The Argument

      It could be claimed that Levinas’s breathtaking ethical theory is reduced to nothing when confronted with the political question, and that this confrontation is intrinsic to his philosophy. To put it bluntly, Levinas’s ethics seems to be doomed from inception because of the political.

      Levinas’s ethics describes the encounter with the other, that is, with any other human being, which takes place on a level distinct from both cognitive reason and aesthetic experience. This face-to-face encounter consists not of acknowledging the other but of being called to responsibility for the other. In ethics, the subject substitutes itself for the “face,” a metaphor for the infinite otherness of the other¹—that is, that which cannot be grasped by concepts, represented by memory, or felt by emotions.² It is a relationship “beyond essence” in which the ego is commanded by a transcendent order to take responsibility for the other person.

      Politics, on the other hand, is an ontological praxis of mediation among at least three people: the ego, the other, and any third party (le tiers).³ Among three people, however, nothing can ever be absolute or transcendent; everything is thought, represented, or felt. It follows that while the ethical substitution has the authority of a religious command (TI 30, TI’ 40; AE 139, OB 87) and implies the all-encompassing responsibility of the ego for the other, the relation between the ego and several others raises questions about duties and rights, namely, about sharing responsibility. Put simply, the presence of two people facing the ego inevitably leads to a calculation of what is due to each of them. Or to put it yet another way: ethical responsibility is anterior to all questions; politics means the emergence of questions about responsibility, and about everything else. The connection among three or more people “interrupts the face to face of a welcome of the other person, interrupts the proximity or approach of the neighbor” (AE 234; OB 150). In Levinas’s oft-quoted words,

      The third party [le tiers] is other than the neighbor but also another neighbor, and also a neighbor of the other.… What am I to do? What have they already done to one another? Who comes before the other in my responsibility? What, then, are the other and the third party with respect to one another? Birth of the question. The first question of the interhuman is the question of justice. Henceforth it is necessary to know, to become consciousness. Comparison is superimposed to my relation with the unique and the incomparable. (PP 345; PP’ 168)⁴

      It is difficult to grasp what appears to be the passage from the ethical relationship to the political situation. Indeed, “the entrance of the third party” seems to undermine everything Levinas has said about ethics. Why spend so many pages describing the unquestionable and absolute responsibility of the ego for the other when the ineluctable arrival of le tiers will necessarily break all ethical constructs, leaving us full only of questions about who is responsible to whom and who comes first? When, at the end of Otherwise than Being, Levinas says “Justice is necessary [Il faut la justice]” (AE, 245; OB, 157)—that is, responsibility must be shared—readers may feel they have been wasting their time. The “entrance of the third party,” as such, brings a disturbing anticlimax to Levinas’s emphatic ethical extremism. Not only does social life—even in its most harmless forms—put ethics in jeopardy, Levinas does not even seem to regret the entrance of the third party and the return of the ontological questions he attacked with such zeal in his ethical analysis.⁵ If all things are eventually reducible to ontological questions, why start by proclaiming a radical break from all ontological questions?

      However, the problem with the “entrance of the third party” is