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God Himself is the ultimate Abraham.
Slavoj Žižek
Was Abraham religious? Was he, I don’t know, very religious? Was he more religious on a particular day of the week, or was it only when the angels dropped by? More so when he bargained with God or did battle for his nephew? Was his religion more visible, more ostentatious, when he migrated—twice—to labour in Canaan, cursed or blessed himself and his descendants with a life of aliens, when he built or arranged a house (or the Kaʿba), or when he realized all on his own and no thanks to the king of Sodom (Sodom!) his version of the American dream (livestock, silver, and gold, and a private mausoleum too—a lasting investment there)? Was it visible when he denied Sarah—twice, again (not thrice, like Peter with Jesus)—or banished Hagar and their son to the wilderness? Did he perhaps affirm and demonstrate his religiosity better when he circumcised himself and his son, later walked with his son, the same or the other, to the mountain, or had his servant swear with his hand on his genitals? Was that because he was against mixed marriages, by the way? Was Keturah? And did Abraham have a take on abortion as well, a religious take? What was his religion anyway? Can we be sure he had one? And if so one only? I mean, Abraham did undergo a conversion, right? Right? Does that mean, then, that he had, or that he acquired, a religion the way one might say that he had his sons, as it were, in possession? But according to what notion of property or belonging? Following which separation of spheres (economy, law, religion)? And with what understanding, what definition, what institution, or science of religion? If Abraham really had a religion, was it temporally or spatially, better yet, administratively, demarcated, as it were, on the side, done while he otherwise attended to more practical or urgent economic matters (again, the livestock, the gold), to science (land survey, well drilling), to politics (tribal those, with a touch of diplomatic acumen), or to law (contracts, definitely contracts)? Was he distinctly preoccupied as well with the sphere of aesthetics (Sarah was beautiful, was she not, and Abraham said so too)? Seriously though, ‘was Abraham a political accommodationist or a metaphysical believer?’ (Halbertal and Margalit 1992: 138). No doubt Abraham, if such is his name (recall that it was not), surrendered himself to God. He was, as Hobbes puts it, ‘first in the Kingdome of God by Covenant’ (Hobbes 1996: ch. XL, 249). But what exactly does that mean? Was Abraham religious (see Ruprecht 2002)?
The problem of meaning here begins and ends, perhaps, with translation—if such is possible, if a ‘technique of translation’ is, that is, available.1 As he refers to the prophet, Muhammad Asad underscores this difficulty and writes (with a measure of ethno-linguistic enthusiasm) that
when his contemporaries heard the words islam and muslim, they understood them as denoting man’s ‘self-surrender to God’ and ‘one who surrenders himself to God’, without limiting these terms to any specific community or denomination—e.g., in [Quran] 3: 67, where Abraham is spoken of as having ‘surrendered himself unto God’ (kana musliman), or in 3: 52, where the disciples of Jesus say, ‘Bear thou witness that we have surrendered ourselves unto God (bi-anna muslimun)’. In Arabic, this original meaning has remained unimpaired, and no Arab scholar has ever become oblivious of the wide connotation of these terms. Not so, however, the non-Arab of our day, believer and non-believer alike: to him, islam and muslim usually bear a restricted, historically circumscribed significance, and apply exclusively to the followers of the Prophet Muhammad. (Asad 1980: xi)
The notion of the Abrahamic, of Abrahamic religions, does not simply find its historical origin in Abraham.2 Nor did the citational, rhetorical, or exegetical references to Abraham in the sources serve in any obvious manner a religious purpose. They may—I repeat: they may—have served a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim purpose (more likely, purposes), but it was not a religious one. There was no general rule under which the particular events or emergences that Abraham’s name marks operated as mere instances or indeed particulars.3 Not for a very long time. Whether theologico-genealogical (‘the God of Abraham’), metaphorico-spiritual (‘the father of circumcision to them who are not of the circumcision only’), or politico-prophetic (‘Behold I shall make you a leader of men!’), Abraham does not found one religion (or many) among others, nor is his multifarious memory exhausted by the category of religion (Gen. 26: 24; Rom. 4: 12; Q. 2: 124). Neither he nor his legacy can be confined, nor are they reducible, to religion. Could the Axial Age (see Eisenstadt 1986)? What Abraham started (his inheritance and world-historical significance) is in no way intended to be diminished here, nor could it be. Was it, however, religious? Was it not equally (or, as it were, unequally) civilizational or theologico-socio-political, philosophical or even ethno-cultural? Is it not still? Although Abraham was not necessarily the very first who walked with God, he may well have been the most important, that is, among the earliest and perhaps the first prophet indeed. But what that has to do with religion is hardly clarified thereby.
