Abraham - Biblical Patriarch - in Literature. - Abraham Biblische Person - Erzvater. Abraham - Blanchot, Maurice - Criticism and Interpretation - Isaak. - Kafka, Franz - Criti

Literature Suspends Death
Literature Suspends Death

Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka
and Blanchot
Chris Danta
Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
2011 Chris Danta
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Danta, Chris.
Literature suspends death : sacrifice and storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and
Blanchot / Chris Danta.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-3972-6 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-3972-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Sacrifice in literature.
2. Bible--Influence. 3. Kierkegaard, Sren, 1813-1855--Criticism and interpretation.
4. Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924--Criticism and interpretation. 5. Blanchot, Maurice--
Criticism and interpretation. 6. Abraham (Biblical patriarch)--In literature.
7. Philosophy in literature. 8. Storytelling in literature. I. Title.
PN56.S25D36 2011
809.933822211--dc23
2011031381
ISBN13: 978-0-8264-4407-3
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

For my grandfather Fritz Henry Reuter (19052001), who died
before I began this work, and for my grandmother Irene Reuter
(19112004), who died before I finished it.
Death may indeed be the last great foe of writing, but writing is
also the foe of death.
J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron
Contents
Acknowledgementsviii
1. Testing the Tested 1
2. The Melancholic Imagination: Kierkegaards Abraham 26
3. Sarahs Laughter: Kafkas Abraham 67
4. The absolutely dark moment of the plot: Blanchots Abraham 100
5. Coda: Agnes and the Merman 131
Notes 136
Works Cited154
Index162
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those who have made it not just possible but also a
great pleasure for me to complete this book. To Kevin Hart for the power to
begin; to Andrew Benjamin for his unstinting patience and enthusiasm and
for always giving me the intellectual strength for the next word; to Mark C.
Taylor and Leslie Hill for their perspicacious reading and generous comment;
to Francis King, Peter Steele and Catherine Runcie for the timeliness of their
encouragement; to Dimitris Vardoulakis, Paul Sheehan, Gordon McIntyre,
Christopher Peterson, Julian Murphet, Elizabeth Cowell, Anthony Alexander,
Lars Eckstein, Robert Savage, Neil Levi, Will Martin, Paul Patton, Sean Pryor,
Bill Ashcroft, Christine Alexander, Peter Alexander and David Fonteyn for
the great gift of their intellectual friendship; to Haaris Naqvi at Continuum
for his enthusiastic support of the project; to all of my family for their love
and support; and, finally, to my wife Susan, without whom I could not have
completed this. Perhaps Abraham never told his wife Sarah about Gods
command to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22. But I could not go on without
telling you everything.
Chatper 1
Testing the Tested
A faith like an axe. As heavy, as light.

Franz Kafka, The Zrau Aphorisms
I Kafkas Abraham and the test des fables
It is a little-remarked because unromantic fact about Franz Kafkas life

that he worked from 1908 to 1922 as a lawyer at the Workmens Accident
Insurance Institute in Prague, where he produced numerous reports on risk
classification and accident prevention in the workplace. But surely this daytime
experience contributed to the notion of the test or the trial becoming one of
the organising figures of Kafkas night-time or literary consciousness?
Rather than the Ancient Greek aphorism Know thyself, the Kafkan imperative
might well be Test thyself however dire the consequences. Test yourself
against mankind, writes Kafka in The Zrau Aphorisms. It teaches the
doubter to doubt and the believer to believe.1 Not only does Kafka produce
narratives that revolve around tests of one kind or another, he is also drawn to
classical narratives involving them. Scattered throughout his notebooks and
letters are provocative re-imaginings of some of the most testing moments in
the Western religious and literary imagination: the Fall, the Tower of Babel,
Odysseus encounter with the Sirens in Book XII of The Odyssey, the gory
punishment Zeus enacts upon Prometheus for helping man to discover fire.
Kafka delights in overturning our assumptions about each of these founda-
tional stories by pointing out something we might have failed to notice in
them. His rhetorical strategy is to appeal to the logic of the pivotal missing
detail. We are sinful, he writes of the story of the Fall, not only because
we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet
eaten of the Tree of Life. The condition in which we find ourselves is sinful,
guilt or no guilt (ZA 82). According to Kafka, the prohibition on the Tree
of Knowledge was just a divine ruse so we wouldnt notice that our real task
was to eat from the Tree of Life. As Roberto Calasso notes, We are sinful
2 Literature Suspends Death
not because we were kicked out of paradise but because our expulsion has
rendered us unable to perform one task: to eat from the Tree of Life (ZA
131). For Kafka, then, human life is constituted around a kind of impossible
or unachievable test.
Along with the Fall, another impossible biblical test that came to obsess
Kafka is the trial of Abraham in Genesis 22. If the Fall tells of how sin enters
into life in order to condition its meaning, then Genesis 22 perhaps tells of
how death enters into life in order to condition its meaning. In this short
and harrowing biblical narrative, God tests the first of the patriarchs in the
most terrible fashion possible: by demanding that he offer up for sacrifice
his beloved son Isaac. Gods demand appears not only cruel but also contra-
dictory for he has already promised Abraham that he will establish his
covenant with Isaac. Remarkably, Abraham acquiesces unquestioningly to the
sacrificial command despite its patent contradictoriness. Saddling his donkey
and cutting enough wood for the sacrifice, the patriarch sets out with Isaac
and two of his servants for the place that God has told him about in the
region of Moriah. The sacrificial party travels for three days until Abraham
recognises the place in the distance (Gen. 22.4 New International Version)
and tells his servants to wait with the donkey while he and Isaac go over
there to worship (Gen. 22.5). On the way to Mount Moriah, the son (who is
carrying the wood and the fire for the sacrifice) asks the father an obvious but
pressing question: The fire and the wood are here but where is the lamb
for the burnt offering? (Gen. 22.7). The father responds to this question
evasively and, as it turns out, somewhat prophetically: God himself will
provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son (Gen. 22.8). Binding Isaac
to the altar, Abraham then takes the knife to slaughter his son before the
angel of the Lord calls out to him from heaven at the last possible moment:
Do not lay a hand on the boy Do not do anything to him. Now I know
you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only
son (Gen. 22.12). Abraham finally looks up to see that a ram has become
caught by its horns in a nearby thicket and understands to sacrifice the hapless
animal in the place of his beloved son. The story thus ends happily, at least for
its human participants; the death that enters into life in order to condition its
meaning turns out to be animal rather than human.
However one reads it, as myth or as religious history or as some mixture
of both these things, Genesis 22 is one of the foundational stories of Western
culture. It is one of the most memorable and written-about episodes in
the Bible. As biblical scholar R. W. L. Moberly notes, For both Jews and
Christians in their differing contexts (and differently again for Muslims,
through the Quran), Genesis 22 has been one of those highpoints in scripture
where the nature and meaning of the Bible as a whole is illuminated with
unusual clarity.2 In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is generally read as a
didactic story exemplifying the movement of faith and the obedience of
Testing the Tested 3
man to the divine. Commentators often conveniently refer to the story by its
Jewish name the Akedah or binding in reference to the Hebrew verb
used in Gen. 22.9. The ancient rabbinical position on the Akedah is that it
constitutes the last and most significant of ten trials Abraham undergoes as
the first of the biblical patriarchs.3 On account of his astonishing conduct
in Genesis 22, Judeo-Christian theology grants Abraham an eschatological
afterlife: Abraham, contrary to the other patriarchs [Isaac and Jacob], who
were permitted to enter into eternal repose, was to receive a posthumous
mission, that of welcoming to his bosom the souls of the elect.4 The most
mesmerising episode in Abrahams life continues to play a pivotal role in the
ceremonial apparatus of the three monotheistic faiths: it is commemorated
in the holiest week in the Christian year, at Easter; it is recited at the start of
the holiest fortnight in Judaism, on Rosh Hashanah; it also gives rise to the
holiest day in Islam, Id al-Adha, the Feast of the sacrifice, which occurs at the
climax of the Pilgrimage.
In grasping the religious significance of Genesis 22, it is important to
recognise how Abraham and (to a lesser extent) Isaac serve the devout as sites
of religious identification. As Clemens Thoma explains:
The narrative found in Gen. 22 had not only a significant religious and spiritual
development in late Old Testament times and afterwards, but above all, it
affected the history of piety. Many people, finding themselves in difficult situa-
tions, were able to sustain themselves on the strength of this account about
Abraham who, confidently obeying the God who was testing him (Gen. 22.1),
was prepared to slaughter his only and beloved son, and about Isaac who was
willing to be offered as a sacrifice. This expression of obedience by Abraham
and submission by Isaac constitute an example worthy of imitation. The story
motivated people to accept obediently and submissively in their lives what
seemed incomprehensible, unendurable and contradictory and to reflect upon it
It is generally accepted then that the adherent of Akedah-spirituality imitates
Abraham in a special way when he is threatened with the loss or removal by
force of something beloved and dear to him. In contrast, when someone finds
himself as a sacrifice on the altar, when rejected, ill or close to death, then Isaac
comes into the center of focus.5
For many readers of Genesis 22, then, Abraham and Isaac are heroic figures
with whom one should positively identify: Abraham when one is threatened
with the loss of something beloved, Isaac when one finds oneself to be the
object of sacrifice.
But Kafka shows us that it is possible to reject this religious point of view
that Abraham is a figure worthy of identification and imitation and focus
instead on those aspects of the story that impede our identification with the
hero: the melodramatic subject matter of a father attempting to sacrifice his
son; the radically laconic and unsentimental style of the chapter that makes
Abraham appear as inscrutable as God. The raison dtre of Kafkas account
of Genesis 22 is thus to interrupt the moment of religious identification with
Abraham. In a June 1921 letter to his friend Robert Klopstock, Kafka calls
the Akedah an old story not worth discussing any longer and then sets about
re-imagining the sacrificial event it depicts entirely afresh.
I could conceive of another Abraham for myself he certainly would never

have gotten to be patriarch or even an old clothes dealer who was prepared
to satisfy the demand of the sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a
waiter, but was unable to bring it off because he could not get away, being
indispensable; the household needed him, there was perpetually something or
other to put in order, the house was never ready; for without having his house
ready, without having something to fall back on, he could not leave this the
Bible also realized, for it says: He set his house in order. And, in fact, Abraham
possessed everything in plenty to start with; if he had not had a house, where
would he have raised his son, and in which rafter would he have stuck the
sacrificial knife?6
How are we to make sense of Kafkas aesthetic decision to transform

Abraham from the father of the faithful into an utterly unheroic agoraphobe?
According to Maurice Blanchot in The Work of Fire, One sometimes has
the impression that Kafka offers us a chance of catching a glimpse of what
literature is.7 Is this the case with his retelling of Genesis 22? Does Kafka
allow us to catch a glimpse of what literature is by precluding a religious type
of identification with Abraham?
The feeling of the Kafkaesque arises when the ordinary persists in the
face of the extraordinary. Gregor Samsa wakes one morning transformed
into a gigantic bug and still tries to get to work. Josef K. is arrested one fine
morning and is still allowed to carry on his business. The persistence of the
ordinary in the face of the extraordinary is also a theme of Kafkas reworking
of Genesis 22: Abraham here responds to Gods extraordinary demand to
sacrifice his son by retreating into the realm of the mundane, the domestic and
the ordinary. Perhaps the first thing to note about Kafkas text, then, is that it
desacralizes Abraham: Kafkas Abraham is no longer the same man with the
same relationship to God. As Moberly notes:
Within the Genesis portrayal of Abrahams life and his relationship with God,
Genesis 22 is the climax. It is not the final story of Abraham, for there are two
more stories in which he features. Since, however, his purchase of a burial place
for Sarah anticipates his own dying and burial (Gen. 23), and in the lengthy
story of the acquisition of a wife for Isaac the focus shifts away from Abraham
himself to Abrahams faithful servant (Gen. 24), these stories provide a kind of
diminuendo and prepare for the storyline to move on from Abraham. Genesis
22 is the story of the last encounter and the last dialogue between Abraham
and God, and its content focuses on the nature of the relationship between
Abraham and God. Elsewhere in scripture Abraham is remembered not with the
honorific titles, man of God or servant of YHWH but with the remarkable
honorific title, friend of God (Isa. 41.8; 2 Chron. 20.7; Jas. 2.23), which implies
a relationship with God of the most desirable kind a real, and mutual, life-
enhancing relationship.8
The New Testament Epistle of James explicitly links Abrahams special status
as friend of God to his conduct in Genesis 22: Was not our ancestor Abraham
considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the
altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his
faith was made complete by what he did. And the scripture was fulfilled that
says, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness
and he was called Gods friend (2.213). But, whatever else we might want
to say about him, Kafkas Abraham is certainly no friend of God. His real,
and mutual, life-enhancing relationship with God has been made tellingly
subordinate to the trials and tribulations of his domestic circumstances.
Kafkas text produces the fiction of another Abraham or, rather, it sets
the thought of a fictional Abraham alongside the thought of the real one.
Jacques Derrida begins his 2003 essay Abraham, the Other by citing and
then reflecting upon this opening gambit of Kafkas rewriting of the Genesis
story:
I could think of another Abraham for myself. One could translate it slightly
differently. For the word think, one could substitute imagine or conceive: Ich
knnte mir einen anderen Abraham denken; I could, for myself, aside within
myself [ part en moi], as for myself, imagine, conceive the fiction of another
Abraham. The sentence comes to us from a brief parable, two short pages,
by Kafka. It bears as a title only a name: Abraham, precisely. Ich knnte mir
einen anderen Abraham denken. And further: Aber ein anderer Abraham; But
yet another Abraham. Perhaps, perhaps then, there would be more than one
Abraham. And this is what would have to be thought (denken). Perhaps.9
Kafka eventually proposes three distinct versions of the Abraham story in his
letter to Klopstock and these have been collected in the bi-lingual edition
Parables and Paradoxes along with some of his other, more aphoristic musings
on the patriarch from the Octavo Notebooks. But rather than parable, the
genre to which Kafkas musings on Abraham best conform is that of fable.
The OED defines fable as a fictitious narrative or statement; a story not
founded on fact, a foolish or ridiculous story.10 In his retelling of Genesis
22, Kafka is producing a fable in the precise sense of a fictional, even a foolish
or ridiculous, story. What is more and this seems to be the very point of
the exercise he is subjecting Abraham to the logic of the fable by allowing
him to become ridiculous. Kafka turns Abraham into a truly quixotic figure.
But take another Abraham, he writes a little later to Klopstock in his third
version of the story. He is afraid that after starting out as Abraham with his
son he would change on the way into Don Quixote (PP 43).
According to Jacques Rancire in The Emancipated Spectator, The
aesthetic effect is initially an effect of dis-identification.11 We can see this
in the case of Kafkas fable: by presenting the patriarch in aesthetic rather
than religious terms, it breaks the readers identification with the biblical
Abraham. It uses fiction critically to test the tested. For want of a better
term, we might call this special kind of test to which Kafka subjects Abraham
the test des fables. Appearing under the entry for fable in the Grand Robert
dictionary, the test des fables is a projective test or trial consisting of ten
fables in which the hero is placed in a situation that requires a choice. In order
to interpret the test des fables, the hypothesis is made that the child identifies
with the hero of the fable.12 Identifying with the hero of the story is one of
the basic ways in which we read narratives. Kafkas point about the narrative
of Genesis 22 is that Abraham somehow fails this basic identificatory test. For
him, the hypothesis cannot be made that the reader identifies with Abraham
at least, not as one finds him in the Bible. This is why he writes, its all an
old story not worth discussing any longer. Especially not the real Abraham
(PP 43).
In coming to terms with the story of faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition,
Kafka puts fiction to critical or sceptical use. Indeed, he goes even further than
that: he defines fiction itself as the place of disbelief. As James Wood notes in
The Broken Estate:
Fiction, being the game of not quite, is the place of not-quite-belief. Precisely
what is a danger in religion is the very fabric of fiction. In religion, a belief that
is only as if is either the prelude to a loss of faith, or an instance of bad faith
(in both senses of the phrase). If religion is true, one must believe absolutely
Once religion has revealed itself to you, you are never free. In fiction, by
contrast, one is always free to choose not to believe, and this very freedom, this
shadow of doubt, is what helps to constitute fictions reality.13
Here, then, is one way to explain Kafkas engagement with the Akedah: he is
playing the game of not-quite-belief with it; he is enacting his literary right
to imagine another Abraham for himself, one who is cast in the shadow of
doubt.
Perhaps under the influence of popular detective fiction (of which he was
an avid reader), Kafka approaches the biblical text of Genesis 22 somewhat
forensically, wondering to himself: what about the various demands placed
upon Abraham by his household? Wasnt he needed around the house? What
about the sacrificial knife? Didnt Abraham need to keep the murder weapon
hidden from Isaac not to mention his wife Sarah? From the point of view
of the original narrative, these kinds of mundane speculations are not just
marginal to the presentation of Abrahams ordeal of faith but also deliber-
ately anachronistic. There is no mention in Genesis 22 of Abraham having a
house (let alone one with rafters!). The more traditional belief is that he lived
nomadically. In Hebrews 11.9 we read: By faith [Abraham] made his home
in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as
did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. According
to biblical scholar Donald Wiseman:
Genesis places no stress on Abrahams nomadism; it merely states that he

moved in response to the divine call from Haran to the land of Canaan, with
no detail of that land which he crossed, to Shechem (Gen. 12.6). The route
would have taken him through or near some of the city-states known to have
dominated the region in both the second and first millennia BC [T]he tents
indicate not so much his mode of living as a tent-shrine set up symbolically
at places where he publicly avowed the promise of the land as a token of its
take-over.14
Whatever else they do, the anachronistic details Kafka playfully inserts
into the narrative about Abrahams house downplay the significance of the
patriarchs relation with God and the promise of the land. In Kafkas fable,
no more is the narrative, as Erich Auerbach famously writes in Mimesis,
permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single
goal.15 The tone is instead bathetic, the focus splintered. No more can one say,
as James does, that Abrahams faith is made complete by what he did. This is
because, in Kafkas tale, intention never translates into action (Abraham was
prepared to satisfy the demand of the sacrifice immediately but was unable
to bring it off because he could not get away). Rather than exemplifying the
act of faith by heroically setting out for the region of Moriah to offer up his
beloved son for sacrifice, Kafkas Abraham hesitates about Gods command
and so puts his family or household first.
By concocting another Abraham for himself, one who is perpetually setting
his house in order, Kafka displays a strange kind of impatience towards the
biblical narrative. Abraham, of course, never has to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis
22. As Terry Eagleton has recently commented in his book Trouble with
Strangers: A Study of Ethics: God is simply testing his disciples faith. The
fable is a dark parody of the creative recklessness of faith. The symbolic law
the command not to sacrifice is the demand of the Real.16 Alls well, we
might say, that ends well. But Kafka cannot wait till the last moment or leave
it up to God to suspend the sacrifice. Through some strange lack of nerve, he
calls the sacrifice off even before it has begun by having his other Abraham
never quite manage to get out the front door of his house.
A third and final point I want to underscore about Kafkas fable
is that it suspends the sacrifice by means of fiction alone. Kafkas heretical
gesture in relation to Genesis 22 is to wrest the decision to suspend the
sacrifice away from God and give it to himself qua literary author or,
more precisely, to his text qua literary fable. The methodological assumption
underpinning Kafkas bizarre re-imagining of Genesis 22 is that fiction or
literature has the power to suspend death, the power to call off the sacrifice
of human life.
Hlne Cixous neatly sums up the theoretical stakes of Kafkas little fable
about Abraham when she remarks in a 2005 interview: The process of
literature doesnt make one happy, it suspends death as long as it manifests
itself. This is what Blanchot calls the arrt de mort. It stops death with
life.17 This is precisely what I take Kafka to be doing in his fable: stopping
death with life by manifesting literature. By wondering to himself, in which
rafter did Abraham stick the sacrificial knife?, Kafka is somewhat vainly
trying to reassert the authority of life over death. He is comically postponing
the inevitable forestalling the fact that Gods first command in Genesis
22 amounts to a death sentence for Isaac and that the three-day journey to
Mount Moriah will have to be made under the sign of death.
Indeed, in the original story, the stakes are even higher than this: Gods call
for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22 constitutes a kind of inter-genera-
tional death sentence. What is here being recklessly tested is not just Abrahams
faith his personal relationship with God but also the relationship of
future generations to the divine. This is because Isaac literally embodies the
future of Gods covenant with Abraham. While God has promised Abraham
that he will establish his covenant with Isaac as an everlasting covenant for
his descendents after him (Gen. 17.19), the paradoxical demand of Genesis
22 appears to suspend if not altogether revoke this earlier promise. In
the words of Martin Luther: God, who previously seemed the highest friend,
now seems made an enemy and a tyrant.18 This is a story about how God
opposes himself to the human becoming, in the process, a kind of enemy.
The first thing Kafka does when he is confronted by the inter-generational
death sentence of Genesis 22 by God made an enemy and a tyrant is
to look for a way out. And what provides him with this way out is nothing
more or less than the act of storytelling: fabrication. As Walter Benjamin
remarks: In the stories which Kafka left us, narrative art regains the signifi-
cance it had in the mouth of Scheherazade: to postpone the future. In The
Trial postponement is the hope of the accused man only if the proceedings do
not gradually turn into the judgement. The patriarch himself is to benefit by
postponement, even though he may have to trade his place in tradition for it.19
Benjamin here compares both the writer and his creation to the archetypal
figure of the oral storyteller: Scheherazade. In the famous frame narrative of

the Thousand and One Nights, sovereign power gains the most gruesome
expression when King Shahriyar discovers both his brothers and his own
wife sleeping with black slaves.20 Inflamed by the desire for revenge, Shahriyar
decides that he will marry a virgin each night and have her executed the next
morning. This sacrificial ritual goes on for some time before the wise and wily
Scheherazade puts an end to it by the power of her storytelling. Scheherazade
avoids being sacrificed by telling the king a story each night one that must
be continued into the next evening. After bearing Shahriyar three children
during the thousand and one nights of her storytelling, Scheherazade finally
becomes his consort.
Like Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights, Kafkas fictional
Abraham also benefits by postponement. The act of perpetually setting his
house in order saves him from the horror of having to set out for the land of
Moriah with his beloved son under the sign of death. If there is a moral to
Kafkas self-reflexive fable, it is that literature postpones the future, which, in
the all-or-nothing stakes of Genesis 22, means that literature suspends death.
We might call this Scheherazades law: One suspends death by telling stories,
even or perhaps especially the most foolish and ridiculous ones.
Another way to explain Kafkas highly idiosyncratic engagement with
Genesis 22 is to say that, for him, faith must be grounded in the motions
of life rather than the motions of death that, for him, faith is a vital
movement. Here it helps to appeal to another of the Zrau Aphorisms, which
Kafka wrote while convalescing in Zrau, in the Bohemian countryside,
between September 1917 and April 1918 at the very time he was contem-
plating the Abraham story. The aphorism takes the form of a dialogue and
runs as follows:
It cannot be claimed that we are lacking in belief. The mere fact of our being
alive is an inexhaustible font of belief.
The fact of our being alive a font of belief? But what else can we do but live?
Its in that what else that the immense force of belief resides: it is the
exclusion that gives it its form. (ZA 108)
According to the logic of this aphorism, Abraham doesnt have to express his
faith by going to sacrifice Isaac. Rather, The mere fact of [his] being alive is
an inexhaustible font of belief. In other words, the fact of Abraham being
immersed in life, of having too much to do around the house, is proof enough
of the strength of his belief. For Kafka, then, Abraham neednt be tested
further, for belief has the effect of throwing us back into the mundanity of
life rather than of removing us from it. Faith is expressed in ones mundane
movements around the house rather than in the exceptional circumstances of
ones removal (with ones beloved son) to the region of Moriah. It is enacted
under the sign of life rather than the sign of death and requires an infinite
kind of patience. It isnt necessary that you leave home, writes Kafka in the
last of the Zrau Aphorisms. Sit at your desk and listen. Dont even listen,
just wait. Dont wait, be still and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be
unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy (ZA 108).
This truly Kafkan image of the world offering itself ecstatically to the
immobile subject stands in stark contrast to the image of a father going
actively to offer up his beloved son in sacrifice. The sacrificial inactivity of
Kafkas Abraham arises from the fact that Kafka withdraws power from him.
According to Elias Canetti in his psychological study Kafkas Other Trial: The
Letters to Felice, Kafka would typically respond to the show of force through
various forms of withdrawal.
Confronted as he was with power on all sides, [Kafkas] obduracy sometimes

offered him a reprieve. But if it was insufficient, or if it failed him, he trained
himself to disappear; here the helpful aspect of his physical thinness is revealed,
though often, as we know, he despised it. By means of physical diminution, he
withdrew power from himself, and thus had less part in it; this asceticism, too,
was directed against power Most astounding of all is another method he
practices, with a sovereign skill matched only by the Chinese: transformation
into something small. Since he abominated violence, but did not credit himself
with the strength to combat it, he enlarged the distance between the stronger
entity and himself by becoming smaller and smaller in relation to it. Through
this shrinkage he gained two advantages: he evaded the threat by becoming too
diminutive for it, and he freed himself from all exceptionable means of violence;
the small animals into which he liked to transform himself were harmless ones.21
Kafka plays out this very logic in his retelling of Genesis 22: He enlarges
the distance between the stronger entity God and the weaker entity
Abraham by allowing the patriarch to become smaller and smaller in
relation to the divine. Kafkas Abraham evades the threat of the sacrifice by
becoming too small for it, by becoming too ridiculous, too mundane to carry
it out indeed, by teaching himself to disappear.
II The Problem of Literary Scepticism
The odd fusion of commentary and narrative in Kafkas account of Abraham

has led a number of his critics to compare it with the ancient form of
rabbinical exegesis known as midrash. Kafka was fascinated by midrash.
As Iris Bruce points out, he owned a copy of Misha bin Gorions Die Sagen
der Juden (The Legends of the Jews), a text containing legends taken from
midrashic-talmudic commentaries on the first nine books of Genesis.22 Kafka
found talmudic discourse fascinating, writes Bruce. In 1911 he remembered

arguing the existence of God with [Hugo] Bergmann in a talmudic style
either of my own or imitated from him And in 1922 he proposed to Brod,
Call in a talmudist to give us a commentary on that! Kafka was also
well aware of the striking midrashic narrative feature of continual narrative
transformation.23 What Bruce says of Kafkas story The Silence of the Sirens
could just as well be applied to his writings on Abraham:
Kafkas narrative is reminiscent of the hermeneutic of midrashic discourse,

which strives to fill in the holes in Scripture through fantasy and legend,
explication [Auslegung] and interpretation [Deutung] (bin Gorion, Sagen, 10).
Filling in the narrative gaps means making the void, any conceivable empty
center, meaningful, and Kafka can be said to fill in the gaps in a meaningful
manner: even though we do not hear the narrator ask questions, the whole
narrative consists of answers to possible questions in the text.24
Taken as a midrash, Kafkas fable Abraham would be intended to fill the gap
between verses 2 and 3 of Genesis 22. It would make meaningful the textual
void of the night we might even say: the dark night of the soul that
passes between Gods sacrificial command and Abrahams departure with
Isaac early the next morning for Moriah. As we have seen, in trying to make
sense of Kafkas text, it has been helpful to imagine it as answering certain
questions its narrator is silently posing about Abrahams situation.
But I would hesitate to call Kafkas fable on Abraham a midrash for the
reason that, depending upon the perspective one takes, it interacts with the
original text too positively or too negatively. Kafkas fable can either be seen
to fill a gap in the original text all too well or else to tear the original text
beyond recognition. As Sandor Goodhart points out by way of definition:
A midrash is a story. It is not something other than a story [A] midrashic

story itself is necessarily secondary in status; there is always a prior text to
which it is a response. Midrash is never an original production. Whatever the
singularities of its formulation, it always exists to serve a primary text other
than itself [T]hat to which it is a response in the prior text is a gap or tear or
discontinuity of some kind; a wound, or silence, or absence, or lack. The prior
text is broken in some fashion; it lacks wholeness or completeness. Something
is missing from it, and midrash is a response to that hole [A]s a response to
that tear or hole in the prior text, it is a particular kind (and not just any kind of
response). It is not, for example, a filling in or patching over of the missing piece,
but a response that in some way materially extends that prior text.25
We might see Kafkas fable as responding midrashically to the problem

of how Abraham prepared for the sacrifice. It certainly tells a story about
Abrahams material circumstances prior to setting out. But can we really say
that it exists to serve a primary text other than itself; that it subordinates
itself to the Bible? It is tempting at this point to recall some of Kafkas well-
known equivocations about religion. From the Diaries: The pages of the
Bible dont flutter in my presence.26 And in the fourth Octavo Notebook: I
have not been guided into life by the hand of Christianity admittedly now
slack and failing as Kierkegaard was, and have not caught the hem of the
Jewish prayer shawl now flying away from us as the Zionists have. I
am an end or a beginning.27 As Walter H. Sokel glosses this last remark: The
great religions of the Western world appear from this perspective as historical
phenomena, not as absolute truths. Kafka mocks religion where, as in the case
of his fathers remnants of Judaism, it has been reduced to social convention
and meaningless ritual. He found the obligatory visits to the synagogue of his
childhood an occasion for boredom relieved by the comedy of the spectacle.28
While no doubt materially extending the text of Genesis 22, Kafkas fable
also has the effect of neutralising the very point of the story, which is that
Abraham expresses his obedience to the divine by going to sacrifice Isaac. To
my mind, reading Kafkas account of Abraham as midrash prevents one from
appreciating it as a profound instance of literary scepticism. It obscures the
fact that Kafka retells the story of Genesis 22 in order to cast doubt upon the
religious experience it describes. What is the aim of Kafkas literary scepticism?
In part, it is to sever the correspondence the Genesis story encourages us to
see between faith and action. Remember how James reads the story: Was not
our ancestor Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered
his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working
together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. In a 1920 letter
to Max Brod, Kafka came up with a striking reversal of this formulation:
Theoretically, there is one consummate possibility of felicity: to believe in
the decisively divine in oneself, and then not to go looking for it (qtd in ZA
128). As Calasso points out, this reads almost identically to number 69 of
The Zrau Aphorisms, written two years earlier in 1918: Theoretically, there
is one consummate possibility of felicity: to believe in the indestructible in
oneself, and then not to go looking for it (ZA 69). What we note, then, is
that in his letter to Brod Kafka has simply replaced the indestructible with
the decisively divine. But, whether one chooses to speak of the indestructible
or the decisively divine in oneself, this much remains true: faith, for Kafka, is
not made complete by what one does. It is rather a matter of the profoundest
kind of withdrawal from the realm of action a withdrawal that paradoxi-
cally causes the world to offer itself ecstatically to the static subject.
The paradoxical quiescence that Kafka advocates is easily misunderstood
as Guenther Anders demonstrates in his polemical 1949 essay Kafka: Ritual
Without Religion: The Modern Intellectuals Shamefaced Atheism. As his title
indicates, Anders here indicts Kafka as the culmination of a pernicious strain
of nineteenth-century German thought so-called Shamefaced Atheism

that presents atheism itself in religious disguise.29 For Anders, Kafkas fiction
is ritualistic, but emptily so, since it bears no relation to religious traditions
or frameworks of meaning.
Kafka pushed into the foreground the original motive of true religion
precision or ritualism. He did this, however, without belonging to any group
united by a common ritual. It was therefore a ghost that he conjured up, for
ritual within the framework of agnosticism is unreal. In magical or religious
rituals, whenever precision is demanded, this demand always implies that the
performer of the ritual the owner of the monopoly of knowledge should
know the aims and also the dangers that surround each act If there was one
thing that Kafka knew, it was that he knew no longer what ought to be done
that is, which among all the many obligations he felt were truly binding. It
was the muse of the agnostic that inflamed his prose. His categorical imperative,
or at least that of his characters, can be reduced to this: Fulfill in the most
scrupulous manner the duties unknown to you.30
Our word religion is of doubtful etymology but modern writers tend to favour
the theory that it derives from the Latin religare meaning to bind. Playing on
this etymology, Anders calls what he finds in Kafka abstract ritualism, by
which he means a free-floating semblance of something binding, but without
anything to which one is bound an imperative without content, the mere
mood of an imperative, a general ritualism without definite rituals.31 Anders
thus admonishes Kafka for invoking through his writing agnostic rituals that
lack any true purpose or end. Such abstract ritualism, he thinks, permits only
despair and self-humiliation.32
The categorical imperative Anders attributes to Kafka or to Kafkas
characters Fulfill in the most scrupulous manner the duties unknown to
you is the same imperative he attributes to fascism. If one asks where such
a blending of agnosticism and scrupulousness and ritualism is most clearly
found, where Kafkas categorical imperative is accepted as most valid,
he writes, the answer leaps to mind: under the terror of fascism, where the
most scrupulous fulfillment of commands is required, though no one actually
knows what he is supposed to do in any special case, or why he is obliged
to do this or that.33 A number of critics have presented Kafka as a prophet
of the Holocaust, a Jewish writer whose fictions of bureaucratic nightmare
predict what was to come for the Jews in Europe.34 But Anders wants to see
Kafka from the opposite standpoint: as a proto-Nazi as a direct forebear
of National Socialism! The popularity of Kafka [in France] may mean that
fascist terror, he writes, instead of being soberly remembered, is now being
disguised in the colours of poetry, and thus becomes somehow an object of
pleasure.35
I think this indictment of Kafkas agnosticism entirely misses the mark,

partly because it ignores Kafkas focus on those who are the victims of
circumstance and partly because it remains blind to what Kafka criticises in
the Bible. For Kafka, it is the real Abraham the hero of Genesis 22 who
must submit to the categorical imperative of absolute power, who is being
made to fulfil in the most scrupulous manner duties unknown to him. For
Kafka, it is the Bible rather than his literature that advocates an abstract
ritualism. Why does God test Abraham in Genesis 22? Where, as Isaac asks,
is the lamb for the burnt offering? The biblical Abraham can only speculate
about the answers to these questions. He is not the owner of any monopoly
of knowledge. He thus blindly relents to the whimsical tyranny of his God.
Kafkas fictional Abraham, by contrast, immediately resists the abstract
ritualism demanded of him in Genesis 22 by undertaking a series of domestic
rituals that reaffirms the mundanity of his life. Kafkas Abraham responds to
the disorientating effects of the unknown with the known, to the unimagi-
nably abstract with the concrete, and to the otherworldly with the worldly. In
short, he sets his house in order.
Kafkas characters are certainly subject to inexplicable and whimsical
expressions of power. But what Anders fails to note is that they emancipate
themselves however ineffectually by responding errantly or quixoti-
cally to the abstract call for them to fulfil unknown duties. Take Red Peter,
for example, the ape-protagonist of A Report to an Academy. When he
is captured in the Gold Coast by a hunting party from the Hagenbeck
Company and shipped back to the zoological parks in Germany, Red Peter
immediately looks for a way out. As he notes in his report, freedom is too
abstract (and possibly too human) a word to describe what he sought to
achieve. It was really a matter of life and death: I said to myself: do your
utmost to get onto the variety stage; the Zoological gardens means only a
new cage; once there, you are done for.36 The stratagem Kafkas ape hits
upon to avoid becoming a zoo exhibit in Hamburg is to try to become a
human being. What he subsequently discovers is that being human begins
with a set of very particular physical gestures and rituals. Red Peter first
makes the transition from ape to man by comically imitating certain defining
cultural practices of Europeans such as shaking hands, drinking schnapps,
smoking cigars and saying Hallo!. He responds to the abstract expression of
human sovereignty in the same way that Kafkas other Abraham responds to
the abstract expression of divine sovereignty: by demonstrating to his human
audience the persistence of the ordinary in the face of the extraordinary
the vitality of the Kafkaesque.
No writer is more aware than Kafka of the fact that absolute power gains
its clearest expression in the phenomenon of the whimsical death sentence.
Think of some of the narratives that he has built around this phenomenon:
The Trial, The Judgement, A Hunger Artist, and even The Metamorphosis.
But Kafka is also no defeatist. He displays a paradoxical kind of optimism

even in his final diary entry of 12 June 1923:
Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits this twist of the hand is their
characteristic gesture becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most
especially a remark like this. And so on ad infinitum. The only consolation
would be: it happens whether you like or no. And what you like is of infini-
tesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons. (D 423)
Even as it is forced to bear witness to the fateful twist of the hand by which
the spirits turn words against their hapless speakers, literature remains
for Kafka a metaphorical weapon that may be used against this abstract
expression of sovereign power. Literature offers the writer a way out in the
qualified though still vital sense Red Peter gives to this expression.
In a third version of the Genesis story, Kafka introduces equivocation into
the story by letting Abraham become riven with self-doubt:
But take another Abraham. One who wanted to perform the sacrifice altogether
in the right way and had a correct sense in general of the whole affair, but
could not believe that he was the one meant, he, an ugly old man, and the dirty
youngster that was his child. True faith is not lacking to him, he has this faith;
he would make the sacrifice in the right spirit if only he could believe he was
the one meant. (PP 43)
As Derrida comments on this version in Abraham, the Other:
I will always be tempted to think that a Kafka, for example, conjures up more
future to come than many others by striking the rock of his fictional writing,
and by calling us to this truth (such at least is my interpretation): that anyone
responding to the call must continue to doubt, to ask himself whether he has
heard right, whether there is no original misunderstanding; whether it was in
fact his name that was heard, whether he is the only or the first addressee of
the call; whether he is not in the process of substituting himself violently for
another; whether the law of substitution which is the law of responsibility, does
not call for an infinite increase of vigilance and concern. It is possible that I have
not been called, me, and it is not even excluded that no one, no One, nobody,
ever called any One, any unique one, anybody. The possibility of an originary
misunderstanding in destination is not an evil, it is the structure, perhaps the
very vocation of any call worthy of that name, of all nomination, of all response
and responsibility.37
In discussing Kafkas fable Abraham, Derrida reminds us that a fable is

not merely a fiction but (according to the pithy definition of second-century
CE author Aelius Theon) a fictitious story picturing a truth.38 For Derrida,

Kafkas fable pictures the paradoxical truth of errancy, the truthfulness of
the errant knight, Don Quixote. To err is first of all to ramble, roam, stray,
wander.39 And this is what Kafkas other Abraham does: he goes astray, but
in such a way as to draw attention to the structural unfairness the very
inhumanity of Gods call for him to sacrifice Isaac. Kafka finds a way out
of the inter-generational death sentence of the sacrificial command by positing
the structural possibility of error, the missed pivotal detail, the liberating
chance that the one who is meant to die (or to do the killing) is in fact not
the one who is meant to die (or to do the killing). He thus locates redemptive
significance in the non-coincidence of goal and way. In an aphorism from
The Zrau Aphorisms to which I shall return in Chapter 3, Kafka labels this
non-coincidence hesitation: There is a destination but no way there; what we
refer to as way is hesitation (ZA 26).
III An Impossible Filiation
For Kafka, death may be defined with frightening simplicity as the mere fact
of arriving at ones destination. If Abraham and Isaac were to make it to
Mount Moriah, he thinks to himself, death will be waiting for them there in
the form of the sacrificial rite that they must perform. If one thinks of death as
arrival-at-ones-destination (Abraham and Isaac at Moriah; Red Peter at the
Hamburg zoo), then one naturally thinks of survival as the failure to arrive at
ones destination. In Kafkas story The Hunter Gracchus, the title character
falls to his death from a precipice in the Black Forest but then miraculously
fails to die. My death ship lost its way; the Hunter Gracchus explains; a
wrong turn of the wheel, a moments absence of mind on the pilots part, a
longing to turn aside towards my lovely native country, I cannot tell what it
was; I only know this, that I remained on earth and that ever since my ship
has sailed earthly waters (PP 129). The type of errancy that here afflicts the
Hunter Gracchus that here prevents him from dying or departing the earth
is the very type of errancy through which literature may be thought to
constitute itself. Literature suspends death it is a death ship that has lost
its way.
To see literature as suspending death is to understand oneself, somewhat
melodramatically, to be subject to a death sentence to be writing for ones
life la Scheherazade. As Cixous says, literature is what Blanchot calls the
arrt de mort. It stops death with life. The French expression arrt de
mort actually carries within it antithetical meanings. Arrt de mort (also the
title of a 1948 narrative by Blanchot) can signify both death sentence and
suspension of death. As Derrida explains in his essay Living On: In French
an arrt comes at the end of a trial, when the case has been argued and must
be judged. The judgement that constitutes the arrt closes the matter and
renders a legal decision. It is a sentence. An arrt de mort is a sentence that
condemns someone to death.40 One might thus understand literature as an
arrt de mort not just in the sense that it suspends death, but also, paradoxi-
cally, in the sense that it is a type of condemnation, a death sentence.
This is the paradoxical dialectic of writing: In order to write vitally and to
celebrate life, the writer writes in relation to death. According to Cixous:
To write is a way of ridding oneself of guilt. If you admit to error, if you point it
out, you haul it out and you inscribe it outside yourself. Im thinking of Kafka,
because he is someone who, in the writing/living conflict, honestly said: writing
should win, and so I lose my life. Its true that, knowing writing should win, he
laid down his life, he paid with his life, with his flesh, with his body, with his
lungs, for knowing it. And what I find absolutely admirable and moving, is that
when writing won, he wept bitterly. The moment Mephisto came and said to
him: Now, old boy, you must pay, this forty-year-old man began to say, No, I
want to live. He was someone who, at the very moment he had to pay, said to
himself: I got it wrong. Because he was a man who really was full of life I
think that most people who write truly vitally, write in relation to death. Its to
celebrate life, to produce beauty and its also I will say this for me, from my
own experience because I dont have the strength, for example, I dont have
the courage to live consuming my life from day-to-day.41
Cixous might here be recalling a remarkable letter Kafka wrote to Max

Brod, postmarked 5 July 1922. In this letter, which forms a kind of literary
theoretical testament or a last word about writing, Kafka puts the writers
terrible feeling of anguish when confronted with the actual experience of
death into the form of an interior monologue that runs as follows:
What I have playacted is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off
by my writing My life was sweeter than other peoples and my death will
be more terrible by the same degree. He is only barely possible in the broil of
earthly life, is only a construct of sensuality. That is your writer for you. But
I myself cannot go on living because I have not lived, I have remained clay, I
have not blown the spark into the fire, but only used it to light up my corpse.
(BK 294)
The consolation of literature is that it suspends death or averts sacrifice. But

Kafkas point is that this act of suspension is really just a form of pretence or
playacting that must eventually end badly for the author. As Blanchot glosses
this part of Kafkas letter, to write is to put oneself outside life, it is to take
pleasure in ones death through an imposture that will become a frightening
reality (WF 261).
If literature is the game of not-quite-belief, then life must be counted

among the things in which the author does not quite believe. For real life,
literature substitutes fiction. Instead of the real Abraham, Kafka shows us
the secular ghost of the religious prototype another, ineffectual Abraham,
who certainly would never have gotten to be patriarch or even an old clothes
dealer. The problem for the writer like Kafka, who feels himself to be made
of literature, is that he has never really lived: I myself cannot go on living
because I have not lived, I have remained clay, I have not blown the spark
into the fire, but only used it to light up my corpse. The author is not just
(as Kafka puts it in his Diaries) a hesitation before birth (D 405), but also
in some sense stillborn. It will be a strange burial, continues Kafka to Brod
(now in his own voice), the writer insubstantial as he is, consigning the old
corpse, the longtime corpse, to the grave (BK 294).
According to biblical scholar Samuel Sandmel in his 1956 study of
the Jewish conceptions of Abraham: The Patriarch serves authors of
non-canonical literature and limited parts of the New Testament (Synoptic
Gospels, Paul, and James) as exemplar of that which the writer is arguing for.
To see what the writer makes of Abraham is often to see most clearly what
the writer is trying to say.42 My aim in this book is to test the usefulness of
Sandmels proposition beyond the context of biblical studies by asking: How
might we read Genesis 22 literary-theoretically that is, as a religious story
that nonetheless illuminates the secular situation of the literary writer? What
does the binding of Isaac tell us about the secular binds of being a writer?
As Derrida recognises in his 1999 essay Literature in Secret: An Impossible
Filiation (a text which expands on the reading of Genesis 22 he offers in
The Gift of Death), this is ultimately a question about literatures impossible
filiation with the religious. Literature surely inherits from a holy history
within which the Abrahamic moment remains the essential secret, writes
Derrida:
(and who would deny that literature remains a religious remainder, a link to
and relay for what is sacrosanct in a society without God?), while at the same
time denying that history, appurtenance, and heritage. It denies that filiation. It
betrays it in a double sense of the word: it is unfaithful to it, breaking with it at
the very moment when it reveals its truth and uncovers its secret. Namely that
of its own filiation: impossible possibility. This truth exists on the condition of
a denial whose possibility was already implied by the binding of Isaac.43
We have already seen Kafka perform literatures impossible filiation with the
religious in his letter to Klopstock. Here, Kafka tries to break with Abraham
by dismissing Genesis 22 as an old story no longer worth discussing. But
rather than simply leaving it at that, he then proceeds to re-imagine the
biblical narrative for himself. Kafka betrays the patriarch not by ignoring him
but rather by dis-identifying with him, by subjecting him to the test of fiction.
Derridas point in the passage above is that the institution we have since the
eighteenth century called literature is in some sense perpetually breaking with
the religious, always denying its affiliation with the sacrosanct without at
the same time being able to separate itself decisively from holy history. And
what allows literature to enter into the religious text in order to deny it in
this way, he thinks, is the moment of Genesis 22 in which Abraham goes at
Gods request to desacralize the world by sacrificing the condition of possi-
bility of the Covenant. According to Derrida, from the moment that Abraham
accepts Gods demand for him to sacrifice Isaac as absolutely binding, there
is nothing more sacred for Abraham, for he is ready to sacrifice everything.
This test would thus be a sort of absolute desacralization of the world (GD/
LIS 154, original emphasis). In going to sacrifice Isaac, the biblical Abraham
shows his willingness to give up on the world as it comes to him from the
divine. Kafkas heretical fable on Genesis 22 helps us to imagine another,
more mundane Abraham, one who desacralizes the world by cleaving to it, by
responding errantly or sceptically rather than obediently to Gods command
for him to sacrifice everything. In this book, I am wondering what follows
from this literary or poetic decision to desacralize Abraham to re-imagine
him as a kind of biblical fool or Don Quixote. What happens, that is, when
one plays the literary game of not-quite-belief with the story of religious faith?
Genesis 22 stops being an old story not worth discussing any longer when
we begin to ask what kind of sacrifice the literary writer might be called upon
to make as soon, that is, as we begin to picture someone like Kafka in the
position of Abraham. According to Sokel:
The exclusiveness with which literature fills Kafka and requires him to live in
its service provides striking analogies to the demands God made on Abraham.
Kafka, too, feels commanded to estrange himself from his family and indeed
from all worldly concerns his job, women, friends, and so on in order to
devote himself to an absolute task which fills him as completely as God wants
His chosen ones to be filled by Him. But, while alienating him completely from
the world that he knows, writing opens another world to him. This strange
unknown world dwells in his depths. It is inchoate, immaterial, indescribable
In a sense, Kafka stands in relation to his writing as Abraham and Isaac
combined stand in relation to God. The sacrifice which his divinity (literature)
demands of its Abraham, Kafka, is his own life: The enormous world which I
have in my head. But how to release myself and how to release it without being
torn to pieces. But rather be torn to pieces a thousand times than to hold it back
in me or to bury it. For this task I exist, that is completely clear to me.44
Sokel here quotes Kafkas Diaries of 21 June 1913. But he might well have
chosen any one of a number of other diary entries making the same point
for example, 3 January 1912: When it became clear in my organism that

writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything
rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed
towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above
all music. I atrophied in all directions (D 163).
Sokels description of Kafka in the situation of Abraham certainly captures
the way in which Genesis 22 constitutes a death sentence. Kafkas dedication
to his all-demanding divinity literature has the vampiric effect of
causing the writers body to atrophy in all directions. This is the sense in
which literature suspends ones life, the sense in which the writer writes to
escape the demands of day-to-day living, the sense in which, as Cixous says
for herself, I dont have the strength, for example, I dont have the courage
to live consuming my life from day-to-day. But what Sokel has to say about
Kafka-as-Abraham utterly ignores the other side of the equation of writing
the way in which the writer uses literature to suspend death, the way in which,
according to Cixous, most people who write truly vitally, write in relation
to death to celebrate life, to produce beauty It also crucially ignores
Kafkas fables on Abraham in which, as weve seen, Kafka has the patriarch
put the demands of life ahead of the demands of death.
Sokels decision to focus on the example of Genesis 22 solely as a death
sentence stems not just from his knowledge of Kafka but perhaps also from his
familiarity with the most vivid, vital and influential interpretation of Genesis
22 from the past two centuries: namely, Sren Kierkegaards 1843 Dialectical
Lyric, Fear and Trembling. Surely no one has made modern readers appre-
ciate the melodrama of the Genesis story better than Kierkegaard? As he
writes in his text: Anyone who looks upon this scene [of Abraham taking the
knife to slaughter Isaac] is paralysed. Who strengthened Abrahams soul lest
everything go black for him and he see neither Isaac nor the ram! Anyone who
looks upon this scene is blinded. And yet it perhaps rarely happens that anyone
is paralysed or blinded, and still more rarely does anyone tell what happens
as it deserves to be told.45 As Philip Weinstein glosses the Kierkegaardian
hermeneutic strategy, If one brackets (as not yet occurred and therefore
not knowable) the happy result and returns the event to the savagery of its
unsecured unfolding if one attends to the outstretched hand holding the
knife the narrative ceases to be didactic and becomes terrifying.46 To tell
what happens as it deserves to be told could well serve as the motto for Fear
and Trembling. Here is a text that is not afraid to present the secular horror
of Abrahams situation; that does not hesitate to call an ancient act of averted
child sacrifice by its modern name of attempted murder. Telling what happens
as it deserves to be told crucially means refusing to remove the act of story-
telling from the domain of the physical or the existential. For Kierkegaard,
the paradoxical idea of Genesis 22 that Abraham must express his faith by
going to murder his beloved son makes thought itself tremble or shudder:
Thinking about Abraham is another matter, however: then I am shattered

I am constantly repelled, and, despite all its passion, my thought cannot
penetrate it, cannot get ahead by a hairsbreadth (FT 33). Even before Kafka,
Kierkegaard realised that Genesis 22 fails the test des fables.
Kafka had read Fear and Trembling; it was one of a number of Kierkegaards
works with which he became familiar after he first began to read the Danish
philosopher in German translation in 1913. We also know that he liked
Fear and Trembling enough to give Klopstock a copy. Kafka betrays his
close reading of the text when he writes in his fable that Abraham set his
house in order. As Avital Ronell points out, While the Bible does not make
Abraham clean his room before he can go out, it turns out that Kierkegaard
does.47 Kierkegaard writes in the Exordium of Fear and Trembling: It was
early in the morning, and everything in Abrahams house was ready for the
journey (FT 14). Like Kafka, Kierkegaard feels the need to respond to the
abstract ritualism of Genesis 22 through fiction by re-imagining the event
for himself. In the Exordium, he presents four different versions of the story.
Such fables, Derrida notes in Literature in Secret, belong to what one would
no doubt have the right to call literature (GD/LIS 123). What is interesting to
note is that, in each of these literary fables, Abraham somehow fails the test
of faith. In the first, the patriarch suddenly loses his nerve in front of his son,
exclaiming: Stupid boy, do you think I am your father? I am an idolater. Do
you think it is Gods command? No, it is my desire (FT 10). This Abraham
would rather that Isaac think his earthly father to be a monster than lose faith
in his heavenly father. In the second version, a guilt-ridden Abraham comes
to lose his faith after the fact: Isaac flourished as before, but Abrahams eyes
were darkened, and he saw joy no more (FT 12). In a third, quite similar
version, Abraham asks to be forgiven for the sin of having been willing to
sacrifice his son: He could not understand that it could be forgiven, for what
more terrible sin was there? (FT 13). In the fourth and final version of the
story, it is Isaac rather than his father who loses his faith after the event: Not
a word is ever said of this in the world, and Isaac never talked to anyone
about what he had seen, and Abraham did not suspect that anyone had
seen it (FT 14). The perfect crime, perhaps: the divinely averted intention to
murder another.
There are some marked similarities between Kafkas fictionalised Abraham
and Kierkegaards fictionalised Abraham. Both are riven with doubt. Both
lose their status as father of the faithful or the friend of God along with their
nerve. Kafkas and Kierkegaards various retellings of the Genesis story attest
to the following paradox: as soon as one tries to re-imagine Abraham for
oneself, he ceases to be the real Abraham. The fiction of another Abraham for
oneself provides the modern commentator of the Genesis story with the only
viable means of identifying with its central protagonist and yet this literary act
of identification leads to a fundamental betrayal of the patriarch. Kierkegaard
puts the problem well when he writes in Fear and Trembling under the
pseudonym Johannes de Silentio (or John of Silence): I am not unfamiliar
with what the world has admired as great and magnanimous. My soul feels its
kinship with it and in all humility is certain that the cause for which the hero
strives is also my cause I think myself into the hero; I cannot think myself
into Abraham; when I reach that eminence, I sink down, for what is offered
to me is a paradox (FT 33, original emphasis). On account of what he does
in Genesis 22 Abraham becomes father of the faithful. But, by the very same
token, he is no hero he defeats all of my attempts to identify with him.
Where Kierkegaard differs fundamentally from Kafka is in his decision to
place Abraham beyond the reach of fictional representation. As I will show in
the next chapter, Kierkegaard bases his attempt to celebrate the astonishing
conduct of Abraham in Genesis 22 upon the self-sacrifice of the literary imagi-
nation. Where Kafka sacrifices Abraham to literature, Kierkegaard sacrifices
literature to Abraham. For Kierkegaard, Abraham defeats my literary desire
to identify with the hero of the story but must nonetheless be considered all
the greater all the more heroic because of this. As we progress beyond
the Exordium of Fear and Trembling, we notice that Kierkegaard transfers
any doubts he might have about the possibility of the sacrifice away from the
patriarch himself and onto the fictional device of the pseudonym. A telling
fact about Kierkegaards text is that, after the aborted literary experiment of
the Exordium, it is the pseudonym that doubts and not Abraham. The fiction
of the pseudonym thus expresses the secular desire of the modern writer for
the non-eventuation of the sacrifice.
IV A Spectral Isaac
Genesis 22 continues to catch the secular eye of the modern reader for the
way it brings together two apparently contradictory modes of time: on the
one hand, the singular, teleological temporality of a human sacrifice demanded
and, on the other hand, the repetitious, deferred temporality of a human
sacrifice averted. Ones reading of the story changes radically depending
on which temporality one decides to emphasise: that of the beginning or
that of the ending, that of the death sentence or that of the suspension of
the death sentence. In a suggestive passage from his 1951 story When the
Time Comes, which I will analyse in detail in Chapter 4, Blanchot imagines
Abraham returning from Moriah to his home at Beersheba after sacrificing
the ram in Isaacs stead. Blanchot describes the sacrifice as having a single,
devastating effect: When Abraham came back from the country of Moria,
he was not accompanied by his child but by the image of a ram and it was
with a ram that he had to live from then on.48 This is reminiscent of one of
Kierkegaards fictional renditions of the Genesis story. The rams image, which
stands contiguously for Abrahams thwarted sacrificial intention, obscures the

existence of the son, thereby rendering it spectral. What this image reveals to
Abraham, in retrospect, is that the sacrifice has depended all along upon the
ethereality and substitutability of his beloved son.
As Blanchot here conceives of another Abraham for himself in the wake
of both Kierkegaard and Kafka, he exposes a dimension of the story usually
ignored by strictly theological readings of the story: given that Isaacs
sacrifice fails to eventuate, Genesis 22 crucially concerns the problem of the
imaginary. According to the typological method of reading, events within
Jewish scripture represent in prophetic similitude events in the life of Christ
and the experience of Christians. As Mark C. Taylor points out, Typology
derives from the Greek tupos + logos. Tupos, which is related to tupt (to
strike), means both a blow and the mark or trace left by a blow or the
application of pressure, e.g., the mark of the nails in Christs hands (John
20:25).49 Since Christians see Christ as the fulfilment of all typologies, they
read his sacrifice as the consummation of Isaacs. Abraham is traditionally
treated as a prototype of the crucified Jesus, notes Eagleton, another figure
who remains loyal in torment and bewilderment to a Father who seems to
have failed him.50 But what this interpretation necessarily ignores, by privi-
leging eventuation over non-eventuation, and reality over fiction, is the fact
that the sacrificial blow misses its human target in Genesis 22. The Akedah
remains an archetypal narrative in its own right insofar as its final image is
of a blow that fails to mark the skin of the son, that marks the human body
invisibly, dispassionately, psychologically. There is a midrash that captures
this paradoxical aspect of the story most graphically by describing Abraham
as wanting to go on with the sacrifice to strangle Isaac or to draw some
of his blood despite its postponement.51 This fascinating psychological
extrapolation of the narrative makes it clear that, in the case of Genesis 22, we
are dealing with the poetics of averted or unconsummated human sacrifice.
Literature has the power to suspend death, but the life it substitutes for the
one subjected to a death sentence is perforce a fictional, imaginary or spectral
one. As I will argue, reading Genesis 22 from a literary-theoretical perspective
makes it possible to see Isaac as the biblical prototype of literary substitution.
This is something that Blanchot intuits in his book The Space of Literature
when he makes the claim (which Sokel later picks up) that Abrahams
dilemma in Genesis 22 in fact resembles Kafkas dilemma as a writer. For
Kafka, Blanchot writes, the ordeal is all the graver because of everything that
makes it weigh lightly upon him. (What would the testing of Abraham be if,
having no son, he were nonetheless required to sacrifice this son? He couldnt
be taken seriously; he could only be laughed at. That laughter is the form of
Kafkas pain.)52 It comes as no surprise to learn that Blanchot, an avowed
atheist and close and perspicacious reader of both Kafka and Kierkegaard,
appropriates this thought-experiment from Kafkas parables on Abraham. In
the second version of the story he presents to Klopstock, Kafka writes: It was
different for the other Abrahams, who stood in the houses they were building
and suddenly had to go up on Mount Moriah; it is possible that they did not
even have a son, yet already had to sacrifice him (PP 43).
This absurd rendition of the Akedah underscores a serious problem in the
biblical narrative, which is that Isaac is strangely passive within it. As Bruce
Feiler notes: Isaac is by far the least compelling of the patriarchs, and one
of the least formidable major characters in the Pentateuch. Abraham is the
father of the world, Jacob is the father of Israel, Isaac is merely the father of
twins. The only memorable things about Isaac are what he wasnt: he wasnt
unborn, he wasnt displaced, he wasnt sacrificed.53 Isaacs life story might
be told as a series of dramatic displacements: his miraculous birth displaces
Sarahs and Abrahams despair at being childless in their old age (Gen. 21);
Isaac then displaces Ishmael, who is sent away on account of Sarah being
jealous of her Egyptian servant Hagar (Gen. 21); the ram displaces Isaac
in the most dramatic fashion at the end of the Akedah; and, finally, Isaacs
younger son Jacob displaces his older son Esau in front of his very eyes (Gen.
27)! Isaac, then, is a biblical name for one who bears witness to dramatic acts
of substitution. For Blanchot, the writer is, like Isaac, someone who lacks any
intrinsic identity and who must always define himself in relation to the human
and nonhuman others around him.
Returning to Kafkas reflections on the story of the Fall in The Zrau
Aphorisms with which we began, we might say that the writer has not yet
eaten of the Tree of Life. What unites the three writers I have chosen to
focus on in this study is that each sees himself as writing under the sign of
death la Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights. For each, the act
of writing has the uncanny effect of suspending the writers relation to the
quotidian. Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot come to identify so strongly with
the story of Genesis 22, I will suggest, because each sees the story of Isaacs
near-sacrifice as prefiguring the spectrality of his own relation to the world.
Kierkegaard once wrote in a striking disavowal of his marriage prospects
with his fiance Regine Olsen: There is and this is both the good and bad
in me something spectral about me, something that makes it impossible
for people to put up with me every day and have a real relationship to me.54
Kafka and Blanchot understand this perceived spectrality to be a painful but
necessary side-effect of the act of writing. As Kafka says in his letter to Brod,
the writer in me has no base, no substance, is less than dust. He is only
barely possible in the broil of earthly life, is only a construct of sensuality
(BK 294). In his autobiographical story The Instant of My Death, to which I
will turn in Chapter 4, Blanchot offers a remarkable account of the spectral
after-effects of the near-sacrifice of the author. Blanchot here uses fiction as
a form of testimony; to tell of his miraculous escape from being shot by a
Russian firing squad at the end of the Second World War. He begins his story:
I remember a young man a man still young prevented from dying by

death itself and perhaps the error of injustice.55 Who else does this young
man remind us of except Isaac, the most spectral and passive of the biblical
patriarchs? What else is fiction doing here except bearing retrospective
witness to the non-eventuation of sacrifice?
Chapter 2
The Melancholic Imagination: Kierkegaards
Abraham
One could also have Abrahams previous life be not devoid of guilt and have
him secretly ruminate on the thought that this was Gods punishment, perhaps
even have him get the melancholy thought that he must help God to make the
punishment as severe as possible.
Sren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers
I The Writer as Storyteller: Kierkegaard as Scheherazade
How true are the words I have so often said of myself, that as Scheherazade
saved her life by telling fairy stories I save my life, or keep myself alive by
writing.1 So remarks Kierkegaard in a journal entry from 1848 that is typical
of the trembling theatrics with which he interpreted his life.2 In the same
entry he recalls the dark background of his life: the dread with which [his]
father filled [his] soul and the life [he] led in the hidden centre of [his] heart
literally never a word breathed to anyone as a result of his fathers own
frightful melancholy.3 Kierkegaard felt he had inherited a melancholic imagi-
nation from his father and was morbidly convinced of the fact that he
would fall victim to a family curse. The entire family must bear the burden of
a guilt, he wrote in a famous journal entry from 1838: It must be the subject
of Gods punishment: It was to disappear, wiped out by the mighty hand
of God, expunged like an unsuccessful experiment.4 The patriarch Michael
Pedersen Kierkegaard provoked divine ire, so the story goes, because he once
cursed God for the hardship of his life as a poor shepherd boy on a barren
Jutland heath. As supposed proof of the curses terrible efficacy, five members
of Kierkegaards family his mother, two of his brothers and both his sisters
died before reaching the age of thirty-three: the age of Christ at the time of
his death. From the point of view of Kierkegaards melancholic imagination,
the act of writing counteracts the fatality of the family curse: it circumscribes
a melancholy present in which the very sovereignty of death is kept at bay.
Despite its distinctly morbid tone, Kierkegaards remark that writing
suspends death is also a strangely affirmative one, especially when one sustains
the comparison and considers how things turned out for Scheherazade in the
Thousand and One Nights. Scheherazade manages to defer the moment of
her sacrifice for one thousand and one nights until she becomes the consort
of King Shahriyar. To his great surprise, Kierkegaard survives his thirty-third
The Melancholic Imagination: Kierkegaards Abraham 27
birthday though, apparently, not without crosschecking this fact against

the parish records. In gloomily claiming that his writing averts the prospective
sacrifice of his life, Kierkegaard nonetheless makes writing an ironically life-
affirming act a matter of the survival rather than the death of the author.
The theoretical implications of Kierkegaard comparing himself to
Scheherazade and thus writing to storytelling are brought into sharper
focus by two versions of an old saying, which he intended to include as
epigraphs to Fear and Trembling. The first old saying comes directly from
Johann Gottfried Herder and reads as follows:
Write. For whom? Write for the dead, for those in the past whom you
love. Will they read me? Yes, for they come back as posterity.
An old saying
The second is the same dialogue, slightly but crucially altered:
love. Will they read me? No!
An old saying slightly altered5
Writing serves the same purpose in both these formulations: to commemorate

or to elegise the dead. The distinctly stoical claim of the second formulation
is that the dead do not listen to the stories that nonetheless exist to commem-
orate them. While we may see ourselves as writing for the fellowship of the
dead [Symparanekromenoi], as Kierkegaard calls it in Either/Or, we are only
read by the fellowship of the living. According to the logic of the second old
saying, writing averts the sacrifice of the authors life by bringing about a
dramatic return to the time of life the melancholy present.
There are two opposing ways in which one might read melancholy as a spur
to the act of writing or storytelling. In the Thousand and One Nights, King
Shahriyars decision to sacrifice a virgin each night stems from his brothers
pronouncement of melancholy at finding his wife with a black slave. Here,
melancholy is expressed punitively and demands the sacrifice of (anothers)
life. But the melancholy of which Kierkegaard speaks in his journal entry
what I am calling the melancholy of the writer as storyteller works in
the opposite way: it is defensive or self-preserving; it is contingent upon the
physical survival of the author; it provides a way of circumventing the pitfalls
of family destiny. This perspective still functions according to a sacrificial
logic: preserving the near the authors life entails the sacrifice of the
distant, the prospect of the authors literary immortality. What the second old
saying ultimately gives up on, then, is the possibility of achieving salvation
through literary posterity. In contrast to the first old saying, it identifies the
living present as the proper time not just of writing but also of reading.
The two old sayings I have just quoted were on the title page of the
printers copy of Fear and Trembling before Kierkegaard finally decided
to cross them out. Despite their absence from the final copy of the text,
they provide a vital clue to its meaning by foregrounding its concern with
the problem of temporal orientation. Throughout Fear and Trembling,
Kierkegaard orients his reader away from the past and towards the future.
His pseudonym is careful not to dismiss Abraham to the waste bin of myth
or history: Or if Abraham perhaps did not do at all what the story tells,
argues de Silentio at one point, if perhaps according to the local conditions
of the day it was something entirely different [to go to sacrifice your child],
then let us forget him, for what is the value of going to the trouble of remem-
bering that past which cannot become a present? (FT 30). For Kierkegaard,
moreover, Abraham is worth remembering because he orients us towards the
future rather than the past. When Abraham goes to sacrifice Isaac he remains
radically open to the possibility of the future and is rewarded for this radical
openness by not having to sacrifice his beloved son. Kierkegaard wants his
readers to experience some of this openness for themselves. His title Fear
and Trembling alludes to a sentence from St Pauls letter to the Philippians:
Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed not only in my
presence, but now much more in my absence continue to work out your
salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will
and act according to his good purpose (Phil. 2:123). What Kierkegaard
appropriates from this apostolic injunction is its dogged insistence on the
prospective. Taking his cue from St Paul, Kierkegaard enjoins his readers to
work out the meaning of Abrahams conduct in Genesis 22 prospectively
which is to say, with genuine fear and trembling.
Abraham and Scheherazade inspire Kierkegaard not just because they
orient themselves towards the salvific potential of the lived future but also
because they reap the rewards for their trials in the here and now rather
than the hereafter. Indeed, it would not be too much of a stretch to consider
Scheherazade one of Kierkegaards pseudonyms one of the secret names
by which he called himself. The claim I want to develop in this chapter is
that writing Fear and Trembling under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio
enables Kierkegaard to become a type of storyteller to take responsibility
for the story of Genesis 22 as a story. According to Derrida in The Gift of
Death:
One often thinks that responsibility consists of acting and signing in ones
own name. A responsible reflection on responsibility is interested in advance
in whatever happens to the name in the event of pseudonymity, metonymy,
homonymy, in the matter of what constitutes a real name. Sometimes one says
it or wishes it more effectively, more authentically, in the secret name by which
one calls oneself, that one gives oneself or affects to give oneself, the name that
is more naming and named in the pseudonym than in the official legality of the
public patronym. (GD/LIS 59, original emphasis)
My contention here is that sometimes one also tells stories more effectively,
more authentically, in the secret name by which one calls oneself, that one
gives oneself or affects to give oneself.
The act of suspending his public patronym and adopting the persona
Johannes de Silentio allows Kierkegaard to close the apparently abyssal
temporal gap between himself qua modern, urbane individual and the brutal
matter of this ancient story. It allows him, that is, to enter into a type of sacri-
ficial communion with the Genesis narrative. As Derrida notes:
One can understand why Kierkegaard chose, for his title, the words of a great
Jewish convert, Paul, when it came to meditating on the still Jewish experience
of a secret, hidden, separate, absent, or mysterious God, the one who decides,
without revealing his reasons, to demand of Abraham that most cruel, impos-
sible, and untenable gesture: to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. All that goes on
in secret. God keeps silent about his reasons. Abraham does also, and the book
is not signed by Kierkegaard, but by Johannes de Silentio (a poetic person who
only exists among poets, writes Kierkegaard in the margins of his text). (GD/
LIS 589)
The figure of silence and the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio provide

Kierkegaard access to the narrative of Genesis 22 and, as such, enable him to
become a storyteller. Kierkegaard uses the fiction of the pseudonym to express
his solidarity with Abraham. By going to offer up his beloved son, Abraham
shows himself willing to sacrifice the great posterity God has promised him in
Genesis 12. This willingness to give up on the distant future has the surprising
and absurd effect of preserving the life of what is near: Isaac. Despite
his willingness to perform the act, Abraham never has to sacrifice Isaac.
The Kierkegaardian pseudonym, I want to suggest, functions analogously:
it ultimately preserves the authorial name it appears to offer up in sacrifice.
A brief anecdote from Kierkegaards life I think neatly illustrates this point.
In October 1843, Kierkegaard sent a copy of Fear and Trembling to his friend
Emil Boesen, who lay sick in bed, with a little note describing the text as the
best I possess, my Isaac.6 Here, Kierkegaard playfully offers up his treasured
text to posterity so as to receive it in the living present as his Isaac.
In this quite hyperbolic instance of literary identification, Kierkegaard is not
just Abraham receiving his beloved son from the jaws of death, but also
Scheherazade saving herself or keeping herself alive by telling fairy stories.
Kierkegaard presents himself as a kind of storyteller on the very first pages
of Fear and Trembling. As Joakim Garff notes: Thanks to his re-narration
(and co-narration) of the biblical tale an art at which Kierkegaard
(verbosely disguised as Johannes de Silentio) is a veritable virtuoso the

story is endowed with a modern, existential emotional intensity, and with its
adroit rhetoric it vaults well above the hidebound official translation of the
Danish Bible from 1740.7 Nowhere does one feel this modern, existential
emotional intensity more palpably than in the opening words of the texts
Exordium:
Once upon a time there was a man who as a child had heard that beautiful story
of how God tempted Abraham and of how Abraham withstood the temptation,
kept the faith, and contrary to expectation, got a son a second time. When he
grew older, he read the same story with even greater admiration, for life had
fractured what had been united in the pious simplicity of the child. The older he
became, the more often his thoughts turned to that story; his enthusiasm for it
became greater and greater, and yet he could understand the story less and less.
Finally he forgot everything else because of it; his soul had but one wish, to see
Abraham, but one longing, to have witnessed that event. (FT 9)
Kierkegaard here tells his reader a kind of hermeneutic fairytale. His point
is that Genesis 22 somehow fails the test of readerly identification (what I
was calling in the last chapter the test des fables). Whereas the child reader
could identify whole-heartedly with the beautiful story of how God tempted
Abraham, the adult reader understands the story less and less. This is a claim
Kierkegaard will develop in various ways throughout Fear and Trembling:
While we admire Abraham for passing his test of faith, we do not thereby
identify with him. A hero is someone with whom one can empathise; but
Abraham is an utterly unconventional hero in that, at least in the case of this
episode, he repels rather than attracts empathy and understanding.
The adult reader understands the story of Genesis 22 according to the
law of diminishing returns because the adult imagination invests Abrahams
actions in Genesis 22 with a sense of criminality. I dont see why the
willingness to kill a child should be considered a test of piety and the prime
example of it,8 avers Carol Delaney in her anthropological study Abraham on
Trial. Derrida goes even further in The Gift of Death: The sacrifice of Isaac is
an abomination in the eyes of all, and it should continue to be seen for what
it is atrocious, criminal, unforgivable The ethical point of view must
remain valid: Abraham is a murderer (GD/LIS 85). Derrida here takes his cue
directly from Kierkegaard, who writes in the Preliminary Expectoration to
Fear and Trembling:
If a person lacks the courage to think his thought all the way through and say
that Abraham is a murderer, then it is certainly better to attain this courage than
to waste time on unmerited eulogies. The ethical expression for what Abraham
did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant
to sacrifice Isaac but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can
make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he
is. (FT 30)
For both Derrida and Kierkegaard, the act of imaginatively accompanying

Abraham on his three-day journey to Moriah means holding to the ethical
point of view that he is a murderer and that no murderer has eternal life in
him (1 John 3.15).
But, of course, there is something a bit misguided about this approach: to
say that Abraham is a murderer is also to forget how the Genesis story ends.
As Terry Eagleton points out in Trouble with Strangers: Abraham does not
slay his son, and it is a touch short-sighted of Derrida to overlook this rather
vital twist in the storyline. It is akin to supposing that Desdemona survives
with a few scratches. Sylviane Agacinski makes a similar mistake [in Apart],
writing repeatedly of Abrahams crime. But Abraham commits no crime,
unless one happens to be a devotee of the thought police.9 The issue is consid-
erably more complicated than Eagleton here lets on: while Abraham is not a
murderer, surely (as Kierkegaard realises) the intention to kill another consti-
tutes a crime? But Eagleton is right to criticise Kierkegaards and Derridas
thoroughly Kierkegaardian approach to Genesis 22: for both these thinkers
ignore the end of the story, the relieving moment of the rams substitution for
Isaac. Both ask readers to suspend their sense of the ending so as to render
Abrahams murderous transgression fully apparent. Each emphasises the
tension-filled approach to Moriah rather than the less-terrifying descent to
Beersheba.
Kierkegaard imbues the Akedah with existential emotional intensity
by condensing the Genesis narrative into some of its most dramatic and
paradoxical moments. Kierkegaards brother, Peter Christian, was surely
right to criticise Fear and Trembling on the grounds that it lacked a strong
statement and a clear assertion of the fact that Abrahams life of faith was
longer than three days.10 Abrahams story, which occupies some fifteen
chapters of Genesis, undergoes a relentless process of metonymic reduction in
Fear and Trembling. It is reduced first of all to the events of his final trial in
Genesis 22 and then to the journey to the country of Moriah that occurs in
the gap between verses 3 and 4 of this chapter. Constituting the narrative of
Kierkegaards Dialectical Lyric is the decision to downplay the significance of
the rams eventual substitution for Isaac at the end of the story. If the one who
is to act wants to judge himself by the result, avers de Silentio, he will never
begin (FT 63). For Kierkegaard, we all know how the story ends; the point is
rather to return to the beginning and to reconsider how Abraham heroically
overcame the pain of the trial (FT 53) in order to become the prototype of
faith. This is why he presents Abrahams story as a series of dramatic and
paradoxical instants, all of which are on constant replay in his melodramatic
text: the decision to begin, the decision to remain silent about his sacrificial
intent, the decision to raise the sacrificial knife.
Fear and Trembling derives much of its rhetorical force from the way it
sees the passage of narrative itself as encapsulated by a single and violent
figurative gesture. The works epigraph both announces and epitomises this
concern with the violent and gestural compression of narrative. The epigraph
quotes the German philosopher Johan Georg Hamann in a 1763 letter to
his friend Johannes Gotthelf Lindner: What Tarquinius Superbus said in the
garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did
not (FT 3). The cryptic point being made here cannot be grasped without a
fuller account of the story being alluded to. When Sextus Tarquinius, the son
of the early Roman king Tarquinius Superbus, had gained the confidence of
the leadership of the kingdom of Gabii under the pretence of being mistreated
by his father, he sent a messenger to his father in Rome asking what should
be done with the city. Tarquinius did not trust the messenger and, rather than
reply directly, took him into the garden, where he proceeded to cut off the
flowers of the tallest poppies. While the messenger was somewhat puzzled by
this action, the son immediately understood it to be a signal that he should
eliminate the leading men of the rival city.
The significance of the epigraph for my purposes is that it reveals
what kind of storyteller Kierkegaard is. The Danish philosopher prefers to
tell stories by stripping them to their barest essentials, by emphasising a
suspensive and inconsolable moment within them, by violently compressing
the passage of narrative into a single cryptic but meaningful gesture. It is thus
tempting to say of Kierkegaard what Benjamin once said of Kafka: that he
could understand things only in terms of a gestus [gesture], and this gestus
which he didnt understand constitutes the cloudy part of the parables.11
There is one cryptic gesture in particular that comes to obsess Kierkegaard
in Fear and Trembling: namely, the silence he understands Abraham to have
kept about Gods sacrificial demand. Genesis 22 is remarkable for the way it
reports an event without the least addition of psychology or doctrine. Indeed,
the Akedah is so clipped or elisional in its mode of presentation that at times
it is difficult to ascertain exactly what happens in it. The text says nothing
about Abrahams emotional or psychological reaction to the divine command
to sacrifice his beloved son. It only tells us what he does after receiving this
command: Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey.
He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut
enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him
about (Gen. 22.3). This verse immediately begs the question: does Abraham
tell anyone about what God has asked him to do? Does he communicate the
gruesome purpose of the journey to Moriah to his wife Sarah, his son Isaac,
or even his two servants?
For Kierkegaard, there can be no doubt about the matter: Abraham said
nothing to anyone about what God asked him to do. The interpretive gambit
of Fear and Trembling is that Abraham somehow concealed his sacrificial
intention from the other members of his household. Was it ethically defen-
sible of Abraham to conceal his undertaking from Sarah, from Eleazar, from
Isaac? (FT 82), asks de Silentio in the third and concluding problema.
Kierkegaard is certainly not the first to impute a form of silence or secrecy
to the patriarch. Three important earlier readings of the story arrive at the
same conclusion. Philo of Alexandria writes in his work De Abrahamo:
Mastered by his love for God, [Abraham] mightily overcame all the fasci-
nation expressed in the fond terms of family affection, and told the divine
call to none in his household, but taking out of his numerous following two
only, the oldest and most loyal, he went forth with his son, four in all, as
though to perform one of the ordinary rites.12 First-century Jewish historian,
Flavius Josephus, draws the same inference as Philo in his Antiquities of the
Jews (93CE): [Abraham] concealed this command of God, and his own inten-
tions about the slaughter of his son, from his wife, as also from every one of
his servants, otherwise he should have been hindered from his obedience to
God.13
Martin Luther is another commentator who attributes silence to the
patriarch. In particular moments of his long and painstaking commentary of
the Genesis 22 story, Luther appears to share Kierkegaards proto-existen-
tialist perspective on Abraham:
I have said that we cannot comprehend this trial; but we can observe and
imagine it from afar, so to speak The text says nothing about Sarah, whether
she was aware of this command or not. Perhaps Abraham concealed this
matter from her What do you suppose the sentiments of Abrahams heart
were in this situation? He was a human being, and, as I have stated repeatedly,
he was not without natural affection. Besides, the fact that he did not dare
divulge to anyone what was happening made his grief greater. Otherwise all
would have advised against it, and the large number of those who advised
against it would perhaps have influenced him. Therefore he sets out on the
journey alone with young slaves and his son.14
What distinguishes the Kierkegaardian account of Genesis 22 is the way it

radicalises the silence Philo, Josephus and Luther readily impute to Abraham.
For Kierkegaard, significantly, at no point in his trial did Abraham convey
his sacrificial intention to another. The relief provided by speech, de Silentio
claims, is that it translates me into the universal (FT 113). By speaking,
I make my actions intelligible to those around me. As Hegel puts it in the
Phenomenology of Spirit: Language is self consciousness existing for others
and as this self-consciousness is universal It perceives itself just as it is
perceived by others.15 Whereas in Genesis 21 Abraham is openly distressed
when Sarah says to him, Get rid of that slave woman [Hagar] and her son
[Ishmael], for that slave womans son will never share in the inheritance with
my son Isaac (Gen. 21.10), in Genesis 22 he seems to conceal his reaction
to the divine command from others, thereby removing it from the realm of
universal or ethical communication.16 According to de Silentio, Abraham
refuses to disclose his plans to sacrifice Isaac to any of the ethical authorities
around him: his wife Sarah, his servant Eliezar, or Isaac himself. Moreover, he
continues to conceal the true purpose of the sacrifice even when Isaac presses
him on the way to Mount Moriah about the lamb for the burnt offering.17
Abrahams response to Isaac that God will provide the lamb for the
sacrifice must be ironic, de Silentio thinks, for it is always irony when I
say something and still do not say anything (FT 118). If we are to understand
Abrahams total presence in that word (FT 118), then he did not speak. In
a dramatic irony of the highest order, he bore Gods demand entirely within
himself. Abraham thus stands silent and, as such, absolutely isolated
before the prospective reproach of others about the senselessness of his act.
II The Biographical Fallacy
Kierkegaard deploys silence as a (Protestant) figure of existential isolation.

It signifies for him that one has decided perhaps necessarily in secret
to separate oneself from ones contemporaries. Kierkegaard writes in his
journals:
Abraham is an eternal prototype of the religious man. Just as he had to leave

the land of his fathers for a strange land, so the religious man must willingly
leave, that is forsake a whole generation of his contemporaries even though he
remains among them, but isolated, alien to them. To be an alien, to be in exile, is
precisely the characteristic suffering of the religious man. (JP 4:4650; FT 2667)
Here, Kierkegaard follows what Hegel says about Abraham in an early text
from 17981800 that has come to be known as The Spirit of Christianity
and Its Fate: He was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men
alike. Among men, he was and remained a foreigner, yet not so far removed
from them and independent of them that he needed to know nothing of them
whatever, to have nothing whatever to do with them.18 However, where
Hegel sees the Abrahamic spirit of self-maintenance in strict opposition to
everything19 as a negative state waiting to be sublated by Christian love,
Kierkegaard reads it positively as an essential criterion of faith. On two
different occasions Abraham decides to separate himself from his contem-
poraries in the most forceful way: firstly, at the beginning of his trials in
Genesis 12, when he leaves his native land in Haran at Gods request for the
Promised Land in Canaan; secondly, at the end of his trials in Genesis 22,
when he follows Gods command to sacrifice Isaac. On both these occasions
God paradoxically rewards Abraham for isolating himself from the realms of
universal understanding and ethical behaviour.
Insofar as it represents a decision made in secret to separate oneself from
ones contemporaries, Abrahams silence seems to be a figure ready-made for
Kierkegaards own biography. Indeed, Kierkegaard pre-empted his critics in
this regard. In a well-known journal entry from 1849 in which he prophesies
the posterius success of Fear and Trembling, he also attests to identifying with
the Genesis story existentially:
Oh, once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough for an imper-
ishable name as an author. Then it will be read and translated into foreign
languages as well. The reader will almost shrink from the frightful pathos in the
book. But when it was written, when the person thought to be the author was
going about in the incognito of an idler, appearing to be flippancy, wittiness,
and irresponsibility personified, no one was able to grasp its earnestness. O you
fools, the book was never as earnest as then. Precisely that was the authentic
expression of horror There is a predominating poetic strain in me and yet the
real hoax is that Fear and Trembling actually reproduced my life. (JP 6:6491;
FT 2578)
He who has explained this riddle [of Abraham] has explained my life (JP
5:5640; FT 242), writes Kierkegaard even more explicitly in an earlier entry
from 1843.
There are two standard biographical explanations of Kierkegaards
connection with the Akedah: in one Kierkegaard plays the role of the
sacrificer, in the other the role of the sacrificed. The first version relates to
Sren breaking his engagement to Regine Olsen in November 1841, two years
prior to publishing Fear and Trembling along with Repetition in Reitzels
bookshop in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843. Kierkegaard became engaged
to Regine in 1840, but broke the engagement off in 1841 and even treated
Regine cruelly so that she might get over him more quickly. In 1896, Regine
was interviewed about the failed relationship by her friend Hanne Mourier,
to whom she dutifully reported: Kierkegaards motivation for the break was
his conception of his religious task; he dared not bind himself to anyone on
earth in order not to be obstructed from his calling. He had to sacrifice the
very best thing he owned in order to work as God demanded him: therefore
he sacrificed his love for the sake of his writing.20 As Agacinski explains
the analogy with Genesis 22:
Regine and Isaac are in the same situation. That is what she said later when she
was asked about it: He sacrificed me to God. That is the truth perhaps, at least
the truth he wanted to lend credence to. But in more than one sense: she was
a gift, an offering to God, and he chose between them by breaking with her in
order to become engaged to him. My engagement to her and my breaking of it
are properly speaking my relation to God; they are in a manner of speaking, my
religious engagement to God.21
Another version puts Sren rather than Regine in the position of Isaac. After
Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard confided to his son in 1838 that he had cursed
God as an eleven-year-old boy, Kierkegaard came to see the tragic deaths
in his family as a divine punishment for the fathers sin, to be transmitted
eventually to the son. As Ronald Green comments, The whole theme of Fear
and Trembling concerns the relationship between a father and a son, indeed,
a father whose conduct physically imperils his sons life, just as the elder
Kierkegaards conduct had spiritually imperilled Srens.22
Sren separates himself from Regine; Michael Pedersen separates himself
from Sren. This much fits in with the Abraham story, with Genesis 22
understood as a kind of divinely ordained death sentence. But where is the
moment in Kierkegaards biography corresponding to the happy ending of the
Akedah, in which Isaacs death sentence is revoked and Abraham is rewarded
for his astonishing act of faith? According to Hannay: Kierkegaard says that
Regine saw in his desire to break off the relationship just a symptom of the
depression he was prone to What Kierkegaard thought she failed to see
was that underlying it all was a religious collision.23 Collision is a term
Kierkegaard appropriates from Hegels lectures on art to refer to the conflict
of mutually justified, yet mutually exclusive ethical positions. Kierkegaard
felt he needed to break his engagement with Regine to establish his higher
religious engagement to God. But let us note that, in breaking permanently
with Regine, in actually sacrificing her to God, Kierkegaard no longer follows
the example of Abraham in Genesis 22, who despite his best efforts never has
to sacrifice Isaac.
After her broken engagement to Kierkegaard, Regine went on to marry
her former teacher and admirer, Johan Frederick Schlegel. When interviewed
in 18989, Regine Schlegel recalled Kierkegaard once saying to her: You
see, Regine, in eternity there is no marriage; there, both Schlegel and I will
happily be together with you.24 Sren believes he must give up on the earthly
happiness of a marriage to Regine so as to receive the eternal so as to
have Regine in eternity. One might note in Kierkegaards odd projection that
he will join Regine and Schlegel in eternity something of the transgressive
desire Heathcliff expresses in Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights to be with
Catherine beyond the grave and beyond her marriage to Edgar Linton. But
this is not Abrahams lot; Abraham is not forced to wait for his reward in
eternity; he gets Isaac back again for this life. In this sense, one cannot really
say that Regine is in the position of Isaac or that Kierkegaard is in the position
of Abraham. The analogy between Abraham and Kierkegaard founders at

the point at which the latter projects eternity to be the site of his sacrificial
reward.
There is some evidence to suggest that Kierkegaard was well aware of this
crucial difference between Abrahams and his own predicament. In a fasci-
nating entry in his Journals and Papers, he retells the Akedah so that eternity
becomes a kind of second prize for Abraham. In this version of the story,
which we will see differs markedly from the ones that actually appear in the
Exordium of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard has Abraham ascend Moriah
with Isaac, bind his son to the altar, take the knife and then actually thrust it
into Isaac, killing him. The exchange that follows between Abraham and God
is worth quoting in full, not least for its Kafkan overtones:
At that moment Jehovah in visible form stood beside Abraham and said: Old
man, old man, what have you done? Did you not hear what I said; did you not
hear me cry out: Abraham, Abraham, stop!
But Abraham replied in a voice half subservient, half confused: No, Lord, I
did not hear it. Great was my grief you know that best, for you know how
to give the best and you know how to claim the best yet my grief is tempered
by Isaacs having understood me, and in my joy over being in accord with him
I did not hear your voice at all, but obediently, as I thought, I thrust the knife
into the obedient sacrifice.
Then Jehovah brought Isaac back to life. But in quiet sorrow Abraham
thought to himself: But it is not the same Isaac; and in a certain sense it was
not, for having understood what he had understood on Mount Moriah, that he
had been selected by God for the sacrifice, he had in a sense become an old man,
just as old as Abraham. It was not the same Isaac, and they were properly suited
to each other only for eternity. The Lord God Jehovah foresaw this and he had
mercy upon Abraham and as always restored everything, infinitely better than
if the mistake had not occurred. There is, he said to Abraham, an eternity; soon
you will be united eternally with Isaac, and you will be in harmony for eternity.
Had you heard my voice and had stopped short you would have gotten Isaac
back for this life, but that which concerns eternity would not have become clear
to you. You went too far, you ruined everything yet I am making it even better
than if you had not gone too far there is an eternity.
This is the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. In the Christian
view Isaac is actually sacrificed but then eternity. In Judaism it is only an
ordeal and Abraham keeps Isaac, but then the whole episode still remains within
this life. (JP 2:2223; FT 2701)
Kierkegaard has perhaps never sounded so much like Kafka as in this

remarkable passage, which sees fumbling human incompetence spilling over
into gruesome eventuation. One can easily imagine Kafka joking about
eternity as a consolation prize for human incompetence. The knife in the

chest is also a typically Kafkan gesture. As Louis Begley notes, Knives turned
against himself or others are a recurring theme in [Kafkas] diaries and
correspondence, as well as in The Trial and Fratricide.25
Kierkegaards version of the Akedah also anticipates one of Kafkas
bathetic retellings of the Genesis story that revolves around the problem of
mishearing. In his fables on the patriarch, Kafka imagines:
An Abraham who should come unsummoned! It is as if, at the end of the year,
when the best student was solemnly about to receive a prize, the worst student
rose in the expectant stillness and came forward from his dirty desk in the last
row because he had made a mistake of hearing, and the whole class burst out
laughing. And perhaps he had made no mistake at all, his name really was called,
it having been the teachers intention to make the rewarding of the best student
at the same time a punishment for the worst. (PP 45)
Kierkegaards account also turns on the problem of mishearing. Abraham is

so buoyed at having convinced Isaac to offer himself up in sacrifice willingly
that he fails to hear God calling off the sacrifice. God beneficently brings Isaac
back to life, but Abraham recognises that his son is no longer the same person
after his traumatic experience on Mount Moriah. Seeing Abrahams disap-
pointment, God then further compensates him for his mistake of hearing:
There is, he said to Abraham, an eternity; soon you will be united eternally
with Isaac, and you will be in harmony for eternity. But here we have arrived
at the moral of the story: the difference between the Christian and the Jewish
conceptions of the story: In the Christian view Isaac is actually sacrificed
but then eternity. In Judaism it is only an ordeal and Abraham keeps Isaac,
but then the whole episode still remains within this life.
After reading this extraordinary retelling of the Akedah by Kierkegaard,
one can understand why Emmanuel Levinas asks in Difficult Freedom: Can
one still be Jewish without Kierkegaard?26 Against the typological reading
that connects Isaacs near-sacrifice with Christs actual sacrifice, Kierkegaard
insists that the two events belong to different temporal orders: Christs
sacrifice invokes the notion of the eternal, whereas Abrahams dilemma takes
place still within this life. But, then, on the basis of this very distinction we
should equally insist that Abrahams silence with respect to Isaac belongs to
a different temporal order to Kierkegaards silence with respect to Regine.
Abrahams silence never causes him to break his ethical engagement with
Isaac, whereas Kierkegaards silence signals the end of his relationship with
Regine. Kierkegaard tries to reduce the Genesis story to its most fraught,
imperilling or melancholic moment: the journey to Moriah. But the danger
of so wilfully suspending ones sense of the ending, as Levinas points out
in his essay Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics, is to downplay Abrahams
astonishing ability to respond immediately to the second call of Genesis 22

that is, the eventual calling off of the sacrifice by the angel of the Lord. In
contrast to Kierkegaards and Kafkas fictional patriarchs, the real Abraham
suffers from no problems of hearing: he responds to the angels intervention at
the end of the story as readily as he does to Gods initial call for the sacrifice.
This enables Levinas to surmise: Perhaps Abrahams ear for hearing the voice
that brought him back to the ethical order was the highest moment in this
drama.27
III Silence: the Figure of Betrayal
Biographical readings rush to explain Kierkegaards identification with the

