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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint

Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint

Cixous, Hélène
Brahic, Beverley Bie

Paperback

Series: European Perspectives: A Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

PhilosophyBiographies GeneralJudaism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0231128258
ISBN13: 9780231128254
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Jul 27 2005
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.36 Width: 7.94 Depth: 8.30
Language: English

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 Hélène 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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