The deconstructive reading of the Book of Esther proposed in this paper is related to one of the central themes in the recent work by Derrida—that of collective identity: its paradoxical character, essential instability and violence. Derrida has elaborated, in particular, upon Jewish identity, which in the last two hundred years has become especially paradoxical due to the processes of secularization. I would like to refer especially to The Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin (Derrida 1998), an essay relating to the experience of "hav[ing] only one language [, which] is not [one's own]" (1998, 1—2). For Derrida, the language belongs to the other; it is the other who is perceived as "monolingual" and/or possessing a homogeneous identity. Identity, like God in negative theology, is not what one is but rather what one is not—a "dispossession" of law and language, which are imposed and heteronomous (cf. 1998, 39). Derrida is himself an Algerian Jew, a native speaker of French acculturated into French culture. No one of the three components of this identity (Jewish, Algerian/Maghrebian, French) is self-evident for him: each of them is either hidden, inaccessible, or imposed. At the same time the desire to excavate one's "true" identity, to build "the prosthesis of origin" too easily turns it into another "language, which is not one's own" (1998, 62).