Derrida’s hyphen joining Jew and Arab pacifies nothing despite its silence

Evidence

In Monolingualism of the Other, “the Jew, the Arab” makes a hyphen out of a comma and surrounds itself with bombs. More precisely, Derrida writes, the silence of the hyphen “does not pacifY or appease anything, not a single torment, not a single torture … A hyphen is never enough to conceal protests, cries of anger or suffering, the noise of weapons, airplanes, and bombs.” This ineffectual silence demands that we follow and pursue a logic that does not quite appear, but that nonetheless constitutes an apparition, a shadow or a specter, which Derrida conjures and invokes when inscribing an “I” that one could still call, though differently, “autobiographical.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 272

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the invented ‘Strange Enemy’ article on hyphenated identities and to the broader ADDENDUM article on identity politics; also evokes the ‘Affirming a hyphen’ thread from this same chapter.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what does it mean that Derrida both invokes the hyphen and insists it does not appease—is the hyphen a form of non-resolution rather than synthesis?