sense the necessity and the force of this thinking, I resist it in the name of what no longer allows itself to be gathered—alas! Alas and no, in fact, because the fact of resisting the gathering might be felt as a distress, a sadness, a loss—dislocation, dissemination, the not being at home, etc.—but it is also an opportunity. It is the opportunity of an encounter, of justice, of a relation to absolute alterity. Whereas on the contrary, there, when this risk and this opportunity do not exist, the worst can happen: under the authority of Versammlung, of logos, and of being, the worst can advance with its political figures. If we had the time, I would attempt to show that, on my side, the side of dissociation, obviously there are the threats of the worst, of death, but also of the best opportunity. And inversely, on the side of the gathering or of the logos of ebbing there is, clearly, the chance of gathering, but also surely the chance of a nonencounter, a certain blindness to the other, a certain cancellation of the event, a certain pure noneventfulness. That would be the argument. I can imagine that people who would polemicize or would plead Heidegger’s case against what I am trying to propose could find resources in Heidegger to say things similar to what I would like to say. And they would, no doubt, be right, to a certain extent. The question is, in the end, that of emphasis, insistence, of the extent, of the stress. And there, undeniably, Heidegger stressed gathering—this is what has to be interpreted historically. Why was he led to stress Versammlung and not the contrary? With respect to the side to which I am drawn, not “on my side,” but the side toward which I feel carried in my reservations with regards to Heidegger, the stress is instead on the side of al-terity, of dissociation, of infinite distance, of dispersion, of the incommensurable, of the impossible, and of “destinerrance.”

To account for this gap different arguments can be considered. One might, at first, talk of a generation gap. Historically, Heidegger is a thinker of the interwar years; the formation of his thinking belongs to a different period. This is a question of generations, but also a question of nations. On the question of Judaism, I would be very careful. I grew up in a cultural milieu that was as Christian as it was Jewish.

Since you allude to it, this might be the moment to append a question about what you think of Marlène Zarader’s work (in The Unthought Debt) concerning Heidegger’s secret Hebraism.

Basically I think that she is right. Heidegger silenced every reference to Jewish thinkers, from Spinoza to Bergson, to more originary Hebraic matters, and to what one calls the “Old Testament.” One can perceive a factual violence, deliberate or not, with respect to the Jewish tradition. What Zarader says is, on the whole, convincing. It remains to be seen why, where, and how Heidegger did this. I wonder if it is because he was seeking the non-Greek or pre-Greek that would