Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint

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 Helene Cixous follows the intertwined threads of Jewishness and non-Jewishness that play through the life and works of one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers. Cixous was a lifelong friend of Derrida, who died in 2004. 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."