Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jacques Derrida was Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Stanford has published six of his books, most recently Monolingualism of the Other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin (1998).

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ADIEU TO EMMANUEL LEVINAS

Stanford University Press

Contents

§ 1 Adieu.................................1§ 2 A Word of Welcome.....................15Notes..........................................127

Chapter One

For a long time, for a very long time, I've feared having to say Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas.

I knew that my voice would tremble at the moment of saying it, and especially saying it aloud, right here, before him, so close to him, pronouncing this word of adieu, this word à-Dieu, which, in a certain sense, I get from him, a word that he will have taught me to think or to pronounce otherwise.

By meditating upon what Emmanuel Levinas wrote about the French word adieu—which I will recall in a few moments—I hope to find a sort of encouragement to speak here. And I would like to do so with unadorned, naked words, words as childlike and disarmed as my sorrow.

Whom is one addressing at such a moment? And in whose name would one allow oneself to do so? Often those who come forward to speak, to speak publicly, thereby interrupting the animated whispering, the secret or intimate exchange that always links one, deep inside, to a dead friend or master, those who make themselves heard in a cemetery, end up addressing directly, straight on, the one who, as we say, is no longer, is no longer living, no longer there, who will no longer respond. With tears in their voices, they sometimes speak familiarly to the other who keeps silent, calling upon him without detour or mediation, apostrophizing him, even greeting him or confiding in him. This is not necessarily out of respect for convention, not always simply part of the rhetoric of oration. It is rather so as to traverse speech at the very point where words fail us, since all language that would return to the self, to us, would seem indecent, a reflexive discourse that would end up coming back to the stricken community, to its consolation or its mourning, to what is called, in a confused and terrible expression, "the work of mourning." Concerned only with itself, such speech would, in this return, risk turning away from what is here our law—the law as straightforwardness or uprightness [droiture]: to speak straight on, to address oneself directly to the other, and to speak for the other whom one loves and admires, before speaking of him. To say to him adieu, to him, Emmanuel, and not merely to recall what he first taught us about a certain Adieu.

This word droiture—"straightforwardness" or "uprightness"— is another word that I began to hear otherwise and to learn when it came to me from Emmanuel Levinas. Of all the places where he speaks of uprightness, what first comes to mind is one of his Four Talmudic Readings, where uprightness names what is, as he says, "stronger than death."

But let us also keep from trying to find in everything that is said to be "stronger than death" a refuge or an alibi, yet another consolation. To define uprightness, Emmanuel Levinas says, in his commentary on the Tractate Shabbath that consciousness is the "urgency of a destination leading to the Other and not an eternal return to self,"

an innocence without naiveté, an uprightness without stupidity, an absolute uprightness which is also absolute self-criticism, read in the eyes of the one who is the goal of my uprightness and whose look calls me into question. It is a movement toward the other that does not come back to its point of origin the way diversion comes back, incapable as it is of transcendence—a movement beyond anxiety and stronger than death. This uprightness is called Temimut, the essence of Jacob.

This same meditation also sets to work—as each meditation did, though each in a singular way—all the great themes to which the thought of Emmanuel Levinas has awakened us, that of responsibility first of all, but of an "unlimited" responsibility that exceeds and precedes my freedom, that of an "unconditional yes," as this text says, of a "yes older than that of naive spontaneity," a yes in accord with this uprightness that is "original fidelity to an indissoluble alliance." And the final words of this Lesson return, of course, to death, but they do so precisely so as not to let death have the last word, or the first one. They remind us of a recurrent theme in what was a long and incessant meditation upon death, but one that set out on a path that ran counter to the philosophical tradition extending from Plato to Heidegger. Elsewhere, before saying what the à-Dieu must be, another text speaks of the "extreme uprightness of the face of the neighbor" as the "uprightness of an exposure to death, without defense."

I cannot, nor would I even try to, measure in a few words the oeuvre of Emmanuel Levinas. It is so large that one can no longer glimpse its edges. And one would have to begin by learning once again from him and from Totality and Infinity, for example, how to think what an "oeuvre" or "work"—as well as fecundity—might be. One can predict with confidence that centuries of readings will set this as their task. We already see innumerable signs, well beyond France and Europe, in so many works and so many languages, in all the translations, courses, seminars, conferences, etc., that the reverberations of this thought will have changed the course of philosophical reflection in our time, and of our reflection on philosophy, on what orders it according to ethics, according to another thought of ethics, responsibility, justice, the State, etc., according to another thought of the other, a thought that is newer than so many novelties because it is ordered according to the absolute anteriority of the face of the Other.

Yes, ethics before and beyond ontology, the State, or politics, but also ethics beyond ethics. One day, on the rue Michel-Ange, during one of those conversations whose memory I hold so dear, one of those conversations illuminated by the radiance of his thought, the goodness of his smile, the gracious humor of his ellipses, he said to me: "You know, one often speaks of ethics to describe what I do, but what really interests me in the end is not ethics, not ethics alone, but the holy, the holiness of the holy." And I then thought of a singular separation, the unique separation of the curtain or veil that is given, ordered and ordained [donné, ordonné], by God, the veil entrusted by Moses to an inventor or an artist rather than to an embroiderer, the veil that would separate the holy of holies in the sanctuary. And I also thought of how other Talmudic Lessons sharpen the necessary distinction between sacredness and holiness, that is, the holiness of the other, the holiness of the person, who is, as Emmanuel Levinas said elsewhere, "more holy than a land, even when that land is a Holy Land. Next to a person who has been affronted, this land—holy and promised—is but nakedness and desert, a heap of wood and stone."

This meditation on ethics, on the transcendence of the holy with regard to the sacred, that is, with regard to the paganism of roots and the idolatry of place, was, of course, indissociable from an incessant reflection upon the destiny and thought of Israel: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Such reflection consisted of requestioning and reaffirming the legacies not only of the...