Jacques Derrida’s
moving funeral speech on the death of his close friend Emmanuel Levinas, at his
cemetery in Pantin on December 27, 1995 has gone down in history as one of the
finest eulogies ever.
Levinas, a great French intellectual, had a great influence on the young Jacques Derrida, a
fellow French Jew whose immensely popular book Writing
and Difference contains an essay, "Violence and Metaphysics", on
Levinas.
To Derrida, ‘Levinas
does not want to propose laws or moral rules… it is a matter of [writing] an
ethics of ethics.’ An ethics of ethics means, here, the exploration of
conditions of possibility of any interest in good actions or lives. In light of
that, it can be said that Levinas is exploring the meaning of intersubjectivity
and lived immediacy in the light of three themes: transcendence, existence, and
the human other. In short, His work is based on the ‘ethics of the Other’.
Levinas himself
describes ‘ethics as first philosophy’, and according to him, ‘the Other is not
knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by
traditional metaphysics’ (which Levinas called "ontology"). He prefers
to think of philosophy as the ‘wisdom of love’ rather than the ‘love of wisdom’.
In his view, responsibility precedes any "objective searching after
truth".
More on Levinas from
the 'Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy' for you -
The Impact of the
Other on Me
Descriptions of
the encounter with another person lies at the core of Levinas’ thought. That
encounter evinces a particular feature: the other impacts me unlike any worldly
object or force. I can constitute the other person cognitively, on the basis of
vision, as an alter ego. I can see that another human being is “like me,” acts
like me, appears to be the master of her conscious life. That was Edmund
Husserl's basic phenomenological approach to constituting other people within a
shared social universe.
A Case for An
Intersubjective Ethos
But Husserl's
constitution lacks, Levinas argues, the core element of intersubjective life:
the other person addresses me, calls to me. He does not even have to utter
words in order for me to feel the summons implicit in his approach. It is this
encounter that Levinas describes and approaches from multiple perspectives
(e.g., internal and external). He will present it as fully as it is possible to
introduce an affective event into everyday language without turning it into an
intellectual theme. Beyond any other philosophical concerns, the fundamental
intuition of Levinas's philosophy is the non-reciprocal relation of
responsibility.
Intersubjectivity
as Lived Immediacy: Language as Response/Dialogue
For Levinas, an
‘I’ lives out its embodied existence according to modalities. It consumes the
fruits of the world. It enjoys and suffers from the natural elements. It
constructs shelters and dwellings. It carries on the social and economic
transactions of its daily life. Yet, no event is as affectively
disruptive for
a consciousness holding sway in its world than the encounter with another
person. In this encounter (even if it later becomes competitive or
instrumental), the ‘I’ first experiences itself as called and liable to account
for itself. It responds. The ‘I’'s response is as if to a nebulous command.
Nothing says that the other gave a de facto command. The command or summons is
part of the intrinsic relationality. With the response comes the beginning of
language as dialogue. The origin of language, for Levinas, is always response—a
responding-to-another, that is, to her summons. Dialogue arises ultimately
through that response. Herein lie the roots of intersubjectivity as lived
immediacy. Levinas has better terms for it: responsibility is the affective,
immediate experience of “transcendence” and “fraternity.”
On his 1972 book
titled Humanism and the Other
In his short yet
profound 1972 book titled Humanism and
the Other Levinas argues that, it is not only possible but of the highest
exigency to understand one's humanity through the humanity of others. In
paperback for the first time, Levinas's work here is based in a new
appreciation for ethics and takes new distances from phenomenology, idealism,
and skepticism to rehabilitate humanism and restore its promises. Painfully
aware of the long history of dehumanization that reached its apotheosis in
Hitler and Nazism, Levinas does not underestimate the difficulty of reconciling
oneself with another. The humanity of the human, Levinas argues, is not
discoverable through mathematics, rational metaphysics, or introspection.
Rather, it is found in the recognition that the other person comes first, that
the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the
self.
On His Swansong Alterity and Transcendence in the 1995
On a similar
vein, he also wrote his last book titled, Alterity
and Transcendence in 1995, the year in which he passed away. This book
discusses transcendence - not as our our relationship to a mysterious, sacred
realm but in the idea of our worldly, subjective relationships to others. To
Levinas, ‘Interpersonal relations are the basis of transcendence’, and he
throws light on the rights of individuals (and how they are inextricably linked
to those of others), the concept of peace, and the dialogic nature of
philosophy, and signs off by giving a call to modern thinkers to investigate not
merely the true but the good!
Excerpts from
Derrida’s Funeral Speech on his friend Emmanuel Levinas and His Philosophy
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
a-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 – to speak straight
on, to address oneself directly to the other, and to speak for the other whom
one loves and admires, before speaking o/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."
The entire text
can be found HERE
Sources
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy @ plato.stanford.edu
Adieu to Levis @ monoskop.org
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