ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the strange occurrences in the story of Cain. The story of Cain is an intriguing one, riddled with enigmatic allusions, twists, and turns. Cain is the only substantial character of the story. He epitomizes the masterful stance incarnated by Western subjectivity. The Midrash sheds a pejorative light on Cain's profession assimilating it to men of "no good". The Midrash ventures a number of reasons as to God's motives for respecting Abel's offering and not Cain's. The exile of pain inflicted by God does not lead to his opening up onto the dimension of the other, but rather to the violent extermination of that other in what seems to Cain a desperate act of self-preservation. The figure of Cain constitutes the very figure of the Western concept of the subject whose nobility resides in his "mastery and possession of nature", to borrow the Cartesian expression.
