The Binding of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida

Logic of Heidegger: Sacrifice of Substitution

All those familiar with Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time immediately recognize in his notion of Being-towards-Death—the existential analysis that captures the human being as a totality—the force of non-transferability. In short, no one can ultimately die my death for me for each individual is individuated by a death that is in every case his or her own.

For Heidegger, those who would give up their life for me have not given themselves in true substitution. While it may delay my death, it will not prevent it. This is because each of us must die our own death. The lamb only prevents Isaac from dying at the time of the Akedah. Deferred to a latter date, Isaac will finally die his own death at which time no exchange is possible. This description of death is for Derrida a case where: “…one has to take into account the uniqueness and irreplaceable singularity of the self as the means by which—and it is here that it comes close to death—existence excludes every possible substitution…” moreover, “…to have the experience of one’s absolute singularity and apprehend one’s own death, amounts to the same thing.” (21)

This contention is riddled with other complexities for Genesis 22. Why then is the bond forged between Abraham and G-d not consummated by the death of Abraham himself? How can his son be a substitute? Likewise, the secondary level of substitution (that of the lamb for Isaac) further begs the question. For Heidegger, as Derrida and Levinas have duly noted, the death of the other is a distraction from one’s own authentic death. In light of this, we might suggest that if an explicit Heideggerian analysis were to exist, then the twofold substitution of lamb for Isaac and Isaac for Abraham would denote a double distraction and a inauthentic relationship with the Divine rather than the an authentic one.

For Levinas (whose contention is backed up by Derrida to an extent) a person’s irreplaceability or singularity is not limited to the Being-towards-Death. Instead, at every moment in life no one may live my life for me at the level of my ultimate responsibility. Others may maintain and address roles that I play, enact superficial substitutions in the performance of roles, (22) but simultaneously fail to get at my unique being as inseparable from my responsibility. In fact, a role may be seen as the slipcase of the self to be “handled” by others while preventing all immediate contact.

Here Levinas and Heidegger come close to one and other with the appeal to a irreducibly individuated self while maintaining a parallax gap regarding the points of emphasis by which this is accomplished. While Derrida attempts to construct a type of responsibly built on Heidegger’s analysis of Being-towards-Death, one senses that it requires, at the very least, the Levinasian clarification, particularly when it comes to the death of other which, in a reevaluation of the hierarchy of self over other, restores the ethical privilege of the other over the self.

Condemned as an egology, Heidegger’s philosophy cast against his politics leaves us with a different sort of fear and trembling. Being that, in Derrida’s words “I can give the other everything except immortality, except dying for her to the extent of dying in place of her and so freeing her from her own death.” (23) We are compelled to take note along with Derrida that: “In that respect we obviously remain within Heidegger’s logic of sacrifice, a logic that is perhaps not that of Patočka even if he seems to follow it up to a point; nor is it that of Levinas.” (24)

We can make limited sacrifices on our part for the other. While it would require a much more lengthy analysis, we might conjecture that Heideggerian attachment to human finitude might lend itself to the cultivation of a limited ethics. By distinction, Levinas whose interest in the infinity rather than totality of the self in relation to all other others, discovers no such limits with death–be it my own or anyone else’s–that could mitigate one’s infinite responsibility.

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