Literature Suspends Death

Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot

Chris Danta

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441177018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

This is the first book-length study of how three important European thinkers-Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot-use the Binding of Isaac to illuminate the sacrificial situation of the literary writer. Danta shows that literature plays a vital and heretical role in these three writers' highly idiosyncratic accounts of the Akedah. His claim is twofold: firstly, that all three authors choose to respond to the Genesis narrative by manifesting literature; and, secondly, that each heretically endows literature-or fiction-with the power to suspend the sacrifice. Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac is traditionally read as the story of faith in action. But what does it mean to play the game of not-quite-belief with the story of religious faith? By examining the literary and heretical treatments of Isaac's sacrifice in the work of Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot, this book develops an original account of literature as a form of sacrificial thinking. For each, writing acts, like God's sacrificial demand of Abraham, to suspend the writer's usual relation to his daily and earthly responsibilities.

Chatper 1

Testing the Tested

A faith like an axe. As heavy, as light.

Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

I Kafka’s Abraham and the test des fables

It is a little-remarked — because unromantic — fact about Franz Kafka’s life that he worked from 1908 to 1922 as a lawyer at the Workmen’s 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 Kafka’s 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 Zürau 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 foundational 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 wouldn’t notice that our real task was to eat from the Tree of Life. As Roberto Calasso notes, ‘We are sinful 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. God’s demand appears not only cruel but also contradictory — 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 Qur’an), 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 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 Abraham’s 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 situations, 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 d’être of Kafka’s 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 Kafka’s 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 Kafka’s reworking of Genesis 22: Abraham here responds to God’s 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 Kafka’s text, then, is that it desacralizes Abraham: Kafka’s Abraham is no longer the same man with the same relationship to God. As Moberly notes:

Within the Genesis portrayal of Abraham’s 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 Abraham’s 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 Abraham’s 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 God’s friend’ (2.21–3). But, whatever else we might want to say about him, Kafka’s 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.

Kafka’s 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 Kafka’s 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 könnte mir einen anderen Abraham denken’; ‘I could, for myself, aside within myself [à 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 könnte 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 Kafka’s 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 Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator, ‘The aesthetic effect is initially an effect of dis-identification.’11 We can see this in the case of Kafka’s fable: by presenting the patriarch in aesthetic rather than religious terms, it breaks the reader’s 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 Iden...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chatper 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Notes
• Works Cited