ABSTRACT
From the eighteenth century onwards, the names of Paul and Abraham often invoked as modernity has negotiated its complex, self-defining battles between transcendence and immanence; heteronomy and autonomy; activity and passivity, subject hood and subjection. The Abrahamic and Pauline promises and projects both seem to fail, or at the very least to be desperately deferred and inconclusive. It is ironic that Abraham becomes the quintessential literalist or fundamentalist, because the biblical text makes all fundamentally unsure about what it might mean to carry out this text/command to the letter. Abraham has become the shadow, the negative, the spectre, the ghost in the machine. In a symptomatic modern transposition of the logic of typology, Abraham's sacrifice has been abstracted into a tableau of philosophical concepts. Abraham lends himself precisely to a sense of Judaism/ Judeitè "more and less".
