Paper Abstracts 

In Alphabetic Order

From Women’s Sacrifice to Feminist Sacrifice: Medicalized Birth and ‘Natural’ Birth versus Woman-Centered Birth 

Sara Cohen Shabot

The concept of sacrifice poses an interesting challenge to feminist theory. On the one hand, it seems that women must reject self-sacrificing practices, along with myths that prize women’s sacrifice, since historically the imperative for women to be sacrificed and to sacrifice themselves has constituted an important patriarchal device for keeping women oppressed and powerless. On the other hand, certain recent feminist analyses have recognized sacrifice as a potential empowering tool for women, so long as it is freely chosen and experienced as positively transformative.

In this paper I argue that it is possible to relate to childbirth either as an event calling for women to sacrifice themselves in the patriarchal sense (either forced to experience birth as pathological or as essentially ‘natural’ and ‘feminine’), or, alternatively, as one that allows for a “feminist sacrifice”—a deeply embodied, painful but creative and redeeming self-sacrifice, chosen by women. 

Using my previous work on childbirth, particularly on medicalized birth, the phenomenon of obstetric violence and on the critique of the ‘idealized natural birth’, I show that while the patriarchal sacrifice of women’s birthing bodies—through shame, blame, objectification, and abuse in the labor room—must be clearly rejected from a feminist perspective, there is nevertheless room for “feminist sacrifice” in childbirth. This kind of “feminist sacrifice” takes place as part of a birth in which, while intense pain and embodied crisis are indeed experienced, they are experienced not as defeat or oppression but as an opportunity for transcendence and positive transformation. This can, however, only occur within a woman-centered birth, in which the birthing woman’s desires and choices are truly honored and celebrated, precisely at the moment of her undeniable, profound self-sacrifice.

Doomed to Sacrifice?: Childbirth as a Key to Redemption of Hu-MAN-kind from Patriarchy

Katerina Koci

Sacrifice, an originally religious but now fully secularised phenomenon, continues to enjoy the interest of theologians and philosophers of religion until the present day. Many scholars across the disciplines agree that sacrifice is inherently bound to humanity. Moreover, that, in one way or another, impacts women more often than men. Addressing the issue of identity and responsibility, various feminist and gender scholars seek to break the sacrificial logic and establish a more equal distribution of sacrificial impacts among men and women. However, the feminist debate includes two possible traps that may ultimately end up maintaining the existing patriarchy. The first trap is to deconstruct anything gender-specific (women play men situation). The second trap is to elevate motherhood to the private and sacred fetish (men have no access to the world of women and vice versa). My paper aims to search for an authentic feminist path that does not compel women to “even up” to men or escape to their “alter (feminine/motherly) world” with no overlap to the existing world and therefore also no chance to influence and change it.

Drawing on Derrida’s existential, religious-philosophical essays, I will address the subject of sacrifice on the background of singular (hegemonic and oppressive) and divided (responsible) identities. Noting the rather vague attitude towards gender in Derrida’s sacrificial discourse, I will continue discussing Sarah Coakley’s perspective on masculinity and femininity in sacrifice and Julia Kristeva’s warning against the toxicity of a women-only world and the sacralisation of motherhood.

I will close the paper by suggesting that the sphere of childbirth – a key topic in the feminist and gender debates – must be opened up to men, who should be allowed to engage in this life-giving process. I believe that in sharing in the pains of childbirth, men can go through an existential transformation from the oedipal to the pre-oedipal father, attain a divided (non-oppressive) identity, and share more equally in the hu(wo)man damnation to sacrifice.

Almost for Nothing?: The Question of Sacrifice in Jan Patočka

Martin Koci

This paper focuses on the idea of the so-called sacrifice for nothing in Jan Patočka. Firstly, I will clarify the concept and explain its place in the context of Patočka’s thought and its surrounding historical conditions. Secondly, I will critically apply Patočka’s concept to some particular examples, such as a free-willing sacrifice of a mother for her child and a forced-violent sacrifice of political oppression. Thirdly and finally, I will argue that despite the language of nothingness, it is possible to draw a positive program from these reflections, and thus to turn the negativity of sacrifice into a being transforming experience.