None of what is said here amounts to another intervention in the debate on the historicity of religion, on the category of religion. Nor is it a version of the claim that ‘anything that counts as a “way of living” or a “mode of social life” can only be understood and criticized on its own terms’ (MacIntyre 1964: 120). The consensus is now well established that the Latin word religio underwent massive transformations, indeed, a re-creation, within the Christian context, and spread outward from there (its translations are another, later development in which missionaries, philologists, administrators, and other imperial secretaries and potentates played a part that is only beginning to be understood) (W. C. Smith 1991; Asad 1993; Balagangadhara 1994; McCutcheon 1997; J. Z. Smith 1998; Derrida 2002; Margel 2005; Masuzawa 2005; Stroumsa 2010). It is a strange consensus, to be sure, which acknowledges the particularity of a word or concept only to maintain it as a universal ground of comparative study. ‘History is supposed to exist in the same way as the earth’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 74). And so, still, religion. Invented, reinvented, or discovered, religion continues to be invoked, its very name spreading even now, precisely there where its very pertinence has come under pointed interrogation (Vries 2008). Accordingly, there are those among us who teach the modern invention of religion, or its Christian genealogy, and nevertheless insist on, or persist in, using the term with regard to periods and places in which its usage or meaning is—often by their very own account—questionable, metaphorical, anachronistic, or even imperialistic. Does all this testify to a better, more expansive, understanding of religion or religions? To religion as a proper object? To a religious imperative in scholarship and in science? The narrative of science’s progress seems not to sit easily with the matter of religion—or its alleged returns. There are, furthermore, those who advocate the dismissal of the word altogether, as if it were possible (King 1999; Dubuisson 2003). Far from me to recommend that we should simply refrain from speaking of religion and bid, after Trouillot, ‘Adieu, Religion’ (Trouillot 2002, and see Sheehan 2005). Besides, religion has all too often been an unacknowledged, albeit paradoxical, beneficiary of another ‘repressive hypothesis’ (Foucault 1978; Assmann 1997)—but there are other ways in which one could practice incitement (to discourse, to hatred, or to the war on terror). One could acknowledge this and other ‘returns’, though, the return of science even, of the comparative science of race or, better yet, of phrenology. And what about alchemy? What about the unfinished projects of pre-modernity? The way I want to propose going about the matter here is, I think, more agnostic. I wish to ask about and imagine Abraham, away from ‘a restricted, historically circumscribed significance’ that would ‘apply exclusively to the followers’ of this or that prophet, as per Asad (1980: xi). I too want to think of another Abraham, an Abrahamic other.4
There are already plenty of Abrahams of course. From Abram to Abraham and Ibrāhīm, from the Bible to the Quran, from Paul to Feuerbach and Auerbach, from Kierkegaard to Kafka or Derrida, there is much more than one Abraham (is there not more than one Abrahamic?). There are humble Abrahams and prophetic Abrahams; genealogical Abrahams and ridiculous Abrahams; religious Abrahams and literary Abrahams. And consider that ‘in the case of Abraham, the Muslim and Jewish accounts are so intertwined, each influencing the other, that in charting the development of their motifs one can not treat them as truly separate entities’ (Lowin 2006: 2). How do we—should we—bring them together, compare them or differentiate between them? Along similar lines, how do we gather, compare, distinguish, and ultimately isolate, religion? Or religions? How do we translate, finally, religion? What does it mean, what could it mean, to imagine yet another Abraham?
