Читать книгу Anthropology as Ethics - T. M. S. (Terry) Evens - Страница 13

Chapter 3

EXCURSUS I

Sacrifice as Human Existence

What makes human sacrifice something deep and sinister anyway? Is it only the suffering of the victim that impresses us in this way? All manner of diseases bring just as much suffering and do not make this impression. No, this deep and sinister aspect is not obvious just from learning the history of the external action, but we impute it from an experience in ourselves.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough.”

Derrida's Kierkegaard

I have sought to address the profoundly vexing questions raised by God's murderous command to Abraham and Abraham's astonishing response. In my view, although it projects a malevolently mistaken, even stupid, picture of the prescriptive importance of absolute faith for human life (which is not to say that we can do without faith), the story features, fruitfully and with penetrating balance, the vital importance of an economy of sacrifice for human beings. But even should one find this reading productive, one might still wonder why the story couches these lessons in terms of sacrifice. That is to say, the questions of the command to Abraham and Abraham's response to it are one thing, while the question of why Abraham's terrible trial must proceed by sacrifice is quite another. Why does this religious story about the critical conditions of human life present itself in the terms of sacrifice?

In his foreword to Hubert and Mauss's (1964) classic study, Evans-Pritchard (ibid.: viii) remarks that the “literature on sacrifice is enormous,” and in their introduction Hubert and Mauss (ibid.: 1) observe that “[t]heories of sacrifice are as old as religions.” I have no need here to try to review this literature and these theories. For my purposes, it suffices to suggest that for the most part, however varied it is, the literature displays the following as a usual feature: it takes as the object of study, and tries to explain, sacrifice considered as a rite. The guiding presupposition is, to quote Evans-Pritchard's expression of agreement with Robertson Smith (in Hubert and Mauss 1964: vii): “'[S]acrificium is the basic rite in ancient (and primitive) religion.” No matter, then, whether the theories are evolutionary, functionalist, structuralist, or something else; they tend to treat sacrifice as a constituent element of religion as such.¹

In the present study, by contrast, sacrifice is grasped as in the first place—before it appears as a ritual practice and component of institutional religion—a structure of human social existence. By seeing sacrifice in this way, its ubiquity as a religious rite is made easier to comprehend. If religion, well differentiated as such or not, is understood as a prescriptive practice bearing on the spiritual aspect of being human, then it is not surprising that sacrifice enjoys so prominent a place in religions. For, speaking very broadly, the spiritual aspect of human existence has always to do with the question of what is owing to otherness considered as that which is ultimately irreducible to the self, and thus makes of religion a sacrificial practice of one kind or another.² I do not aim here to give a minimum definition of religion, but merely to suggest that inasmuch as all religions are keyed to a sense of self as vitally bound to a higher power, all logically entail sacrificial conduct, which is, ideally, self-abnegation of some sort. Exactly how this concern for otherness manifests itself in any particular ritual sacrifice is a matter for empirical research and interpretive analysis. For instance, in the previous chapter I tried to show, among other things, that displacement and indebtedness stand at the bottom of the Akedah, and in the next chapter I offer an interpretation of the Holocaust in terms of sacrifice similarly considered.

This conception of sacrifice as the dynamic structure of human existence suggests that neither sacrifice nor violence can be eradicated. Nevertheless, it also implies that sacrifice can take forms more irenic than utterly violent or powerful, and other than bloody or holocaustic. For all its murderous message, the Akedah provides an instruction on how to quit homicide as such, and, by implication, ultimately, bloody sacrifice altogether. Indeed, ‘modern’ religion is marked by its formal refusal of sacrifice of this kind, although all too obviously such sacrifice remains thematic in characteristic domains of modern life, including most conspicuously warfare.³

My answer, then, to the question of why Abraham's trial is framed as a matter of sacrifice is that the story is about the terms of human existence, and that it implicitly understands the structure of this existence as sacrifice. That is to say, it implies that ultimately there is no distinction to be made between sacrifice and any action that is peculiarly human—all human action has the form of sacrifice.

