Réponse du ‘Juif’ à l’antisémite: Derrida, commentateur de L’Esprit du christianisme de Hegel

Abstract

Abstract Scholarship on Derrida has largely led us to believe that the philosopher’s concern with Judaism and Jewishness only began with his later work. This stance fails to account for Glas, a book composed in two columns and published in 1974, in which Derrida comments on a violently anti-Jewish text by Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity. This article aims to demonstrate the continuity of Derrida’s concern with Jewishness in his œuvre, and to examine the way he responds to Hegel’s anti-Jewish discourse in his commentary. The article argues that Derrida, through various enunciative strategies that we will follow in detail, claims for himself the very traits Hegel assigns to the ‘Jew’ and, even further, turns them into key elements of his poetics. In accordance with the commentary technique he has elaborated in his previous works, Derrida does not directly address the anti-Jewish theses he comments on, but reads Hegel against himself: by transforming Hegel’s most antisemitic tropes, he strategically hijacks Hegel’s text in favour of a ‘Jewish’ poetics that performatively responds to the antisemitic logics on which he comments.