Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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is, although irredeemably and significantly imperfect, so substantive and imposing that the victim is responsible for the sacrifice in a distinctive way.
In Genesis 22, Abraham is twice called by God and once by Isaac. Each time Abraham responds “Here am I.” This phrase (Heb. heneni) amounts to an announcement of individual responsibility. In effect, in answering thus to his son and to God, Abraham declares that he, Abraham, inasmuch as he himself is, is owing to each. It is as if he said, “Here I am—me, myself, and I—on the proverbial spot!” Derrida too understands the phrase in just such terms of individual responsibility (1995: 71): “God…addresses Abraham who has just said: ‘Here I am.’ ‘Here I am': the first and only possible response to the call by the other, the originary moment of responsibility such as it exposes me to the singular other, the one who appeals to me. ‘Here I am’ is the only self-presentation presumed by every form of responsibility: I am ready to respond, I reply that I am ready to respond”5 The point is that having responded “Here am I” to the address by the other, the other that is the self becomes the self-responsible other, which is to say, the self. Therefore, even if one wishes to identify as a kind of other the self that is at stake in an act of sacrifice, there remains a critical difference between sacrifice of this sort of other and of the sort we are inclined to think of as surrogatory. This is the difference between, in ordinary parlance, self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of others.
It is crucial to take care not to fall into the dualist trap of thinking of this difference as complete. If the self is always other to itself, then, obviously, the difference at point must be relative rather than absolute. In which case, responsibility too must be essentially relative. The relative character of responsibility is what Derrida is driving at when he maintains that for every responsibility discharged another necessarily goes begging. But in relation to the difference between self- and other-sacrifice, this relativity has yet another aspect: it means that responsibility can never be attributed unequivocally to a self. If the self is always in some measure other to itself, then plainly it cannot be wholly responsible for ‘its’ acts. The implications of this observation are shatteringly powerful. To the extent that one is other to oneself, the other must share in the responsibility for one's acts. Conversely, as the other of other selves, one is always also responsible for what the other does. In effect, as selves, that is, as uniquely discretionary beings, we are responsible not only to but also for the other. Put another way, just as one can never be held totally accountable, so, insofar as one enjoys a self, one can never be without some responsibility for what happens.
The fact that the difference between self- and other-sacrifice is relative, though, scarcely means that it is a difference that makes no difference. On the contrary, as is my main emphasis here, this difference is an element of the logic of existence as sacrifice. Because the fundamentally ethical character of that logic turns on it, this difference could not be more critical. On it rests the possibility of assessing responsibility at all: in the absence of any such difference, in which the self is identified as a self, as a reflexive and therefore agential being, ‘responsibility’ would be not simply relative but utterly meaningless. In which case, of course, there could be no moral universe, no world in which it makes sense to speak of even a relative difference between good and bad. But the fact of the matter is that the difference between self- and other-sacrifice (as between good and bad), fundamentally relative though it may be, will not go away. It seems undeniable that despite the intrinsically fuzzy boundary between self and other, axiologically it more or less amounts to one thing to offer up oneself on behalf of another, and something else to sacrifice the other on behalf of oneself. To think otherwise would be to deny that whether Abraham kills himself directly or does so (more profoundly) by making Isaac his proxy is significant. But it could not be more obvious that the Akedah would not have the same axiological force if Abraham had chosen directly to bind him-self instead of Isaac—the story virtually turns on the son as the designated offering. Or, in anticipation of the chapter to follow, to take an example wherein the lack of ambiguity is even more conspicuous, to deny the difference between self- and other-sacrifice would be to deny that it would have made any significant difference if Hitler had chosen to kill himself instead of the Jews.
Chapter 4
COUNTER-SACRIFICE AND INSTRUMENTAL REASON—THE HOLOCAUST
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