Caring for the Self beyond Itself: Notes on Sacrifice for Nothing and the Hyperbole of Being

Sandra Lehmann

This paper is pursuing three goals. It first discusses self-sacrifice in the framework of ancient epimeleia heautou. Against this background, it will secondly have a critical look at Jan Patočka's notion of sacrifice for nothing, which is related to his interpretation of ancient epimeleia heautou as care for the soul. Third, the paper develops an alternative interpretation of epimeleia heautou as well as self-sacrifice by proposing a revision of the classical notion of the transcendent good as hyperbolic being-beyond-being.

Sacrificing Gender: Kierkegaard’s Existential Ethics and the Traumatic Self

René Rosfort

Kierkegaard’s authorship is saturated with gender biases, and Kierkegaard’s approach to selfhood is structured on the binary conception of male and female. In this sense, Kierkegaard was a child of his time. And yet, this binary structure and the ossified conceptions of gender are constantly destabilised by Kierkegaard’s ethical ideal of humanity as a radical equality (Menneske-lighed) that can only be realised in and through existential differences such as body, gender, sexuality, and class. This paper will examine the argument that the sacrifice of gender plays a vital ethical function in Kierkegaard’s conception of human selfhood. Selfhood is not possible without sacrifice. To exist as a human self is to constantly sacrifice one’s own conceptions of the significance of the existential differences that make each and every one of us the irreplaceable individual that we are. For Kierkegaard, the human self is inescapably traumatic. We only become the self that we are through the wound of otherness, and gender is a basic feature of this existential trauma. Gender is one of the most intimate of our existential differences, and, as Kierkegaard’s writing makes abundantly clearly, it is as such also one of the most potentially alienating features of human interaction. We are inherently gendered, and we cannot escape this traumatic ambiguity of intimacy and alienation endemic to our gendered existence. And yet, to become the gendered self that we are requires that we sacrifice our gendered conceptions of being human in light of a demand for a radical equality beyond gender differences. This sacrifice of gender is an ethical demand that we can never fulfil because of our gendered existence. 

Other Abrahams (Augustine – Kierkegaard – Kafka): Tracing Sacrifice and Exile in Conceptualisations of Faith

Anna Sjöberg 

”Sacrifice” and ”exile” are pivotal concepts in the sacred texts shared by Jews and Christians, as well as in the New Testament, and deeply embedded in the European cultural heritage. By confronting two modern commentaries of the faith of Abraham – Kierkegaard’s Abraham in Fear and Trembling, and Kafka’s comical subversion of this Abraham in a letter to Robert Klopstock – with Augustine’s multi layered rendering of Christian faith in the first chapter of The Confessions, this paper aims to investigate how exile and sacrifice in these texts are placed at the very heart of man’s faithful relation to God. My focus will be the distances and proximities staged in and between these texts; between Abraham and other Abrahams, between faith now and then, between man and God, between Kierkegaard and Kafka, and between these two modern authors and Augustine. In all of these texts, albeit in different ways, the faithful relation to God from the standpoint of the human perspective seems to imply an ”exiling” experience, whereby the believer becomes homeless in the world. In Kierkegaard, the willingness to sacrifice Isaac, this supreme act of faith, is at the same time a sacrifice of ”home” and ”community” in this world. The faithful relation to God posits the Christian as part of neither the world nor the divine order, and in Augustine’s early Christian conceptualization of faith a circle is drawn, creating an inside and an outside of faith, both within the believer and between believer and non-believer. In Kierkegaard’s modern protestant understanding of faith, this conflicted space is stretched to the breaking point. Kafka helps us to identify a critical tendency inherent in the Christian construal of faith as the primary bond between human being and God. By making us attentive of the process of demarcation active in Augustine and Kierkegaard, he discloses how the very creation of this space of faith, of an ”inside” and an ”outside”, inevitably will lead to the exclusion of believer and non-believer alike. With the help of Giorgio Agamben, Werner Hamacher and Jacques Derrida, this paper will use the notions of ”exile” and ”sacrifice” as entry points to this critical space.