Abraham story by affixing themselves to the proper name that would appear
to ground this identification: whether that name be Regine Olsen or Michael
Pedersen Kierkegaard. In so doing, however, they leave unthought the identi-
fication Kierkegaard affirms with the Abraham story through the operation
of the improper name Johannes de Silentio. Before it expresses an existential
form of identification on the part of its author, Fear and Trembling first
performs a literary act of sacrifice a reduction of a biblical narrative to
the figure of silence. A kind of prolepsis of the proper name, the pseudonym
compresses and anticipates the figurative unfolding of the entire text. Like
Tarquinius Superbus lopping the heads off the tallest poppies in his garden, it
assigns itself a future meaning by a figurative leap that is in turn predicated
upon a break from the realm of universal communication: not the leap of
faith, one might say, but the leap of figure. Readers only come to under-
stand the meaning of the Latin epithet de Silentio after grasping the central
rhetorical move of the work, by which Abraham is figured to remain silent
through the trial of Genesis 22. As Mark C. Taylor notes, silence thereby
becomes the watchword for Kierkegaards retelling of Genesis 22: Consider
the author: Johannes de Silentio. Consider the central character: Abraham,
who not only does not speak, but who cannot speak. Consider the books
central pre-occupation: silence. A book by Johannes de Silentio, about a
person named Abraham who cannot speak, devoted to an exploration of the
significance of silence.28
Kierkegaard says of Abraham in Genesis 22 that he remains silent. Indeed,
at times he goes further by insisting that Abraham cannot speak to others
about what God has asked him to do: When Abrahams heart is moved, when
his words would provide blessed comfort to the whole world, he dares not
offer comfort, for would not Sarah, would not Eliezer, would not Isaac say
to him, Why do you want to do it, then? After all, you can abstain (FT
114). This virtually repeats Luthers claim that Abraham did not dare divulge
to anyone what was happening Otherwise all would have advised against
it. But here I would ask: what exactly is the status of this claim Kierkegaard
makes along with Philo, Josephus and Luther that Abraham remains silent?
Does it have the status of a fact or a fiction? Does it properly belong to the
story or to the commentator of the story? Nowhere in the Bible do we read
that Abraham actively concealed his sacrificial purpose from those around
him. This is rather something that the commentator deduces from the gaps in
the text in the manner of a midrash for example, as Luther does, from the
fact that the text says nothing about Sarah, whether she was aware of this
command or not. As we have seen, a midrash is a response to the Bible that
aims to fill a gap in the original text through fantasy and legend, explication
and interpretation. Imagining Abraham to have kept the sacrificial command
a secret satisfies the commentators desire to account for Sarahs peculiar
absence from the scene. Spelling out Abrahams motivations towards the rest
of his household also imbues the event with a degree of psychological realism.
Writing in the wake and perhaps also the thrall of Kierkegaard,
Derrida attributes to Abrahams silence the status of an indisputable fact.
No one would dare dispute that the very brief account of what is called the
sacrifice of Isaac or Isaac bound leaves no doubt as to this fact: Abraham
keeps silent, at least concerning the truth of what he is getting ready to do, as
far as what he knows about it but also as far as what he doesnt know and
finally will never know. Concerning Gods precise, singular call and command,
Abraham says nothing and to no one. Neither to Sarah, nor to his own, nor to
humankind in general. He does not reveal his secret or divulge it in any familial
or public, ethical or political space. (GD/LIS 128, original emphasis)
But surely one anxiously overdetermines the matter of the story by calling
Abrahams silence a fact? According to Derridas reading, which is at times
virtually indistinguishable from Kierkegaards, we hear nothing more or
other in the gaps in the Genesis narrative than Abrahams silence; every-
thing that is not said simply becomes more evidence (to be used in a court of
law) of Abrahams (criminal) collusion with God.
Where Kierkegaard expresses a taste for silence, Derrida expresses a
taste for secrecy. Among all those, infinite in number throughout history,
who have kept an absolute secret, a terrible secret, an infinite secret, writes
Derrida in Literature in Secret, I think of Abraham, starting point for all
the Abrahamic religions (GD/LIS 121). But, of course, one does not have
to imagine the Akedah taking place in the manner of a modern detective
fiction with Abraham acting as the prime suspect. It is possible to render the
event without making it revolve around the question of concealment. In the
Islamic account of the sacrifice found in sura 37 of the Quran, Abraham
openly discusses his dilemma with his son (who is not actually named but is
now assumed to be Ishmael rather than Isaac): My son I have seen myself
sacrificing you in a dream. What do you think? The son replies, Father,
do as you are commanded and, God willing, you will find me steadfast
(Quran 37.102). One of the early Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible,
the Fragmentary Targum, renders Abrahams response to Isaac on the way
to Moriah as similarly open and frank: The Word of the Lord shall prepare
a lamb for himself. If not, my son, you shall be the burnt offering. And they
went together with a quiet heart.29 Here, the qualifier if not shows Abraham
not to understand the purpose of the sacrifice at the moment universal
communication is demanded from him. Instead of covering over this fact and
internalising the prospect of the sacrifice by responding to Isaac ironically,
Abraham provides Isaac with the two possible narrative eventualities either
the Word of the Lord (or the God of the promise) will provide the lamb or
the burnt offering shall be Isaac. In contrast to the Kierkegaardian account,
the narrative is being driven here by the uncertainty of the ending rather than
the heros will to concealment. Claus Westermann summarises an essential
difference between the Jewish and the Christian accounts of Genesis 22, when
he notes: Christian exegesis sees the crucial point of the narrative in what
happens between God and Abraham; so Luther, Kierkegaard, and von Rad
following them; Jewish [and we might add, Islamic] exegesis on the contrary
sees it in what happens between God, Abraham, and Isaac.30
Some readers might object to this last criticism on the grounds that
Kierkegaard rightly infers Abrahams silence from the text of Genesis 22
as we have it, in its current redacted form. But if we seek to defend the
Kierkegaardian reading on the basis of its psychological or even existential
realism, then another line of critique immediately suggests itself: for how
long can Abraham really conceal the purpose of the sacrifice from Isaac?
When does Isaac realise that he is the one meant for the sacrifice? By the time
he asks Abraham about the lamb for the sacrifice on the way to Moriah?
When he is being bound to the altar? When Abraham takes the knife to slay
him? It certainly strains the bounds of psychological probability to think that
Isaac fails to intuit what is going on. Rather than addressing this significant
problem of Isaacs reaction to the sacrifice, Kierkegaard simply ignores it by
making the crucial point of the narrative what happens between God and
Abraham.
What Kierkegaard fails to consider in Fear and Trembling is the exemplary
piety Isaac exhibits in Genesis 22 by submitting to the sacrifice. When reading
Fear and Trembling or, for that matter, The Gift of Death it is easy to
forget that Genesis 22 concerns not just Abrahams obedience to God but
also Isaacs submission to both Abraham and God. While considering so
many forms of silence in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard tellingly ignores
Isaacs quiet and (at some point) knowing acquiescence in the sacrifice. He
disregards Isaacs silent act of piety, one presumes, because it is communicated
openly rather than in secret. It is thus possible to criticise Kierkegaard for
overhastily equating silence with concealment, as Derrida does in Literature

in Secret when he writes: Such a secret does not have the sense of something
to hide as Kierkegaard suggests (GD/LIS 154). By focusing so much on what
Abraham says or does not say to Isaac on the way to Moriah, Kierkegaard
remains blind to the non-verbal ways in which Isaac must have expressed his
acquiescence in the sacrifice.
Silence marks a deconstructive edge to Kierkegaards text it is, to
borrow a phrase from Benjamin, the cloudy part of Kierkegaards parable that
he doesnt understand. De Silentio notes in the third problema that Silence is
the demons trap, and the more that is silenced, the more terrible the demon;
but silence is also divinitys mutual understanding with the single individual
(FT 88). The problem, as Kierkegaard well realises, is that by concealing
Gods command from those around him Abraham appears to be both a
criminal (seeking to murder his son) and a man of faith (seeking to do Gods
bidding). For Kierkegaard, Derrida explains:
the highest expression of the ethical is in terms of what binds us to our own and
to our fellows (that can be the family but also the actual community of friends
or the nation.) By keeping the secret, Abraham betrays ethics. His silence, or at
least the fact that he doesnt divulge the secret of the sacrifice he has been asked
to make, is certainly not designed to save Isaac. (GD/LIS 60)
If Abraham conceals his sacrificial mission, it is to avoid being hindered from

his obedience to God. But here is the rub: in order to express this obedience
to God, Abraham must renege upon his ethical obligations to his family. This
is what Kierkegaard famously dubs the teleological suspension of the ethical:
Abraham suspends his ethical relation to his family in order to express his
higher religious duty to God.
In Fear and Trembling, silence figures a form of betrayal specifically, the
betrayal of one being by another. Silence is the demons trap: by concealing the
purpose of his sacrificial mission, Kierkegaards Abraham betrays ethics, since
ethics demands disclosure and punishes secrecy. The only acceptable silence,
as far as Kierkegaard is concerned, is that which the father of faith keeps
with the divine, Abraham with God. This silence marks the exclusiveness of
Abrahams covenant with God. One could even speculate that God expresses
jealousy towards the inter-human relation by demanding Isaacs sacrifice. God
would here be reminding Abraham in the most brutal fashion possible that he,
rather than Isaac, is Abrahams first love. It would be, Derrida remarks:
As if God were to have said to Abraham, Dont speak of it to anyone. Not

so that nobody knows (and in fact, it is not a question of knowledge), but so
that there is no third party between us, nothing of what Kierkegaard will call
the generality of the ethical, political, or juridical. Let there be no third party
between us, no generality, no calculable knowledge, no conditional deliberation,

no hypothesis, no hypothetical imperative, so that the covenant remains
absolute and absolutely singular in its act of election. You will undertake not to
open yourself up to anyone else In short, the secret to be kept would have,
at bottom, to be without an object, without any object other than the uncon-
ditionally singular covenant, the mad love between God, Abraham, and what
descends from him. His son and name. (GD/LIS 1546, original emphasis)
Derrida once again goes too far here in arguing that the secret Abraham keeps
with God in Genesis 22 is without an object and involves no third party. For,
in so doing, he strangely occludes the problem of the victim of the sacrifice
whether we consider this victim to be Isaac or the ram that eventually
substitutes for Isaac.
Dominick LaCapra picks up on this occlusion in his book History and Its
Limits:
The fact that the question of the victim does not become a key problem for
Derrida [in The Gift of Death] may seem surprising since in sacrifice the typical
gift is the victim. The actual sacrifice of the ram as a substitute for Isaac is a
seeming non-issue, as it tends to be in other accounts of the Abraham story. The
ram (caught in a thicket by its horns as if already trapped and bound) seems
at best to be an extra that remains offstage. And Isaac as potential sacrificial
victim plays at most a cameo part. At least in The Gift of Death [but we can
also say in its follow-up, Literature in Secret], the dialogue is almost exclusively
one that involves Abraham, God, and Derrida. Neither the human nor the other-
than-human animal as sacrificial victim is given a voice or significant role in the
excessive focus on the excessive gift.31
Rather than in terms of voice, we might just as well put the problem in terms
of silence: there is not just Abrahams silence to consider in Genesis 22, but
also Isaacs silence, the rams silence, the silence of the two servants who
accompany Abraham and Isaac to Moriah, not to mention the silence of the
one who doesnt: Abrahams wife Sarah.
We might now say that silence is not simply the demons trap but also
the commentators trap. This is because silence overspills the limits and
the control of the single individual by putting that individual in relation
to others, whether these be human or non-human. As soon as one imagines
Abraham to have remained silent in Genesis 22 then, as Ive been indicating,
all kinds of other silences come into play silences that act in relation to
Abrahams and that show him to be still acting in relation to others. Both
Derrida and Kierkegaard try to make the crucial point of the narrative what
happens in secret between God and Abraham. But this attempt to
sequester the individuals relation to the divine ultimately comes unstuck
because it crucially alters our sense of the sacrifices eventuality. By making

the Akedah solely a matter between God and Abraham, by occluding the
problem of the sacrificial victim, Derrida and Kierkegaard stop us from
imagining the sacrifice eventuating as it did happily for its human partici-
pants, with the rams substitution for Isaac. Or rather, both lead us into a
kind of hermeneutic temptation by allowing us to imagine the sacrifice as
eventuating in a way that it didnt. Kierkegaard writes in the Preliminary
Expectoration of Fear and Trembling: We glorify Abraham, but how? We
recite the whole story in clichs: The great thing was that he loved God
in such a way that he was willing to offer him the best So we talk and
in the process of talking interchange the two terms Isaac and the best, and
everything goes fine (FT 28, original emphasis). For Kierkegaard, we only
become sleepless when we stop speaking so metaphorically about the story
and imagine ourselves actually taking Abrahams place in the journey to
Moriah. But this existential thought experiment also requires us to forget
that Abraham never has to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22. LaCapra notes that
a similar confusion vitiates Derridas analysis in The Gift of Death: Derrida
recognises that God (or his angelic messenger) stops the human sacrifice
and that Abraham displaces it onto the animal. But Derrida understands the
Akeda as if Abraham had already killed Isaac in the instance of Abrahams
decision.32
The Kierkegaardian focus on silence puts Abraham into a negative relation
not just to the sacrificial object (Isaac or the ram) but also to the end of the
story. We see this most clearly in the fictional re-imaginings of the event of
Genesis 22 that open Fear and Trembling. As Derrida notes: Four lyrical
movements of fictional narration in fact open the book. Such fables belong
to what one would no doubt have the right to call literature. They recount or
invent the biblical story in their own way (GD/LIS 123). I observed in the last
chapter that Abraham fails the test of faith in each of these lyrical movements.
That is what is accentuated in the four [retellings], notes Kierkegaard in
his journals, for in each case [Abraham] does it, but not in faith (FT 249).
What is significant for my purposes here is that silence conspires against the
patriarch in three of these fictions of a literary type to stop him from exiting
the event as the father of the faithful or the friend of God. Kierkegaards
literary fables thereby attest to the paradox guiding my entire inquiry: that as
soon as one tries to re-imagine the event of Genesis 22 for oneself, Abraham
ceases to be the real Abraham or ceases to relate positively either to the
demand or to the outcome of his final trial.
In the first version, silence truly is the demons trap.
It was early in the morning when Abraham arose, had the asses saddled, and
left his tent, taking Isaac with him They rode in silence for three days. On
the morning of the fourth day Abraham said not a word but raised his eyes and
saw Mount Moriah in the distance But Abraham said to himself, I will not
hide from Isaac where this walk is taking him. (FT 10)
In a last-ditch effort to protect the faith of his child, Abraham decides to affect
the visage of a monster:
Then Abraham turned away from him for a moment, but when Isaac saw
Abrahams face again, it had changed: his gaze was wild, his whole being
was sheer terror. He seized Isaac by the chest, threw him to the ground, and
said, Stupid boy, do you think I am your father? I am an idolater. Do you
think it is Gods command? No, it is my desire. Then Isaac trembled and
cried out in anguish: God in heaven, have mercy on me, God of Abraham
have mercy on me; if I have no father on earth then you be my father!
But Abraham said softly to himself, Lord God in heaven, I thank you; it
is better that he believes me a monster than he should lose faith in you.
(FT 101)
As Derrida notes of this first version in Literature in Secret, Abraham doesnt

say anything to [Isaac here], so that at the end of this first movement,
one hears an Abraham who understands [sentend] he is speaking only to
himself or to God, within himself to God (GD/LIS 124, original emphasis).
What Derrida fails to take proper account of is that the test of faith here
fails because it only concerns what happens between God and Abraham
because Abraham chooses to exclude Isaac from the sacrifice by manipulating
his psychological reactions to it.
In Kierkegaards second version of the story, silence once again expresses
the psychological abyss separating Abraham from Isaac.
They rode along the road in silence Silently he arranged the fire and
bound Isaac; silently he drew the knife then he saw the ram that God
had selected. This he sacrificed and went home. ... From that day henceforth,
Abraham was old; he could not forget that God had ordered him to do this.
Isaac flourished as before, but Abrahams eyes were darkened, and he saw joy
no more. (FT 12)
In the first two versions of the story, Kierkegaard has Abraham absorb the
shock of the event on behalf of his son. In the last version, Kierkegaard exposes
Isaac to the psychological fallout of the sacrifice. In the fourth movement the
secret of silence is indeed shared by Isaac, Derrida notes, but neither one nor
the other ruptures the secret of what has happened; moreover, they have well
and truly decided not to speak of it at all (GD/LIS 124, original emphasis).
Isaac here shares the terrible secret of Gods demand with Abraham but in
absolute solitude, without ever speaking to him or anyone else about it.
They rode along in harmony, Abraham and Isaac, until they came to Mount
Moriah. Abraham made everything ready for the sacrifice, calmly and gently, but
when he turned away and drew the knife, Isaac saw that Abrahams left hand
was clenched in despair, that a shudder went through his whole body but
Abraham drew the knife. Then they returned home again, and Sarah hurried
to meet them, but Isaac had lost his faith. Not a word is ever said of this in the
world, and Isaac never talked to anyone about what he had seen, and Abraham
did not suspect that anyone had seen it. (FT 14)
As Derrida glosses this passage: The same secret, the same silence, therefore
separates Abraham and Isaac. For what Abraham has not seen, or so the
fable makes clear, is the fact that Isaac saw him, saw him draw his knife,
saw his face wracked with despair. Abraham therefore doesnt know that
he has been seen. He sees without seeing himself seen. In this regard he is in
nonknowledge. He doesnt know that his son will have been his witness, even
if a witness henceforth held to the same secret, the secret that binds him to
God (GD/LIS 125).
In the three fictional retellings I have just rehearsed, silence functions
entirely negatively to separate one being from another. What in fact rever-
berates through all four versions is Gods silence, his abandonment of human
beings to their own psychological devices. Nowhere does Kierkegaard
mention the angel of the Lord calling out from the heavens to suspend the
sacrifice. Silence thereby expresses the despair of the individual who finds
himself abandoned by the divine to the palpable senselessness of the sacri-
ficial demand. But to psychologize Abrahams silence in this way is also to
impoverish it. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard fails to acknowledge the
sense in which Abrahams silence is richly expressive, the sense in which it
relates positively both to Isaac and to the end of the story. As Derrida points
out in The Gift of Death, Abraham says something to Isaac on the way to
Moriah that is not nothing and that is not false. He says something that is not
a non-truth, something moreover that, although he doesnt know it yet, will
turn out to be true (GD/LIS 60, original emphasis). Although from an ethical
point of view evasive, Abrahams reply to Isaac that the Lord will provide
the lamb for the burnt offering is also a dim prophesy of the end of the story
where the ram will substitute for the son. Indeed, in his essay Abraham the
Seer Martin Buber uses this fact to see in the Abraham story and particu-
larly in the climactic events of Genesis 22 the birth of biblical prophesy.
What the fictive elements of Fear and Trembling the focus on the theme
of silence, the pseudonym de Silentio ultimately attest to is the impossi-
bility of maintaining a positive relation to the end of the story. Kierkegaards
literary or fictional Abrahams attune the reader to the mindset of one who
lacks the faith or the nerve of Abraham in Genesis 22. They are imagi-
native embodiments of the impossibility of identifying with Abraham as he
goes to sacrifice his son. If I had been ordered to take an extraordinary

royal journey as the one to Moriah, Kierkegaards pseudonym concedes:
I know very well what I would have done. I would not have been cowardly
enough to stay at home, nor would I have dragged and drifted along the road or
forgotten the knife in order to cause a delay. I am quite sure that I would have
been punctual and all prepared more than likely, I would have arrived too
early in order to get it over sooner. But I also know what else I would have done.
The moment I mounted the horse, I would have said to myself: Now all is lost,
God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him and along with him all my joy yet God is
love and continues to be that for me, for in the world of time God and I cannot
talk with each other, we have no language in common. (FT 345)
This is as good a summary as one could hope to provide of the mindset of the
four fictional Abrahams that Kierkegaard presents in the Exordium. Each of
these Abrahams loses his nerve when confronted with the sacrificial demand
and thinks to himself at one point or another: Now all is lost, God demands
Isaac, I sacrifice him and along with him all my joy.
IV Sacrificing Literature to Abraham
In the last chapter, we saw how Kafka sacrifices Abraham to literature by

making him into a figure of ridicule and errancy, a biblical fool or Don
Quixote. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard proceeds in the opposite way
to Kafka: he bases his attempt to celebrate Abrahams incredible actions in
Genesis 22 upon the self-sacrifice of the literary imagination. The rhetoric of
the pseudonym in Fear and Trembling works, somewhat counter-intuitively,
to anathematize the act of poetic commemoration. In his 1843 journals,
Kierkegaard celebrates the literariness of Abrahams sacrifice of Isaac in
Genesis 22: But where indeed is the contemporary poet who has intimations
of such conflicts? he wonders. And yet Abrahams conduct was genuinely
poetic, noble, more noble than anything I have read in tragedies (JP 5:5640;
FT 241). In Fear and Trembling itself, he eulogises the poetic genius of
Shakespeare, only to ask: Why did you not articulate this torment? (FT 61).
But the lament is an ironic one: If poetry becomes aware of the religious and
of the inwardness of individuality, he writes a little later, it will acquire far
more meaningful tasks than those with which it busies itself now (FT 91n).
As far as Kierkegaard is concerned, the story of God asking Abraham to
sacrifice his beloved son Isaac demands more than a strictly poetic, or literary,
form of commemoration can offer.
In a significant gesture, Kierkegaard retracted the description of de
Silentio on the works title page as a poetic person who exists only among
poets (JP 5:5660; FT 243). One can read this retraction merely as prudent
editing the idea of a lyricism to the second degree perhaps already being
conveyed by the impossible pseudonym itself. But one could equally suggest
that Kierkegaard retracts the additional epithet because it runs against one
of the organising principles of his text, which is to show how Abraham
evades a straightforwardly poetic treatment. In being careful not to banish
de Silentio injudiciously to the realm of the purely poetic, Kierkegaard also
resists jettisoning the dialectical in the process. Indeed, after the four lyrical
attunements in the Exordium his discussion proceeds dialectically. And what
interests him throughout Fear and Trembling is not the beautiful tapestry of
imagination but the shudder of the idea (FT 9). There is thus good reason
why Shakespeare never took on Abraham on the way to Moriah: literature
remains fundamentally unequipped to tackle religious collisions such as
Abrahams. Read Shakespeare, writes Anti-Climacus, the pseudonym of
Kierkegaards The Sickness Unto Death, you will shudder at the collisions.
But really religious collisions even Shakespeare seems to have recoiled from.33
De Silentio approaches the problem of Abrahams poetic conduct in
Genesis 22 with the aid of the poetical that dares to say everything and
the dialectical that shuns no consequences.34 This conjunctive style in turn
produces equivocality. According to Agacinski, The style of S. [Sren] is
neither philosophical nor mystical, but rather dialectical-lyrical (the sub-title
of Fear and Trembling) not a mixture of styles, which would already
suppose the purity and autonomy of its components, but a collapse of styles,
due to a kind of trampling down of the discourse that gives up on presenting
itself in a form of knowledge and that then undertakes a commentary on this
surrender.35 It is thus the burden of de Silentios fictive existence not just to
eulogize or exalt Abraham as a poet but also to reflect (upon) the inadequacy
of such lyricism as a mode of apprehending Abraham. I am not a poet, he
says at one point, and I go at things only dialectically (FT 90). Moreover, as
Anti-Climacus has it, every act becomes infinitely heavier when it becomes
dialectical and heaviest when it becomes sympathetico-dialectical.36
The equivocality of Kierkegaards project in Fear and Trembling which
dares to say everything poetically and yet does not lack the courage to think
a thought through to the end reaches its apogee at the end of the third
section of the text titled Eulogy on Abraham. De Silentio here paradoxically
eulogises Abraham in such a way as to undercut the role of the eulogising
poet:
Venerable Father Abraham! Centuries have passed since those days, but you
have no need of a late lover to snatch your memory from the power of oblivion;
for every language calls you to mind and yet you reward your lover more
gloriously than anyone else. In the life to come you make him eternally happy in
your bosom; here in this life you captivate his eye and his heart with the wonder
of your deed. (FT 23)
The poet, we have been told earlier, contends night and day against the
craftiness of oblivion, which wants to trick him out of his hero (FT 15). De
Silentio views poetry, somewhat reductively, as a retrospective enterprise. The
late-coming poet commemorates the hero in the same way as the late-coming
word commemorates the deed: The poet can do nothing but bring to mind
what has been done, can do nothing but admire what has been done (FT
15). Of course, without the artists commemorative song, the hero would fall
into oblivion.37 Yet, according to the hyperbole of de Silentios apostrophe,
Abraham has no need of a poet or late lover to rescue his memory from
oblivion. He lacks the heros requisite sense of being-for-the-past to satisfy the
poets commemorative desire. He does not need a Shakespeare to intercede
on his historical part and say everything just as it is because he has somehow
tricked oblivion and put himself beyond the dialectic of poet and hero. As
a result of his actions in Genesis 22, Abraham himself possesses an aston-
ishing capacity to compress the passage of time that literally separates him
from his historical admirer so as to figure the here and now as captivating,
the hereafter as blessed. He becomes identifiable with a type of oblivion that
remains prospective that must be approached with fear and trembling since
it continues to condition the very sense of the present and of the future.
One might say that Abraham resists the commemorative enterprise of the
poet to the extent that he is an eschatological rather than merely an historical
figure. It has not been noted by any of the English translators of Fear and
Trembling Lowrie, Hannay or the Hongs and noted only recently by
the Danish editors that de Silentios apostrophe refers to a significant biblical
phrase occurring only in Luke 16.223: the bosom of Abraham. According
to Ernest W. Saunders in The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, Abrahams
bosom refers to:
the place where the good go at the moment of death, and where judgement is
enacted as preliminary and perhaps probationary to the Final Judgement at the
end of the age. In the Parable of the rich man and Larazus, the beggar at death is
carried by angels to Abrahams bosom, and separated by a great chasm from the
tormented rich man in Hades (Sheol: Luke 16.2223). Jewish literature of the
NT period contains many references to Father Abraham, together with the patri-
archs Isaac and Jacob, as eschatological figures. Rabbinic Judaism sometimes
spoke of rest in Abrahams bosom in relation to the meal of the blessed in the
world to come, which was enjoyed by the righteous after death (Math. 8.11;
Midrash on Exodus 16:4; cf. John 13.23) In the Lukan parable the metaphor
probably indicates a blessed communion of the faithful, as of a parent and child
(cf. John 1.18), apart from any reference to a heavenly banquet.38
Kierkegaards pseudonym is clearly playing on the eschatological implica-

tions of the term Abrahams bosom in his apostrophe and trying to establish
Abraham as inhabiting an ambivalent, prospective temporality irreducible
to that of straightforward poetic commemoration. He is, moreover, directly
linking the claim for Abrahams eschatological status to his conduct in
Genesis 22. For de Silentio, it is precisely because of the way Abraham
conducted himself in the face of Gods demand to sacrifice his son Isaac that
one can claim he transcends the historical or tricks oblivion. To the extent that
this episode represents an overcoming of the power of oblivion that consti-
tutes the historical, the Abraham of Genesis 22 does not require the services
of the poet who, according to de Silentio echoing the Gospel of Mark, is no
apostle and drives out devils only by the power of the devil (FT 61; cf. Mark
3.15 and 22).
The poet as the representative of language and recollections genius (FT
15) continues to rely on the passing of time and the power of oblivion in
a way that Abraham does not. For this reason, it is possible to see the entire
rhetorical thrust of Fear and Trembling as encapsulated by de Silentios bold
formulation: in the Hongs translation, Venerable Father Abraham every
language calls you to mind. According to this claim, both lyrical and dialec-
tical, Abraham is not merely an historical figure subject to the possibility of
becoming lost to oblivion but somehow contiguous and co-terminus with the
act of language itself. Abraham is not simply a heroic figure to be commemo-
rated in language by the poet but is rather a figure that is recalled by the
action of language itself. As Kevin Newmark glosses it, From the moment
there is language (Tungemaal), there is reminder of Abrahams faith.39
V Alone Like Abraham: the Inconsolable Present
But how is this so? How does commemorating Abraham equate to commem-
orating the operation of language itself? Answering this question returns
us to the problem of Abrahams silence and, in particular, to the lesson
about the function of language that Kierkegaard seems to derive from the
Akedah. For Kierkegaard, the act of communication involves a suspensive
moment corresponding to the suspensive moment in the Abraham story in
which the patriarch goes to sacrifice his beloved son without yet knowing
the outcome of his trial. In Kierkegaard, one separates oneself from others
by means of silence. We have already seen a number of instances in Fear and
Trembling in which characters use silence decisively, as a mode of distancing
or separation. Tarquinius Superbus cuts the heads off the tallest poppies in his
garden in a gesture that immediately mystifies the messenger sent by his son.
Abraham speaks to no one in his household about Gods sacrificial demand.
At a more formal level, the pseudonym also symbolically re-enacts the break
from the world of immediate perception corresponding to the prototypical act

of faith. Instead of receiving a work from a real author, Sren Kierkegaard,
readers receive a work attributed to an impossible name. The pseudonym
only becomes legible, moreover, after readers have experienced the rhetorical
time of the text insofar as this time remains intimately bound up with the
retelling of a story. Once the text has been read, however, de Silentio immedi-
ately recalls the works essential interpretive gesture and so immediately calls
forth Abrahams majestic act of faith. The name Johannes de Silentio thus
recalls the story of Abrahams faith as Sren Kierkegaard tells it.
What fascinates Kierkegaard about the story of Genesis 22 is the sense
in which Gods command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac locks the patriarch
into an inconsolable, or melancholic, present. Abrahams silence is a sign
that he is isolated not just from others but also within time. To appreciate
the paradoxicality of Abrahams final trial it is important to recognise how it
functions as a trial of time. Genesis 22 shows Abraham having paradoxically
to separate himself not just from the past but also from the future. Buber
helps us to understand this point when he notes in Abraham the Seer that the
biblical command lekh lekha usually translated into English as Go or Get
thee bears a unique relation to Abraham. Buber, who worked with Franz
Rosenzweig on translating the Hebrew Bible into German, reminds us that
this phrase occurs only twice in the Bible and each time bears upon Abraham.
It first appears at the beginning of Abrahams trials when God sends Abraham
away from his native land in Haran. Genesis 12.1 reads: Now the Lord had
said to Abram, Leave your country, your people, and your fathers household
and go [lekh lekha] to the land I will show you. It then occurs for a second
and final time when God commands Abraham, at the end of his trials, to
sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Genesis 22.2 reads: Then God said, Take your
son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go [velekh lekha] to the region
of Moriah. Sacrifice him there for a burnt offering on one of the mountains I
will tell you about.
According to Buber:
In the one instance the demand, at the beginning of [Abrahams] trials, is that
he separate himself from the past, from the world of the Fathers; in the second
instance, at the end of the trials, that he separate himself, despite the promise
given to him by that same God, from the future, from the world of the sons. Both
times God does not tell the man where he is sending him. Later, while on the
road, God will show him the land that is his goal, will tell him the mountain that
is his goal. Out of the life of memory, God sends man into uncertainty, out of
the life of expectation, into uncertainty; except that the man knows, in the first
instance, that he is going into the fulfilment of the promise, and, in the second
instance, that he is going into what is, as far as he can see, the cancellation of the
promise, and this moreover, by his own act, the inhuman act he must accomplish
at his Lords bidding. But this time, as before, Abraham answers this demand
not by a word, but by a deed. This time as before, it is written: and he went.40
For Buber, lekh lekha is a demand for Abraham to move away from the realm
of certainty and into the realm of uncertainty. What distinguishes the second
movement from the first in a sense, making it the cancellation of the first
is that it appears to be one set against the passage of time itself. In being asked
in Genesis 12 to separate himself from the past from the life of memory
and the realm of the fathers Abraham is simultaneously given a promise for
the future. God says to Abraham: I will make you into a great nation / and
I will bless you, / I will make your name great, / and you will be a blessing, /
I will bless those who bless you / and whoever curses you I will curse; / and
all peoples on earth / will be blessed through you (Gen. 12.23). Upon the
heels of this promise follow two others, the promise of land of Canaan (Gen.
13.14) and the promise of the birth of Isaac (Gen. 18.15).
Leaving Haran is an ordeal that one called Abram or exalted father
might be expected to undergo in order to fulfil the promise of his name.
To make such a movement is to act heroically. In Genesis 22, however, God
is asking Abraham to act unheroically, indeed, criminally. Here, the patriarch
must separate himself, by his own inhuman act, from the realm of expec-
tation: from the promise contained in the change of his name from Abram to
Abraham (or father of nations). One might say that what is being closed off
to Abraham in the approach to Moriah is the future as a locus of meaning. As
Newmark notes: Isaac represents not only the future as such, but also the
future as the hermeneutic possibility of meaning, the temporal site in which
Abrahams life, that is, his relationship to God, can find its ultimate signifi-
cance [W]ithout Isaac, there is no future for Abraham, no space in which
Gods promise to Abraham can acquire meaning.41 According to E. A. Speiser:
Isaac was to Abraham more than a child of his old age, so fervently hoped for
yet so long denied. Isaac was also, and more particularly, the only link with
the far-off goal to which Isaacs life was dedicated. To sacrifice Isaac, as God
demanded, was to forego at the same time the long-range objective itself. The
nightmare physical trial entrains thus a boundless spiritual trial.42
How can God ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac when he is the very embodiment
and future of Gods covenant with Abraham? As Kierkegaard ruminates
in his journals, The terrifying thing in the collision is this that it is not a
collision between Gods command and mans command but between Gods
command and Gods command (JP 1:908; FT 248). Yet, of course, as Buber
notes, Abraham responds to this ordeal as to the first, without any form of
complaint.
The following passage from the Talmud (of which Louis Jacobs notes
Kierkegaard probably had no knowledge) captures the atmosphere of

temporal inconsolability that pervades Genesis 22. The passage, Sanhedrin
89b, supplies an explanation for the mysterious opening words of Genesis 22,
After these things , by positing a midrashic parallel with the book of Job
where Satan provokes the testing.
And it came to pass after these words that God did tempt Abraham (Genesis
22.1). What is the meaning of after? Rabbi Johanan said in the name of Rabbi
Jose ben Zimra: After the words of Satan. It is written: And the child grew up
and was weaned: and Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was
weaned (Genesis 22.8). Satan said to the Holy One, blessed be He: Sovereign
of the Universe! Thou didst give a son to this old man at the age of a hundred,
yet all the banquet he prepared he did not sacrifice to Thee a single turtle-dove
or pigeon! God replied: Did he not do all this in honour of his son! Yet were
I to tell him to sacrifice that son to Me he would do so at once On the way
(as Abraham was leading Isaac to be sacrificed) Satan confronted him and said
to him: If we assay to commune with thee will thou be grieved? Behold,
thou hast instructed many, and thou hast strengthened weak hands. Thy words
have upholden him that was falling, and thou hast strengthened the feeble knees.
But now it has come upon thee, and thou faintest (Job 4.25) (i.e., Abraham
is being asked to commit a wrong against which his whole has hitherto been
directed). Abraham replied: I will walk in my integrity (Psalm 26.2). Satan
said to him: Should not thy fear be thy confidence? (Job 4.6). He replied:
Remember, I pray thee, whoever perished being innocent? (Job 4.6). Seeing that
Abraham would not listen to him, Satan said to him: Now a thing was secretly
brought to me (4.12). I have heard from behind the veil the lamb, for a burnt
offering (Genesis 22.7) but not Isaac for a burnt offering. Abraham replied:
It is the punishment of a liar that he is not believed even when he tells the
truth. In the parallel passage in the Midrash (Genesis Rabbah, 56:4) Satan says
to Abraham: Tomorrow He will condemn thee as a murderer but Abraham
replies: Nevertheless!43
Evil, Kafka once wrote, is whatever distracts (DF 75). Aiming to distract
Abraham in the passage above is Satans outcome-oriented or teleological
approach to the trial. Even under the prospective threat of divine accusation,
Abraham resists this pragmatic way of thinking, thereby holding the thought
of after in abeyance through the ordeal. For Buber, With Abraham what
matters is not his character as God finds it, so to speak, but what he does, and
what he becomes. His faith is the fact that he trusts in God before God has
fulfilled the promise.44 What matters, in the terms given by this midrash, is
that Abraham refuses the consequentialist mode of thinking the temptation
of the ethical that Satan here embodies. Walking in integrity thus means
refusing to temporalize ones actions in terms of their immediate or expected

outcomes that is, in terms of an economy of ethical calculation.
Another line of defence becomes available to Abraham (and, in a sense, to
God as well) when Isaac is safely returned to him. As Bruce Feiler explains:
God demands only that Abraham take Isaac to a mountain and offer him
as a burnt offering. Early Jews, mindful of this nuance, referred to the event
as an offering, not a binding and not a sacrifice. Death was not considered
part of the story.45 Genesis Rabbah 56.8 neatly conveys this point by having
Abraham confront God about the trials contradictoriness after the event:
Recently Thou didst tell me (Genesis 21.12): In Isaac shall seed be called to
thee, and later Thou didst say (Genesis 22.5): Take now thy son. And now
Thou tellest me to stay my hand! God is made to reply in the words of Psalm
79 verse 35: My covenant I will not profane, nor alter that which is gone out of
My lips. When I told thee: Take thy son, I was not altering that which went
out of my lips [i.e. the promise that Abraham would have descendents through
Isaac]. I did not tell: Slay him but bring him up [i.e. take him to the mountain
and make him ready to be sacrificed]. Thou didst bring him up. Now take him
down again.46
In his 1758 translation of Baron Holbergs An Introduction to Universal

History, Gregory Sharpe tries to justify this reading of Genesis 22 by
observing that God was only calling for the return of what was already his:
The intended sacrifice of Isaac has often been objected to by infidels as impious
and cruel, the most unnatural in a father to execute. But it is manifest from the
event, that Providence did not intend the sacrifice of Isaac. All that Abraham was
required to do by the divine command, Gen. xxii, was to offer up his son, his
only son, whom he loved, for a burnt-offering. And when this was done, when
he had offerd his son, and given this utmost proof of his fidelity, and would have
proceeded to the sacrifice, the angel of the Lord calls unto him out of heaven,
and says, Lay not thine hand upon the lad. If a reason is demanded for this
offering up of Isaac, besides the trial of his fathers faith let it be rememberd,
that he who was thus dedicated to the Lord, was he whom the Lord had given
to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, after whom the seed of Abraham was to
be called, and in his seed were all the nations of the earth to be blessed.47
This reading of the story hinges on the obscurity of Isaacs origins. To whom,
finally, does Isaac belong: to Abraham and Sarah or to God? It is precisely this
ontological ambivalence that renders him a somewhat spectral figure on the
way to Moriah, and that allows Abrahams act of offering him up in sacrifice
to assume symbolic meaning.
For Kierkegaard, Abraham embodies muscular, existential separation.
Kierkegaards alone is not of Socrates; writes Buber in Between Man

and Man, it is of Abraham Genesis 12.1 and 22.2, alike demand in the
same Go before thee the power to free oneself of all bonds, the bonds
to the world of the fathers and to the world of sons.48 Abrahams silence
signifies the temporal isolation of the individual: the decision one makes in
secret to separate oneself not just from the past the world of the fathers
but also from the future the world of the sons. Language commemo-
rates Abrahams actions in Genesis 22 in allowing for a radical break with
the world of immediate perception that eventually becomes meaningful.
Abrahams putative failure to communicate his sacrificial intentions to others
acquires redemptive significance in light of the rams substitution for Isaac at
the end of the story. But this means that silence is something more than simply
the absence or the failure of communication. It means that silence orients us
within language towards the problem of prospective and unforeseen eventu-
ation. In a variation of the midrash I just cited, Abraham points out to God
that his trial of time should entail redemptive consequences for the genera-
tions to come:
I might have reproached Thee, and said, O Lord of the world, yesterday Thou
didst tell me, in Isaac shall thy seed be called, and now Thou sayest, Take
thy son, thine only son, even Isaac, and offer him for a burnt offering. But I
refrained myself, and I said nothing. Thus mayest Thou, when the children of
Isaac commit trespasses and because of them fall upon evil times, be mindful of
the offering of their father Isaac, and forgive their sins and deliver them from
their suffering.49
According to Johannes de Silentio, Abraham is thus a guiding star that saves

the anguished (FT 21). He is righteous outside of or prior to the community
of sinners. He shows, in the words of Anti-Climacus, that the opposite of sin
is faith.50
Kierkegaards appeal to Abraham as a redemptive figure a guiding
star that saves the anguished exposes a fundamental ambivalence in
his analysis of the Genesis story. As we have seen, Kierkegaard wants a
prepositional rather than propositional sense of Abrahams trial. This is the
melodramatic wager of his text. He wants his readers to feel the pain of the
trial. He wants us to feel alone or anguished like Abraham on the way to
Moriah. And yet, he can only appeal to us in this way to suspend our sense
of the ending because he knows and we know how things eventually
turn out for Abraham. Another way to make this point is to say that silence
cannot be used to figure absolute separation since it proves inseparable from
the necessarily communal experience of a narrative. Abrahams silence about
his sacrificial intentions his radical break with the world of immediate
perception, with the ethical orbit of his household only gains meaning
in light of the subsequent reprieve of Isaacs death sentence. Rather than

separating him absolutely or indefinitely from others (as Kierkegaard would
have us believe), it merely isolates him for a circumscribed period of time.
Like Abrahams silence, Kierkegaards choice of pseudonym gains meaning
over the course of his retelling of the Genesis narrative. Fear and Trembling
is not just a text about the propriety or the impropriety of silence, but also
a text about the propriety or the impropriety of the name of silence the
name, that is to say, that would most properly call the idiom of silence to
mind. A reader soon enough discovers that the true name for silence in
Kierkegaards work is not de Silentio but rather Abraham. As Peter Fenves
notes, Johannes may descend from a region entitled Silentio, but as the text
itself bears witness, he has abandoned his homeland and ventured into the
foreign region of discourse, into the domain of writing, to be more exact.51
The Kierkegaardian pseudonym is not a matter of anonymity everyone in
the gossipy town of Copenhagen was well aware of who the author of these
texts was. Rather, as Agacinski insists, it is a matter of recognising a certain
autonomy of the text, of its particular mode of functioning and communi-
cating [W]hat is essential here is only that this signature in some way
express the individuality the author would like to pass himself off as.52
In the case of Fear and Trembling, the individuality Kierkegaard would
like to pass himself off as is in a vital respect Abrahamic; it evolves from his
thoroughgoing perhaps even sacrificial identification with the unfolding
of Abrahams narrative. In this sense, the act of writing entails leaving ones
homeland, just as Abraham did in Genesis 12. But it also means being prepared
to sacrifice the thematic destination of the proper name, just as Abraham was
forced in Genesis 22 to offer up for sacrifice the divinely appointed meaning
of his name: the father of nations. What Kierkegaard says of his authorship
as a whole in an 1849 journal entry I cannot, after all, say: I But this
is my limitation I am a pseudonym53 is most acutely the case in writing
about Abraham. Fear and Trembling is thus a pseudonymous text that also
stages the problem of pseudonymity itself insofar as this can be understood
as a sacrificial suspension of the authors proper name in an attempt to think
the propriety of the name itself. In this schema, the figural and fictitious name
de Silentio functions paradoxically to confer propriety onto Abraham. The
bad example, the imposturous figure that is unable to make the movement
of Abrahamic faith, nonetheless provides Kierkegaard with the aesthetic
and philosophical distance in which to think Abraham in his autonomy and
individuality. Despite what de Silentio says to the contrary, in this instance the
hero continues to need his poet.
One oversimplifies the complex negotiation of the proper name that takes
place in Fear and Trembling when one disconnects the pseudonym from the
subject of its address, Abraham. Yet this is precisely what Pat Bigelow does
in Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing when he writes: Kierkegaard
makes constant appeal to the peal of silence, since as he says of silence, all
language calls thee to remembrance.54 Bigelow is here glossing de Silentios
apostrophe. But he is also crucially misattributing its subject. As we have
seen, Kierkegaard does not say that language calls silence to remembrance
but rather that it commemorates Abraham. For all its rhetorical ingenuity,
Bigelows formulation elides the complex negotiation of the proper name that
takes place in Kierkegaards text around the theme of silence. While Abraham
certainly epitomises what silence is for de Silentio, the question remains: how
is the silence de Silentio here invokes to describe Abraham still a function
of the rhetoric and fictiveness constituting the pseudonym itself? By
removing from de Silentios apostrophe every trace of the proper and the
improper name, Bigelow crucially bypasses the metonymic deployment of
the matter of the story constituting the pseudonyms meaningfulness.55
VI Abraham and the Trope of the farre-fet
If Fear and Trembling encrypts a secret, at once personal and impersonal,

idiomatic and theoretical, then this secret revolves around the rhetorical
manipulation of temporal or narrative sequence. In 1852, Kierkegaard
imagined himself waking one morning to the thought: What you are experi-
encing is similar to the story of Abraham, only to add almost in the same
breath: But he did not understand Abraham or himself (JP 6:6791; FT 270).
The correct rhetorical name for this uncanny act of identification, which
attributes the incomprehensibility of the present to something in the distant
past, is metalepsis. According to Jacob Bggild:
Like numerous other tropes of classical rhetoric [in which we know Kierkegaard
was schooled], metalepsis is a figure of substitution. More specifically, an
immanent effect is ascribed to a distant cause, which thus replaces a closer one.
Therefore, the deviation or turn of the trope of metalepsis can coincide with
the manipulation, in the grammatical sense, of any given speech act. Though it
is not one of the well-known tropes, like metaphor, metalepsis might then be a
highly relevant figure in any context where human language is being discussed.56
A fuller account of this trope will help us to see how it functions as the very
engine of Kierkegaards idiosyncratic style of storytelling.
In his Institutio Oratoria, first-century Roman rhetorician Quintilian trans-
lates the ancient Greek rhetorical term metalepsis into Latin as transumptio.
The English word transumption means: a copy or quotation; transfer or
translation; transmutation or conversion. The precise meaning of the term in
rhetoric is unclear and somewhat contested, but there is a general sense that
it is a kind of meta-trope, a figure of linkage between figures and that there
will be one or more unstated middle terms which are leapt over, or alluded
to, by the figure.57 In his 1596 The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham
amusingly terms metalepsis the trope of the farre-fet or the far-fetched:
And it seemeth the deviser of this figure, had a desire to please women rather
than men: for we use to say by manner of Proverbe: things farrefet and deare
bought are good for Ladies: so in this manner of speach we use it, leaping over
the heads of a great many words, we take one that is furdest off, to utter our
matters by: as Medea cursing hir first acquaintance with prince Jason, who had
very unkindly forsaken her, said:
Woe worth the mountaine that the maste bare
Which was the first causer of all my care
Where she might as well have said, woe worth our first meeting, or woe
worth the time that Jason arrived with his ship at my fathers cittie in Colchos,
when he took me away with him, and not so farre off as to curse the mountaine
that bare the pinetree, that made the mast, that bare the sailes, that the ship
sailed with, which carried her away.58
To speak metaleptically is thus to express oneself indirectly, by appealing to

