Levinas's Politics. Annabel Herzog
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a word, a purely theoretical view or doctrinal affirmation … do not this predilection and this signification of the always call for a whole structuring of concrete human reality and a whole orientation of social and intellectual life—perhaps justice itself—which would render only such a signification possible and significant? But before entering into such a serious debate, I still owe an explanation to the critical minds present in this room, who might precisely be surprised that such serious and topical problems are being treated in the context of bread and tables. (ADV 33; BTV 17; emphasis mine)
If, as Hegel and Rosenzweig agreed, history and politics come together, and if, as Rosenzweig argued, the Jewish people lives in “eternity,” can the Jewish people experience a “concrete human reality” and a “social and intellectual life”? Levinas’s response is: such a concrete life with others will come precisely from that which is apparently most foreign to it—the ritual of the bread, symbolizing permanence. The abstruse details of the Temple ceremony become, in Levinas’s reading, the key for building a well-organized society. Citing a midrash about the furnishings of the Temple, three of which had frames or “crowns,” Levinas claims that the table on which the bread was displayed symbolizes political sovereignty: “The crown of the table is thus the royal crown. The king is he who keeps open house; he who feeds men. The table on which the bread is exposed before the Lord symbolizes the permanent thought that political power … is vowed to men’s hunger.… To think of men’s hunger is the first function of politics. That political power should be thought of from the point of view of men’s hunger is rather remarkable” (ADV 34; BTV 18).
Levinas has accomplished another “reversal of the order of things” (AHN 74; ITN 61), a reversal of both Hegel’s and Rosenzweig’s arguments. Reality can be dissociated from Hegelian history, which is a history of egos fighting for preponderance, namely, a history of wars. There can be a political order outside of this history—a political order Levinas founds on the rituals that Rosenzweig conceptualized as a-political eternity. However, having rejected both Hegel and Rosenzweig, Levinas reaches a conclusion that is not far from being Hegelian: the political life of the Jews realizes their spiritual life.25 The table on which the ceremonial loaves are presented in the Temple represents both a spiritual (i.e., ethical) ideal and a political order together.
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