Sodom

Abstract

Shadowed by his tent flap, Abraham confronted his god.¹ “And the Lord appeared to him in the Terebinths of Mamre when he was sitting by the tent flap in the heat of the day”² In the vocalizations of the Masoretic Text, Abraham addresses the visitors in the plural as “my lords,” and their appearance in the oaktrees of Mamre provoked not fear but hospitality, according to the book of Genesis. Abraham’s hospitable and brave approach to his god (or gods) on the plains of Mamre revealed a model of human subjectivity not predicated on obedience to the sovereign god.

When those [angels] came unto him and bade him peace, he answered, “[And upon you be] peace!”—[saying to himself,] “They are strangers.”

—Qur’an LI, 25

No doubt the corpse is a signifier, but Moses’s tomb is as empty for Freud as that of Christ was for Hegel. Abraham revealed his mystery to neither of them.

—Jacques Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”

If every concept shelters or lets itself be haunted by another concept, by an other than itself that is no longer even its other, then no concept remains in place any longer. This is about the concept of concept, and this is why I suggested earlier that hospitality, the experience, the apprehension, the exercise of impossible hospitality, of hospitality as the possibility of impossibility (to receive another guest whom I am incapable of welcoming, to become capable of that which I am incapable of)—this is the exemplary experience of deconstruction itself, when it is or does what it has to do or to be, that is, the experience of the impossible. Hospitality—this is a name or an example of deconstruction.

—Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion