Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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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