Approche des démences à partir du livre du Qohélet (vers 350 avant J.-C.)

Around 350 years before our era, an unnamed author of the Bible (Qoheleth) evokes, in poetical terms, the state of old age. He considers it as a disengagement from reality that vanishes, like smoke, so as to discover what does not glide away. Cognition decline and, even more, insanity symptoms only become expressions of the fugitive immanence of reality that cannot be stopped, while only the relationship with other people lasts, which is the “face to face” defined by Levinas. The old and ill subject is not only the expression of Sartre's nihility dialectics, but also the “being other” defined by Levinas, who gives ethics the place of primary philosophy. “Being” forbids any find of “nothingness”.