Levinas's Politics. Annabel Herzog
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seems to express the pure conatus of the self. How should we make sense of this selfish “right”?
In his 1985 essay “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other” (HS 175–187; OS 116–125), Levinas defines the rights of man in a way that chimes with his definition of ethics:
These rights are, in a sense, a priori: independent of any power that would be the original share of each human being in the blind distribution of nature’s energy and society’s influence.… Prior to all entitlement: to all tradition, all jurisprudence, all granting of privileges.… Is it not the case that the a priori may signify an ineluctable authority, older and higher than the one already split into will and reason … the authority that is, perhaps—but before all theology—in the respect for the rights of man itself—God’s original coming to the mind of man. (HS 176; OS 116–117)
Here, Levinas brings together respect for the rights of man and the ethical command. He continues in the same vein: “The rights of man manifest the uniqueness or the absolute of the person, despite his or her subsumption under the category of the human species, or because of that subsumption” (HS 177; OS 117). The rights of man are synonymous with the infinite and divine command in the face of the other.
Returning to the workers of “Judaism and Revolution,” we now understand that in using the vocabulary of the social contract, Levinas clarifies the relationship between ethics and politics. The workers’ rights correspond to the ethical command in the face of the other. Like Hobbes’s natural right, they are “anterior” to all human agreement. However, the contract—which, as in all contract narratives, follows the statement of rights—is the only guarantee of these rights. A natural right exists before any contract but cannot be fulfilled without a contract. Ethics—the workers’ right to have someone take absolute responsibility for them and to receive unlimited food—is not phenomenally anterior to the contract that promises some food (but not “any food” and not “any quantity of food”). The worker’s unlimited right to food cannot be implemented before being limited by a contract that stipulates what kinds of food and how much food will be offered.
Note that ethical responsibility can be found in both conditions—that is, in that which considers the workers as descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and that which treats the worker-employer relationship as requiring a contract. In the first case, however, ethical responsibility is “pure” but vague and unrealizable. An open-ended promise invites preposterous and unreasonable demands; “food” that means “all food” or “infinite food” also means, in concrete situations, “no food.” In the second, ethics appears in the form of rights that are fulfilled thanks to the contract’s specific clauses.
In short, like Hobbes, Levinas believes that sustainable life must be secured by a contract designed around the protection of rights. However, for Levinas the only way to truly protect rights is to focus first on the rights of the other. As he writes, “It is then not without importance to know if the egalitarian and just State in which man is fulfilled (and which is to be set up, and especially to be maintained) proceeds from a war of all against all, or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for all” (AE 248, OB 159; PP 346, PP’ 169). Against a conception of the contract meant to protect the subject, he proposes a contract that is meant to protect the other: “In opposition to the natural perseverance of each being in his or her own being (a fundamental ontological law), care for the stranger, the widow and the orphan, a preoccupation with the other person. A reversal of the order of things!” (AHN 74; ITN 61).18 That is, according to Levinas a contract instituted by subjects fearing their own violent death will result in a society of egoists, while a contract aimed at protecting everybody’s neighbors will result in care for everybody.19 Interestingly, though, the Levinassian contract does not limit violence; rather, it limits charity and responsibility.20 It does not end the terror that some people exert on others but the self-sacrifice of the ego to the other: “The contract does not put an end to the violence of the other. It does not abolish an order—or disorder—in which man is a wolf toward man. In the wolves’ forest, no law can be introduced. But it is possible, when the other man is in principle infinite for me, to limit the extent of my duties to a degree, but only to a degree. The contract is more concerned with limiting my duties than with defending my rights” (DSS 20; NTR 100).21
We could say that in Hobbes’s state of nature, natural rights are not respected enough, while in Levinas’s ethics they are too respected. In both situations, however, the subject would not survive without a contract: In Hobbes’s state of nature he would most likely be killed by his neighbor, while in Levinas’s ethics, he would most likely sacrifice himself. In both cases the subject needs a contract that will secure his or her life. The contract that safeguards and defends the neighbor is not only for the neighbor’s benefit—it also protects the subject.
Non-Indifferent—or Merciful—Justice
At first sight, the Talmudic extract that Levinas examines in “Model of the West” is more esoteric than the passages he interprets in “Judaism and Revolution.” The mishnah quoted in Baba Metsi’a 83a and the paragraphs from the Gemara that follow it deal with employment law; the extract that Levinas addresses in “Model of the West,” from Menahot 99b–100a, focuses on the so-called showbread, or “bread of display”—the twelve loaves or cakes of bread that, according to the Bible, were to be displayed by the priests in the desert Tabernacle and then in the Temple in Jerusalem (Exod. 25:23–30; Lev. 24:5–9). The mishnah that introduces the Talmudic text details the weekly ritual in which the priests ceremonially removed the old loaves that had been displayed for the previous seven days on a table of gold and replaced them with fresh loaves. The mishnah ends with a few words about the rules for consumption of the old loaves by the priests. The Gemara then clarifies and expands on the Mishnaic introduction to the topic.22 The digressions of the Gemara are as spectacular as in most parts of the Talmud and lead, among other things, to a reflection on Greek “wisdom” or philosophy.
It is in this context that Levinas’s reading focuses on two interrelated topics: time and politics. After a brief introduction, Levinas starts the reading proper by quoting Exodus 25:30: “And on the table, you shall set the bread of display, to be before me always.” It is this last word, “always,” that prompts the first question raised in the Gemara: on occasion, time must have elapsed between the removal of the old loaves and their replacement by the new. How, then, can the bread be said to have been before God “always”? It is also this notion of “always” that captures Levinas’s imagination.
To elucidate the meaning of “always,” Levinas defines Jewish time as “permanence” (ADV 33; BTV 17), “duration which never wears out” (ADV 36; BTV 21). This he contrasts with the “‘historical meaning’ that dominates modernity” (ADV 33; BTV 17). Levinas adopts here the framework of Rosenzweig’s critique of Hegel in The Star of Redemption. We will return to the influence of Hegel and Rosenzweig on Levinas in Chapters 7 and 8. Here, suffice it to say that Rosenzweig contests Hegel’s fusion of spiritual and political existence in the historical process, and the universalization of that fusion. For Rosenzweig, Hegel’s conception of history is relevant only for Christianity. By contrast with the Christian presence in historical time, the Torah “lifts the people out of all temporality and historical relevance of life, it also removes its power over time.” Therefore, the Jewish people “purchases its eternity at the price of temporal life.”23 The Jews have a spiritual, not temporal, life; they exist not in history but in eternity.24
Levinas echoes Rosenzweig’s answer to Hegel already in the preface of Totality and Infinity, in which he famously acknowledges that Rosenzweig is “too often present in this book to be cited” (TI 14; TI’ 28). In that preface, Levinas reflects on the opposition between war and peace, according to which war must be understood in the Hegelian context of universal History and peace as “eschatology” beyond history (TI 7–8; TI’ 22–23). It is in “Model of the West,” however, that Levinas explains the concrete