De gave van de dood

by Jacques Derrida, Sophia van 't Ende (Translator)

In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida's most sustained consideration of religion to date, he continues to explore questions introduced in Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Patocka's Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Levinas, and Kierkegaard.

A major work, The Gift of Death resonates with much of Derrida's earlier writing and will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism, along with scholars of ethics and religion.

Collection: Religion and Postmodernism Series

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Religion, Theory, Death, Theology, France

203 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

LIFE IS A TEMPLE, WHOSE LIVING PILLARS SOMETIMES WHISPER UNINTELLIGIBLE SECRETS...
Charles Baudelaire

The gift of death is also the gift of life. By grappling with the irreducibly problematic gridlock of our aporetic angst we can renew our lives - simply by disentangling them from all trashily chthonic satisfactions - for true faith is timeless and has no issue.

Such is the life-giving gift of this book.

This was perhaps the most eye-opening book of my middle age. And it was my first-read opus from the Derrida canon.

It’s a dense, provocative study of the different possible historical reactions to moral decadence.

Two of those reactions - the Classical and the Christian - are in particular studied under Derrida’s high-definition microscope.

No flaw escapes his gaze - but he unfortunately omits to give any hint at a RESOLUTION to the intense sense of unease which exposure to depravity elicits in ethically-minded folks.

For he had found none. Such is the essence of the Quest.

Thankfully, my own faith journey later quelled all such anxiety. And a grateful sense of peace replaced my own turbulent midlife crisis.

But, you gotta know, when I discovered this book by accident I had no IDEA of the impact it would have on my life...

In 1991, I used to often spend my lunch hours at the public library on the days when my wife had packed me a brown bag lunch.

Fresh from an intense and defiantly individualistic study of a Camus book on existentialism - was it Resistance, Rebellion and Death? - I had decided to explore more recent French philosophy.

I have always been grateful to my mother for drumming the Dewey Decimal System into my skull during the years I worked as a page in her library:

It made quick hits at the library so much easier in those later days when my free time would be so short, for, as Christopher Marlowe (almost) wrote:

Lente, lente, currite dies equi!

Anyway, this unknown book was by a great (then-) living philosopher, and it was short, so I grabbed it and headed to an easy chair.

It’s a nebulous metaphysical dismantling of the roadblocks that obscure our view of mankind’s most perfidious peccadilloes... (but no spoilers here).

Wow! I was floored, once I managed to hack my way through the dense undergrowth of postmodernist metaphysics.

This was a keeper!

Since that time, I’ve always had my OWN copy ready at hand.

As I said, Derrida leaves us hanging... because he always left HIMSELF hanging. He accepted as a priori the maxim that to write is to write in thin air, without any trace. ‘Vanity, saith the Preacher...’

Yes, he knew vanity kills.

But he lets a few bombshells drop in this book. And he’s not too shy to call ‘em as he sees ‘em!

Yes, the law of lust prevails for many... yet the infinitely more powerful and totalizing dream of grace, wisdom and forbearance - at least to my aged understanding - will be our final arbiter.

And Derrida successfully dismantles the Ogre of Depravity - but his critique gives his turbulent soul no rest, as he can’t believe in a firm Ground for himself! For he has made himself Invisible, without mooring on terra firma, only God.

Even deconstructed, evil remains insidiously lethal - for such is the Curse of the Ring’s gift of invisibility! O Sur châtiment - and such is the lure of its forbidden fruit.

But, for me, this wonderfully ingenuous man will in Eternity be Saved by his humility. No matter how much us lesser mortals recoil in anguish from the dizzying implications of his lapidary words, in his deserts of the Void!

Caveat emptor, to untried newbies who chance upon this book! Thankfully, this Dark Wasteland is, like Dante Alighieri’s, only impenetrable without the inspiration of the Spirit Who gives you wings to fly over it.

You know, the One who raises us up from that pit wants us to KNOW we are henceforth safe from evil by His act. But to make that knowledge stick we must feel it in our bones.

If you are forearmed by Faith, what this philosopher reveals will only add strength and perseverance to that secure foundation.

Gott, der Herr, ist Sonn und Schild!

And Derrida really did ME a favour with this book...

It gave me a very real and substantial bone to chew on, and an essential key to my indefatigable persecutors’ behaviour, as I worked my way through my midlife crisis.

And it was one of the reasons why I, like Jacques Derrida, came out safely on the other side.

All because of a random hit in a neglected library!

Funny, this thing called serendipity.

For love works wonders worldly wisdom never knows.

[Gordon Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a hauntingly, sublimely beautiful book. It makes you think--really. I don't mean just in the "How about that" sense: it makes you reconsider loss, betrayal, hardship, duty, sacrifice. And that's just the easy stuff. A gift for Jacques is like a ghost that passes unawares from the giver to the receiver. It is never experienced in the way in which it was expected. Miracle, blessing--all these concepts made sense to me after reading The Gift of Death.

