰ Of course, the fact that at the story's end the angel of the Lord states plainly that Abraham is to be rewarded for his compliant behavior seems to rule out any such interpretation. But perhaps the words of the angel, which so credit God's command as gospel, themselves reflect a redactional loss of perspective or the failure to represent truly what is otherwise than representable.

Whether or not one thinks that the stories of Genesis are somehow god-given, there can be no reasonable doubt that they have been propagated by human hands, and that, in any event, they naturally and inextricably include a human point of view. As a result, in some substantial sense, the creational as well as the creatural principals in these scriptural tales cannot but present an earth-bound perspective, a view from somewhere rather than nowhere. I suggest that in the Akedah, God-Elohim, that high and mighty patriarchal figure, in ordering Abraham to make of his beloved and only son (by Sarah) a perfect gift, displays a disposition that is only too human. I have in mind the disposition to make everything come out even, which is to say, to bring everything to a final end or to seek perfection. I do not necessarily mean to imply that representing God in terms of perfection makes of him a human figure (although it may, notwithstanding Descartes’ proof of the existence of God—that if inherently imperfect beings can conceive of perfection, then God must exist). I mean instead that inasmuch as God's movements are pictured as having perfection as a desideratum, as if this quality had gone missing and needs to be restored, the figure of God has been assimilated to a human sensibility and aspiration. It was Rousseau (1992: 25–26) who spoke of self-perfectibility as the human faculty that “develops all the others,” and who, doubtless taking his cue from a biblical theme, was inclined to see it as “the source of all man's misfortunes.”

This interpretation suggests that in this story the figure of God, as profoundly informed by otherness as it may be, might also share in the identity of Abraham. I have already shown that as Isaac is identifiable with the ram of God, so Abraham is identifiable with Isaac. As a matter of fact, the basis on which these identities are fixed leads one to see that the same sort of identity-in-difference obtains between God and Abraham.

Anthropomorphism: From Abraham's Psyche to God's Mouth

The defining identity between Abraham and Isaac is both the same as and different from the identity between Isaac and the ram. Isaac, after all, is tied to Abraham by virtue of biological continuity, making the identity between them the only sort that, at least for certain purposes, moderns are likely to take as seriously as that between an individual and him- or herself. But it is crucial to recall that even in this biological aspect, the identity between Abraham and his son is given by God in a miraculous manner. When Sarah is 90 and Abraham 100 years old, God promises Abraham that “Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac” (Genesis: chap. 17). In effect, then, in the case not only of the ram but also of Isaac, it was indeed the Lord who provided, consecrating identity between, on the one hand, Isaac and the ram and, on the other, Abraham and Isaac, and therewith among the three of them.

By the same token, Abraham is identified with God. Isaac is the issue of Abraham's loins, but those geriatric sinews are miraculously invigorated by God's initiative. It may be seen, then, that in the child of their union—an unequal union, to be sure, of spirit and matter—Abraham and God are in a sense made one ‘flesh’; together they constitute a marvelous identity in and of fatherhood. The fact of the story is that as a creational elision between the figures of God and Abraham, Isaac's father is both one and two at the same time—that is to say (a theme given added and more other-worldly emphasis in the figure of Jesus), Isaac is both the son of man and the son of God.

None of this is to say that these three dyadic identities—Isaac and the ram, Abraham and Isaac, and God and Abraham—are not also relationships of critical difference. That between Isaac and the ram holds the difference of economy in sacrifice, a difference so vital as to make a virtual world of difference between the cessation and the continuation of a people called Israel. And that between Abraham and Isaac, as between God and Abraham, holds the difference of belatedness, according to which one of the two parties to each pair enjoys over the other the tremendous authority owing to generative others and claimed by creator-patriarchs.

But these differences do not so much spring from or conceal identities as foster them. I do not think that this story can be understood unless the god-figure's infinite and originary difference from man is placed alongside that figure's substantial identity with man, for its meaning lies precisely in this paradox. The story pictures Abraham as a creaturely extension of God's person, but, paradoxically, an extension with a mind of his own.¹¹ Hence, while Abraham responds to God's authoritarian command bodily, just as if he were a hand of God, his response is seen also to constitute an autonomous decision.

The story itself thus authorizes the identity between God and Abraham as flowing directly from God's creative initiative to his creatures. What I want to suggest here, though, is the possibility that identity also flows the other way—it backs up, so to speak, informing the figure of God with the figure of man. This is hardly a bold or novel thesis, in view of the well-known consideration that anthropomorphism is a characteristic feature of the Hebrew bible's depiction of the godhead (e.g., Johnson 1961, 1964). In the story in question, it seems to me that God's command to offer up Isaac registers just such a reflux of identity. By calling in all debts, that command expresses a diagnostically human want of perfection: it prescribes a sacrifice that would put an end to all sacrifice and therewith to life itself. In effect, although it issues from God's mouth, it smacks of an ever-present temptation on the part of humanity to overreach itself.

The interpretation of the Akedah as primarily a trial of Abraham's faith is predicated on the presumptive, utter righteousness of the order to take Isaac's life in sacrifice. If, though, it is correct that logically perfect sacrifice on the part of man must constitute a threat not only to the law of man but also to the primacy of the Other, then the interpretation to faith should not go unquestioned. It would seem that the justice of both God's command to Abraham, a mere mortal, to kill his own son and of God's subsequent approval of Abraham's zealous response is open to serious question from a perspective that is more than humanistic and runs deeper than the patriarchal warrant recorded in the story.¹² If it is to be identified with the creational force registered at the end of the story (by the promise of life), then the figure of God appearing at the beginning would seem to be disturbingly compromised. For whereas the creational force is a vital force, the command to cut Isaac's throat on the altar is so perfectly lethal, so globally destructive, that it is out of keeping with even the undeniable sense in which death may be construed as a chronic condition of life.

Between Perfect and Perfectly Imperfect Sacrifice

Total Economy and the Anti-sacrifice

If, then, the story's apparent lesson about faith is neither as plain nor patent as has been thought, can we dismiss it? I do not think so. For taken together with the lesson about surrogation in sacrifice, it yields an interpretation of the story that serves to enlighten beyond both lessons.

Generations of readers have noted that in this story the terms for the deity alternate between Elohim or God and Yahweh or the Lord, the former appearing five times in the first half of the story, the latter appearing in the second half, also five times (Spiegel 1993: 121–22). Accordingly, the story has been controverted as at least two-sided, one side centering on God's (Elohim's) test and command to bind Isaac (his ‘power’) and the other on the Lord's (Yahweh's) saving intervention and promise of life (his ‘mercy’). Indeed, it has been argued by experts that the story is not simply two-sided but in fact is made up of at least two distinct prime documents (Spiegel 1993: 122ff.). For my purposes, though, what counts is that the two sides appear together as one story, and whether or not they are narratologically reconcilable, their pairing yields a discerning portrait of the human condition.

As I have shown, the highly suspect nature of the command to bind Isaac is brought to light by seeing the command as reflected in the mirror of the Lord's countermand to substitute a beast for the boy. In other words, in contrast to the vital economy provided by surrogate or imperfect sacrifice, perfect sacrifice looks stupidly lethal and therefore cannot emerge as a demand in any sacrificial logic determined by an overarching reproductive imperative. By the same token, when it is seen in the mirror of God's distinctly non-viable call for a holocaust, a pure gift, the economic relief brought by the Lord's provision of a surrogate victim also looms suspect. By insinuating the possibility of a total economy, one that is logically no less absolute than a perfect sacrifice, the offering of a proxy undermines the very ideas of gift and sacrifice. The economizing capacity of surrogation projects an image of a no-cost existence, wherein salvation is realized as self-savings—the ‘I’ banks itself with a miserly and ultimately self-destructive completeness.

