Circumcision anxiety

The article reflects on Derrida's project as partly characterised by the effort to invent a language capable of responding to a post-war situation of aporia whose double-bind he seems to have felt most acutely refracted in his always anxious identifications and denials regarding his own situation as a post-war ‘Jew’. The article examines the intersections between the ‘Jewish’ element of his autobiography and his philosophical practice and argues with critics who have sought to ‘play up’ or ‘play down’ the significance of this relation in his work. The article further considers the emphasis Derrida places on his private life and looks at a number of instances where Derrida implies that what seems least important (marginal or trivial) in his writing may be the site of his most ‘global’ claims. Finally, the article argues that Derrida, like Freud, suffered from a condition that I diagnose as ‘circumcision anxiety’, which, unlike castration anxiety, concerns the relationship with the sibling rather than the father and fears not abandonment so much as the consequences of election or love

Aesthetics · Anxiety · Art history · Biography · Judaism · Political science · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Legal and cultural studies analysis · Philosophy · Psychology