Derrida frames the Abrahamic as an unreadable, explosive field at the sources of religion.

Evidence

With “the Jew, the Arab,” with the Abrahamic, we are confronted, on the one hand, with a Derrida preoccupied with ethical concerns and with what one could call an “ethics of memory.” On the other hand, there is here a Derrida who has painfully inscribed incineration, suffering, and who exhorts us to an exposure to a reading field that is also a minefield. This is a field that Derrida describes “at the two sources of religion” at the sources of the theologico-political: “a non-identified field … like a desert about which one isn’t sure if it is sterile or not, or like a field of ruins and of mines,” champ de mines, “and of wells and of caves and of cenotaphs and scattered seedings; but a non-identified field, not even like a world.” With the Abrahamic and with its names, with “the Jew, the Arab,” the “I” and the name of Derrida become double, at least. They explode over this minefield which, far from offering a placid topology, resists all localization. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 274

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up how Derrida conceptualizes ‘the Abrahamic’ as a minefield resisting localization, a key term for the whole book.