Academics From France

"Hardly a word about the condition of women is heard. Not a single statement about the fate of minorities, some of whose members have contributed to the independence of their country at the risk of their life; not a sign of recognition. On the contrary, they most often find themselves being gradually eliminated from the country's civil-service bureaucracy. In this way a great occasion is lost to build, at least in words, an open and multicultural nation, one that includes the Algerian Kabyles, the Egyptian Copts, Jews and Christians … precisely what intellectuals living in the West demand for themselves in their host countries!"

"If you raise a baby crocodile in your apartment, one day he will eat you. The Americans gave aid to the Taliban in fighting the Russians and later went to war with them. The Israelis initially encouraged the Palestinian fundamentalists in Hamas, who then turned against them. The ruler knows this; he knows that if the fundamentalists gain power, he will be eliminated. To avoid this he will practice a balancing act, sometimes granting them favors, sometimes tightening the screws. The Islamic veil, the beard, the mosques, the confraternities serve as escape valves, but all the Arab governments know they are raising crocodiles in their midst. This providential aid, granted through the intermediary of the priests, is not disinterested. It is a poisoned alliance, where everyone, using his own weapons, tries to neutralize, then despoil, the others."

"The suicide bomber denies the rules so painfully acquired by human societies, the outline of a moralization of war. It is a reversal of the gradual humanization of human societies. They cut the throats of journalists, who are only doing their job, abduct or machine-gun tourists, who have arrived from another part of the world and had the misfortune to want to amuse themselves. A tract that appeared in Casablanca before a horrendous attack, one that was distributed only in the mosques, exhorted its readers to make no exceptions for women or children—all of them were considered guilty and deserved to die. The same justification has been advanced by Palestinian leaders: all Israelis without exception must be attacked. Islamic terrorism appears to have declared war on the entire world, including the Arab countries that fail to align themselves with its objectives. Tunisia, Morocco, even Saudi Arabia, the leading sanctuary of the Arab-Muslim world, have been struck. Until recently, Palestinian bombers concentrated on Israeli or Jewish targets; now the battle has extended to the world at large."

"Obviously, the misfortune of the Arabs does not arise from the existence of Israel; even if the country didn't exist, none of these problems would be resolved."

"There is no mystery to the Arab texts used for domestic consumption; they openly discuss the destruction of Israel. Didn't the first president of the Algerian republic, Ben Bella, go so far as to declare that, if he had had an atomic bomb, he would have launched it against Israel, which had become a kind of absolute evil?"

"To speak of Israel in terms other than as a historical, even metaphysical, disease that the Arab world needed to be cleansed of became a form of blasphemy that had to be punished. Giving it a place on a map was a sacrilege, a felony. As if, by denying its existence, it could magically be made to disappear. This effort was facilitated by the fact that the Jews served as an excellent scapegoat for the problems of others. Israel's existence was far too convenient."

"When seen in its proper context, compared to the magnitude of the problems—demographic, economic, political, social, cultural, and religious—that now face the Arab world, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict turns out to be a minor drama in a small corner of the world, just one among many."

"Like Palestine for the Palestinians, Israel is a national fact, the response to an untenable condition and a collective desire, with its own imaginary, binding it, rightly or wrongly, to this earth. This is how the United Nations viewed the situation when it determined the constitutions of the two sovereign states."

"There no longer exists, if there ever did in the Arab-Muslim world, that great public tribunal characteristic of democracy, where everyone can publicly give his opinion without unnecessary risk. True controversies are rare, except possibly for unimportant details, where disagreements occur against a background of underlying unity. As a result, any condemnation of wrongdoing and scandal always comes from the exterior, from those outside the community, leading to suspicions of bias or perversity."

"Racism rests upon and functions as a kind of seesaw: the persecutor rises by debasing and inferiorizing his victim."

"There is a strange kind of tragic enigma associated with the problem of racism. No one, or almost no one, wishes to see themselves as racist; still racism persists, real and tenacious."

"Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises."

"Israel, however, is not a colonial settlement, which would therefore be legitimate to destroy, an idea the Arab states have tried to promulgate. Aside from its domination of the Palestinians, which is unacceptable, it has none of the characteristics of such a state. Nor is it a product of the Crusades, a religious excrescence of Europe, destined sooner or later to vanish off the map from Christianity's lassitude."

"Levinas teaches us that to be entitled with the adjective of human, you must first acknowledge the humanity of the other, and particularize the other within multitude, the one, the specific."

