The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  Our task will be to mark in which manner Abraham can be thought, not only in its onto-theological Aufhebung but also as that figure which at once renders this very deployment suspect, that is, interrupts its self-accomplishment while committing the necessity of this very history incessantly to deploy itself otherwise and alternately. As if the precedence of the figure of Abraham could here be thought as a “pre-cedency” that a-chronologically engages and suspends, puts forth and subjects the deployment of philosophical thinking, meaning, conceptuality. That is, advances and questions the deployment of philosophical thinking toward an entirely other modality than the one it performed in regard to the figure of Abraham. An entirely other modality reserving possibilities yet unthought by the history of European thought and that maintain the very efficacy of philosophical thought. Hence, perhaps we could here think the figure of Abraham possessing a secret resource that, far from simply inverting the relation to the history of philosophy, in truth forces this very history to activate itself as that which cannot and does not identify itself with itself. Urging philosophical conceptuality to be incessantly subjected to an-other that, far from being comprehended in its essence, opens to other performatives irreducible to those signifiers that have formed the ground of the history of philosophy.

  But let us firstly ask: Which history is here at stake? In this question, we are already seeking to grasp how the figure of Abraham relates to the place from which the event of philosophy has sprung and the possibility of envisaging for this very event other performatives where the history of philosophy would not constitute its ownmost meaning but project itself always beyond the possibility of appropriating a meaning and calling it its own. It is also perhaps the question posed by Derrida on Europe in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe 4 before displacing it toward another formulation in search of other topologies, and perhaps other names, in Abraham, the Other.5 Could there be more than one history of philosophy? Or is philosophy always and already constituted by the Greco-Christian genealogy of European ideals? And from where are we to begin thinking, rethinking, remembering, or projecting the idea of Europe? There would perhaps be an Abrahamic Law capable of subjecting the very deployment of Greece and Christianity. If the history of philosophy does little else but confirm the reappropriation of Hebraism by the Greco-Christian signifier of philosophical thought, it is perhaps here our task to rethink this relation and to suggest—not simply to inverse or reverse—another status for Hebraism. This other status would certainly have an affinity with a novel questioning of the Greco-Christian horizon of European philosophical thought, harboring also a radically irreducible idea of justice at once capable of opening and keeping in check this very horizon named philosophy.

  Abraham represents the other than philosophy (which already means: the other of philosophy in philosophy). This otherness is a primary definition of Abraham. We know that this otherness is textually inscribed in the Hebraic appellation Abraham ha-ivri. Abraham ha-ivri means Abraham the Hebrew, but it also signifies the one who comes from the other bank. Abraham the Hebrew is the figure who comes from the other side or the other frontier. That is, he is other to the determinate, identifiable place. He thinks and speaks otherwise than the teleological reconciliation of thought and speech that always presupposes the very place of its enunciation. Abraham is the foreigner and remains always estranged to the spatial deployment of onto-theology. This foreignness provokes the following: The history of philosophy does not, properly said, form a concept of the figure of Abraham per se. This figure remains only that which is not inscribed in the deployment, the formation, the construction of a conceptual schema. The history of philosophy does not “comprehend” this figure. It “deals” with this figure, “treats” it, leaving it nevertheless without figure, other to the figure, and foreign to or estranged from its subsumption in a logical comprehension. As if the figure of Abraham represented a certain untouchable sublime (a sublime greater than Kant’s) that remains irreducible to philosophical discourse. Which provokes the following: This figure enters and invites itself in philosophical discourse always as an “other,” a “stranger,” a “foreigner” whose very advent provokes a disruption or disorder of traditional onto-theological concepts. In this sense, the figure of Abraham is always an “event” in the history of philosophy turning the very rationality of its discourse outside of itself and exposing it radically and entirely to the question: What is this otherness? What is its essence? Its substance? Its Spirit and its Fate?

  The question “What is this otherness? What is its essence? Its substance? Its Spirit and its Fate?” evokes the title of Hegel’s early theological writings. By evoking these texts, it ought to be remarked that the question here posed calls upon the entire language, structure, grammar, that is, the totality of the signified movement of the Hegelian dialectic. It marks the speculative presupposition of reconciliation between substance and subject, between identity and difference, between faith and knowledge.