To be sure, to deny a religion the man whom it praises as the greatest of its fathers is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly.5 But I am not thinking of a ‘secular’ (or Egyptian?) Abraham. God forbid. I wish instead to reflect along the lines of Shapin and Schaffer (1989), who have taught us about the emergence of a new ‘art of separation’, the separation of politics from science (Walzer 1984). Think of this as ‘Leviathan and the God Pump’ (lately, we have been hearing of the God gene, so this should be relatively easy). Not necessarily religion and science, an issue that is probably overdone and overrated these days. Consider instead the possibility that, as Bruno Latour might phrase it, ‘we have never been religious’. Or, after the fashion of Franz Rosenzweig’s famous quip: if you want to distinguish the German from the Jew, put him on the operating table. Cut him (them?) open. See what survives the procedure. Put Abraham under the knife (for a change) and find—or lose—your religion. After a similar fashion, we might register the separation between science and politics that Shapin and Schaffer document, at the same time as we recognize that the separation was never quite accomplished, never quite established, and above all never actually successful. What was constantly at stake was rather a strange and ongoing endeavour, closer even to an attempt to part the sea (but Abraham was no Moses). Politics and science, like religion and politics, did not quite manage to cleanse themselves of the other. They were never quite ‘other’ to each other. And though we have the rudiments of an account with regard to the trials and failures that trace their shared history, we do not have, to my knowledge, an account of what led us (us?) to divide being, and how, not just into regions and religions, but into these specific, and strangely ossified ones: science, politics, economy, religion, and so forth.
Some will object that the (historical) distinction between science and politics that was achieved, or at least initiated, in the seventeenth century is an advance, a sign of progress. And the same will no doubt be said about religion and politics in the nineteenth (or was it in fact in the first century—God, Caesar, and all?). Secularization as specialization. The rhetoric of progress, or of supersession, notwithstanding, it may well be the case. But this does not amount to a demonstration that the spheres of existence thereby designated are objective—or universally normative—regions of being. Unlike the earth, these would not always have existed after all. Recall, in this context, Borges’s encyclopedia, as described by Michel Foucault. ‘The monstrous quality that runs through Borges’s enumeration consists…in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. What is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity would be possible’ (Foucault 2002: xviii). What if the things we now easily list were in fact monstrous? What if our encyclopedias, now enriched by way of the novel designator ‘Abrahamic religions’, were equally so? And what if we were to acknowledge that the ‘common ground’ on which ‘religions’ allegedly meet has also been destroyed, if it ever were there? Their propinquity impossible? Once again, their existence can most certainly be projected onto earlier historical periods, and translated anew into other cultural spheres. They can even be produced or propped up as ‘reality-effects’. But precisely therein lies their monstrosity, for ‘the quality of monstrosity here does not affect any real body, nor does it produce modifications of any kind in the bestiary of the imagination; it does not lurk in the depths of any strange power. It would not even be present at all in this classification had it not insinuated itself into the empty space, the interstitial blanks separating all these entities from one another’ (xvii). The question that remains is therefore not so much whether we understand life, labour, and language (or politics, science, and religion) better than our ancestors or disadvantaged contemporaries, but rather what does the division of being which has insinuated itself between these regions serve? What do the ‘empty space, the interstitial blanks separating all these entities’, and the distribution of our existence into these particular spheres tell us about ourselves? What do they do for us? By proposing to think of another Abraham, I ask about the uses and abuses of the notion of religion, its monstrosity, however historicized and particularized. I also wonder about the reduction of Abraham to a religious figure.
Try telling a prophet about the separation of powers.
We understand, for instance, that homo oeconomicus is a recent invention, a discovery. At the same time, we (we economists, that is, and those similarly inclined) happily project this construct backward and outward. ‘Economics’, one eager advocate writes, ‘enables us to examine behavior within the framework of capitalist societies, but also of socialist societies, and not only of today’s societies, but of societies in both the past and a potential (post-industrial) future as well’ (Kirchgässner 2007: 8).6 And the desert grows. But what is at stake in this instance should be obvious. Exchange and accumulation may or may not be all there is to human beings, but by isolating—or expanding—our economic being, our understanding too may increase (or indeed diminish). Our sense of an alternative economic existence, of ‘rational choice’, indeed, the very meaning of ‘economy’, may reveal itself as contingent—or not. Whatever the case may be, economic thinking of this sort, hegemonic as it is, cannot adjudicate on whether existence is or should be grounded on, or lived according to, economic principles, nor can it demonstrate, with the psychologists in tow, that motivation has taken, that it should have taken, the form it now appears to have, if it in fact does. Some normative intervention (as to the verification and validity of explanatory models), some translation, at the very least, has to happen (Asad 1993; Chakrabarty 2000), minimally some efforts in global and historical marketing, if we are to recast, say, the basic social unit as primarily a function of economic accumulation, as the effect of emotional (read: neuro-chemical, right?) dispositions, or as the main instrument of biological or genetic survival. Not that ‘the proper of man’ has to be one—or all—of the above. The point is that these are not equivalent, nor are they necessarily primary or even distinct, even if they can be isolated. By means of an air-pump, for instance, that is, in a vacuum. As if it were possible.