We can get our bearings here by examining Jacques Derrida's (1995) interpretation of the Akedah. More exactly, Derrida's is a tendentious reading of Kierkegaard's interpretation. The good Frenchman is primarily concerned to rethink the nature of the great Dane's axial distinction between what Abraham owes to his fellow humans and what he owes to God. According to Kierkegaard, the distinction tells the difference between ethical and religious obligation, and the latter sort of obligation necessarily takes precedence over the former, because it alone may be construed as absolute. By reconceiving the god-figure in the story—generalizing (or, as Derrida would say, “disseminating”) it away from the particularity of at least the revelatory religions—as purely and simply what is wholly other, Derrida mitigates the distinction. Propounding the dictum tout autre est tout autre (“every other is wholly other” or, as translated in the book, “every other (one) is every (bit) other”), Derrida argues that inasmuch as all others, including non-human animals, do in fact display what is wholly other, our obligation to them is also absolute. It is, he says (1995: 83), a question of recognizing in the “infinite alterity of the wholly other, every other, in other words each, each one, for example each man and woman.” Kierkegaard conceives of the (religious) obligation to God in terms of singularity, as utterly unexampled, while he depicts the (ethical) obligation to all the others in (Hegelian) terms of generality. Derrida's point is that each of the other others is also a singularity, a unique being, and therewith wholly other and deserving of the attendant obligatory respect.

As Derrida sees it, this universalizing (but not ‘universalist’) reinterpretation does not so much refute Kierkegaard as supplement his point. It displaces Kierkegaard's emphasis on the absolute uniqueness of God, such that the extraordinary is disseminated, adding force to Kierkegaard's text—the force, I suppose, of being apprised that at each instant each of us is existentially tied to death-by-sacrifice, that is, to (as in the title of Derrida's book) the gift of death. This, Derrida (1995: 79) seems to hold, is the great force of the story of Abraham and Isaac, what makes (re)interpretation of the story so abidingly attractive. If we take Derrida's point, then, however intellectually perplexed we find ourselves as to the story's nature, at the level of existence we cannot but identify with Abraham and his dilemma.

The Akedah as the Human Condition

Derrida's reinterpretation has more than one notable consequence, to be sure. But for purposes at hand, the most outstanding is that it describes all self-other relations, that is, all human relations, as relations of sacrifice. In the Akedah, Abraham, feeling preemptively bound by God's order, finds it necessary to disregard—to sacrifice—what is owed to all lesser others, including to his own son (and, of course, to Sarah). Derrida's point is that this sacrificial turn of events is not extraordinary but in fact our quotidian condition. For insofar as we fulfill our obligation to any particular other, we are necessarily failing to do so to all the other others. In effect, we exist by virtue of sacrificing others. Such is the very structure of our conduct. Whatever we do in our agential capacity as responsible beings, that is, as humans, we necessarily manage to displace ourselves and/ or others. Derrida's illustrations of this existential condition are impressive (1995: 69):

By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professorial and professional philosopher, writing…in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations; my obligations to the other others whom I know or don't know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. I betray my fidelity or my obligations to other citizens, to those who don't speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner (this for the so-called public space to which I sacrifice my so-called private space), thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my son, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day.

Here Derrida manages to describe how sacrifice characterizes the entirety of our lives. He shows the ineluctable sacrificial nexus between his personal preferences and his obligations to his nation (“citizens”), the international community (“those who don't speak my language”), the creaturely world in general (“the animals that are even more other others than my fellows”), and, indeed, to his own “private” life, his family and each of its members in all of their singularity. A little later he goes on, as follows, to suggest that although it hardly would occur to us to think that the criminally murderous event described by the Akedah is any more than a scriptural account with a theological wallop, in fact not only does it happen in today's world, but we ourselves, simply by virtue of the “smooth functioning” of the social order in which we live, with its pronounced rule of law and moral discourse, organize it on a routine and massive scale (ibid.: 85–86):