Now Derrida, as we know, only makes sense when interpreted. But interpretation in this context takes on a whole new meaning. It means thinking, like Rodin's thinker, with one's whole body, and how you live your life. It doesn't mean rewording or reducing the metaphysician's ideas, let alone simply parrot them back. I have tried that game as many times as everyone else has and it's fun and frustrating in equal measure. That said, it's missing the point. Then again, to miss the point is precisely to embark on the journey, which is truly one of enlightenment.

Does God exist? "God does not exist, but their is (a) God ("Il y'a dieu'). Likewise, one never dies, yet death comes. It's all about suspension of belief, to rework Coleridge, to arrive at revelation beyond belief. Derrida does not dance around here, as he has been known to (very well, at least) heretofore. In this book he goes straight to the heart. The Gift will make you love the late, great man. Here, he is not the Napoleon of epistemology withering away on Elba. On the contrary, he is the Colossus at Rhodes, bridging an isthmus.

[Patricia Nedelea · Rating 5 out of 5]

So poetic. It's literary theory but it reads like fiction, it feels like fiction and it inspired me just the way great fiction does. Thank you for this, Mr. Derrida.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

I probably overestimate how much it can say in isolation of a larger critical context, but I would say this book profoundly changed how I articulate my life experiences, my thoughts, and my beliefs.

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derrida’s The Gift of Death excavates and reconstructs the deep structure of the relationship between death, responsibility, the sacrifice, and the hidden or secret in the history of European thought from Plato to Heidegger.

The first three sections of the book primarily consist of close readings of several philosophical and religious texts, beginning with the Czechoslovakian philosopher Jan Patočka’s book Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History. Unfamiliar as I am with Patočka’s work, I was initially wary, but I quickly became convinced it was a useful framework for understanding the problematic, and I got what I needed to from Derrida’s clear explication.

As a supplement to this reading, Derrida considers the famous passage in Plato’s Phaedo in which Socrates describes philosophy as a “preparation for death,” thereby laying the initial historical groundwork for the development of this complex. As Heidegger would one day articulate, it is within one's authentic recognition of one's own mortality that the foundations of the self as a finite, bounded being are fully set in place.

In Patočka’s reading, Plato and his followers represented the final flowering of what he calls the “orgiastic” or “demonic” stage of development, which I believe he would primarily associate with something like a Dionysian religious frenzy of self-abandonment and the transgression of norms. In his reading, the longing for the transcendent in this stage is chiefly characterized by a desire to completely merge with the absolute principle. In this process, the self is be dissolved, along with personal guilt or responsibility. In contrast, Christianity, following the model of the Phaedo, makes the individual's relationship to death the site of recognizing the absolute singularity of the self, and this singularity is preserved, even in relationship to the transcendent deity. That is, the self is not negated in relationship to the absolute deity, and this stage can therefore be seen as the birth of historical consciousness and individual responsibility.

As an aside, I think Patočka is wrong to believe that religions striving after the dissolution of the self are necessarily antinomian. The Gelukpa philosophers of Tibetan Buddhism, for example, argue that it is precisely because the self lacks independent existence that individuals are ethically obliged to care for others, because we are all mutually implicated in the same endless web of interacting causes and effects. My own thinking is somewhat closer to the Gelukpa view than Patočka’s, and I found it a little strange to see Derrida, the father of deconstruction, take over the discourse of “absolute singularity” and “absolute other” without criticism. The idea of an “absolute” anything does not seem very poststructuralist to me. In fact, I can hardly see a point in the whole enterprise if it retains some kind of unproblematized essentialism at its heart.

In any case, Patočka’s reading is heavily influenced by the sections in Heidegger’s Being and Time which deal with being-toward-death. Derrida correctly notes that the ghost of the Phaedo haunts this work, even if it is not explicitly named.

Having established the relationship between individuation, interiority, and responsibility, Derrida brings these concepts into the domain of human action with an analysis of the sacrifice. This is heavily based on Kierkegaard’s reading of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling. Derrida follows Kierkegaard in asserting that the question of moral obligation is entirely encompassed by the relationship of the absolutely singular self with the transcendent other, where God is the transcendent other par excellence. Reflecting a strikingly Protestant inflection, it is argued that a deed is "good" insofar as it is done solely for the sake of duty. Just as Kant argues in his Critique of Practical Reason, if we do something because it is a good thing to do, it is no longer good.

A great many philosophical and psychological shell games have resulted from the moral logic of Protestantism, in which, as Hegel put it, the feudal lord has been taken into the heart and set up on a new throne. Now the agonized Christian must not only do the right thing, but they must also prove (even, it would seem, to themselves) that they don't secretly believe that they're good for doing it. This is, I daresay, how we get to Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Such emphatic convictions mask their opposite, and not very well.

