Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a young Jewish saint
"In Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint French feminist philosopher Helene 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 non-belonging"--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.""--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2004
Columbia University Press, New York, ©2004