Maranaty Derridy: sekrety, tajne bractwa, widma
Derrida’s Marranos: Secrets, Secret Brotherhoods, Spectres

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of the essay is to evaluate Jacque Derrida’s famous self-declaration contained in "Circonfession", where he says that it is “sort of the Marrano of French Catholic culture”. Does this mean that Derrida is comparing himself to the "conversos", the Sephardic Jews who were converted by force and officially became Christians but still secretly practiced their prohibited Judaism? Does this sort of identification shed light on the Derridian “secret”, which is one of the creator of deconstruction’s most obsessive themes? And does deconstruction itself as a method of discovering what is hidden not thereby gain new meaning? The essay attempts to answer these questions, putting forth the idea that once you internalize Derrida’s Marrano message, his oeuvre opens up to a completely new interpretation, in which his controversial relationship with Jewishness ceases to be, as it is usually considered, a marginal issue.

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