But if there is a superficial side to this problem, there is a deeper side as well. In the western European tradition, there is something about goodness or sacrality that carries within itself the secret, the inexpressible, the purely interior. Within individuals and within cultures, this secret can be wrapped up into itself and completely forgotten, but this forgetting itself is a mode of its preservation. Part of this is a reflection of the intrinsic singularity of moments of transcendent significance, which do not generally conform to the patterns of ethical judgment we ordinarily reference. At root, this is the meaning of the Abraham story - it illustrates the fundamental conflict between our duty to God, which is individual and singular, and our ethical judgments, always have a general form.

Note that Derrida emphasizes that this does not mean the ethical judgments are no longer binding in such cases. Abraham is still guilty when he raises the knife. That is itself part of the sacrifice.

I think Derrida accurately reconstructs a real complex of ideas that hold sway in the western Christian church, and I was a bit surprised at how keenly he reads this literature. The exegetical writing that occupies the first three sections of the book is first rate, and quite persuasive.

Unfortunately, the fourth and final section of the book is not nearly as engaging or persuasive. Derrida takes off from the historical reconstruction he’s undertaken to link his ideas to a more general set of poststructuralist concepts, but in my view, none of it really lands. He doesn’t really develop any new coherent insights, and largely recapitulates what has already been made clear in earlier sections, only with more jargon.

Addendum: I forgot to mention in my review being struck by Derrida's observation that a whole series of twentieth-century philosophers attempted to replicate the primary moments of religious though without themselves being religious and listed several examples, but he left himself off that list - despite, in "Plato's Pharmacy", having spent a hundred pages analyzing the Logos, making statements like "the Logos proceeds from the father" (!), but always in the context of analyzing the Egyptian god Thoth, and never once mentioning the Gospel of John or Christ or the Trinity or Christianity (!!).

Harold Bloom wrote a whole book on the anxiety of influence, and it is very real.

[lilly amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

derrida is based actually ?? thanks, i hate it...

[William Durden]

I'm using this book as a theoretical basis for my thesis. It's been a life-changing read for me.

[Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this while researching a paper and found, to my delight, that the late Prince of Opacity can be surprisingly lucid when he wishes. As I understood it, his main arguments are:

1. Christianity superseded Platonism because it made a "gift" of death. Not only did it give its adherents a way out of death, but it also, reciprocally, made their own deaths a gift to the Other.

2. Death, or the apprehension of death, leads to a notion of irreplaceability (only I can die my death), and thus responsibility: how will I die my death? This apprehension, leading to irreplaceability and responsibility, creates the self. Death furnishes unrepeatability of self (hence the gift idea again).

3. Sacrifice means both loving something and rejecting something (rejecting that which we won't sacrifice for). Every choice of an Other means a rejection of the "others."

4. But! Every other is every (bit) Other. Every other that I reject is as Other as the one I accept.

I'm still working out the consequences of this last point, where Derrida deconstructs Other and other. The final chapter was difficult, and I had to read it swiftly. Now that it's summer, though, I'm putting it aside, saving it for the fall. People on the bus were giving me strange looks when they saw the title. When gray skies and rain come again I'll be able to get away with it.

[Paul H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The GR reviews for this book are hilarious ... I'm not quite sure how Derrida became the go-to author for pretentious people trying to feel profound (why not Husserl? or Bergson?), similar to how people like to pretend to be knowledgeable about quantum mechanics, but not electromagnetism or particle physics (not sexy enough, I guess?).

Anyway Gift of Death is Derrida at his laziest; late 80s-early 90s is definitely his worst phase, I think. The entire book (a rambling essay, really) is a series of uninteresting reflections on Jan Patočka's unfounded and unilluminating distinction between the demonic/mystical and the responsible/religious. Derrida decides to just go ahead and take this as normative (?! lol) and then riff on a bunch of random themes he had bouncing around in his head at this time, mainly referencing Kierkegaard and Levinas. In short, a great deal of wordplay and very little of substance. Early Derrida is effing amazing (show me the fluff in his book on Husserl's Origin of Geometry -- there is literally none) but he was in full egotist rock-star mode by 1990 and there's very little of value here.

Post-2000 Derrida gets interesting again, and Acts of Religion, a later work, covers the same loose themes as Gift of Death, but is actually worth reading.

[Jerome · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derrida is at his best in this slim book from the early 1990s. What is exemplified in the volume is not his signature ability to tweak meaning and structure but rather, putting those styles of thought to work, a remarkably dynamic examination of phenomenological political thought in the protestant tradition. Starting with an examination of Czech philosopher Patocka's political writings of the 1970s, D. makes his way through the ecstatic elements of phenomenology and early existentialism (Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard) to dwell at length on Abraham's displaced sacrifice of his son, significant across religions.

Like some of Derrida's work on sovereignty (in Given Time ), the logic of the gift offers not a meditation on Foucauldian conditions of possibility but on the necessity and impossibility of death in Christian and modern ethics. Claiming the ecstatic as the sublimation and incorporation of pagan ethics, he asserts this is a history of sexuality, forcing a conversation with Foucault in which the gift of death threatens and extends toward the gift of life offered by the biopolitical.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always with Derrida, he is most comprehensible when one has a good familiarity with the subject matter he is approaching. The first half of this text concerns Patočka and Heidegger, neither of which I've read. So I was having trouble there.