what is distant rather than to what is near.
What distinguishes metalepsis from other tropes is the fact that it involves
the figurative compression of a causal sequence. As John Hollander points
out:
In most descriptions of rhetorical figure a kind of implicitly spatial language

connects the representation with what it replaces part for whole or vice
versa, proximate or otherwise associated object or quality and so forth.
Save for dramatic irony, with its audiences or readers proleptic
sense of an outcome of which the dramatic speaker is unaware, and which
engenders an interpretation more powerful than the raw intended meaning
of the speaker himself, only transumption seems to involve a temporal
sequence.59
Since metalepsis fetches significance from afar in time as well as in semiotic

space,60 the metaleptic self is not just a far-fetcher but also an after-taker. And
since (as Puttenhams example shows) it is a trope that enables one to curse
ones present circumstances, metalepsis is also a trope ideally suited to the
melancholy imagination.
I can think of no better instance of metalepsis than when that other great
biblical character with which Kierkegaard identified, Job, is blighted with
painful sores and curses the day of his birth:
After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. He said: / May
the day of my birth perish / and the night it was said, A boy is / born! / That
day may it turn to darkness; / may God above not care about it; / may no
light shine upon it. / May darkness and deep shadow claim it / once more: / may
a cloud settle over it; / may blackness overwhelm its light. / That night may
thick darkness seize it; / may it not be included among the days / of the year /
nor be entered in any of the months. (Job 3:16)
Poet and translator Stephen Mitchell aptly describes Jobs curse as a

ferocious hymn of de-creation.61 Job is so inconsolable because the Lord
has stretched out his hand at Satans insistence and struck everything he has.
Job has just lost his seven sons and three daughters, his servants, his seven
thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five
hundred donkeys and has been blighted with sores on his body. Everything
Job says to his friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar thus takes place in an
atmosphere of temporal inconsolability in which the exposed self seeks
figurative refuge from inexplicably harsh circumstances. Metalepsis offers
Job figurative refuge by offering him an ironic way out of his torment: the
chance, that is, to take control of his destiny by wishing himself dead. As he
makes explicit at one point, My soul chooseth strangling and death rather
than my life (Job 7.15).
God sorely tests both Abraham and Job and we might now note
how well the trope of the farre-fet applies to the story of Abraham and, in
particular, to the events of Genesis 22. In this chapter of the Bible, God asks
Abraham to perform the most far-fetched task imaginable: to offer up for
sacrifice the child which was miraculously gifted him at the age of 100 and
which is the very promise of his great posterity. In Genesis 17.19, just after
the Covenant of Circumcision, God says to Abraham, your wife Sarah will
bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with
him as an everlasting covenant for his descendents after him. In Genesis 21.2,
Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very
time God had promised him. Yet, Gods extraordinary demand in Genesis 22
signals the imminent cancellation of all his former promises to Abraham.
Abraham responds to Gods far-fetched demand in kind: by himself
maintaining a belief in the far-fetched. According to Johannes de Silentio, the
patriarch believes by virtue of the absurd (FT 36) that Isaac will be returned
to him, even in the event of being sacrificed:
Let us go further. We let Isaac actually be sacrificed. Abraham had faith. He did
not have faith that he would be blessed in a future life, but that he would blessed
here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one
sacrificed. He believed on the strength of the absurd, for all human calculation
had ceased long ago. (FT 36)
Here, Kierkegaard follows his Protestant forbear Luther and, more specifi-
cally, the argument of Hebrews 11.19: Abraham reasoned that God could
raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from
death. For Kierkegaard, Abraham expresses his faith in metaleptic terms:
via a figurative or idealising compression of causal sequence. In response to
Isaacs question about the lamb for the burnt offering, he skips over the grim
reality of the present and looks to the hopeful future as he speculates that
God will provide the animal for the sacrifice. Like a true storyteller, Abraham
averts his charges eyes from the actuality of sacrifice so that the present
relates to the future indirectly or figuratively.
Where Job projects negatively or despairingly into the past, Abraham
projects positively or hopefully into the future. In his response to Isaac,
Abraham pits himself against the passage of time. Instead of resigning himself
to the inevitability of Isaacs death, he holds the moment open for God to
intervene and return Isaac to him. As de Silentio notes:
Abraham had faith for this life. In fact, if his faith had been for the life
to come, he certainly would have more readily discarded everything in order
to rush out of a world to which he did not belong. But Abrahams faith was
not of that sort, if there is such faith at all, for actually it is not faith but the
most remote possibility of faith that sees its object on the distant horizon but
is separated from it by a chasmal abyss in which doubt plays its tricks. But
Abraham had faith specifically for this life faith he would grow old in this
country, be honoured among his people, blessed by posterity, and unforgettable
in Isaac, the most precious thing in his life. (FT 20)
But isnt Abrahams belief that God will supply the lamb for the sacrifice
ultimately a metaleptic fantasy, a rhetorical projection into the future, a
fiction of a literary type? Abraham doesnt know what is going to happen on
Mount Moriah. Indeed, God keeps quiet about why he demands Isaacs life
until the very last moment.
Given this fact that God keeps Abraham in the dark about the purpose
of the sacrifice, it is possible to see Abraham as using the occasion of Isaacs
question about the lamb for the burnt offering to speak indirectly and aggres-
sively to God in short, to quietly curse him. According to Agacinski:
Abrahams reply to Isaac suggests, I suspect, that as well as Abraham being

tested by God, God was being put to the test by Abraham. Just how far will
you let me go? Behold: I do as I am commanded, but are you really going to let
me slaughter my son? Johannes tries to demonstrate Abrahams faith by saying
that he believed that God would not demand Isaac of him. But the point could
also be expressed negatively: Abraham did not believe that God would demand
the sacrifice of Isaac.62
Feiler similarly conjectures:
Maybe Abraham is not being tested at all. Maybe hes doing the testing. Perhaps
the episode is Abrahams way of testing God, specifically Gods promise in the
preceding chapter that Abrahams offspring will be continued through Isaac
The offering therefore, becomes Abrahams Call to God. Instead of Go forth,
Abraham says, Come hither! And faced with his moment of decision, God
acts.63
And Kierkegaard himself writes at one point in Fear and Trembling: What is
it to tempt God? And yet this is the movement of faith (FT 48). In this version
of the story, Abraham acquires some of the negativity of Job. He expresses the
inconsolability of his present situation by putting the onus on God to call the
sacrifice off. To Gods lekh lekha he responds aggressively with a metaleptic
Come hither.
VII Beyond Secrecy (Derridas Abraham)
To see Abraham as a kind of Job in that he tests or tempts God by offering

Isaac up for sacrifice certainly helps us to psychologize the patriarch.
But my claim here is that it doesnt get us any nearer to the meaning of the
Akedah. For neither is this meaning reducible to the domain of psychology
nor is it containable in the being of any one subject. I might best make this
point by returning to the problem of the secret. In Genesis 22, God never
asks Abraham to keep his sacrificial command a secret. It is not like that odd
moment in Genesis 18.9 when the three mysterious visitors ask Abraham,
Where is your wife Sarah?, as if to make sure that the patriarch is alone
before he receives the good but unbelievable news from God that his wife
will soon bear him a son. Despite this fact that God never swears Abraham to
secrecy as Prince Hamlet swears Horatio and Marcellus to secrecy about
the appearance of the ghost in Shakespeares play both Kierkegaard and
Derrida continue to insist that Abraham is bound to keep a sacrificial secret
from the rest of his family.
Why is this so? For Kierkegaard, it is the content of the command that
forces Abraham into a demonic kind of silence. Given that God is asking
Abraham to murder his son, Kierkegaard thinks to himself, how can the
patriarch be expected to speak of it to anyone else? Wouldnt they all respond
to him by urging him to abstain from killing his beloved son? For the German
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, it is not just the content of Gods
command that is incredible but also the fact that a man believes he is speaking
with God. Kant dismisses the Akedah most memorably in his 1798 text The
Conflict of the Faculties:
For if God were really to speak to man, the latter could after all never know that
it is God who is speaking to him. It is utterly impossible for man to apprehend
the Infinite through his senses, to distinguish him from sensible objects and
thereby know him. He can, though, no doubt convince himself in some cases
that it cannot be God whose voice he believes he hears; for if what it commands
him to do is contrary to the moral law, he must regard the manifestation as an
illusion, however, majestic and transcending the whole of Nature may seem to
him to be.
For example, consider the story of the sacrifice which Abraham was willing
to make at the divine command by slaughtering and burning his only son
what is more, the child unwittingly carried the wood for the sacrifice. Even
though the voice rang out from the (visible) heavens, Abraham ought to have
replied thus to this supposedly divine voice, It is quite certain that I ought not
to kill my innocent son, but I am not certain and I cannot ever become certain
that you, the you who is appearing to me, are God.64
Here, Kants focus on the rational has the comic effect of divesting the Akedah
of all its dramatic tension. Act in such a way that you always treat humanity,
whether in your own person or in the person of others, never simply as
a means, but always at the same time as an end, avers Kant famously in
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.65 Abrahams sin in Genesis 22, as
far as he is concerned, is to treat his son as a means to an end rather than an
end in himself.
The problem with Kants position on the Akedah is that the hypothetical
case of an acceptable yet religious sacrifice never arises.66 What Kant is
dismissing, then, is the very notion of sacrifice, which depends on the sacri-
ficial victim whether we consider this to be human or animal becoming
a means to an end. For Kierkegaard, if what Abraham does in Genesis 22 is
rationally inexplicable, this is because faith begins precisely where thought
stops (FT 53). Faith is an end that justifies the terrible means of human
(or animal) sacrifice. Contra Kant, Kierkegaard thus seeks to preserve
the meaningfulness both of Gods call from the (visible) heavens and of
Abrahams response to this call. If occasionally there is any response at all
these days to the paradox, he notes in Fear and Trembling, it is likely to be:
One judges it by the result (FT 62). For Kierkegaard, in approaching Genesis
22 with an attitude of Thats to be judged by the outcome, thought skips too
quickly to the happy end and so avoids thinking the terrible time of the trial:
those three days Abraham spent approaching Moriah. Kierkegaard thinks
Abraham is justified in keeping quiet about the sacrificial command because
this silence preserves the prospective meaningfulness of this (and, indeed,
of any other kind of) sacrifice. In this sense, Abraham is not just the father
of faith, but also the father of sacrifice. This, no doubt, is why Kierkegaard
comes to think of the patriarch when he breaks his engagement with Regine.
Like Kierkegaard, Derrida also wants to preserve the meaningfulness of

sacrifice against the kind of rationalist attack that Kant offers in The Conflict
of the Faculties. For Derrida, however, the secret Abraham keeps has less
to do with the content of the command than with the absolutely singular
relationship that the command establishes between Abraham and God. The
axiom that Abraham kept quiet about the sacrifice obliges us to pose or to
suppose a demand for secrecy, he writes, a secret asked by God, by him who
proposes or promises the covenant (GD/LIS 154). Like Kierkegaard, Derrida
obsesses about the implications of Gods sacrificial demand. As he muses
quite amusingly in his 2001 essay Above All, No Journalists!:
What must God have said to Abraham? What did He tell him, necessarily, at the
moment when he gave him the order to climb Mount Moriah, accompanied by
Isaac and his donkey,67 in view of the worst possible sacrifice? What could and
should He have told him? [W]hat He must have told him can be summarized
thus: Above all, no journalists!
To translate: What happens here, my summons and your response, your
responsibility (Here I am) all of this must remain absolutely secret: just
between us. It must remain unconditionally private, our internal affair and
inaccessible: Dont tell anyone about it. Reread the story: it underlines (and
Kierkegaard amplified this point) the near-total silence of Abraham.68
A little later in Above All, No Journalists! Derrida renders the implications

of Gods command even more comically:
God: So, no mediator between us (not even Christ, who will have been the first
journalist or news-man [nouvelliste], like the Evangelists who bring the Good
News), no media between us. No third. The ordeal that binds us must not be
newsworthy. This event must not be news: neither good nor bad.69
For Derrida, what Abraham has to prove in Genesis 22 is that he is capable

of keeping a secret (GD/LIS 121). The OED defines secret as: Some fact,
affair, design, action, etc., the knowledge of which is kept to oneself or
shared only with those whom it concerns or to whom it has been confided;
something that cannot be divulged without violation of a command or breach
of confidence.70 But, for Derrida, Abrahams is not a secret in this ordinary or
everyday sense of the word. As he notes, Abrahams secret does not have the
sense of something to hide as Kierkegaard suggests It is a secret without
content, without any sense to be hidden, any secret other than the request for
secrecy, that is to say the absolute exclusivity of the relation between the one
who calls and the one who responds Here I am (GD/LIS 154). On Derridas
account, it is almost as if God demands Isaacs sacrifice because he is ontologi-
cally jealous. What Derridas God seems to say to Abraham in Genesis 22 is
this: you will respond to me before and above any other being; whenever you
say, Here I am, you will always mean, Here I am alone before God.
Derridas analysis of the Akedah, both in The Gift of Death and Literature
in Secret, hinges on the fact that Abraham keeps two distinct but related kinds
of secret in the event:
First secret: he must not reveal that God has called him and asked the greatest
sacrifice of him in the tte--tte of an absolute covenant. This is the secret he
knows and shares. Second secret, super-secret: the reason for or the sense of
the sacrificial demand. In this regard, Abraham is held to secrecy quite simply
because the secret remains a secret for him. He is therefore held to secrecy not
because he shares Gods secret but because he doesnt share it. Although he is,
in fact, as if passively held to the secret he doesnt know, any more than we do,
he also takes passive and active responsibility, such as leads to a decision, for
not asking God any questions, for not complaining as Job did, of the worst that
seems to threaten him at Gods request. (GD/LIS 129, original emphasis)
According to the logic of the super-secret that Derrida develops in this

passage from Literature in Secret, however actively or fastidiously Abraham
pursues Gods sacrificial request, he still remains in the dark as to its ultimate
meaning. Since Abraham relates to the divine demand not just actively but
also passively, he approaches Mount Moriah with as much uncertainty about
what will happen there as his son.
But if this is the case, if Abraham relates both actively and passively to
Gods demand in Genesis 22, then why cant he tell others about what he has
been asked to do? Why must Abraham take sole and terrible responsibility for
the sacrifice? Why must he interiorise his despair as Isaacs father and remain
silent about the death sentence that God has passed down?
What is strange or unexpected about Derridas Kierkegaardian account
of the Akedah is that it fails to take note of a deconstructive consequence
that follows from its positing of the super-secret. According to the logic of
the super-secret, the sacrifice requires both activity and passivity on the part
of the sacrificial subject, since it orients this subject towards an unknown
indeed, an unknowable future. Of course, it is always possible to locate
this activity and this passivity within the one subject, as both Kierkegaard
and Derrida do by having their Abrahams take sole responsibility for the
sacrificial event. But it is certainly not necessary that we do so. We might
just as well locate the paradoxical interplay of activity and passivity in the
inter-subjective space that sacrifice necessarily opens up between human
beings and between species. Indeed, given that the sacrificial event in Genesis
22 involves both Isaac and the ram, this would seem to be a much more
natural line of interpretation to adopt than the one taken by Derrida and
Kierkegaard.
My point here is that the Akedah does not just concern what happens
between Abraham qua single individual and God. In thinking about the
sacrifice, we must take into account not just the patriarchs tacit decision to
follow Gods command but also Isaacs tacit decision to follow Abrahams
command. The sacrifice in Genesis 22 depends for its meaning not simply
upon the one who decides in secret to sacrifice (Abraham) but also upon the
one who decides in secret to be sacrificed (Isaac). It depends, moreover, upon
the sacrificial communion that father and son willingly enter into as they
approach Moriah with a quiet heart.
The more weight Derrida gives to the implications of Gods initial
command for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the less what follows this scene
seems to matter. In order for this request to have the sense of a trial, Derrida
writes in Literature in Secret:
the veritable object of the divine injunction had to be something other than
putting Isaac to death. Moreover, what interest could God have in the death of
this child, even if it were offered as a sacrifice? That is something he will never
have said or meant to say. The putting to death of Isaac therefore becomes
secondary, which is an even more monstrous eventuality. In any case it is not
the thing to be hidden, the content of a secret that is to be safeguarded. It has
no sense. And everything will hang on this suspension of sense. Gods injunction,
his command, his request, his imperious prayer, are designed only to test
Abrahams endurance, to put it to the test of an absolutely singular appeal. It is
only a matter of his determination, his passive-and-active commitment not-to-
be-able-to-mean-to-say, to keep a secret even under the worst conditions, hence
unconditionally. (GD/LIS 155, original emphasis)
Derridas focus on the secret falls prey to the same problem as Kierkegaards
focus on silence: it gives Abraham all the power in the situation by allowing
him to interiorize the sacrificial decree, which is to say, to take both active and
passive responsibility for it. Derridas and Kierkegaards analyses of Genesis
22 coincide on this point: they offer no account of the victim of the sacrifice
or else they consider this victim to be Abraham. I will return to this problem
in Chapter 4.
Transumption means transference or translation to another part or place.71
It is easy for readers to get caught up in the powerful rhetorical flourishes that
constitute both Kierkegaards and Derridas texts and so overlook how these
texts take Abraham across into the realms of silence and secrecy respectively.
It is easy to forget, in other words, how one necessarily betrays Abraham
by re-imagining him for oneself, how any translation of him remains at the
same time a traducement. In one of the penetrating meditations on Fear and
Trembling he produced in 1918 after studying Kierkegaard the previous year,
Kafka perceives the inadequacy of explaining the Akedah solely in terms
of Abrahams silence or Abrahams secrecy. The incommunicability of the

paradox does perhaps exist, writes Kafka somewhat cryptically in the fourth
of the Octavo Notebooks, yet it does not manifest itself as such, for Abraham
himself does not understand it. Now, he does not need to understand it, or is
not supposed to understand it, and hence also he is not supposed to interpret
it for himself; but undoubtedly he may try to interpret it for others (DF 102).
Kafkas point here is that the paradox of Abrahams situation in Genesis 22
remains unaffected by what Abraham actually communicates to Isaac and
even by how Isaac responds to it. This is because the paradox of Abrahams
situation in Genesis 22 is that God orients him towards the inscrutability of
the future. There is a paradoxical sense in which, even as he takes the knife to
slay Isaac, Abraham remains as passive as his bound son. As we have already
seen Kierkegaard observe, The terrifying thing in the collision is this that it
is not a collision between Gods command and mans command but between
Gods command and Gods command (JP 1:908; FT 248). On this reading
of the story, when Abraham tells Isaac on the way to Mount Moriah that
God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, what he expresses is the
redemptive possibility of Scheherazades law: the fact that one saves oneself
or keeps oneself alive by telling fairy stories.
Chapter 3
Sarahs Laughter: Kafkas Abraham
[Isak] Lwy: A rabbi in the Talmud made it a principle, in this case very
pleasing to God, to accept nothing, not even a glass of water, from anyone.
Now it happened, however that the greatest rabbi of his time wanted to make
his acquaintance and therefore invited him to a meal. To refuse the invitation
of such a man, that was impossible. The first rabbi therefore set out sadly on
his journey. But because his principle was so strong, a mountain raised itself up
between the two rabbis.
Franz Kafka, Diaries
Man was made for eternity: woman leads him into an apart [aside].
Sren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers
There is no sophistry in my body.

Ted Hughes, Hawk Roosting
I Abraham and the Kafka Myth
Recently, when I bought a copy of Kafkas The Zrau Aphorisms, the

sales attendant at the bookshop had time to flip through the volume as
my card was being processed. After the transaction was approved (nothing
Kafkaesque to report here), the young man awoke from uneasy dreams
to comment concisely, Hes dark, isnt he? For all its clich, dark was
probably just the right word in any case, it is what Kafkas critics have
been telling us for years. W. H. Auden once remarked that one should
only read Kafka when one is in a eu-peptic state of physical and mental
health.1 This is because, as Blanchot notes, Kafkas narratives are among
the darkest in literature, the most rooted in absolute disaster (WF 10). For
the majority of their readers, they are the product of a grim depressive,
a literary self-harmer who also managed to cut himself when he plunged
the sharpest Ockkhams razor into the substance of the novel.2 As Jean
Starobinski writes: A man stricken with a strange sorrow, so Franz Kafka
appears to us Here is a man who watches himself being devoured (qtd
in WF 5).
Melodramatic and even melancholic descriptions like these, which
could be multiplied at will, help us understand why certain critics have found
it necessary to turn to Genesis 22 as a way of explaining the mystery of
Kafkas life and work. The Akedah is surely among the darkest [narratives]
in literature, the most rooted in absolute disaster. Here, God inexplicably

demands the sacrifice of the very condition of possibility for his covenant with
Abraham. As Blanchot notes in The Space of Literature:
What is demanded of Abraham [in Genesis 22] is not only that he sacrifice his
son, but God himself. The son is Gods future on earth, for it is time which is the
Promised Land the true, the only dwelling place of the chosen people and of
God in his people. Yet Abraham, by sacrificing his only son, must sacrifice time,
and time sacrificed will certainly not be given back in the eternal beyond. The
beyond is nothing other than the future, the future of God in time. The beyond
is Isaac. (SL 61)
Abrahams final trial in Genesis 22 is a trial of time. What the patriarch stands
to lose here is not the promise of the land but rather the Promised Land of
the future, which Isaac embodies. The nightmare physical trial entrains thus
a boundless spiritual trial.3
For Kierkegaard, the Abraham of Genesis 22 separates himself from his
contemporaries in a paradoxical way that is at once criminal and holy. This
is another point of connection with Kafka. Separation is probably the corner-
stone of the Kafka myth. What Hegel says about Abraham in The Spirit of
Christianity and Its Fate that he was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the
soil and to men alike4 would not seem out of place in a book about Franz
Kafka. According to Max Brod in his biography of Kafka, The category of
holiness (and not really that of literature), is the only right category under
which Kafkas life and work can be viewed.5 For Heinz Politzer, Kafka had to
remain single in order to become a writer. Solitude was a prerequisite, almost a
symbol, of the littrateurs existence.6 Kafkas dedication to his writing induces
an ascetic reaction in him analogous to a boundless physical and spiritual trial.
Kafka writes in his Diaries on 3 January 1912: When it became clear in my
organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take,
everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were
directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and
above all music. I atrophied in all directions (D 163).
Kafka confesses his feeling of extreme isolation in one of his conversations
with the young Czech poet Gustav Janouch indeed, the one from which
French psychoanalytic critic Marthe Robert took the title of her book As
Lonely as Franz Kafka.
Are you so lonely? I asked.

Kafka nodded.
Like Kaspar Hauser? I said.
Kafka laughed.
Much worse than Kaspar Hauser. I am as lonely as as Franz Kafka.7
Sarahs Laughter: Kafkas Abraham 69
Kafka is as lonely as Kafka or, to put it a little less tautologically, Kafka is

as lonely as Abraham in Genesis 22. I have already quoted Walter Sokel to this
effect in my first chapter: In a sense, Kafka stands in relation to his writing
as Abraham and Isaac combined stand in relation to God. The sacrifice which
his divinity (literature) demands of its Abraham, Kafka, is his own life.8
Kafka is in an analogous position to Abraham, so the argument goes, because
literature was for him an all-consuming passion, one that served to estrange
him from the worldly concerns of his job, his relationships with women, his
friends and his family. Kafka expresses this passion for literature hyperboli-
cally in a letter he drafted to Felice Bauers father on 21 August 1913, which
details his incapacity to marry Felice. Kafka proved as unreliable an addresser
of this father as of his own. Rather than sending the letter to Herr Bauer, he
sent it instead to Felice, who seems not to have passed it on. In the letter,
Kafka writes:
My job [at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute in Prague] is unbearable

to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is
literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing
else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me
completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility Everything that is
not literature bores me and I hate it, for it disturbs me or delays me, if only
because I think it does. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an
observer. (D 2301)
It is perhaps Kafkas truly psychosomatic engagement with literature that

caused Blanchot to remark in The Work of Fire that One sometimes has
the impression that Kafka offers us a chance of catching a glimpse of what
literature is (WF 12).
Another anecdote from Kafkas life captures the seriousness with which
he took his literary calling. Once, when on vacation in Sylt, Felice showed a
sample of Kafkas handwriting to a graphologist, who happened to be staying
in the same pension. Kafka took immediate offence at the graphologists
finding that the subject showed artistic interests. No that was an insult.
Kafka replied sharply: I dont have literary interests, Im made of literature,
Im nothing else and can be nothing else.9 Given Kafkas exaggerated claim
to be made of literature, it is understandable why he refers to the writer in a
1922 letter to Brod as a construct of sensuality (BK 294). In this remarkable
letter, Kafka claims to Brod that literature suspends not just death but also
life:
What I have playacted is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off
by my writing My life was sweeter than other peoples and my death will
be more terrible by the same degree. He is only barely possible in the broil of
earthly life, is only a construct of sensuality. That is your writer for you. But I
myself cannot go on living because I have not lived, I have remained clay, I have
not blown the spark into the fire, but only used it to light up my corpse. It will
be a strange burial, the writer insubstantial as he is, consigning the old corpse,
the longtime corpse, to the grave. I am enough of a writer to appreciate the scene
with all my senses, or and it is the same thing to want to describe it with
total self-forgetfulness not alertness, but self-forgetfulness is the writers first
prerequisite. (BK 294)
Dedication to his writing causes Kafka to avoid not merely living an ordinary
life but also dying an ordinary death. Even though literature is essentially an
avoidance of death, Kafka thinks the writer must still be prepared to describe
with total self-forgetfulness how his real self, his longtime corpse which has
never lived, is consigned to the grave. The writer, in other words, must take
account of the ultimate failure of their writing to suspend the real passage of
time or the actual instant of the authors death.
If there is an analogy to be made between the events of Kafkas literary
career and Genesis 22, then it hinges upon Max Brods decision not to destroy
the work of his dear friend. Kafka ordered Brod on two separate occasions
(firstly in autumn/winter 1921, and then for a second time on 29 November
1922) to recover and make a whole burnt offering of his literary remains
including his diaries, notebooks, manuscripts, letters and sketches. In an
epilogue to The Trial, Brod justifies his decision not to obey Kafkas final
request by relaying a conversation that took place between the two:
My will [said Kafka] is going to be quite simple a request to you to burn

everything. I can still remember the exact wording of my answer. In case you
ever seriously think of doing such a thing, let me tell you now that I would not
fulfil any such request. The whole conversation was carried on in the jesting
tone habitual to us, but there was always a background of seriousness assumed
by each of us in what we said to each other. Franz knew that my refusal was in
earnest, and at the end, if he had still intended these wishes to be carried out, he
would have appointed another executor.10
Brods decision not to burn Kafkas work as requested parallels the moment in
Genesis 22 when the angel of the Lord calls Isaacs sacrifice off and allows the
ram to be substituted for the beloved son. It is, in other words, the moment of
grace that bestows meaning upon the attempted sacrifice of the works very
condition of possibility, which is time itself.
Why does Kafka not ask to have his physical body like his body of
work burned? wonders John Zilcosky in Kafkas Travels. For Zilcosky, it
is has to do with the fear Kafka often manifested in his fiction of joining the
ranks of the undead:
Perhaps he realized that the annihilation of his corpse would not save him from
immortality. Whereas writings materiality can be destroyed (Kafka knew this
from burning manuscripts and letters at various points in his life) the bodys
immateriality cannot. The body carries on posthumously because the writer
(who cannot die) has memorialized it Cremations and burials, Kafka knew,
are not final. They are games for ghostly writers, who, through ritual, achieve
a Pyrrhic victory over death Kafka does not require that his body be burned
(nor did he, after 1914, ever again perforate a heart in his fiction) because he
knew that such a ceremony only supplies more nourishment for the ghosts.11
Unlike Kierkegaard, Kafka did not willingly address his writing to the
fellowship of the dead. In a 1922 letter to his Czech translator and confi-
dante Milena Jesensk, he confessed that: All the misfortune of my life
derives, one could say, from letters or from the possibility of letters. Writing
letters means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which
they greedily await. Written kisses dont reach their destination, rather they
are drunk on the way by the ghosts.12 Kafka may insist time and again upon
the spectrality of the author, but he is not foolhardy enough to deny the reality
of the reader. Kafka confirms that he is nothing but literature by addressing
himself spectrally to real, flesh and blood readers. One of the roles, then, of
the various proper names that haunt his biography Felice, Milena, Brod,
Hermann Kafka and even Herr Bauer is to confer reality onto his work.
By insisting upon the reality of the addressee over and above that of the
author, Kafka makes the body whether his own or anothers the proper
destination of his literary letters. By refusing to execute his friends final
instructions, Brod rescues Kafka from the ghosts and re-establishes the act of
writing as an averted sacrifice of the authors life rather than as (what Kafka
calls in his letter to Milena) an intercourse with ghosts.13
My aim in this chapter is to show how Kafka insists on tying his literature
to the body or, rather, on making the (human or animal) body the very
site and proving ground of literary meaning. This is something he does in an
aphorism from 1920 whilst reflecting upon the nature of posterity:
The reason why posteritys judgment of an individual is sounder than that of

his contemporaries resides in the dead man. A man does not develop in his own
way until after death, when he is alone. The state of death is to an individual
what Saturday night is to a chimney sweep; he washes the soot off his body.
It becomes possible to see whether his contemporaries did him or he did his
contemporaries more harm; in the latter case, he was a great man.14
According to the somewhat macabre logic of this aphorism, which Zilcosky

might have used in justifying why Kafka did not order his body burned, the
role of the critic is to wash the soot off the dead writers body to see whether
his contemporaries did him or he did his contemporaries more harm. There
is something in this last image of the gruesome physicality of Kafkas story
In the Penal Colony, which features a torture device designed to inscribe the
criminal sentence upon the skin of the accused. What I take to be emblematic
about Kafkas aphorism is that it continues to think meaning in terms of
the body even after the body has been interred. In Kafka, as we shall see,
bodies dont have to be particularly functional to be meaningful.
II Give it up!
Critics have appealed to the story of Genesis 22 to illustrate not merely

Kafkas paradoxical situation as a writer but also his radically laconic style of
writing the sense in which, as Theodor W. Adorno succinctly puts it, Each
sentence [of Kafkas] says, interpret me, and none will permit it.15 In his
influential 1962 study Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox, Politzer tries to take
account of Kafkas monolithic laconism by way of an analogy with Genesis
22. For Politzer:
While the content and purpose of Kafkas narratives are both ultimately and
uniquely ambiguous, their style and structure nonetheless permit some closer
exploration. The word background has repeatedly emerged in our argument.
It is meant to be understood in the sense given it by Erich Auerbach in his book
entitled Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. In the
first chapter Auerbach compares the extensive style employed by Homer in the
nineteenth book of the Odyssey with the intensive style which distinguishes the
account of Isaacs sacrifice, given by the so-called Elohist in the twenty-second
chapter of Genesis.16
Here is the key passage from Mimesis upon which Politzers analogy turns:
It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of

these equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand [in the case of
the Odyssey], externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite
time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual
foreground; thoughts and feelings completely expressed; events taking place in
a leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand [in the
case of Genesis 22], the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is
necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive
points in the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies beyond is nonexistent;
time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings
remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and fragmentary speeches;
the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward
a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and
fraught with background.17
In his famous essay Kafka and His Precursors, Jorge Luis Borges puts together
a heterogeneous list of sources (some well known, others obscure) that he sees
as resembling Kafka: the paradox of Zeno, an apologue of Han Yu, a passage
from Kierkegaard, Robert Brownings poem Fears and Scruples, Lon Bloys
Histoires dsobligeantes and Lord Dunsanys Carcassonne.18 As far as
Politzer is concerned, Borges list of Kafkas precursors might be expanded to
include Genesis 22 of the Elohist or E source.19 In light of Auerbachs analysis
of Genesis 22, Politzer calls Kafkas figures late descendents of the figures in
the text of the Elohist.20
Not only is Kafka as lonely as Abraham in Genesis 22; his characters are
also mysterious and fraught with background like Abraham in Genesis 22.
We shall not be able to say much more about Kafkas figures than that they
too are congenitally and intimately connected with their background, writes
Politzer. The background penetrates their words, determines their attitudes,
and fills up their silences.21 Politzer once again defers to the authority of
Auerbach on this matter. The biblical characters described by the Elohist,
Auerbach argues:
have greater depth of time, fate, and consciousness than do the human beings in
Homer; although they are nearly always caught up in an event engaging all their
faculties, they are not so entirely immersed in its present that they do not remain
continually conscious of what has happened to them earlier and elsewhere; their
thoughts and feelings have more layers, are more entangled. Abrahams actions
are explained not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only
by his character but by his previous history; he remembers, he is constantly
conscious of, what God had promised him and what God has already accom-
plished for him his soul is torn between desperate rebellion and hopeful
expectation, his silent obedience is multilayered, has background.22
Linking Genesis 22 to Kafka, Politzer claims, is a stylistic emphasis on

narrative lacunae that call for interpretation. Like the Akedah, Kafkas stories
generate maximum complexity in a minimum of narrative space. They force
their readers to look for their meaning outside the temporal frame of the
narrative present. Just as Abrahams actions [in Genesis 22] are explained
not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only by his
character but by his previous history, so too the actions of Kafkas figures
are not explained by their immediate context but are felt to be mediated by
an earlier and an elsewhere.
A problem with Politzers analysis is that the earlier and elsewhere of
Kafkas narratives are even more mysterious and indeterminate than the
earlier and elsewhere of the Elohists text. Immediately reassuring the

narrative indeterminacy of Genesis 22 is the contextual background of
Abrahams story. A reader of Genesis 22 can fill in the psychological gaps in
the text by recalling Gods earlier promises to Abraham or the miraculous fact
that Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah despite their advanced ages and
Sarahs barrenness. One can imagine Abrahams soul torn between desperate
rebellion and hopeful expectation in the episode, as Auerbach does, by
bringing to mind the promise of Genesis 12. Or one can attribute to Abraham,
as Kierkegaard does in a Christian tradition encompassing St Augustine and
Luther, the belief that for God all things are possible, even the resurrection
of the dead.23 In a less sanctimonious gesture, one can even link the episodes
implausibility to Sarahs laughter upon hearing about the promise of Isaac,
as we shall see Kafka does in his fables on Genesis 22. In short, there is an
abundance of canonical and non-canonical material with which to make
sense of Abrahams trial of time in Genesis 22.
But this is not the case with Kafkas narratives. Far, far from you world
history unfolds, Kafka once wrote, the world history of your soul.24 As Politzer
notes, Kafkas narratives may deal with time, or play with it, but they are not
to be measured or judged by the usual processes of time.25 According to Philip
Weinstein: Time passes in these narratives, without anyone getting anywhere.
Time becomes a parenthesis, possibly a lifelong parenthesis.26 Rather than
relating to an explanatory background, Kafkas foregrounds enigmatically
empty their backgrounds of explanatory power and content. From this point of
view, the chief interpretive problem Kafkas narratives pose is that of temporal
intransitivity: the foreground of the story invokes a temporal yonder without at
the same time allowing us passage to this yonder. Kafkas stories thus leave the
reader in an uncomfortably pre-positional state much like the man from the
country in his parable Before the Law who seeks but never gains admittance
to the law. As Benjamin comments in his 1934 essay commemorating the tenth
anniversary of Kafkas death: Do we have the doctrine which Kafkas parables
interpret and which K.s postures and the gestures of his animals clarify? It
does not exist; all we can say is that here and there we have an allusion to it.27
Something that makes Kafkas parables ultimately enigmatic, I would suggest,
is their tendency to direct readers away from history and towards the ad
infinitum of history: which is to say, personal oblivion.
J. M. Coetzee nicely encapsulates the problem of time in Kafka in his essay
Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafkas The Burrow:
We treat the past as real insofar as present existence has been conditioned or
generated by it. The more indirect the causal derivation of the present from
a particular past becomes, the weaker the past becomes, the more it sinks
toward a dead past. But with Kafka it is precisely the power of each moment
to condition the next that seems to be in question. Someone must have been
telling lies about Josef K., but no backward exploration of time will reveal the
cause of the accusation against him. Gregor Samsa finds himself one morning
transformed into a giant insect, why and how he will never know. Between the
before and the after there is not stage-by-stage development but a sudden trans-
formation, Verwandlung, metamorphosis.28
The suddenness and the violence of Gregors metamorphosis into a gigantic

insect invoke the temporal paradox of the absolutely transient instant: the
present in a disturbingly pure and unstable state. At the opening of The
Metamorphosis, it is thus as if Kafka puts time itself on trial or, rather,
questions the power of each instant to condition the next. What he shows us
here is that the present is not simply that which emerges from the past and
moves into the future, but also that which rebuffs the past and the future in
order to sustain its own fragile autonomy.
It is significant to note in this regard that Kafka tries to end his story
happily by evoking a positive transformation to offset the negative transfor-
mation with which he began.
While they were thus conversing, it struck both Mr and Mrs Samsa, almost at
the same moment, as they became aware of their daughters increasing vivacity,
that in spite of the sorrow of recent times, which had made her cheeks pale, she
had blossomed into a pretty girl with a good figure. They grew quieter and half
unconsciously exchanged glances of complete agreement, having come to the
conclusion that it would soon be time to find a good husband for her. And it
was a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end
of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young
body. (BK 54)
Kafka never liked the ending of The Metamorphosis, commenting in his

Diaries in January 1914: Great antipathy to Metamorphosis. Unreadable
ending. Imperfect almost to its marrow. It would have been better if I had not
been interrupted at the time by the business trip [to Kratzau] (D 253). But I
think the ending works by hinting at the possible monstrosity of Gretes trans-
formation. Kafka writes in a diary entry from early 1910: I write this very
decidedly out of despair over my body and over a future with this body (D
10). The ambivalence that hangs over the conclusion of The Metamorphosis
is the potential for despair to determine the future of the body and the
narrative. The problem is that Gretes apparently natural transformation
might not eclipse the monstrosity of Gregors because it might not in fact be
of a different order to Gregors. The ending disturbs because it is an utterly
unconvincing attempt at catharsis. It is finally as if the secret of time, rather
than revealing itself to anybody, had simply passed obliviously from one
body to another.
By emphasizing the problem of the background in Kafka, Politzer both

underdetermines and under-theorizes the role of the foreground in Kafkas
narratives. The problem from my point of view is that he doesnt go far
enough with the analogy between Kafkas narratives and Genesis 22. What he
fails to consider is that Kafkas narratives resemble the Akedah not just stylis-
tically but also thematically. (It is significant in this regard that Politzer never
mentions Kafkas own writings on Abraham.) As I argued in my first chapter,
Kafka consistently produces narratives that revolve around the notion of a
test or trial. He presents characters, moreover, that find themselves being
tested like Abraham in Genesis 22 in ways that they do not fully comprehend.
According to Politzer:
Biblical Abraham is open to a background replete with the presence of his God.
He remembers Him when he accepts the unintelligible command to slaughter his
firstborn son. His promise fills Abrahams consciousness even when he prepares
for the sacrifice. The certainty of this belief not only connects Abraham with
his background, it is identical with it. The background of Kafkas man, on the
other hand, consists of a darkness symbolising the complete absence of any such
certainty. It is an eclipse of God, a Gottesfinsternis.29
Politzers desire to oppose Abraham to Kafkas man might seem surprising

to anyone familiar with Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling. Of course, it
is always possible to imagine Abraham with a background replete with
the presence of his God in Genesis 22 to historicize him, so to speak,
as Auerbach does in Mimesis. But it is also possible to de-historicize him,
mythologize the moment of his final trial and thus reply to Politzer with an
admirable caveat from Kierkegaard: An ordeal that word can say much
and little, and yet the whole thing is over as soon as it is said (FT 52). If, as
Kierkegaard insists in Fear and Trembling, the point of the Akedah is not to
relieve the sense of tension but rather to grant it the full force of being an
ordeal, then one cannot simply explain it away by appealing to the presence
of God in the background of the episode. This stops one from appreciating
the existential darkness of Genesis 22 from recognizing it as a trial of time
and an eclipse of God.
What Politzer fails to make explicit in his analysis is that Kafkas characters
are mysterious and fraught with background like Abraham in Genesis 22
because the unexplained or inexplicable test constitutes a primary theme or
trope of Kafkas work. As Sokel notes in the wake of Politzer:
Auerbachs distinction between the mimetic, visual relationship of the Homeric

style to physical reality and the auditory hearkening posture with which the
Biblical style refers to mans relationship to an invisible reality is extremely
relevant to Kafka. The Hebrew God manifests Himself not by images, but by
voice, and by the call Kafka, in whose work the call is a fundamental struc-
tural principle as well as primary theme, obviously conforms to Auerbachs
biblical type.30
I would be more specific than Sokel is here and say that the terrifying demand
that God places upon Abraham in Genesis 22 to give up on the future of
his narrative identity in the form of Isaac is an abiding concern of Kafkas.
Indeed, we see Kafka express this concern in the example of his work
that Politzer chooses to compare stylistically with Genesis 22. This is a
posthumous parable that Politzer takes not just to exemplify Kafkas literary
style but also to constitute a kind of motto for commentary. Kafka composed
the fragment late in 1922 with the title A commentary. But Brod gave it the
more forceful title Give it up! when he came to publish it in 1936.
It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my
way to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realised
that it was much later than I had thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of
this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way. I wasnt very well acquainted
with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him
and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: You asking me the
way? Yes, I said, since I cant find it myself. Give it up! Give it up! said he,
and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his
laughter. (BK 1578)
What else is the man in Kafkas story undergoing except a trial of time?
A common observation about the variance between personal and interper-
sonal time watch and clock soon escalates into a singular drama of
metaphysical proportions. At the end of the episode, Kafkas man is not just
physically but metaphysically late. As Politzer notes: Completely absorbed
in his meeting with the policeman, the man experiences at the same time a
meeting with powers which seem to draw him back to his childhood and,
further still, to the unfathomable recesses of the memories of his race. Since,
however, time seems to be suspended with regard to everything Kafka wrote,
his narratives also point forward, to the future.31
For Politzer:
The man in our story resembles the Abraham of the Elohist in that his actions
cannot be explained by the events that actually occur, but by reasons hidden
both below the threshold of his consciousness and beyond the frame of reference
of what is told in his story. He too is suspended between hope and despair,
indignation and expectation; and the silence in the end is so multilayered that
we are unable to state with any degree of assurance whether it indicates his end
and not, perhaps, a new beginning.32
I would only add that the man in our story resembles the Abraham of the
Elohist because he is being tested in a way that he doesnt fully comprehend.
The man thinks he is undertaking the most mundane of tasks by asking the
policeman for directions to the station, only to be told that what he seeks
is somehow beyond his powers to achieve. In this sense, the policeman (the
German word Kafka uses, Schutzmann, ironically suggests protection) begins
to resemble Elohim, the remote God of the Elohist. And when the policeman
demands that the man give up on the goal or end of his narrative, Kafkas
protagonist finds himself blocked both physically and metaphysically, like
Abraham on the way to Mount Moriah in Genesis 22.
The analogy between Give it up! and the Akedah becomes even sharper
when we consider how both stories convert the subjects experience of time
into a trial. In Genesis 22, God does not initially tell Abraham precisely where
he is being sent; time precedes place in the narrative order. When Abraham
leaves early in the morning with his son and two of his servants, it is as if his
destination (the region of Moriah) is merely away from here. It is three days
before Abraham lifts his head and sees the place God had told him about in
the distance. When the sacrifice is finally suspended, these three days become
the focus of the episode. Genesis 22 does not simply commemorate the fact
that Abraham went out to sacrifice his son, but also that he journeyed for
over three days in order to do so. Auerbach puts it very well in Mimesis: The
journey [to Moriah] is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the
contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present, which is
inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead,
and which yet is measured: three days! Three such days positively demand the
symbolic interpretation they later received.33 The climax to Kafkas parable
functions in an analogous way to the climax of the Akedah. The policemans
Give it up! retroactively converts the mans experience of time into the
experience of a trial. It transforms his journey into a silent progress through
the indeterminate and the contingent and shifts the narrative focus onto the
mans enigmatic relation to time.
If one were to look for a moral to Kafkas fable, one could hardly do better
than number 26 of his Zrau Aphorisms: There is a destination but no way
there; what we refer to as way is hesitation (ZA 26).34 As Geoffrey A. Hale
glosses this enigmatic pronouncement, The way with respect to the given
destination, is given only as separation from any destination a separation
that at the same time temporalises the relation to this destination always only
as delay or hesitation (Zgern).35 The policemans response to the protagonist
has the effect of postponing the future. At the end of the parable, the station
no longer appears as an everyday object in space to be found by asking for
directions, but rather as the world itself reduced to a moment of profound
and mysterious hesitation. The protagonists goal is never entirely eclipsed
After all, writes Kafka in the third Octavo Notebook, everything wants
to get to the goal, and there is only one goal (DF 97). But the goal is given
without the possibility of arrival.36 Kafkas narrative finally concerns what
happens when the way towards a clearly communicable goal dissolves into
interminable delay. One can thus see why Borges chose Zenos paradox as a
precursor of the Kafkaesque. In Kafka, life is short but full of infernal delay,
as he says himself in his brief text The Next Village: My grandfather used
to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems
so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man
can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that not to
mention accidents even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short
of the time needed for such a journey (BK 148).
III Kafkas Laughter: Simulated Joy
The policeman in Give it up! finally separates himself from the hapless first-
person narrator by turning away from him like someone who wants to be
alone with his laughter. But we know that Kafka was not someone like this,
who wanted to be left alone with his laughter. Immediately contradicting the
popular image of Kafka the grim depressive and literary self-harmer are the
accounts of the Czech writer laughing at times uncontrollably when he
read his work aloud to his Prague coterie. As Brod recounts in his biography
of Kafka: We friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us
hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there
were moments when he couldnt read any further. Astonishing enough, when
you think of the fearful earnestness of this chapter. But that is how it is.37
What are we to make of Kafka and his friends laughing quite immoderately
at the fearful earnestness of his work? For Brod, it points to something too
easily and often overlooked by critics: Kafkas joie de vivre. Certainly it was
not entirely good, comfortable laughter, Brod continues. But the ingredients
of a good laugh were also there alongside the hundred incidents of uncan-
niness, which I shall not try to minimise. I am only pointing out the fact that
is otherwise so easily forgotten in studies of Kafka the streak of joy in the
world and in life.38
Having taken account of Kafka as a poster boy for melancholic existen-
tialism, I now want to complicate this picture somewhat by introducing the
question of Kafkas sociability or joie de vivre. It is time, in other words, to
debunk certain aspects of the Kafka myth. As novelist Adam Thirwell puts it
playfully in an introduction to a collection of Kafkas stories:
It is now necessary to state some accepted truths about Franz Kafka, and the
Kafkaesque Kafkas work lies outside literature: it is not fully part of the
history of European fiction. He has no predecessors his work appears as if
from nowhere and he has no true successors These fictions express the
alienation of modern man; they are a prophecy of a) the totalitarian police
state, and b) the Nazi Holocaust. His work expresses a Jewish mysticism, a
non-denominational mysticism, an anguish of man without God. His work is
very serious. He never smiles in photographs It is crucial to know the facts
of Kafkas emotional life when reading his fiction. In some sense, all his stories
are autobiographical. He is a genius, outside ordinary limits of literature, and
a saint, outside ordinary limits of human behaviour. All of these truths, all of
them, are wrong.39
This is an admirable attempt to meet Kafka on his own hyperbolic terms

and a call for the critic not to take the Czech writer completely at his own
word.40
In their influential Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari seek to debunk the once-dominant perception of Kafka as
a guilt-ridden, solemn and despondent modernist. Their playful text seems
to find its very condition of possibility in Brods suggestive anecdote. The
best part of Max Brods book on Kafka, they write, is when Brod tells how
listeners laughed at the reading of the first chapter of The Trial quite immod-
erately.41 Deleuze and Guattari want nothing less than to reread Kafka on
the basis of this immoderate laughter arising from the reading (aloud) of The
Trial. There is a Kafka laughter, they claim:
a very joyous laughter, that people usually understand poorly. It is for stupid
reasons that people have tried to see a refuge far from life in Kafkas literature,
and also an agony, the mark of an impotence and a culpability, the sign of a sad
interior tragedy He is an author who laughs with a profound joy, a joie de
vivre, in spite of, or because of, his clowning declarations that he offers like a
trap or a circus Everything leads to laughter, starting with The Trial.42
Despite so vehemently affirming the significance of laughter to Kafkas work,

Deleuze and Guattari do not develop their thinking any further on this
topic.43 In light, then, of the provocative but still inchoate remarks of Brod
and of Deleuze and Guattari, I want to ask here: how should we continue to
think about Kafkas (relation to) laughter?
A somewhat poignant reminiscence from Janouchs Conversations with
Kafka helps me to clarify the stakes of my inquiry. Franz Kafka and I often
laughed long and loud together, Janouch recalls:
that is to say, if one could ever describe Franz Kafkas laughter as loud. For me
at least what remained in my memory is not the sound of his laughter but the
physical gestures by which he expressed his amusement. Depending on how
much he was amused, he threw his head back quickly or slowly, opened his
mouth a little and closed his eyes in narrow slits, as if his face was turned to the
sun. Or he laid his hand on the desk, raised his shoulders, drew in his bottom lip
and shut his eyes as if someone were going to shower him with water.
When Kafka was in just such a mood, Janouch told him a little Chinese story.
The heart is a house with two bedrooms. In one lives suffering and in the
other Joy. One mustnt laugh too loud, or one will wake the sorrow in the
next-door room.
And Joy? Isnt she woken by the noise of sorrow?
No. Joy is hard of hearing. So she never hears the suffering in the next
room.
Kafka nodded. Thats right. Thats why one often only pretends to be
enjoying oneself. One stuffs ones ears up with the wax of pleasure. For
instance, me. I simulate gaiety in order to vanish behind it. My laughter is a
concrete wall.
Against whom?
Naturally, against myself.44
Laughter emerges from Janouchs anecdote as above all else a matter of the
body and of its various gestures or mannerisms. (As Benjamin says, Kafka
could understand things only in the form of a gestus.45) Precisely as a
matter of the body, laughter is able to render the abstract tangible: one fears
laughing too loudly because manifesting Joy convokes the physical proximity
of Sorrow. Perhaps on account of this astonishing capacity to materialize
emotion, laughter remains for Janouchs Kafka a defensive or a sceptical
mode of expression. As he says: I simulate gaiety in order to vanish behind it.
My laughter is a concrete wall. Laughter becomes sceptical when it simulates
rather than expresses joy that is to say, when it shows the body to be not
just expressing itself, but also withdrawing into itself.
What immediately complicates Kafkas notion of laughter, then, are the
doubts he retains about the body as a locus for true expression. For Kafka,
dedication to his writing seems to entail the sacrifice of the body; it has the
vampiric effect of rendering the body barren. Kafka notes in his Diaries on 22
November 1922:
It is certain that a major obstacle to my progress is my physical condition.

