ABSTRACT
Yvonne Sherwood: …It is my very great pleasure to introduce-in French one would say vous présenter-Jacques Derrida, who we are so very pleased to say is here, present with us right before our very eyes and ears [laughter]. There are numerous ways that I could introduce this man who as an academic signature needs no introduction, but who, because of the persistence of certain caricatures that still stand in for reading, still perhaps, in some sense, does. I could present him, as it is customary to do on these occasions, in terms of his curriculum vitae, but then his work, as he once said of Emmanuel Lévinas, is so large that one can no longer glimpse its edges. I could introduce him in terms of his institutional affiliations, past and present (for example Yale, the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and the New School in New York) but I wouldn’t want to give you an impression of someone too much in love with institutions, who hasn’t asked searching questions about what the University means and does. I could introduce him, as he sometimes has introduced himself, in a slightly tongue-in-cheek “Ecce Homo,” as a little Arab Jew, a marrano of French Catholic culture, who grew up in a Christianised Judaism that spoke of circumcision as “baptism” and bar
mitzvah as “communion,” or as someone who regularly watches the Sunday morning TV programs on religion …These things would certainly not be irrelevant to our context here at the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. Perhaps I should simply reel off a litany of topics that echo around Derrida’s work as regularly as they reverberate around discussions at our annual meetings: for example, Augustine, circumcision, confession, Paul, prayer, the spirit and the letter, the Talmud, the tallit, the touch of Jesus, the flood, the tower of Babel, the sacrifice of Isaac (and/or Ishmael), Kierkegaard, messianism, wars of interpretation, Jerusalem, mysticism, Gershom Scholem, kabbalah, religious violence, the limits of ecumenism and tolerance, sacrifice, the sacrifice of woman at the heart of sacrifice, ethics, responsibility and forgiveness, the eschaton, the apocalypse of John, the name of God. Perhaps I should say, just once more, for the record, that Derrida is not an enemy of the good old Aufklärung, not an inventor of a machine or school called “deconstruction,” not someone who believes that all the world’s a text and we are merely players. Indeed, as Derrida has said, one of the requirements of deconstruction is that it touch on “firm structures” and “physical institutions,” and that it makes texts answer, precisely to what matters to us.
