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18 Interview with Emmanuel Levinas Edith Wyschogrod: Is there a turning (Kehre), a change in your work, such that instead of finding moral significations by way of phenomenology , through what is inscribed in the face of the Other, you find it in language? If there is such a change, I would like to know why you now rely on the Logos more than previously. Emmanuel Levinas: I am quite surprised that [you assert] there is a change and that there is no longer phenomenology. [In fact] there is not at all an analysis of language. It is a certain manner of speaking, of finding in language what was always signified phenomenologically . I don’t at all proceed like Heidegger, who attributes a special wisdom to language. I use the word disinterestedness. It is grounded in the phenomenon of disinterestedness in which can be found the trace of two words, interest and disinterest. It is only a way of suggesting. I do not attribute, I do not lend, to language this revelatory power. What is more, I now strongly insist on the element of taking, of grasping, both in our concepts as perception and as comprehension . But there are grounds for this. The emergence of the hand in comprehension is extremely old. It is also very Husserlian. In any case, I was never aware of a transition from a logical phenomenology to the Logos, to wisdom. That there is a wisdom in language is possible. I would be very happy to find it, but it is not at all something definitive for me. The word Kehre is Heideggerian. He is a very great philosopher whom one cannot imitate. 283 EW: It seems to me that Otherwise than Being is a work of the greatest importance, more radical, if I may say so, than Totality and Infinity, and that people have hardly begun to understand it. I would like to consider three subjects you develop in this work: the question of God, the theological problematic, the question of language—that is, the difference between Saying [le Dire] and the said [le dit]—and the question of skepticism. To begin with the question of language, to which you attribute so much importance: you distinguish between the Saying and the said. Now, on principle, it is absolutely necessary to have the said once you have posited the Saying. Haven’t you then really returned to the roots of Western philosophy? How can you avoid entangling ethics in ontology? EL: The Saying and the said . . . The ethical moment is the Saying. But one can’t dispense with the said. I am going to respond to you in a very general way about this. There is, in Otherwise than Being, the necessary return to ontology, starting with the section on the advent of the third—the return to ontology, not ontology as such, but to theory in general or, if you wish, justice, which must be added to charity . For the word charity, I always think of the Hebrew chesed. I use the word beauty, which in my mind is always the Hebrew word yefed. [Yefed in Hebrew means both ‘‘beauty’’ and ‘‘Greek.’’ The point appears to be that beauty, the aesthetic dimension, figures in Greek rather than in Judaic thought.] I would even say there is an insistence toward the end of Otherwise than Being on the fact that there cannot be [moral] existence as a couple à deux). There is not existence as a couple because existents are numerous [more than two] and the whole theme of multiplicity, of plurality, is very much present in Totality and Infinity. Also, it is an attempt to think plurality otherwise than it has been thought by the Neo-Platonists. For the NeoPlatonist , plurality was always a privation (privatio) of actuality, of the soul. Discourse was always less than the unity of the One. The One could not even have consciousness of self because then it would be two. On the contrary, there was the [Neo-Platonic] idea of plurality and plurality as I always think of it, the ‘‘for you’’ [pour vous]. One of the blessings of multiplicity is that there are many more relations of love in the world when there is plurality. But in that case, [when there is plurality] it is absolutely necessary to compare the incomparable , and, in consequence, to think in language. In speech, alongside of Saying there absolutely must be a said. The latter is what...

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