“Se i profeti irrompessero nelle porte della notte”. Una rilettura filosofica contemporanea del profetismo

If the prophets broke in through doors of night”: it is with this verse by the poet Nelly Sachs that I would like to introduce a philosophical reflection on prophetism that takes as its starting point certain leading figures of the Ecole Juive de Paris such as André Neher and Emmanuel Levinas. Biblical prophetism, on the one hand, revisited through a contemporary lens according to the perspective of Neher’s book Prophètes et prophéties. L’essence du prophétisme, will be reinterpreted in parallel and almost in chiasm with the perspective of an ethical prophetism, and even a prophetism “beyond ethics” as formulated by Levinas in the final parts of Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. But why prophetism, precisely? Why bring out of the dust those biblical figures circulating in Jerusalem or originating from the areas around its deserts? Why draw on and turn to precisely them, the prophets, today? Why speak of prophetism owing to those who, in the aftermath of an incinerated post-war period, already grasped the profound lesson – perhaps dissident, perhaps “against the current”, but also certainly human, distinctly and necessarily human? Perhaps because it is precisely in the crisis of sense that pervades our days (and those of our children) in different ways, precisely in an age where philosophical thought addresses the non-human – whether animal, vegetable, cybernetic, nano-technological, etc. – with growing interest, that the prophets remind us, “against the current” now as in the past, of the necessity of the sense of the human. The biblical prophets, who have been interpreted during the history of philosophy and religion as “journalists” (Renan), as “socialists” (Darmesteter), as “demagogues” (Weber), as “utopians” (Boch), but above all, as we will see with Neher and Levinas, as “witnesses of the absolute”, are perhaps also first and foremost “witnesses”, even “resisters”, of the human. I will therefore show how, according to these two voices in particular, the prophets are not only “servants” or “witnesses of the absolute” (Neher), and how prophetism is not only related to “witnessing God”, but also above all – and this is what interests me here – to being (as otherwise than being) “at the service of men that look at me”. Why the prophets? In short, because they are “witnesses” of the human and “resisters” of the human, for the human, during.