In the second half, Derrida introduces Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and close readings of the Old and New testaments. This was much more my speed. A beautiful expansion of Kierkegaard's concerns in Fear & Trembling. I think I'd be more satisfied with a reading of this once I've come to know Heidegger better.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the more difficult books by Derrida that I've read. It's focus is very diffuse, covering such topics as gift-giving, death and sacrifice, and there are many points where I could not follow along with Derrida's train of thought. While I may just not be bright enough to get everything that the author is trying to convey, the book certainly felt disjointed and filled with non-sequiturs.

The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the final chapter, "Tout Aute Est Tout Autre," (Every other [one] is every [bit] other). It is here that Derrida discusses the story of Abraham and meditates on the nature of sacrifice. Sacrifice, according to Derrida, is an act of giving without calculation of return. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, humans sacrifice to a God that is wholly hidden and "other." Thus in offering sacrifices to this God, there is no possibility of anticipating rewards. Humans are incapable of knowing what God wants or intends, and so sacrifice, in this tradition, must be made blindly and without hope of benefit. Derrida suggests that the time has come to absorb the idea of God into our own consciousness, doing away with a God outside of ourselves. In this way, we could offer sacrifices to ourselves.

The book is made up of four essays that meander and wander all over the place. I think Derrida would have benefited from a good editor.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derrida, like many of my favorite philosophers, brings the you along a stream-of-ideas until the logical, and in this case, disconcerting end appears before you know it and off the cliff you go - with no parachute.

[Juan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deconstruction at its purest. Great book for those interested in ethics, religion and politics.

[Ivan Loginov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book offers us both a fun and insightful journey to deconstruct responsibility and sacrifice through the term of the so-called gift of death. The first chapter, inspired by Jan Patočka, is a bit incomprehensible due to the heavy phenomenological jargon that Patočka's thought requires, but otherwise, it is a good old Derrida with word-plays and ironic accents.

In this essay, Jacques Derrida synthesizes the idea of the responsibility to the other that comes through their sacrifice (Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling) and of mysticism and secrecy present Christianity (Jan Patočka: Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History). While also drawing from some works of Heidegger, Levinas, and Mauss, Derrida describes an economy of death which coincides and codevelops with and beside economies of secret and sacrifice.

These economies allow for the emergence of responsibility. Responsibility to God as an absolute other means responsibility to other people, as for Derrida "every other (one) is every (bit) other" (tout autre est tout autre). Derrida's God is one's self possibility of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior. Such secrets, witnessed by unseen (Christian) God, distinguish one individual singularity from all the others while making it responsible to all of them (individually).

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

I too, like Abraham, must betray ethics and become the knight of faith 😤🫡

[Júlia]

li só "la littérature au secret"

[Michael Dodsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derrida is a notoriously elusive subject. To try and do justice to such complex and obscurantist writing in a few short sentences such as this review will allow, is impossible. All I can do is offer a few thoughts of my own on the fundamentals of his work. I do not, nor have I ever met anyone, who has fully understood all his ideas; responses are inevitably a matter of surmise.

‘The Gift of Death’ is Derrida’s most extended discourse on ethics and religion in which he compares his ideas with those of Heidegger, Levinas and Kierkegaard with particular emphasis on Jan Patocka. Whenever I think about Derrida’s ideas I always return to basics: the things that motivated him, the notions that shaped his life. I think it is important in the understanding of Derrida to remember that he was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Algiers, growing up as member of a marginalised, dispossessed culture. It is the word ‘marginalised’ here which I think is key to Derrida’s positioning. His view was that for every central belief, whether ethical or religious, there is a marginalised ‘other’. People often complain that little or no manifestation of philosophical thought ever permeates through to everyday life – this cannot be said of Derrida, whether you like him or loathe him. Today many of his ideas about deprivation, marginalisation and prejudice occupy us today. Whether it be the treatment of women, repression of religious beliefs or the persecution of race and minorities, many of these have their roots in Derrida’s philosophy. So, for example, any culture which has Christianity as its central tenet, will, accordingly and often unwittingly, marginalise Buddhists, Muslims, Jews et al. Thus, the word religion can be ‘deconstructed’ to mean the marginalisation of the other – i.e. not only does it mean belief but also that which we do not believe. By extension the marginalised could then be seen to be central itself, when seen from an unfamiliar perspective.

Derrida’s ideas are in some respect a development of Cartesian Dualism, i.e. between the physical or the material and the metaphysical or immaterial aspects of human activity. Derrida’s concern is how we rationalise the ‘gift’ of life and death and the way that the spiritual could lead us to absolve our physical actions. One obvious example being the confessional and the absolution it brings to the soul. One question I think Derrida is posing is the danger that religion may lead us into ‘demonic rapture’ as he puts it, to the exclusion of the ethics of the everyday material world. So, we return to that theme again, the marginalisation of binary opposites. It seems to me that this poses the greatest question facing us today: how do we balance binary opposites to produce a stable world? Is it even possible? This is the central conclusion I draw from this most provocative of Derrida’s texts.

