Levinas's Politics. Annabel Herzog
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words: “The third looks at me in the eyes of the other” (TI 234; TI’ 213). And: “It is not that the entry of a third party would be an empirical fact, and that my responsibility for the other finds itself constrained to a calculus by the ‘force of things.’ In the proximity of the other, all the others than the other obsess me, and already this obsession cries out for justice, demands measure and knowing; it is consciousness” (AE 246; OB 158).
For Levinas, therefore, the framework of all relationships can be considered to be always, and necessarily, political. There is no passage from the ethical duo to the political trio, because the trio exists from the very beginning. As Madeleine Fagan puts it, “Ethics and politics are not separable realms that corrupt one another but are necessarily inseparable and contained within one another.”7 If so, we are tempted to ask again, why bother with ethics at all?8 If the basic structure of human existence is sociopolitical life, namely, if life consists of ontological relationships between three or more people, why focus on the ethical face to face and define it as preceding all relationships? There seems to be a serious contradiction or paradox here, one that is acknowledged by Levinas himself: “If everything terminates in justice, why tell this long story about the face, which is the opposite of justice?” (PM 175). Levinas offers three reasons for this contradiction:
The first reason is that it is ethics which is the foundation of justice. Because justice is not the last word; within justice we seek a better justice. That is the liberal state. The second reason is that there is a violence in justice. When the verdict of justice is pronounced, there remains for the unique I that I am the possibility of finding something more to soften the verdict.… The third reason is that there is a moment when I, the unique I, along with other I’s, can find something else which improves universality itself. (PM 175)
In this book, I take as a starting point Levinas’s three answers to the paradox of the “entrance of the third party” and discuss them in light of a close reading of the Talmudic readings—that is, Levinas’s “Jewish” works. I argue that this procedure is effective because it is precisely in his Talmudic commentaries that Levinas developed the implications of these answers. There may be many reasons—historical and philosophical—for Levinas’s choice to confine the gist of his political thinking to this unfamiliar genre. Here, I suggest the following: (1) for Levinas, the questioning that characterizes the Talmudic hermeneutic is, by definition, political; (2) the Talmud provides Levinas with paradigmatic cases that give his abstract ethics a concrete substrate; and (3) in Levinas’s œuvre, the readings constitute a different kind of writing, which disturbs his ethical philosophizing: as such they are, in themselves, political. The first two reasons will be elucidated all along the book. The third is developed in the first chapter.
A Critique of the “Religious” Readings of the Readings
Until a few years ago, scholars of Levinas tended to separate his work into two corpuses, the philosophical-phenomenological and the Talmudic.9 One group regarded Levinas as a philosopher and focused on his philosophical books, turning occasionally to the Talmudic readings for an illustration. The other saw him as an exegete of the Holy Scriptures, responsible for a renewal of theological concerns in the secularized Judeo-Christian world.10 Some radical readers, like Benny Levy, even contended that the philosophical and the Talmudic works contradict each other.11
In response to this polarization of Levinas studies, recent publications have argued for reading all of Levinas’s works together. According to this new understanding, the differences between the two sets of works are matters of style, not of essence. That is, beyond the formal differences in language and style that differentiate philosophical treatises and textual exegesis, there is no contradiction between the two corpuses, which convey convergent meanings, supporting and completing each other.12 Indeed, for this scholarship, Levinas’s purpose was precisely to give modern expression to the concord between philosophy and Judaism. Levinas himself left the question open, claiming that both corpuses are philosophical,13 yet insisting on the distinction between them, as expressed in his choice of different publishers for the two bodies of work and in his calling the readings his “confessional” writings.14
I propose to reconcile these divergent views. It is clear to me that for Levinas, there is no irreducible difference between the philosophical and Jewish traditions, and that for him, they differ primarily in the realm of style and language. For Levinas, philosophy speaks Greek, by which he means both Western philosophical language and an interest in essence or ontology. By contrast, the Jewish tradition speaks Hebrew, by which he means both the rabbinic mode of interpretation and a concern for transcendent otherness, which he called “ethics.” Both philosophy and the Jewish tradition, however, deal with the relationship between the thrust toward sameness and the concern for otherness, that is, between ontology and ethics. At the end of the day, their central questions are very close. For instance, Levinas underlined the ontological necessity perceptible in Scripture when he wrote, in the first pages of Difficult Freedom, “Here Judaism feels very close to the West, by which I mean philosophy. It is not by virtue of simple chance that the way towards the synthesis of Jewish revelation and Greek thought was masterfully traced by Maimonides, who is claimed by both Jewish and Muslim philosophers; that a profound respect for Greek knowledge already fills the wise men of the Talmud; that education for the Jews merges with instruction and that the ignorant person can never really be pious” (DL 29; DF 15). However, he also pointed to the ethical anxiety perceptible in Plato: “It is true that in certain traits the Greeks were, if I dare say, ‘biblical.’ Plato … places Goodness above Being, which is extraordinary.”15 In other words, Levinas’s claim to “express in Greek those principles about which Greece knew nothing” (ADV 232–233; BTV 200) cannot be accepted uncritically.
This being said, it seems to me that Levinas’s emphasis on the distinction between the two kinds of works should be taken seriously. For one thing, as Michael Fagenblat is right to remind us, in his phenomenological writings “Levinas accepted the rules of the game of French philosophy and went at lengths to downplay or even deny the religious element of his thinking.”16 Yet beyond the constraints imposed by the French tradition, there are positive, substantive reasons to distinguish between the phenomenological and Jewish writings. The difference between them is not a function of the difference between Greek and Hebrew, or between the philosophical and Jewish traditions. Rather, the difference relates to the distinction between two philosophical concerns, namely ethics and politics.17 That is, the phenomenological books present a utopian and impracticable ethics, while the Talmudic readings reflect a political, and at times pragmatic, mode of thought.18 In a quite paradoxical way, therefore, Levinas’s ethical philosophy is formulated in what looks like a “Greek” body of work, whereas politics, which Levinas put in the category of the ontological, is conceptualized in writings that, at first sight, focus on texts that are very clearly “Hebrew.”
This book is a study of Levinas’s Talmudic readings from a political perspective. Seen from this perspective, the readings manifest a political thinking that challenges the ethical analyses offered in Levinas’s phenomenological works—Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being, Of God Who Comes to Mind, and related essays. My claim is that there is a distance between Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy” and the political thinking underlying the readings.19
A few words about the body of work discussed in this book. In the corpus of Talmudic readings studied here I include Difficult Freedom, Nine Talmudic Readings (i.e., Quatre lectures talmudiques and Du sacré au saint), Beyond the Verse, In the Time of the Nations, and New Talmudic Readings. Some of the essays published in these volumes are not “Talmudic readings” stricto sensu, in that they do not analyze Talmudic extracts, but Levinas considered them to belong with his “confessional writings,” the category in which he placed the Talmudic readings. I also include in this corpus several essays, such as “La laïcité et la pensée d’Israël” and “Idéologie et idéalisme,” which were not published in volumes of collected readings but which discuss the Talmud. What I call the “Talmudic readings,” then, is the body of texts related to the Talmud and other Jewish sources, which look different from Levinas’s phenomenological