autrement dit

““More than a quarter century ago, our lives and most likely history itself, was interrupted. No measure is enough to describe the enormity of the monstrous things which happened then. For someone whose memory is affected with such a tumor, twenty years are like nothing. Yes, death will soon overcome us and erase the unearned injustice of having survived, while six million people did not. But even if the distractions of life fill this life again (if grace allows) - even if all values from before the Deluge hold again - even if all words which seemed to have died with us are again among us in newspapers and books - even if institutions and public power have reinstated and protected rights that seemed lost to us - there is still nothing that could have filled the abyss, or even cover her up. Hiding in our daily distractions we look back upon that abyss, almost as often as we used to. The dizziness that overcomes us is still the same”.”

“The relation to the other is therefore not ontology. This bond with the other which is not reducible to the representation of the other, and which invocation is not preceded by an understanding, I call religion. The essence of discourse is prayer.”

“Then all life is a form of waiting, but it is the waiting of loneliness. One waits to recognize the other, to see the other as one sees the self. Levinas writes, ‘The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays.’”