Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations of Levinas' works
- Introduction
- 1 Levinas, phenomenology, and theology
- 2 Ethics, theology, and the question of God
- 3 Incarnate existence
- 4 Existence as transcendence, or the call of the infinite: towards a theology of grace
- 5 The economy and language of grace: grace, desire, and the awakening of the subject
- 6 The liturgical orientation of the self
- 7 Eucharistic responsibility and working for justice
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations of Levinas' works
- Introduction
- 1 Levinas, phenomenology, and theology
- 2 Ethics, theology, and the question of God
- 3 Incarnate existence
- 4 Existence as transcendence, or the call of the infinite: towards a theology of grace
- 5 The economy and language of grace: grace, desire, and the awakening of the subject
- 6 The liturgical orientation of the self
- 7 Eucharistic responsibility and working for justice
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Emmanuel Levinas died on 25 December, 1995, a curiously strange Christian day which celebrates incarnation and the acknowledgement of the divine in the human, and the human in the divine. A god walks and wanders the way of humanity and occupies the wilderness and strangeness of the human.
A funeral oration was delivered by Jacques Derrida that same day. In that Derrida quotes from Levinas' own writings on ‘uprightness’ (droiture), taking from Levinas' commentary on the Tractate Shabbath Levinas' description of consciousness as
the urgency of a destination leading to the Other and not an eternal return to self … an innocence without naivety, an 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 towards the Other that does not come back to its point of origin the way a 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.
Derrida continues:
This same meditation also sets to work … all the great themes which the work of Emmanuel Levinas has awakened in us, that of responsibility first of all, but of an ‘unlimited’ responsibility that exceeds and precedes my freedom, that of an ‘unconditional yes’.
Derrida recalls a conversation on the rue Michel Ange in Paris, where in response to Derrida, Levinas remarks,
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Levinas and Theology , pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006