Derrida: A Biography

The Time of Dialogue 2000–2002 503

‘How to respond?’ he wondered, before trying to explain the kind
of silence, or at least reserve, that he had always kept. It was ‘[a]s
if – a paradox that I will not stop unfolding and that summarizes
all the torment of my life – I had to keep myself from Judaism [.. .]
in order to retain within myself something that I provisionally call
Jewishness’. Derrida insisted on his refusal to claim ‘a communal,
even national or especially state-national, solidarity and before
speaking, before taking sides and taking a stand as a Jew’.^23

I do indeed have a hard time saying ‘we’, but there are occasions

when I do say it. In spite of all the problems that torment me on

this subject, beginning with the disastrous and suicidal politics

of Israel and of a certain Zionism [.. .], well, in spite of all that

and so many other problems I have with my ‘Jewishness’, I will

never deny it. I will always say in certain situations, ‘we Jews’.

This so very tormented ‘we’ is at the heart of what is most

worried in my thought, the thought of someone I once called,

with just a bit of a smile, ‘the last of the Jews’.^24

Derrida had already indicated the complexity of his position in
an interview with Élisabeth Weber, shortly after the publication
of ‘Circumfession’: since he had both the impression of ‘now being
Jewish enough’ and ‘being too Jewish’, it was important for him ‘to
try to think through, without being able to master it, this paradox-
ical logic’.^25 Although many people thought he had been infl uenced
by the Talmud, even seeing him as a sort of crazed Talmudist,
Derrida continually pointed out how scanty his Jewish culture
actually was.

It may be amusing to wonder how someone can be infl uenced

by what he does not know. I don’t rule it out. If I greatly regret

not knowing the Talmud, for example, it’s perhaps the case that

it knows me, that it knows itself in me. A sort of unconscious,

you see, and one can imagine some paradoxical trajectories.

Unfortunately, I don’t know Hebrew. The milieu of my child-

hood in Algiers was too colonized, too uprooted. No doubt by

my own fault in part, I received there no true Jewish education.^26

All this led Derrida to identify himself more and more with the
fi gure of the Marrano. This term of contempt, a synonym of ‘pig’ in
Spanish, was used in Spain and Portugal to designate the converted
Jews and their descendants. Forced to abjure their religion, the
Marranos continued to practise it in secret. But by keeping it secret,
they sometimes forgot it completely. It was rather in this way that
Derrida perceived his own Jewishness: ‘Everything that I say can
be  interpreted as arising from the best Jewish tradition and at the