Not quite a devotee of some universal homo religiosus, Soren Kierkegaard famously opposed (on Abraham’s behalf, as it were) the ethical and the religious. This particular distinction too must be interrogated, though not in order to revive the familiar equation of religion with morality. My purpose is rather to ask whether Abraham does not become a more pertinent, and uncanny, figure if we understand him, and ourselves, as never having been religious. It might extend his reach, suit better his dominion. Now, to be perfectly clear about my intentions here, I will repeat that the distribution of being not just into regions, but into the very regions we have instituted and continue to uphold, the division of the world into distinct spheres such as religion and politics (or genealogy), law and economics, arts and science—these are not universal distributions and divisions. And the specific role and function that religion plays in this context is to naturalize them, to buttress the legitimacy of the modern age (Cole and Smith 2010). It is at once important and true, of course, that religion is ‘a science left aside, or forgotten, by Michel Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge in the age of reason”’ (Stroumsa 2010: 38). But more than that, the isolation of religion (or its dismissal) generally occludes the enduring force of one particular ‘religion’—in which these divisions and distributions find their source and power—by maintaining its status, quite precisely, as religion, one among many, as it were, and thereby diminishing its significance and accurate limits. Consider then that we have never been religious—not unless we have always already been Christians.7 Otherwise put, Christianity is the only religion. Or it is no religion at all.8 Christianity is at any rate better understood as the particular distributive system, a network if you will, which has slowly devised a division of the world, a distribution of being into spheres, and key among these is religion. By casting itself as ‘only’ a religion (although its own practical understanding—indeed, understandings—has always been much more expansive, involving the world as a whole, and the next world too), Christianity occludes its inheritance (Abrahamic or not) from itself, and from us. Accordingly, it recasts its difference from Judaism, Islam and, for that matter, capitalism by placing them in categories that either level the difference among them (all religions, ‘monotheistic religions’) or increase its distance from them (economics, as in ‘capitalism and religion’) (Anidjar 2009). But one can think, still, of another Abraham.
It is after all no mere foreshadowing that Abraham appears to us as a migrant and an immigrant, burdened with ostentatious signs, which may or may not be recognizable as religious (Bernstein 1994; Asad 2006; Fernando 2010). First down, way down in Egypt land, Abraham is an exile, himself the threat of exodus and displacement and the promise of liberation. And although Hobbes may have gone too far when he attempted ‘to reduce the authority of the canon to [his] conception of political authority’ (Halbertal 1997: 140), it does not mean he had no ground for conceiving of Abraham as a political figure, a civil sovereign, and indeed a leader of men. An improbable character at the wellspring of literature, simultaneously aggrandized and diminished father, yet another among Kafka’s countrymen who pray for admittance to the law, Abraham is an actor of unfathomable depth in a foundational narrative. He is the subject of the absolute, the absolute subject, as it were, one who, sovereign no more, only submits, to his spouse and to his God, embraces an ethics of passivity or does what he is told, merely following orders perhaps. Does Abraham thereby ascend to a higher ethical order, an order higher than ethics, or does he figure our ‘social legacy’, the quintessence of patriarchy (Delaney 1998)? Between law and society, Abraham does not comfort us either in our translations of law (Hallaq 2009). Nor is clarity gained, in his case, by dividing law from, say, narrative in the Bible, as if God were a storyteller one day and a legislator the next. Much like light and darkness (and a few other things), the two can of course be distinguished, and they have been indeed (there were days when Moses had to judge the people, and days when he had to supervise the building of the Tabernacle, but what this conveys is that law and architecture were as religious, as political, as negotiations with God on the future of the people). But little is added, in fact, by casting them as religious except perhaps to reduce the challenge they pose to our current existence. For there is a dispute here at work. At least there has been one.9 ‘O followers of earlier revelation! Why do you argue about Abraham?’ (Q. 3: 65). If only they did really! And this is not merely the challenge posed by the religious to the ethical, but in excess of it. This requires a different measure. It is also, to repeat, a challenge of translation, the possibility and impossibility of translation.
