Who can say "I am Jewish?" What does "Jew" mean? What especially
does it mean for Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction,
scoffer at boundaries and fixed identities, explorer of the
indeterminate and undecidable? In "Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a
Young Jewish Saint," French feminist philosopher H?l?ne Cixous
follows the intertwined threads of Jewishness and non-Jewishness
that play through the life and works of one of the greatest living
philosophers.
Cixous is a lifelong friend of Derrida. They both grew up as
French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of
exclusion and nonbelonging" -- not Algerian, rejected by France,
their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida's family
"one never said 'circumcision'but 'baptism, 'not 'Bar Mitzvah'but
'communion.'" Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the
undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous
calls a "Jewish Saint."
An intellectual contemporary of Derrida, Cixous's ideas on
writing have an affinity with his philosophy of deconstruction,
which sought to overturn binary oppositions -- such as man/woman,
or Jew/non-Jew -- and blur boundaries of exclusion inherent in
Western thought. In portraying Derrida, Cixous uses metonymy,
alliteration, rhyme, neologisms, and puns to keep the text in
constant motion, freeing language from any rigidity of meaning. In
this way she writes a portrait of "Derrida in flight," slipping
from one appearance to the next, unable to be fixed in one spot,
yet encompassing each point he passes. From the circumcision act to
family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan,
Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography
and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his
works, and being (or not being) Jewish.
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