ABSTRACT
One commemorates a philosopher most fittingly by addressing his work and honoring it, by venturing to set in motion again the questioning inaugurated in the work. Yet when the occasion is to commemorate a philosopher with whom there was also a strong bond of friendship, a brief personal note is perhaps not entirely out of order, especially if its brevity serves to underline an accord with something that Dominique Janicaud once said on a similar occasion. The occasion was a memorial symposium on the work of Reiner Schürmann, which was held at the New School for Social Research a few months after Schürmann’s death. Dominique began with an expression of his affectionate remembrance of Reiner Schürmann and then cited a declaration by Heidegger, of which (he notes) Reiner Schürmann would no doubt have approved, that “the greater a thinker is, the more purely his person disappears behind his work.” 1 Dominique then proposed to let his silence about the person be intimately bound to his speech about the work. This is what I too, now, hope to do: to let the memory of my dear friend Dominique resound silently in what I will say of his work.
