Abraham’s Ordeal

Abstract

This paper seeks to elucidate Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s shared understanding of faith by providing a phenomenology of faith. This is accomplished by applying Nancy’s conception of experience (which resonates with that of a number of contemporary phenomenologists, notably Claude Romano) to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, of which this paper thus offers a phenomenological reading in order to analyse the experience of faith its pseudonymous author relates (i.e., the ordeal of Abraham’s life as depicted by the book). In doing so, however, we will discover that faith belongs to a realm of experience that is more fundamental than, and thus takes priority over, the lived-experience of classical phenomenology: it is an experience of life as a whole that as such forms the basis on which things are subsequently lived in experience. Faith is therefore held up as the prime example of the phenomenologically primary sense of “experience”: namely, the experience in which a life lived consists, the experience of undergoing life itself; the experience that, as Nancy puts it enigmatically, is existence. Since classical phenomenology fails to think this experience that makes its lived-experiences possible, the paper suggests that phenomenology should turn itself into poetics: namely, a discourse on the creative forms of life that constitute all lived-experiences. To that end, the paper proceeds in four steps: the first step consists in an exposition of the phenomenological framework used (drawing especially on Nancy, Gadamer and Romano); the second and third steps consist in applications of said framework to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith; the fourth and final step draws on Nancy to spell out the consequences of the preceding analysis.