In point of fact, every act of substitution in sacrifice is intrinsically open to interpretation as hypocrisy. No doubt there is cause to celebrate the Akedah narrative's evident implication that human sacrifice is a pagan abomination in the eyes of the Lord (Spiegel 1993). But what about the ram, whose innocent life is expended in place of the life that is owing? Instead of reading the story as a warrant to end human sacrifice, it can just as well be seen, from the ram's point of view, as an artful blind to draw attention away from the fact of the matter.¹³ And the fact of the matter is that when in sacrifice the life of another is substituted for the life of the self, the self has chosen to deceive—often enough itself and always the other. Indeed, if surrogation is carried to its logical conclusion, then in principle the self remains undiminished while the other alone is eradicated.

Such a turn of events does more than make nonsense of the ideas of surrogation, gift, and sacrifice—it defines their negation. An immaculately economic act of sacrificial slaughter constitutes an anti-sacrifice, and as such is, like its exact antonym (perfect sacrifice), as lethal as can be. Despite its strong impulsion to misrecognize itself as a totality rather than a basic ambiguity, the self is, after all, nothing more than a powerful manifestation of self-other relations. What singularity it enjoys rests precisely with this its fundamental multiplicity, its constitutional dynamism, its becoming-other. In which case, of course, any attempt on the part of the self to obliterate the other, in an effort to complete itself by excluding the otherness on which it depends for its being, must lead to the extinction of itself as well as the other.

A Magical Movement

In effect, then, as reflected in the mirror of each other, both of the story's lessons at point here—blind faith and surrogation—look seriously flawed. But as a result of this narrative chiasm, the story holds out—perhaps beyond the redactors’ intentions—yet another lesson, an even more profound and complicated one. I have in mind the lesson that as human beings we are caught irremissibly between the needful self and the obligatory other. What the Akedah shows is that Isaac is in fact doubly bound, to the Other who gave him life as well as to the life of the self thus promised him, and through him to generations of others to come. To take the allegorical meaning, we are damned if we fail to give ourselves on behalf of the other, and we are damned if we do not fail. Which means, of course, that salvation rests in managing to do both—an impossibility or a magic act if ever there was one.

As I have shown, both perfect and perfectly imperfect sacrifice come to precisely the same end: the end of time. This is because the double bind can be put off but not resolved. Human existence may be construed in terms of the process of putting off the dead end described by the double bind. This process amounts to a taking hold of both horns of the dilemma. In so doing, the dead end is postponed, making time. Of course, it is impossible to take both horns at one time—were it possible, the dilemma would not be dilemmatic. But one can manage to move between the horns in such a way as to realize them both for the time (of) being. This amounts to a kind of high-wire act, in which one moves, ever precariously, first this way and then that, between the two ends of the wire. The object of the exercise is to keep the two ends extant, not by reaching them but by reaching for them. Once reached, they spell death. In other words, whereas the ends themselves signify the end of time (a falling off the wire, into the abyss), the back-and-forth movement between them, a paradoxical movement of suspension or untimely time, constitutes time.

The story of Isaac's binding may be read to offer instruction in how to perform this magical movement. Isaac is pictured as bound by or condemned to the wire, suspended over a terrible and unfathomable abyss. He is caught between the altar rock of what is owing to the absolute other, from which the self issues, and the hard place of that self's impelling initiative, that is, the derivative but demanding power of the self to empower itself. Although fundamentally opposing, these two demands define each other. Indeed, they meet representatively in the singular figure of Isaac: on the one hand, he is God's gift, and therefore he is owing to and even (at least implicitly) participant in God; on the other hand, as other to the absolute otherness of God, he makes and is owing to himself, which is to say, to humanity or all the others. In the story, Isaac does not so much mark the spot where these two demands intersect, as if he were separate and distinct from them; rather, he is their crossing, a dramatic and personified dynamic of reversal. How is this so?

With Isaac's victimization, the story moves first toward death, in the direction of redeeming Isaac's (and Abraham's) debt to the Other. But with the provision of the surrogate animal, the story reverses course, moving toward the preservation of the self and humanity, and thus paradoxically redefining the original direction—God's directive—as life rather than death. From a logical point of view, the upshot is scandalous: a sacrifice that is not a sacrifice, a holo-caust that is not whole in the required sense (in the end, it is not Isaac qua Isaac that is immolated). The paradox is facilitated by two critical conditions. One is Isaac's ordeal, which, because Abraham acts in earnest, is palpable and far more than symbolic. By trying Isaac's life, this condition consecrates his identity as victim and therewith establishes identity between him and the ram of God. The other condition is of course the intervention by God, which provides and licenses the ram in substitution. As a result of these two conditions, in Isaac death is transfigured into life.

But like all tricks, even the most ingenious, this one is subject to exposure. And once exposed, its magical effect goes up in smoke. By projecting it in the sober illumination of its logical conclusion rather than in the bedazzling light of a divine stay, the act of surrogation too is betrayed as having death as an end. The slaying of the ram is the murder of another and therefore cannot foreclose the possible murder of all the others in the economizing interest of the self's saving of itself. Thus, the transfiguration of death into life, Isaac's resurrection, is exposed for what it is—a kind of trick. But it is the trick of a lifetime. It constitutes a vital rather than perfect economy. It negotiates the double bind, such that life can go on. It is an immensely creative enterprise.

A Magical Time or the Time of the Other

From an existential rather than logical point of view, the paradox at issue marks time—it marks the time it takes to convert a death sentence into a life sentence, a putting-off time, the time of one's (and one nation's) life. In the story, such time is registered as threefold. First of all, there is the time it takes to carry out the sacrifice. This time is pictured as an actual journey into a foreign land and then up one of its heights, both called Moriah, and then back again to the place known as Beersheba. The journey also describes a progression of sacrificial stages, moving from the call to sacrifice, to the consecration of the victim (Isaac being made to bear, like Abraham's beast of burden, the wood for the burnt offering), to the altar and immolation. Second, there is the time mentioned at the end of the story, a promised time pertaining to the proliferation and greatness of Abraham's posterity. Finally, there is the time marked in the powerful moment of truth, when Abraham takes the knife to his child, only to have his hand stayed instantaneously by the angel of the Lord. This kind of time, in which what happens happens all at once, is the time of creation—in effect, it is the no-time of eternity in which something is made from nothing, life from death.

All three kinds of time mark the time of the Other. Hence, the sacrificial journey goes up to and down from the place thenceforth called Adonai Yireh, or the mount on which the Lord sees (and is ‘seen’). The time of Abraham's posterity signifies the time of futurity. Although God's promise appears to reduce this time to the certainty of the self and the present, the essential uncertainty and otherness of this time are given in the fact that the promise is decidedly the prerogative of the absolute other. Finally, the time of instantaneity is the time of creation, of the emergence of the singular and novel, of ‘effects’ irreducible to causes. This is the time marked by the point of crossing, that is, Isaac, in whose figure is projected the life-time of a people.

