Tribute to Ralph Cohen

To say "Ralph Cohen" is to evoke Virtue, and the virtues of Friendship par excellence, whose other name is Hospitality, attentiveness without end, subtlety of hearing, the quiet repetition of a promise.

What gathers and forms itself, like an inner landscape, made up of a profusion of times and images, is extraordinarily clear and peaceful. I think I can say here with a smile that I have known Ralph forever, just as, when one is grown up, one feels one knows a place of origin distantly and with a deep familiarity, with this most rare sensation that it has always been there. One comes and goes, one travels, one feels that Ralph is always-there, unalterable, like a haven, a childhood home, faithful to me because faithful to himself, because faithful to others. Never, until now, have I experienced a relationship as light and as solid in the whole world of critical culture. Under his leadership, New Literary History will have been a sort of well-tempered literary democracy. This is due to Ralph's unviolent openness to the event of a different thought or speech. Here is a man who knows how to listen. He has always been for me the plenitude of acceptance and assent, granting an unlimited freedom to whatever I am and do. The most beautiful thing is that this surprising capacity for acceptance is unreserved, it is not directed towards "me" by selection and exclusion, but, being both vast and generous, towards many quite heterogeneous thoughts. One could easily say to oneself that such an openness is perhaps the consequence of an indifference. But quite the contrary: it is the lucid, patient exercise of a great force of nonaggression, a way of admitting points of view, a benevolence, a charitable disposition in reading (bienlisance), a matricial psychic structure, which will have provided untiring support to so many passers-by, their relations to each other sometimes fuelled by antipathy and suspicion. Now, luckily for the agitated world in which literary critical reading so often traces its paths by movements of rejection, somebody like Ralph Cohen will have existed to lend credence to the most diverse voices. A real mystery. All who inhabit that virtual planet on which circulate the ideas and minds of beings who are self-centred by definition and often incompatible, will understand what I am trying to depict here: it takes a Ralphcohen, that is to say, a passer-on, a good conductor-receiver, to connect the currents, avoid short-circuits, and above all, to allow encounters to take place which, but for him, would have been improbable.

To return to Ralph Cohen's place in my history: it is of an immense depth. His presence has always been for me the sign of a doubly precious shelter, on the one hand, through the solidarity he has always offered me, actively, on the other hand, through what he has never inflicted upon me and the harms he has not caused me. Thus I never felt in him the slightest fold of misogyny, or the slightest intellectual fear. This pure absence of hostility has always been a blessing in my long career, checkered as it is by many demonstrations of adversity and resistances. I call greatness this dimension of infinite politeness in Ralph. For it is beyond calculation.

As for what he has given me: a kind of discreet "home," a stable place, always ready, like a table always set for the sharing of bread, which signifies trust and assent.

When, at his invitation, I taught in Charlottesville in the mid-1990s and I saw him sometimes taking his seat quietly in the seminar room, I saw a simple, unforgettable scene, some intimate sequence secretly rich in traces, like those found later in literary archives. The light of these moments remains in my memory like a message which means: here there is something livably human and without sorrow. This attentive benevolence spread itself, naturally. I remember a dinner party (I run away from dinner parties) bringing together a great many colleagues, at which, for the first time, I...