Derrida’s Jewish Question
Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper will pose the question of the future minoritization of the white, gentile, Christian European and EuroAmerican identity, which has dominated world history from colonization through the post-Cold War historical present. The question is not how this is coming to an end in the near future as empirical fact and in what manner, but an attempt to imagine another future, another identity than what has been proscribed in the past. In order to move into this alterity, we will engage in a critical reading of Derrida’s essay “Abraham, The Other,” in the volume titled Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida. By examining the philosophical complexity of Derrida’s quasi-autobiographical reflection on his Jewish identity, we can prepare the conditions for how the future gentile white European identity could look when not grounded in its self-edifying monotheism of a white, Christiandominated political and cultural state. The relation between the future diversification of European identity is not just a matter of postcolonial immigration and multiculturalism. It has to do with the ontological problem of how to understand the origin and telos of gentile white European identity in its Christian heritage and metaphysics (from the ancient Greeks to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) when simple notions of origin and end are erased. This brings in the philosophical problem of historical time, movement, and epochal shifts between today’s Europe and another Europe, today’s future and what is other to that. Derrida’s text provides a guide into what is other to monotheism, unicity, oneness, and—by extension, we will argue—gentile whiteness, Christianness too, which is not simply the opposite of polytheism and today’s racial diversity, i.e., non-white and non-western Christian minorities in Europe, the United States, Canada, and the “west” in general. Having said that, this does have obvious implications regarding justice and equality as European and “western” societies in general diversify. Linking the most archaic, or the farthest in distance beyond the mythic origin of Abraham and therefore of Jewish biblical-historical identity, raises the prospects of “another” Abraham. This Other is not rooted in historical memory. This paper argues that Derrida’s reflections will help us understand an alternative future whose metaphysics is yet to be written, one that is not simply a repetition of the contents of the history of (gentile) religion and philosophy in Europe and its linear, successive, chronological historical time-frame, i.e., the Gregorian calendar.
Article Details
JWP is an open access journal, using a Creative Commons license. Authors submitting an article for publication to JWP agree on the following terms:
- The Author grants and assigns to the Press the full and exclusive rights during the term of copyright to publish or cause others to publish the said Contribution in all forms, in all media, and in all languages throughout the world.
- In consideration of the rights granted above, the Press grants all users, without charge, the right to republish the Contribution in revised or unrevised form, in any language, and that it carries the appropriate copyright notice and standard form of scholarly acknowledgement as applicable under the CC-BY license.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.