"According to Levinas, we construct our world in our individual minds, and this constructed reality has boundaries or "horizons" as Levinas calls it. But when the Face of the Other intrudes into this boundaried construction, what Levinas terms our "same," the Other inevitably becomes part of our construction. The key phrase is "our construction," because our construction of the Other is not the Other; the Other can never become one with our "same": it continually transcends our poor attempt to know it."

"In 1923 Levinas went to France to continue his studies, where he had Charles Blondell and Halbwachs as teachers."

"When ethics thus moves into the domain of politics and becomes morality, the possibility of violence appears because of the threat of the application of such absolutist forms of thought. Further, although the moral agent must remain free in order to avoid the totalizing domination of the state, morality must still be grounded in the ethical relation of the face-to-face."

"For Levinas there is a radical opposition between politics and religion. The former enslaves liberty by encompassing it within the 'Great All'. Religion on the other hand, which for Levinas is the metaphysical relationship with the Other, is based in respect and mutual aid even beyond need, submission and generosity."

"The theory of transparency was set up in reaction to the theory of mental images, of an inner tableu which the perception of an object would leave in us. In imagination our gaze always goes outward, but imagination modifies and neutralizes the gaze: the real world appears in it as it were between parenthesis or quote marks."

"To be or not to be is not the question where transcendence is concerned. The statement of being's other, of the otherwise than being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness — the very difference of the beyond, the difference of transcendence."

"He teaches us that we can redeem our humanity by not just caring about our own perspective but by seeing details of the other individual in the mass of humans."

"The transition of the subject-object relation to that of the I-Thou implies a passage of consciousness to a new sphere of existence, viz, the interval, betweenness or Zwischen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung."

"Fear for the Other, fear for the other man's death is my fear, but is in no way an individual's taking fright."

"By asserting the objectivity of the physical world, naturalism identifies the existence and the conditions of existence of the physical world with existence and the conditions of existence in general. It forgets that the world of the physicist necessarily refers back, through its intrinsic meaning, through the subjective world which one tries to exclude from reality as being pure appearance, conditioned by the empirical nature of man, which is incapable of reaching directly to a world of things in themselves. But while the world of the physicist claims to go beyond naive experience, his world really exists only in relation to naive experience."

"The detour to ideality leads to coinciding with oneself, that is, to certainty, which remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adventure of being."

"To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods."

"The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed."

"The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine, and because nothing is more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness itself."

"The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution , of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others."

"The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice."

"If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme?"

"Dieu est le poète et les hommes ne sont que les acteurs."

"Un peu d'esprit et beaucoup d'autorité, c'est ce qui a presque toujours gouverné le monde."

"Il n'y a point d'enfants que nous aimions davantage que ceux qui naissent de notre esprit, et desquels nous sommes père et mère tout ensemble."

"Rien n'est si voisin du haut style que le galimatias: le ridicule est une des extrémités du subtil."

"La solitude est certainement une belle chose, mais il y a plaisir d'avoir quelqu'un qui sache répondre, à qui on puisse dire de temps en temps, que c'est un belle chose."

"L'utilité publique se fait sou vent du dommage des particuliers."

"Le venin guerit en quelque rencontre, et, ce cas-là, le venin n'est pas mauvais."

"Il n'y a personne qui soit tenu d'être habile; mais il n'y en a point qui ne soit obligé d'être bon."

"L'amour sacré de la patrie."

"Quel triste élève de la Grè Pourrait, en voyant sa beauté, Préférer les lis de Lucrèce, Et les paleurs de la sagesse, Aux roses de la volupté?"

"Malheureux qui craint de rentrer Dans la retraite de son âme! Le coeur qui cherche a s'ignorer Redoute un censeur qui le blâme."

"Monseigneur, j'attendrai"

"La cause de notre grandeur Peut l'être aussi de notre parte."

"Le naturel est le sceau du génie."

"On ne rit plus, on sourit aujourd'hui, Et nos plaisirs sont voisins a l'eunui."

"J'aime mieux un franc ennemi Qu'un bon ami qui m'égratigne."

"Secret de Polichinelle."

"Amis, plus souvent qu’on ne croit, La tache est tout juste à l'endroit Où l'on voit briller la paillette."

"Je vais où va toute chose, Où va la feuille de rose Et lafeuille de laurier."