The Gift of Death

While continuing to explore questions introduced in "Given Time" such as the possibility, or impossibility, of giving and the economic and anthropological nature of gifts, this work focuses on the notion of responsibility and the ultimate gifts of life and death. Jacques Derrida divides the book into four parts, which deal respectively with: the development of the notion of responsibility in the Platonic and Christian traditions; the relation between sacrifice and mortality; the contemporary meaning of the story of Abraham and Isaac; and the relation between religious ideology and economic rationality. The texts under discussion include the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as well as writings from Patocka, Heidegger, Levinas and Kierkegaard. Derrida's main concern is with the meaning of moral and ethical responsibility in Western religion and philosophy. He questions the limits of the rational and the responsible that is reached in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution or suicide.
Beginning with a discussion of Patocka's "Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy", Derrida develops Patocka's ideas concerning the sacred and responsibility through comparisons with the works of Heidegger, Levinas and Kierkegaard. Derrida's treatment of Kierkegaard makes clear that the two philosophers share some of the same concerns. He then undertakes a reading of Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling", comparing and contrasting his own conception of responsibility with that of Kierkegaard, and extending and deepening his recent accounts of the gift and sacrifice. For Derrida, the very possibility of sacrifice, especially the ultimate sacrifice of one's own life for the sake of another, comes into question.