A few excepts from Writing and Difference:

“Face to face with the other within a glance and a speech wich both maintain distance and interrupt all totalities, this being-together as separation precedes or exceeds society, collectivity, community. Levinas calls it religion. It opens ethics. The ethical relation is a religious relation… Not a religion, but the religion, the religiosity of the religious, the is transcendence beyond negativity is not accomplished by an intuition of a positive presence; it “only institutes languange at the point where neither no nor yes is the first word” but an interrogation. Not a theoretical interrogation, however, but a total question, a distress and denuding, a supplication, a demainding prayer addressed to a freedom, that is, to an commandment: the only possible ethical imperative, the only incarnedted nonviolence in that it is respect for the other.”

Jacques Derrida (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And my most quoted excerpt from Derrida:

“A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet found the language in has decided to seek, is not yet sure of its own possibility within the community. A community of the question about the possibility of the question. This is very little–almost nothing–but within it, today, is sheltered and encapsulated an unbreachable dignity and duty of decision. An unbreachable responsibility. Why unbreachable? Because the impossible has already occurred.”