For purposes of the story, the most telling time is the third kind, the instantaneous time of creation. It is this kind of time to which the magic of the trick is keyed. Taken in its everyday sense, creation time is described by decision or choice. As it is the medium of determination, by definition a true choice cannot be told beforehand. A true choice is a quintessentially creative act. Even if in hindsight conditions for it can be isolated and identified, in critical part it constitutes its own condition and remains therefore, in a crucial sense, unconditioned. It makes difference.

The Choice to Choose: Spirit for Matter

The story of the Akedah plainly turns on a pair of choices. God issues to Abraham two commands: respectively, to kill and then not to kill Isaac. In regard to each, Abraham decides to obey rather than disobey. But the choice confronting Abraham exceeds, by a quantum leap, the question of compliance. Given its dire content, its instruction to cut off Abraham's line and thus (from the story's chauvinist perspective) the future of humankind, the first command obliges Abraham to make a choice between what is owing to God and what is owing to himself. Owing to God is not merely allegiance, though; more fundamentally, according to the command, it is life itself. And as a matter of God's promise, owing to Abraham is also life, but life in the unique sense of selfhood. At stake is not simply animate but, more profoundly, reflexive existence. Put another way, at stake is self-consciousness or human life. Put still another way, Abraham is due precisely the power to choose for himself, that is, to choose on behalf of his self.

Every choice of whether or not to obey a directive implicates the choice between having and not having choice. This is because for most practical purposes the choice to obey deprives one of any way to show that one has in fact taken a choice, whereas in the nature of the case the choice to disobey presents one as having chosen for oneself. When one chooses to obey a command, one's self-definition as a chooser, a self, becomes a matter of faith, since there is nothing to be seen in the manifestation of the choice that can serve to distinguish one as anything other than a mere function of the command. But choosing to do other than the other's bidding necessarily describes one indeed as the other's other and therewith as oneself.¹⁴

In this connection, what I wish to bring to light is that in the Akedah, the choice to choose, instead of being left implicit, is given added, even exceptional, emphasis. In view of the infanticidal content of the first command, Abraham is being asked to make a choice so hard that it cannot fail to highlight the question of choice itself. He is obliged to choose between being and not being. The question put to him, then, is Hamlet's. And as in the case of Shakespeare's prince, the question asks either that he deny himself, his own being, and suffer the Other's choice (“The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”) or that he assert himself by choosing to choose for himself (“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, /…/ When he himself [my italics] might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin [blade] ?”). Whereas for Hamlet the ‘good’ choice is against “conscience” or the Other and for himself, for Abraham the reverse is the case. (In Kierkegaard's terms, Hamlet chooses what is for him the higher ethical value in his given situation, whereas Abraham trades ethics for the infinite, thus making him a knight of faith rather than a tragic hero.) But in both cases, at stake is the capital power to be a chooser, that is, to be empowered to create one's own world.

It is only because Abraham enjoys this creational power that the story can present itself in the thematic terms of a test of faith. How must Abraham prove himself? By forgoing this god-given power and trusting in God to call the shots, even though—and this is the critical point—he, Abraham, could have done otherwise. In effect, in resolving to slay his own son as ordered to do so by God, Abraham makes a sacrifice and is duly rewarded. But what exactly has he offered up? At the end of the day, for all that his beloved son has suffered materially, it is precisely not Abraham's self in any bodily form (including his son's body) that gets sacrificed but rather the self that is belonging to Abraham in spirit. He has agreed, at God's bidding, to return what God had given him in the first place: the power to choose to do other than God's bidding. This is precisely the power not of embodiment but of inspiration—this is the power given man when God breathed life into him, not when he formed him of dust from the ground. The substitution of a beast for a human being is warranted, as the story goes, because Abraham has indeed already sacrificed himself in a profound way—in spirit (cf. Sarnum 1966: 162–63).

The kind of being at stake in this story, then, is described by the power of choice, the magical or spiritual power to create worlds and make time. The story makes the point that if man is to benefit from this power to render being from nothingness, life from death, he must substantially acknowledge that he enjoys it only at God's behest, and therefore always within limits. Hence, while the story turns on an exercise of the power of choice by Abraham, the happy ending depends not on this choice exactly but on the ensuant one taken by God. It is God's intervention—God's choice, the choice of God—that creates the magical transfiguration of life from death. The story means to reaffirm, then, that the deity is the master chooser, the creator of worlds, a claim that has been in question at least ever since Adam and Eve got away, in a critical sense, with stealing the forbidden fruit. The narrative of Abraham and Isaac reminds us, in disturbing terms, that although the tree of the knowledge of good and evil may have fallen into the hands of man, the tree of life remains forever beyond his reach.

The ‘Stupidity’ of Blind Faith

Blind Faith vs. Pre-reflective Understanding: The Akedah and the Nuer Rite of Gar

The story then constitutes a specific, instructional answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The answer is that life is a gift from God, and that the continuing enjoyment of this gift depends on abnegational sacrifice as a matter of blind faith, that is, as a matter of conscious but uncomprehending choice. It strikes me that this answer, while deep and salutary, also bears a grave danger. On the one hand, in a very powerful way it serves to remind us that choice is limited and never wholly witting, individual, and free (a scriptural shibboleth reiterated with a difference by postmodernism); on the other, by promoting the choice of blind faith, the answer can serve to foster Hitlerian aspirations.

In order to elucidate this judgmental conclusion further, I want to compare and contrast the Akedah to another answer to the question of human existence. Given that each and every culture may be regarded as a particular approach to putting off the dead end of being doubly bound, to living a dilemma and making time, there are indeed many other answers or myriad forms of human life. But there is a feature of the Akedah that serves to distinguish it categorically in the present connection. I can bring this feature into high relief by viewing it in light of a phenomenologically ‘more primitive’ treatment of the existential problem of the double bind.

The Nuer of East Africa also perform surrogate sacrifice, to the same life-sustaining purpose as expressed in the Akedah.¹⁵ The ideal victim for the Nuer is an ox, and the key to this practice among them is their perception of identity with their cattle. This identity is established in an initiation rite called gar or ‘the cutting, whereby all pubescent boys are made to undergo a severe scarification: several lines are incised, to the bone, in the boys’ foreheads, starting from the center of the brow and extending to each ear. In effect, the horns of cattle are carved indelibly into the boys’ heads. This bloody initiation into manhood empowers the initiates to perform, among other things, ritual sacrifice to Kwoth (Spirit or God). The cutting, then, appears to be a master rite, the root sacrifice that licenses all the others.

For general purposes, the formal and functional parallel between this Nuer ritual and the binding of Isaac is obvious. (At risk of putting too fine a point on it, it is worth recalling here that the Akedah's ram was, as preparatory to the fulfilling of its sacrificial role, caught in a thicket “by it horns.”) In the present connection, though, there is a crucial difference. Whereas Isaac's trial is a matter of choice, and dramatically so, the ordeal of the Nuer youths is simply taken for granted as a part of the natural course of things. However it appears at first blush, this difference, as registered in the Akedah's theme of blind faith, is momentous.