I’m not sure whether any of the foregoing will enlighten anybody but they are my rather random thoughts distilled over half a lifetime of reading (on and off!) this ‘enfant terrible’ of modern philosophy. One thing I will always thank Derrida for, and this goes for all the other great thinkers, is to instil into oneself the discipline never to accept any idea at first hand without first taking the time to weigh its possibilities and, crucially, the effect that idea has on others. Rather than the gift of death, perhaps the gift of thought should be the object of our eternal gratitude, and Derrida’s greatest legacy.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derrida's work here took me by surprise--specifically, I found his implicit support for an ethics (and perhaps the only meaningful system of ethics) based in religion. Indeed, as Derrida suggests, responsibility constitutes religion. This responsibility roots in the human's relationship with "God"--that infinite other who sees in secret and knows me better than the 'I' knows myself. With this all-seeing infinite other that sees in secret, then, a responsibility manifests itself as an internal force rather than an external force--countries cannot hide their nuclear arsenal guilt-free because their responsibility comes from within. This responsibility with a God also applies to situations such as that of Abraham and Isaac--which Derrida argues represents our current existence. Derrida uses the example of himself: he spends time writing and thinking about philosophy and thus does not spend time taking care of the poor and starving. Or, for example, feeding one cat comes with the sacrifice of not feeding another starving cat. God, Derrida seems to suggest, saves ethics from this absurdity by introducing a larger meaning and thereby responsibility. I wonder, however, if we might expand upon Derrida's idea of religion to include things typically not associated with "religion."

For example, might we see Sartre's existentialism as a religion, since it introduces responsibility? I think we safely might, especially since Derrida cited extensively Heidegger's comments regarding the "being-towards-death" which might allow one to take ownership of their own life (whatever that means) indicating an introduction of responsibility--as Derrida shows, one who takes ownership of his/her biological facticity of death can realize his/her un-replaceability, thereby instilling the individual with a responsibility to not allow his/her life to waste away. Does Derrida see this as inadequate? Does this explain why he focuses extensively on systems with a God (in this case, the Abrahamic religions in general but Christianity mostly)?

A final note: many of the 20th century "Continental" thinkers tended to shy away from enlightenment values (as well as Platonic)--with a heavy emphasis on reason above a more holistic experience. Thus, Derrida seems to celebrate Christianity's split with Platonism--with its emphasis on the "orgiastic" and mystical--e.g. Abraham made the greatest sacrifice when he murdered (by standards of intention) his own beloved son without questioning God's orders, also, Jesus's supreme sacrifice of his own self for the sin's of the world. Might this mystery lead to a curbing of world wars and thereby to meaningless deaths? Derrida (and Kierkegaard) recognize the fact that, by societal standards, Abraham represents a murderer--perhaps insane, but he seems to do away with this due to the incommensurability of Abraham's responsibility in his unequal relationship with the infinite other as well as due to the fact that we all rest in Abraham's shoes in a larger sense. However, I do wish Derrida would have discussed atrocities committed as a result of religious people's perceived responsibility in relation to God--I think, namely, of the Spanish Inquisition, the crusades, ISIS attacks, etc.

Derrida brilliantly broaches a multitude of fascinating discussions in this small book--definitely a work to revisit.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derrida says this about Abraham, per Kierkegaard:

'Whereas the tragic hero is great, admired, and legendary from generation to generation, Abraham in remaining faithful to his singular love for every other, is never considered a hero. He doesn’t make us shed tears and doesn’t inspire admiration: rather stupefied horror, a terror that is also secret. For it is a terror that brings us close to the absolute secret that we share without sharing it, a secret between someone else, Abraham as the other, and another, God as the other, as wholly others. Abraham himself is in secret, cut off from both man and from God. But this is perhaps what we share with him. But what does it mean to share a secret? It isn’t a matter of knowing what the other knows, for Abraham doesn’t know anything. It isn’t a matter of sharing his faith, for the latter must remain an initiative of absolute singularity. And, moreover, we don’t think or speak of Abraham from the point of view of a faith that is sure of itself, any more than did Kierkegaard.'

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read the Polish philosopher Jan Patocka (I mean, who has?), but I think the gaps can be filled if you've got a working knowledge of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Heidegger's Being and Time. I was irritated at first to have yet more attention dedicated to the tired old subjects of European Christianity and Father Abraham, but Derrida has a knack for recasting old stories in bizarre and unnatural ways.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh Derrida, you little punk. This book frustrated me to no end. I will say that I was thoroughly fascinated by his reading of Abraham and Isaac, and as much as I thought I had wrapped my head around his core argument, there were still many unanswered questions. I would recommend this if you are interested in a philosophical/theoretical/relativistic reading of a Biblical story. If not, you might be intrigued about the attempt to deconstruct God. Overall, this book is a challenging and rewarding read, even more so the second go around.

