Derrida’s Interpretation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

The Gift of Death (1995), by Jacques Derrida, is a complex work that attempts to deconstruct traditional notions of morality and ethics by reducing all Ethical systems to a particular way of privileging one group’s beliefs and practices over another, and ultimately one individual’s life over another’s.

The smooth functioning of...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 of hunger 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.

To deconstruct the societal discourse of Ethics, Derrida addresses Religious notions of death, as well as Literary and Philosophical traditions dealing with sacrifice, suicide, and ritual. These discourses of death are the best way, says Derrida, to explore the ethics of a society, which grow out of existential concerns.

The Existential

Existential angst, says Derrida, is caused by the human knowledge of Death, and its secrets, which, in many cases, translate to the secret language of the wholly unknowable God. We respond to this pressure by creating Ethical systems that place individuals in fixed relationships to Death and God. Justifying our decisions are so-called Universal Ethics and the will of the Biblical God, who is posited as the ultimate Judge.

The focal point of Derrida’s critique is Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a work that deals explicitly with the relationship between Ethics and Faith, which may challenge our fixed notions of morality. This tension becomes Derrida’s jumping-off point for a critique and deconstruction of Kierkegaard’s “Ethical Sphere.” For Kierkegaard, the story of the Binding of Isaac is an example whereby Abraham, as a Knight of Faith, is able to obey God’s will only by fighting his own conscience. Derrida sees this as a key to understanding our relationship to Ethics, and thus the mystery of Death that always underlies the smoothing and normalizing of a society.

This seems right in spirit, because for Kierkegaard the Knight of Faith is stronger and on a “higher plain” than simply the Ethical, which can be seen as a worldly temptation. Transcending this temptation may be necessary to have faith. Derrida works from this assumption, and also accepts (or adapts) Kierkegaard’s notions of trembling, secrecy, and faith as his own vocabulary for dealing with Death.

One reading of Kierkegaard is that he is the “father” of Existentialism. He still relies on traditional answers to the Existential problems, but he poses the problems in a new, subjectivist manner that may point to a modern Psychological and Atheistic or Humanistic viewpoint. In works such as The Concept of Anxiety, however, Kierkegaard clearly explains psychological anxiety by positing a Dogmatic antecedent. Derrida ignores Kierkegaard’s Dogmatic concerns, and presents Fear and Trembling as a contemporary existential document.

Derrida follows Kierkegaard’s reading of the Abraham story, focusing on Kierkegaard’s vocabulary and presentation. Trembling, for Derrida, is the condition of being faced with some mystery and being unable to communicate this condition--ultimately we are faced with the mystery of death, and we tremble. We are faced with the mystery of life, and we tremble. In traditional Religion, God and Death are closely related, as in human sacrifice in the story of the Binding of Isaac. Derrida emphasizes the subjective meaning and existential turmoil implicit in the text. The non-communicability of the mystery of Death/God becomes Abraham’s “secrecy”--and ultimately he must act on faith without integrating this terrible murder into his own conscience, or Ethics. However, Derrida deconstructs this further, and elaborates Abraham’s state into the realm of all ethical decisions, which we, in a sense, must make/take on faith. Why? For Derrida, God is not the only Other, He is simply the Other par excellence.

The true experience of the Other, the representation of our own mortality, and the impossibility of expressing the subjective experience is the experience we have every day: simultaneously being ourselves, but also being part of a society with “others.” By communicating, we give up our “secrecy,” and our obedience to our God by obeying the ethical precepts of the society. We must fit into the categories and discursive avenues of life, which attempt to shield us from the very real concerns of life and death. Derrida considers Kierkegaard’s distinction between the normal concerns of Ethical sphere and the special responsibilities to God that the Knight of Faith must make, but he then takes the “leap of faith” a step farther.

Finally, Derrida, in a particularly heretical final move, equates God with the part inside each one of us that is unknown, but demands unity, secrecy, and self-identity that cannot be shared or diluted. The ultimate Other is ourselves, because we must diminish ourselves in order to cooperate in the order of society. We, like the God of the Bible, may still thirst after blood--but the Ego balances and counters the Superego that societal Ethics defines. Ironically, by disobeying our own egos, we show the strongest faith, but it is ultimately the paradoxical faith in systems that our own egos create and disobey--the realm of ethics. We kill, we order laws against killing, and we still kill.

