Levinas's Politics. Annabel Herzog

paradigms.

      In short, another reason Levinas focuses on the Talmud to formulate his own political thought is his need for paradigms: specific cases that he can use to concretize and test—or try—his absolute ethics. This trial of ethics is of the utmost importance. According to Levinas, general and absolute ideas must be tested by particular cases in order to avoid becoming ideologies:

      The great strength of the Talmud’s casuistry is to be the special discipline which seeks in particular [cases] the precise moment at which the general principle runs the danger of becoming its own contrary, namely, [the discipline that] watches over the general in light of the particular. This protects us from ideology. Ideology is the generosity and clarity of the principle, which have not taken into account the inversion that awaits this generous principle when it is applied. (ADV 98–99; BTV 79)

      The pages that follow constitute a commentary on Levinas’s commentary on another commentary. My approach is textual and interpretative more than historical; I search for the “overall unity” and the “central ideas” (NLT 11; NewTR 50) of Levinas’s thinking in the readings. As he said about his own reading method, “Our first task is therefore to read [this corpus of work] in a way that respects its givens and its conventions, without mixing in the questions arising for a philologist or historian” (QLT 15; NTR 5). Through this process, I will aim to elucidate Levinas’s often obscure language in the readings and show that despite many digressions and contradictions, the readings display a coherent political thought.

       Overview of This Book

      As noted earlier, I take as a starting point Levinas’s three answers to the paradox of the “entrance of the third party” and discuss them in light of a close examination of the Talmudic readings. I show that the Talmudic readings embody a political pragmatism that complements, revises, and challenges the utopian analyses offered in Levinas’s phenomenological works, namely, in his ethics.

      Levinas’s first response to the paradox of the “entrance of the third party” is that ethics is the “foundation of justice” and the source of a “better justice” to be found within justice. This point raises the question of precedence: Who comes first—the ego, the other, or the third party? But also what comes first—ethics or politics; transcendence or essence? Throughout his work, Levinas makes it clear that precedence does not mean temporal anteriority, because ethics is a relation to an “immemorial past” (TA 277; TO 355). In other words, the precedence of ethics does not contradict the chronological anteriority of ontological questions. Levinas’s originality lies partly in his moderating chronological anteriority by ethical precedence. He is also original in his ability to moderate ethical precedence by chronological anteriority. Indeed, if, in the phenomenological works, ethics always seems to be stopped or reduced or, at least, put to trial by the entrance of the third party, in the Talmudic readings ethics most often appears within the framework of politics’ chronological anteriority.³³ In the readings, I show, Levinas tried to do two things that he could not do in the phenomenological books: first, prevent politics from bringing about the failure of ethics; and second, construct politics positively, and not as the interruption and collapse of ethics.

      Chapters 1, 2, and 3 analyze the main processes in this construction of a concept of politics that uses ethics but goes beyond it. In Chapter 1, I deconstruct Levinas’s writing endeavor and show that in the context of his thought, the readings have the function of “the other writing.” Having in his youth ventured into literature, and then chosen philosophy to express the rupture of ontology, Levinas still felt the need for a mode of expression distinct from that of traditional philosophical works, one that would disturb ethics itself. This is, therefore, a third reason why Levinas chose the Talmud to express his political thought: the readings constitute a genre subject to different constraints and impositions compared with Levinas’s phenomenological style. This disturbance in form sustains a disturbance of content: the readings are political, and interrupt ethics.

      Chapter 2 formulates Levinas’s conception of the political in the Talmudic readings. The political is viewed as concern for the other’s hunger, a concern that Levinas associates with the “liberal state.” To a large extent, however, this concern constitutes a reversal and a criticism of the liberal problematic of rights, and leads to the expression of another kind of social contract, based on Levinas’s idiosyncratic understanding of justice. For Levinas, justice, politics, and the law sometimes seem almost synonymous. It is important to note, however, that Levinas’s understanding of justice changed from the time of Totality and Infinity to that of Otherwise than Being (PM 171). In the earlier texts, justice means the ethical relation, namely, the infinite responsibility of the ego for the other. In the later texts, justice means the consideration of the third party, namely, the calculation of what is owed to and expected by each side in the relationship. Justice in the Talmudic readings, however, is synonymous with neither ethics nor politics but consists in the relationship between the two. Therefore, it does not constitute a fixed category but rather forms an evolving correlation, the process of a “justice which desires a better justice” (PM 177)—an equitable order responsive to particular cases—that I will call a non-indifferent or merciful justice.³⁴

      In Chapter 3, I establish the distinction between Levinas’s conception of politics and his understanding of the social. In his resolute criticism of the social, Levinas strongly condemns certain aspects of the liberal tradition and of the indifferent individualism that characterizes modern urban life. Politics, however, appears to be the only possible solution to the anonymity and absence of solidarity that pervade the social.

      Levinas’s second response to the paradox of the “entrance of the third” is that justice contains a necessary violence. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I analyze Levinas’s understanding of political violence, which is distinct from the evil that appears in various situations of collective life and in nature—from political domination to the vegetal and animal indifference to suffering. Chapter 4 shows that, in the Talmudic readings, Levinas is no pacifist: political violence—expressed in repression and thematization—is never evoked as a reason to reject political institutions, which are necessary to build a society promoting a non-indifferent justice: a justice that will moderate its own violence. By contrast with violence, however, evil, in the readings, is resolutely rejected as the manifestation of injustice and as the impossibility of justice. As I argue in Chapter 5, political violence contributes to fighting evil and must not be confused with it. Evil, in the Talmudic readings, appears in three contexts: (1) it is related to a certain conception of deprivation and privacy, namely, it is identified with a misappropriation of homes and nations; (2) it is related to deception, namely, to ideology and idolatry; and (3) it is linked to animality, namely, to a certain idea of essence. In Chapter 6, we see how Levinas’s understanding of evil in nature may help us build what we can call a cautious environmentalism. It enables a reassessment of our relationship to nature that avoids both egoistic anthropomorphism, which destroys nature, and the romantic enthusiasm that regards all things natural as more “authentic” and morally superior to anything made by human beings.

      Levinas’s final answer to the paradox of ethics and politics involves the possibility of “improving universality itself.” At stake here is the relationship between the conception of a non-indifferent justice and the self-definition of political entities—namely, the link between non-indifferent justice, general laws, and national aspirations.