Interinclusion » Article Archive » Sacrificial Heterologies (Part 4)

Sacrificial Heterologies (Part 4)

By Asher Crispe: June 29, 2012: Category Inspirations, Thought Figures

The Binding of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida

Logic of Levinas: Substitution Let us begin with Levinas’ critique of Kierkegaard. While the uplifting of the self above the universal in Kierkegaard may seem like a great and noble gesture—one that refuses Hegelianism—it might also be said to damage our relation to the other in a more fundament way. Derrida proclaims the “logic of an objection” here by citing an essay where Levinas explicitly challenges the author of Fear and Tremblingmaintaining:

The entire polemics between Kierkegaard and speculative philosophy presupposes subjectivity as tenses on itself, existence as a care that a being takes for its own existence, as torment for self. The ethical means the general for Kierkegaard. The singular of the I would be lost under the rule that is valid for all. Generality can neither contain nor express the secret of the I, infinitely needy and distressed for itself. (25)

Formulated in this way, Levinas levels the charge against both Hegel and Kierkegaard that they have forgotten the other. Heidegger for that matter, has also regarded the other in a negative fashion as a distraction from authentic being, a stumbling block before the ‘I’ or even a threat. The alterity of the other is regarded as placing the self in jeopardy.

By contrast, Levinas interjects a revolutionary idea: that the other actually helps to establish the self in it’s uniquely individualized way. Ethics does not belong to the dimension of generality but rather founds particular responsibly recoverable in each moment of one’s encounter with the other. Others do not sacrificethe individual on the altar of universality—they preserve the unique untransferability of ethical burdens such that no one can assume my place. Levinas erects a new bridge between the particular and in universal reversing the flow of traffic.

The consequence of all of this with regard to our biblical story is that Kierkegaard’s reading as seen through the prism of Levinas “…describes the encounter with God as a subjectivity rising to the religious level: God above the ethical order!” and continuing on he offers an alternative to this stance where: “Perhaps Abraham’s ear for hearing the voice that brought him back to the ethical order was the highest moment of the drama.” (26)

From here, we can reintroduce Heidegger and emphatically express Levinas’ foremost application of this nuance in reading, namely, that “I am responsible for the death of the other to the extent of including myself in that death. That can be shown in a more acceptable proposition: ‘I am responsible for the other inasmuch as the other is mortal.’ It is the others death that is the foremost death.” (27)

Thus, the true ‘moral’ of the story is that Isaac is not to be sacrificed. The death of the other as my primary concern is indistinguishable from my own death and is ‘bound’ to my experience of the religious in a way that could not be authenticated otherwise. Levinas, says Derrida, teaches that: “In the first place because the other is mortal that my responsibility is singular and ‘inalienable’.” (28)

Another crucial different between Heidegger and Levinas hinges on the idea of death as a known end. For Heidegger, death or Being-towards-Death hits upon the human being as a totality—that which defines a person completely. Nonetheless, this stands on a fraudulent assumption that fundamentally misunderstands death. Amongst his many ruminations on this subject, Derrida has clarified and shaped the rift between them asserting that: “Even though Levinas, in a fundamental debate, reproaches Heidegger, as well as an entire tradition, for wrongly thinking death, in its very essence and in the first place, as annihilation.” (29) We cannot be certain of this. At the very least it remains unverified. Rather, Levinas will offer an alternative description, one that Hent de Vries summarizes as follows:

The à dieu is characterized by another temporality than that of my being towards or for death. It is marked by another time, the time of the other, the in-finity calling the self in its very finitude and from beyond its own utmost possibility, that is to say, from beyond its own impossibility—from beyond and beyond its own death. This occurs not in view of a life or resurrection after this death, but in response to a call that originates neither in a Dasein that is called back to its proper being nor in a Dasein’s being faced with the possibility of its own end. Rather, we are dealing here with a ‘obligation’ from which death (my death and the death of the other) does not absolve us; an ‘imperative’ signification that comes from the future independent of and beyond my own death…. (30)

Therefore, to say that all ends with death is presumptuous. We project ahead of ourselves into a kind of life beyond death or life after life. The effect of these projections whether real or imagined impacts the patterns of behavior we live by. Death by no means cancels responsibility; obligations follow me in and beyond my death and the death of the other. Substitution, oneself for the other, as the movement of sacrifice, of self-sacrifice, of surrendering one’s self-interests, can only be declared according to Levinas for myself. I am obligated in this way but I cannot demand the same sacrifice from the other. “To say that the other has to sacrifice himself to the others would be to preach human sacrifice,” declares Levinas. (31) This distinction makes clear that Abraham apply it to himself but not to Isaac. The final assessment demands, as de Vries deciphers it: “in addressing the substitution of the subject, Levinas makes clear that, strictly speaking, he can speak only of his substitution for the other…” (32)