Nothing can be accomplished with such a body. I shall have to get used to its
continual balking My body is too long for its weakness, it hasnt the least bit
of fat to engender a blessed warmth, to preserve an inner fire, no fat on which
the spirit could occasionally nourish itself beyond its daily need without damage
to the whole. (D 1245)
According to Canetti:
Kafka never lost his pronounced sensitivity to anything related to his body. This
sensitivity must have marked even his childhood. Early on, his thinness made
him attentive to his body. He became accustomed to taking note of anything that
his body lacked. He found, in his body, an object of observation which never
escaped him, which could not slip away from him Gradually thoughts about
the individual organs beset him. A pronounced sensitivity to these organs begins
to develop, until finally each is placed under a separate guard. But by this the
dangers are multiplied there are countless symptoms to be watched by a mind
fraught with suspicion, once that mind is aware of the special character of the
organs and their vulnerability. There are moments of pain The pains warn of
dangers, they are heralds from the adversary. Hypochondria is the short change
of Angst; it is Angst which, for its distraction, seeks names and finds them.46
Insofar as it evokes the hypochondriacal or the simulated body, laughter may

indeed be viewed dialectically as one of the distractions of Kafkas Angst.
To conceive of Kafkas laughter as simulated gaiety is to recognize that it
does not serve to alleviate the fearful earnestness of the work. The comical
element in Kafka does not have a mitigating or a mollifying effect; indeed,
if anything, it functions to heighten the abiding sense of horror (perhaps in
the way that Gretes transformation does at the end of The Metamorphosis).
As Kafkas fellow countryman and devotee, Milan Kundera, explains in his
essay Somewhere Behind: the Kafkan takes us inside, into the guts of a joke,
into the horror of the comic. In the world of the Kafkan, the comic is not a
counterpoint to the tragic (the tragi-comic) as in Shakespeare; its not there to
make the tragic more bearable by lightening the tone; it doesnt accompany
the tragic, not at all, it destroys it in the egg and thus deprives the victims of
the only consolation they could hope for: the consolation to be found in the
(real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy.47 Tragedy consoles because it affords
its onlooker access to states of interiority. The tragic hero suffers externally
endures an ignominious death so that heroic action may resonate
emotionally with the audience. According to Aristotle in the Poetics, tragic
suffering should never be a matter of mere spectacle: For the plot should be
so ordered that anyone merely hearing about the incidents will shudder
with pity and fear as a result of what is happening.48
What Kundera rightly perceives as unnerving about the comic element
in Kafka is its insistence upon the irreducibility of spectacle. The Kafkan
precludes tragic catharsis by continuing to associate the victim-protagonist
in death with a type of metaphysical shame. While tragic death is ultimately
redemptive, Kafkan death represents an ultimate or pure form of humili-
ation. (Think of the end of The Judgement where the immediate precursor
of Josef K., Georg Bendemann, accepts his fictitious guilt and throws himself
into the river at the request of his father.) When Kafka laughs at the opening
of The Trial he is revelling, no doubt devilishly, in the comic humiliation of
his protagonist. But he is also laughing at himself, recognising in the absurd
circumstances of Josef K.s arrest an aspect of his own humiliation. As Canetti
observes: Two decisive events in Kafkas life events which he of all people
would have wanted to keep especially private had taken place in a way
that was embarrassingly public: the official engagement in the Bauer family
home on June 1, and six weeks later, on July 12, 1914, the tribunal at
the Askanische[r] Hof, which led to the breaking of the engagement. In the
tribunal as Kafka later came to call it Felice confronted him with love
letters he had written to Grete Bloch during the period of their engagement.
With Bloch (who had supplied the letters to Felice) presiding as judge, Kafka
offered no defence and the engagement dissolved, as he had wanted it to in
any case. Canetti continues: It can be shown that the emotional substance
of both events entered directly into The Trial, which Kafka began to write in
August. The engagement becomes the arrest in the first chapter; the tribunal
appears as the execution in the last.49 The Trial thereby derives its emotional
resonance from the peculiar fact of the author becoming a public spectacle.
Josef K.s unwarranted arrest at the beginning of the novel signifies the public
realm invading and evacuating the private: Somebody must have been telling
lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested
one fine morning.50 This disquieting foreclosure of the private is consecrated
even more forcefully at the very end of the novel when a mysterious figure
watches from a distant window as Josef K. dies like a dog, so that the
shame would outlive him.
Not the curse of solitude but the violation of solitude is Kafkas
obsession!,51 avers Kundera. Here, Kunderas interpretive gambit is once
again to oppose the Kafkan to the tragic. As I am arguing, the curse of
solitude is the defining mark of the tragic hero and the preservation of the
heros solitude (even in the ignominy of death) is what ultimately enables
for our cathartic identification with him. Insofar as the Kafkan comes about
through the violation of solitude, however, it disrupts this tragic schema; it
forces us to find meaning not in tragic interiority (the heros guilt) but rather
in the horror of the comic, that is to say, in the heros humiliating exposure
to the unexpected intrusion of others into the private sphere. According
to Deleuze and Guattari, Only one thing really bothers Kafka and angers
him, makes him indignant: when people treat him as a writer of intimacy,
finding a refuge in literature, as an author of solitude, of guilt, of an intimate
misfortune.52 What serves to break the spell of interiority in this schema is
Kafkas laughter: by laughing at the rape of [Josef K.s] privacy,53 Kafka
locates the meaning of (his) literature outside the readers identification with
the hero in a form of social contact whose raison dtre is the annihilation
of the selfs (right to) privacy.
Kafka writes in his story Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, what
is entrusted to ones care one does not laugh at (BK 134). One laughs, rather,
at what is no longer entrusted to ones care, at what one has come to relate
to in more external or impersonal terms. According to the superiority thesis,
dominant in the philosophical tradition up until the eighteenth century,
laughter works by putting the object of derision the butt beyond the real
or ethical concerns of the derider or wit.54 By laughing at something I distance
that thing from myself so as to neutralise its power to affect or even to hurt
me. Laughter thereby embeds everything, in the words of Virginia Woolf, in a
kind of non-descript cotton wool.55 It celebrates the things of the world, that
is, insofar as they have become marvellously ineffectual or profoundly inert.
To link literature to laughter is first of all to posit an ideal addressee who
confirms the meaningfulness of the work precisely by laughing at it, that is
to say, by acknowledging its intrinsic ineffectuality or its profound inertia. In
a speech he gave upon receiving the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, Kundera wryly
conceives of the form of the novel as the echo of Gods laughter. There is a
fine Jewish proverb, he writes:
Man thinks, God laughs. Inspired by that adage, I like to imagine that Franois
Rabelais heard Gods laughter one day, and thus was born the idea of the first
great European novel. It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into
the world as the echo of Gods laughter. But why does God laugh at the sight of
man thinking? Because man thinks and the truth escapes him. Because the more
men think, the more one mans thought diverges from anothers. And finally,
because man is never what he thinks he is Don Quixote thinks, Sancho
thinks, and not only the worlds truth but also the truth of their own selves slips
away from them.56
For Kundera, literature is consubstantial with irony; it is intrinsically comical

or diversionary. Moreover, it relates to the possibility of radical doubt
otherwise than Descartes in his Meditations. Cartesian scepticism brackets
off corporeal reality in order to arrive at the metaphysical truth of what I
am: a thinking thing (that doubts). Literary scepticism or irony, by contrast,
achieves its profoundest effects in the opposite way: by attempting to embody
the metaphysical.
According to Simon Critchley in his book On Humour, What makes
us laugh is the return of the physical into the metaphysical, where the
pretended tragical sublimity of the human collapses into a comic ridicu-
lousness which is perhaps even more tragic.57 In the more economical phrase
of Henri Bergson, the comic is the body taking precedence over the soul.58 In
a wonderful parable from the first volume of Either/Or, Kierkegaard stages
this idea of the comical by depicting the assembly of the Roman gods laughing
at the sight of man thinking. Kierkegaards pseudonym the aesthete A
here tells of trying to wrest the power of laughter away from the gods.
Something wonderful happened to me, he writes:
I was transported into the seventh heaven. All the gods sat there in assembly.
By special grace I was accorded the favour of a wish. Will you, said Mercury,
have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the prettiest girl, or any other
of the many splendours we have in our chest of knickknacks? So choose, but
just one thing. For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the
gods as follows: Esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing: always to have
the laugher on my side. Not a single word did one god offer in answer; on the
contrary they all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my prayer was
fulfilled and found that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste; for
it would hardly have been fitting gravely to answer, It has been granted you.59
What this astonishing parable reveals about the nature of laughter is its tendency
to escape towards the other or to exceed the limits of self-possession. In wishing
to have the laughter on his side, Kierkegaards aesthete does not wish for
anything he might possess (such as youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or
the prettiest girl, or any other of the many splendours [the gods] have in [their]
chest of knickknacks). Rather, his desire is to encounter the transcendence of
the divine not just physically but also socially. The gods oblige our aesthete in
the most appropriate way imaginable: by laughing at him.
Insofar as it shows the metaphysical momentarily taking physical form,
Kierkegaards little parable operates in the opposite way to Descartes
famous evil genius scenario. Towards the end of the first of his Meditations,
Descartes writes: I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely
good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost
power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me I
shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses,
but as falsely believing I have all these things.60 As Ian Hacking observes
of this scenario: The malicious demon is an all-purpose demon who can
create doubt about anything, particularly, the truth that I have a body, that I
have a head and arms. This doubt, about my very body, is in fact strikingly
close to some manifestations of what is called paranoid schizophrenia; real
live scepticism is close to genuine madness.61 But there can be no laughter
without the body. Laughter thus works uncannily to neutralize the power of
the metaphysical to deceive the physical and may be viewed as an empirical
counter to the metaphysical nihilism of Descartes thought experiment,
which would have us contemplate nothing less than the annihilation of every
consolatory image. This, I take it, is the ironic point of Kierkegaards parable:
as the gods honour their end of the bargain and laugh at his pseudonym,
they are momentarily dispossessed of their metaphysicality and must express
themselves in reassuringly human terms.
In Kierkegaards parable (as in the Jewish proverb), the gods assert their
superiority over man by laughing at him. As Georges Bataille writes in his
article Un-Knowing: Laughter and Tears (in what is another formulation of
the superiority thesis): In general we laugh on condition that our position of
dominance not be at the mercy of laughter, the object of laughter. To laugh,
it is necessary that one not risk losing ones position of dominance.62 The
gods are free to respond to Kierkegaards pseudonym as they do because
his wish does not require them to give up their position of dominance. But
it does require them, momentarily, to express their dominance in a physical
rather than a metaphysical way. Insofar as it figures the enigmatic encounter
between the physical and the metaphysical, the phenomenon of laughter thus
shows this encounter to finish up on the corporeal side of things. To laugh
to have the laughter on your side is always to cleave to physical rather
than metaphysical possibilities. This is perhaps why all laughter expresses a
direct or an indirect joie de vivre and why the best type of comedy is physical
comedy. We are able to see the humour in two strange men entering into Josef
K.s bedroom and arresting him one morning without reason because this
remains however uncomfortably a physical possibility. On the other
hand, we cannot laugh at Descartes imagining himself without hands, eyes,
flesh, blood or any of the senses because this presents us with a purely and
terrifyingly metaphysical scenario.
For Bataille, that which is risible may simply be the unknowable:
We laugh in passing very abruptly, all of a sudden, from a world in which

everything is given as stable within a generally stable order, into a world in
which our assurance is overwhelmed, in which we perceive that this assurance
was deceptive. Where everything had seemed totally provided for, suddenly the
unexpected arises, something unforeseeable and overwhelming, revelatory of an
ultimate truth: the surface of appearances conceals a perfect absence of response
to our expectation.63
Here, Bataille shifts his focus from the superiority to the incongruity theory
of laughter. But my point remains the same: whether expressing a feeling
of superiority over the butt of a joke or a perception of the incongruous,64
laughter proceeds by first divesting the unknown of its metaphysicality. What
is revealed to be laughable is, in some sense, revealed to be of the body. (The
wish of Kierkegaards pseudonym is also to affirm the value of finitude.) As
Critchley remarks: If we laugh with the body, then what we often laugh at
is the body, the strange fact that we have a body. In humour, it is as if we
temporarily inhabited a Gnostic universe, where the fact of our materiality
comes as some-thing of a surprise.65
IV Sarahs Laughter: the Scepticism of the Body
To understand better how laughter divests the unkown of its immateriality, it

is helpful at this point to recall the story of the birth of Isaac, whose Hebrew
name means: he laughs. As Malynne Sternstein summarises the biblical
episode:
Sarahs beauty was legendary but it was barren: she remained childless until the
fulfilment of Gods (laughable) promise that she would be mother of nations
(Gen. 17.16). Old as she and Abraham were she was in her 90s, he a cente-
narian she gave birth to the promised son. Sarahs doubt of God (giving her
maidservant Hagar to Abraham as a surrogate mother, she enterprisingly fulfils
Gods promise for Him) is often cited as the center of this tale. Yet Sarah is not
punished for her lapse of faith; she is not scolded for her sceptical laughter, her
gallows humor. She is instead rewarded Her laughter is embodied forever in
Gods award of Isaac (Vitzchak).66
From the point of view of the incongruity theory of humour, Isaac appears as
an incarnation of laughter. The apparent incongruity he overcomes, moreover,
is one that preoccupies Kafka. For one who is so concerned with the feeling
of physical barrenness (I am a hesitation before birth, writes Kafka on 24
January 1922), Sarahs doubts about being able to conceive a child in her old
age come to represent an irreducibly meaningful expression of despair. We
discover the following fragment in Kafkas Diaries, dated 21 October 1921:
It had been impossible for him to enter the house, for he had heard a voice
saying to him: Wait till I lead you in! And so he continued to lie in the dust
in front of the house, although by now, probably, everything was hopeless (as
Sarah would say) (D 395).
Let us now turn to the detail of the story. In Genesis 17, Abraham first
learns that he will soon have a son by Sarah. God says to him:
I will bless [Sarah] and surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she
will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.
Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, Will a son be born
to man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety? And
Abraham says to God, If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!
Then God said, Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will
call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant
for his descendants after him. (1618)
Abraham laughs here because of the seeming impossibility the apparent

incongruity of the couple conceiving a child now that they are well into
their old age. This incredulity gains even stronger expression in the next
chapter of the Bible when it is Sarah rather than the patriarch himself who
laughs uncontrollably upon hearing Gods incredible promise.
Sarahs laughter is remarkable for the way it seems to come about despite
Gods best efforts. In Genesis 18, three (strange) men appear to Abraham;
some exegetical remarks cite them as angels, some as God triumvirate.67
These strangers are immediately at pains to ensure that Sarah is excluded
from the discussion:
Where is your wife Sarah? they asked him.

There, in the tent, he said.
Then the Lord said [to Abraham], I will surely return to you about this time
next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.
Now Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent, which was behind him.
Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, so Sarah was
past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, After I
am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?
Then the Lord said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh and say, Will I really
have a child, now that I am old? Is there anything too hard for the Lord? I will
return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son.
Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, I did not laugh.
But he said, Yes, you did laugh. (915)
Vital to the meaning of this scene is Sarahs positioning at the entrance of the
tent. According to Don Seeman, the instability of her enclosure there is she
inside the tent, or at its opening? is mirrored by a concern with the unstable
closure of her body, which threatens to frustrate the divine promise of
motherhood she has received.68 In the context of the Hebrew Bible, Seeman
explains:
Closure can be positively valued as protection from external assault, but it more
often carries negative connotations. Closure of wombs indicates the inability of
women to conceive children, while the enclosure of people within houses can
represent either the ritually enacted social alienation that accompanies affliction,
or the dumb isolation of mourning. Each of these usages presumes a structural
opposition between open and closed in which the latter is the more negatively
valenced term. Thresholds (or tent openings) are therefore a natural focal
point for biblical narrative, because they represent a site for the mediation of
blessing and barrenness. Abraham and Sarahs continuous movement towards
[relative] openness and exteriority in the narrative of Isaacs conception signals
the movement towards new fertility and the covenantal promise of progeny that
they receive.69
According to Seeman, Genesis 18 shows Sarah moving to the opening of

the tent to receive Gods blessing in a distinct and gender-specific way. But
to leave it there is to suppress the negative moment of her gallows humour
and the completely ambivalent exchange it subsequently provokes with God.
Sarahs laughter is more incredulous or faithless than Abrahams because it
is more self-reflexive: it leaves her alone with the thought of (the limits of)
her own body: After I am worn out [or barren] and my master is old, will I
now have this pleasure? What immediately lessens the degree of Abrahams
scepticism is his ability to make another the focus of his concern. Abraham
avoids contemplating the (meta)physics of Gods promise by worrying about
the welfare of his first son, Ishmael: If only Ishmael might live under your
blessing! There is no/body, however, to divert Sarah from doubting God (or
the metaphysical) by doubting the full and proper functioning of her body.
Sarahs laughter expresses what I want to call here the scepticism of the
body. I understand two things by this phrase: on the one hand, the sense of
incredulity that our physical selves may express towards the metaphysical;
but then, also, the doubts we may retain about the body as a locus for true
expression. Rather than developing into a melancholic or a tragic affir-
mation of solitude, (Sarahs) laughter marks the ambivalent threshold the
opening between the inside and the outside, the public and the private,
the blessed and the barren. By laughing, Sarah overexposes herself to and
humiliates herself before the metaphysical other. She attempts to cover over
her sense of humiliation by lying. But this does her no good; her laughter
has denied her the right to privacy upon which properly tragic interiority
depends. At the same time, however, the very spontaneity of her response has
an uncanny and self-empowering effect: it momentarily suspends the power
of the metaphysical over the physical. God is bemused by Sarahs laughter:
Why did Sarah laugh and say, Will I really have a child, now that I am old?
Is there anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed
time next year and Sarah will have a son. In the act of chastising her, he
nonetheless reaffirms the potential of her laughter to equivocate his word and
so allows for this equivocation to become co-present with the passage of the
promise. The point, I take it, is the same as in Kierkegaards parable: laughter
reveals the physical momentarily taking precedence over the metaphysical; the
only appropriate way for God to reply to Sarahs scepticism of the body is to
deliver on his promise of Isaac.
Generating the tension in this scene is not just the awkward disclosure
of Sarahs faithless laughter, but also the fact that we must wait for God
to respond to Sarahs provocation in kind. This happens a year (and three
chapters of Genesis) later when Sarah duly gives birth to Isaac at the age
of 90. Upon his birth, Isaac becomes a miraculous sign to his mother that
the laughter is on her side: Sarah said, God has brought me laughter, and
everyone who hears about this will laugh with me. And she added, Who
would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have
borne him a son in his old age (Gen. 21:6). Isaac consecrates the (comic)
meaningfulness of Sarahs incredulous laughter, her scepticism of the body. In
Critchleys terms, he is the joyful return of the physical into the metaphysical:
the embodiment (or the echo) of Gods laughter. Sarah was right to laugh at
Gods incredible promise of Isaac because the encounter between the physical
and the metaphysical was (meant) to end comically rather than tragically.
There is thus a sense in which Sarahs laughter allows the birth of Isaac to
be thought not in terms of the covenant and of sacrificial obligation to the
divine but rather according to another, more ironic, comical and, I would add,
literary temporality.
V Kafkas Abraham
It is difficult not to be struck by the absence of woman in [Genesis 22], notes

Derrida in The Gift of Death:
It is a story of father and son, of masculine figures, of hierarchies among men:

God the father, Abraham, Isaac. The woman, Sarah, is she to whom nothing is
said, not to mention Hagar Would the logic of sacrificial responsibility within
the implacable universality of the law, of its law, be altered, inflected, attenuated,
or displaced, if a woman were to intervene in some consequential manner? Does
the system of this sacrificial responsibility and of the double gift of death imply
at its very basis an exclusion or sacrifice of woman? (GD/LIS 76)
In her essay The Sacrifice of Sarah, Peggy Kamuf amplifies and generalises
Derridas point:
The fearsomeness of imminent and inevitable death has been called up or

appealed to only rarely, it seems, through the figure of a woman. In the West, the
heroic effigy has had it most memorable and oft-repeated incarnation as a man:
from Achilles, Hector, and Socrates to Billy Budd and Terminator 2, popular or
classical literature has recorded the ultimate moment of these singular lives, all
lived within mens bodies The counter-examples of heroic women standing
before death or sacrificing their lives are far fewer in the general cultural imagi-
nation. Obvious exceptions Antigone, Joan of Arc, Rosa Luxemburg are
exceptions As for biblical or religious figuration, as distinct from the classical
heroic one, there seem to be no sacred deaths to be remembered, revered or
worshipped except those of fathers and sons. One could extend the references
in several directions in order to track the ways in which a womans death is most
often represented non-heroically, which is to say as non-exemplary.70
An obscure exception to this generalisation that comes to mind is the

remarkable story recounted in the apocryphal text 4 Maccabees of the mother

and her seven sons who heroically martyr themselves rather than renounce
their Jewish traditions in defiance of the tyrant Antiochus IV. Antiochus
demands that the mother and her sons relinquish the Jewish prohibition
on eating pork, but each refuses to the point of torture and death. When it
comes time for the mother to be tortured after all her sons are dead, we read
that, sympathy for her children did not dislodge the mother of the young
men, like-souled as with Abraham as she was.71 Rather than an exception to
Kamufs rule, we might still conclude from this story that its heroine expresses
a male or masculine model of sacrificial responsibility due to her invocation
of the example of Abraham in Genesis 22.
There is no doubt that the Kierkegaardian account of the Akedah, with
its dialectical and lyrical focus on Abrahams silence, harbours a deep-seated
anxiety towards the speculative possibility of a woman intervening in some
consequential way. In two revealing drafts of a scene finally excluded from
Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard imagines Sarah finding out about the
sacrifice and confronting Abraham, only for the patriarch to respond to her
most melodramatically:
Perhaps even one more move could be made let Sarah get to know about it
and let her make an objection, at which point Abrahams despair would find
expression in this way: Wretched woman, Isaac is in fact not our child; were
not both of us old when he was born; did you yourself not laugh when it was
announced.
And again:
Abraham said this to Sarah. She became terrified and would dissuade him, but
Abraham said: Wretched woman, how did you know it was our child; was it
not in your old age that you had him; were not both of us decrepit. It is not our
child but a phantom. (FT 255)
For Kierkegaard, significantly, the fact of Isaac belonging to Sarah and

Abraham by virtue of the absurd only further authorises the act of the
sacrifice and further justifies the exclusion of the feminine perspective from
the sacrificial scene.72 Abrahams silence thus marks an active exclusivity: it is
the ordeal figured not as a natural blackening of the breast, as in the case of
a mother weaning her child, but as an unnatural read: masculine, violent
and antisocial blackening of the entire spirit. Fortunate is he, writes
Kierkegaard in his Journals, who did not need to blacken himself, who
did not need to journey to hell to find out what the devil looks like so that
he could make himself look like him and in this way possibly save another
human being, at least in that persons God-relationship (JP 5:5640; FT 242).
In order to figure the trial of spirit, Kierkegaard sees fit to displace the natural
and linear scene of female procreation with the artificial and anachronistic
scene of male re-creation through work: Here it does not help to have
Abraham as father or to have seventeen ancestors. The one who will not work
fits what is written about the virgins of Israel: he gives birth to wind but
the one who will work gives birth to his own father (FT 29).
What is fascinating about Kafkas account of Genesis 22 is that it does
allow woman to intervene in the sacrifice in a consequential way. To appre-
ciate Sarahs laughter as a figure of the literary, we must now follow a
rhetorical move Kafka makes and contrast Sarahs expression of scepticism
in Genesis 18 with Abrahams expression of faith in Genesis 22. We have
already seen how the father replies evasively to the sons question on the
way to Mount Moriah about the animal for the sacrifice. By saying to Isaac
that God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, Abraham subsumes
the physically humiliating circumstances of the present (in which the son
surely suspects what is up) to the metaphysical grandeur of an imagined or
hoped-for future. For her part, Sarah refuses to make this temporal leap of
faith; her laughter draws its rhetorical strength from the very act of giving
up on the metaphysical reality of the future. By laughing at Gods promise of
Isaac, she cleaves to the physically humiliating circumstances of the present,
even as these leave her without hope. I want to conclude my argument by
affiliating Sarahs laughter with the Kafkan. When Kafka famously put it
to Brod that There is an infinite amount of hope but not for us,73 does
this pronouncement not owe a rhetorical debt to Sarahs dark comedy of the
body?
A single sentence from Kafka allows us to posit Sarahs laughter as a
precursor to his own. The story of Abrahams averted sacrifice of Isaac was
long one of his favourite topics and in his remarkable June 1921 letter
to Robert Klopstock, he mocks the story by rereading it in terms of Sarahs
laughter. [I]ts all an old story not worth discussing any longer, writes Kafka
dismissively.
Especially not the real Abraham; he had everything to start with, was brought
up to it from childhood I cant see the leap. If he already had everything, and
yet was to be raised higher, then something had to be taken away from him, at
least in appearance: this would be logical and no leap. It was different for these
other Abrahams, who stood in the houses they were building and suddenly
had to go up on Mount Moriah; it is possible they didnt even have a son, yet
already had to sacrifice him. These are impossibilities and Sarah was right to
laugh. (PP 43)
This is a truly beguiling passage not least because, rather than commenting
simply or directly on the Genesis narrative, it also responds to Fear and
Trembling. For one familiar with the argument of that text, Kafkas dense
observations constitute a none-too-veiled criticism of Kierkegaards account
of Abraham. Kafka is here zeroing in on Kierkegaards famous claim for the
leap of faith. This is the belief Abraham must maintain throughout the trial
that the demand for Isaacs sacrifice comes from God and that it requires him
to suspend his ethical obligations to his son for the higher telos (whether end
or goal) of religious piety. According to Kierkegaard, Derrida explains in
The Gift of Death, the highest expression of the ethical is in terms of what
binds us to our own and to our fellows (that can be the family but also the
actual community of friends or the nation) (GD/LIS 60). The Kierkegaardian
leap signifies the point at which adherence to ethical (or familial) obligation
becomes, by virtue of the absurd, insufficient to the expression of faith. The
leap means that Abraham is paradoxically able to realise the work of the
eternal as a temporal being but only on violent terms. As Kierkegaard puts
it in Fear and Trembling: only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac (FT 27).
For his part, Kafka rejects this aggressive conception of Genesis 22,
which puts the ethical, not to mention the eternal, so firmly in Abrahams
grasp. According to Adorno, Kafka used motifs from Kierkegaards Fear
and Trembling not as heir but as critic.74 An initially enthusiastic Kafka
first began reading Kierkegaard in 1913, at the time he was breaking off
his first engagement with Felice. On the same day that he drafts the letter
to Herr Bauer detailing the reasons why he cannot marry Felice (21 August
1913), Kafka also comments upon receiving a selection from Kierkegaards
journals: Today I got Kierkegaards Buch des Richters [Book of the Knight/
Judge]. As I suspected, his case, despite essential differences, is very similar
to mine, at least he is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like
a friend (D 230). Here, Kafka compares his situation with Felice to that
of Kierkegaard breaking off his marriage engagement to Regine Olsen (in
November 1841). The biographical comparison with Kierkegaard extends to
the suffering Kafka felt he endured as a child under his authoritarian father
Hermann, whom he addresses in the remarkable and unsent Letter to
His Father. Both Kierkegaard and Kafka struggled to establish stable relations
with women; neither writer married nor had children. But these biographical
similarities were ultimately superficial in nature, and Kafkas feelings of
existential fraternity with Kierkegaard do not last very long. After studying
Kierkegaard in 1917, Kafka disparages Fear and Trembling in a March 1918
letter to Brod: He [Kierkegaard] doesnt see the ordinary man and paints
this monstrous Abraham in the clouds.75
Kafka criticises Fear and Trembling not simply on the grounds that
Kierkegaards Abraham is a murderer and, by antiphrasis, a Cain.76 What
ultimately disturbs him about Kierkegaards presentation of Abraham is less
its endorsement of physical violence than its sheer metaphysicality. Kafka
writes to Brod:
The relationship to the divine, as far as Kierkegaard is concerned, defies any

outside point of view Now, to be sure, the religious relationship wants to
reveal itself, but cannot do so in this world. Therefore aspiring man must set his
face against the world in order to rescue the divine in himself; or, what comes
to the same thing, the divine sets him in opposition to the world in order to
rescue itself.77
Kafka does not identify, as does Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, with an
Abraham who expresses his faith by interiorising the sacrificial demand and
by setting himself against his contemporaries. As Adorno points out:
Dialectical theology fails in its attempt to appropriate [Kafka] not merely

because of the mythical character of the powers at work, an aspect which
Benjamin rightly emphasized, but also because in Kafka, unlike Fear and
Trembling, ambiguity and obscurity are attributed not exclusively to the Other
as such but to human beings and to the conditions in which they live. Precisely
that infinite qualitative distinction [that is, the leap] taught by Kierkegaard and
Barth is levelled off; there is no real distinction, Kafka writes, between town and
castle.78
By appealing to Sarahs laughter, Kafka is attributing ambiguity and obscurity

to human beings and to the conditions in which they live. As Jean Wahl
notes: we therefore discover two incommunicable spheres in the world of
Kafka: the incommunicable of the particular, and the incommunicable of the
general. For Kierkegaard on the other hand, only the particular is incom-
municable, while the general is communicable (which is the social and moral
order).79
Kafkas democracy, one might say, is that he does not allow the hero of
the story to become the sole legislator of the divine. In his account of the
Akedah, there are two forms of fear and trembling two types of fear of the
Lord functioning equally to displace one another. While Abrahams silence
expresses a mythical form of non-understanding that would readily acquiesce
to the divine call to sacrifice Isaac, Sarahs mundane laughter works invisibly
alongside the hero of the story to capture the ridiculousness of the sacrificial
event. This sceptical laughter functions analogously to the policemans Give
it up! to disorient the real Abraham as he approaches Moriah and to delay
his arrival with Isaac at the appointed destination.
According to Kierkegaard, Abraham transcends the mundane and enters
as a single individual into direct relation to the Absolute (God) by violently
suspending his ethical relation to Isaac in Genesis 22. But, for Kafka, this
philosophical (or, if you prefer, theological) version of tragic solitude remains
dangerously unimaginable and hence monstrous a bit like Descartes
wondering what it would be like to be without a body. Contra Kierkegaard,
Kafka thus insists upon depicting an absurdly ordinary or mundane Abraham,

one who remains unable to extract himself from the ethical contingencies of
his daily life. Kafka writes to Klopstock (in what is a fine illustration of his
comic touch):
I could conceive of another Abraham he certainly would never have gotten

to be patriarch or even an old clothes dealer who was prepared to satisfy the
demand of the sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but was
unable to bring it off because he could not get away, being indispensable; the
household needed him, there was perpetually something or other to put in order,
the house was never ready; for without having his house ready, without having
something to fall back on, he could not leave this the Bible also realised, for
it says: He set his house in order.80 And, in fact, Abraham possessed everything
in plenty to start with; if he had not had a house, where would he have raised
his son; and in which rafter would he have stuck the sacrificial knife. (PP 423)
The main consequence of Kafkas thinking about the Genesis narrative,

Benjamin notes, is that Abraham must cede his place in tradition.81 We laugh
at Kafkas Abraham because his deeply personal and unique relationship
with God has come down to the purely material problem of finding a place
to hide the sacrificial knife. According to Kierkegaard, faith is the paradox
that interiority is higher than exteriority (FT 69). But, for Kafka, there is
no such paradox or divine right to privacy only the horror of the comic.
By emphasizing the fact that Abraham had a house with rafters in which to
stick the weapon, Kafka thus ridicules Kierkegaards supposition in Fear and
Trembling that Abraham successfully concealed from all the ethical author-
ities around him not just the knife, but also his sacrificial intentions.
If Kafkas intention is to render the patriarch in comic rather than tragic
terms, then surely the Archimedean point of his thinking about the sacrifice
is reached when these other Abrahams are required to go up to Moriah even
though they do not yet have a son: It was different for these other Abrahams,
who stood in the houses they were building and suddenly had to go up on
Mount Moriah; it is possible they didnt even [noch nicht] have a son, yet
already [schon] had to sacrifice him. These are impossibilities and Sarah was
right to laugh. These other Abrahams are incapacitated and humiliated
by the absurd fact of lacking a son to sacrifice. But the son, Isaac, is here
really just another name for a definite sense of the present, the finite or the
temporal. Thus, as Jill Robbins notes, We could read this not yet [having
a son] and already [having to sacrifice him] as an always not yet and
an always already, that is, as an unreachable futurity and an unreachable
anteriority.82 In contrast to the real Abraham who enjoyed divine favour from
the beginning who already possessed everything and was able to offer it
up readily in the form of Isaac these others are dispossessed of a sense of
the present, the temporal, the finite at the crucial point of the sacrifice being
demanded. The absurdity of their predicament their relation to the absurd
arises precisely from this constitutive lack.
In Kierkegaards version of events, Abraham expresses his faith by asserting
his absolute solitude that is to say, by doubting the ultimate reality of his
ethical relations to others. Kafkas Abraham takes this scepticism one crucial
and comical step further: he doubts he even has a son to sacrifice. It is thus
as if Kafka here re-imagines everything from the point of view of Sarahs
laughter in Genesis 18: Sarah was right to doubt Gods promise of Isaac; Isaac
was never born; and yet Abraham is still asked to offer up his son for sacrifice.
The absurdity of this situation expresses what Kundera refers to as the horror
of the comic: Abraham is exposed before the metaphysical other but is at
the same time unable to retreat into the consolatory or cathartic depths of
tragic interiority. He is bound to the contingencies of the mundane as these
give expression to his intrinsic banality. The basis for Kafkas astonishing
act of literary expropriation is a sense of physical inadequacy in the face of
metaphysical possibility: not (the real) Abrahams faith, but (the real) Sarahs
laughter.
In a third and final rendering of the trial to Klopstock (to whom he had
given a copy of Fear and Trembling), Kafka foregrounds Abrahams feelings
of physical inadequacy in the face of the metaphysical ordeal. In this version,
which Peter Mailloux acknowledges as most clearly expressing Kafkas own
qualities, Abraham remains unable to go through with the sacrifice because
he becomes afraid of transforming into Don Quixote on the way.
But take another Abraham. One who wanted to perform the sacrifice altogether
in the right way and had a correct sense in general of the whole affair, but
could not believe that he was the one meant, he, an ugly old man, and the dirty
youngster that was his child. True faith is not lacking in him, he has this faith;
he would make the sacrifice in the right spirit if only he could believe he was
the one meant. He is afraid that after starting out as Abraham with his son
he would change on the way into Don Quixote. The world would have been
enraged at Abraham could it have beheld him, but this one is afraid that the
world would laugh itself to death. However, it is not the ridiculousness as such
that he is afraid of though he is, of course, afraid of that too and, above all, of
his joining in the laughter but in the main he is afraid that his ridiculousness
will make him even older and uglier, his son even dirtier, even more unworthy
of being really called. An Abraham who should come unsummoned! It is as if,
at the end of the year, when the best student was solemnly about to receive a
prize, the worst student rose in the expectant stillness and came forward from
his dirty desk in the last row because he had made a mistake of hearing, and the
whole class burst out laughing. And perhaps he had not made a mistake at all,
his name really was called out, it having been the teachers intention to make
the rewarding of the best student at the same time a punishment for the worst.
(PP 445)
An Abraham who should come unsummoned!83 We have now entered fully

into the bowels of the joke. Abraham or should we rather say Kafka
himself? must not only confront his irremediable ridiculousness, but also
stop himself from laughing along with the others. What precludes Kafkas
Abraham from escaping ridicule by relating privately to the divine is his
overwhelming sensitivity to his own physical inadequacy: in the main he is
afraid that his ridiculousness will make him even older and uglier, his son
even dirtier, even more unworthy of being really called. Here, then, Kafka
completes his parabolic act of identification with the figure of Sarahs laughter
by transferring her doubts about the propriety of her body onto the patriarch
himself. Along the way to Moriah, via the pages of Fear and Trembling,
Kafkas Abraham so becomes a laughing stock a purely literary figure, a
Don Quixote.
VI Sancho Panza
For the general relevance of Kafka in the history of quixotic fictions, remarks
Alexander Welsh in Reflections on the Hero as Quixote, it suffices to say that
circumstances can play the part of God or father.84 At the end of Kafkas third
retelling of the Akedah, Robbins notes that there is:
a turn away from the question of an error of hearing and a turn to somebody
elses the teachers intention (nach der Absicht des Lehrers). That intention
is not like the intention of a subject but the kind of intention that is a law of
Kafkas writing: the road to the Castle did not lead up the castle hill; it only lead
near it, but then as if intentionally [wie absichtlich], it turned aside, and if it did
not lead away from the castle, it did not lead nearer to it either.85
Rather than the intention of a subject, it is circumstances that get in the

way of Kafkas Abraham. One might best sum up the quixotic law of
Kafkas writing, in which circumstances can play the role of God or father,
with number 26 of his Zrau Aphorisms: There is a destination but no
way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation (ZA 26). But, as Ive been
arguing, it is wrong to conclude that Kafka dissociates goal from way in his
narratives so as to separate himself from others or be left alone with his
laughter like the policeman at the end of Give it up! In fact the opposite
is closer to the truth: the solitude of the Kafkan hero is always being offset
or interrupted by the laughter of those around him or her by the horror
of the comic.
This is really just to say that Kafka never forgets the diversionary nature
of all storytelling, what I am calling in this book Scheherazades law. We have
already seen Kierkegaard define this law in starkly existential terms: How
true are the words I have so often said of myself, that as Scheherazade saved
her life by telling fairy stories I save my life, or keep myself alive by writing.86
Kafka expresses a gentler, more philosophical understanding of the figure of
the storyteller in his parable The Truth About Sancho Panza. This short piece
is remarkable for the way it presents the hero of the story as the storytellers
diversion. In a typical gesture, Kafka inverts the power structure in Cervantes
original story so that Sancho Panza becomes the imaginer of Don Quixote
and Don Quixote the demon of Sancho Panza:
Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years,
by feeding him a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the
evening and night hours, in so diverting from himself his demon, whom he later
called Don Quixote, that this demon thereupon set out, uninhibited, on the
maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a pre-ordained object, which
should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho
Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a
sense of responsibility, and thus had of them a great and edifying entertainment
to the ends of his days. (BK 2423)
After calling this Kafkas most perfect creation, Benjamin then adds the
following comment: Sancho Panza, a sedate fool and clumsy assistant, sent
his rider on ahead; Bucephalus [the horse of Alexander the Great and the
protagonist of Kafkas parable The New Attorney] outlived his. Whether it is
a man or a horse is no longer so important, if only the burden is removed from
the back.87 Kafkas fable idealises postponement not because it guarantees the
storytellers personal survival (as Kierkegaard asserts), but rather because it
allows the storyteller a great and edifying entertainment. This is ultimately a
fable celebrating the diversionary nature of literature: since the mad exploits
of the storyteller lack a preordained object, since they attach themselves to a
spectral body, they harm nobody and thus entertain everybody.
Underlying Kafkas laughter, I have been arguing in this chapter, is the

scepticism of the body, one extreme expression of which is the feeling of being
unable to have children. On 19 January 1922, Kafka returns in his diaries to
what is a persistent topic of reflection: namely, the burden of childlessness.
The infinite, deep, warm, saving happiness of sitting beside the cradle of ones
child opposite its mother.
There is in it also something of this feeling: matters no longer rest with you,
unless you wish it so. In contrast, this feeling of those who have no children: it
perpetually rests with you, whether you will or no, every moment to the end,
every nerve-racking moment, it perpetually rests with you, and with no result.
Sisyphus was a bachelor. (D 401)
In Kafka and the Works Demand, Blanchot explains Kafkas peculiar

situation as a writer by appealing to his reworking of the trial of Abraham.
As Blanchot points out, what burdens the writer is the nerve-racking fact of
lacking a real object in this privileged case, a beloved child to sacrifice:
For Kafka the ordeal is all the graver because of everything that makes it
weigh lightly on him. (What would the testing of Abraham be if, having no
son, he were nonetheless required to sacrifice this son? He couldnt be taken
seriously; he could only be laughed at. That laughter is the form of Kafkas
pain) (SL 612). What else is laughter, one might ask, but a form of imaginary
pain? Or, the imagination of a pain to come: the birth pains of the future?
We recall the moral of Janouchs little Chinese story: one must not laugh too
loudly for fear of waking the sorrow in the next room. Insofar as he draws his
power and authority from an always imaginary or imagined form of suffering,
from a type of pain to come, the writer must acknowledge the rectitude of
Sarahs laughter. This most anxious and sceptical form of laughter expresses
a joie de vivre by momentarily and inadvertently releasing the despairing self
into the company of others. However elusive or fugitive it may seem, the
telos of (Kafkas) laughter is the return of the physical into the metaphysical
which is the happiness of being with people (D 411; 2 Feb 1922). According
to Brod, It is a new kind of smile that distinguishes Kafkas work, a smile
close to the ultimate things a metaphysical smile so to speak indeed
sometimes when he used to read out one of his tales for us friends of his, it
rose above a smile and we laughed out aloud.88
Chapter 4
The absolutely dark moment of the plot:
Blanchots Abraham
To the arbitrariness within oneself there corresponds the accidental outside

oneself.
Sren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
The poet borrows all his materials other than images.

