ABSTRACT
At his death in 2004, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was the most famous philosopher in the world. Born in 1930 in El Biars, Algeria, Derrida was a Jewish child caught between Arab Muslim North Africa and European Christian France. Derrida never fully embraced his Jewish identity, calling himself ironically “the last of the Jews” (Peeters 2013, 503). He moved to France to matriculate at the École Normale Supérieure, and then lived and taught in France and the United States, writing complex, influential and important texts. Although his early work treated religious ideas and themes, it was only in the 1990s that he began more explicitly discussing religion in positive terms. In the late 1990s and 2000s, readers in English began reflecting and commenting on the significance of this interaction, with the most famous interpreter being John D. Caputo, who published The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida in 1997.