[Joe Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first two chapters of this short book are among the most thought-provoking I've read anywhere. The third slows down, and the fourth eventually peters out. A must-read, though, for sure!

[Sara-Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

finished on the fourth aniversary of his death. dun dun dun.

[Fernando Fernández · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gana con la relectura. Quince años después y un poco más cerca de la muerte, se comprende mejor su desafío.

[Lucas Mattos]

Review forthcoming

[Griffin Duffey]

“For in the discourses that dominate during such wars, it is rigorously impossible, on one side and the other, to discern the religious from the moral, the legal from the political. The warring factions are all irreconcilable fellow worshipers of the religions of the Book. Does that not make things converge once again in the fight to the death that continues to rage on Mount Moriah over the possession of the secret of the sacrifice by an Abraham who never said anything? Do they not fight in order to take possession of the secret as the sign of an allegiance with God to impose its order on the other, who becomes for his part nothing more than a murderer?… Things are such that this man [Abraham] would surely be condemned by any civilized society. On the other hand, the smooth functioning of such a society, the monotonous complacency of its discourses on morality, politics, and the law, and the exercise of its rights, are in no way, impaired by the fact that, because of the structure of the laws of the market that society has instituted and controls, because of the mechanisms of external debt and other similar inequities, that same “society” puts to death or allows to die and disease tens of millions of children without any moral or legal tribunal ever being considered competent to judge such a sacrifice, the sacrifice of others to avoid being sacrificed oneself. Not only is it true that such a society participates in this incalculable sacrifice, it actually organizes it.” (84-86)


Responsibility, morality, history, debt, the gift, the secret. Stuff way above my awareness but nonetheless speaks to me and for me. That’s a long quote to include here but it sounds like better version of some thoughts I’ve been having around religion and contemporary politics. Screw it—here’s another long quote that feels necessary for me to type out slowly:

“What is thus found at work in everyday discourse, in the exercise of justice, and first and foremost in the axiomatics of private, public, or international law, and the conduct of internal politics, diplomacy, and war, is a lexicon concerning responsibility that can be said to hover vaguely about a concept that is nowhere to be found, even if we can’t go so far as to say that it doesn’t correspond to any concept at all. It amounts to a disavowal, whose resources, as one knows, are in exhaustible. One simply keeps on denying the aporia and antimony, tirelessly, and one treats as nihilist, relativist, even poststructuralist, and worse still deconstructionist, all those who remain concerned in the phase of such a display of good conscious.” (85)

Really great stuff throughout but the final chapter is where it starts to come together for me. Discussing with the homies will surely make this come alive for me. Perhaps the best reviews are those where I don’t say anything and just quote.

“God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior.” (108)

[SCDavis · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be reviewed after having digested more than now, as all these chewed bits of speculation on the progression of the responsible economy of being in the world, from ritualistic attempts to merge with Nature to the Platonic climb towards contemplation of the Good, and further still, to the JudeoChristianIslamic struggle with understanding the God who sees while being unseen and asks that we live by a spiritual rather than materialistic economy of give and take. 

Such speculations still sit barely aperch whatever stool there may be there, gurgling and churning throughout my guts.

[John Kameas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere buried in here is probably the best answer to the problem of divine hiddenness ever devised. Unfortunately, as is everything written by any french philosopher ever, he wants you to get down on your knees and suck till you get lock-jaw. Maybe a skill issue on my behalf, but I couldn’t get the big pay-off. Regardless, the shit you will understand will stay with you forever (the end of part 2 for me) and that makes it worthwhile.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida critically analyzes and deconstructs the notion of responsibility. Heavily influenced by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida offers a more “radical” form of responsibility that he ultimately concludes can never be truly responsible, since it preserves “within itself a nucleus of irresponsibility or of absolute unconsciousness” (22). For Derrida, responsibility, specifically the kind of “absolute responsibility” exhibited by Abraham in the Akedah, is “condemned a priori to paradox, scandal, and aporia”; it demands that, like Abraham, one sacrifices another to whom one is responsible in order to relate responsibly to the other, another other, perhaps even the Other (69). Consequently, any specific instance of this more radical responsibility necessarily entails the “absolute sacrifice” of all other possible responsibilities (68-9). Derrida stresses that the absolute responsibility that demands absolute sacrifice is intimately linked with religion, which “presumes access to the responsibility of a free self” (4). In fact, for Derrida, “religion is responsibility” (5, my emphasis). He ultimately hopes to disclose “the possibility of religion without religion,” a “logic” that “has no need of the event of a revelation or the revelation of an event” (50). The Gift of Death is, admittedly, a difficult text: it presumes familiarity with a whole host of thinkers and meanders from reflection to reflection, often without any apparent connection between textual analyses. Moreover, it is not entirely clear what to make of Derridean responsibility, which Derrida insists is both exceptional and utterly mundane in practice (the sacrifice of Isaac is at one point compared to the decision to feed one’s cat at the expense of all other cats). Still, Derrida provides a helpful deconstructive analysis of responsibility that clarifies its paradoxical nature, even if he also muddles the water with respect to how the concept of responsibility presupposes the sacrificial logic of modernity.

