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7. SACRED/HOLY
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7. SACRED/HOLY In 1987, close to the end of Levinas’s long philosophical career, François Poirié asked the philosopher what his project was at the beginning of his research. Levinas responded: I don’t know whether it was my initial project or whether it is my final project; I have no idea, I can’t tell you. I have never thought of those things in terms of well-written biographical pathos. But the idea that after all the true, unquestionable value, and the one that it is not ridiculous to conceive of, is the value of holiness. It has nothing whatsoever to do with doing without things. It is in the certainty that the other must be given the first place in all respects; from the “after you” before the open door to the disposition — hardly possible but holiness demands it — to die for the other.1 There are indications that this theme in fact dominated toward the end of his career. In the course of the same interview, Poirié asks, still in reference to the main theme of Levinas’s philosophy: Poirié: So it’s ethics, primarily? Levinas: The word ethics is Greek. I think much more, especially now, about holiness; the holiness of the face of the other, or the holiness of my obligation as such. Granted, there is a holiness in the face, but especially there is holiness or ethics toward oneself in a behavior that approaches the face as a face, in which the obligation with respect to the other is imposed before all obligation . To respect the other is to take the other into account, to put him before oneself. And courtesy! Ah, it is very good: to have him or her pass before me, that little courteous incentive is also 72 access to the face. Why should you pass before me? It is very difficult because you, too, approach my face. But courtesy or ethics consists in not thinking of that reciprocity.2 The idea of not considering reciprocity, not requiring the same behavior of others, is repeated constantly throughout the later writings and interviews. In saying that “it is very difficult, because you, too, approach my face,” I don’t think Levinas is referring to the practical difficulty of getting through doorways when each person is deferring to the other, but to a conceptual difficulty for objective thought. Ethics has, in the philosophical tradition, usually been viewed as a matter of arriving at principles that could be applied evenly and across the board to all human beings. Here ethics is only to be thought of in the first person. It is always only I who have responsibilities, I who am obligated, I who must yield to the other. The relation between self and other appears, at least for the purposes of ethical behavior, to resist any synoptic view. Levinas’s increasing interest in the idea of holiness is again attested, this time by Jacques Derrida: “One day, on the rue MichelAnge , during one of those conversations whose memory I hold so dear, one of those conversations illuminated by the radiance of his thought, the goodness of his smile, the gracious humor of his ellipses, he said to me: ‘You know, one often speaks of ethics to describe what I do, but what really interests me in the end is not ethics, not ethics alone, but the holy, the holiness of the holy.’”3 The uniqueness of the first person is already thematized in the work of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl; but there the uniqueness was of the epistemological subject rather than of the ethical one. The moral specificity of the I/thou relation doubtless owes everything to Martin Buber; but what is different from Buber’s dialogical philosophy here is the asymmetry of the relationship. In Levinas, the other is always greater, always “closer to God” than I am. Holiness would seem to be more at home in a religious, or perhaps theological, context, than in a strictly philosophical one. Yet Sacred/Holy 73 [3.235.246.51] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:53 GMT) the way Levinas proceeds to discuss the term is in fact philosophical . First, there is the gesture of the distinguo. One of Levinas’s most persistent and systematic distinctions, which becomes particularly important in his critique of Heidegger, is between the “sacred” and the “holy” (le sacré/le saint).4 He associates the sacred with something akin to...