Le visage, dans la trace de l’Absent : comme dire/dé-dire le mot « Dieu »

Abstract

This interpretation aims to comment upon a few passages from the essay “La trace de l’autre,” 1963, written by Levinas for a journal and included in En decouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (1967) and subsequently in Humanisme de l’autre homme (1972). In this text, “God” is conceived as absolutely distant from the question of his existence or non-existence, which must however be traced back to his significance and, in particular, to the meaning of the name that enunciates him, the word “God.” Here, in short, we refer to that measureless idea expressed by the excessive term of “God.” In any case, this is not an argument that Levinas – and I with him – formulate as a theologian (as one may expect), but rather as an unfaithful phenomenologist, who aims to find “the phenomenological concreteness” in which the word “God” acquires significance, such as the concreteness of the “face” or of the “trace”.