While the Nuer do indeed ‘trust’ in Kwoth, they do not have ‘faith’ in him, if that usage is meant to convey that they have deliberated a decision to believe in him. By contrast and for all the automatism of his response, there can be no doubt that the Akedah pictures Abraham as having to prove himself by making just such a decision. In view of the shocking and seemingly insane and perfidious imperative to murder Isaac, the credibility of the God of Abraham must have looked open to question to Abraham's redactional authors, at least to some degree. Accordingly, Abraham is pictured as having to decide whether he should take the imperative—and hence the mouth from which it issued—as true. For the Nuer, though, Kwoth's designs are not open to human prerogative at all. Instead, Kwoth and the order imposed by him are entertained as matters of perception alone: Nuer see and experience the world in terms of them. In other words, whereas in the Akedah God is presented, in part but critically, as a function of Abraham's faith or belief, for the Nuer, Kwoth, like the earth, wind, and water, simply is.

The phenomenological ramifications of this ontological state of affairs, wherein God is an indubitable presence, run deep. For one thing, logically speaking, the situation in which humans would need to prove their acceptance of God as true or existing cannot arise. And for another, although there is a need to establish especial identity between the self and the surrogate victim, there is no need to warrant the reality of this identity by rationalizing it. In the case of both the Nuer and the Akedah, this identity is made by causing the intended victim to suffer a terrible ordeal, thus linking him to the sacrificial beast. But whereas for the Nuer the resulting identity, surely conceived of as Kwoth's design, is really real, for us it presents itself as, although serious, a kind of fiction. For this reason the Akedah finds it necessary to back up the identificatory warrant for the substitution with the implicit thesis that what in reality has been sacrificed is Abraham's spiritual power. It is as if because the identity between Isaac and the ram must in the end be deemed merely symbolic, and therefore a kind of cheat, the act of surrogation is in need of rationalization by reference to a more genuine sacrifice. Thus, notwithstanding the overt attention of the narrative, the most innovative critical sacrificial substitution in the Akedah is not beast for man, but spirit for matter.

Blind Faith: A Dualistic Development

By comparison to ritual sacrifice among a people like the Nuer, then, the Akedah's theme of faith betokens nothing less significant than a different world, a different sense of reality. It might be said that Nuer reality is keyed more to perception and actuality than to commitment and choice. The fact that Kwoth is readily perceived by the Nuer as, although separate and distinct from man, also close to man and participant in his world suggests that for them the distinction between spirit and matter is as fuzzy as can be. In light of this comparison, the Akedah's theme of faith becomes conspicuous by virtue of the incipient way it treats matter as one thing and spirit as quite another. In effect, the difference in question projects the difference between a dualistic and a nondualistic ontology.

A critical caution is in order here, for as it obtains specifically between these two examples, this difference can easily be overdrawn. The forgoing analysis plainly suggests that there is a great deal in the Akedah narrative to indicate that, in relation to the way in which the reality of God was experienced in Abraham's world, that world had much in common with the Nuer's.¹⁶ We should not forget that the biblical story also blurs the boundary between spirit and matter, as in the identity it establishes between the finite figure of Abraham and the infinite figure of God. Nevertheless, the exegetically celebrated theme of faith in the biblical story, with its diacritical accent on the difference between spirit and matter, marks unmistakably a dualistic development. This development is further advanced and refined in the story of the sacrifice of Jesus, where the whole point becomes how spirit, in the figure of the creator, can save matter, cast as the creature, by offering itself up on the latter's behalf. In effect, then, the Akedah is on the road to dualism, a thesis crucial to my interpretation of the story and my willingness to credit Kierkegaard's Pauline reading in terms of blind faith.

Blind faith, in the sense of belief that is resolute but based solely on trust, is a servile attitude made possible by dualism. The Akedah's account of Abraham as self-sacrifice in spirit alone clearly implicates the dualism of spirit and matter as it revalorizes the very idea of obedience, away from obeisance or even reverence and toward sheer servility. This kind of sacrifice, wherein spiritual is substituted for material being, is recorded in the story as a supererogatory decision on the part of Abraham to obey God's abhorrent command. The surpassing nature of Abraham's decision rests with the nature of the risk: Abraham risks ‘his’ life, and all the promised life that his life includes, for God's sake. But the risk is brought to its critical edge by the fact that Abraham's decision is taken blindly, without knowing for what he is taking the risk. He knows only too well what he is risking, but he can have no idea of whether the risk is worth it or not. In effect, then, it goes wholly unmitigated, even by such knowledge as is standard in cases of risk-taking—the knowledge of whether the possible benefit warrants the risk.

Blind faith in this sense can emerge only where ‘sighted’ commitment is an option. In relation to faith, sightedness means having access to a reason for commitment. Abraham has no such access—he must commit in total intellectual darkness, on the basis of revelatory authority and obligation alone. God does not offer Abraham a ground for the command; he just issues it. The point is, though, that blind faith is blind, not because reason is not part of the picture, but because access to reason is denied under circumstances in which it is part of the picture. In point of fact, faith of this kind entails the idea of reason, which is to say, it supposes the clear differentiation of the intellect from the senses. For this reason, a Nuer cannot act in blind faith, at least in respect of Kwoth. True, he acts in the absence of any ground other than the perception of Kwoth, Kwoth being the certain ground on which everything stands and from which everything derives. For this very reason, however—that Kwoth for him is a matter of perception and not belief—the situation cannot arise in which the Nuer can conceive of a ground on which he can put the truth of Kwoth or his order to question. For under these epistemological conditions, any such ground would have to have as its ground the perception of Kwoth and his designs.

Put another way, for the Nuer, reason and the intellect, like spirit itself, are not clearly differentiated from the senses. As there can be, then, no reason qua reason that one can forgo in commitment, in such a world blind faith, the kind of faith Abraham's act is seen by Kierkegaard to epitomize, is simply not possible.

Total Risk

To return now to my value judgment, it seems to me that blind faith courts ‘stupidity’. By this supposition I do not intend that such faith is in error, but rather that as a mode of thought, it too readily entertains malevolence.¹⁷ On the explicit basis of revelatory experience and authority that goes not simply unquestioned but unquestionable, Abraham risks everything—not just his son's life, or even his own, but life itself. This global risk is occasioned by unalloyed faith, the presumption of which stands behind the command to Abraham to prove himself by sacrificing Isaac. As the story goes, the risk proved worth it, since it produced an extraordinary benefit—redemption so very substantial that humans were thenceforth effectively permitted to sacrifice themselves basically in spirit rather than in substance. This benefit amounts to a progressive movement—a veritable leap—in the direction of selfhood. The resultant differentiation of spiritual from material sacrifice and the story's thematic acknowledgment of Abraham's self, made implicitly but powerfully in the voluntary act of abnegation, indicate that what is gained is the superadded re-creation of the life of the self. It is paradoxically but precisely the spiritual power to choose and determine one's own world that gets expressed and redoubled in Abraham's decision to abdicate this power in the face of the Lord.

If Abraham had known beforehand that he had a world to gain as well as to lose, his faith would have been not blind but instrumental—a gambler's faith—and the risk, although still great, calculated. But the story treats the possibility of global risk as a function of perfect faith. That is to say, such incalculable risk is brought into play only because God seeks to test Abraham's faith. The roundness of the risk repeats and depends on the perfection of the faith.