Novalis, On Goethe
I Caravaggios Ram: The End of the Story
According to Sylviane Agacinski in her book Time Passing, No image can

make real that terrible time of what Kierkegaard called the infinite resig-
nation of Abraham.1 Here Agacinski seeks to justify the position Kierkegaard
expresses in Practice in Christianity that suffering is something the imagi-
nation cannot represent, except in a rendering that represents it as already
perfected, that is, softened, toned down, fore-shortened.2 To justify her
claim that Abrahams approach to Moriah defies presentation by the image,
Agacinski appeals to a classical example: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggios
1605 painting The Sacrifice of Isaac, which is reproduced on the front cover
of this book. Caravaggios painting depicts what Ive been calling the end
of the story the moment in which the angel of the Lord calls the sacrifice
off and points to the ram that will substitute for Isaac. Now housed in the
Uffizi Gallery in Florence, it works by forcefully foreshortening the distances
separating the divine, the human and the bestial in the biblical account of
the trials suspension in order to have them cohere into a single, singular and
full-bodied image. At its centre, Abraham is standing with the knife, pushing
Isaacs head against a sacrificial stone with his left hand. Despite his awkward
position, Isaacs right eye nonetheless directly and disturbingly engages the
gaze of the viewer while his open mouth emits an inaudible cry of terror.
Immediately to the left of the sacrificial pair, the angel of the Lord, towards
whom Abraham is turned, no longer calls out from the distant heavens as in
the traditional account but clutches Abraham on the right wrist yet with a
lightness and gentleness of touch opposed to the patriarchs heavy hand. The
angel points to the nearby ram, which is not caught in an out-of-view thicket
but is rather transfixed right beside the sacrifice as if having been drawn
magnetically into the event. Here, then, is Isaacs sacrifice being suspended by
The absolutely dark moment of the plot: Blanchots Abraham 101
a sense of physicalized, claustrophobic, baroque intrusion: the proximity of

the clenched knife to the sons proffered neck as it is offset by the proximity
of the angel and the ram to father Abraham.
For Agacinski, Caravaggios painting:
spares us the time of Abrahams trial and Isaacs that is, the terrible time
of the decree of death [A]s soon as Abrahams arm is immobilised by the
painting and the murder is definitively suspended, the painting inevitably erases
everything that makes Abrahams trial horrifying, that is, all the time during
which he prepares himself for the sacrifice of his son.3
Since it cannot show the temporality of a movement or passage,4 the painting

works to erase the pain of the trial the passage of three days in which
Abraham single-handedly sustains the trial by his decision to continue on
towards the place of sacrifice. Agacinskis point is that the image remains
unable to depict the terrible time of the decree of death that nonetheless deter-
mines it. The image, she might have said, suspends death.
What Agacinski says of Caravaggios painting is in some sense incon-
testable: Caravaggio does not even try to depict the ephemeral time of the trial
in his painting. His subject is instead the moment of the trials suspension. But
this does not mean that his image remains disconnected from the transience of
the trial. Indeed, I would argue that The Sacrifice of Isaac invokes the pain of
the trial by showing Abrahams furtive sacrificial act being brought suddenly
to the light of day, to the painted surface.
My problem with Agacinskis analysis is that it severely undervalues the
narrative capacities of the painted image. Why must we assume, as Agacinski
does, that the painted image cannot show the temporality of a movement or
passage? Louis Marin, for one, accounts most beautifully for the narrative
capacity of Caravaggios painting in the following passage from his essay
Depositing Time in Painted Representations:
A narrative is instituted starting from the interval of the arrested knife and the
proffered neck: a matrix instant pregnant with the moment that will follow.
But in this gap and this interval, in this place where the prohibition of a throat-
cutting that will not take place occurs, the subjects gaze rushes to accomplish
the sacrifice in the representation and in the time of contemplation: the single
eye of Isaac, lying on the stone and looking at me, constitutes me as a fascinated
gaze falling into the open mouth, emitting an inaudible cry. In that instant, I
cannot stand to wait any longer between the globe of the eye and the hole of
that mouth, I keep on looking and traversing the interval between the knife and
the neck to carry out the sacrificial murder The Sacrifice of Isaac precipitates
the subject himself and his gaze into the scene; the representation constitutes
him as subject in that precipitation of his self-image that he meets in Isaacs eye
and mouth; or, more precisely, [the viewer] is constituted only in never ceasing
to recognize the suspension of his own throat-cutting. He experiences himself in
his own time only in the reprieve of his own death.5
The imagination of the event in Caravaggios work does not stop, as it does
in Fear and Trembling, with the destructive raising of the knife but continues
on towards the two narrative possibilities of Isaacs death and reprieve. As
Marin notes, it is the second of these possibilities that conditions our sense of
the first. We constitute ourselves as viewers in our own time by experiencing
the reprieve of our own death. Our sense of deaths possibility comes from
our simultaneous sense of its impossibility. What enables us to experience the
reprieve of our own deaths is the substitution of something else for ourselves.
In the somewhat fabulous case of Genesis 22, this is the substitution of the
nonhuman ram for the human Isaac. By emphasizing the proximity of the ram
to the sacrifice, Caravaggios painting shows us that our capacity to identify
with Isaac depends not upon the subjective time of the trial the time of
Abrahams infinite resignation, as Agacinski calls it but rather upon the
objective, fateful moment of the rams substitution.
II Blanchots Ram
Caravaggios painting gets us to think about how the end of the Genesis
story the unexpected substitution of the ram for Isaac transfigures the
narrative identities of its two main human protagonists. Before it, we might
ask: how does the fabulous substitution of the nonhuman for the human
animal at the end of Genesis 22 affect our understanding of the sacrificial act,
of Abrahams sacrificial intention and of Abrahams relation to Isaac? It is this
aspect of the story, I want to suggest here, that most preoccupies Blanchot
about the Akedah. Each of the three authors I focus on in this book empha-
sises a different moment in the Genesis narrative and so tells a different story.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard is mindful to show how Abraham was
able heroically to set out on the sacrifice. In some sense, the beginning of the
story is also Kafkas concern in his fable Abraham. But, as is his wont, Kafka
draws the problem of beginning out into the interminability of the middle
so that his Abraham is perpetually and unheroically stranded, heading
towards Moriah without any real hope of arriving there. In contrast to both
Kierkegaard and Kafka, Blanchot focuses upon the problem of the end of the
story. In a striking reprisal of the Akedah that appears in his 1951 narrative
When the Time Comes, Blanchot takes up the story after the climactic
moment of the rams substitution. In quasi-midrashic fashion, he imagines
Abraham being confronted on the return home to Beersheba by a mirage of
the near-death of his son:
When Abraham came back from the country of Moria, he was not accompanied
by his child but by the image of a ram and it was with a ram that he had to
live from then on. Others saw the son in Isaac, but they didnt know what had
happened on the mountain, but he saw the ram in his son, because he had made
a ram for himself out of his child. A devastating story [Histoire accablante].
(WTC 253)6
In Blanchots passage, the image of the ram marks the impossibility of Isaacs
death, Isaacs death as it falls like Gregor transformed into a gigantic insect
in Kafkas story The Metamorphosis back into existence. In this sense, it
is human death become a mirage. Abraham makes a ram out of his son
produces this mirage by allowing Isaac to become interchangeable with
the ram that eventually occupies the place of death in the story. The image of
the ram taking Isaacs place on the return to Beersheba thus refolds into the
narrative passage of time the thought of Isaacs death as a narrative possi-
bility. Isaac could have died, but he didnt. No one else can see this because
no one else has seen what happened on Mount Moriah. The image thus makes
visible but in a still privative or imaginary way what otherwise falls
outside the register of sight at the end of Genesis 22. This is Isaacs material
death as it continues to be a condition of the narrative beyond the moment
of his substitution.
With its focus on Abrahams private experience of Isaacs near-death,
Blanchots passage recalls one of the literary fables with which Kierkegaard
begins Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard writes in the fourth of these:
They rode along in harmony, Abraham and Isaac, until they came to Mount
Moriah. Abraham made everything ready for the sacrifice, calmly and gently, but
when he turned away and drew the knife, Isaac saw that Abrahams left hand
was clenched in despair, that a shudder went through his whole body but
Abraham drew the knife. Then they returned home again, and Sarah hurried
to meet them, but Isaac had lost his faith. Not a word is ever said of this in the
world, and Isaac never talked to anyone about what he had seen, and Abraham
did not suspect that anyone had seen it. (FT 14)
Like Blanchot, Kierkegaard here presents the Akedah as a traumatic event,

as a devastating story that has the effect of isolating Abraham from the rest
of reality. Kierkegaards Abraham hopes to take the secret of what happened
on Mount Moriah to his grave: he never speaks of it to anyone and did
not suspect that anyone had seen it. Blanchots Abraham appears similarly
turned inward and isolated from others: Others saw the son in Isaac, but they
didnt know what had happened on the mountain. One can easily imagine
Blanchots Abraham nervously and guiltily looking around as he returns home
to Beersheba to make sure that nobody had been a witness to his actions.
It is tempting to see Blanchot as paying tribute to Kierkegaard in the passage

from When the Time Comes. Blanchot was a prodigious and attentive reader
of Kierkegaard; indeed, the opening review in his first book, Faux Pas, is of
Kierkegaards Journals. In a short piece commemorating Blanchots death
(on 20 February 2003, age 95), Mark C. Taylor suspects Kierkegaard and
Blanchot of sharing a singularity and isolation that joined them in something
like an unavowable community: As is often the case, the deepest influences
remain unspoken or almost unspoken. To this end, Taylor acknowledges
receipt of personal correspondence from Blanchot confirming the fact that
Kierkegaard had, indeed, been more important for him than his published
works indicated.7 It is true that both writers have become synonymous with
a profound type of withdrawal from the world in particular, with the
withdrawal of authority to which one might see the act of writing as bearing
witness. Blanchot was a famous recluse who preferred to correspond with
others via letter or telephone rather than in person. But according to his friend
Jean-Luc Nancy, He did not withdraw to set up in his place the imposing
figure of the thinker or the haughty stature of the writer.8 Rather, he would
no doubt have condoned what Kierkegaard says in Crisis in the Life of an
Actress: that as a writer I am a peculiar sort of genius neither more nor less
absolutely without authority and therefore completely dependent on his own
liquidation so as never to become, for anyone, an authority.9
Without wanting to deny the fact of Kierkegaards secret influence on
Blanchot, I find little evidence for it in his musings on Abraham.10 If anything,
Blanchot expresses a certain antagonism towards Kierkegaard through his
writings on the patriarch. This is in part because he lets Kafka, rather than
Kierkegaard, guide his thinking about Genesis 22. What Blanchot has to say
about the Akedah emerges more or less directly and more or less unproblem-
atically from his engagement with Kafka and with Kafkas Abraham. Indeed,
apart from the passage in When the Time Comes, Blanchot only comments
on the story of Isaacs near-sacrifice in essays on Kafka: first in the 1949 essay
Kafka and Literature; and then in the 1952 essay Kafka and the Works
Demand.
The more one looks at Blanchots retelling of the sacrifice of Isaac in When
the Time Comes the less Kierkegaardian it appears. There is an obvious
and significant difference between Kierkegaards and Blanchots fictional
presentations of Genesis 22: Kierkegaard does not mention the ram that
eventually substitutes for Isaac. Since he believes that the crucial point of
the story is what happens in secret between Abraham and God, Kierkegaard
downplays the roles of Sarah, Isaac and the ram in the sacrifice. In the last
chapter, we saw that Kierkegaard harbours a deep-seated anxiety towards
the speculative possibility of Sarah intervening meaningfully in the sacrificial
event. I might now add that he is equally anxious about the actual role played
by the ram in the sacrifice. Kierkegaard writes in Eulogy on Abraham:
If Abraham had doubted as he stood there on the mountain in Moriah, if

irresolute he had looked around, if he had happened to spot the ram before
drawing the knife, if God had allowed him to sacrifice it instead of Isaac then
he would have gone home, everything would have been the same, he would
have had Sarah, he would have kept Isaac, and yet how changed! For his return
would have been a flight, his deliverance an accident, his reward disgrace, his
future perhaps perdition. (FT 22)
As far as Kierkegaard is concerned, to pass the test of faith, Abraham must remain
submerged, in secret communion with the Absolute, for as long as possible. In
the Kierkegaardian account, the ram thus has a purely negative role to play in
the story: it is there to indicate that Abraham fails the test if he looks outside of
himself prematurely for the resolution of his spiritual trial. Kierkegaard makes
this point even more emphatically in his journals: If we imagine that Abraham,
by anxiously and desperately looking around, discovered the ram that would
save his son, would he not have gone home in disgrace, without confidence in
the future, without the self-assurance that he was prepared to bring to God
any sacrifice whatsoever, without the divine voice from heaven in his heart that
proclaimed to him Gods grace and love? (JP 5:5485; FT 240).
But the ram is not just a sign that Abraham might fail the test by looking
up too soon. Nor is it simply a function of Abrahams belief that for God all
things are possible. Rather, it is the whole sacrifice and the whole story
as it must be rethought in terms of the substitution of a purely vicarious
victim.11 The story ends or climaxes with the angel of the Lord calling
out to Abraham from the heavens to stop just as the patriarch is about to
slay his son. The patriarch is to be spared the awful task of sacrificing his son,
since he has shown that he fears God. At this point, Abraham looks up and
there in a thicket he sees a ram caught by its horns. He now understands to
sacrifice the ram instead of Isaac. In A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke
admonishes Kierkegaard for downplaying the dramatic end of the story:
In building a theology about a Biblical anecdote, why play down so important a

part of it? The story in its entirety is brief. Yet when using it as a base on which
to erect his theological doctrines, Kierkegaard here makes it even briefer. Isnt
the assurance that the angel stayed [Abrahams] hand as important a part of
the story as Abrahams willingness to sacrifice Isaac? At least, Isaac must have
thought so Is this a story about a God who demands the killing of Isaac, or is
it about a God who demands Abrahams willingness to sacrifice. The story itself
is quite explicit on this point. It says that what God wanted was not a kill, but
a sign; and when he got the sign, he ordered the son to be spared.12
The introduction of the sacrificial animal at the end of the story has a
profoundly dissociative effect: it precludes Abraham not just from fulfilling
Gods command to transgress his ethical relation to Isaac but also from
gaining a sense of identity from his willingness to go through with the
sacrifice. The suspension of the sacrifice produces a momentary disjunction
between Abrahams motives (to fulfil Gods initial command and sacrifice
Isaac) and Gods motives (to call off the sacrifice by calling it a test). The event
becomes traumatic for Abraham to the extent that he fails to shift his self-
perception from potential murderer of Isaac to father of the faithful.
A remark from Walter Benjamins essay Fate and Character helps me to
explain the disjunctive effect of the rams substitution at the end of Genesis
22. Benjamin here takes issue with Heraclitus famous adage character is fate
by stating that, where there is character there will, with certainty, not be fate,
and in the area of fate character will not be found.13 My reading of the rams
substitution at the end of Genesis 22 is that it forces Abraham to operate in the
area of fate precisely where it excludes or obscures character. At the point of the
rams substitution for Isaac, circumstances prevent Abraham from becoming
a murderer of his son. Kierkegaard downplays the end of the story, one might
say, because he holds to the Heraclitean view that character is fate or, rather,
because the thought of fate is anathema to his own. As Julia Watkins explains:
It can be noted that a fundamental presupposition in Kierkegaards authorship

is that Christian metaphysics, with their assumption of human freedom,
ultimately do represent the correct objective state of affairs in the universe.
Second, since this is the case, those who relate to ideologies that posit the
objective facticity of necessity fatalistic or deterministic as a controlling
force, must inevitably be unfortunate and unhappy, even when things seem to
be going well.14
For Kierkegaard, Abrahams decision to set out on the sacrifice is freely taken
and, as such, a direct expression of his character. This is why Kierkegaard
spends so much of Fear and Trembling presenting Abraham as a potential
murderer, who must take ultimate responsibility for his decision. What
Kierkegaard never considers is the heretical possibility that Gods sacrificial
command might be completely out of character or that God might be capable
of changing his mind. Nor does he contemplate the consolations offered by a
sense of determining objectivity. In short, Kierkegaard is incapable of seeing
Abraham as happy because fate intervenes on his behalf and gives him back
his son.
Blanchot immediately differentiates himself from Kierkegaard in When
the Time Comes, then, by raising the problem of the end of the story. What
fascinates Blanchot in the passage I have quoted is the disjunctive effect that
the rams substitution has on Abraham. The rams substitution for Isaac is
what the narrator of When the Time Comes calls the absolutely dark moment
of the plot: the point at which [the plot] keeps returning to the present, at
which I can no longer either forget or remember, at which human events,

around a center as unstable and immobile as myself, indefinitely construct
their return (WTC 260). It is the disjunctive moment in the story in which
character becomes an obscure function of plot rather than vice versa. The
appearance of the ram represents that element of the event that Abraham
cannot possibly account for as he begins on the sacrifice: the external happen-
stance towards which the whole narrative tends. By showing us the image
of the ram burned into Abrahams retina on the return home to Beersheba,
Blanchot thus insists contra Kierkegaard that Genesis 22 cannot take
place without the appearance of its purely vicarious victim.
Kierkegaard is certainly not alone in failing to come to grips with the
paradoxical ending of the Akedah. The non-eventuation of the human
sacrifice in Genesis 22 the lack of human blood on the makeshift altar on
Mount Moriah remains one of the most perplexing aspects of the narrative
and has provoked all manner of putative solutions from readers. In order to
see the Akedah as an expiatory act the Rabbis note in Midrash ha-Gadol:
Though he did not die, Scripture credits Isaac with having died and his ashes
having laid on the altar.15 According to Geza Vermes:
These arguments were, however, bound to have appeared unsatisfactory for the
important reason that, according to Jewish theology, there can be no expiation
without the shedding of blood There is, of course, no scriptural foundation
whatever for the belief that Isaac shed his blood, but, as has been shown more
than once, theological theses had to be maintained even at the price of disre-
garding the Bible, and the new doctrine took root that atonement for the sins of
Israel resulted both from Isaacs self-offering and from the spilling of his blood.
It appears already in the Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum.16
The dominant position in the Jewish tradition is that Isaac was not sacrificed
although there have been speculations to the contrary, especially during
the medieval period, due to the fact that the Bible makes no mention of Isaac
immediately after Abraham sacrifices the ram in his stead.17 Genesis 22.19
reads: Then Abraham returned to his servants, and they set off together for
Beersheba. And Abraham stayed in Beersheba.18 Why is Isaac not mentioned
here? Could it be that Abraham has in fact sacrificed him? Indeed, there is
a further textual anomaly: Genesis 22 ends with a recitation of the lineage
established not through Isaac but through Abrahams brother Nahor; it is as
if Isaac had ceased to exist.19
In his famous poem protesting World War I, The Parable of the Old Man
and the Young, the English poet Wilfred Owen rewrites the story of Genesis
22 so that Isaac is sacrificed. Owen updates the Akedah for his time by using
Abrahams sacrifice of his son to allegorize a stolen generation of European
youth. Since it is short, I here reproduce the poem in full:
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.20
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young shows that it is perhaps
more psychologically satisfying to imagine Abraham going through with
the human sacrifice than it is to imagine him withdrawing from it for
this brings the patriarchs actions into line with his murderous intentions.
But it must be said that this remains a wilful and perverse misreading of
the biblical story.
As I see it, there are two ways in which to misread the suspension of the
human sacrifice in Genesis 22. The first, as we have just seen, is to credit Isaac
with having died on the altar. This is what Derrida does in The Gift of Death
when he notes parenthetically, God stops [Abraham] at the instant when
there is no more time, when time is no more given, it is as if Abraham had
already killed Isaac (GD/LIS 73, original emphasis). Derridas point here is
that Abraham passes his test of faith when he comes as close as is humanly
possible to killing Isaac when space but not time separates the anguished
father from his terrified son. But surely the point of the story is that the son
survives to tell the terrifying tale? Surely what God demands from Abraham is
merely a sign of his willingness to sacrifice Isaac? Surely, then, it is somewhat
perverse to continue to favour the possibility of Isaacs death over the
actuality of his survival, when the result of the trial is known?
The second way to misread the dnouement of Genesis 22 is to focus solely
on the non-eventuation of Isaacs sacrifice. This is what Taylor does when he
uses a passage from Derridas essay Signsponge to comment on Fear and
Trembling:
In its several versions, Kierkegaards story of Abraham remains a story without

an event in the traditional sense of the word The story is indeed a fable
[fable], a story with the title of fiction, a simulacrum and effect of language
(fabula), but such that only by means of it can the thing as other and as other
thing come to pass with the allure of an inappropriable event (Ereignis in
abyss). The fable of allure (I give the name allure to the action of something
that comes without coming [vient sans venir] the thing that concerns us in this
strange event) where nothing takes place except as it does in this little text.
After quoting Derrida, Taylor then offers the following comment of his own:
The transgression does not actually take place. Though Abraham raises the knife,
Isaac, the flower of his and Sarahs eye, is not cut. The act is delayed, deferred
infinitely. A substitute is sacrificed a ram instead of a son Entangled in a
series of substitutes and supplements, the transgression takes place without
taking place. It is an event that is a nonevent, an impossible event that might be
the eventuality of the Impossible.21
One conceives of Genesis 22 as an event without an event only by discrediting

the eventual sacrifice of the ram, by favouring the sons miraculous escape
over the rams hapless demise. To be sure, Abrahams ethical transgression
with regard to Isaac is suspended, but not so his ethical transgression with
regard to the ram. The end of the story thus sets two competing temporalities
in motion, as the rams substitution immediately offsets the infinite deferral
of Isaacs sacrifice. To put it in a Levinasian way, at the point of Abrahams
greatest blindness with respect to his son, he nonetheless sees the ram!
What is missing from Fear and Trembling, precisely because of the
decision to throw all its rhetorical weight behind the approach to Moriah
and the pain of the trial, is a viable account of the moment of substitution.
It is as if Kierkegaard stops reading the story when Abraham stretches
forth his hand and takes the knife to slay his son. By constantly replaying
this moment in his text, Kierkegaard reveals his paradoxical reluctance to
read this brief narrative in its entirety. Perhaps the chief rhetorical move of
Fear and Trembling is to subordinate the plot of the Genesis story to the
character of its hero, Abraham. Heroism is not determined by the end(ing)
but rather by beginnings.22 For Kierkegaard, we all know the outcome of
the story. Perhaps it does not amaze us anymore, because we have known
it from our earliest childhood, but then in truth the fault does not lie in
the story, but in ourselves, because we are too lukewarm genuinely to feel
with Abraham and to suffer with him (JP 5:5485; FT 240). The fault lies
with us, in our inability to feel sufficiently for the hero of the story. As
far as Kierkegaard is concerned, one rectifies the problem by returning to
the beginning of the story and by reconsidering how Abraham heroically
overcame the pain of the trial in order to become the prototypical knight
of faith.
At the same time, however, Kierkegaard frustrates his readers efforts to feel
and suffer with Abraham by defining the patriarch in terms of his isolation
from others: When Abrahams heart is moved, when his words would provide
blessed comfort to the whole world, he dares not offer comfort, for would
not Sarah, would not Eliezer, would not Isaac say to him, Why do you want
to do it, then? After all, you can abstain (FT 114). Another reason there
can be no positive account of the event in Kierkegaards text is that there
can be no substitution for Abraham in the event. As Agacinski notes in her
essay We Are Not Sublime: We tremble before the man of faith just as he
trembled before his God. Abraham encountered the mystery of God, but we
only encounter the mystery of Abraham.23 What Kierkegaard cannot avoid
implying in Fear and Trembling, even though it undermines his entire account,
is that Abrahamic faith does not rest upon the passing of the event. In this
sense, for Kierkegaard the problem of faith lies so entirely with Abraham in
Genesis 22 that it doesnt require any input from Sarah or from Isaac; indeed,
it doesnt even require the sacrifice of the ram.
To reduce the ending of the Akedah to the non-eventuality of Isaacs
sacrifice is also to read the story too anthropocentrically. According to Hale:
The difficulty [of Genesis 22] is that, as both Kafka and Kierkegaard point out,
nothing is taken away from Abraham. In spite of all preparation, Abraham
never sacrifices Isaac. He never has to. Abraham and Isaac go out to Mount
Moriah to perform a sacrifice, nothing more. Every account of Abraham, then,
is an attempt to come to terms with precisely this: nothing changes. And yet,
each account is an attempt in one way or another to come to terms with the
paradoxically ethical transgression that constitutes Abrahams act.24
Hale here defines ethics as what happens between humans, not between
species. But the ending of Genesis 22 defies this anthropocentric approach
to the event in that it concerns not just what happens between humans
(Abraham and Isaac) but also what happens between humans and animals
(Abraham and the ram, Isaac and the ram). Of course, something does change
on Mount Moriah: Abraham sacrifices a ram instead of his son. His ethical
transgression in relation to his son is symbolically displaced onto the sacri-
ficial animal. In this sense, the ram becomes a kind of scapegoat that bears
away the sin of the fathers murderous intent towards his son in the moment
of its annihilation.
Having earlier invoked fable in the sense of a fictitious narrative picturing
a truth, I might now appeal to another meaning of the word: namely, a story
involving animals devised to convey some useful lesson. We might think of
Genesis 22 as a kind of meta-fable in the sense that it ultimately concerns the
relation between the human and the animal. When the ram takes the ethical
place of the beloved son in the story, the sacrifice concerns not just the human
relation to the divine but also the human relation to the animal. As Levinas
writes of fables in his essay Reality and its Shadow:
Those animals that portray men give the fable its particular color inasmuch as
men are seen as these animals and not only through these animals; the animals
stop and fill up thought. It is in this that all the power and originality of allegory
lies. An allegory is not simply an auxiliary to thought, a way of rendering an
abstraction concrete and popular for childlike minds, a poor mans symbol. It is
an ambiguous commerce with reality in which reality does not refer to itself but
to its reflection, its shadow.25
By reading the story simply in terms of Abrahams averted transgression in

relation to his son, one mistakenly effaces the appearance of the ram at the
end of the story. In the passage from When the Time Comes, I see Blanchot
as trying to offer a viable account of the fabulous substitution by refocusing
our attention on the nonhuman animal. The passage constitutes a little fable
in its own right in the sense that it shows the ram stopping and filling up
(Abrahams) thought by taking Isaacs place in the sacrifice.
Let me try to explain how the fable works. Abrahams action of sacrificing
the ram causes Isaacs identity to become permeable or spectral: Others saw
the son in Isaac, but they didnt know what had happened on the mountain,
but he saw the ram in his son, because he had made a ram for himself out of
his child. Abraham makes a ram out of his son by turning him into a sacri-
ficial victim. A passage from Michel Serres The Parasite reveals the hidden
logic of Blanchots passage:
The victim is not killed Faced with murder, the gesture is deferred, as is the
decision. The action bifurcates and the tautology starts to predicate; it slips, it
jumps to something else. It no longer says a is a; it substitutes and begins to say
a is b. The victim is not fixed in his identity; the victim is anyone: he could be
the youngest or the first to arrive.26
Isaac is not killed; the gesture is deferred and the ram is killed in his place.
But the traumatic effect of this act of substitution on Abraham is that Isaac
is no longer simply Isaac. Identity is no longer tautological but now starts to
predicate or to become metaphorical: a is b; Isaac is the ram; the human is
the animal. A possible next step in this process of traumatic metaphorization
is that Abraham will come to see himself as the sacrificial ram. As Serres
points out, the victim is anyone: he could be the youngest or the first to
arrive. It is enough to have been witness to the events on Mount Moriah to
be traumatized by them. Genesis 22 is thus a devastating story because it
makes everyone in the story with the possible exception of God into a
kind of victim.
III Wandering in the Wilderness in reverse
We can now see why Blanchot chooses Kafkas account of Genesis 22 over
Kierkegaards. Blanchot is drawn to Kafkas reading of the Akedah by the way
it displaces the existential melodrama of Fear and Trembling. For Kierkegaard,
the absolutely dark moment of the plot occurs when Abraham stretches
forth his hand and takes the knife to slay his son. This is the moment when
Abraham proves not just his unwavering obedience to the divine but also his
murderous intent towards Isaac. The Kierkegaardian hero is always absolute
isolation (FT 79) is he for whom no one else can substitute in the event.
In the last chapter we saw that Kafka disparages this reification of Abraham
in a 1918 letter to Max Brod: [Kierkegaard] doesnt see the ordinary man
and paints this monstrous Abraham in the clouds. In his 1921 letter to Robert
Klopstock, Kafka paints an utterly unheroic Abraham who certainly would
have never gotten to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer (PP 41) and
even goes so far as to imagine Abraham being prevented from carrying out
the sacrifice by the fact of not yet having a son to sacrifice: It was different
for these other Abrahams, who stood in the houses they were building and
suddenly had to go up on Mount Moriah; it is possible they didnt even have
a son, yet already had to sacrifice him (PP 43).
This image of Abraham having already to sacrifice a son who does not yet
exist fascinates Blanchot; indeed, so much so that he appropriates it in order
to figure the paradoxical situation of the writer. For Blanchot, the writer
experiences the end of the story not as the triumph of the heros will (as in
Kierkegaard) but as the translation of the pain of the trial into imaginary
suffering (as in Kafka). By privileging the end of the story over the beginning,
Blanchot reverses Kierkegaards existentialism and upholds Genesis 22 as a
narrative very much concerned with the problem of the imaginary and thus
with the act of literature. In an extraordinary passage from Kafka and the
Works Demand, he boldly plays Kafkas account of the Akedah off against
Kierkegaards:
Kafkas story and the story of Kierkegaards engagement have been compared,
by Kafka himself amongst others. But the conflict is different. Kierkegaard
can renounce Regine; he can renounce the ethical level. Access to the religious
level is not therefore compromised; rather, it is made possible. But Kafka, if he
abandons the earthly happiness of a normal life, also abandons the steadiness
of a just life. He makes himself an outlaw, deprives himself of the ground and
the foundation he needs in order to be and, in a way, deprives the law of this
perspective. His is Abrahams eternal dilemma. What is demanded of Abraham

is not only that he sacrifice his son, but God himself. The son is Gods future on
earth, for it is time which is the Promised Land the true, the only dwelling
place of the chosen people and of God in his people. Yet Abraham, by sacrificing
his only son, must sacrifice time, and time sacrificed will certainly not be given
back in the eternal beyond. The beyond is nothing other than the future, the
future of God in time. The beyond is Isaac.
For Kafka the ordeal is all the graver because of everything that makes it
weigh lightly on him. (What would the testing of Abraham be if, having no
son, he were nonetheless required to sacrifice this son? He couldnt be taken
seriously; he could only be laughed at. That laughter is the form of Kafkas
pain.) (SL 612)
It is with the Christians that we find the disavowal of the here below,27 notes
Blanchot in a section of The Infinite Conversation entitled Being Jewish. The
Danish philosopher Hans Brchner echoes Blanchots sentiment in relation to
Kierkegaard: For him, Christianity was unconditionally incompatible with
the world its requirement was to die away [from the world].28 According
to the sacrificial structure implicit in Kierkegaards Christian perspective, one
world is won by losing the other and he expresses his religious commitment
to God by sacrificing the earthly happiness of a marriage to Regine.
In attributing Abrahams dilemma in Genesis 22 to Kafka, Blanchot
challenges the conventional wisdom that presents the Akedah as an allegory
of Kierkegaards life. In Chapter 2 we saw how Kierkegaard inaugurates this
biographical approach when he writes in 1843: He who has explained this
riddle [of Abraham] has explained my life. But who of my contemporaries
has understood this? (JP 5:5640; FT 242). Kierkegaards claim here is that
Genesis 22 is a story that allows him to say I to recognize or interpose
himself in the narrative detail. For the most part, critics have accepted
Kierkegaards invitation to connect the Abraham story to the details of his
own life, and so have read Regine or Sren for Isaac. However, an inevi-
table drawback of these biographical speculations is that they tend to match
Kierkegaard for melodrama. As John Lippitt observes: Doubtless, there are
indeed autobiographical features to Fear and Trembling. But its relevance
to a sad, short-lived romance in the 1840s can hardly explain the interest that
the text has generated from commentators over the past century or so.29
What Blanchot immediately recognizes is that Kierkegaard identifies only
partially with Abraham indeed, only with the melodramatic moment in
which God asks him to sacrifice Isaac. This is something to which Kierkegaard
himself admits when he writes in his journals on 17 May 1843: If I had had
faith, I would have stayed with Regine (JP 5:5664; FT xix). This entry shows
how the analogy between Abraham sacrificing Isaac and Kierkegaard sacri-
ficing Regine collapses when one considers the story in its entirety. What the
analogy fails to take into account is the positive moment of the story when
Abraham gets Isaac back again after having undergone the trial. While Isaac
is a gift that Abraham does not ultimately have to return to God, Kierkegaard
gives up (on) Regine and feels compelled to rewrite the end of Repetition after
learning of her engagement in 1843 to her former teacher and admirer, Johan
Frederick Schlegel. We might also ask: if, according to another version of
the biographical analogy, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard is supposed to have
spiritually imperilled his son by cursing God on a barren heath as a child,
then where is the corresponding moment of release or unbinding? Rather
than taking into account the positive ending of the story, Kierkegaard merely
identifies with the imperilling moment of the trial in order to satisfy his own
melancholy imagination.
The Kierkegaardian I preserves itself ironically by disavowing the moment
of productive substitution from the outside: the ram. Kierkegaard may gain
the eternal by sacrificing Regine. But he does not thereby resemble Abraham
in Genesis 22, who goes further and expects to regain Isaac in this life. In
contrast to Abraham, Kierkegaard fails to undergo a genuine moment of
substitution where external or objective eventuation confounds internal or
subjective projection where the hero of the story renounces the destructive
passion to sacrifice the beloved. In this regard, Kierkegaard bears more than
a passing resemblance to his pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, who tells us
that he would immediately give up on the finite, if he were commanded to
sacrifice Isaac, in order to reconcile with the eternal: The moment I mounted
the horse, I would have said to myself: Now all is lost, God demands Isaac, I
sacrifice him and along with him all my joy yet God is love and continues
to be that for me, for in the world of time God and I cannot talk with each
other, we have no language in common (FT 345).
What de Silentio cannot comprehend about Genesis 22 is that Abraham
gets Isaac back in this life rather than the next. This specific intolerance is part
of a more general intolerance Kierkegaard expresses towards the finite. As
Adorno notes, perhaps with The Sickness Unto Death uppermost in his mind:
Kierkegaards absolute self is mere spirit. The individual is not the sensuously
developed person, and no property is accorded him beyond the bare neces-
sities. Inwardness does not consist in its fullness but is ruled over by an ascetic
spiritualism.30 Kierkegaard remains unable to process the moment of finite
substitution because he believes the finite to be a property that demands to be
given up even before it has been properly possessed. As we have seen in the
case of Genesis 22, when Kierkegaard imagines Sarah confronting Abraham
about the sacrificial command, the patriarch responds in his own defence: It
is not our child but a phantom (FT 255). As Adorno notes, Kierkegaards
doctrine of existence could [thus] be called realism without reality.31
This realism without reality is precisely what Kafka rejects in Kierkegaard.
In an aphorism from 1918, Kafka writes of Kierkegaards Abraham:
He has too much mind [Geist: mind or spirit], and by means of that mind he
travels across the earth as upon a magic chariot, going even where there are no
roads. And he cannot find out for himself that there are no roads there. In this
way his humble plea to be followed turns into tyranny, and his honest belief that
he is on the road into arrogance. (DF 103)
Another aphorism in which Kafka complains of Kierkegaards Abraham not

having been mixed profoundly enough with the diversity of the world (PP
41) consolidates the criticism contained in the one above.32 According to
Herbert Tauber, Kafkas work expresses a certain mistrust of the spirit and
the word as bearer of the spirit.33 Kafka makes this very point in number 57
of The Zrau Aphorisms: Language can be used only very obliquely of things
outside the physical world, not even metaphorically, since all it knows to do
according to the nature of the physical world is to treat of ownership
and its relations (ZA 58). This, then, is why Kafka cannot teleologically
suspend his relation to the ethical: if he does, he gives up on language itself,
on this world, on being a writer.
Kafkas situation differs from Kierkegaards in that the notion of the
eternal does not offer him an alibi for his actions in this world. As Blanchot
puts it, if Kafka abandons the earthly happiness of a normal life, [he] also
abandons the steadiness of a just life. He makes himself an outlaw, deprives
himself of the ground and the foundation he needs in order to be and, in a
way, deprives the law of this perspective. Blanchot might be alluding here to
a remark Kafka makes to Gustav Janouch regarding Kierkegaards Either/Or:
Kierkegaard faces the problem, whether to enjoy life aesthetically or to

experience it ethically. But this seems to me a false statement of the problem.
The Either-Or exists only in the head of Sren Kierkegaard. In reality one can
achieve an aesthetic enjoyment of life as a result of a humble ethical experience.
But this is only a personal opinion of the moment, which perhaps I shall
abandon after closer inquiry.34
Despite the final qualification, Kafka never gives up on this conviction that
the autonomy of the stages (the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious) exists
only in the head of Sren Kierkegaard. For Kafka, it is unrealistic to separate
aesthetic experience from ethical experience, just as it stretches the bounds of
probability to suspend a humble ethical existence in order to express a purely
religious commitment. This is why Kafkas Abraham never makes it to the
point of the sacrifice, why there was perpetually something or other [around
the house for him] to put in order (PP 41) before he sets out for the country
of Moriah.
In Kafka and the Works Demand, Blanchot advocates reading Kafka
not from the common Christian perspective (according to which there is
this world, then the world beyond, the only one which has value, reality,
and majesty), but always from the Abraham perspective (SL 70). For
Kierkegaard, as we have seen: This is the relationship between Judaism and
Christianity. In the Christian view Isaac is actually sacrificed but then
eternity. In Judaism it is only an ordeal and Abraham keeps Isaac, but then
the whole episode still remains within this life (JP 2:2223; FT 271). Kafka
resembles Abraham in Genesis 22 in the sense that he cannot resolve the trial
of writing by appealing to the greater reality of another world or of another
order of time. Rather than Christian, Kafkas poetics are thus decidedly
Abrahamic. In January 1922, he writes in his Diaries of inhabiting another
world, but without any mention of transcending this one:
I am already a citizen in this other world which compares to the ordinary

world just as the desert compares to cultivated land (I have been forty years
wandering from Canaan), and it as a foreigner that I look back It is indeed a
kind of Wandering in the Wilderness in reverse that I am undergoing: I think I
am skirting the wilderness and am full of childish hopes (particularly as regards
women) that perhaps I shall keep in Canaan after all when all the while I
have been decades in the wilderness and these hopes are merely mirages born of
despair, especially at those times when I am the wretchedest of creatures in the
desert too, and Canaan is perforce my only Promised Land, for no third place
exists for mankind. (D 4078)
As Blanchot glosses this remarkable passage: as far as Kafka is concerned, to

be excluded from the world means to be excluded from Canaan, to wander
in the desert It is as if, cast out of the world, into the error of infinite
migration, he had to struggle ceaselessly to make of this outside another
world and of this error the principle, the origin of a new freedom (SL 70).
Here, significantly, the metaphor of the desert displaces that of the eternal so
as to render truth nomadic rather than transcendental. Kafkas is Abrahams
dilemma because the Akedah concerns not the eternal per se, but rather the
eternal refashioning of another world within this world.
Whereas for Kierkegaard there is linear progression from this world to
the world beyond, Kafka finds himself in the vicious circle of Canaan or
the desert (for no third place exists for mankind). In describing himself
as Wandering in the Wilderness in reverse, Kafka figures the writer as
a quixotic character condemned to the error of the imagination. In this
schema, the writer inhabits a kind of spiritual no-mans land, which makes
him perpetually unsure whether he is wandering towards or away from the
Promised Land in Canaan. Blanchot defines this no-mans land that Kafka
describes in his Diaries as the very space of literature. Art is not religion,
writes Blanchot echoing a remark of Kafkas, but art is justified [by] the
effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and
eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth that lies behind this error (SL 83).
Reached only by incessant contestation of received categories and values,
Kevin Hart explains, this truth is what Blanchot will call the Outside, and
for him it is the last vestige that we have of the sacred. It is the truth that
remains when the sacred has been disengaged from the divine and all that
attends it, especially unity (and hence the unity of truth).35 One might say
that, for Blanchot, the writer seeks the sacred quixotically: not by sacralizing
the world through actual sacrifice but by desacralizing the world through the
production of images. In contrast to Kierkegaard, Kafka finds himself exiled
in the imaginary without any dwelling place or subsistence except images and
the space of images (SL 82). What inaugurates the experience of the outside
for Blanchot is thus the writers rejection of the Christian poetics of eternity.
As Blanchot concludes, Perhaps it must be said that the artist the man
Kafka also wanted to be, the poet, concerned for his art and in search of its
origin is he for whom there exists not even one world. For there exists for
him only the outside, the glistening flow of the eternal outside (SL 83).
Blanchot turns once again to the example of Genesis 22 to explain the
situation of the literary writer in his essay Kafka and Literature:
Literature is not an apartment house where everyone can choose a flat, where if
someone wants to live on the top floor, he will never have to use the back stairs.
The writer cannot just drop out of the game. As soon as he starts writing, he is
within literature and he is there completely: he has to be a good artisan, but he
also has to be a word seeker, an image seeker. He is compromised. That is his
fate. Even the famous instances of total sacrifice change nothing in this situation.
To master literature with the sole aim of sacrificing it? But that assumes that
what one sacrifices exists. So one must first believe in literature, believe in ones
literary calling, make it exist to be a writer of literature and to be it to the
end. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, but what if he was not sure that
he had a son, and what he took for his son was really just a ram? And then,
silence is not enough to make a writer more than a writer, and whoever tries
to leave art to become a Rimbaud still remains an incompetent in the silence.
(WF 15)
It is the fate of the writer to be compromised, to be both an artisan and an

image seeker. For Blanchot, this situation is in no way a matter of choice
one cannot simply choose to opt out of the game as Rimbaud did when he
stopped writing poetry at the age of 20. Blanchot somewhat oddly makes
this point with a building metaphor: Literature is not an apartment house
where everyone can choose a flat, where if someone wants to live on the
top floor, he will never have to use the back stairs. This metaphor begins
to make more sense when placed alongside the following passage from The
Sickness Unto Death in which Kierkegaard presents spiritual compromise
as a function of free choice. If one were to imagine a house consisting of

basement, ground floor and first floor, writes Kierkegaard, tenanted or
planned in such a way that there is, or is meant to be, a difference of social
class between the occupants of each floor and if one were to compare
being a human being with such a house, then the sorry and ludicrous fact
with most people is, alas, that in their own house they prefer to live in the
basement.36 This passage neatly illustrates Adornos point that the concrete
self is for Kierkegaard identical with the bourgeois self.37 The point Blanchot
wants to make in relation to it is that writers are not free to choose to live
on the top floor of their own house as pure spirit. Each must rather, by virtue
of being a writer, mix in with the diversity of the world and sometimes use
the back stairs.
Kafkas situation resembles Abrahams in Genesis 22 in two related
ways. First, his writing forces him to maintain faith in this world: How is it
possible to rejoice in the world except by fleeing to it? (ZA 25), writes Kafka
in number 25 of The Zrau Aphorisms. Secondly, literature causes him to
sacrifice the very condition of possibility for his work, which is to say, time
that will certainly not be given back in the eternal beyond. To what extent,
asks Blanchot:
did [Kafka] connect the ordeal of his heroes with the way in which he himself,
through art, was trying to make his way toward the work and, through the
work, toward something true? Did he often think of Goethes words, It is
by postulating the impossible that the writer procures for himself all of the
possible? This much at least is strikingly evident: the fault which he punished
in K. is also the one with which the artist reproaches himself. Impatience is
the fault. It wants to hurry the story toward its dnouement before the story
has developed in all directions, exhausted the measure of time which is in it,
lifted the indefinite to a true totality where every inauthentic movement, every
partially false image can be transformed into an unshakeable certitude. (SL 81)
For Kafka, impatience is what caused the Fall of Man: There are two cardinal
human vices, he writes in number 3 of The Zrau Aphorisms, from which
all the others derive their being: impatience and carelessness. Impatience got
people evicted from Paradise; carelessness kept them from making their way
back there. Or perhaps there is only one cardinal vice: impatience. Impatience
got people evicted, and impatience kept them from making their way back
(ZA 5).
Kafka is certainly not immune from the cardinal sin of impatience, as he
shows in his Diaries on 20 August 1911 when he writes: I have the unhappy
belief that I havent the time for the least bit of good work, for I really dont
have time for a story, to expand myself in every direction in the world, as I
should have to (D 50). As Blanchot recognizes, removing the obtrusions of
the world would not necessarily satisfy Kafka; for, although producing more
time to write, it would not thereby enable more of an experience of literature:
The world provides time, but takes it up. Throughout the Diaries at least
up to 1915 there are despairing comments, where the thought of suicide
recurs, because he lacks time: time, physical strength, solitude, silence. No
doubt exterior circumstances are unfavourable: he has to write in the evenings
and at night, his sleep is disturbed, anxiousness wears him out. But it would
be vain to believe that the conflict could have been resolved by better organi-
sation of [his] affairs. Later, when illness affords him leisure, the conflict
persists; it deepens, changes form. There are no favourable circumstances.
Even if one gives all ones time to the works demand, all still is not
enough, for it is not a matter of devoting time to the task, of passing ones
time writing, but of passing into another time where there is no longer any
task; it is a matter of approaching that point where time is lost, where one
enters into the fascination and solitude of times absence. When one has all
ones time, one no longer has time, and favourable exterior circumstances
have become the unfavourable fact that there are no longer any circum-
stances. (SL 60)
For Blanchot, being a writer is less a matter of devoting all ones time to
the task of writing than of recognising that in the act of writing one passes
over into another sense of time altogether, one that is no longer oriented
dialectically towards achieving a project or a task even one as abstract,
self-reflexive and apparently unworldly as the freedom to write. What makes
literature an uncanny experience, Blanchot thinks, is the fact that it creates a
negative correlation between world and time such that the more world one
has, the less time one has, but equally, the more time one has, the less world
one has.
Kafka would require more time, but he would also need less world (SL
61). The problem Blanchot elucidates here is a quintessentially Kafkan one:
the goal of freedom from the worlds impingements of having all ones time
to write comes at the cost of the worlds disappearance. Kafkas complaint
about not having enough time to write epitomises the experience of literature
not because it projects the ideal of having all ones time to write, but rather
because it shows this ideal to be achieved by paradoxically moving towards
the point of times (and the worlds) disappearance, just as Abraham does in
Genesis 22 when he is asked to sacrifice the very future of his covenant with
God in the form of Isaac. Kafka wants more time to write a story so that he
might extend himself in every direction in the world. But he only achieves this
goal by pitting time and world against one another.
I might consolidate my point here by briefly revisiting Kafkas fable Give
it up!:
It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my
way to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realised
that it was much later than I had thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of
this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way. I wasnt very well acquainted
with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him
and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: You asking me the
way? Yes, I said, since I cant find it myself. Give it up! Give it up! said he,
and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his
laughter. (BK 1578)
As the fable opens, the narrators experience of time is still linked to the
possibility of reaching his destination. The narrator still has the expansive
hope of gaining not just more time but also access to more of the world.
Time and world still relate dialectically so as to enable the achievement of a
specific task. However, when the policemans monolithically laconic response
dissociates the goal and the way, time no longer synthesizes with the world
to produce the possibility of arriving at the destination. The man has all the
proverbial time in the world, but nowhere to go. The experience of literature
arises for Kafka, I am suggesting, in this taut and suspensive moment in which
goal becomes dissociated from way.
IV Midrash Degree Zero
In light of Blanchots claim that Kafkas situation as a writer resembles

