ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book extends Derrida's commentary on all those thinkers who tried to impregnate the Greek philosophical mould with Jewish theological traces in order to breathe new life into Western speculative thought. Seen in this way, Alexandria Alexandria revisited offers a possible place of a new encounter between Athens and Jerusalem, in which they both find shelter. The Jewish concept of redemption is thus rarely bound with the private salvation of the soul, but, as Scholem argued convincingly, it involves a future-oriented image of a public utopia where the object of the redemptive action is not the individual but the world, sometimes even in its material entirety. In fact, 'Jewish philosophy', if it deserves its name, is a kind of a clinamen on the seemingly neutral corpus of Western thought, but this swerve cannot be simply reduced to a local colouring.
