God now sounds himself as
El-Shaddai.
He re-sounds Abram and Sarai as Abraham and Sarah. Zizek asks whether the renaming is a form of symbolic castration (The Fragile Absolute, xvii).
I think the rest of the chapter which is about circumcision, gives us the resonance of the name change.
Healthy human sounding requires the ability to sound and the ability to listen. We know that some of us sound incessantly without listening. Is the act of stopping to listen resonant with circumcision? Is listening in some sense a cutting off, of sound?
Sarai has the very end of her name cut off. The ‘ai’ ending now is opened to an ‘ah’ ending. The circumcision of her name, the opening of her sound, resonates with the opening of her womb.
Abraham has to go through the physical circumcision so his name isn’t cut off, as much as it is opened. The more abrupt ‘Abram’ now has an open ‘ha’ in it. Is this Abraham’s laugh in his chapter? On a more serious note does the opening of his name signify the opening of God’s blessing on the world?