La muerte del otro: Kierkegaard, Lévinas, Derrida

The aim of this article is to show that it was Derrida who expounded the excesses of Kierkegaard’s concept of death, especially in relation to the “death of the other” as opposed to one’s own death. In spite of Lévinas’ criticism of the concept of religion in Fear and Trembling, implying a suspension of ethics, Derrida discovers in Kierkegaard a more constraining ethic, an ethic which suspends ethics: the ethics of the survivor. Kierkegaard implemented, according to Derrida, “a non-dogmatic double of dogma, one that repeats the possibility of religion without religion”.
My thesis is that this ethic of absolute duty which Derrida discovers in Fear and Trembling, is an ethic which, as opposed to the other which gives meaning to life in spite
of death, revolves around the central point of the death of the other. This is precisely the “second ethics” which is propounded in Fear and Trembling and which Kierkegaard develops in Works of Love with his concept of the absolute duty to “love the dead”.