Milah : A Counter-Obituary for Jacques Derrida

Obituaries, by definition, look back over the course of a life and a work. But the logic of the Derridean “legacy” also demands the forward-looking perspective, geared to the prospective as well as the retrospective, albeit prospects now sadly broken by his death. Here, if I may be permitted, I have something to report, even if in the context of his death, sporting personal acquaintance with Jacques Derrida seems in particularly poor taste—as if to appropriate the departed as a personal belonging, in gross violation of everything Derrida said about property, gift, self and other. There is however, on this occasion, good reason to place on record what he said to me several times: that the reflection on “circumcision” and associated “Jewish” themes constituted for him “unfinished business;” in particular the link—constitutionally and irreducibly prospective in its own right—between a “Jewishness” and that fundamental call to the future that marks his work: the indeter-minable à venir. More specifically, the unfinished business he was referring to has to do with certain “secrets” partly disclosed in Circonfession and a few other texts. These secrets revolve around circumcision, but “circumcision” with the peculiarly Derridean spin that combines “cutting” with “cutting to,” with special reference to language as contingent on scission. And Derrida has a word for this—one word that homophonically joins the two separate Hebrew roots for “circumcision” and “word”: Milah.