The sacrifice of Isaac is an abomination in the eyes of all, and it should continue to be seen for what it is—atrocious, criminal, unforgivable; Kierkegaard insists on that. The ethical point of view must remain valid: Abraham is a murderer. However, is it not true that the spectacle of this murder…is at the same time the most common event in the world? Is it not inscribed in the structure of our existence to the extent of no longer constituting an event? It will be said that it would be most improbable for the sacrifice of Isaac to be repeated in our day; and it certainly seems that way…Things are such that this man [Abraham] would surely be condemned by any civilized society. On the other hand, the smooth functioning of such a society, the monotonous complacency of its discourses on morality, politics, and the law, and the exercise of its rights (whether public, private, national or international), are in no way impaired by the fact that, because of the structure of the laws of the market that society has instituted and controls, because of the mechanisms of external debt and other similar inequities, that same “society” puts to death or (but failing to help someone in distress accounts for only a minor difference) allows to die of hunger and disease tens of millions of children (those neighbors or fellow humans that ethics or the discourse of the rights of man refer to) without any moral or legal tribunal ever being considered competent to judge such a sacrifice, the sacrifice of others to avoid being sacrificed oneself. Not only is it true that such a society participates in this incalculable sacrifice, it actually organizes it. The smooth functioning of its economic, political, and legal affairs, the smooth functioning of its moral discourse and good conscience presupposes the permanent operation of this sacrifice.⁴

Derrida is most critically concerned in these passages to show that our moral and ethical decisions are never finally justifiable, that at the end of the day we have no way to truly account for our various ‘choices’, all of which somehow involve the sacrifice of others, whoever or whatever they may be, on the altar of still other others. This is the case, as Derrida sees it, whether these choices are well considered or simply lived. In the penultimate chapter of this book, I will return to the vital question of ethical justification. For present purposes, though, what is important about these passages is their effective description of sacrifice as, in Derrida's words, “inscribed in the structure of our existence.” Again, Derrida's stunning assertion that society operates necessarily according to, one might say, a hypocritical oath, whereby “the smooth functioning” of any social order's “moral discourse and good conscience” depends on permanent “incalculable sacrifice [of others],” is for the moment beside the point. The point I wish to make is, rather, this: being human, that is, conducting oneself in a manner that identifies one as human, takes the form of sacrifice. By no means does this mean that all forms of sacrifice (human, animal, vegetable, self, other, etc.) are ethically of equal weight or character; it just means that being human may be described as a sacrificial dynamic.

It is important to be clear that this picture of human existence in terms of sacrifice constitutes a description, not a theory, of that existence. It explains nothing. Instead, it is a way of looking at being human, a way distinguished, in my view (which may or may not be Derrida's), by its overriding prejudice for ethics. That is to say, it is a picture of human existence as, above all, ethics—a discretionary dynamic keyed to the good and bearing principally on the displacement of self and other. Hence, Derrida finds that whatever our preferences, in executing them, we betray all the obligations that they necessarily preempt: in preferring our professional duties, we fail to discharge nonprofessional ones; in preferring our public commitments, we fail to discharge private ones; in preferring our native tongue, we fail to give way to other languages; in preferring our cultural habits, we fail to make room for other cultures. These sacrificed obligations constitute ‘Isaacs’, as it were—sons and daughters all.

Self-Sacrifice and the Question of Responsibility

What is curious about Derrida's discourse here, however, is that it is couched largely in terms of the other, of how the discharge of our duties to the Other and to others displaces or sacrifices our duties to still other others. The ‘self’ is scarcely mentioned by him. Even so, the idea of the self is presupposed throughout his argument; indeed, it seems to serve therein as the blind spot of the eye of one's moral perception. The obligations of which he speaks, whether fulfilled or forgone, are meaningful as obligations only in virtue of self-responsible beings. His point seems to be that, as against the understanding of the usual moralisms, responsibility is fundamentally paradoxical. In Derrida's picture of things, it is impossible for the self to discharge its responsibilities to the other without at the same time being significantly irresponsible. Still, by failing to speak openly in terms of the self, he sidesteps a crucial question in relation to responsibility, namely, the question of self-sacrifice.

Derrida does, though, acknowledge the possibility of self-sacrifice. At one point in his text (1995: 69), after speaking of the sacrificial offering in the Akedah as both Isaac and Abraham, he feels obliged to remark parenthetically, “and it is the sacrifice of both of them, it is the gift of death one makes to the other in putting oneself to death, mortifying oneself in order to make a gift of this death as a sacrificial offering to God.” Yet as we have seen, he basically debates the question of sacrifice in terms of the displacing of others, not of the self. Given that from the perspective of others one's self is also an other (it is so even to oneself, as when one turns one's gaze on oneself), perhaps Derrida means to include the possibility of self-sacrifice under the rubric of the sacrifice of others. In any event, self-sacrifice, while giving life to the other, would entail the irresponsibility of taking life from the other that is the self.

