Lending assistance always to itself: Levinas' infinite conversation with platonic dialogue

ENIn a text written in the hours immediately following the death of Emmanuel Levinas and read at a service at the cemetery in Pantin on December 27,1995, Jacques Derrida pays tribute to the remarkable life and work of Emmanuel Levinas and to the unique role Levinas played in twentieth-century thought both inside and outside of France and inside and outside of philosophy. In his tribute, Derrida praises and celebrates Levinas' life and work in order to say at the end "Adieu," in order to pronounce in his own voice the word he says he learned to hear and pronounce otherwise from Emmanuel1 Levinas. Continuing a conversation that began more three decades earlier, Derrida speaks to Levinas in Levinas' absence and concludes by offering him a final "Adieu," a final word both to mark the interruption that Levinas' death brought to their conversation and to recall what was at the very origin of that conversation.