Abrahams situation with Isaac in Genesis 22, we might now return to the
passage from When the Time Comes and see in it the problem of literature.
What Blanchots Abraham experiences on the return to Beersheba when
he mistakes his son for the image of the ram is the error of the imaginary.
The question the image of the ram raises is of how to conceptualize the
space of Isaacs near-death ex post facto. According to the Jewish sources,
this is a space not just of fear and trembling (that is, of Abrahams or of
Isaacs prospective experience of the trial), but also literally of death (that
is, of Sarahs retrospective experience of trial). The account of Sarahs death
immediately follows the Akedah. In Genesis 23.12, we read: Sarah lived
to be a hundred and twenty-seven years old. She died in Kiryat Arba (that
is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan and Abraham went to mourn Sarah and
to weep for her. The Rabbis in Genesis Rabbah use the narrative proximity
of Sarahs death to Isaacs sacrifice to draw the following inference: From
where did [Abraham] come? From Mount Moriah, for Sarah died of that
pain (58:5). According to another midrash, which continues the story
of Satan attempting to dissuade Abraham from going through with the
sacrifice:
When Abraham returned from Mount Moriah, the Satan was angry when he
saw that he had failed to realize his desire to stop Abrahams sacrifice. What
did he do? He went and said to Sarah! Oh Sarah! Have you not heard what
happened? She said to him, No. So he told her, Your old husband took the
lad, Isaac, and brought him for a burnt offering, and the lad was crying and
wailing that he could not be saved. Immediately she began to cry and wail. She
cried three cries corresponding to three blasts [on the shofar], and three wails
corresponding to three ululations [of the shofar]. And her soul took flight and
she died.38
What does it mean to connect Sarahs death to the Akedah? It is perhaps to

reconnect the experience of death in the story to the experience of a human
death. According to Hebrews 11.19, Abraham reasoned that God has the
power to resurrect the dead. On this New Testament reading of the story,
which Kierkegaard reiterates in Fear and Trembling, Abrahams gift of death
remains firmly a matter between Abraham and God. But in the midrashim
I have just cited, Sarah realises the entirely human death, which Abraham
disavows in Genesis 22 by holding to the Christian belief in Gods power to
resurrect Isaac. That is to say, she takes the place of the ram that has already
taken the place of Isaacs death. To connect Sarahs death to the Akedah is
to re-establish to re-inscribe in/through/on the body an economy of
mourning and consolation that Abraham can be thought to have suppressed
in order to carry out the sacrificial decree. In this sense, Sarahs corpse comes
to embody the narrative possibility, eventually elided in Genesis 22, of Isaacs
material death. Here, Sarah dies for Isaac. This second substitution in turn
goes towards recovering the lost materiality of Isaacs death and works to
undo the ideality of Abrahams sacrificial act by forcing him, in mourning the
death of his wife, also to mourn the death of his son. Of course, impossibly:
because this death does not take place as such at least, not in the present.
The rabbinical appeal to Sarahs corpse in Genesis 23 produces a way of
reading Genesis 22 otherwise than in terms of the heroic sense of subjectivity
required to begin on the trial. In this regard, it opposes the Kierkegaardian
reading of the sacrifice. For Kierkegaard, mastering the pain of the trial means
interiorizing the threat of Isaacs accidental death. But to rethink the Akedah
in relation to Sarahs death in Genesis 23, as the Rabbis do, is to rethink
the dialectic of the sacrifice and the pain of the trial in terms of the role
contingency plays in the story. If Isaac is the indispensable condition for the
beginning of the story (Gen. 22.2: Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom
you love), then the ram is the indispensable condition for the end of the
story. The absolutely dark moment of the plot, as I am describing it, occurs
at the point at which the condition for the end of the story interferes with
the condition for the beginning so as to assume priority over it. As the image
of the ram obscures Isaac on the way home from the country of Moriah,
narrative is shown to take place no longer in terms of the movement of

heroic subjectivity but rather in terms of the narrative accident that displaces
the telos of heroic subjectivity. This is the pain of the trial as it refuses to be
contained by Abrahams sacrificial actions as it still offers a way to account
for the contingent fact of Sarahs death.
By linking Sarahs death directly to the Akedah, the Rabbis begin to think
the material presence of death in the story: death as it invokes the mater and
the mother figure as it in turn allows for mourning. Connecting Sarahs death
to Isaacs sacrifice in this way makes it possible to read the substitution of
the ram as otherwise than figurative. Here, Isaacs sacrifice becomes identified
with a type of death that paradoxically gains significance by refusing to stand
in meaningful relation with anything outside it. Sarahs death represents the
non-eventuation of the sacrifice as producing an experience of materiality
outside all living experience which is to say, the experience of the corpse.
The claim I now want to develop is that this is the intended effect of the image
of the ram in Blanchots story. The image confronts Abraham with that which
it was impossible for him to confront during the sacrifice: the thought of the
corpse, the materiality of the others death as it neither coincides nor coheres
with the ideality of the sacrifice.
V The Image and the Corpse
An appendix essay to The Space of Literature, The Two Versions of the

Imaginary (1952), composed around the time of When the Time Comes,
proves pivotal in formulating this link between the image and the corpse.39
Blanchot there proposes two versions of the imaginary. The first concerns the
production of ideal meaning; the second the obscure materiality of which this
production is the telltale sign. Blanchot writes:
The image can, when it wakens or when we awaken it, represent the object to
us in a luminous formal aura; but it is nonetheless with substance that the image
is allied with the fundamental materiality, the still undetermined absence of
form, the world oscillating between adjective and substantive before foundering
in the formless prolixity of indeterminacy. Hence the passivity proper to the
image a passivity which makes us suffer the image even when we ourselves
appeal to it, and makes its fugitive transparency stem from the obscurity of fate
returned to its essence, which is to be a shade. (SL 255)
As this passage indicates, Blanchot only treats the first version of the
imaginary cursorily; it is with the second that he is truly concerned. According
to the first version, the image helps us grasp something formally or ideally.
The image holds the thing or situation at a temporal distance in order for it
to be comprehended within a system of meaning or truth. In the temporal gap

that separates the image from the thing represented, death functions produc-
tively to convert the material, the substantial into the ideal. Put in somewhat
Hegelian terms, the image is thus the life-giving negation of the thing: prolix
matter negated into meaning.
We might bear in mind the thought that idealism has, finally, no guarantee
other than a corpse (SL 258), writes Blanchot in The Two Versions of the
Imaginary. According to the second version of the imaginary, the version
Blanchot privileges as the precondition of the first, the image resembles the
corpse, which in turn resembles nothing. The corpse shares with the image
a propensity to suspend the subjects relation to place. Death suspends the
relation to place the place is missing, the corpse is not in its place. Where
is it? It is not here, and yet it is nowhere else. Nowhere? But then nowhere is
here (SL 256). The corpse suspends the relation to place by overdetermining
its place: by transforming the here and now into nowhere. The corpse is here,
but here in turn becomes a corpse: it becomes here below in absolute terms,
for there is not yet any above to be exalted (SL 256). Here, death does not
represent a productive transformation whereby, according to the first version
of the imaginary, meaning always escapes into another equally meaningful
meaning. Rather, death figures as a bleak substitution of the known and
the living for the dead and unknown, of the here and now for the nowhere.
A second characteristic the image shares with the corpse is the propensity for
self-resemblance. For Blanchot, while no man alive, in fact, bears any resem-
blance yet, the corpse shows itself to be similarity par excellence (SL 258).
The corpse appears in the strangeness of its solitude as that which has disdain-
fully withdrawn from us. Then the feeling of a relation between humans is
destroyed, and our mourning, the care we take of the dead and all the preroga-
tives of our former passions, since they no longer know their direction, fall
back upon us, return toward us. It is striking that at this very moment, when
the cadaverous presence is the presence of the unknown before us, the mourned
deceased begins to resemble himself The cadaver is its own image. It no
longer entertains any relation with this world, where it still appears, except that
of an image, an obscure possibility, a shadow ever present behind the living form
which now, far from separating itself from this form, transforms it entirely into
shadow. (SL 2578)
In Blanchots schema, the image addresses us from a profoundly subtractive

and inhuman place where the relation with the living other is lost and true
mourning becomes impossible.
The image speaks to us, and seems to speak intimately to us of ourselves. But
the term intimately does not suffice. Let us say rather that the image intimately
designates the level where personal intimacy is destroyed and that it indicates in
this movement the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside, the deep,
the sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in their disappearance.
Thus it speaks to us, propos of each thing, of less than this thing, but of us.
And, speaking of us, it speaks to us of less than us, of that less than nothing that
subsists when there is nothing. (SL 254)
The image, like the corpse, is not the same thing at a distance but the thing
as distance, present in its absence (SL 2556). It is substitution that stops us
from projecting the differential of ourselves our productive or lively lack of
self-resemblance onto the object or situation being represented. The image
is in this sense objectivity as it utterly refuses subjective manipulation the
traumatic blow of substitution.
In The Two Versions of the Imaginary, Blanchot is responding directly to
the extraordinary polemic against the image that Levinas launches in Reality
and its Shadow, an essay first published in 1948 in Jean-Paul Sartres journal
Les Temps Modernes. According to Levinas in this essay, the most elementary
procedure of art consists in substituting for the object its image. While a
concept is the object grasped, the intelligible object, the image neutralizes
this real relation. The image marks a fundamental passivity directly visible
in magic, song, music, and poetry.40 It is thus a function of irresponsibility, a
caricature a shadow of being opposed to the conceptual, self-possessed
and muscular work of criticism that integrates the inhuman work of the
artist into the human world.41 While Blanchot likens the image to a corpse,
Levinas claims that every image is a statue, an idol abiding in the derisory
time of the meanwhile. In dying, Levinas writes, the horizon of the future
is given, but the future as a promise of a new present is refused; one is in the
interval, forever an interval.42 As far as he is concerned, the image ultimately
signals a disengagement from reality that is pitifully unaccompanied by any
form of transcendence: Is to disengage oneself from the world always to go
beyond, toward the region of Platonic ideas and toward the eternal which
towers above the world? Can one not speak of a disengagement on the hither
side of an interruption of time by a movement going on on the hither side
of time in its interstices.43
Rather than challenging or displacing any of the descriptive claims Levinas
develops in Reality and its Shadow, in The Two Versions of the Imaginary
Blanchot simply reverses their value judgment, attributing a positive rather
than a negative value to the image. For Blanchot, the maintenance of the
interval of dying is arts raison dtre and thus a sign of strength rather
than weakness. The corpse constitutes the basis of the image and the
imaginary precisely because it neutralizes the relation between living beings
and instantiates the experience of the outside in which the conceptual self-
possession that Levinas prizes fails to gain any dialectical hold.
What happens, for example, when one lives an event as an image?

Blanchot answers his own question in a way that bears directly upon the
passage in When The Time Comes I am seeking to interpret:
To live an event as an image is not to see an image of this event, nor is it to

attribute to the event the gratuitous character of the imaginary. The event really
takes place and yet does it really take place? The occurrence commands
us, as we would command the image. That is, it releases us, from it and from
ourselves. It keeps us outside; it makes of this outside a presence where I does
not recognize itself. This movement implies infinite degrees. (SL 262)
That Abraham comes to live the event of Genesis 22 as an image does not
mean that the event becomes imaginary. The event really takes place; really
has a place. But the place in which the Lord provides in place of: Moriah
only provokes a sense of placelessness. The retroactive effect of the image
is to divest Abraham of his commanding presence in the event, of his ability
to distinguish between his son (the unique and irreplaceable condition for the
beginning of the story) and the ram (the unique and irreplaceable condition
for the end of the story). The passing of the event carries him outside himself
into the space of the outside, which is dedicated not to the resurrection
embodied in conceptual thought [that is, the ideality of the sacrifice, the
hope of Isaacs return], but to the unthinkable singularity that precedes the
concept as its simultaneous condition of possibility and impossibility. The
unthinkable singularity conditioning the possibility and the impossibility
of conceptual thought is the event horizon that resides outside the dialectic
of sacrifice. This is not the ideality of Isaacs death, which always remains
thinkable or calculable within the dialectic of the sacrifice. It is rather Isaacs
death as it can be linked to Sarahs corpse death as it attaches itself to
the incalculable and material response of the other to the sacrifice, death as
it remains involved with the substitution at the end of the story. The contin-
gency that cannot be accounted for or sublated here is the sense of death that
attaches itself to the outside perspective. Abraham begins to experience this
perspective this non-productive relation to death in the persistence of
the image of the ram, that is, as he remains unable to reverse the effect of the
substitution and becomes aware of the terrifying incommensurability opening
up between his fated act and his character.
In supplanting Isaacs identity on the return to Beersheba, the image of
the ram reverses the traditional meaningfulness of the story, transforming
it from histoire [story, history] into histoire accablante: story/history which
overwhelms history. The power of the image, as Blanchot here invokes it,
is the power to reverse the first version of the imaginary into the second,
to interrupt or un-work the possibility of meaningful or idealised temporal
slippage upon which the first version is based. Here, then, meaning does not
escape into another meaning, but into the other of all meaning (SL 263).
According to the second version of the imaginary, the statement to which the
corpse attests in its self-resemblance that man is made in his image
must first be understood as Man is unmade according to his image (SL 260,
original emphasis). This is because where there is complete self-resemblance,
there is no longer any humanity, any subjectivity, any character.
On 4 June 1966, Ren Magritte wrote to Michel Foucault of his decision to
replace the figures in Manets painting, Le Balcon (1868) with coffins: Why
did I see coffins where Manet saw pale figures? Perspective: Le Balcon de
Manet [1950] implies its own answer: The image[,] my painting reveals where
the dcor of the Balcony is suitable for placing coffins.44 Blanchot similarly
understands the Greek myth in which the poet-songster Orpheus travels to
the underworld to retrieve his dead wife Eurydice as a story of the creative
act because of the way it substitutes the corpse for the pale figure. Perhaps,
as Kierkegaard suggests in Fear and Trembling, the gods deceived Orpheus
with an ethereal phantom instead of the beloved deceived him because he
was a zither player and not a man (FT 27).45 But this does not change the
fact that the image Orpheus must use in his song to recover Eurydice is the
image or sense of self-resemblance she projects as a corpse. As Blanchot
notes in The Writing of the Disaster, The mortal leap of the writer without
which he would not write is necessarily an illusion to the extent that, in order
really to be accomplished, it must not take place.46 For Blanchot, Orpheus
great activity that of going to the underworld by the power of his own
will is an illusion and thus a passivity predicated on the double sense of the
corpse. Orpheus makes his salto mortale only by failing to leave Eurydices
side. The anachronistic precondition for his art turns out to be the sense of
incommensurable exteriority he feels before her corpse. The writer, one might
say, is alone before the corpse rather than God.
For Blanchot, literature begins with the phenomenal passivity one experi-
ences before the corpse. As he writes in Literature and the Right to Death,
literature wants Lazarus in the tomb and not Lazarus brought back into the
daylight, the one who already smells bad (WF 327). The passivity proper
to the experience of the corpse is that proper to literature itself: a passivity
which makes us suffer the image even when we ourselves appeal to it, and
makes its fugitive transparency stem from the obscurity of fate returned to
its essence, which is to be a shade (SL 255). In Blanchots account of Genesis
22, Abraham suffers the image as Orpheus suffers the loss of Eurydice
as the obscurity of his fate returned to its essence. This is his sacrificial act
as it begins to resemble itself, detach itself from the question of his character
and preclude him (or anyone else, for that matter) from identifying with it
or from gaining a sense of identity from it. As Blanchot writes in When the
Time Comes: To bind oneself to a reflection who would consent to that?
But to bind oneself to what has no name and no face and to give that endless,
wandering resemblance the depth of a mortal instant, to lock oneself up with

it and thrust it along with oneself to the place where all resemblance yields
and is shattered that is what passion wants (WTC 258). To live an event
as an image to bind oneself passionately to its reflection or shadow is to
experience the event as it has become a corpse and the blow of substitution.
Read in these terms, Genesis 22 presents not just the making of Abrahams
character, as Kierkegaard suggests, but also as Kafka and Blanchot insist, the
unmaking of Abrahams character.
VI The Instant of My Death
Rather than the approach to Moriah or the time of Abrahams trial, Blanchot
thinks it is the rams substitution for Isaac that constitutes the absolutely
dark moment of the plot. In this moment, which Blanchot emphasizes in his
account of Genesis 22 independently of Kierkegaard and Kafka, the impos-
sibility of death functions to produce an image of the event that returns
Abraham to the present and to the obscure matter of his fate. By evoking the
impossibility of death in this way, the treatment of Genesis 22 in When the
Time Comes calls to mind a devastating story bound up with Blanchots own
fate: namely, The Instant of My Death (1994). This rcit recounts the near-
death by firing squad of a young man we can recognize as the young Blanchot.
We now know that Blanchot himself was almost summarily executed in the
summer of 1944 when the Vlassov army passed by his family home in Quain,
Sane-et-Loire. In his speech at Blanchots cremation (on 24 February 2003),
A Witness Forever, Derrida testifies to receiving a package from Blanchot
containing LInstant de ma mort and a letter that begins: July 20 [1994], fifty
years ago I experienced the happiness of being almost shot. Twenty-five years
ago, we set foot on the moon.47
In a remarkable twist of fate Blanchot thus comes to play the part of
Isaac, becoming a victim of circumstance, a purely vicarious victim as he
momentarily and spectrally brushes up against death. In The Instant of
My Death, Blanchot immediately imbues the event with sacrificial overtones.
When the Nazi lieutenant howls in shamefully normal French for the young
man and his family to get outside, the young man did not try to flee but
advanced slowly, in an almost priestly manner (ID/D 2). After the inhabitants
of the chteau are all outside, the lieutenant shakes the man, shows him the
bullet casings which are evidence of the fighting that has been going on and
then places his men in a row in order to hit, according to the rules, the human
target. At this point, the man already less young (one ages quickly)
implores his captor, At least let my family go inside. This request is granted
and the mans ninety-four year old aunt, younger mother, sister and sister-in-
law slowly make their way back into the house. Just as the man is about to be
shot, there is a saving distraction: the considerable noise of a nearby battle

suddenly calls the lieutenant away from the imminent sacrifice. In a final,
strange act of grace, the lieutenants men take matters into their own hands:
first by telling the protagonist that they are not Germans but in fact Russians
from the Vlassov army and then by making a sign for him to disappear.
Stunned, the man moves away and eventually finds himself in a distant forest
(ID/D 5).
A feeling of incommensurable lightness accompanies the failure of the
protagonists death to take place as expected. This feeling of lightness
overturns the initial assumption of the event as an entirely private
experience and enables others (including the protagonists own self as
another) to identify with the events passing: that is, to live the event as an
image.
There remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer still
to come the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed
from life? the infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the
absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond. I know, I imagine that this
unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the
death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death inside him. I
am alive. No, you are dead. (ID/D 79)
Why would anguish be loath to be summoned outside? It is just as fine

outside as inside,48 asks Blanchot in From Anguish to Language in a
pointed remark directed squarely at Kierkegaard. For Blanchot, the neutrali-
zation of the existential relation contained in the image is accompanied by
the awakening to suffering outside the self: No doubt what then began for
the young man was the torment of injustice (ID/D 7). What conditions this
awakening this tormented fall back into existence is the imagination of
the corpse (No, you are dead) that immediately empties the affirmation of
survival (I am alive) of any sense of absolution. In this unmaking of the first
version of the imaginary by the second, the I becomes without a self, without
existence, without. As Derrida remarks in A Witness Forever: I am alive.
No, you are dead, these two voices compete for or share speech in us. And
conversely: I am dead. No, you are alive.49
In his essay Reading Kafka, Blanchot reflects upon literatures astonishing
capacity to generate a state of permanent peripeteia:
If each word, each image, each story can signify its opposite and the opposite
of that as well then we must seek the cause of that in the transcendence of
death that makes it attractive, unreal, and impossible, and that deprives us of the
only truly absolute ending, without depriving us of its mirage. Death dominates
us, but it dominates us by its impossibility. (WF 9)
In When the Time Comes, Blanchot uses the trial of Genesis 22 to show
how literary narrative deprives us of the only truly absolute ending, without
depriving us of its mirage. When Abraham confronts the mirage of his sons
near-death on the return home from Moriah, he not only confronts the
traumatic kernel of his purely private religious act but also the condition of
narrative itself. As he returns to the present, if only to obliterate the eternality
of his act, he experiences the transcendence of death that makes it attractive,
unreal, and impossible. This is the image of the end of the story as it displaces
the existentiality of the beginning: the ram as it obscures the beloved son. In
this moment, death dominates him, but by its impossibility.
VII Negotiating with the Dead
In a letter to Evelyn London, Blanchot approves of the story of Orpheus as

an interpretive lens for his works of fiction: the subject seems to me very
justified: Death Sentence, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me,
When the Time Comes and in a more provoking way (perhaps, but perhaps
not) The Last Man, Awaiting Oblivion are carried by this movement.50
Blanchot would perhaps also approve of what Margaret Atwood writes in
her book Negotiating with the Dead with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
uppermost in her mind: All writers must go from now to once upon a time
all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must be careful not to be
captured and held immobile by the past.51 As Atwood quickly qualifies, the
descent can only be half even if the most interesting half of the story. For
there can be no story no negotiating with the dead without a return to
the present that reinstates the divide between life and death as impermeable.
The dead may guard the treasure, Atwood continues, but its useless treasure
unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter
time once more which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm
of the readers, the realm of change.52 Orpheus fateful turn expresses not just
an insouciant, transgressive desire for his beloved, but also a refusal to be
held immobile by the past or transfixed by his loss. It circumscribes the fragile
enterprise of writing by reinstating the basis of all storytelling: the return to
the present, the reascent to the earths surface to be once more among others.
That the writer must be careful not to be captured and held immobile by
the past also seems to be the point of the two versions of An old saying that
Kierkegaard intended to include but ultimately excluded as epigraphs to Fear
and Trembling.
love. Will they read me? Yes, for they come back as posterity.
An old saying
love. Will they read me? No!
An old saying slightly altered (FT 244)
With this defiant No! the writer gives up the desire to monumentalize
himself through the act of writing. The return to the present paradoxically
disconnects him from all sense of historical continuity indeed, even from
the instant of his own death. The paradox to emerge here is that writing is
a negotiating with the dead that takes place nowhere else but here and now.
Orpheus must reascend to the surface because, in a sense, he has never left
it. The myth is ultimately about how to avoid becoming resentful when ones
lived experience becomes a descent into the imaginary.
The section of The Gay Science in which Friedrich Nietzsche introduces the
notion of the eternal return is entitled The greatest weight. In it, Nietzsche
posits the thought of the eternal return as a paradoxical way to escape living
as a man of ressentiment:
If this thought [of eternal return] gained possession of you, it would change you
as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, Do you
desire this once more and innumerable times more? would lie upon your actions
like the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to
yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal
confirmation and seal?53
Blanchots fiction with the same desire to escape the problem of ressen-
timent nonetheless figures this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal not
as a great weight upon existence but as an incommensurable lightness a
moment without existence, an experience of the image and of the imaginary.
Chapter 5
Coda: Agnes and the Merman
In the third problema of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard recasts and then
comments on the Nordic legend of Agnes and the Merman. This legend is
the subject matter of a Hans Christian Andersen play, written in 1834 and
performed by all accounts unsuccessfully in Copenhagen in April and
May 1843. Adorno notes that Kierkegaard makes a change to this narrative
that is so small and perfect that it can be compared only with what the sagas
underwent at the hands of the attic tragedians: the enigmatic step that leads
out of nature by remaining within it; the reconciling redemption of sacrifice.1
According to Adorno, Kierkegaard acknowledges something in the story of
Agnes and the Merman that he completely fails to acknowledge in the story of
Genesis 22: namely, that narrative effects the move from passion to reconcili-
ation without a genuine sacrifice taking place.
Kierkegaard writes:
The merman is a seducer who rises up from the chasm and in wild lust seizes
and breaks the innocent flower standing on the seashore in all her loveliness
This has been the poets interpretation until now. Let us make a change.
The merman was a seducer. He has called to Agnes and by his wheedling
words has elicited what was hidden in her. In the merman she found what
she was searching for as she stared down to the bottom of the sea. Agnes is
willing to go with him He is already standing on the beach, crouching to
dive out into the sea and plunge down with his booty then Agnes looks
at him once more, not fearfully, not despairingly, not proud of her good luck,
not intoxicated with desire, but in absolute faith and in absolute humility,
like the lowly flower she thought herself to be, and with this look [Blik]
she entrusts her whole destiny to him in absolute confidence. And look! The
sea no longer roars, its wild voice is stilled; natures passion, which is the
mermans strength, forsakes him, and there is deadly calm [Blikstille] and
Agnes is still looking at him this way. The merman breaks down. He cannot
stand the power of innocence, his natural element is disloyal to him, and he
cannot seduce Agnes. He takes her home again, he explains that he wanted
to show her how beautiful the sea is when it is calm, and Agnes believes him.
The he returns home, and the sea is wild, but not as wild as the mermans
despair. He can seduce Agnes, he can seduce a hundred Agneses, he can make
any girl infatuated but Agnes has won, the merman has lost her. Only as
booty can she be his; he cannot give himself faithfully to any girl, because he
is indeed only a merman. (FT 945)
Kierkegaards merman tries to retain control over the situation when his
powers fail him by keeping his identity as a seducer a secret. This decision
to adopt a mask or a veil has the effect of magnifying his despair, since it
prevents him from ever being with Agnes. For Adorno, Kierkegaards retelling
of the myth is significant for what it presents and then proceeds to disavow:
a moment of reconciliation. In the story, the merman becomes impotent and
yet Agnes still desires to go with him: she is still looking at him this way. This
gesture this look by which Agnes holds true to her initial desire has a
genuinely transformative effect. As Adorno points out, Sacrifice disappears
and, and in its place dialectic holds its breath for an instant.2 Here, in other
words, the subjects passion for sacrificial renunciation is thwarted because it
is no longer in dialectical conflict with what is outside it.
What Kierkegaard misses in his commentary on the Agnes myth is that the
merman is not simply a merman when natures passion forsakes him. At this
moment in the narrative, his identity is being determined by what is outside
him, by his enigmatic encounter with Agnes, which suddenly makes it impos-
sible for us to tell who exactly is doing the seducing and who exactly is being
more active. Here, then, the story is no longer taking place as a function of
the pre-established identity of its characters (the merman is a seducer; Agnes is
an innocent) but rather in terms of a substitution or trading of identities that
results from the characters interaction in a narrative (the merman becomes
innocent; Agnes becomes seductive). The merman retains his former identity
as a seducer only by renouncing the transformative effects of his contact with
Agnes that is, by rejecting the outside as a determiner of identity and the
true site of reconciliation.
What Kierkegaard ultimately disavows by renouncing the effects of
narrative experience on identity is the transformative power of desire. In
Either/Or, he defines desire as dialectical: This is the main defect of every-
thing human, that it is only through opposition that the object of desire is
possessed.3 But in his retelling of the Nordic myth of Agnes and the Merman,
it is the defect of the merman (or half man) rather than the human to desire
purely dialectically. As Adorno notes in his commentary, Agnes holds true to
nature till the end.4 This means that she does not oppose herself to the object
of her desire when this object is rendered momentarily and unaccountably
passive and powerless. Rather, she comes to possess the merman in this
instant insofar as she forces him to confront a sense of passivity of which
he is neither the origin nor the cause a type of passivity that is not simply
melancholic or self-absorbed.
When they retell Genesis 22 in the wake of Fear and Trembling, Blanchot
and Kafka both utilise this non-dialectical sense of desire originating outside
the subject in the inter-subjective space of narrative to critique Kierkegaards
melodramatic and perhaps solipsistic presentation of the story. Each
author in his turn comes to figure woman as desire that undoes the interiorising
Coda: Agnes and the Merman 133
relation of the male subject to his task that one finds in Kierkegaard. In his
fable Abraham, Kafka thus imagines Sarah laughing at the impossible
demand of Genesis 22 and so displacing the Kierkegaardian Abrahams
zealous equation of faith with work. The imaginative possibility of Sarahs
laughter functions to keep the narrative of Genesis 22 from becoming the
sole province of an active and autonomous subject. For Kafka, significantly,
narrative has the effect of diminishing rather than of expanding subjectivity.
As he writes in number 90 of his Zrau Aphorisms: Two alternatives: either
to make oneself infinitesimally small, or to be so. The second is perfection
and hence inaction; the first a beginning and therefore action (ZA 89, trans.
mod.).5 The motivating factor for action in Kafka is this desire to become
small and thereby approach the perfect state of inaction.
Blanchot subtly connects desire to narrative in the passage from When the
Time Comes that I examined in the last chapter. He writes:
I met this woman I called Judith: she was not bound to me by a relationship of
friendship or enmity, happiness or distress; she was not a disembodied instant,
she was alive. And yet, as far as I can understand, something happened to her
that resembled the story of Abraham. When Abraham came back from the
country of Moria, he was not accompanied by his child but by the image of a
ram and it was with a ram that he had to live from then on. Others saw the son
in Isaac, but they didnt know what had happened on the mountain, but he saw
the ram in his son, because he had made a ram for himself out of his child. A
devastating story. I think Judith had gone to the mountain, but freely. No one
was freer than she was, no one troubled herself less about powers and was less
involved with the justified world. She could have said, It was God who wanted
it, but for her that amounted to saying, It was I alone who did it. An Order?
Desire transfixes all orders. (WTC 253)
Blanchot imagines Judith, an ethereal character in his narrative whose name

means Jewess, going to Mount Moriah no longer out of obligation to God
but freely. Because she wills the sacrifice upon herself, it becomes the same for
her to say It was God who wanted it as It was I alone who did it. Desire
transfixes all orders: in willing the sacrifice so actively, Judith simultane-
ously renders the will of God inactive. In the desired or willed moment, the
emphasis shifts from the activity of beginning and of following the command
to the perfection of being inactive (the experience of delay and of substi-
tution). Judith thus represents a sense of transformative desire, which, in
bringing about a moment of inactivity, renders all identity small. She figures
the objectivity of narrative to the extent that she prefigures the diminishment
of subjectivity that all narrative brings about.
In this book, I have attempted to establish the rams substitution in verse
13 as the most properly literary moment in Genesis 22. It is in this moment
that identity becomes truly contingent upon narrative development. The

absolutely dark moment of the plot is not, as Kierkegaard maintains,
Abrahams decision to set out to sacrifice his son. Here, desire functions
existentially and dialectically to produce a heroic or expansive sense of
subjectivity. Abrahams love of/obedience to God here collides with his
love of/obedience to his son. As a result of the divine command to sacrifice,
Abraham teleologically suspends the ethical: he gives up on his ethical duty to
his family and achieves eternal individuality through a purely religious duty.
But in the moment of the rams substitution for Isaac, the human will
stops functioning dialectically or expansively, since it is no longer opposed
to what is outside it. As Ive tried to show, the outside and the imagination
of the outside become genuine problems for the critical understanding as a
result of the rams substitution. In this anachronistic instant, eternity holds its
breath and the problem of finitude re-expresses itself. Abraham sees his own
mortality the instant of his own death in the reprieve of Isaacs death.
He thus experiences narrative as that which annihilates his self-sacrificial
passion.
Taking shape here is what we might call the primal scene of the silent
witness: narrative is generated by the other silently bearing witness to the
annihilation of the sacrificial impulse within me. Constituting the narrative is
the fact that the other witnesses me as I am unable, despite my best efforts,
to effect real oblivion. Thus, Isaac silently witnesses Abraham desisting from
the sacrifice. Thus, Agnes silently witnesses the merman unable to convert his
seduction. As Garff puts it: Agnes says nothing at all, she only sees, just like
Isaac. But with this gaze (which makes the world as still as glass [Blikstille])
she gives herself so entirely to the merman that he collapses in impotence
and cannot seduce her.6 Agnes opens herself entirely to the merman by
bearing witness to him. As Levinas writes in God, Death, and Time: Bearing
witness is not expressed in or by dialogue but in the formula here I am. As a
dedication of oneself, this witnessing is an opening of self that expresses the
surplus of exigency that expands as the exigency of responsibility is filled.7
For Kierkegaard, as Adorno notes, the sole organ of reconciliation is the
word.8 But Ive been arguing that reconciliation takes place at the same time
as transgression and thus prior to the word. This is the poetics of the silent
witness a poetics, we should note, that Kierkegaard and Derrida entirely
ignore in their respective accounts of the Akedah.
Literature suspends death only by brushing up against it and by bearing
witness to it. The writer writes in relation to death and literary images
are in a way strange burials by which authors substitute fictional deaths for
real ones. The sacrifice of Isaac is archetypal, Ive been arguing, to the extent
that all narrative has for its condition Scheherazades law: the reprieve of the
instant of my death. Vouchsafing the future of the covenant between God and
Abraham is the meaningful suspension of human death. This, we should note,
Coda: Agnes and the Merman 135
is the symbolism of the name Abraham gives to the place of his sons averted
sacrifice: So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide [Jehovah-jireh].
And to this day it is said, On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.
(Gen. 22.14).9 But it is equally important here not to forget about the death of
the nonhuman animal at the end of the story. What links images to the notion
of sacrifice is the sense in which they require for their expression the horizon
of a real death and, in the case of Genesis 22, this horizon is provided by the
death of the ram. On my view, the truly literary moment in Genesis 22 thus
arrives when Abraham recovers the sense of the world by way of a visible or
palpable substitution: that is, when he sees the image of the ram instead of his
son on the way home to Beersheba.
The American poet W. S. Merwins poem Elegy surely one of the shortest
in the English language consists of a single, unpunctuated line: Who would
I show it to.10 Here, the poet enters into a kind of sacrificial communion with
his subject by refusing to produce the poem as an heroic amplification of the
lost others self, as a journey to the underworld, as an elegy. His refusal to show
the relationship that he mourns does not constitute a form of hiding (like the
Mermans botched attempt to seduce Agnes in Kierkegaards retelling of the
myth). This is because, in the moment of apparent self-sacrificial refusal, the
lost other nonetheless bears witness silently, from beyond the grave to
the production of the poem. In not speaking of or giving voice to its subject,
the poem attests to the impossibility of recuperating the other by sacrificing
its own identity as a poem. Here, reconciliation is being thought to take place
via an invisible and pre-discursive exchange of identities. Perfection lies in
inactivity, in the telos of becoming small, in the formula here I am. Merwins
poem thus lays claim to a form of reconciliation that resembles transgression
in taking place outside of and prior to formal discourse. If one unfolds it, it
has, as a narrative archetype, the moment of the rams substitution for Isaac
in Genesis 22.
Notes
1. Testing the Tested
1 Franz Kafka, The Zrau Aphorisms, with an Introduction and Afterword by

Roberto Calasso, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Harvill Secker, 2008), 74.
Hereafter abbreviated as ZA.
2 R. W. L. Moberly, Bible, Theology, and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 71.
3 Samuel Sandmel provides a common list of Abrahams ten trials in Philos Place
in Judaism: A Study of Conceptions of Abraham in Jewish Literature (New York:
KTAV Publishing House, 1971): departure from Ur [Gen. 11]; the famine in
Egypt [Gen. 12]; the abduction of Sarah [Gen. 12]; the banishment of Ishmael
[Gen. 21]; the banishment of Hagar [Gen. 21]; the covenant of Genesis 15; the
fiery furnace of Ur [apocryphal]; the war of the kings [Gen. 14]; circumcision
[Gen. 17]; the binding of Isaac [Gen. 22] (87 n506).
4 Andr Parrot, Abraham and His Times, trans. James H. Farley (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1968), 152.
5 Cited in Moberly, Bible, Theology, and Faith, 76.
6 Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, in German and English, (ed.) Nahum H.
Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 43, 42. Hereafter abbreviated as PP.
For Kafkas letter to Klopstock see Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and
Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), 285.
7 Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 12. Hereafter abbreviated as WF.
8 Moberly, Bible, Theology, and Faith, 723.
9 Jacques Derrida, Abraham, the Other, in Judeities: Questions for Jacques
Derrida, (ed.) Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (New
York: Fordham, 2007), 1, original emphasis.
10 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. Fable.
11 Jacques Rancire, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London
and New York: Verso, 2009), 73.
12 Cited in Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments
in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), 56.
13 James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (London:
Pimlico, 2000), xv.
14 Donald J. Wiseman, Abraham in History and Tradition, Bibliotheca Sacra 134
(April-June 1977), 1256.
Notes 137
15 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,

trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1957),
9.
16 Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics (Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009), 255.
17 Hlne Cixous, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, (ed.) Susan
Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 28.
18 Martin Luther, Luthers Works, Vol. 4, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 215, (ed.)
Jaroslav Pelikan and Walter A. Hansen, trans. George V. Schick (Saint Louis:
Concordia Publishing House, 1964), 94.
19 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, (ed.) Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 129.
20 See Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, trans. N. J. Dawood
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 1520.
21 Elias Canetti, Kafkas Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, trans. Christopher
Middleton (London: Caldar and Boyars, 1974), 8990, original emphasis.
22 Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison, Wisconsin:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 93.
23 Ibid., 912.
24 Ibid., 108.
25 Sandor Goodhart, A Land that Devours Its Inhabitants: Midrashic Reading,
Emmanuel Levinas, and Prophetic Exegesis, Shofar 26.4 (2008), 18.
26 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka 191023, (ed.) Max Brod (London:
Vintage, 1999), 342. Hereafter abbreviated as D.
27 Franz Kafka, Dearest Father, Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and
Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 99100. Hereafter abbre-
viated as DF.
28 Walter H. Sokel, Between Gnosticism and Jehovah: The Dilemma in Kafkas
Religious Attitude, South Atlantic Review 50.1 (Jan. 1985), 3.
29 Guenther Anders, Kafka: Ritual Without Religion: The Modern Intellectuals
Shamefaced Atheism, Commentary 8 (1949), 561.
30 Ibid., 562, original emphasis.
31 Ibid., 562.
32 Ibid., 563.
33 Ibid., 563.
34 For a recent example of this type of reading see Michael Wood, Literature
and the Taste for Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
6894.
35 Anders, Kafka: Ritual Without Religion, 562.
36 Franz Kafka, The Basic Kafka, (ed.) Erich Heller (New York: Washington Square
Press, 1979), 253. Hereafter abbreviated as BK.
37 Derrida, Abraham, the Other, 34.
38 Cited in Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural
Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 43.
39 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. Err.
138 Notes
40 Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman and J.

Hillis Miller, Deconstruction and Criticism (London and Henley: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1979), 90.
41 Cixous, White Ink, 17.
42 Sandmel, Philos Place in Judaism, 29, original emphasis.
43 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Second Edition) / Literature in Secret, trans.
David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 157.
Hereafter abbreviated as GD/LIS.
44 Sokel, Between Gnosticism and Jehovah, 101, original emphasis.
45 Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling / Repetition, (ed.) and trans. Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1983), 22. Hereafter abbreviated as FT.
46 Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 12.
47 Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003),
349.
48 Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader:
Fiction and Literary Essays, (ed.) George Quasha (Barrytown, New York:
Station Hill Press, 1999), 253. Hereafter abbreviated as WTC.
49 Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 56.
50 Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 257.
51 Genesis Rabbah: The Judaic Commentary to the Book of Genesis, Vol. 2, trans.
Jacob Neusner (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1985), 56:7.
52 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 612. Hereafter abbreviated as
SL.
53 Bruce Feiler, Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths (New York:
William Morrow, 2002), 86, original emphasis.
54 Cited in Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley:
Routledge, 1982), 157.
55 Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction
and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 2000), 3. Hereafter abbreviated as ID/D.
2. The Melancholic Imagination: Kierkegaards Abraham
Some of the material from this chapter originally appeared in The Poetics of Distance:
Kierkegaards Abraham, Literature & Theology 21.2 (2007): 160177; doi:10.1093/
litthe/frm009
1 Sren Kierkegaard, The Laughter Is On My Side: An Imaginative Introduction
to Kierkegaard, (ed.) Roger Poole and Henrik Strangerup (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), 238.
2 Joakim Garff, Sren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 137.
Notes 139
3 Kierkegaard, The Laughter Is On My Side, 238.