At the outset of the book, Derrida claims to approach the idea of responsibility historically; with a cue from the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, he contends that the irresponsibility latent within responsibility has to do with Christianity, and more specifically derives from its repression of “the demonic sacred” (also called “the orgiastic”) first subordinated in Platonism. To make sense of this, Derrida, in classical post-structuralist fashion, first starts with a binary opposition between this demonic element, equated with irresponsibility, and responsibility, which he then destabilizes in his interpretation of Christian responsibility. He borrows this dichotomy from Patočka, who claims that responsibility developed historically in opposition to the idea of demonic, sacrificial violence. For Patočka, who critiques the decadence of inauthentic and irresponsible modern civilization, Platonism and Christianity represent the two most influential attempts to overcome the demonic and establish responsibility. Yet Patočka is hostile toward Platonism and its concomitant “mystery,” i.e. the journey of the individual soul toward a transcendent Good. He contrasts this Platonic mystery with the mystery of Christianity, the mysterium tremendum, which he characterizes as the absolute incommensurability and asymmetry between God and the human. Whereas Platonism seeks to establish responsibility rationally, with the discipline of the demonic and the intellectual ascent of the soul toward an object, i.e. the Good, Christianity understands responsibility as bound up in a relationship with the person of God. Patočka ultimately identifies the decadence of modernity with Platonic hubris, whereas Christianity (or at least a certain, adequately thematized version of it) offers the only viable way to overcome the demonic and establish authentic, responsible life.

Without much justification, Derrida utilizes the concepts “the demonic sacred,” “Platonism,” and “Christianity” as Patočka more or less understands them to narrate his history of responsibility, which differs in important respects from that offered by Patočka. Whereas for Patočka, Christianity and Platonism are in some sense fundamentally opposed to one another, Derrida claims that the Christian mysterium tremendum is a repression of the Platonic mystery, and insofar as the Platonic mystery retains within itself the demonic sacred it seeks to subordinate and discipline, Christianity, too, contains this demonic element. This history of responsibility needs to be “admitted to,” Derrida insists, for unless we admit this history, we will miss the crucial paradox of responsibility, i.e. that (Christian) responsibility cannot escape irresponsibility, an omission which in turn has serious ethical implications (11). As it stands, Christianity is unaware of this repressed violence that stands at the heart of its conceptions of responsibility and selfhood; it is “incapable” of reflection on the Platonic mystery it represses and by extension the demonic sacred retained within Platonism (26). Moreover, because (European) modernity incorporates Christianity as its historical predecessor, modernity likewise contains within itself the “secret” of the demonic. In fact, the decadence of modern civilization is concomitant with the return of the demonic, which manifests in perpetual boredom and the outbreak of periodic violence, the latter of which we often fail to see (or do see, yet nevertheless justify) due to the repression of the demonic sacred (85-6). For these reasons, Derrida asserts that the “secret of responsibility . . . concerns the very essence or future of European politics” (35). For my part, I do not think he means this hyperbolically.

Derrida’s interpretation of the Christian mysterium tremendum paves the way for his articulation of a “more radical form of responsibility” that retains within it the irresponsible and sacrificial violence of the demonic sacred or orgiastic (28). By way of Kierkegaard, he contrasts the “absolute responsibility” of faith, archetypically demonstrated by Abraham in the Akedah, with the universal responsibility of ethics, i.e. the universal (Kantian) concept of duty that binds us in a moral relation to all other humans. As Kierkegaard interprets the Akedah, Abraham must sacrifice his responsibilities to those whom he knows and loves, above all his son Isaac, in order to fulfill his responsibility to an unknowable, hidden, and absent God who commands what, in the eyes of ethics, is murder. In other words, the absolute responsibility demanded of Abraham by God requires irresponsibility in the realm of ethics, at least in terms of how ethics conceptualizes responsibility (as universal duty). Consequently, there is a tension in responsibility, what Derrida calls an aporia: responsibility within the realm of ethics demands that one answer for oneself with respect to the universal, before the impartial tribunal of morality, whereas responsibility within the realm of faith demands that one answer for oneself with respect to the radically particular, in silence and in secrecy, within a relationship that by definition excludes all those to whom one relates morally (62). Paradoxically, then, ethics can make us irresponsible in terms of absolute responsibility, while faith can make us irresponsible in terms of universal responsibility; in both ethics and faith, one must be irresponsible in order to be responsible. Here, we pointedly see the return of the sacrificial violence of the demonic sacred: irresponsibility is latent within the idea of responsibility.

