Sostare lungo i bordi. Lo schibboleth di Jacques Derrida

The ancient Hebrew word Schibboleth is a tongue-twister that allows to recognise the stranger – the one who speaks a different language – by blocking his passage within the territory to which we belong. Starting from these suggestions, this paper proposes a symbolic hermeneutics of that schibboleth on which the paradoxical identity of Derrida was built. The Jew, the Arab, the Algerian, the Frenchman, the European, the Christian, the Islamic are plural allegiances that structure – and de-structure – the marrano Derrida, always placing his identity at the border, which thus becomes open to the event and the voices of the Others that constitutes him. The schibboleth reveals a pursuable itinerary to rethink twenty years after Derrida’s death his spiritual legacy: what is at stake, then, is the ethical and political challenge of the identity of Europe with its troubled borders, the future of its democratic promise. Far from any exclusive attachment to place and, at the same time, from a definitive uprooting, Derrida leaves us the task of new cosmopolitan identity which, in its plural crossing, learns to linger along the edges.