My Non-Essential Friend: The Dis-Figured Jew

This paper will critically examine a common and even dominant contemporary strategy of critical approach towards the historical figuration of the Jews in Western tradition. This strategy consists in rejecting the very operation of "figuration" or coceptualization of the Jew or of Jewish-being. Such conceptualization is understood as "essentialism", against which the same strategy posits the "living", "flesh and blood", "concrete" Jew. In reference, among others, to Derrida, the paper will criticize this contemporary dis-figuration of the Jew in the name of "life" as presenting an even more accomplished form of "essentialism". It will be argued, that this essentialist dis-figuration constitutes yet another form in the historical tradition of Jewish figures.