Levinas's Politics. Annabel Herzog

For Derrida, Levinas’s literary style is a kind of hyperbolic différance. It is thus no surprise that he calls it a “performative without present” (ECM 187; AVM 173), which echoes Derrida’s own “performative to come,” also called “the messianic.”²⁸ By this, Derrida refers to the creative part of writing, namely, what “overflows” language and generates the displacement of meaning.²⁹ If so, Levinas’s writing not only describes the openness of the subject to the other but exhibits it in its own form.

      In “L’intrigue littéraire de Levinas,” which prefaces the third volume of the recently published Œuvres, Nancy reiterates Derrida’s understanding of Levinas’s style as made of tears. Nancy calls this style an “intrigue,” pointing not only to the intricacy of hiatuses and knots between the same and the other but also to the use of literary schemes in Levinas’s writing.³⁰ Nancy stresses that Levinas’s first works, unpublished until recently, were pieces of poetry and fiction. In other words, Levinas’s rejection of literature (in texts such as “Reality and Its Shadow”) should be seen against the backdrop of the fact that Levinas had previously sought to express “the truth” in novels.³¹ The young Levinas, Nancy says, had a “disposition” or even a “drive” toward literature, which was from the beginning intimately tied in with his philosophical project.³² He “saw in literature the place that would perhaps be most suited to presenting the intrigue of the other and relationships, approach and contact.”³³ Later on, Levinas changed his mind, or at least he abandoned his efforts in fiction, and aimed instead to reflect the “intrigue of the other” through literary “twists, manners or behaviors” in his theoretical style.³⁴

      In Autrement: Lecture d’Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence d’Emmanuel Levinas, Ricœur comments on the correlation between “saying” and “said” in Otherwise than Being.³⁵ He shows that this correlation is described in a declarative tone reinforced by an insistent use of hyperbole. By contrast with Derrida, who focuses on Levinas’s repetitions and erasures, and Nancy, who underlines Levinas’s use of literary strategies, Ricœur insists on Levinas’s use of “extremes” and his “increment of pathic in pathetic and pathologic.”³⁶ The “excessive” gesture culminates in Levinas’s “substitution,” or sacrifice for the other, which is so extreme that it cannot be expressed in words and is only approximated in a “crescendo: persecution, outrage, expiation.” Ricœur suggests: “Is this not the admission that ethics disconnected from ontology has no language that would be direct, proper, appropriate?”³⁷ The notion of a “saying” that will never become a “said” leads to a hyperbolic argumentation that constitutes “verbal terrorism.”³⁸

      However, says Ricœur, it is this verbal terrorism that generates the necessity of the “said” expressed by what Levinas calls the “entrance of the third party” (AE 245, OB 257; PP 345, PP’ 168). The “entrance of the third party” is not an event but the fact that “in the proximity of the other, all the others than the other obsess me” (AE 246; OB 158). The ego never faces one single “other” but many; there are always multiple people to take into account at the same time. Therefore, on the substitution of the ego to the other is superimposed the question of the possible substitution to other others, called by Levinas “the third party.” The ego compares the third with the other and weighs its responsibility in light of the needs of these different others. The question and comparison implied by the expression “the third” (or “the entrance of the third”) constitute a reenactment of the “said,” which is ineluctable.

      For Ricœur, these processes mean that Levinas, a philosopher who writes philosophical books, speaks from the position of the third—the position that introduces questioning and comparing.³⁹ A philosopher, says Ricœur, cannot be satisfied with statements about ethical responsibility. He or she must question ethical responsibility. If so, the “said” is an interruption of “saying” no less than the opposite. That is, in Levinas’s writing, “saying” interrupts the “said” but the “said” also interrupts “saying.” However, the latter is not a simple “return” to ontology that would destroy the ethical “saying.” The disturbance of ethics by the “said,” claims Ricœur, is a special case of ontology interrupted by ethical responsibility. Ricœur calls this “a post-ethical quasi-ontology.”⁴⁰ In other words, for Ricœur Levinas describes three distinct situations: (1) pure ontology (or idolatry), namely, the mechanism of presence and sameness; (2) pure ethics, namely, the rupture of presence induced by responsibility for the other; and (3) post-ethical quasi-ontology, which comes with “the entrance of the third party.”

      No doubt, Levinas’s formulations lead to much confusion. At first sight, it seems that ethics comes to interrupt ontology: the other is a “stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself [le chez-soi]” (TI 28; TI’ 39). If such is the case, ontology precedes ethics. However, Levinas makes very clear that ethics precedes ontology. It is to emphasize this point that he formulates “the entrance of the third party” in a theatrical way, as if the third were entering a scene where the ego and the other are already present: “The third party introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until then went in one direction” (AE 245; OB 157). However, this chronology is broken as soon as it is announced because, as recalled, the third appears in the face of the other. It is impossible to establish a chronology in which ontology and then ethics, or ethics and then ontology, combine into what Ricœur calls a “quasi-ontology.” I argue that there is only one phenomenal situation in Levinas and that it is neither pure ethics, nor pure ontology, nor any process that would lead to a combination of the two. Reality consists through and through of an interplay between “said” and “saying.”⁴¹ It is such a quasi-ontology that, as we shall see, will prove in the Talmudic readings to be an original conception of “justice.”

       The Talmudic Readings as Quasi-Ontology

      In a 1942 diary entry, Levinas planned his work-to-be as a triptych of philosophy, fiction, and literary critique.⁴² As we know, fiction and critique were subsequently abandoned. However, the fact that Levinas wrote two kinds of discourses, the philosophical books and the Talmudic readings, makes us wonder whether the dislocated intrigue of ethics as first philosophy in the phenomenology books is open enough to the other. Indeed, it is the need for a writing different from the traditional philosophical kind that is perceptible in the production of the readings, which Levinas began to publish in the 1960s.⁴³ Therefore, in Levinas’s work, the readings have the function of “the other writing,” and as such are a disturbance. Their relationship to the “philosophical” books parallels the intricacies of “saying” and “said” in Levinas’s philosophy. Moreover, the readings themselves display the interplay of “said” and “saying.” Put differently, the readings manifest the relationship between “said” and “saying” at both a micro level (within the readings themselves) and a macro level (in the context of Levinas’s entire œuvre).

      Levinas emphasizes that the Talmud is a “living speech” embodying an “openness” and a “challenge” that “cannot be summarized by the term ‘dialogue’” (DSS 7; NTR 91). To put it differently, the Talmud expresses a “saying” that is graspable by no kind of “said.” As such, Levinas claims that traditional philosophy, including those works that, like the Socratic dialogues, are open to otherness (thanks to their dialogical form), is always more a “said” than the Talmud. Indeed, the Talmud is a collection of oral “sayings” that were not intended to become “said” and were written down only “accidentally” (QLT 13; NTR 5).⁴⁴ They seek always to remain “gesture,” a “non-writing [non-écriture]” (DSS 7; NTR 91), a “literature before the letter” (ADV 8; BTV xi).

      Interestingly, Levinas finds support for his understanding of the Talmud as “saying” in the composition of the Talmud itself. An important component of the Talmudic discussions is their use of beraitot—an Aramaic term referring to opinions professed by the sages of the Mishnah, the Tannaim, but that were not included in the Mishnah itself or in any other written source. The Amoraim (sages of the Gemara) reference