Levinas's Politics. Annabel Herzog

of the Talmud or of Jewish literature more generally. Put differently: to comment on a written text (the Mishnah), the sages of the Gemara use the remembered opinions of sages who lived several hundred years before them and that, more likely than not, were never written down until the Gemara itself was put to writing in a later stage of its development. Levinas thus sees the “trace” of absolute otherness in the very structure of the Talmud: the beraitot—“left-out sayings” that “open new horizons” (QLT 11; NTR 4)—are a “beyond-the-text” that makes the text possible by opening it up into its exteriority. Like the “trace of the other,”⁴⁵ they point to a non-written origin, which obtains its status as origin only in the “saying” of the Gemara sages that became “said” in the redaction of the Talmud.

      This openness of the text, perceptible in its very fabric, is expressed also in its content: “The respect for the stranger and the sanctification of the name of the Eternal are strangely equivalent. And all the rest is a dead letter. All the rest is literature. The search for the spirit beyond the letter, that is Judaism itself” (QLT 61; NTR 27–28). Put differently, Judaism is about the relationship to the wholly other, stranger or God. This core notion takes place “beyond the letter.” Everything else must be considered a “dead letter” or literature, built on rhetoric, which “from the depth of all language, throws up its bewitching [ensorceleurs] illusions and warps the woof of a text” (DSS 7; NTR 91). The adjective “bewitching,” used here as it was in “Signature” of Difficult Freedom to describe art’s “bewitching [ensorceleurs] rhythms” (see above), underlines the inert passivity that can be induced by literature. By contrast, the Talmud is an enterprise of “demythification” (DSS 10; NTR 10). By this Levinas does not mean that there are no myths in the Talmud, or that the Talmud aims to dismiss or invalidate myths, but that the Talmud reflects an active exegesis of myths rather than a passive acceptance of their “sacredness” (DSS 89; NTR 141). Every religion, every culture, and every ideology is founded on myths. The “holiness” of the Talmud comes from the fact that it goes beyond them through commentary (DSS 89; NTR 141).

      Before we go on, it will be helpful to consider how Levinas himself read the Talmud. Levinas was not a trained Talmudist, and he did not use the traditional methods of Talmudic exegesis employed by the later rabbis in their own commentaries (and commentaries of commentaries) on the Talmud. He also refused to use any of the modern academic approaches to the study of the Talmud, whether based on philological science or structuralist analysis (QLT 14–15, DSS 8; NTR 5, 92). Instead he looked for unity in the disparate texts—the debates, opinions, ritual and legal rulings, and anecdotes—that make up the Talmud. In this endeavor, he hoped neither to understand the logic of the Talmud’s approach to religious law nor to unravel its historical composition or mythical structure but to identify its “central ideas” (NLT 11; NewTR 50). This focus on unified and unifying ideas was purely philosophical. As such, he spoke “otherwise” than the Talmudic sages: “Traditional study does not always expose [thématise] the meanings that appear thus, or else it takes them for truisms that ‘go without saying’ …; or else it states them in a language and in a context that are not always audible to those who remain outside. We strive to speak otherwise” (DSS 9; NTR 92). As a result, if the Talmud is made of non-thematized “sayings,” Levinas’s commentaries integrate these “sayings” into a thematized philosophical “said.” (The term “theme” appears everywhere in Levinas’s work, without being specifically defined anywhere. It means roughly “concept” and is often used as a synonym of “said.” In his description of the “entrance of the third” [in AE 245; OB 157 and PP 345; PP’ 168], it is used as a synonym for categorization.)⁴⁶

      This philosophical “said” is most clearly expressed in the bold universalism that permeates the readings. In his introduction to Quatre lectures talmudiques, Levinas emphasizes that “the chief goal of our exegesis is to extricate the universal intentions from the apparent particularism within which facts tied to the national history of Israel, improperly so-called, enclose us” (QLT 15; NTR 5). In other words, for Levinas the Jewish context has little value as Jewish context. It serves as grounds or material for an enlargement to universal understandings, or ideas, which can be “said” and understood by all of humanity. Universalism has here two meanings. First, it defines Levinas’s goal and methods, in that his textual commentary incorporates universal—that is, philosophical—considerations (QLT 106; NTR 48). Second, it demands that we redefine the word “Israel” to designate not a specific people but humanity in its entirety:

      I have it from an eminent master: each time Israel is mentioned in the Talmud one is certainly free to understand by it a particular ethnic group which is probably fulfilling an incomparable destiny. But to interpret it in this manner would be to reduce the general principle in the idea enunciated in the Talmudic passage, to forget that Israel means a people who has received the Law and, as a result, a human nature which has reached the fullness of its responsibility and its self-consciousness. (DSS 18; NTR 98)⁴⁷

      For Levinas, the meaning of the Talmud “is not only transposable into a philosophical language, but refers to philosophical problems” (DL 101; DF 68). This philosophical universalism is the reason why the spirit of the Talmud, which is “literature before the letter,” is the basis of all literature: “No doubt there is instituted in this inspired essence of language—which is already the writing of a book—a commanding ‘ontological’ order … which all literature awaits or commemorates.… Hence … the eminent role played by so-called national literatures, Shakespeare, Molière, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe and Pushkin” (ADV 8; BTV xi). Note that from the general condemnation of art (or poetry) as idolatry that we saw at the beginning of this chapter, we have reached a point where great literature is lauded for its relationship to the Talmudic ideal—the antithesis of idolatry. More: this ideal, supposed to be a “non-writing” and a “saying,” is now considered an “ontological order”—a universal “said.”

      The Talmudic readings were composed for a general audience (i.e., not an audience of philosophers), and they dealt ostensibly with matters of Jewish interest, certainly matters outside the philosophical tradition. Moreover, their universal “said” was pronounced as a “saying”: they were prepared as oral lectures, and Levinas retained their spoken form when the readings were published (QLT 13; NTR 10). In each of the readings, Levinas addresses his audience as “you” and guides his listeners through the twists and turns of the rabbinic discussions. For all these reasons, the readings have long been regarded as part of the cultural and religious Jewish revival that transformed and revivified the French Jewish community a few decades after World War II. However, while I do not contest the importance of Levinas’s teaching for the French Jewish community, it seems to me that the lectures must be understood as part of a larger expression of the relationship between “saying” and “said,” in which “saying” and “said” cannot exist without each other—indeed, must confront each other.

      It is in this context of the necessary interrelation of “saying” and “said”—which, as we saw earlier, do not designate different entities but the same entities considered from different points of view—that the Talmudic readings make sense in Levinas’s work. This interrelation takes the form of a repeated mise en abyme: as spoken lectures, the readings introduce a “saying” into the “said” of Levinas’s body of work, which develops the idea of ethics as “saying.” As texts, they translate that rabbinic “saying” into philosophical ideas, namely, into “said.” The rabbinic “saying” itself had already become “said” in the written Talmud and was restored to its glory as “saying” in the lectures before being recrystallized as “said” in the published readings. The readings show the intricate scheme of “saying” and “said” at multiple levels of discourse.

      The inseparability of “saying” and “said” comes from the concreteness of life itself, in which ethics and ontology develop together. It is the function of “phenomenology” to show their intrigue:

      Is this implication of ethical responsibility in the strict and almost closed saying of the verse … not the original writing in which God, who has come to the idea, is named in the Said? I am not just political and a merciless realist; but I am not … just the pure and voiceless