Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics Series) Book

A collection of just two essays, the first of which is highly personal and equally moving eulogy delivered by Derrida at Levinas's funeral. The second essay is a longer introductory address delivered at a symposium for the first anniversary of Levinas's death. It is at once a radical rereading of Totality and Infinity according to the insight that "the vocabulary of welcoming...provide[s:] the keys..to this book", an examination of the relationship between ethics and justice--of the way in which the face-to-face encounter with the Other is always also an encounter with the third, a suggestion contra Irigaray (and against his own previous reading of Levinas) that Levinas's reading of feminine alterity can function as a "feminist manifesto", an exploration of Levinas's always ambiguous relationship to Zionism, an exposition of an ethics and politics of hospitality in the context of global concerns around immigration (both legal and illegal [sans papiers:]), and a thinking through of Levinas's claim that peace is prior to war to the extreme paradox that war may be the continuation of peace by other means.