DERRIDA AND THE TEST OF SECRECY

Abstract

Jacques Derrida reads the biblical story of Genesis 22, in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, as a test of secrecy. Derrida follows Kierkegaard in presuming that Abraham not only does not but also cannot tell anyone about what God has commanded him to do. For Derrida, moreover, Abraham comes to embody the absolute right to non-response or secrecy constituting the modern institution of literature. In this essay, I criticize Derrida's highly Kierkegaardian account of Genesis 22 for underplaying the involvement of Isaac and the ram in the sacrifice. By seeing how Derrida ignores the two victims of the sacrifice, we can see how both Genesis 22 and literature are inadequately described as tests of secrecy.

Keywords:

• Jacques Derrida
• Abraham
• Genesis 22
• sacrifice
• secrecy
• literature

Notes

I would like to thank the anonymous reader for Angelaki for his or her very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Some of the contextualizing material in this essay appears in my book Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (London and New York: Continuum, 2011).

For an expansive discussion of secrecy, democracy and the democracy of literature in Derrida, see Wills. Wills also focuses on Derrida's reading of Abraham in The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. But he is less concerned, as I am here, to interrogate the validity of Derrida's reading of Genesis 22 and more concerned to show how this reading expresses Derrida's ideas about the interrelation of secrecy, democracy and literature.

Derrida does briefly give the ram in Genesis 22 a voice in his essay “Rams”: “One imagines the anger of Abraham's and Aaron's ram, the infinite revolt of the ram of all holocausts. But also, figuratively, the violent rebellion of all scapegoats, all substitutes. Why me?” (Sovereignties 157). He also considers the ram's perspective parenthetically in The Animal That Therefore I Am: “(ask Abraham's 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)” (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?” (71).

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.’”

“Elegy” by W.S. Merwin, currently collected in The Second Four Books of Poems by W.S. Merwin. Copyright © 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1993 by W.S. Merwin.