ABSTRACT
I have titled this essay “Secrets and Sacrifices of Scission” and am going to offer a perspective on Derridean thought in which these three notions converge on a single figure: the figure of circumcision. This has bearing on the theme of this section of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion conference, “Other Testaments: Derrida and Religion,” but only insofar as we view Derrida’s “religion”—marked by quotation marks, of course-as an affiliation with nonaffiliation, somewhat along the lines suggested in John D. Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: a “religion without religion.”1 Or more specifically, a cutting to which is also a cutting from: a scission that involves secrets and sacrifices.
