Judeities: Questions for Jacques DerridaPaperback, 15 June 2007

Invited to answer questions about his relationship to Judaism, Jacques Derrida spoke through Franz Kafka: "As for myself, I could imagine another Abraham." He explores the movement between growing up Jewish, "becoming Jewish," and "Jewish being" or existence. In his essay "The Other Abraham," which appears here in English for the first time, he imagines other Abrahams in light of the proclaimed universalism of philosophy and its recent fragmentation into "philosophemes." Thus we no longer confront "Judaism" but "Judeity," multiple Judaisms and Jewish existences, manifold ways of being and writing as a Jew--in Derrida's case, as a French-speaking Algerian deprived of, then restored to French nationality in the 1940s. Contributions contrast Derrida's thought with philosophical predecessors such as Rosenzweig, Levinas, Celan, and Scholem, and trace confluences between deconstruction and Kabbalah. Derrida's relationship to the universalist aspirations in contemporary theology is also discussed, and an evaluation is offered of his late autobiographical writings.