  Hegel’s text The Spirit of Judaism forms the first part of The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,6 and it was written in Frankfurt between 1797 and 1800. The essay was never intended for publication but always remained with the author; the text was found in 1831, after the philosopher’s death—in the top drawer of his desk at the Humboldt University of Berlin. It offers an interpretation of all the central concepts of Judaism7 and examines the manner in which the religion of the Law needs to be accomplished and appropriated by the religion of Love, the “natural speculative religion,” Christianity. This interpretation of Judaism is marked by a profound, radical, even violent “anti-Judaism.” We will not go into the details of Hegel’s anti-Judaism—to grasp properly all the ramifications and effects of this position would require an extensive study all its own. It ought, however, to be noted that, for Hegel, the Judaic figure, as “odium generis humani,” is the “particularity” that cannot and, a fortiori, does not, comprehend the movement of History as Concept and thus resists the effective reconciliation of God and Man. The Judaic figure refuses thus the very modality of Spirit. Hence, it remains attached to the simple “naturality” of a concrete existence and, refusing to elevate itself beyond this condition toward the effective reconciliation of Spirit, is condemned to “be dashed to pieces on his faith itself.”8 The Judaic figure is destined to be always irreconcilable with the deployment of History and, according to Hegel, remains thrown in a condition where, subjected to an abstract and dominating Law proclaimed by an invisible and unrepresentable God, it is cut and separated from the “commonality” of the community, exiled in a “no-man’s-land.” It also categorically rejects all forms of reconciliation: with God firstly, but then also with other men and with nature. In this sense, the Judaic figure is, for Hegel, always the bearer of the irreconcilable and the unrepresentable. Which means that since it cannot recognize the effective deployment of Spirit, it cannot elevate or relieve its limited and finite condition to the infinite resolution of Absolute knowledge. Consequently, for Hegel, the Judaic figure remains purely subjected to an exterior “positivistic” Law and, by “being-subjected” to this unrepresentable commandment, only seeks to dominate and control others. Hence, the Judaic figure is nothing more than a “dominated dominator,” or, moreover, a purely egoistic, self-severing being whose sole project is to exercise its particularity over and above others. It lives only through judgment, since it is always and already both judged and subjected to an invisible, unnameable, and infinitely superior Being.

  Hegel never ceases to radicalize the purely negative condition of the Judaic figure. Even the identity of the Judaic figure is problematic. Its identity is structured as pure separation and thus becomes, according to Hegel’s logic, the very model of contradiction. Furthermore, the contradiction it incessantly marks cannot elevate itself out of itself. In other words, the Judaic “identity” cannot even affirm itself without falling back into a further contradictory stance, that of affirming an identity as separation or difference. The Juda
ic figure is thus absolutely contradictory. It contradicts the deployment of history as reconciliation, contradicts the universality of reason as human community, and contradicts the speculative ideal of love as effective and concrete reunification of opposites. This means that the Judaic figure always and already empties out and excavates history, community, love, forgiveness, recognition, and reconciliation into an abyss of incomprehension. Fundamentally, it voids the very deployment of philosophical comprehension. Its own Law, structurally incomprehensible and irreconcilable, is infinitely elevated into the purity of an abstract and intangible essence. And consequently, the Judaic figure remains attached to this intangible Law. This implies that his faith, for Hegel, is not a faith, for it remains absolutely foreign to its reconciliation with knowledge. It is thus a purely blind faith which believes that which is without reality, without concreteness, without manifestation, and thus without truth. The Judaic figure remains attached—such is its fate, which is nothing other than a structured decadence—to an incomprehensible heteronomy, chained to an invisible and unperceivable God (who is, as such, not even a God—since, for Hegel, a God that does not manifest itself is not). The Judaic figure is thus condemned to rejecting the all-encompassing totality in which differences (and to name those important to Hegel at the time of this essay: between God and Man, between Man and Nature, between Men and other Men) are brought to reconciliation.

