Related to this is a complicated interplay of singularity and universality: the question of the subject’s insertion into the symbolic and the nature of the wound thereby encountered. Is circumcision the ‘collective wound,’ the identifying mark, of a particular community or ‘symbolic order’ (Jewish, Muslim, etc.)? Or does circumcision give a particular form to the universal entry into ‘the symbolic’ as such? In an interview exploring his views on Jewishness, Derrida highlights this ambiguity:
On the one hand, I insist on the singularity, the irrepressibility of the wound, circumcision, my own circumcision, which is irreplaceable, it’s a wound which structures myself as an absolute singularity. But, on the other hand, I suggest that there are analogies between the Jewish circumcision and every kind of wound which constitutes a community. At the origin of any identity, or cultural identity or nationality, there is something like a circumcision, there is a mark on the body, an ineffaceable mark on the body and this wound is universal. So I postulate between the two and I want to say both things at the same time. On the one hand it is absolutely irreplaceable and on the other hand there are circumcisions everywhere, even outside the Jewish or Islamic communities. That’s the ambiguity of the mark on the body.3
Derrida’s comments situate circumcision at the level of particular communal identity and universality at the same time. He moves between circumcision as something that ‘structures’ him as an ‘absolute singularity,’ and as a wound which ‘constitutes a community.’ Singularity indicates something beyond the level of communal identification, something absolutely specific to an individual subject; Derrida’s circumcision is his wound alone. Yet, for him, this singularity occurs against the backdrop of his communal constitution, his Jewish identity – which then extends further, into the conditions for the constitution of community as such. In Lacanian terms, Derrida appears to argue that circumcision illuminates how the encounter with castration and inscription into the symbolic order are simultaneously the universal conditions for subject formation and are undergone by each desiring subject in his or her ultimately singular way.