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.

As Emmanuel Levinas states in the preface to Existence and Existents, "this study is a preparatory one. It examines . . . the problem of the Good, time, and the relationship with the other [person] as a movement toward the Good." First published in 1947, and written mostly during Levinas's imprisonment during World War II, this work provides the first sketch of his mature thought later developed fully in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This new (...) edition marks the first time this important work has been made available in an inexpensive paperback edition. Levinas's project in Existence and Existents is to move from anonymous existence to the emergence of subjectivity; to subjectivity's practice, theory and morality; to its encounter with the alterity of the other person. He is concerned here primarily with the time of the solitary subject; time is the inner structure of subjectivity, of the movement of existing. "Levinas's work," says Alphonso Lingis, "contains not only wholly new analyses of the forms of time of the present, the past, the future but also a new conception of the work of time." Beginning with Existence and Existents, then, it is possible to begin tracing the progressive "alterization" of time as it unfolds across the development of Levinas's entire philosophy. As a "preparatory" study, Existence and Existents introduces the major themes and concerns that occupied Levinas throughout his career. This is essential reading for understanding both Levinas's own philosophy and the developments in philosophical thought in the twentieth century. (shrink)

The problematic reality of an alterity implicit in the concept of communication has been a consistent attestation in formal discourse. The rapport of thought to this alterity has been consistently described as a radical inadequation. By virtue of the communicational economy which produces discontinuity and relation, illumination and the possibility of consciousness, an opacity haunts the famili arity of comprehension. Consciousness' spontaneity is limited by the difference or discontinuity of the exterior thing, of the exterior subject or intersubjective other, and (...) of the generality of existence in its excess over comprehension's closure. An element implicit in difference or discontinuity escapes the power of comprehension, and even the possibility of manifestation. Within the system of tendencies and predications which characterizes formal discourse, however, this escape of alterity is most often understood as an escape which proceeds from its own substantiality: the unknowable in-itself of things, of subjects, and of generality. Alterity escapes the power of comprehension, on the basis of its power to escape this power. That which escapes the effectivity of consciousness, escapes on the basis of its own effectivity. For this reason, the rapport of inadequation described by the escape may function in formal discourse as a correlation. The inadequation of comprehension and exteriority may function as the vicissitude of a larger adequation. The latent principles of this adequation are power and totalization. (shrink)

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers—among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature , first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading (...) as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarme;, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language. (shrink)

"Le secret de la littérature, la littérature comme exigence et comme sens et sa voie à venir se trouvent au centre de ces recherches. Avec un savoir passionné et anxieux, il nous est parlé de Proust, d'Artaud, de Broch, de Musil, de Henry James, de Samuel Beckett, de Mallarmé, de plusieurs autres et même de celui qui sera, un jour, le dernier écrivain. Mais peut-être, plus que des auteurs et des livres, est-il question ici du mouvement d'où viennent tous les (...) livres et qui détient, d'une manière encore cachée, l'avenir de la communication et la communication comme avenir. (shrink)