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