ABSTRACT
One of the earliest accounts of responsibility occurs within the context of fratricide in the book of Genesis with Cain’s murder of his brother, Abel. Over time, the story has moved from the religious realm to that of politics and law because it not only recounts the first murder after creation but, even more tellingly, poses the fundamental question of social justice: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ This chapter examines ways in which the story of Cain and Abel, as one of primordial fratricide and fraternity, haunted the writings of Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas. Beginning with Schmitt’s meditation on Cain and Abel while imprisoned by the Allies in 1947, we move to Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of Schmitt’s conception of politics. If Schmitt is haunted by Europe’s fraternal war, Levinas’s reflections on Cain and Abel are written within the context of the Holocaust and World War II. The juxtaposition of Schmitt and Levinas’s reflections on Cain and Abel reveal vastly different understandings of the same story. Schmitt focuses on the relationship between fratricide, politics and death, while ignoring Cain’s question of whether fraternity entails responsibility towards one another. Levinas, however, takes Cain’s question to God as the starting point for ethics as first philosophy.
