ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Jewish-Christian relation and consequently interior/ soul exterior/body relation by recontextualizing it in the framework of Jacques Derrida's notion of deconstruction. Gideon Ofrat claims that "circumcision is Derrida's most basic philosophical experience: the enforced incision, the separation, the castration the father perpetrated upon his son; in theological rendition: the distance the divine father imposes upon the devotee-son". In Derrida's own family the use of the term "baptism" for circumcision was nonetheless not caused by fear against persecution but rather as effect of assimilation. In Derrida's answer, the unconscious circumcision consists in a stumbling block against the transition from heteronomy to autonomy. This is the reason of Derrida's sorrow about being "contaminated" by Christianity and recognizing in the empty ritual a more subtle resistance to this contamination. The primordial sin appears together with the difference between good and evil, when man has turned away from God's unity because he wished to discern himself between good and evil.