I am not saying that Abraham was sublimely ridiculous (as Kafka further suggested), or that he was a ‘primitive’ for whom being appeared as an undifferentiated chaos. I am merely suggesting the possibility that neither Abraham, nor his heirs, divided the world according to the same categories, let alone according to ours. This should hardly constitute an abrupt or revolutionary newsflash. But recall that much as Moses could hardly have been a microbiologist (not that this prevented people from saying that he was (Hart 2007)), there is little to be gained—or is there now?—by suggesting that Abraham was the local equivalent of a scientologist, you know, just another religious guy—or spy—on an impossible mission. If Abraham were otherwise than religious, if we have never been religious, then Abraham may have a different lesson to teach us. More broadly, if the Abrahamic is not about religion, it may be because it sends us back to a division whereby Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (not to mention—I shall continue to invoke ‘religious’ monikers—Hinduism and Buddhism, but the list is longer than, and different from, the usual suspects) are not confronting each other on an even or level plane, much less a religious one (however explosive or tame), not even on a civilizational plane. For what, again, of ‘capitalism and religion’? What of ‘markets and punishment’ (Harcourt 2011)? And would someone seriously claim, for instance, that ‘Marxism’ (or ‘Liberalism’) and ‘Capitalism’ are just two modes of ‘economic’ existence? That they can be effectively compared according to narrowly conceived parameters such as work and money? The ‘dispute’ between them is of a different order, of different orders, and it must be conducted on wider grounds, with different divisions of being at stake. As with ‘feudalism’, that other ‘pre-modern’ construct (Davis 2008), there are different social, political and symbolic arrangements, and other divisions of being at stake.10 Here too, there is no equivalence, therefore, no general rule to warrant or justify the comparison between them, to restrict it to a matter of mere economics. Minimally, such rule remains to be found. And if it is the case, the dispute, the challenge, however threatening or tamed, can hardly be seen as having been resolved.
Consider Lyotard’s warning (1988: 106): ‘One does not dare think out Nazism because it has been beaten down like a mad dog, by a police action, and not in conformity with the rules accepted by its adversaries’ genres of discourse (argumentation for liberalism, contradiction for Marxism). It has not been refuted.’ At least we know, the wisdom goes, who the bad guy was in this case. But have we dared think out religion? The question is not simply whether religion has been refuted (has it?), although it is also that. It is whether it has ever existed. The critique of Christianity, at any rate, has always been conducted while subsumed under a general and generalized critique of religion, pre-emptively extending the benevolence of critique to all, newly and grudgingly acknowledged, religions. Which is why the question remains whether religion has been properly thought out in conformity with rules accepted by its adversaries’ genres of discourse. I propose therefore that the dispute between (and therefore beyond) so-called religions must be seen as exceeding any shared category or established rules and genres, the result of a coup de force whereby different modes of collective existence were levelled and tamed for comparative purposes (Olender 1992). For now, the dispute has been and continues to be managed and defused, in fact contained and confined to a diminutive sphere, namely, religion. Religion, that old-new science, is a strategy of containment; it is an art of separation.
The dispute, should there be one, cannot always and at all times be conducted on all fronts, of course. Kierkegaard was right. Abraham also raises an unprecedented challenge to ethics. But also to much else. For why stop at ethics? Who would fail to recognize that Abraham interrogates and unsettles what today passes for law and for politics, and indeed, for religion? A non-religious Abraham—an Abrahamic that is not about religion, religious accommodation, or comparative religion—potentially loosens the very premises upon which modern society is organized as a whole (as Delaney [1998: 5] poignantly asks, ‘why is the willingness to sacrifice one’s child the quintessential mode of faith, why not the passionate protection of the child?’), from market capitalism (God didn’t say ‘buy my book’ in every language, nor did he proceed to trademark it with a copyright sign), to medical experimentation (self-circumcision anyone?), carceral or burial practices (do you know what it means today to be buried for all eternity?). We may accept or refuse that challenge; we may participate still in defusing the dispute, but by claiming that it is a religious one we hardly begin to contend with it.
