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DERRIDA AND THE TEST OF SECRECY

Jacques Derrida reads the biblical story of Genesis 22, in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, as a test of secrecy. Derrida follows Kierkegaard in presuming that Abraham not only does not but also cannot tell anyone about what God has commanded him to do. For Derrida, moreover, Abraham comes to embody the absolute right to non-response or secrecy constituting the modern institution of literature. In this essay, I criticize Derrida's highly Kierkegaardian account of Genesis 22 for underplaying the involvement of Isaac and the ram in the sacrifice. By seeing how Derrida ignores the two victims of the sacrifice, we can see how both Genesis 22 and literature are inadequately described as tests of secrecy.