Phenomenology 2005

Volume 2, Issue Part 2, 2007

Selected Essays from Latin America Part 2

Adeus: A epifania do Outro segundo Levinas

The paper seeks to revisit Levinas’s conception of à-Dieu as a plausible account of a new way of saying (dire) the name of God (Dieu) without reducing its radical alterity to a mere dictum (dit). The Portuguese word adeus is perhaps the most felicitous way of doing justice to Levinas’s radical subversion of onto-theology, as the hyphenated term (a-deus) also allows for an important ambiguity, beyond its own polysemy and plays on words, that not only one may think of the equivalent function of addressing the Other (à Dieu) and its negation by way of a privative alpha (a-Dieu) but also a tacit il y a.