According to Assmann (2010), the dispute started much earlier, if not as early as Abraham. It is the nature of this dispute, the art of separation it implies or sustains, that I want to explore in the remainder of this chapter. For what Assmann calls ‘the Mosaic distinction’ (‘the shift from “polytheistic” to “monotheistic” religions, from cult religions to religions of the book, from culturally specific religions to world religions, in short, from “primary” to “secondary” religions’, p. 1) is indeed a dispute, though it is not quite about god or gods. It later came to be identified as ‘monotheism’ (a term Assmann acknowledges as a modern invention), but it is not about a divine economy either, the number or organization of divine entities. ‘God’s oneness is not the salient criterion here but the negation of “other” gods. This negation’, Assmann continues, ‘is a theological rather than religious matter’ (31). Strictly speaking then, monotheism is not quite a religion. It should even be questionable to what extent it is more aptly described as a ‘counterreligion’, but it is certainly a dispute, the original dispute and the revolt that rises against ‘the cult of the dead and that of the ruler’ (28). The ‘Mosaic distinction’, at any rate, institutes a new relation to the world and to the divine by separating between them. It establishes the two terms—God and world—as distinct (hence Assmann proposes ‘cosmotheism’ as the opposite of ‘monotheism’). More generally, and as its name clearly indicates, the Mosaic distinction is the making of a decisive separation and a strict division (between true and false, for example, or between god and the world). It is ultimately about difference and ‘translatability’, rather than about religiosity (18–20). It constitutes a new carving of the world, linguistic and otherwise, and the policing of its borders (within the world, but also between the world and its divine other). Thus, ‘for Judaism, it is utterly self-evident that monotheism draws a border and that the Jews are responsible for policing this border’ (17). At its starkest, the Mosaic distinction and these borders it establishes bring about ‘a new form of hatred into the world: hatred for pagans, heretics, idolaters and their temples, rites, and gods’ (16). That is why, for Assmann, what must be acknowledged as important, even foundational, ‘is the fact that the gods and cults of the traditional religion were abolished and persecuted in accordance with the Mosaic distinction’ (32).
At this point of my argument, the question to reiterate is: what is it that makes the Mosaic distinction a ‘religious’ distinction, the violence and hatred it harbours, unleashes, or simply brings about, ‘religious’ violence and hatred? Who is it, what kind of subject is it, that ‘makes’ the distinction and over what? What is the nature and the extent of the Mosaic claim? If it implicates the entire cosmos, the claim neither emerges from, nor applies to, a separate sphere called ‘religion’. The second question that must be raised has to do with the exclusive character of the ‘monotheistic’ art of separation as it is characterized by Assmann. I do want to underscore that, although I see him as part of a larger, and puzzling, movement that has tended to place on religion, and particularly monotheistic (or ‘Semitic’) religion, the burden of blame for violence and intolerance in human history, I do think Assmann is right to emphasize difference and distinction as a crucial dimension of understanding. We are indeed talking of an art of separation—of one among many. Yet, in insisting on using the word ‘religion’ and in presenting us with what can only be described as a Solomonic paradigm, Assmann evokes only one, narrow facet of this ‘monotheistic religion’ (as Freud had already called it after the German fashion), one circumscribed and limited aspect. Let me reiterate that I am convinced by Assmann’s claim that the important issue is not the matter of numbers, from the many to the one. Biblical monolatry, many have pointed out, was not about the one and only God but about the exclusive God. This is precisely why I wish to recall the Solomonic trial here, because it indicates something significant with regard to both numbers and exclusivity.