  In this philosophical anti-Judaism we must note that Hegel is hardly ignorant of Judaism. On the contrary, Hegel recognizes several of Judaism’s central themes—the unrepresentable essence of God, the heteronomic Law, the proscription of images, the Judaic election, the severance with nature, other human communities and God, etc. But he turns them against Judaism, interpreting it as the “religion of separation” and asserting its difference from the Absolute reconciliation of philosophy with itself as reconciliation of faith and knowledge, of identity and difference, of Man and God, Nature and other men. And in order to mark this reversal of Judaism against itself, Hegel calls upon the figure of Abraham. Why Abraham? Because he is, in Hegel’s words, the “true progenitor of the Jews,” and Abraham is therefore the figure that constitutes the Spirit of Judaism.9 In this sense, the figure of Abraham bears the secret of the Judaic identity: that of not being able to compose itself as an authentic identity and thus being forever structured by separation.

  At the outset of the interpretation, Hegel marks the thesis that will determine the entirety of his reading of Judaism: Abraham’s identity is not an authentic identity. This ought not to mean that Abraham, and consequently that Judaism, has no identity. But rather, that his identity is entirely constituted by the partition of identity. The Judaic “identity,” if it can be called as such, is but a separation from all that can furnish the possibility of identity. The figure of Abraham is thus identified with the figure of a “passerby” whose being is not includable in the dialectic by which identity defines itself through the movement of its own alienation. Which means that the divided identity of Abraham has no place. He marks a radical separation between himself and place—being always a stranger to place. He is exilic and persistently non-identifiable with any type of characterization or determination, be it national, linguistic, or communal. In this sense, Abraham’s divided identity, although it presents itself as a radical “elitism,” is in truth but a profound depravity, corruption, and altered form of non-being. His identity is a non-identity and persistently voids all forms of identification. The passages claiming this Judaic non-identity, this absence or voiding of Spirit as Spirit of this “nation,” the estrangement to all place, are numerous in Hegel’s early theological writings. Indeed, the philosopher constantly revisits the same thesis, fastening his attention on key moments and characters in biblical history where the Judaic figure constitutes itself: Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, David, and so forth.

  The passages are numerous and the explications multiple. But the thesis remains the same: The Spirit of Judaism cannot love, it does not know how to love, and it does not want to love. And thus the Judaic figure continuously and incessantly extracts itself from the very possibility of willing, of knowing, of being, by cutting itself from all relations—with God, with nature, with other men. To the point where this figure becomes radically a-historical, a-meaningful, a-intentional and stands always outside, refusing and rejecting, the deployment of history as incarnation of the identity of Spirit reconciling itself with the different moments of its manifestation. In this sense, the Judaic figure does not and cannot even pretend to embrace a faith. It is radically removed from the very essence of faith as it is continuously retracting itself from the meaning of faith, incessantly removed from the reconciliation, always inscribed and present, always maintained and kept in faith, with knowledge. And since, for the young Hegel, knowledge is always reconciled with faith—faith and knowledge being mutually signified one by the other—the Judaic figure—that figure which cannot know anything other than absence and void—can only believe in the absence and the void. According to Hegel, the sky, for the Judaic figure, is empty. The Judaic figure cannot thus believe in anything as it cannot know anything. It is therefore lost, without faith and without knowledge in a world without God, that is, without the effective manifestation of God.

  We will focus on one of the most telling of Hegel’s passages marking precisely the Spirit without Spirit of the Judaic figure. The passage, although brief, is in fact crucial to Hegel’s interpretation of the Judaism. It revolves again around Abraham, and most particularly on the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22). The passage marks the incapacity, the inability, the impossibility for the Judaic figure to love. And the testimony of this incapacity, this inability, this impossibility, is signified by the non-sacrifice of Isaac, the bearer of the Promise and the beloved son of Abraham. The passage reads as follows:

  Love alone was beyond his power; even the one love he had, his love for his son, even his hope of posterity—the one mode of extending his being, the one mode of immortality he knew and hoped for—could depress him, trouble his all-exclusive heart and disquiet it to such an extent that even this love he once wished to destroy; and his heart was quieted only through the certainty of the feeling that this love was not so strong as to render him unable to slay his beloved son with his own hand.10