Since a Nuer takes God's presence for granted, faith cannot be an issue for him. And since he cannot act in blind faith, unlimited risk is not about to define his situation. A Nuer does not sacrifice in order to show his faith, but rather to ensure the continuity of life. And even in this connection the sacrifice is not exactly a means to an end since, as a function of Kwoth's design, sacrifice constitutes its own satisfaction. Whether or not the sacrifice effects the immediate purpose (say, healing), it is only incompletely differentiated from everyday (profane) life and therefore enjoys the practical status of simply the living of that life. In other words, for the Nuer, sacrifice is practiced in much the same way as eating, sleeping, and interrelating. To be sure, in view of the fact that a Nuer offers up what he truly perceives as a part or extension of himself, there is risk. But the risk is limited, never total. For this reason, among the Nuer a sacrifice like Abraham's, one so rarefied that it can alter the need and nature of sacrifice itself, is unthinkable. Each and every sacrifice not only gives life, but, precisely because it is definitively measured, because it always falls short of payment in full, also ensures that the practice of sacrifice will have to continue in its current form. While some Nuer sacrifices are deemed more important than others, none can serve as a sacrifice so total that it can effect a redemption powerful enough to reduce the need, by a giant Abrahamic step, for further sacrifice.

Self-Perfection and the Inversion of the Hierarchy of Spirit and Matter

“No risk, no gain,” to be sure. If Abraham's inordinately hazardous action yielded the considerable return of a marked intensification of human selfhood, then Nuer ritual practice must correspond to a relatively undeveloped or naive sense of self. That is to say, the act of sacrifice does not advance the Nuer along the road of self-development and, tautologically, toward the reduction of the need for substantive sacrifice. But the implicit value judgment here is pointedly complicated by the consideration that the Abrahamic leap of faith, which is also a leap of self-consciousness, not only carries grave risk but also encourages the turning of that risk into reality.

It is not hard to see that the self-development registered in the story of Abraham and Isaac reveals the operation of the principle of perfection. Indeed, inasmuch as that development ensures the perpetuity of Abraham's self as a leader of nations, of a premier worldly world (“In his seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” [Genesis: chap. 22]), it bespeaks Abraham's likeness to God—the first creator of worlds. But as it does, it holds out an image not simply of self-development but of self-completion. That is, it informs man with, above and beyond a strong sense of self, a sense of self the logical destiny of which is sheer self-containment and self-transparency. More precisely, the development in question defines man, teleologically and for himself, as that creature whose fundamental end in life is self-perfection. This holds true despite the fact that the story's narrative, with its stunning emphasis on the need for Abraham to submit his will to God's, gives a powerful, if unarticulated, lesson about the idolatrous deception of such an image. Indeed, it is the implicit operation of this perfectibilist self-definition that explains why the lesson has to be given at all.

How does the Akedah portray this image of self-completion? To stay with the story's theme of blind faith, the relationship between God and man is depicted as a matter of choice. God chooses to issue a certain command to Abraham, who in turn, on no other basis than faith, chooses to obey. Inasmuch as it is wholly intentional and creative—that is, agential and unconstrained by force, guile, or reason—the conduct of both epitomizes what it means to choose. The relationship is thus pictured as mediate rather than immediate, a tie between two selves each of which has the power to direct its own conduct toward the other and therefore stands to the other as other. The relationship is in this sense open: the tie has a significant degree of play in it. The play amounts to the power of choice and thus constitutes a spiritual rather than material freedom. As such, obviously, it is predicated on a prominent distinction between mind and body. It is this distinction, of course, which admits of the most novel change recorded in the story, namely, the substitution of material by spiritual being in sacrifice. In effect, by deferring his volitional power to God, Abraham performs not a bloody but a spiritual transfusion; he injects God or the Other with the life that is His, thus renewing that patriarchal figure and defining it all the more so as a matter of spirit.

Hence, the theme of blind faith entails a prominent distinction between matter and spirit. The character of the difference between man and God implicates the sharpness of this distinction. What is narratively featured is not the material but the politico-spiritual character of the difference. Insofar as man enjoys the power of choice, he is one of a kind with God and is thus implicitly equipped to displace the latter (or at least appears so to himself). The story furnishes an account of how God goes about containing this difference, ensuring against the threat of it.¹⁸ But right from the beginning, the story secures the primacy of God's place by signaling that there really can be no contest, and that notwithstanding man's power of choice in the least, the relationship between him and God is ineradicably hierarchical rather than equalitarian, a relationship of authority rather than power. God's command is, although presumptively not Abraham's wish, certainly Abraham's witting but unquestioning commitment.

The hierarchical nature of the relationship is ultimately founded on generational priority: it is understood that man could not have created himself in the first place and is therefore owing to his Other. This fundamental asymmetry of creator and creature is inevitably glossed in terms of the ontological polarity of spirit and matter. Man's limited generative power or pro-creativity marks him as, although not exclusively, representatively material, while God's absolute generative power, creativity in itself, identifies him absolutely with the spiritual pole. Therefore, in respect of this polarity, man's power of choice, a godly attribute, presents a transcendence and makes of him a walking contradiction—a representatively material being that is nonetheless inspirited.

Herein rests the nub of the problem. Although the spiritual pole is in principle deemed superior, when it is prepossessingly introduced into man, that is, into the ‘creature, it risks subjection to definition by its material counterpart. As a result of this unholy-holy admixture, the creature is ever tempted to define himself in terms of the limitlessness or perfection of the maker, and to conduct himself in such a way as to make that self-definition come true. Insofar as the main intended lesson of the story is about the vital need to acknowledge performatively God's supremacy, the threat of this antinomian turn of events may be seen to furnish the story's very raison d'être.

Hierarchical Inversion and Immaculate Boundaries

Referring to the idea of boundaries can flesh the point out. Plainly, because they extend in space, material things lend themselves to precise delineation. Spirit, however, characterized by zero dimensions, does not—its boundaries are definitively ethereal. Therefore, insofar as material boundaries are spiritually informed, one might expect them to present themselves as fuzzy and fluid rather than fast. But the same condition of ontological ambiguity offers the alternative possibility: where they are found together in the concrete individual, that is, nearer to the material end of the polarity, that end is enabled and even given to impose its inherent perspective on the spiritual pole. The boundaries of the individual thus look not merely but perfectly precise. Which is to say, for purposes of self-definition, they become absolutely exclusive or closed, dualistically defining the individual as against everything else.

As soon as the material perspective presents itself as the starting point of perception, the kind of boundary it disposes advances a definition of perfection in terms of fixity and closure. This definition stands in sharp contrast to any non-idolatrous apprehension of the Perfect, in which is featured precisely the unrepresentability of amorphous openness. And when the material notion of boundary is applied to the distinction between matter and spirit, it defines dualism. Considered as a dualism, this distinction is no longer simply sharp and prominent, but differentiates its polar principles immaculately. Consequently, matter comes to be seen as one thing and spirit entirely another.

More importantly here, though, is that such mutual exclusion allows material boundaries to appear as if they go unqualified by the basic ambiguity characterizing all ‘things’ we are inclined to speak of in spiritual terms. In effect, it is forgotten that such boundaries not only separate but also connect.¹⁹ What is more, by virtue of the phenomenological emergence of boundaries of this immaculate kind, the world of spirit too comes to be apprehended as a closed whole, a kind of totality or individual. That world then gets defined by virtue of the boundary differentiating it from the material world, an exclusionary boundary. To detect the cognitive movement in this direction, we need only cite the dramatic example of the figure of Christ, in whom, apparently for the first time, spirit as such and in full comes to be contained phenomenologically within the confines of a material singularity, an individual human being. Surely, this is one crucial meaning of the ‘incarnation’ of Christ.²⁰ This meaning was not lost on the Canaque of New Caledonia, who take the spirituality of the world for granted. When their Christian missionary-anthropologist, Maurice Leenhardt, asseverated that he had introduced Spirit to them, they objected, saying that, on the contrary, what he had brought was the Body (Leenhardt 1979: 164).

