“The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of nativeland and native tongue, of propria and my-ownness. The idea is to disarm the bombs, les grenades (Foi, 62), of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, against les jufs in Lyotard's sense, against all the others, all the other others, all of whom, according to an impossible formula, a formula of the impossible, are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida's more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida's democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say ‘I’ or ‘we’, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munus, muneris) ourselves in common against the other, to draw ourselves together (com) in a circle against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit ofthe "we" of "Christian Europe," or of a "Christian politics," lethal compounds that spell death for Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other.”

—John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, V. Circumcision, §Hegel and the Jews: Derrida and the Jew, pp. 231-2.

هكذا هو «اليهودي» عندما يريد أن يتفلسف وهو يشعر أنه في نفسه تجسيد للـdiaspora، عندما يحاول أن يتخذ في كتاباته دائمًا وضعية من يكتب من المنفى، من الفَلَاة، بوصفه رحَّالةً هائمًا، بوصفه outsider، بوصفه شريدًا ومُهَجّرًا بلا مثوى — وبالأخص عندما تحمل نظرة مسيانية لمصيرك كيهودي لكنك تحصر معنى هذه النظرة بعدم تحققها على أرض الواقع ألبتة. عندها سترى إلى نفسك ذَرًّا منثورًا وتبذل قصاراك كي تُحِيل العالم كله على صورتك: صورتك التي تجعلها تمثّلًا تامًّا للـtout autre. عندها ستحاول أن تقتلع الجميع من جذورهم وترميهم في عالم ضبابي حيث تخلصت فيه حتى من المتضادات اللغوية. اليهودي ليس ضحية، لكن الظاهر أنه عشق هذا الدور منذ فجر التاريخ وما زال يلعبه جيدًا.