Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas
by Jacques Derrida
130 Members (3.83)
On This Page
Description
This volume contains the speech given by Derrida at Emmanuel Levinas's funeral on December 27, 1995, and his contribution to a colloquium organized to mark the first anniversary of Levinas's death. For both thinkers, the word adieu names a fundamental characteristic of human being: the salutation or benediction prior to all constative language (in certain circumstances, one can say adieu at the moment of meeting) and that given at the moment of separation, sometimes forever, as at the moment show more of death, it is also the a-dieu, for God or to God before and in any relation to the other. In this book, Derrida extends his work on Levinas in previously unexplored directions via a radical rereading of Totality and Infinity and other texts, including the lesser-known talmudic readings. He argues that Levinas, especially in Totality and Infinity, bequeaths to us an "immense treatise of hospitality," a meditation on the welcome offered to the other. The conjunction of an ethics of pure prescription with the idea of an infinite and absolute hospitality confronts us with the most pressing political, juridical, and institutional concerns of our time. What, then, is an ethics and what is a politics of hospitality? And what, if it ever is, would be a hospitality surpassing any ethics and any politics we know? As always, Derrida raises these questions in the most explicit of terms, moving back and forth between philosophical argument and the political discussion of immigration laws, peace, the state of Israel, xenophobia—reminding us with every move that thinking is not a matter of neutralizing abstraction, but a gesture of hospitality for what happens and still may happen. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Members
- Recently Added By
Published Reviews
Derrida schlägt, geführt von der Hand seines verstorbenen Lehrers und Freundes, einen weiten Bogen von Kants Schrift "Zum Ewigen Frieden" (1795) über die Lehre des Talmud, die Politik Israels, diejenige Frankreichs seinen Asylbewerbern gegenüber und wieder zurück zur geschichtsphilosophischen Schrift des Königsberger Transzendentalphilosophen, ohne dabei je die Höhe des philosophischen show more Diskurses zu verlassen und sich gänzlich in den Niederungen der Religion oder der Politik zu verlieren. show less
added by Indy133
Author Information
402+ Works 19,760 Members
Jacques Derrida was born in El-Biar, Algeria on July 15, 1930. He graduated from the École Normal Supérieure in 1956. He taught philosophy and logic at both the University of Paris and the École Normal Supérieure for around 30 years. His works of philosophy and linguistics form the basis of the school of criticism known as deconstruction. This show more theory states that language is an inadequate method to give an unambiguous definition of a work, as the meaning of text can differ depending on reader, time, and context. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 40 books on various aspects of deconstruction including Of Grammatology, Glas, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, and Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce. He died of pancreatic cancer on October 9, 2004 at the age of 74. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas
- Original publication date
- 1997
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 130
- Popularity
- 250,070
- Rating
- (3.83)
- Languages
- 9 — English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Portuguese, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 11