The Displacement of the Other by the Self

The terrific irony is that Abraham's plain and powerful movement toward spirituality leads, not ineluctably but nonetheless forcefully, to the logical extinction of the very idea of spirit. Although it would seem to treat its two constitutive principles equally, in fact the dualism of matter and spirit always privileges the former. This is because the defining essence of dualism, mutual exclusivity, supposes a world in which things do not participate in but are instead exterior to one another. Notwithstanding the rationalism of Descartes’ cogito, such a world is at bottom primarily material. Hence, in the dualistic contest between spirit and matter, spirit cannot really win. The contest implies that each of the two principles is essentially purposed to reduce the other to itself. But whereas logically the material principle can succeed in eliminating the spiritual one, by defining the world in quantifiable terms, in order for the spiritual principle to triumph, it has to reduce itself to the measure of the material. In the dualistic terms of the contest, it can win only by excluding or by wholly incorporating the material world, thus denying its own defining essence as basic ambiguity. Thus, with the advent of dualism, spirituality is insidiously denatured and denied.

The point can be made more concretely. One upshot of the Akedah is that spirit is put decidedly at the disposal of humanity and history. As the just reward for his act of self-sacrifice, Abraham, through his descendants, is re-spirated, or hooked up in perpetuity to a divine respirator. Once the life, nationhood, and supremacy of Abraham's posterity seem guaranteed, though, he is positioned to forget the experience of his own heteronomy. A presumption of perpetuity so imposing as to be received as in the order of things (as is promised at the close of the story) invites one to take oneself as self-contained, as one's own starting point. What does it mean to forget that one ever originates in otherness, if not that one has displaced in one's own mind the other with the self? And what is the self in this dualistic context but, at least at first, the sense that one has of oneself as a substantive denizen of the world of procreation. Hence, the starting point of perception looks to be, instead of a blind spot, or something always already forgotten, or what is otherwise than being, an empirically well-defined and highly visible phenomenon.

The narrative of the Akedah is finely attuned to just such a turn toward self-centeredness. The narrative tells a horror story, a story expressly meant to serve as a reminder that, for all the promise of their continuing existence as self-contained entities, men are in fact vitally and irredeemably dependent on what is other to them. The reminder is necessary because one of the forceful consequences of the development of self-consciousness is the loss of memory of the other as truly other. With each advance in the development of self-consciousness, man is given to feel more secure in the promise of his empirical being; correspondingly, he becomes less cognizant of the experience of his own otherness. The inevitability of this state of affairs is lodged in the reminder itself. I mean nothing so uncomplicated as that the reminder would not be necessary but for man's inclination to self-perfection. Rather, I mean the following eventful paradox: that the reminder cannot recall to man his essential heteronomy without at the same time reminding him of his autonomy. It works, even when it is meant to strike the fear of God into the hearts of men, by appealing to them in view of their power of choice, their power to do otherwise. For this reason, in their capacity as a phenomenology of mind, the biblical stories speak here of ‘temptation’ instead of, for example, ‘determination’ or ‘dialectic. With abiding insight, the stories grasp man's essential situation of consciousness as no less a matter of conscience and hence in terms of what is called here ethics rather than reason.

The Reduction of the Infinite

All this is inscribed in orthodox religion's password, ‘blind faith’. As we have seen, this usage denotes that Abraham decides on the basis of faith alone, without benefit of reason or understanding. In effect, he makes his decision in view of what is invisible to him, of that to which he is perfectly blind. The reminder of his heteronomy is a reminder of precisely this: that the truth of God is no less certain for being objectively unknowable and unrepresentable. According to Midrashic commentary, at the moment his father raised his hand to take his life in sacrifice, Isaac was blinded (Shulman 1993: 4). With this interpretive insight the Midrash is surely indicating that, as a correlate of Abraham's pious decision, the blind spot that is the truth of God, the fount of all perception, is phenomenologically brought into relief. What Isaac was forbidden to see at that life-threatening instant was the very source of himself, that which gives life and takes it away.

The inherent but perilous temptation to self-perfection on the part of man makes it easy to see why it might be critical to institute a set of understandings, whatever their specific contents, that serve constantly to remind men of their fundamental belatedness, of the primacy of the Other. To forget this condition, whether in relation to other human beings, other kinds of animals, inanimate things, or, more abstractly, otherness as such, is a profoundly risky business. This kind of forgetfulness amounts to the attitudinal exclusion of that on which life ultimately rests—an exclusion the consequences of which are logically predictable.

But it is one thing to remain alert to one's fundamental finitude and quite another to take instruction from it as if the invisible ground imposing it issued commands on the model of a human order. To take instruction in this way makes not only a category mistake but also a consequential contradiction. For it implicitly renders the invisible ground present and even accounted for, as if it were man's to access in the way men facultatively access one another. True, in Abraham's case the ground remains for him out of sight, but it is presented plainly as within his earshot. God's fundamental invisibility certainly highlights his otherness, the way in which he differs from any determinate object in this world. However, although vision and hearing inflect absolute otherness differently, the voice Abraham hears speaks words that are clear and distinct, in the manner of human talk, talk that bespeaks, as vision betokens, not indefinitude, but the present-at-hand.²¹

I am again arguing, then, that Abraham's willingness to take God's instruction in this story actually constitutes not the knightly success celebrated by Kierkegaard's commentary but an egregious failure by Abraham to stay alert to his own fundamental limitedness. It is futile to question that in the general case there is always something to which we cannot but remain blind. Since any question cannot explain its own possibility without effecting an infinite logical regression of further questions, the question at point ultimately betrays the operation of the very blind spot it seeks to dispel. But if there is one thing that we have learned from the horrific events of the twentieth century, it is never to allow a specific command to remain unquestionable. Unlike an existential condition, each and every specific command is finite or contingent and therefore accessible in principle as to its rationale.

By trusting implicitly the justice of God's command, far from demonstrating trust in the invisible otherness that goes in the story by the name of God, Abraham actually violates that trust. The essential black hole of human understanding can be brought to the attention of human consciousness by the figure of God, but it cannot be brought to light. In claiming to know God's specific command, Abraham does not remember but forgets that there is always already something forgotten. He conducts himself as if he can—not cannot—know, for certain and concretely, without any doubt whatsoever, what the always already forgotten amounts to. He forgets that it is the intrinsic openness, not the determinacy, of the absolute other that needs to be kept in trust. It is because this memory fails him that he can be certain that the command he hears, all too humanly exact and patriarchal, issues from the mouth of God himself and, accordingly, be willing—quite insanely—to risk all of life, absolutely everything.