In the famous illustration of the wisdom of King Solomon, there are two mothers, one of whom will be revealed (as well she must) a false mother. This seems to agree with Assmann’s argument and with what he describes of the Mosaic distinction: an exclusive assertion of truth and falsity operates by way of exclusivity and even exclusion. Accordingly, Solomon demonstrates that there is a true mother and a false one, excluding and expelling the latter. Now, much earlier, and before she, like Job, demanded to have her day in court (‘Let the LORD decide who is right, you or me’, Gen. 16: 5); before the dispute that is, Sarah (then called Sarai still) had asked to be ‘built up’. She had asked for something constructive, a construction in the form of a son (16: 2). The Hebrew phrasing, which famously leaves the request ambiguous between construction and reproduction, is quite limpid with regard to Sarah’s future claim. Whatever happens, it will be her belonging, her property. She will be the mother and owner. Sarah, in other words, stakes her legal, property claim as a mother. It is with regard to and against that very claim that Hagar in fact asserts herself, and it is with regard to that claim as well that Sarah asks for a trial, one that prefigures another trial of and between mothers, the famous trial of Solomon. ‘It becomes obvious that the story…is Hagar’s as well as Sarah’s and that the issue addressed to YHWH was a question concerning motherhood between Hagar and Sarah and not that of the birth of a son to an aged patriarch—particularly since the name of the future child reflects incidents in the life of the Matriarch’ (Teubal 1997: 111). The difference between two trials, somehow on a par with the difference between two mothers, perhaps pales when compared to the unsettling fact that, within the bounds of the narrative sequence, Ishmael will have had two mothers, both of whom are in fact recognized by a divine judgement that challenges our sense of truth, along with the conduct of exclusivity and indeed violence.
What has not been adequately remarked, then, or measured in its full significance, is that one finds in the Solomonic narrative a later instantiation of a prior, much more famous narrative of two mothers, a repetition with a difference that suggests an alternative understanding, indeed, a distinct art of separation. One could refer to this, somehow inadequately but for our purposes here pertinently, as the Abrahamic moment. I would do so at the very least because I see Assmann’s insistence on Moses (here again not only his own, of course) as symptomatic of a strange displacement of Abraham, the marginalization—as it were in plain sight—of the Abrahamic by way of a recasting of the foundations of ‘monotheism’ in Moses (Moses the Egyptian, one could say, recasts Abraham the Chaldean, not to speak, but this is a different story, of Jesus the Jew). Yet, foundational as it is, this Abrahamic moment does not simply stand in opposition to the Mosaic distinction (after all, Moses too had two mothers).11 Rather, it broadens and expands the field of its operations. It too establishes distinctions, and initiates disputes, but it does so without adjudicating absolutely—that is to say, by absolving or dissolving, by absolution—on ultimate validity. In my reading, then, the Abrahamic is hardly about ‘religion’ nor does it make its intervention—the institution of a new art of separation—by attending merely to God and world. Rather, the Abrahamic comes into the world by attending to the presence, or rather co-presence of translation and difference, with regard, in this case, to mothers, and more precisely to two mothers who stand in a relation of complex temporality (both untimeliness and contemporaneity, even simultaneity). The Abrahamic is what ultimately reduces the number of mothers, but it does so locally only, that is to say, without subtraction. Moreover, and crucially so, the Abrahamic does not pronounce on the true mother, nor even on the true son. It cares little for true and false. Instead, the Abrahamic separates mothers and distributes blessings. Put another way, the Abrahamic establishes motherhood as locally exclusive (you will have no other mother before me), but not globally or cosmically so. It states that there are other gods, that there is another mother. There is indeed a dispute then, but—pace Assmann—there is no absolute invalidation. This paradoxically means, that, as with the gods and as with the world, motherhood was multiple in the first place (ultimately oneness will be God’s alone). Like the world and the gods, motherhood is there to be divided, divided and distributed anew by way of translation and difference. The Abrahamic institutes a dispute alright. It constitutes itself as dispute over the regions and divisions of the world, which includes difference and/as untranslatability.12
1 Derrida (2001: 183) insists on the constant and simultaneous necessity and impossibility of translation (‘At every moment, translation is as necessary as it is impossible. It is the law; it even speaks the language of the law beyond the law, of the impossible law’). Assmann (2010: 23–4) separates a ‘hermeneutics of translation’ from a ‘hermeneutics of difference’, whereby the latter, by virtue of its uncompromising exclusivity, appears devoid of ‘translational technique’.
