An interview with Alain David, “Derrida and Lévinas: ‘Entre lui et moi dans l’affection et la confiance partagée,’” appeared in Magazine littéraire 419 (April 2003): 30–4.

In this interview, Jacques Derrida cautions against the risk of recuperation and “depoliticization” in the reception of Emmanuel Levinas, with whom he shared a deep friendship of the mind and of the heart. By his own admission, Derrida placed his work under the triple sign of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Levinas. Moreover—and I can attest to this personally—what “Derrida thinks” or “but what does Derrida think of this,” was the source of a constant preoccupation, an anxiety and a stimulation for Levinas. The friendship between Derrida and Levinas (to recall here a deeply moving expression from Adieu on Levinas and Blanchot) was a blessing [une grâce]—a blessing that lets something of itself be read here in this interview which Derrida has granted the Magazine Littéraire today. We offer here our—infinite—gratitude.

Alain David: At the end of the text he devotes to you, Levinas speaks of this “pleasure of a contact at the heart of a chiasmus,” which is like “the very modality of the encounter in philosophy,” to which you responded that the chiasmus was “very narrow” [tres effilé].