We read in sacred scripture: And God tempted [fristede] Abraham and said: Abraham, Abraham, where are you? But Abraham answered: I. You to whom these words are addressed, was this the case with you? --Kierkegaard (21) The great experiences of our life have properly speaking never been lived. Are not religions said to come to us from a past which was never a pure now? Their grandeur is due to this exorbitance exceeding the capacity of phenomena, of the present and of memory. To the voice that calls from the burning bush, Moses answers, Here am, but does not dare to lift up his eyes. --Levinas (Phenomenon and Enigma 68) The Here am of the Hebrew Bible sounds different after Descartes's cogito; after Kierkegaard and Levinas, the cogito sounds different with their re-sounding of the Here am. The apodictic elegance of Descartes's certification of the subject contrasts with the Bible's tentative performative: the Here am names a self at risk of failing in its response to a call, and a self falling into danger if it succeeds. While the cogito names a self transparently present to itself--a coincidence of thought and being in the act of self-consciousness (Zizek 15)--the Here am is a subject without sovereignty over thought or being, a subject in the vicinity of an infinite alterity and exteriority. The Here am is an identity that is not simply itself because it finds itself among unreadable signs and confronted with a demand or challenge still to come. It is a creature uttering its fragility, and for modern thought about subjectivity this utterance is a revelation of an excess in the self, a dramatic noncoincidence between being and the experience of selfhood, an ontological charge that exceeds the circuitry of identity. The Here am--an admission of guilt as much as presence, of obedience more than self-assertion--can never be the divine that am. Kierkegaard himself is not simply Kierkegaard; in Fear and Trembling it is Johannes de Silentio who speaks, a pseudonym or alter ego displacing a proper name. It is in this moment of displacement that we find a capacity of the self to answer to alterity, precisely in its incapacity to sustain the cogito's seamless equation between being and consciousness. Levinas finds a decertification of the cogito even in Descartes's thought: In meditating upon the idea of God, Descartes sketched, with an unequaled rigor, [...] a thinking going to the point of the breaking up the think (God, Death, and Time 215). The Cartesian self, after Levinas, ruptures under the thought of God that overflows every capacity; the 'objective reality' of the cogitatum breaks up the 'formal reality' of the cogitatio (God and Philosophy 173). What remains of selfhood, for Levinas, is an in which the nucleus of the subject is uprooted, undone, [...] an torn from the concept of the ego [...]. This is the that is not but which says 'here am' (181-82). One way to understand this assignation that is not designated, or this I without ego, is as subjectivity attuned to an absolute that exceeds itself, an absolute that cannot be correlated with its own being or knowledge, and that brings that being and knowledge to crisis. Kierkegaard and Levinas imagine this absolute relation in different ways--Kierkegaard's Here am is a response directed first to God, Levinas's first to the human other--but even in their different maps of transcendence they share an essential concern: that we notice the modern subject trembling at its implication in an alterity it can neither avoid nor understand. The trembling represents Kierkegaard's theological critique and Levinas's ethical critique of thought that coerces the subject into abstraction and subsumes irreducibly particular identities into universal totalities. Kierkegaard and Levinas, in their distinct (and at moments antagonistic) critiques of philosophical abstraction and totalization, want us to understand that the human is realized as a nearly unthinkable singularity, its uniqueness derived from its untransferable obligations and unrepresentable commitments to an alterity that cannot be reduced to the terms of the self. …