But even if this is the case, Derrida still manages to avoid addressing directly the question of self-sacrifice. It is reasonable to construe the self that is at stake in self-sacrifice as an ‘other’. But it can never be just another other, for this sort of other is characterized by a uniquely incarnate co-incidence with the sacrificing self, such that it must bear peculiarly (but not exclusively) the responsibility for the act of sacrifice. In other words, the identity between the victim and sacrificer is, although irredeemably and significantly imperfect, so substantive and imposing that the victim is responsible for the sacrifice in a distinctive way.

In Genesis 22, Abraham is twice called by God and once by Isaac. Each time Abraham responds “Here am I.” This phrase (Heb. heneni) amounts to an announcement of individual responsibility. In effect, in answering thus to his son and to God, Abraham declares that he, Abraham, inasmuch as he himself is, is owing to each. It is as if he said, “Here I am—me, myself, and I—on the proverbial spot!” Derrida too understands the phrase in just such terms of individual responsibility (1995: 71): “God…addresses Abraham who has just said: ‘Here I am.’ ‘Here I am': the first and only possible response to the call by the other, the originary moment of responsibility such as it exposes me to the singular other, the one who appeals to me. ‘Here I am’ is the only self-presentation presumed by every form of responsibility: I am ready to respond, I reply that I am ready to respond”⁵ The point is that having responded “Here am I” to the address by the other, the other that is the self becomes the self-responsible other, which is to say, the self. Therefore, even if one wishes to identify as a kind of other the self that is at stake in an act of sacrifice, there remains a critical difference between sacrifice of this sort of other and of the sort we are inclined to think of as surrogatory. This is the difference between, in ordinary parlance, self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of others.

It is crucial to take care not to fall into the dualist trap of thinking of this difference as complete. If the self is always other to itself, then, obviously, the difference at point must be relative rather than absolute. In which case, responsibility too must be essentially relative. The relative character of responsibility is what Derrida is driving at when he maintains that for every responsibility discharged another necessarily goes begging. But in relation to the difference between self- and other-sacrifice, this relativity has yet another aspect: it means that responsibility can never be attributed unequivocally to a self. If the self is always in some measure other to itself, then plainly it cannot be wholly responsible for ‘its’ acts. The implications of this observation are shatteringly powerful. To the extent that one is other to oneself, the other must share in the responsibility for one's acts. Conversely, as the other of other selves, one is always also responsible for what the other does. In effect, as selves, that is, as uniquely discretionary beings, we are responsible not only to but also for the other. Put another way, just as one can never be held totally accountable, so, insofar as one enjoys a self, one can never be without some responsibility for what happens.

The fact that the difference between self- and other-sacrifice is relative, though, scarcely means that it is a difference that makes no difference. On the contrary, as is my main emphasis here, this difference is an element of the logic of existence as sacrifice. Because the fundamentally ethical character of that logic turns on it, this difference could not be more critical. On it rests the possibility of assessing responsibility at all: in the absence of any such difference, in which the self is identified as a self, as a reflexive and therefore agential being, ‘responsibility’ would be not simply relative but utterly meaningless. In which case, of course, there could be no moral universe, no world in which it makes sense to speak of even a relative difference between good and bad. But the fact of the matter is that the difference between self- and other-sacrifice (as between good and bad), fundamentally relative though it may be, will not go away. It seems undeniable that despite the intrinsically fuzzy boundary between self and other, axiologically it more or less amounts to one thing to offer up oneself on behalf of another, and something else to sacrifice the other on behalf of oneself. To think otherwise would be to deny that whether Abraham kills himself directly or does so (more profoundly) by making Isaac his proxy is significant. But it could not be more obvious that the Akedah would not have the same axiological force if Abraham had chosen directly to bind him-self instead of Isaac—the story virtually turns on the son as the designated offering. Or, in anticipation of the chapter to follow, to take an example wherein the lack of ambiguity is even more conspicuous, to deny the difference between self- and other-sacrifice would be to deny that it would have made any significant difference if Hitler had chosen to kill himself instead of the Jews.