2 See J. Boyarin (1997), and see van Seters (1975); Firestone (1990); Hendel (2005). Massad (2009) criticizes the received notion of the Abrahamic as an Islamic construct, and see Hawting (2010) for a different argument (which more or less equates the words dīn and milla as ‘religion’); and see Guy G. Stroumsa, ‘From Abraham’s Religion to the Abrahamic Religions’, Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 12 May 2010, Abrahamic Religions Chair (published in Stroumsa (2011)). I thank Professor Stroumsa for allowing me to read the text of his lecture.
3 ‘Thus sceptic and believer do not share a common grasp of the relevant concepts any more than anthropologist and Azande do’, which does not imply, as MacIntyre (1964: 132–3) makes clear, that agreement is contingent on understanding, nor understanding contingent on agreement.
4 The phrase ‘I can think of another Abraham’ is Kafka’s phrase in a letter to Robert Klopstock, dated June 1921, which Ronell (2002: 280ff.) reads; Derrida (2007) follows up; and see Hammerschlag (2008) and Julien and Nault (2011).
5 I cite and alter Freud’s famous opening sentence to his Moses and Monotheism: ‘To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly’ (Freud 1939: 3).
6 I find inspiration in the forthcoming work of Dotan Leshem on ‘the Pre-Modern Origins of the Economy’, where the ancient separation of ‘three spheres of existence (the economic, the political, and the philosophical)’ is brought under interrogation in its contingency and diachronic persistence. Interestingly, Leshem does not isolate a ‘religious’ sphere, though he later attends to the further division, brought about in and by early Christianity, between the economical and the theological, or, as Giorgio Agamben puts it, ‘between power as government and effective management, and power as ceremonial and liturgical reality’ (Agamben 2011: xii).
7 Boyarin (2007) makes the persuasive argument that Christianity produced the Jewish-Christian difference as a ‘religious’ difference (strangely enough, Boyarin does not think that Hinduism was the recipient of a similar benevolence). He also explains that Christianity produced itself as a religion, which leads me to a different conclusion than his. In my view, what he calls ‘the subject of Christianity’ is not quite a religious subject, though it does fashion itself as such, as it were, diminutively. Christianity does dis-embed religion, in other words, but first of all, from itself, from a more expansive self or subject. In a sense that is fundamentally different from Judaism in Boyarin’s description, Christianity is and is not a religion; and see Barber (2011).
8 In Taubes’s concise 1953 formulation, ‘Christian history can have no religious significance of any kind for the Jewish creed; nor can the division of historical time into “BC.” and “AD.” be recognized by the synagogue’ (Taubes 2010: 48).
9 I refer to the dispute—the ‘unresolvable difference’ as Taubes referred to it—that opposed Judaism (and Islam) to Christianity (see note 8 above). After Taubes and Funkenstein (1993), Raz-Krakotzkin (2007) has been elaborating a history of the transformations of the Jewish-Christian dispute and an account of how it was defused. Dispute, should this need to be said, does not refer to some purported ‘clash of civilizations’. Dispute means proximity and discord, not necessarily comparability or translatability.
10 As Chakrabarty puts it, ‘“precapitalist” speaks of a particular relationship to capital marked by the tension of difference in the horizons of time. The “precapitalist,” on the basis of this argument, can only be imagined as something that exists within the temporal horizon of capital and that at the same time disrupts the continuity of this time by suggesting another time that is not on the same, secular, homogeneous calendar (which is why what is precapital is not chronologically prior to capital, that is to say, one cannot assign it to a point on the same continuous time line). This is another time that, theoretically, could be entirely immeasurable in terms of the units of the godless, spiritless time of what we call “history,” an idea already assumed in the secular concepts of “capital” and “abstract labor”’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 93).
11 ‘One of the most uncanny attractions of Egypt’, writes Barbara Johnson in her discussion of ‘Moses the Egyptian’ (2010: 50) ‘is thus the idea that European culture might have a double origin. It might have two mothers, in effect.’ And see ‘The Theme of the Two Mothers’ in Vitz 1993: 26–9.
12 For their questions and comments on earlier versions of this chapter, I am grateful to the participants of the MESAAS Colloquium at Columbia University and to the audience at the Seventh International Conference on Unity and Plurality in Europe, convened in Mostar by the International Forum Bosnia in July 2012. I particularly wish to thank Professor Rusmir Mahmutćehajić for his kind engagement and hospitality.