Los límites de la afinidad entre la concepción derrideana del lenguaje y la rabínica

Jacques Derrida, like other contemporary theoreticians, turns several times to Jewish
thinkers and categories when formulating his own understanding of text and language. Sometimes it
seems like just an analogy, but other times he does it explicitly. This has given rise to several attempts
of appropriation on behalf of Judaism. Susan Handelman (1982), Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford
Budick (1986), Beth Sharon Ash (1987), Sanford L. Drob (1997; 2006), Hélène Cixous (2001), Elliot
R. Wolfson (2002), Moshe Idel (2003), Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (2007)
—among others— have tried to show the similarity between the Derridean and Jewish concepts of
language; some of them even go so far as to claim that the first is a mere modern representation
of the Rabbinic Literature and the Kabbalah. In our opinion, these attempts of appropriation are
excessive. Thus, our goal is to explore the analogy between the Derridean understanding of language
and the Jewish counterpart at stake in Rabbinic and Kabbalistic literature, in order to show, ultimately,
the irreducible specificity of the former.