N’ayant pas réussi à joindre Masato Goda, nous publions ce magnifique texte sans son autorisation. Nous espérons qu’il nous en excusera (PM).
It has been more than thirty years since I discovered the texts of Emmanuel Levinas. Before publishing the Japanese translations of Totality and Infinite and Otherwise than being, I published an anthology of Levinas’ work that included texts such as ‘‘Il y a’’, ‘‘Reality and its shadow’’ and so on. While I translated these texts, I noticed the importance Levinas accorded to the notion of ‘‘breaking of rhythm’’ as well as to that of ‘‘rhythm’’ itself, either when he compared ‘‘il y a’’ to the prose poem by Edgar Alan Poe in ‘‘Il y a’’ or when he stressed the musicality of image in ‘‘Reality and its shadow’’. But I’ve not been able to develop this topic for long time, until I read the first and the second volume of Levinas’ Complete Works where we can find several very significant fragments on rhythm. [...]
