I'll admit I hadn't expected a deconstructionist to use terms like "absolute," "transcendant," "God," "self"--in profusion and in earnest. But perhaps Derrida has sufficiently exposed the instability, metaphoric basis and deceptive play of language to be able to employ it without qualifiers, disclaimers, and tedious textual self-referentiality. As is his custom, he represents his own work as a critique of others' works--Plato's "Phaedo," Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," and the contemporary, politically executed Polish philosopher Jan Potocka. While he establishes his distance from Plato and Nietzsche, his re-visioning of Kierkegaard offers new angles without questioning or challenging the great Dane's existential reading of the Abraham-Isaac story. And his alignment with Potocka is so complete as to suggest more an apologia than a critique of the latter's work. Add to these texts numerous references to Heidegger and to both the Old and New Testaments as well as to stories by Poe and Hawthorne, and you'll have some idea of how richly allusive, not to mention dense, Derrida's discourse can be, even in a brief work such as this.
The primary requisite for reading "The Gift of Death" is some knowledge of its precursor, "Fear and Trembling." Like Kierkegaard, Derrida defines religion as access to the responsibility of a free self, which in turn is defined as a relationship consciously and secretly experienced by the individual subject who sees him or herself in the gaze of God. Truth is separated from Socrates' truth by its interiority, by its replacement of reason, ethics, and aesthetics with the sheer horror of the abyss. Compared to Kierkegaard, however, Derrida's account is less romantic, less inspiring, more disturbing. The leap of faith involves not a sacrifice of Isaac but of oneself, a secret and senseless meeting with one's own death. Derrida interprets the absence of woman in the Abraham and Bartleby stories as proof that the "knight of faith's" quest is not the "tragic hero's". Instead, it is beyond all knowledge, a confrontation with the abyss that marks the Absolute singularity of the self. (This latter observation is reminiscent of Marlowe's inability, or unwillingness, in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," to share the "truth" of Kurtz' final words, "The horror, the horror," with Kurtz' fiance.)
In the latter part of his critique, Derrida offers a paradoxical criticism of the technological, modern age. Far from becoming quantified or de-naturalized, we have returned to the demonic and orgiastic from which religion arose. Modern man has fallen into inauthenticity, becoming not a self or person but assuming the mask of a "role." Present-day democracy, in turn, is not about the equality of individuals but of roles. Hence the importance of discovering and accepting the gift of death that determines human uniqueness. Responsibility is the criterion; freedom is the result.
This is a work not to be read quickly or only once. Derrida moves slowly, taking two steps backward before moving one step forward, but his method insures the communication of his meanings. If it's any inducement to the reader, I would suggest that the fourth and final chapter, "Tout autre est tout autre," is anticlimactic and unhelpful. By then the attentive reader will already have located the gift.