4 Cited in Garff, Sren Kierkegaard, 132.
5 Sren Kierkegaard, Sren Kierkegaards Journals and Papers, 17, (ed.) and
trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 196778), entry no. 1550. Hereafter
abbreviated as JP followed by the volume and serial entry number. In his
Journals and Papers, Kierkegaard cites Herder from Zur Literatur und Kunst
XVI: Schreibe sprach jene Stimme und der Prophet antwortete fr wen? Die
Stimme sprach fr die Todten, fr die Du in der Vorwelt lieb hast. Werden sie
mich lesen? Ja, denn sie kommen zurck als Nachwelt (JP 5:5560). He later
notes: The motto for Fear and Trembling should have started with Write.
For whom? Write for the dead, for those in the past whom you love.
Will they read me? No! (JP 5:5674).
6 Cited in Garff, Sren Kierkegaard, 251, original emphasis.
7 Garff, Sren Kierkegaard, 254.
8 Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), 29.
9 Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 255.
10 Bruce H. Kirmmse, (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His
Contemporaries, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 261.
11 Benjamin, Illuminations, 129.
12 Philo, De Abrahamo, trans. F. H. Colson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1959), 87. A few striking similarities between Kierkegaards and
Philos accounts of the sacrifice in Genesis 22 suggest that Kierkegaard may have
been familiar with Philo. Philo not only emphasises the fact of Abrahams silence/
concealment but also goes on to oppose the patriarch to the Greek tragic hero. He
writes, perhaps with Agamemnons sacrifice of Iphigenia in mind: Indeed they say
that among the Greeks men of the highest reputation, not only private individuals
but kings, have with little thought of their offspring put them to death, and thereby
saved armed forces of great strength and magnitude when enlisted as their allies,
and destroyed them without striking a blow when arrayed with enemies (9091).
Philo vehemently opposes the public act of the classical tragic hero to the radical
solitude of Abrahams sacrifice: Surely, too, [Abraham] had nothing to fear from
man, since no one knew of the oracular message which he alone received; nor
was he under pressure of any public misfortune which could be remedied by the
immolation of a child of special worth What praise could there be in a solitude
where no one was present to report his fame afterwards, but even the two servants
had been purposefully left afar off lest he should be making a boastful parade by
bringing witness to his pious conduct? (934). Here is a single piece of evidence
that Kierkegaard read Philo. On 11 Feb 1839, Kierkegaard writes in his journals:
Philo says somewhere: [The godless is fatherless, and the one who claims many
gods is the son of a prostitute] (JP 5:5370). The Hongs, however, note that this
line has not yet been located in any of Philos works.
13 Flavius Josephus, The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans. William Whiston
(Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1869), 36.
140 Notes
14 Luther, Luthers Works, Vol. 4, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 215, 96, 98.
15 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 652.
16 For a good discussion of the relation of Genesis 21 to Genesis 22 see Mark
Brett, Abrahams Heretical Imperative: A Response to Jacques Derrida, in
Charles H. Cosgrove, (ed.), The Meanings We Choose: Hermeneutical Ethics,
Indeterminacy and the Conflict of Interpretations (New York and London: T.
and T. Clark International, 2004): 16778.
17 As Jill Robbins notes in Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity
in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas, The grammatical ambiguity of my son
in Hebrew (in the vocative case or in apposition to the lamb, in the accusative
case) allows two possible readings [of Abrahams response to Isaac on the way
to Moriah]: God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, O my
son or God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, namely,
my son ([Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 1623).
18 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 186.
19 Ibid.
20 Kirmmse, (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard, 367.
21 Sylviane Agacinski, Apart: Deaths and Conceptions of Sren Kierkegaard,
trans. Kevin Newmark (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1988), 137.
22 Cited in Jerome I. Gellman, Abraham! Abraham! Kierkegaard and the Hasidim
on the Binding of Isaac (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 34.
23 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 157.
24 Kirmmse, (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard, 42. This statement was reported
by Raphael Meyer (a childhood friend of Regines) but has not been found in
Kierkegaards Letters and Documents or in his Papers.
25 Louis Begley, The Tremendous World That I Have Inside My Head. Franz Kafka:
A Biographical Essay (New York: Atlas & Co., 2008), 156.
26 Cited in Robbins, Prodigal Son, 74. According to Robbins in Altered Reading:
Levinas and Literature: While acknowledging in effect the compelling quality
of Kierkegaards retelling of Genesis 22 in Fear and Trembling, indeed, its
inescapable contribution within the history of exegesis, Levinas rhetorical
question Can one still be Jewish without Kierkegaard? simply points out
that while it is as if Kierkegaard supplied something that we thought, within
the dominant conceptuality and the negative and privative interpretation of
Judaism, that we were lacking, the Jewish exegetical tradition about the Akedah
is already compelling. In fact, its distinctive intelligibility has been covered up
and its hidden resources need to be critically retrieved ([Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1999], 112).
27 Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: The
Athlone Press, 1996), 74. Levinas also reprimands Kierkegaard in this essay for
not mentioning Abraham entering into dialogue with God to intercede in favour
of Sodom and Gomorrah (74). Here, however, Levinas is mistaken. Kierkegaard
writes: But Abraham had faith. He did not pray for himself, trying to influence
Notes 141
the Lord; it was only when righteous punishment fell upon Sodom and
Gomorrah that Abraham came forward with his prayers (FT 21). Kierkegaard
doesnt emphasise Abrahams intercession on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah in
Genesis 18 because he believes the trial of faith to concern the individual and the
knight of faith to be always absolute isolation (FT 79). According to Gellman
in Abraham! Abraham! Kierkegaard and the Hasidim on the Binding of Isaac:
neither the akedah story nor the Sodom episode serves as a paradigm for Jewish
spirituality. Instead, we are to see the two episodes as pointing precisely to the
lack of a one-sided paradigm for Jewish spirituality. So seen, the akedah, and
how it functioned for Abraham, signifies an ability to not even think in terms of
a paradigmatic episode for our spiritual lives (108).
28 Mark C. Taylor in Robert L. Perkins, (ed.), Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling:
Critical Appraisals (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1981),
165, original emphasis.
29 Cited in Geza Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961), 194. The Neofiti Targum 1: Genesis renders the verse
thus: From before the Lord has he prepared a lamb [for] the burnt offering;
otherwise you will be the lamb of the burnt offering. And the two of them
went together with a perfect heart [a heart at ease] (trans. Martin McNamara
[Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992], 116). Genesis Rabbah 56:4 renders it: God
himself will provide the lamb, O my son; and if not, thou art for a burnt
offering.
30 Claus Westermann, Genesis 1236: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion
(London: SPCK, 1985), 354.
31 Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limit: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2009), 182. Derrida does briefly give the ram in
Genesis 22 a voice in his essay Rams: One imagines the anger of Abrahams and
Aarons ram, the infinite revolt of the ram of all holocausts. But also, figuratively,
the violent rebellion of all scapegoats, all substitutes. Why me? (Sovereignties
in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, (ed.) Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen
[New York: Fordham University Press, 2005], 157). He also considers the rams
perspective parenthetically in The Animal That Therefore I Am: (ask Abrahams
ass or ram or the living beast that Abel offered to God: they know what is about
to happen to them when men say Here I am to God, then consent to sacrifice
themselves, to sacrifice their sacrifice, or to forgive themselves) ((ed.) Marie-
Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills [New York: Fordham University Press, 2008],
30). But LaCapra is right to point out that Derrida largely ignores the problem of
the victim of the sacrifice in The Gift of Death. Derrida raises the question of the
animal victim of sacrifice in this text in relation to his pet cat (perhaps the same
one who sees him step naked from his shower and inspires his essay The Animal
That Therefore I Am): How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all
the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years,
whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? (GD/LIS 71).
32 Ibid.
33 Sren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay (London:
Penguin, 1989), 161.
142 Notes
34 Sren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, (ed.) and trans. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), 15.
35 Agacinski, Apart, 80.
36 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 160.
37 Edward F. Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaards
Fear and Trembling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 36,
original emphasis.
38 Ernest W. Saunders in George Arthur Buttrick, (ed.), The Interpreters Dictionary
of the Bible An Illustrated Encyclopedia (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962),
212. Saunders also notes: This view of a moral division among the dead
who dwell in Sheol appeared in Jewish literature in the first century A.D.
Older Jewish literature makes no mention of that part of Sheol reserved for the
righteous dead, nor any localising of Paradise in Sheol (212).
39 Kevin Newmark, Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: The Space of Translation,
in Harold Bloom, (ed.), Modern Critical Views: Sren Kierkegaard (New York,
Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989), 229.
40 Martin Buber, Biblical Humanism: Eighteen Studies, (ed.) Nahum N. Glatzer
(London: Macdonald, 1968), 41.
41 Newmark, Between Hegel and Kierkegaard, 221, original emphasis.
42 E. A. Speiser, trans. and (ed.), The Anchor Bible: Genesis (Garden City, New
York: Doubleday and Company, 1964), 164.
43 Cited in Louis Jacobs, The Problem of the Akedah in Jewish Thought, in
Perkins, (ed.), Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling, 5, original emphasis.
44 Buber, Biblical Humanism, 33, original emphasis. Mordecai Joseph Leiner
(18021854) the Hasidic Rabbi of Izbica offers a similar reading of
Genesis 22 in his work Mei Ha-shiloah: The trial of the akedah has to do with
the greatness of Abrahams faith in God: even though God had told him [that
his seed would be great] and that the covenant would be established through
Isaac, and now he is being told to offer him up as a burnt offering, nonetheless,
he believed in the first promises as before, and did not lose faith in them. And
this faith is beyond human grasp. Cited in Jerome I. Gellman, The Fear, The
Trembling and the Fire: Kierkegaard and the Hassidic Masters on the Binding of
Isaac (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 199), 24.
45 Feiler, Abraham, 878, original emphasis.
46 Cited in Jacobs, The Problem of the Akedah in Jewish Thought, 23.
47 Baron Holberg, An Introduction to Universal History, translated from the Latin
of Baron Holberg, with Notes Historical, Chronological and Critical by Gregory
Sharpe (London: A. Linde, 1758), 24.
48 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York:
Macmillan, 1965), 43.
49 Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. 1, trans. Henrietta Szold
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 284.
51 Peter Fenves, Chatter: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 165.
52 Agacinski, Apart, 229, original emphasis and ellipsis.
Notes 143
53 Cited in Geoffrey A. Hale, Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language (Minneapolis

and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 28.
54 Pat Bigelow, Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing (Tallahassee: Florida State
55 Bigelow later cites the apostrophe precisely as I have and offers the following
commentary: The ambiguity in this passage is striking. Language calls forth
silence, every language, or so we are told; it calls it to remembrance. According
to Johannes de Silentio, silence does not need the ministrations of the poet. Yet
Johannes breaks his own silence to give voice to silence, to proclaim it as a lover
would his beloved and in so doing achieves a state of grace (Kierkegaard and
the Problem of Writing, 109). Although the pseudonym is here acknowledged,
the elision of the name Abraham continues.
56 Jacob Bggild, Revocated Trials: On the Indirect Communication in Two of
Kierkegaards Early Religious Discourses, in Elsebet Jegstrup, (ed.), The New
Kierkegaard (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004),
57 John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 114.
58 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, (ed.) Gladys Doidge Willcock
and Alice Walker (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970),
59 Hollander, The Figure of Echo, 134.
60 Ibid., 143.
61 Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), xiii.
62 Sylviane Agacinski, We Are Not Sublime: Love and Sacrifice, Abraham and
Ourselves, in Jonathan Re and Jane Chamberlain, (eds.), Kierkegaard: A
Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 134, original emphasis.
63 Feiler, Abraham, 88, original emphasis.
64 Cited in Perkins, Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling, 32.
65 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton
(New York: Harper, 1964), 96. Kant also refers damningly to the sacrifice of
Isaac in his 1793 text Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone : Even though
something is represented as commanded by God, through a direct manifestation
of Him, yet, if it flatly contradicts morality, it cannot, despite all appearances, be
of God (for example, were a father ordered to kill his son, who is so far as he
knew, perfectly innocent) (trans. T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson [New York:
Harper, 1960], 812).
66 Emil L. Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy
(Northvale, New Jersey, and London: Jason Aronson, 1994), 62.
67 Derrida is wrong here about the donkey accompanying Abraham and Isaac up
Mount Moriah. In Genesis 22.5, Abraham tells his servants when he sees Mount
Moriah in the distance: Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over
there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.
68 Jacques Derrida, Above All, No Journalists!, in Religin and Media, (ed.) Hent
de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2001), 56, original emphasis.
144 Notes
69 Ibid., 57.
70 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. Secret.
71 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. Transumption.
3. Sarahs Laughter: Kafkas Abraham
Some of the material from this chapter originally appeared in Sarahs Laughter:
Kafkas Abraham, Modernism/modernity 15.2 (2008): 34359.
1 W. H. Auden, The I Without a Self, in Leo Hamalian, (ed.), Franz Kafka: A
Collection of Criticism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 43.
2 Roberto Calasso, K., trans. Geoffrey Brock (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 3.
3 Speiser, trans. and (ed.), The Anchor Bible, 164.
4 Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 186.
5 Max Brod, The Biography of Franz Kafka, trans. G. Humphreys Roberts
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1947), 49.
6 Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
7 Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (London,
Melbourne, New York: Quartet Books, 1985), 70.
8 Sokel, Between Gnosticism and Jehovah, 11, original emphasis.
9 Calasso, K., 117.
10 Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Folio, 1967),
217.
11 John Zilcosky, Kafkas Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of
Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 196, original emphasis.
12 Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, (ed.) Willi Haas, trans. Tania and James Stern
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1953), 229.
13 Ibid.
14 Cited in Marthe Robert, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, trans. Ralph Manheim (New
York: Schocken Books, 1986), 2.
15 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: The
Garden City Press, 1967), 246.
16 Politzer, Franz Kafka, 16.
17 Auerbach, Mimesis, 9.
18 Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka and His Precursors, in Other Inquisitions: 19371952,
trans. Ruth L. C. Sims (Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1975):
1068.
19 Genesis 22 is traditionally attributed to the Elohist or E source. However, it
has been contended that the story contains Yahwistic elements. On internal
evidence, based on style and content, concludes Speiser in The Anchor Bible,
the personality behind the story should be J.s (166). Verses 1518 of the text
are commonly considered a secondary addition. But arguments have also been
put (by Mark Brett, for example) for the narrative coherence of these verses. It is
not my intention to enter into these debates about attribution or genealogy; the
point to note is that both Politzer and Auerbach assume there to be a consistent
Notes 145
style to the chapter. Willis Barnstone encapsulates the remote God of the E
source nicely in The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice: In the E
document Elohim is depicted differently from Yahweh of the J. While Yahweh
walks in the garden as a powerful mangod, eats with Abraham, and wrestles
with Jacob, Elohim is a more spiritual and necessarily more remote god, one
of miracles, angels, signs, and magicians, whose principal magician was Moses.
Found in dreams, visions, and whirlwinds, Elohim needed mouthpieces and
interpreters, Abraham and Moses, through whom he could perform miracles and
utter decrees ([New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993], 15960).
21 Ibid.
22 Auerbach, Mimesis, 910. Brian Boyd challenges Auerbachs claim that Homer
knows no background in On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition,
and Fiction: Far from having no background or perspective, Homer creates
multiple perspectives, present, past, future possible, future foreglimpsed or
future preordained, mortal, divine, postmortal, divinely objective or humanly
subjective, observed, dreamed, or remembered. He portrays sophisticated multi-
level metarepresentational minds in his characters, and he expects such minds
in his audience, easily able to imagine and distinguish memories, projections,
perspectives, guesses, mistakes, and lies, and effortlessly understand their status
([Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2009], 273).
23 In Prodigal Son, Robbins notes a similarity between Kierkegaards emphasis on
Abrahams getting Isaac back and Augustines in The City of God (XVI.32):
Abraham is to be praised in that he believed without hesitation that his
son would rise again [resurrectum] when he had been sacrificed (163 n37).
In commenting on the Hebrews passage in Genesis Interpretation: A Bible
Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, Walter Brueggemann inflects the
meaning of resurrectum: It is the word of resurrection which leads us through
this text to the God who surprises us with life. That is not to say simply that Isaac
would have been raised had he been killed. For that is speculation and is not the
claim of the text. Heb. 11.1719 links Isaac to the power of the resurrection,
but not in terms of raising a dead man. Resurrection concerns the keeping of a
promise when there is no ground for it. Faith is nothing other than trust in the
power of the resurrection against every deathly circumstance. Abraham knows
beyond understanding that God will find a way to bring life even in this scenario
of death. That is the faith of Abraham ([Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982], 193).
24 Cited in Pascale Casanova, Literature as a World, New Left Review 31
(January-February 2005), 71.
26 Weinstein, Unknowing, 139.
28 J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, (ed.) David Attwell
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 228.
30 Sokel, Between Gnosticism and Jehovah, 10.
146 Notes

32 Ibid., 1819.
33 Auerbach, Mimesis, 7. According to the glossa ordinaria, these three days
symbolise the three ages of the Jewish people from Abraham to Moses, from
Moses to John the Baptist and from John the Baptist to Jesus.
34 Brod extracted a series of aphorisms from the octavo notebooks based on
a copy Kafka had reproduced on separate sheets of paper with the corre-
sponding numbers but no title. Brod titled the collection Reflections on Sin,
Suffering, Hope, and the True Way. Calasso has recently renamed them The
Zrau Aphorisms after the place in the Bohemian countryside in which Kafka
composed them between September 1917 and April 1918.
35 Hale, Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language, 153.
36 Ibid.
37 Brod, The Biography of Franz Kafka, 139.
38 Ibid.
39 Cited in Zadie Smith, F. Kafka, Everyman, review of The Tremendous World
I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, by Louis Begley,
The New York Review of Books, 19 May 2009. <http://www.nybooks.com/
articles/21610#fn3>.
40 James Hawes offers an amusing, though at times glib, debunking of the Kafka
myth in his Excavating Kafka. One of Hawes chief exhibits is Kafkas porn.
In 1906, Dr Franz Blei published a journal called The Amethyst (later renamed
Opals to avoid the censors), which contained pornographic images nestled
within many, many more pages of words ([London: Quercus, 2008], 60). The
journal contained a variety of types of writing, including translations of Keats,
edgy work by upcoming writers and even some of Brods literary productions.
Kafka was a keen subscriber to both manifestations of Bleis journal. As Hawes
explains: Kafka kept his collection of The Amethyst/Opals at his parents place,
in a locked bookcase. He took the key away with him in August 1907 when he
left the apartment to go on holiday, taking the new Opals but leaving last years
Amethyst safely tucked away (65).
41 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans.
Dana Polan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
95 n16.
42 Ibid., 412.
43 For a sustained discussion of Kafkas humour see Jean Collignon, Kafkas
Humor, Yale French Studies 16, Foray Through Existentialism (1955): 5362.
44 Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 33. Janouchs book of reminiscences was
first published in 1951. A second edition, revised and enlarged, was published
in 1968, the year of Janouchs death. The quoted passage is one of the additions
Janouch made to the 1951 version. Janouch was 17 when he first met Kafka in
1920 and the conversations between the two men probably only continued on
until 1922. It should be noted that many Kafka scholars (including Ronald Gray,
Roy Pascal, Malcolm Pasley, Peter Neumeyer, Gersholm Sholem and Eduard
Goldstcker) have doubted the authenticity of Janouchs book, especially the
expanded edition. Critics remain sceptical, for the most part, because the author
Notes 147
wrote up the conversations from his various notes and diary entries long after
they had actually taken place. Hugh Haughton analyses the various aspects of
the controversy surrounding the Conversations in his introduction to the present
edition (vii-xxxv). To balance the gathering negative assessments of the work,
Haughton notes the following: Max Brod and Dora Dymant thought Janouchs
book brought Kafka back to life. Even if much of Janouchs material is fictional
and garbled, all of it bears something of the imprint of Kafkas personality
and voice It may well be that the Conversations should be classified with the
multiplying number of imaginary or semi-fictional portraits of Kafka (xxiii).
James Rolleston writes in his 1986 essay, Kafka-Criticism: A Typological
Perspective in the Centenary Year: The old debate about the authenticity of
the Conversations with Kafka now looks uninteresting in the extreme. What
that book does is to loosen the limits which Kafka imposed on his own fictional
writing, to suggest how powerfully he could find words for phenomena like
Charlie Chaplin or the Russian Revolution, to validate the readers sense that the
history of this century has already been written by Kafka (in Alan Udoff, (ed.),
Kafkas Contextuality [New York: Gordian Press, 1986], 5). My aim in what
follows is to demonstrate that, however much a fictional or imaginary portrait,
Janouchs reminiscence does bear something of the imprint of Kafkas voice and
can be shown to provide valuable insight into Kafkas idea of the phenomenon
of laughter.
46 Canetti, Kafkas Other Trial, 26.
47 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, translated from the French by Linda Asher
(New York: Grove Press, 1986), 1045, original emphasis.
48 Aristotle, Poetics [1453b], in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. Penelope
Murray and T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin, 2000), 74.
49 Canetti, Kafkas Other Trial, 63.
50 Kafka, The Trial, 1.
51 Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 111.
52 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 41.
54 For a strong, recent defence of the superiority thesis of laughter see F. H. Buckley,
The Morality of Laughter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
55 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings,
(ed.) Jeanne Schulkind (London: University of Sussex Press, 1976), 70.
57 Simon Critchley, On Laughter (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 43.
58 Cited in Critchley, On Laughter, 61.
59 Sren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, abridged and trans. Alastair
Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 57.
60 Ren Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II, trans. John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge
61 Ian Hacking, Dreams in Place, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59.3
(Summer, 2001), 256.
148 Notes
62 Georges Bataille, Un-Knowing: Laughter and Tears, trans. Annette Michelson,

October 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche,
Un-Knowing (Spring 1986), 97.
64 James Russell Lowell cited in Critchley, On Laughter, 3.
65 Critchley, On Laughter, 44, original emphasis.
66 Malynne Sternstein, Laughter, Gesture, and Flesh: Kafkas In the Penal
Colony, Modernism/modernity 8.2 (2001), 316, original emphasis. Sternstein
begins her article by linking Kafkas laughter with Sarahs laughter and ends it
by mentioning Kafkas Sarah, but does not in the space between analyse Kafkas
own parabolic remarks about the Abraham story, which appear in various letters
to friends and in the Octavo Notebooks. In the next chapter, I will address
some of Kafkas remarks in the Octavo Notebooks, but I will restrict myself
here to the letters. For a discussion of Kafkas reflections on Kierkegaard and
Abraham in the Octavo Notebooks see Jean Wahl, Kierkegaard and Kafka,
trans. Lienhard Bergel, in Angel Flores and Homer Swander, (eds.), Franz
Kafka Today (New York: Gordian Press, 1977): 26275 and Richard Sheppard,
Kafka, Kierkegaard and the K.s: Theology, Psychology and Fiction, Journal of
Literature & Theology 5. 3 (November 1991): 27796.
67 Ibid., 316.
68 Don Seeman, Where Is Sarah Your Wife? Cultural Poetics of Gender and
Nationhood in the Hebrew Bible, The Harvard Theological Review 91. 2 (Apr.
1998), 112.
69 Ibid., 109.
70 Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 2005), 1023. For an exemplary study of women violently excluded in
and by biblical narratives including Hagar and the Daughter of Jepthah, an
example to which Kierkegaard appeals in Fear and Trembling see Phyllis
Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).
71 David A. deSilva, 4 Maccabees: Introduction and Commentary on the Greek
Text in Codex Sinaiticus (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 49.
72 Kierkegaard makes the same point here as Gregory Sharpe in his 1758 trans-
lation of Baron Holbergs An Introduction to Universal History. According to
Sharpe, If a reason is demanded for this offering up of Isaac, besides the trial
of his fathers faith let it be rememberd, that he who was thus dedicated to the
Lord, was he whom the Lord had given to Abraham and Sarah in their old age,
after whom the seed of Abraham was to be called, and in his seed were all the
nations of the earth to be blessed (24, original emphasis).
73 Cited in Benjamin, Illuminations, 116.
74 Adorno, Prisms, 268.
75 Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 200.
76 Robbins, Prodigal, 91.
77 Cited in Wilhelm Emrich, Franz Kafka: A Critical Study of His Writings, trans.
Sheena Zeben Buehe (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1968), 756.
78 Adorno, Prisms, 259.
Notes 149
79 Wahl, Kierkegaard and Kafka, 280.

80 Kafka could here be alluding to 2 Samuel 17.23: When Ahithophel saw that his
advice [to Absalom] had not been followed, he saddled his donkey and set out
for his in his hometown. He put his house in order and then hanged himself. So
he died and was buried in his fathers tomb. I am indebted to Peter Alexander
for pointing this reference out to me.
82 Robbins, Prodigal, 92.
83 In A Hesitation Before Birth, Mailloux links Kafkas notion of an Abraham
who came unsummoned to his own refusal to buy into the grandiose future
Klopstock had predicted for him as a writer: In fact, he wanted the future
too much to jeopardise it by premature belief in it ([London and Toronto:
University of Delaware Press, 1989], 485).
84 Alexander Welsh, Reflections on the Hero as Quixote (Princeton: Princeton
85 Robbins, Prodigal, 98. The dispersion of subjectivity that occurs at the end of
Kafkas fable on Abraham illustrates the point Blanchot makes about third person
narration in a footnote to his essay The Narrative Voice: The he [narrative
voice] does not simply take the place traditionally occupied by the subject; as a
moving fragmentation, it changes what we mean by place: a fixed spot, unique
or determined in its placement. Here we should say once again (confusedly): the
he, scattering after the fashion of a moving and diversely unoccupied place,
designates his place as both the place from which he will always be lacking
and which will thus remain empty, and also as a surplus of place, a place that is
always too much: hypertopy (The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson
[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 462 n2).
86 Kierkegaard, The Laughter Is On My Side, 238.
88 Brod, The Biography of Franz Kafka, 105.
4. The absolutely dark moment of the plot: Blanchots Abraham
Some of the material from this chapter originally appeared in The absolutely dark
moment of the plot: Blanchots Abraham, in Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson and Dimitris
Vardoulakis, (eds.), After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2005): 20520.
1 Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. Jody Gladding
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 96.
2 Kierkegaard cited in Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the
Aesthetic, trans. and (ed.) Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), 1378.
3 Agacinski, Time Passing, 96.
4 Ibid., 95.
5 Louis Marin, On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 2934, original emphasis.
150 Notes
6 Maurice Blanchot, Au moment voulu (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 147. My aim here
is to situate this passage in relation to Blanchots engagement with Kierkegaaard
and Kafka rather than in relation to the rest of his rcit. For good discussions of
Abraham in When the Time Comes see Gary D. Mole, Blanchots Au moment
voulu and the Silence of Abraham, Australian Journal of French Studies 32:1
(1995): 4865 and Larysa Mykyta, Blanchots Au moment voulu: Women as the
eternally recurring figure of writing, Boundary 2 2:2 (Winter 1982): 7795.
7 Mark C. Taylor, Withdrawal, in Kevin Hart, (ed.), Nowhere Without No: In
Memory of Maurice Blanchot (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2003), 25.
8 Jean-Luc Nancy, Homage to the Man Blanchot, in Hart, (ed.), Nowhere
Without No, 14.
9 Cited in Adorno, Kierkegaard, 5.
10 One does detect Kierkegaardian resonances in the following passage from The
Infinite Conversation, in which Blanchot discusses Andr Nehers 1962 book
Lexistence juive: The Jewish man is the Hebrew when he is the man of origins.
The origin is a decision; this is the decision of Abraham separating himself from
what is, and affirming himself as a foreigner in order to answer to a foreign truth.
The Hebrew passes from one world (the established Sumerian world) to something
that is not yet a world and is nonetheless this world here below It must be
added that if a memorial of the origin comes to us from so venerable a past is
certainly enveloped in mystery, it has nothing of the mythical about it. Abraham is
fully a man; a man who sets off and who, by this first departure, founds the human
right to beginning, the only true creation. A beginning that is entrusted and passed
on to each of us but that in extending itself, loses its simplicity (126).
11 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1962), 252, original emphasis.
13 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,
(ed.) Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986),
306.
14 Julia Watkins, The Idea of Fate in Kierkegaards Thought, in James Giles, (ed.),
Kierkegaard and Freedom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 109.
15 Cited in Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism, 205.
16 Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism, 205.
17 For a discussion of the medieval Jewish legends that presented Isaac as a martyr
who was actually sacrificed on Moriah see Shalom Spiegal, The Last Trial, trans.
Judah Goldin (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
18 Commenting on the meaning and significance of the final verses of the Akedah,
Mark Brett writes in Abrahams Heretical Imperative: The concluding verses
of ch. 22 might seem relatively insignificant, and we may not expect them to
contribute much to the discussion of the weighty issues of covenant theology.
But Gen. 22.1924 may indeed be related to the subversive editorial intentions
evidenced by the juxtaposition of chs 21 and 22. There are at least two aspects
worth noting: the reference to a journey in 22.19 and the genealogical notes in
22.2024. After the dramatic test of faith in ch. 22, v. 19 says that Abraham
returns to Beersheba, the very place where, according to 21.14, the divine
Notes 151
promise concerning Ishmael was delivered to his mother Hagar. Historicist schol-
arship my treat this as the accidental collocation of originally separate traditions,
but for the careful reader of the final form, this geographical irony is simply too
great to dismiss; Beersheba is the site where God promised that Abrahams other
son would become a great nation. Ishmael is the son confirmed by God as the
seed of Abraham (21.13), and Ishmael is the son whom Abraham himself circum-
cised, marking him with the sign of the covenant (17.2327). As the son of an
Egyptian, he is the product of a foreign marriage, but the editors have planted
numerous clues to suggest that this is no impediment to divine blessing (173).
19 Delaney, Abraham on Trial, 124. In his historical biography of Abraham, David
Rosenberg tries to overcome the problem of Isaacs absence from the concluding
verses of the Akedah by Kierkegaardian means: Although Isaac isnt mentioned
here, Rosenberg writes, it isnt necessary. It was Abraham alone who was
author of this dream (Abraham: The First Historical Biography [New York:
Basic Books, 2006], 279).
20 Cited in David Jasper and Stephen Prickett, (eds.), The Bible and Literature: A
Reader (Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1999), 120.
21 Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1987), 350.
22 Agacinski, Apart, 91.
23 Agacinski, We Are Not Sublime, 144.
24 Hale, Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language, 1434.
25 Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1987), 6, original emphasis.
26 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 160.
27 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 127.
28 Kirmmse, (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard, 252.
29 John Lippitt, Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling (London and New York:
Routledge, 2003), 139.
30 Adorno, Kierkegaard, 51.
31 Ibid., 86.
32 These two aphorisms come from the Octavo Notebooks. The second is repro-
duced in Kafkas fable Abraham in Parables and Paradoxes.
33 Herbert Tauber, Franz Kafka: An Interpretation of His Works (New York:
Haskell House Publishers, 1967), 241.
34 Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 81.
35 Kevin Hart, The profound reserve, in Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson and Dimitris
Vardoulakis, (eds.), After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2005), 39.
38 Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer cited in Gellman, Abraham!, 96.
39 For an interesting discussion of Blanchots account of the image that culminates
in a reading of Kafkas Metamorphosis see Alexander Garca Dttmann, Life-
line and self-portrait, trans. Humphrey Bower, in Carolyn Bailey Gill, (ed.),
152 Notes
Time and the Image (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press,
2001): 2134.
40 Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 3, original emphasis.
41 Ibid., 8, 12.
44 Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982), 56.
45 Kierkegaard here follows Plato in the Symposium. In the Symposium, Plato is
even stronger in his reproach than Kierkegaard: Orpheus, the son of Oegarus,
because he appeared to them [the gods] to be a cowardly harper, who did not
dare to die for his love, like Alcetis, but contrived to go down alive to Hades,
was sent back by them without effecting his purpose; to him they showed an
apparition only of her whom he sought, but herself they would not give up;
moreover, they afterwards caused him to suffer death at the hands of women,
as the punishment of his intrusiveness (Plato, Symposium and Phaedrus, trans.
Benjamin Jowett [New York: Dover Publications, 1993], 8).
46 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 64.
47 Derrida, A Witness Forever, in Hart, (ed.), Nowhere Without No, 47. See also
ID/D 52.
48 Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 12.
49 Derrida, A Witness Forever, 47.
50 Cited in Mole, Blanchots Au moment voulu and the Silence of Abraham, 58;
my translation.
51 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (London:
Virago, 2003), 160, original emphasis.
52 Ibid.
53 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans.
Shaun Whiteside (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 274.
5. Coda: Agnes and the Merman

2 Ibid.
3 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 43.
5 I have altered Michael Hofmanns translation of this aphorism because it misat-
tributes the descriptions of the two alternatives that Kafka puts forth in his
aphorism. Kafkas original German reads: Zwei Mglichkeiten: sich unendlich
klein machen oder es sein. Das zweite ist Vollendung, also Unttigkeit, das erste
Beginn, also Tat (Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus
dem Nachlass [Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1966], 50).
6 Garff, Sren Kierkegaard, 260, original emphasis.
Notes 153
7 Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 198.
9 Jireh is the Hebrew word for to see, but it can also mean see to or provide.
According to Buber in Biblical Humanism, The narrator is actually making
reference to a common expression of his own day, on the mountain where
JHVH lets himself be seen (42).
10 W. S. Merwin, The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target / The
Lice / The Carrier of Ladders / Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Port
Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993), 226.
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Index
Abraham Agnes and the Merman 1314

and betrayal of ethics 42 Akedah see Sacrifice of Isaac, The
and laughter see laughter Anders, Guenther 1214
as father of nations 52, 56 Andersen, Hans Christian 131
as father of the faithful 4, 212, 44, Aristotle 82
106 Atwood, Margaret 129
as friend of God 5, 21, 44 Auden, Wyston Hugh 67
as knight of faith 110, 140n 27 Auerbach, Erich 7, 724, 768, 144n 19,
as murderer 301, 53, 106 145n 22
as nomad 7
as origin of literature 1819 Barnstone, Willis 144n 19
as prophet 2, 46 Bataille, Georges 86
as redemptive figure 34, 6, 21, 55 Bauer, Felice see Kafka, Franz
Blanchot on 223, 68, 99, 10030, Benjamin, Walter 89, 32, 42, 74, 81,
133 945, 98, 106
compared to Don Quixote 6, 19, 47, Bergmann, Hugo 11
967 Bigelow, Pat 567, 143n 55
compared to Job 5961 Binding of Isaac see Sacrifice of
compared to Sarah 914 Isaac, The
compared to Scheherazade 9 bin Gorion, Misha 1011
death of 4 Blanchot, Maurice
Derrida on 5, 1819, 2931, 40, and arrt de mort 8, 16
426, 616, 90, 108, 141n 31, and Derrida 126, 129
143n 67 and Kierkegaard 1037, 150n 10
eschatological status of 3, 49 and Levinas 124
Kafka on 125, 6799, 112, 1145 Being Jewish 113
Kierkegaard on 202, 2666, 68, 74, compared to Isaac 25, 127
76, 916, 1036, 10910, 112, 116, Faux Pas 104
121, 140n 27 From Anguish to Language 128
on the contradictoriness of Genesis Infinite Conversation, The 113, 149n
22, 54 85, 150n 10
Abrahams bosom 3, 4950 Instant of My Death, The 24, 1279
Adorno, Theodor W. 72, 934, 114, Kafka and Literature 104, 117
1314 Kafka and the Works Demand 99,
Agacinski, Sylviane 31, 356, 48, 56, 60, 104, 112, 115
1002, 110 Kierkegaards Journals 104
Index 163
Literature and the Right to Death Deleuze, Gilles 80, 83

126 Derrida, Jacques
Narrative Voice, The 149n 85 Above All, No Journalists! 63
near-death experience of 1279 Abraham, the Other 5, 1516
on Abraham see Abraham and Blanchot see Blanchot, Maurice
on Genesis 22 see Sacrifice of Isaac, and Kafka 5, 156
The and Kierkegaard 21, 2831, 406,
on Kafka 4, 17, 67, 69, 99, 11220, 616
128 Animal That Therefore I Am, The
on Kafka and Kierkegaard 1123 141n 31
on the image 1207 Gift of Death, The 18, 19, 21, 2830,
Reading Kafka 128 406, 635, 76, 90, 93, 108, 141n
Space of Literature, The 23, 68, 122 31
Two Versions of the Imaginary, The Literature in Secret 18, 21, 40, 423,
1227 45, 645 see also Gift of Death,
When the Time Comes 223, 1024, The
1067, 111, 120, 122, 1257, 129, on Abraham see Abraham
133 on ethics see ethics
Work of Fire, The 4, 69 on Genesis 22 see Sacrifice of Isaac, The
Writing of the Disaster, The 126 on literature and religion 189
Bloch, Grete 83 on secrecy see secrecy
Boesen, Emil 29 on silence see silence
Bggild, Jacob 57 Rams 141n 31
Borges, Jorge Luis 73, 79 Signsponge 1089
Boyd, Brian 145n 22 Witness Forever, A 1278
Brett, Mark 140n 16, 144n 19, 150n 18
Brchner, Hans 113 Descartes, Ren 86, 94
Brod, Max 1112, 1718, 24, 6871, Dttmann, Alexander Garca 151n 39
77, 7980, 924, 99, 112, 146n 34,
146n 40, 147n 44 Eagleton, Terry 7, 23, 31
Bront, Emily 36 Elohist 724, 778, 144n 19
Bruce, Iris 1011 errancy 16, 47
Brueggemann, Walter 145n 23 error 1617, 25, 97, 1167, 120
Buber, Martin 46, 513, 55, 153n 9 Esau 24
Buckley, Frank H. 147n 54 ethics
Burke, Kenneth 105 and animals 1056, 11011
and Sacrifice of Isaac see Sacrifice of
Calasso, Roberto 1, 12, 146n 34 Isaac, The
Canetti, Elias 10, 823 Blanchot on 112
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da Derrida on 30, 40, 42, 93
1002 Kafka on 115
Cixous, Hlne 8, 1617, 20 Kierkegaard on 301, 334, 42, 934,
Coetzee, John Maxwell vi, 74 96
corpse 178, 701, 1218
Critchley, Simon 84, 86 fable 125, 3, 44, 46, 74, 78, 98, 1023,
Delaney, Carol 30 10911, 11920, 133
164 Index
test des fables 1, 6, 21, 30 Janouch, Gustav 68, 801, 99, 115,
fate 73, 106, 117, 122, 126, 127 146n 44
Feiler, Bruce 24, 54, 61 Jesensk, Milena 71
Fenves, Peter 56 Job 53, 5861, 64
Foucault, Michel 117 Josephus, Flavius 33, 40
Fragmentary Targum see Sacrifice of
Isaac, The Kafka, Franz
Abraham 125, 38, 9297, 112, 115
Garff, Joakim 29, 134 agnosticism of 1214
Gellman, Jerome 140n 27 and Derrida see Derrida
Genesis 22 see Sacrifice of Isaac, The and Felice Bauer 69, 71, 83, 93
Genesis Rabbah 534, 120, 141n 29 and Kierkegaard 93, 11217
glossa ordinaria 146n 33 and laughter see laughter
Goodhart, Sandor 11 and midrash 1012
Green, Ronald 36 as prophet of the Holocaust 13, 80
Guattari, Flix 80, 83 as proto-Nazi 13
attitude towards the body 10, 20,
Hacking, Ian 85 702, 87
Hagar 24, 34, 87, 90, 136n 3, 148n 70, Before the Law 74
150n 18 Castle, The 97
Hale, Geoffrey A. 78, 110 comical element in 824
Hamann, Johan Georg 32 compared to Abraham 1920, 69,
Hannay, Alastair 36, 49 1123, 116
Hart, Kevin 117 Dearest Father, Stories and Other
Hawes, James 146n 40 Writings 53, 66, 79, 115
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 334, Diaries of Franz Kafka 191023, The
68 12, 18, 19, 67, 68, 75, 81, 87, 989,
Herder, Gottfried Johann 27, 139n 5 116, 11819
Holberg, Baron (Ludvig) 54, 148n 72 Fratricide, A 38
Hollander, John 58 Give it up! 729, 97, 11920
Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem
image 223, 76, 85, 1003, 107, 1168, Lande und andere Prosa aus dem
12030, 133, 1345 Nachlass 152n 5
Isaac Hunger Artist, A 14
as figure of substitution 24, 111 Hunter Gracchus, The 16
as redemptive figure 3 In the Penal Colony 72
as sacrificial victim 413, 111 Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse
birth of 24, 52, 87, 8990 Folk 84
death of 107, 150n 17 Judgement, The 14, 823
passivity of 24 Letter to His Father 93
spectrality of 225, 54, 91 Metamorphosis, The 14, 75, 82, 103,
Ishmael 24, 34, 40, 87, 89, 136n 3, 151n 151n 5
18 New Attorney, The 98
Next Village, The 79
Jacob 3, 7, 24, 49 Octavo Notebooks 5, 66, 146n 34,
Jacobs, Louis 52 148n 66, 151n 32
Index 165
on Abraham see Abraham LaCapra, Dominick 434, 141n 31

on childlessness 989 laughter
on Genesis 22 see Sacrifice of Isaac, and Abraham 967
The incongruity thesis of 86
Parables and Paradoxes 5, 6, 15, 16, in Kafka 7986, 98, 148n 66
24, 38, 92, 97, 112, 115, 151n 32 in Kierkegaard 85
Report to an Academy, A 1415 of Sarah see Sarah
scepticism of see scepticism superiority thesis of 84, 147n 54
Silence of the Sirens, The 11 leap of faith 39, 923
theme of the test in 12, 769 lekh lekha 512, 61
Trial, The 8, 14, 38, 70, 7980, 83, 92 Levinas, Emmanuel 389, 111, 124, 134,
Truth About Sancho Panza, The 98 140n 26, 140n 27
Zrau Aphorisms, The 1, 910, 12, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum see
16, 24, 67, 78, 97, 115, 118, 133, Sacrifice of Isaac, The
146n 34 Lindner, Johannes Gotthelf 32
Kafka, Hermann 71, 93 Lippitt, John 113
Kamuf, Peggy 90 London, Evelyn 129
Kant, Immanuel see Sacrifice of Isaac, Lowrie, Walter 49
The Luther, Martin see Sacrifice of Isaac, The
Kierkegaard, Sren
and Derrida see Derrida, Jacques Magritte, Ren 126
and Kafka 93, 11217 Mailloux, Peter 96, 149n 83
and melancholy 267, 114 Marin, Louis 1012
and Regine Olsen 24, 35 Merwin, William Stanley 135
Crisis in the Life of an Actress 104 metalepsis 5761
Either/Or 27, 84, 100, 115, 132 midrash 1012, 23, 40, 49, 535, 102,
family curse of 267, 36 107, 1202
Fear and Trembling 202, 2666, 76, Midrash ha-Gadol see Sacrifice of Isaac,
913, 95, 103, 105, 110, 112, 114, The
126, 12931, 139n 5, 140n 27 Mitchell, Stephen 59
on Abraham see Abraham Moberly, R. W. L. 2, 4
on Genesis 22 see Sacrifice of Isaac, Mole, Gary D. 150n 6
The Mourier, Hanne 35
personal identification with Abraham Mykyta, Larysa 150n 6
349, 1134
personal identification with Neofiti Targum 1: Genesis see Sacrifice
Scheherazade 268, 98 of Isaac, The
Repetition 35, 114 Newmark, Kevin 50, 52
Sickness Unto Death, The 48, 114, Nietzsche, Friedrich 130
117
Kierkegaard, Michael Pedersen 26, 36, Olsen, Regine 24, 356, 389, 93
39, 114 Orpheus 126, 12930, 152n 45
Kierkegaard, Peter Christian 31 Owen, Wilfred 107
Klopstock, Robert 4, 5, 6, 18, 21, 24,
92, 95, 96, 112, 149n 83 Philo 33, 40, 139n 12
Kundera, Milan 824, 96 Plato 152n 45
166 Index
poetry 479, 117, 124 in Sanhedrin 53

Politzer, Heinz 68, 727, 144n 19 in Talmud 523
Puttenham, George 58 Jewish account of 23, 38, 41
Josephus on 33, 40
Quintilian 57 Kafka on 125, 6799, 102, 112,
Quran 2, 401 1145, 133
sacrifice of Ishmael in 401 Kant on 613, 143n 65
Kierkegaard on 202, 24, 2666, 68,
ram 2, 20, 22, 24, 31, 436, 55, 64, 70, 74, 76, 914, 96, 1007, 10910,
10012, 114, 117, 1202, 125, 127, 1124, 116, 121, 127, 1324, 140n
129, 1335, 141n 31 27
Rancire, Jacques 6 Levinas on 389, 140n 26
Rimbaud, Arthur 117 Luther on 8, 33, 3941, 60, 74
Robbins, Jill 95, 97, 140n 17, 140n 26, Owen on 1078
145n 23 Philo on 33, 40
Robert, Marthe 68 redemptive consequences of 55
Rosenberg, David 151n 19 Sandmel, Samuel 18, 136n 3
Sarah
sacred, the 19, 90, 117 barrenness of 74, 879
Sacrifice of Isaac, The death of 1202
and ethics 30, 42, 534, 1056, encounter with God in Genesis 18
10911, 134 889
and literature 1622 laughter of 74, 8797, 99, 133
and the resurrection of the dead 60, scepticism of see scepticism
74, 121, 145n 23 Saunders, Ernest W. 49, 142 n38
as death sentence 8, 16, 20, 22, 36, scepticism
56, 64 Cartesian 845
as desacralization of the world 19, literary 1016, 845
117 of Kafka 1016, 989
Blanchot on 225, 68, 99, 10030, of Sarah 8790, 92
1323 Scheherazade 89, 16, 24, 2634, 66,
Brueggemann on 145n 23 98, 134
Christian account of 23, 23, 38, 41, Schlegel, Johan Frederick 36, 114
74, 121 Schlegel, Regine see Regine Olsen
compared to Genesis 12 512 secrecy
contradictoriness of 2, 512, 54, 59 Derrida on 18, 289, 406, 616
see also Abraham Kierkegaard on 26, 334, 55, 57,
Derrida on 406, 616, 1089 1035, 132
in Epistle of James 5 Seeman, Don 88
in Fragmentary Targum 41 Serres, Michel 111
in Genesis Rabbah 534, 120, 141n Shakespeare, William 479, 61, 82
29 Sharpe, Gregory 54, 148n 72
in Hebrews 60, 121, 145n 23 silence
in Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 107 Derrida on 40, 426, 616
in Midrash ha-Gadol 107 Kierkegaard on 324, 35, 3847,
in Neofiti Targum 1: Genesis 141n 29 501, 557, 616, 912
Index 167
Sokel, Walter H. 12, 1920, 23, 69, 767 Vermes, Geza 107
Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor 52, 144n 19 von Rad, Gerhard 41
Starobinski, Jean 67
Sternstein, Malynne 87, 148n 66 Wahl, Jean 94
St Paul 289 Watkins, Julia 106
Weinstein, Philip 20, 74
Talmud 52, 67 Welsh, Alexander 97
Taylor, Mark C. 23, 39, 104, 1089 Westermann, Claus 41
Thirwell, Adam 79 Wiseman, Donald 7
Thoma, Clemens 3 Wood, James 6
Thousand and One Nights, The 9, 24, Wood, Michael 137n 34
267 Woolf, Virginia 84
tragic hero 823, 139n 12
transumption 578, 65 Zeno 73, 79
see also metalepsis Zilcosky, John 701
Trible, Phyllis 148n 70
typology 23, 38

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Genesis places no stress on Abrahams nomadism; it merely states that he

figure of the oral storyteller: Scheherazade. In the famous frame narrative of

Confronted as he was with power on all sides, [Kafkas] obduracy sometimes

II The Problem of Literary Scepticism

The odd fusion of commentary and narrative in Kafkas account of Abraham

found talmudic discourse fascinating, writes Bruce. In 1911 he remembered

Kafkas narrative is reminiscent of the hermeneutic of midrashic discourse,

A midrash is a story. It is not something other than a story [A] midrashic

We might see Kafkas fable as responding midrashically to the problem

of nineteenth-century German thought so-called Shamefaced Atheism

I think this indictment of Kafkas agnosticism entirely misses the mark,

But Kafka is also no defeatist. He displays a paradoxical kind of optimism

As Derrida comments on this version in Abraham, the Other:

In discussing Kafkas fable Abraham, Derrida reminds us that a fable is

CE author Aelius Theon) a fictitious story picturing a truth.38 For Derrida,

III An Impossible Filiation

Cixous might here be recalling a remarkable letter Kafka wrote to Max

The consolation of literature is that it suspends death or averts sacrifice. But

If literature is the game of not-quite-belief, then life must be counted

for example, 3 January 1912: When it became clear in my organism that

Thinking about Abraham is another matter, however: then I am shattered

stands contiguously for Abrahams thwarted sacrificial intention, obscures the

I remember a young man a man still young prevented from dying by

I The Writer as Storyteller: Kierkegaard as Scheherazade

birthday though, apparently, not without crosschecking this fact against

The second is the same dialogue, slightly but crucially altered:

Writing serves the same purpose in both these formulations: to commemorate

The figure of silence and the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio provide

(verbosely disguised as Johannes de Silentio) is a veritable virtuoso the

For both Derrida and Kierkegaard, the act of imaginatively accompanying

What distinguishes the Kierkegaardian account of Genesis 22 is the way it

II The Biographical Fallacy

Kierkegaard deploys silence as a (Protestant) figure of existential isolation.

Abraham is an eternal prototype of the religious man. Just as he had to leave

of Abraham. The analogy between Abraham and Kierkegaard founders at

Kierkegaard has perhaps never sounded so much like Kafka as in this

eternity as a consolation prize for human incompetence. The knife in the

Kierkegaards account also turns on the problem of mishearing. Abraham is

astonishing ability to respond immediately to the second call of Genesis 22

III Silence: the Figure of Betrayal

Biographical readings rush to explain Kierkegaards identification with the

overhastily equating silence with concealment, as Derrida does in Literature

If Abraham conceals his sacrificial mission, it is to avoid being hindered from

As if God were to have said to Abraham, Dont speak of it to anyone. Not

between us, no generality, no calculable knowledge, no conditional deliberation,

because it crucially alters our sense of the sacrifices eventuality. By making

As Derrida notes of this first version in Literature in Secret, Abraham doesnt

goes to sacrifice his son. If I had been ordered to take an extraordinary

IV Sacrificing Literature to Abraham

In the last chapter, we saw how Kafka sacrifices Abraham to literature by

Kierkegaards pseudonym is clearly playing on the eschatological implica-

V Alone Like Abraham: the Inconsolable Present

from the world of immediate perception corresponding to the prototypical act