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