Yet Derrida complicates this Kierkegaardian paradox by way of Levinas, who contends that the other to whom one is absolutely responsible is not just God, but also the other human person. Yet if, as Levinas observes, the other is (or can be) the other human, then ethics is not (just) the realm of the universal, as Kierkegaard would have it; for if every other (one) is every (bit) other (tout autre est tout autre), as Derrida frequently maintains, then I am responsible to each and every other, yet only capable of responsible relation to a particular other, on account of what absolutely responsibility entails—for Levinas, my death in place of the other. It is notable that Derrida, who takes more of a Heideggerian line on this point, focuses less on self-sacrifice than Levinas; while Derrida frequently cites the idea of “nonsubstitution,” which refers to how another person cannot take “my place” in my responsible relation to the other (or with respect to my death; no one can die my death), the Levinasian concept of “substitution” is conspicuously absent from The Gift of Death. In its simplest formulation, “substitution” captures how I am constituted as an ethical subject in my unique responsibility for the other person; for Levinas, substitution means that I am responsible even for the other person’s death, such that a responsible relation to the other requires my death in their place (I “substitute” for the other when I die for them). Conversely, Derrida focuses more on how my responsible relation to a particular other requires my sacrifice of all the other others—or more precisely, the sacrifice of my (absolute or ethical) responsibility to all the others who are just as other as the other to whom I do responsibly relate. “And I can never justify this sacrifice,” Derrida explains. “Whether I want to or not, I will never be able to justify the fact that I prefer or sacrifice any one (any other) to the other” (71). Once more, we see here the return of the sacrificial violence of the repressed demonic sacred, yet not in terms of my death, the sacrifice of my life. For Derrida, the return of the demonic always seems to manifest in terms of my sacrifice of others on the same model as the Akedah.

In any case, Derrida observes that Levinas introduces another wrinkle into the aporia of responsibility with his insistence that every human is wholly other. For if this is true, then it is impossible to differentiate, as Kierkegaard does, between the universal duties of ethics that would need to be sacrificed in absolute responsibility to the divine Other and the faith that turns to God and away from these human duties. In other words, if absolute responsibility extends just as equally toward all humans as it does toward God, then there is no clear distinction between ethics and faith, since ethics (as Levinas frequently claims) is also the realm of absolute responsibility. At the same time, Derrida points out, because Levinas seeks to differentiate “the infinite alterity of God and the ‘same’ infinite alterity of every human,” he cannot entirely dispense with the Kierkegaardian distinction between faith and ethics either. “Neither one nor the other [i.e. neither Kierkegaard nor Levinas] can assure himself of a concept of the ethical and of the religious that is of consequence; and consequently they are especially unable to determine the limit between those two orders” (84). In the end, it turns out that the Kierkegaardian distinction between ethics and faith is untenable, just as the Levinasian distinction between the alterity of God and that of the other human similarly breaks down. Here, too, we see Derridean deconstruction at work.

Derrida is successful, I think, in his demonstration that responsibility as conceived by Kierkegaard and Levinas contains within itself the irresponsibility of the demonic sacred. It seems especially important to his project to unveil this “secret” at the heart of responsibility, even when, as in Kierkegaard and Levinas, responsibility is conceptualized more radically than mere accountability or universal duty. His point seems to be that there is a real and ineradicable violence in responsible action that amounts to a cruel betrayal of all the others to whom I am equally responsible. More perniciously, he contends that the smooth operation of our social, economic, and political order, as well as of our ordinary moral discourse, “presupposes” the sacrifice of millions at the altar of supposedly responsible action. Society “puts to death” or “allows to die” millions of humans and non-human animals in the name of responsibility, a fact to which we are oblivious when we fail to appreciate the latent irresponsibility in responsibility insofar as modernity, like Christianity, has repressed the demonic sacred (86-7). Now, all this needs to be spelled out further. One may readily concede that the smooth operation of modern society presupposes the sacrifice of millions, but Derrida must say more about how our moral discourse is complicit in this bloody sacrifice. He must also relate this claim to his analysis of absolute responsibility. Is it that the vocabulary of universal moral duties, i.e. universal responsibility in the realm of ethics, presupposes or somehow requires this sacrifice? Or does this Kantian vocabulary merely obfuscate or even justify it (a more defensible proposition)? Alternatively, does the fulfillment of my absolute responsibility, either to God or another human, presuppose a sacrificial logic? This seems to be precisely what The Gift of Death is all about, yet it is unclear how this absolute responsibility relates to the smooth operation of modern society, a society in which absolute responsibility of this sort seems so obviously absent. Unless, of course, absolute responsibility is not what Levinas claims that it is, i.e. substitution or self-sacrifice (which certainly is absent in our irresponsible era), but what Derrida claims that it is, i.e. my unjustifiable sacrifice of others to whom I am responsible in order to fulfill my responsibility to a particular other, even if that other is my cat.