Levinas's Politics. Annabel Herzog
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focus on these questions, first through the highly debated question of how Levinas understood Zionism, and then through the general issue of political messianism, which includes Levinas’s treatment of the concepts of Law and History. In both chapters, I show that Levinas’s political thinking is indebted to Hegel and, indeed, that Levinas’s conception of messianism is the foremost expression of his dialogue with Hegel.
The final chapter sums up the original political story told in the Talmudic readings. Here, I discuss the possible links between this story and the two major political trends of modernity, socialism and liberalism. I conclude by arguing that Levinas’s political thinking was a reconceptualization of the French notion of laïcité, reworked by Levinas’s idiosyncratic understanding of religion.
A Technical Note on the Talmud
This book deals not with the Talmud per se but with Levinas’s work and rhetoric, and deep knowledge of the Talmud is not a prerequisite for engaging with the following chapters. Nevertheless, a few words about the Talmud will be helpful for readers not familiar with this work.
The Talmud comprises two corpuses of texts—the Mishnah and the Gemara (both terms come from roots meaning “to study,” in Hebrew and Aramaic, respectively). In the Jewish tradition, these texts are called the Oral Law, because they began as oral teachings that were written down and edited at a time of persecution and dispersion. The Mishnah, a restatement of biblical legal teachings, was completed at the beginning of the third century CE, and it consists of the teachings of generations of rabbinic sages called Tannaim. It is divided into six “orders” (sedarim), which themselves are divided into “tractates” (mesekhtot), then further subdivided into “chapters” (perakim) and, within those, paragraphs called mishnayot (sing.: mishnah). Therefore, the term “Mishnah” means both the book itself and (with a small “m”) its smallest unit, which consists of a specific idea or legal opinion with, sometimes, an accompanying terse debate.
The Gemara is a body of commentaries on the Mishnah. One version was written and redacted in the Land of Israel (the Jerusalem Talmud) and the other, better known and more studied, in Babylonia, modern Iraq (the Babylonian Talmud), by generations of sages called Amoraim. They were completed in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. In modern publications of that immense book, which comprise twenty huge volumes, the smallest unit is a double-sided printed page, or folio, identified by a page number with the letters a and b to indicate the two sides (recto and verso.)35 The Gemara is organized as a set of commentaries on the various mishnayot, which are quoted within the text of the Gemara. These commentaries fall into two categories: halakhah and aggadah. The former is made up of law-oriented controversies aimed at delineating specific rulings, while the latter constitutes a corpus of stories, myths, folklore, and anecdotes. The two kinds of commentaries are interwoven within the text, and both often range far from the mishnah under discussion, sometimes contradicting it and frequently raising apparently unconnected themes.36
Another word readers will encounter in the following pages is “midrash.” A midrash is an exegesis of biblical verses, whether in the realm of halakhah (where the midrash comprises a story that leads to a legal ruling) or aggadah (a story aimed at conveying a lesson or moral). Collections of midrashim exist outside the Talmud, but many midrashim can be found within the Talmud (i.e., the Gemara) itself, as part of both the halakhic and aggadic literature. The important point, as we look at Levinas, is that a midrash or commentary is never a paraphrase but a development of meaning that goes in unexpected directions.37 As Levinas puts it:
The strict contours of the verses outlined in the Holy Scriptures have a plain meaning which is also enigmatic. A hermeneutics is invited whose task is to extricate, from within the meaning immediately offered by the proposition, those meanings that are only implied. Do these extricated meanings have enigmas themselves? They in their turn must be interpreted on different modes. And in the search for new teachings, hermeneutics incessantly returns even to those verses which, though already interpreted, are inexhaustible. (ADV 7; BTV x)
CHAPTER 1
The Talmudic Readings
From Literature to Politics
Few philosophers produce multiple distinct kinds of philosophical writing. Some, like Maimonides and Camus, wear many hats, and under each one write a different body of work (Maimonides was a philosopher, a physician, and a rabbi; Camus was a novelist, a playwright, a journalist, etc.). Others, like Heidegger and Derrida, extend their philosophizing to the interpretation of literary texts or artworks, dealing with different disciplines but always in a philosophical way. Spinoza wrote philosophical treatises but also a Hebrew grammar, and we could jestingly imagine that, influenced by Levinas, he might have called this grammar and his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus his “confessional writings.” Levinas is in the original situation of being defined by himself and others solely as a philosopher but having written and published two explicitly separate corpuses of work.
The Talmudic readings stand out in Levinas’s philosophical corpus—some would say, alongside his philosophical corpus. Their peculiar position derives from three points: they were conceived as spoken lectures; they are commentaries on Talmudic texts rather than independent philosophical arguments; and these texts are aggadic narratives, namely, literary anecdotic stories. For these reasons, emphasized by the fact that they were published separately from the phenomenological books, the readings are unique in Levinas’s work. In this chapter, I explore this difference and argue that the readings constitute Levinas’s challenge to his philosophy. By this, I mean a double challenge, as in what Derrida calls a “double genitive”:1 Levinas’s philosophy is challenged by the Talmudic readings, and itself presents a challenge, thanks to the Talmudic readings. This challenge will prove to be the substance of Levinas’s political thinking.
In the first part of the chapter, I trace Levinas’s positions on representation in general, and on writing in particular, to show that from his earliest to his latest texts, he reflected on the difference between philosophy and other mediums for expressing ideas. In the second part of the chapter, I focus on Levinas’s distinction between “said” and “saying,” which is arguably the most important but also the most tortuous conceptual distinction of his work. This distinction between “said” and “saying” explains the need, within Levinas’s work, for another kind of writing. In the last part of the chapter, I show that the readings reflect the interplay of “said” and “saying” that characterizes, according to Levinas, a livable politics.
Levinas on Representation and Style
Levinas wrote few works on artistic representation and literature. Some are early, like the chapter titled “Exoticism” in Existence and Existents and the essay “The Other in Proust,” both published in 1947 (EE 83–92, EE’ 52–57; NP 117–126, PN 99–105); “Reality and Its Shadow,” published in 1948 (RO 107–127; RS 1–14); and “Persons or Figures,” published in 1950 (DL 170–174; DF 119–122). Later works include “The Prohibition Against Representation and ‘The Rights of Man,’” published in 1984 (AT 129–147; AT’ 121–130), and “De l’oblitération,” published in 1990. The recent publication of the third volume of Levinas’s diaries and unpublished manuscripts, Eros, littérature et philosophie, which comprises unfinished novels and poems written in Russian, helps round out our understanding of Levinas’s position on art and literature.2 From these texts emerges an ambivalent and even self-contradictory view of aesthetic representation.
On the one hand, Levinas expresses strong criticism of art, on the grounds that it is anti-ethical. In the most extreme formulation of this position, found in “Reality and Its Shadow,” he rejects what he regards as the predominantly Hegelian conception of aesthetics, in which “artistic expression rests on cognition” and “is identified with spiritual life” (RO 107, 126; RS 1, 12).3 Under this Hegelian conception, says Levinas, “what common perception trivializes and misses, an artwork apprehends in its irreducible essence.