Portrait of Jacques Derrida As a Young Jewish Saint

by Hélène Cixous, Beverley Bie Brahic (Translator)

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, France

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Hélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974.

She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Helene's texts are translated across the world, but they remain untranslatable. We are two French writers who cultivate a strange relationship, or a strangely familiar relationship with the French language -- at once more translated and more untranslatable than many a French author. We are more rooted in the French language than those with ancestral roots in this culture and this land." -- Jacques Derrida

I remarked years ago to my best friend Joel that relationships are so nuanced, so stilted, that they often become inexplicable to everyone else. I am not sure if the Cixous/Derrida dynamic falls under that purview, but I do agree with JD that the play here is untranslatable, it swings upon an axis of homonymy, it is forever deferring and playful, yet the project remains rigid as it is essentially hagiography: that doesn't suit well. Both autobiographical and speculative, Cixous examines the ritual of Circumcision, making it a circumfession, she begins to implore more than explore -- which is often a bore, though I am unable say that in French. The codes of anti-Semitism and the self-deception of the Other are explored, but only obliquely. This tome deserved more. It should be more of a big sibling to the Insister, it wasn't and there we remain. I need to step away from this friendship for a while now.

[Penina Eilberg-Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"what is it he says above? 'only ever having loved the impossible'--that's him in a nutshell, this confession, and this love, he loves everything that is the impossible, if he says that it is to light the way for us, for he is the poet and the prophet of the aporias that are our destiny and our destination, he tells us because we don't want to tell ourselves, that's for sure we say--but isn't it true, we too neither, we are unable to love anything but the impossible, and similarly we can only forgive the unforgivable, he says it over and over again, and if he repeats it, plays it anew in every text, raising the stakes to body and soul, it's because it is one of those things we don't want to know, the truth's logic we complain is impossible, it is cruel, it tries our patience to the breaking point and yet and yet not only are we unable [nous impouvons] but we have to be unable and similarly, following the example of the knight of the impossible that he is, we can only unbelieve: the believing [le cru] in which I do not believe, he says--it's incredible a phrase like that, how on earth could they ever have translated it, with its pirouette on the word cru, accruing in back of him--never having loved he says but that one belief the one in which he doesn't believe, a grand cru, a fine wine from Algeria, vintage Saint Augustine.

[isabela]

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[Charles Rost · Rating 1 out of 5]

Helene Cixous wants us to believe with her that Jacques Derrida is a "saint". Is she really serious? It seems she is. This book has to be read to be believed. It is a case study in how one's personal infatuations can cloud one's professional judgment. I say this and I've read Cixous and really admired her writing in the past.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks, Ken! I think.