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.