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
