Universalizing the Jew: The Absolute as Antidote for Paranoia

We attain an authentic attitude only when we arrive at the experience that—in a sense far from being metaphorical—we are all Jews.

Auschwitz is the most real of realities.

It is perhaps a commonplace, today, to note the fact that even though orthodox deconstruction is no longer practiced, its central theses continue to inform contemporary conceptions of identity. The crux of these theses is the notion that identity is not something substantial, fixed, essential, universal, etc., but is, on the contrary, something discursively produced, a product of history, limited, variable, multiple. Identity is, so the saying goes, not pre-formed but performed, and it can never consolidate itself as a totality because there is within it a kernel of radical heterogeneity, a kernel of otherness that cannot be symbolized. What this means for our attempt to render transparent “who we are” is simply that such an attempt is, strictly speaking, never-ending; we are, it appears, never done with the process of making and re-making the self, of writing and re-writing our identity. This insight is the principle legacy of post-structuralist theorizing: my identity may in fact be determined by some larger totality—that is to say, some universal structure—but there is always some surplus that exceeds this very identity, a surplus that reveals the discursive (and hence finite) nature of the structure itself. What can never be made present is precisely this surplus. As Derrida puts it, “It is always something like an opening which will frustrate the structuralist project. What I can never understand, in a structure, is that by means of which it is not closed” (“'Genesis” 160). Despite, then, all of my efforts to bring my identity into the orbit of my understanding, to make it present to me as an object of knowledge, something always escapes me—and what it is that always escapes me is nothing else but the origin or cause of the structure itself.

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