"Contrary to the claims of Derrida’s more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida’s democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say I or we, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munis, muneris) ourselves in common against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit of the “we” of “Christian Europe,” or of a “Christian politics,” lethal compounds that spell death of Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian European spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all les juifs [Jews as archetypal outcasts], even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from FranceLiterary criticsPhilosophers from FranceCultural criticsPhilosophers from Algeria
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
John D. Caputo (1997). The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, pp. 231–232
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida (15 July 1930 – 8 October 2004) was a French Algerian philosopher who introduced the practice of "deconstruction".
60 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Jacques Derrida →
Related Quotes
"Oh. Marx's love for Shakespeare! It is well known. Chris Hani shared the same passion. I have just learned this and I…"
"The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And …"
"Il n'y a pas de hors-texte."
"At the end of Being and Nothingness, ... Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being; and this totality of bei…"
"What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itsel…"
"As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical disco…"
"Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into …"
"Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about."
"I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts."
"The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a …"