  We ought to notice firstly the manner in which Hegel wholly revises Genesis 22. No mention here of the divine commandment ordering Abraham to sacrifice his only son on Mount Moriah. No mention, thus, of the relation between God and man. On the contrary, Hegel here interprets the entire sequence as a testimony of the purely egoist and egoistical subjectivity of Abraham. This focus places the entire reading on the character of Abraham, soon to be understood as one of the defining traits, if not the defining trait, of the “Spirit” of Judaism: the incapacity to love. In this sense, the sequence by which Abraham sets his beloved son, Isaac, on the altar of sacrifice is here interpreted as a proof of the capacity for Abraham to master and to measure his love for the other, and thus is read as a confirmation that his only love is a self-motivated love. A love for himself and consequently a measured love for the other. Hegel here reduces the entire sequence of the sacrifice of Isaac to nothing but a test Abraham took upon himself in order to show that the only love that animated his heart was a love of himself. The sacrifice is thus but a simulacrum of sacrifice. Isaac will have remained living, but his life is but the receptacle of an egoist posture and thus an evidence of non-love. In this sense, the sacrifice of Isaac is interrupted not because Abraham loves his only son but rather—as the text suggests—because Abraham does not and indeed cannot love him. He loves only his own self-motivated ego. Hence, if the sacrifice of Isaac is interrupted, it is not in the name of love but rather because this interruption is the testimony of a mastered and controlled, and thus false, love. In truth, there will have never been here an experience of a sacrifice. Only the experience of a preservation of the self for the self. A testimony, thus, of egoism. And the reason that i
nforms this entire interpretation is always the same, as we said: The Judaic figure does not and cannot love. It does not know how to love nor does it comprehend the meaning or the truth of love. And hence, the Judaic figure entirely ignores the speculative principle in love, the necessary modality of love, that is, ignores the essentiality of sacrifice.11 In truth, the figure of Abraham, for Hegel, reduces the speculative signification of sacrifice to a merely economical and self-preserving modality of the subject. Abraham thus ignores what Hegel sees as the truth of sacrifice: that which renders effective the deployment of the resolution of truth as Spirit. That is, he ignores the speculative movement reconciling meaning, sacrifice, and love as resolution of Spirit in and as History. He ignores the truth of sacrifice and thus conceives of sacrifice and the possibility of sacrificing his son, the bearer of the promise, as that which only reassures him in the domination of his own personhood over and above the other. In stark contrast to this non-knowledge, of this economy of sacrifice performed only for the assurance of his egoism, Hegel presents the figure who grasps and comprehends the speculative reconciliation signified by the experience of sacrifice. For Hegel, this figure is the one who resolves, exposes, and gives himself entirely to the truth of sacrifice, that is, to the accomplishment and resolution of sacrifice: the figure of Christ.

  The difference between Abraham and Christ could hardly be more pronounced. The Judaic figure ignores all of sacrifice, reducing it to a mere experience of self-preservation, whereas the figure of Christ grasps the essentiality of this modality by comprehending that through it is marked and rendered effective the very presence of Spirit in and as History. For sacrifice is the modality that relieves and elevates the finite, the profane, the difference to the infinite, to the sacred, to the identification of differences. Sacrifice is that which elevates the finitude of death to the infinity of life. And this is precisely what Christ grasps—contrarily to Abraham—in (his) sacrifice. To attain the Absolute, to comprehend and seize the modality of Spirit as and in History, one must sacrifice the limit, the finitude, the difference of the Self. One must negate the marked and stark separation between finitude and infinity, between ideality and reality, between Father and Son. And, thus, reveal in which manner the sacrifice of finitude, deploys, through its negation, its elevation toward its own infinity. In truth, to sacrifice is to recognize that all limits contain in themselves and by their negation the movement of the infinite that Hegel calls “Absolute Life.” And this “Absolute Life” requires and commands that all life, all finite and limited life, as all finite and limited thought, must pass through the experience of its own sacrifice, of its own negation, of its own annihilation, and in doing so negate its own limit and reveal by this negation its infinity. In this sense, because Abraham’s sacrifice does not correspond to this model, Isaac will have had his life saved, but this salvation is without redemption, without meaning, simply finite and fixed, and thus his life remains without life. Already dead, claims Hegel. In order to grasp the infinity of Life, its Absoluteness, one has to endure and pass through the experience of a sacrifice, of the negation of the finitude of life.