Constituting Deconstruction

Obviously, this deconstruction of Kierkegaard is an intriguing take on the relationship we have to the Ethical and Religious realms, though it can hardly be taken as a competent “reading of” Kierkegaard. There are several Freudian psychoanalytic overtones to Derrida’s work and it is unclear if he believes he is in fact interpreting Kierkegaard’s inner beliefs or is simply hijacking his reputation to appear historical.

Derrida seems to fall into the usual trap of Kierkegaard criticism, taking off from the cue “if you believe in something, it’s right.” This fallacy allows any old god to be God and any old ethical system to be the Ethical realm. However, there is no indication in Kierkegaard’s own work that he does not uphold the Ethical realm as truly Universal. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s works clearly rely on the foundation of traditional Christianity and a Christian God, while Derrida uses the most humanistic formulation of God. While it is appropriate to read Kierkagaard in the traditional of Enlightenment formulations of the Christian notion of God, Derrida’s God seems inconsistent with itself and certainly with Kierkegaard. Derrida defines God as “Absolute Other,” and seems to conflate the Kantian limit-God with a the Gnostic or mystical Other God. This allows Abraham’s “secrecy” to act as mystical vow.

But Kierkegaard is never this esoteric. The dogmatic issues addressed by the Abraham narrative are of Religious importance in that they reveal the anxieties of the Ethical realm and the paradoxes which help us move to the sphere of Faith by virtue of the absurd. Kierkegaard is ultimately uninterested in Abraham’s psychology or existential crises, per se, but rather the actions he makes which justify his Faith. Abraham’s relationship with God is not some mystical connection to some unknown, but rather the direct connection to the outside God via Faith. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s God could not be inside us, or He would be knowable.

Most telling is the fact that Derrida never mentions the ultimate paradox, and the connection of the finite and the infinite--that is,Christ. And although Fear and Trembling is ostensibly about Abraham as the Knight of Faith, Kierkegaard’s Religion is itself not based around this notion entirely (he relies much more on traditional Dogma), and Johannes De Silentio, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, is not quite Kierkegaard.

Like many “deconstructions” of societal norms, Derrida’s attack on Ethics leaves very little sacred, and very little left to guide us. If ethics are merely a hypocrisy, how are we to solve the existential crises that manifest themselves in our canonical texts and our Religious foundations? Derrida seems to equate God with Ego--or is that Id? If Derrida rejects the Superego, perhaps he prefers the death impulse of ritualistic killing. This seems unlikely, but in a climate so devoid of certainty, and an attack on morality so far-reaching, it is difficult to determine what right or wrong would even look like.

The Knight of Faith has been smeared, and in the name of Kierkegaard. He becomes an ironic, Quixotic character, who fights without the knowledge that his faith cements only the terrible crimes of humanity. That Derrida can hold on to such ethical malfeasance in good conscience after dismissing Ethics seems like a leap of Faith greater than Kierkegaard’s.

And so, Derrida uses an altered version of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith for his own attack on both traditional morality and religion. This attack, while using the Kierkegaardian notion of the “religious” as “above” the Ethical, is ultimately unsatisfactory, as it immediately destroys this distinction, and it attempts to put forth an attack on universal ethics without the sense of Religion that any “attack” on Ethics would necessitates in Kierkegaard’s own work. And besides, Kierkegaard doesn’t ever dismiss Ethics or put Ethics under attack to the degree that Derrida tries to present. After all, Abraham would have no dilemma he didn’t live in an Ethical world. And, after all, his God did not make him sacrifice his son.

This reminds us that, for Kierkegaard, the God of Abraham is also the God of Christianity--the God who died on the cross for our sins. Because Derrida utilizes a fundamentally non-Christian notion of God, and a non-Kantian notion of Ethics, his attempt to “update” the moral of Fear and Trembling to the postmodern can only do so by sacrificing both the subtle balance of existential angst and Christ on his Cross.