Levinas’s Conception of Politics in the Talmudic Readings

      Much work has been dedicated to Levinas’s shift from the dual relation between the ego and the other to the triangular relation between the ego, the other, and the third party—namely, from ethics to politics. It has been shown that Levinas seems to tell a story that starts with the face-to-face encounter and is then transformed by the entrance of the third:¹ “The responsibility for the other is an immediacy antecedent to questions, it is proximity. It is troubled and becomes a problem when a third party enters” (AE 245; OB 157). However, Levinas insists that the third has always been there. He or she is not an addition to the dual relation but materializes in the face of the other from the beginning. As Levinas writes, “The epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity” (TI 234–235; TI’ 213).² Put differently, at one and the same time Levinas says that ethical responsibility is prior to the entrance of the third, and that the third appears with the other.³

      One way to resolve this apparent contradiction is to argue that the “third in the face of the other” is a metaphor—that the existence of one other attests to the possible existence of many others. By this reading, the face of the other hints at the future presence of another other—it includes a third in potentia. In such a case, as Bernasconi puts it, “whatever political philosophy one finds in Levinas would be derived from his ethics as a modification of it.”⁴ Politics, as a potential or actual dis-location of the model of the ethical duo, would always be an interrupted ethics, a troubled ethics, a lesser ethics.

      The problem is that this interruption is necessary and ineluctable. There is no way to remain—even for a minute—in the ethical face-to-face encounter because, as quoted above, “the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.” The idea of the “third in the face of the other” implies the impossibility of pure ethics and the inexorability of plural relationships. If so, Levinas’s conceptualization of unadulterated ethics may be considered a sterile game, and even a logical failure. What is the point of analyzing a situation that has never existed, and will never exist by definition? One could lament that Levinas did not spend less time on ethics and more time on its necessary “modification,” which is our social life.

      A second way to resolve the contradiction is to say that the appearance of the third takes place in parallel to the ethical meeting—that ethics and politics coexist but on different levels. In this case, however, one wonders how this coexistence allows for the “antecedence” of the ethical face-to-face. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a preliminary answer to this question, one that will become clearer over the course of the book.

      I argue that in the Talmudic readings, ethics mirrors the Hobbesian state of nature. In so saying, I subscribe to C. Fred Alford’s important claim that “from the beginning to the end, Hobbes shadows Levinas’s project.”⁵ However, my understanding of how Levinas mirrors Hobbes is different from Alford’s. For Alford, Levinas “collapses the state of nature, the state of war and the state itself.”⁶ The “place” that Alford chooses as a metaphor for this triply collapsed state is an apartment in which a doorbell rings: the other is at the door waiting to be met.⁷ He defines Levinas’s so-called state of nature as the “civilized” experience of urban individualism (which he calls “cosmopolitanism”), disturbed by the intrusion of the other. The ethical meeting constitutes the end of the state of nature, which was a sociopolitical state. For that reason, Alford interestingly refers to Levinas’s political views as “inverted liberalism.”⁸

      While I agree that the apartment and doorbell make an excellent metaphor for Levinas’s ethical meeting, my reflection on the “state of nature” in Levinas goes in another direction.⁹ What I mean in saying that ethics mirrors Hobbes’s state of nature is that like Hobbes’s natural right, ethical responsibility is logically and normatively anterior to politics but not chronologically anterior to it. Indeed, it is manifested only in politics. It is an a priori purity that includes in itself its own impossibility as purity and that can be manifested only in its impure version, the political world. This is not to say that Levinas’s ethics and Hobbes’s state of nature are similar in content. To the contrary: their contents are opposed, and it is for this reason that I say that they mirror each other. I will here develop this argument, focusing principally on the Talmudic readings “Judaism and Revolution” (DSS 11–53; NTR 94–119), “Model of the West” (ADV 29–50; BTV 13–33), and “The Will of God and the Power of Humanity” (NLT 9–42; NewTR 47–77).

       The Contract

      “Judaism and Revolution” is a reading of a discussion found in the Talmudic tractate Baba Metsi’a, folio 83a–b.¹⁰ The mishnah quoted in Baba Metsi’a 83a decrees that working hours and workers’ meals should be regulated by local custom, that is, neither by arbitrary will nor by universal law. The mishnah declares: “He who hires workers and tells them to begin early and finish late cannot force them if beginning early and finishing late does not conform to the custom of the place. Where the custom is that they be fed, he is obligated to feed them; where it is that they be served dessert, he must serve them dessert.”¹¹ The phrase “conform to the custom of the place” means that local custom limits the employer’s generosity as much as his power, as is clear from a later part of the mishnah, which holds that promises to workers are also restricted by the custom of the place. Workers may expect neither less nor more than what custom dictates.

      Understanding the text as being strictly oriented toward workers’ welfare, Levinas infers that the mishnah is concerned with the “rights of the other person” (DSS 15; NTR 97; emphasis in the original). What Levinas means by “the other person” is that, in the Mishnaic text, the workers are considered not in terms of their objective status as persons or citizens but in terms of their relationship with the “I” or ego of the text, the employer. That is, the text is concerned with how we treat those whom we subjectively perceive to be outside ourselves, and whom we accordingly regard as “others.” The phenomenological assumption that lies at the origin of the expression “the other” is that the reference is always the subject-who-perceives-the-other. In this context, Levinas’s argument is that the Mishnaic ruling is not a general law about free, rational, and responsible members of the community but a law about the people that the subject perceives as his or her exteriority: “It is not the concept ‘man’ which is at the basis of this humanism; it is the other man” (DSS 17; NTR 98). That is, the law depends on the fact that people perceive others and turn toward them. Turning toward others (or intentionality in phenomenological language) lies at the basis of the ethical responsibility for