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7 1 “An Almost Unheard-of Analogy” Derrida Reading Levinas This word “other” [“autre”] is very soon, I predict, going to become absolutely unutterable, given the abuse or the inflation to which it has fallen victim. Jacques Derrida, “Above All, No Journalists!” Show yourself! Reveal yourself to me so that I can see you! This is the demand—the appeal—that Moses addresses to God. In the well-known passage from the Book of Exodus, Moses is said to implore God: “I beseech thee, show me thy glory” (Exod. 33:18 AV). However, his entreaty is swiftly denied when God replies: “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exod. 33:20). All that Moses can hope for is to see the “back parts” of God. “But my face,” he is assured, “shall not be seen” (Exod. 33:23). Hachem Foda, a professor of Arabic literature, invokes this very relationship between Moses and God in a meeting of several Arab intellectuals with Jacques Derrida that took place in Rabat, Morocco, in June 1996. In a paper analyzing a series of Arabic terms having to do with the notion of uns (a concept that encompasses sociality and warm companionship with others as well as with God), Foda claims that any communion or relation with God is only possible in terms of a friendly and intimate relation that one shares with one’s neighbors. Foda refers to al-Kalâbâdhî’s Traité de soufisme, whose author quotes the words of the Egyptian mystic Dhũ l-Nũn.1 Uns or intimacy with God, the mystic is said to have said, “is for the one who loves, being at ease with the beloved [être à l’aise avec l’Aimé]” (EC 20). As an example of the desire for uns, for this intimacy and comfort, al-Kalâbâdhî cites the demand that Moses is said to have placed on God: “Show yourself to me, so that I can see you.”2 It is the very desire for uns, according to Foda, that motivates Moses to want to 8 ■ Analogies see God. And the response from God—“you will never see me”—Foda believes, demonstrates that divinity as such does not belong to the phenomenal order.3 Thus, having God as companion, Foda writes, is akin to “having company without companions,” it is “being with no one [être avec personne],” or “being in the company of no one [être en compagnie de personne]” (EC 30). In his response to Foda’s paper, Jacques Derrida not only highlights the almost Blanchotian reference to companionship with this some one “who does not accompany me” but also the example of the relation between Moses and God. What Foda’s paper reveals, Derrida wants to suggest, is precisely the impossibility of being able to rigorously distinguish between the relation to the other and the relation to God. The scene in which Moses asks God to show himself and God refuses visibility, Derrida provocatively claims, can in fact be taken as “the paradigm for all relations to the other [l’autre], whatever it may be [quel qu’il soit], human or divine.”4 If the other’s manner of presenting itself—in a relation of interruption and separation, dissociation and disjunction—consists in not ever presenting itself, then, the relation to alterity in general, this experience of an invisibility in the visible or of a nonphenomenality, is a relation where the other “can only present itself as other, never presenting itself as such” (Fid 226). The condition of the experience of the other as other is that we can never have direct access to the other side, “to the zero point of this other origin of the world,” in the same manner that there can be no immediate intuition or originary perception of the alter ego. “Isn’t this,” Derrida asks, “the law of the relation to the other, whatever it may be [quel qu’il soit], X, animal, God or human being?” (Fid 226). In other words, the law of the relation to the other entails that all relations to the other, each relation to every other—and tout autre est tout autre—is an interruptive rapport to the distant, the inaccessible, and the secret. Contrasting his belief in the impossibility of clearly distinguishing between the relation to the other and the relation to God with Levinas ’s thought, which wishes to maintain a distinction, however tenuous, between the...

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