Jacques Derrida’s Life as an Algerian Jew

I just finished Kevin MacDonald’s remarkable The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998). I’ll write a longer review in the future.

MacDonald’s thesis is that, from the perspective of group identity theory (actualized in the form of ethnocentrism), thousands of years of self-imposed jewish separatism has led to an identifiable, quasi-cryptic, evolutionary strategy among jews which involves the direct and indirect promotion of jewish interests (actualized through overt or indirect ethnocentrism) at the expense of any white European ethnocentrism. The litany of major postmodernism figures who promoted universalistic or relativistic theories, while simultaneously identifying strongly as jews and promoting jewish in-group identification (e.g., Boas, Freud, Horkheimer/Adorno, et al.), is staggering.

Jacques Derrida, for example, was one of the most influential postmodern relativists who wreaked havoc on the humanities from ’90s even through today. From Tablet Magazine — a jewish-orient publication (that is, an ethnocentric-oriented publication) is “Jacques Derrida’s Life as an Algerian Jew“. Terry Eagleton is quoted in the piece:

At the age of 12, Derrida was excluded from his lycee when the Algerian government, anxious to outdo the Vichy regime in its anti-semitic zeal, decided to lower the quota of Jewish pupils. … Paradoxically, the effect of this brutal rejection on a “little black and very Arab Jew” as he described himself, was not only to make him feel an outsider, but to breed in him a lifelong aversion to communities. He was taken in by a Jewish school, and hated the idea of being defined by his Jewish identity. Identity and homogeneity were what he would later seek to deconstruct. Yet the experience also gave him a deep suspicion of solidarity.

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