Abraham and Dire Madness

“When people are convinced they speak in the name of God,” writes John Caputo (1993: 145), “then it is time for the rest of us to head for the doors.” Who is it Abraham hears speaking? He can be sure of the invisible other, but can he be sure that that other has spoken a command to him to kill his own son? That kind of certainty implies that the command he hears issues from not an invisible other but another other, one whose voice is audible and articulate in this world. Such an other betrays a self, a positive creature that can see and direct itself in relation to others and to the invisible other. But unlike the voice of another such other, the voice Abraham hears does not resound for all to hear—it is for his ears only. Whose voice can it be, then, but his own? And who, then, is speaking in God's name, but Abraham—to himself?

Today, of course, Abraham's conduct would lead us to think him mad—schizophrenic, to be exact.²² He experiences the voice he hears as coming from outside himself rather than as his own. But this experience constitutes and betrays a distortion of his relationship to the invisible other. That relationship is essentially bipolar: man is at once both part of and contraposed to that otherness. In his contraposition, he differentiates himself, ultimately as an individual; but in his participation, he remains always other to himself, including his own individuality. By projecting God as the said rather than the saying, in terms of words the denotative meaning of which can be fixed and deciphered, Abraham distorts this bipolarity into a kind of a monopoly. For inasmuch as he comprehends the otherwise than being in such mundane terms, he reduces it to determinate being, his very own. In his presentation of self, then, he has lost sight of himself as a singularly double-bounded creature whose part in the order of things is to contrapose it-self to that very order without ever ceasing to belong to it. In effect, he has defined himself in terms of one pole of his being only, the contrapositional one, allowing it to do double duty, as both itself and as his (voiced-over) patriarchal other.

By specifying God's order and acting on it, Abraham resolves in his own mind his opposition to that order. He thus presents himself as indistinguishable from it. He does so not by increasing his participation in it to the point of losing himself, as one might lose oneself (one's mind) in, say, a rampaging crowd. Rather, he collapses it into his own determinate being. To be sure, he truly experiences the voice as belonging to another. Nevertheless, his experience is solipsistic: he alone hears God's order.²³ Having managed to obscure the concrete way in which he continuously belongs to what is other to his self, he forgets that his mind is not simply conveyed by his body but is itself bodily. According to the story, he hears with his mind's ear (in the sense that one might see with the mind's eye), and he obeys. In other words, as in all dualistic epistemological contexts, he presents himself first as mind, then as body. Pace Kierkegaard, what Abraham discerns is not the subjective truth of God, but rather the precarious truth of his own subjectivity. In the event of this dualistic self-definition, the loss of mind Abraham suffers is—although articulated contrarily as an intensification of mind—not less for his having convinced himself that he has internalized God's infinite compass instead of having mindlessly allowed himself to be fully incorporated by it. Of course, these two outcomes are equally deadly. Indeed, Abraham becomes, if you like, a mad crowd of one, deranged and malevolent as regards his own child and even life at large.

Madness and the Eclipse of the Common World

By presenting himself so critically in terms of subjectivity, Abraham eclipses from view the one world common to us all. I do not mean the objective world according to science and rationality. Rather, I have in mind the world as we find it when we see it in relation to ourselves looking at it at the same time. Unlike the scientific picture of it, this world comprises the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial. By including in our ‘view’ the sense of ourselves looking at the world, we bring into account our own particular perspectives. And because these perspectives are particular rather than universal, they imply an infinite regression of enabling perspectives. They are therefore definitively limited, excluding from immediate seeing the ground that is the condition of their possibility. In which case, the objective world cannot be the world according to science. Instead, it is the world in which we participate and in so doing help produce by coming to terms with the particular standpoints of one another (and of the Other). The terms we come to are, in the first place, practical rather than ratiocinative. They reflect a dynamic bodily perception through which the fundamentally limited views offered by particular perspectives are articulated with one another to constitute a working world.

The objective world I have in mind, then, is a correlate of the mindful body before it emerges as a preponderantly theoretical proposition. The universality that admits of a shared world emerges with, rather than a view from nowhere, the dynamic, temporal articulation of motile human beings, who watch their step in relation to one another's movements.²⁴ As a result of this bodily complicity, we are enabled to fill in gaps of our own particular perspective, expressing in our very movements vis-à-vis others and otherness a working sense of the whole. This is the sense that prevails, say, when we navigate in vehicular or pedestrian traffic—the sense in which each of us grasps from our own particular position the same visible formation as well as our own relationship to it.²⁵ This working sense of the whole furnishes a basis on which well-defined cultural worlds (including the sensus communis) and properly theoretical ones may arise, and may in turn inform the particular perspectives regulating and enabling our perception of the world. And because it remains always infinite and open, this sense of the whole also implicates the possibility of divinity and occasions conceptualizations thereof.

In the Akedah, Abraham's solipsism—a dualistic turn of his self-consciousness away from bodily to hermetic, soulful perception—cuts off his access, in a crucial respect, to the common world just described. Hence, although the form of his actions can be understood (he sets out to make a burnt offering), their content, by reason of its unthinkable character, appears utterly incomprehensible (he intends to slaughter his own child). In effect, without appeal to an actually common world, he is no longer able to meet others and communicate with them as co-participants. This lived and mindful state of profound isolation, impregnable to deliberated self-repair, defines madness. Abraham cannot explain himself—not even to himself (insofar as that self remains still a question of, by contrast to an acutely subjective ‘inner’ construction, sensible articulation with others). Thus, apart from prophetic lies, he has nothing to tell his two servants and his inquiring son about his actions.

Faith and the Common World

Throughout the ages, concerned interpreters have striven to make sense of Abraham's conduct. In fact, if we take it as exegesis in its own right, the story itself tries to do the same. It accounts for Abraham's action as a proof of his faith in God. But this is far from explication by reference to the one world we all have in common. Instead, as Kierkegaard brought out in such depth, ‘faith’ denies any sort of objective world in favor of a profoundly subjective one. According to the argument from faith, the only thing we really have in common with one another is the fact of our solipsism. In which case, the argument in question can have force in one community only: the community of the faithful, or at least of those who take for granted belief as a natural attitude among men.²⁶ The argument derives its force not from demonstrating that Abraham's actions are other than malevolent, but from presuming, on the basis that Abraham is carrying out the orders of one who is not only almighty but also all-just, that the actions cannot but be benevolent.

But even among the community of the faithful, the argument is unlikely to obviate feelings of suspicion. On the contrary, because it is predicated on solipsism, the kind of faith at issue always stands on the edge of madness. Hence, Abraham is asked to prove his faith precisely by undertaking an apparently deranged act, one which can hardly make sense in terms of human decency. In connection with this act, for Abraham, evidently, it was enough to trust in God. But for all those trying to penetrate and justify Abraham's behavior, it is necessary to trust not only in God but also in Abraham's trust that he has indeed heard the word of God. In view of the heinous act he intends to perform and his inability to make the commission of the act comprehensible in human terms, why should we?²⁷

We cannot help but have faith, but we need not be stupid about it. Earlier I indicated that by ‘stupidity’ I intend a structure of thought that fosters unnecessary violence. Here, though, I can add that the particular structure of thought in point does its disturbing work by obscuring the fact that our life depends not only on our separation from but also on our connection to the chronically inchoate world that we all have in common. The story of the binding of Isaac frames the abhorrent but perfect ethical enormity of Abraham's act as a measure of his faith. But it is just plain stupid to give credence to a man who is about to slaughter any child, let alone his own, on the grounds that the unrepresentable other is making him do it.

