The Teshuvah of Jacques Derrida: Judaism Hors-texte

‘Sparks’of Judeity appear everywhere within Derrida’s discourse. They illuminate previous gnomic terminology and propel future focus. His early deconstruction of Husserl’s pseudo-intuitive epoché in 1964, for example, accrues added significance when seen as a pseudo-interiority in The Gift of Death in contrast to the silent avowal of Kierkegaard’s Abraham in the moment of the Akedah. Levinas’s “ethics beyond ethics” allows Derrida to launch a second sailing after deconstruction. In the autobiographical “Circumfession,” Derrida assumes an inner life hors-texte and, sans exemplarity, a personal election as a Jew. In “Abraham, the Other,” he claims a “hyper-ethical, hyper-political, hyper-philosophical responsibility…that burns at the most irredentist core of what calls itself ‘jew.’” Derrida’s teshuvah finds its full fruition in later political writings such as “Force of Law,” enacting a new equation: “deconstruction is justice” (243)