Performing the Covenant: Akedah and the Origins of Masculinity — Page 3:
11 In his analysis, Derrida’s discussion of the “gift” follows from a reading of Mauss’ theory of the potlatch: the gift-giving always functions under the assumption of reciprocity: “the potlatch must be returned with interests like all other gifts [. . .]. The sanction for the obligation to repay is enslavement for debt” (Mauss 42–43). According to Mauss, there is no gift as such in itself: there is only the meaning of the gift, its symbolic function that binds the giver and the receiver in the bonds of reciprocity. The gift is what the gift does; it is the impossible, “the secret [. . .] that there is no Secret” (Caputo 19). A gift veils its own negativity in the rhetoric of mutuality. In the economy of self-sacrifice, the symbolic enslavement to the terms of reciprocity of these for whom the suicide dies is the measure of the power of his death: the degree of his posthumous veneration.[6]Alvarez suggests that in some primitive societies, the idea of self-sacrifice itself has a kind of magical quality: “it is as though [the suicide] were committed in the certain belief that the suicide himself would not really die. Instead, he is performing a magical act which will initiate a complex but equally magic ritual ending in the death of his enemy” (67) The gift of death is given with the presumption that the recipient will be forced to accept it and, thus, will be forced to repay it.
12 Owing his death, Jesus offers himself for others; his death saves mankind, and the salvation requires reciprocity (similarly, as Isaac dies for Abraham). However, like other gifts, Derrida points out, the gift of death functions only on a rhetorical level; it is an impossible. One cannot die in anyone’s place, one cannot die for anyone, and God cannot die for man, in his place. In Being and Time, Heidegger defines being as foremost being-towards-death, one’s own:
No one can take the other’s dying away from him. Someone can go “to his death for an other.” However, that always means to sacrifice oneself for the other “in a definite matter.” Such dying for [. . .] can never, however, mean that the other has thus had his death in the least taken away. Every Da-sein must itself actually take dying upon itself. Insofar as it “is,” death is always essentially my own. (§47, 223)
13 To be authentically means to be in preparation for one’s death, to take one’s dying upon oneself. Death is what brings Da-sein to its wholeness. Heidegger asks “in what sense, if any, death must be grasped as the ending of Da-sein?” (227). Grasping death as the ending of one’s being means coming to terms with its certainty: “As a potentiality of being, Da-sein is unable to bypass the possibility of death. This death reveals itself as the ‘ownmost nonrelational possibility not to be bypassed’” (223). Every Da-sein has to take his dying upon himself. One cannot die for another. In this sense, death marks man’s “singularity.” In The Gift of Death, Derrida elaborates on this Heideggerian theme:
Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, “given,” one can say by death [. . .]. I can give the other everything except immortality, except thus dying for her to the extend of dying in place of her and so freeing her from her own death. I can die for the other in a situation where my death gives him a little longer to live, I can save someone by throwing myself in the water or fire in order to temporarily snatch him from the jaws of death, I can give her my heart in the literal or figurative sense in order to assure her of a certain longevity. But I cannot die in her place, I cannot give her my life in exchange for her death. Only a mortal can give [. . .] to what is mortal since he can give everything except immortality, everything except salvation as immortality. (41–43)
14 To die for someone would mean to make him immortal. And indeed, with the death of his son who dies for man, God grants man the eternal immortality of his soul, the post-mortal salvation. But this immortality, like Socrates’ deathbed discourse of the eternal soul, is rhetorical. Death, because it is man’s own affair, marks man’s ethical singularity; thus, the gift of death (dying for someone or something) has only symbolic significance. It functions only on the level of signifiers. One cannot go through the experience of death, as one cannot die for anyone else. The gift of death, thus, the impossibility of death as a possibility, signifies the paradoxical nature of language (and ethics) that signifies nothing beyond itself, nothing beyond the self in-itself. The Western ethics of faith and responsibility are founded on the rhetoric of the eternal soul and mortal body because only through the rhetoric of the eternal soul can the economy of the gift of death fulfill its symbolic function. The discourse of the immortal soul marks the sacrifice as the breaking point between humanity and godliness. The sacred is the function of the gift of death.
“Woman’s Sacrifice”: Undoing the Patriarchal “Logic of Sacrificial Responsibility”
15 The sacrificial contract between God and Abraham, the paradox of the gift of death that structures the impossible of Western ethics, presumes that “no trial could be greater than that endured by the Patriarchs,” “no experience surpasses that one in sanctity” (Spiegel 25, 24). Since the sacred is a function of faith and responsibility that is embedded in the nature of the gift of death, given between God and man, literally, the language of both Western ethics and religion is necessarily patriarchal. “[T]he relationship of the patriarchs to God became the exemplar [. . .]. Only that could become the exemplar which appeared as such to the later generation from the perspective of its own religious concepts” (Westermann 119). Since Akedah is incomparable with anything else performed for the sake of God, it became an exemplar of an ethical action, with Abraham becoming an exemplar of an ethical subject. Hence, automatically, the double gift of death is a contract between the male and the divine, and only the male gains the status of an ethical subject. The covenant is structured around the patriarchal axis—man, his son, and his male god. What is then the place of the feminine in the economy of the sacred? What is the place of the feminine in the aporia of faith and responsibility? What is the place of the feminine in the gift of death? And finally, what is the place of the feminine in the structure of ethics?