死と復活の意味

アグノンとレヴィナス

抄録

S.Y. Agnon, one of the great masters of modern Hebrew literature, wrote a short story called “The Sign”, in which he treated the attempted genocide of Jews by Nazis and described the resurrection of the dead in a mystic vision.
Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish philosopher who worked in France, wrote a short essay called “Poetry and Resurrection. Notes on Agnon” and commented on Agnon's “The Sign”. But “Notes on Agnon” is an extremely difficult text, some of whose themes, such as the ’resurrection of the dead‚, seem to have no place in Levinas' ordinary philosophy.
The objective of this article is not to perform a comparative study of the two authors' thought, as this would be beyond the author's capabilities, but instead to present the content of the two texts and to make clear how Levinas read Agnon, in order to prepare elementary data for the study of Levinas' ’Notes on Agnon‚. As a result, it will become clear that Levinas abstracted from Agnon's personal problems and interpreted the concepts of ’death‚ and ’resurrection‚ in diverse and original senses in order to focus his commentary on universal philosophical problems. For example, ’resurrection‚, according to Levinas, is primarily understood as the phenomenon of an order of meaning, referring to the sense of language.
In spite of this effort towards a philosophical interpretation of Agnon's work, “Notes on Agnon” nevertheless contains a certain element that differs from most of Levinas' other works. This difference suggests that there is something about Levinas' dialogue on the Holocaust with Agnon's work that resists being absorbed into ’Levinassian philosophy‚.