Abraham too is being stupid, although his stupidity is allied with madness. As I see it, in keeping with my ‘theory’ of sacrifice, the madness stems from anxiety of displacement, a fear that is fed by the critical focus on Isaac as the promise of Abraham's immortality. That immortality is fundamentally compromised, since it proceeds most concretely by Isaac's displacement of Abraham. When it is considered that Abraham is no ordinary father but the father of us all, a singularly potent patriarch, it becomes comprehensible in human terms why he might be moved to embark on the sacrifice of his son. He wants to displace the otherness of Isaac, his other and future self, before that otherness can displace him in his immediate and exceptional concreteness. An anxiety the object of which is so perfectly full and vital is enough to drive anybody mad.

That Abraham should exhibit this terrible anxiety is hardly surprising in view of the fact that the story pictures God himself as similarly stricken. The existential force of this anxiety mimetically pervades the story. God's menacing command to Abraham, no less than Abraham's sacrificial assault on Isaac, constitutes a shocking reminder of belatedness to the son, of the son's vital dependence on the father. Both the Father and the father of us all—God and Abraham—display a grave concern for their own continuation as a function of the filial piety of their offspring. This concern is not unrealistic. For inasmuch as the father's continuing existence is a matter of the son's continuing acknowledgement of the father's priority, it is the son who creates the father. But once the son exists on his own account, what is there to guarantee that he will continue to pay his filial dues in this way?

Abraham is driven mad by this anxiety. He is moved to divorce himself from the world of limits and compromise, thus creating his world as self-certain. The nature and logic of the command to kill his own son is an enabling expression of such madness. For one thing, the command is utterly uncompromising in what it prescribes. Abraham is asked to offer up his son, neither surrogatively nor synecdochally, but whole, as a holocaust. The command leaves no room for compromise, placing Abraham out of the human world and into an absolute one. For another thing, given its purpose as a test, the command asks Abraham to choose, as against life and choice, to obey. In so choosing, however, Abraham cannot help but revitalize, aggrandize even, his power of choice. For the fact that the choice confronting him is absolute—a matter of life and death—redefines that power in turn as absolute, implicitly representing him as godlike.

Abraham fails to conclude that the horrifying words he hears as coming from out-side himself, but which, inaudible to others, resound in his head alone, must be his own. Can this failure define him as other than a madman? His actions stem from the fact that he has cut himself off from the world as it allows us to come to viable terms with one another as well as with otherness in itself. Notwithstanding the story's own obvious intentionality and the gist of so much exegesis, it is not really the temporal world (Kierkegaard's objective world) from which he withdraws, the world as it blinds us to our own basic limitedness. On the contrary, inasmuch as he forgets that he is participant in a primary world, the common ground of which makes it possible for each of us to meet and compromise and communicate with others, Abraham in fact succumbs to the temptation to regard himself one-sidedly in terms of his own worldly autonomy and subjectivity. And insofar as we choose to countenance his determined, lethal violence against Isaac, his beloved but most threatening other, we are displaying a lack of sensibility so egregious as to be nothing short of stupid.

Faith vs. Life

The argument from faith addresses only those whose subjectivity is sufficiently advanced along the road to dualism to make intelligible the idea of inner commitment. But the argument does not appeal to the world as we find it in our capacity as self-conscious bodily beings always already materially committed to—that is, constituent of and compromised by—one another in a dynamic and open whole. On this world all norms ultimately rest, since it amounts to the inherently indeterminate foundation by virtue of which norming itself, in an endless repetition of difference, takes place.

In connection with this world, the argument from faith can occlude but not dispel the conclusion to the malevolence of Abraham's actions. For this world is quintessentially vital. It expresses itself above all as life, and presents life as good, in a singularly ambiguous sense. Life is good both because it constitutes its own end and because it constitutes its own end. Put another way, the world in question presents itself primarily as bent toward life—it has life as its good. At the same time, however, it presents life as peculiarly capacitated to determine its own good. In practice this ambiguity amounts to ethical existence, a uniquely tensile form of life wherein any overarching good leaves other goods fundamentally open to creative choice. The tension results, then, not simply from the power of choice, whereby the good is always subject to question, but from the paradoxical fact that this power is limited by life, that it necessarily has life as its prepossessing good. In other words, the good of life is no ordinary norm, but that by which all norms are constructed and judged. For this reason, although under the conditions of ethical existence death can be determined as a good, when death is granted dominion not as a function of life but in its own right, it is bound to sponsor malevolence.

That is why, despite the proven metaphysical attraction of the argument from faith, we remain uncomfortable in the face of Abraham's actions. Indeed, even Kierkegaard, in one of four possible projections of Abraham's afterthoughts, considers that the patriarch might have entertained the conclusion of malevolence (1985: 47): “It was a tranquil evening when Abraham rode out alone, and he rode to the mountain in Moriah; he threw himself on his face, he begged God to forgive his sin at having been willing to sacrifice Isaac, at the father's having forgotten his duty to his son…He could not comprehend that it was a sin to have been willing to sacrifice to God the best he owned; that for which he would many a time have gladly laid down his own life; and if it was a sin, if he had not so loved Isaac, then he could not understand that it could be forgiven; for what sin was more terrible?” The killing of one's own offspring, the arresting of biological continuity, insofar as it cannot be justified by reference to human vitality, qualifies representatively as a senseless act of death. Abraham is in no position to justify his conduct as life-giving—his faith depends on precisely his inability to do this. If his faith is to be proven, it has to be blind.

To be sure, the story justifies this justification of Abraham's conduct (justification by faith) by rewarding him in fact with life. But there is something fishy about the logic of this reward. Perhaps the story implies that although Abraham can know God's order only as death-dealing, because it issues from God he can trust that the order is issued actually on behalf of life. But even in this interpretation, the fundamental good of life is given short shrift. It is subordinated to the interest in God, but a god depicted as concerned primarily with the preservation of his position as God and only secondarily with the principle of vitality. In this narrative figure, God speaks in the language of men and is concerned to test their faith. The anthropocentric reductionism here is registered in the story's treatment of the principle of vitality, which, in the cause of securing faith, is patently instrumentalized.

Notice that the trouble is not that God is pictured in the dual terms of both life and death. Such a picture only stands to reason. Rather, the trouble is that owing to the story's elevation of faith over life as the ‘first principle, the relationship between these two sides of the same coin of the realm of animate existence is mediated so substantially as to give death dominion in its own right. By tying it to the axiomatic supersession of the good of life by patriarchy, death is no longer perceived as a condition of life but as an independent phenomenon. It is so introduced in God's command at the beginning of the story: without so much as a how-do-you-do to the poor man—never mind an explanation in terms of life—God, keen to prove Abraham, calls to him and simply instructs him to put his beloved son to death. In virtue of this opening command, this test, that which primarily conditions life in the story is not death but heedfulness of patriarchal authority. If this observation is correct, then the promise of life to Abraham as a reward for his conduct is, rather than what one might expect, an unqualified non sequitur. The very nature of this reward implicitly and irrefutably defines his faithful but murderous conduct as malevolent: where life is the essence of the good, and death is other than a condition of life, there death must be what makes the bad bad. My point is, then, that by virtue of the normative tenor of the primary world, the world in which we come to terms not only with one another but also with otherness as such, Abraham's actions as well as the command that prescribes them cannot help but convey malevolence.²⁸