Levinas's Politics
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Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a French philosopher known for his radical ethics and for his contribution to Jewish thought in his commentaries on Talmudic sources. In Levinas's Politics , Annabel Herzog confronts a major difficulty in Levinas's philosophy: the relationship between ethics and politics. Levinas's ethics describes the encounter with the other, that is, with any other human being. For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter is a relationship in which the ego is commanded by a transcendent and unquestionable order to take responsibility for the other person. Politics, on the other hand, presupposes at least three people: the ego, the other, and any third party. Among three people, nothing can be transcendent; on the contrary, everything must be negotiated. Against the conventional view of Levinas's conception of the political as the interruption and collapse of the ethical, Herzog argues that in the Talmudic readings, Levinas constructed politics positively. She shows that Levinas's Talmudic readings embody a pragmatism that complements, revises, and challenges the extreme ethical analyses he offers in his phenomenological works— Totality and Infinity , Otherwise than Being , and Of God Who Comes to Mind . Her analysis illuminates Levinas's explanations of the relationship between ethics and politics: ethics is the foundation of justice; justice contains a necessary violence that must be moderated by mercy; and justice, general laws, and national aspirations must be linked in an attempt to «improve universality itself.»
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Levinas’s Politics
JUSTICE, MERCY, UNIVERSALITY
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Is this to say that, for Levinas, any corpus of questioning, any hermeneutic system, would be political, at least in part? The answer is yes, by definition. Moreover, the two questioning systems with which Levinas worked—the Talmud and the philosophical tradition that issued from the Platonic dialogues—were political, or more exactly, they were the only “politics” left to two elites that had lost concrete sovereignty: Plato founded the Academy after giving up all hope of reforming the polis, and the rabbis wrote down the oral law after losing all hope of reestablishing political power in the Land of Israel. One could here object that given these conditions both the Talmud and philosophy are eminently non-political, or even anti-political.30 Even a superficial reading of Levinas’s work, however, makes clear that he puts philosophy and politics in the same ontological category. Similarly, his insistence on the political character of basic questioning, at least from a certain point of view, puts the Talmud—by contrast with prophetic ethics—in the same category as politics. This explains Levinas’s choice of the Talmudic commentaries to convey his political thinking, but only partly, because traditional philosophy is also a questioning system. Thus, we need to inquire into other possible explanations.
The Talmud, as Whitehead might put it, is a commentary on the Torah somewhat in the way that European philosophy is a commentary on Plato. The Talmud, however, does something that philosophy often neglects: it examines the law in the light of particular cases. The Talmud confronts the apodictic law with concrete situations. As Levinas writes, “The Talmud, according to the great masters of this science, can be understood only from the basis of life itself” (QLT 20; NTR 8). As such, Talmudic commentary does not merely explain the Law but deconstructs it, tests it, strengthens it, and sometimes overturns it. Likewise, Levinas’s Talmudic commentaries reinforce and confront the ethical call with particular situations.31 Levinas calls this method “paradigmatic modality”: “Without fading before their concepts, things denoted in a concrete fashion are yet enriched with meanings by the multiplicity of their concrete aspects” (ADV 127; BTV 103).32 The readings ask the question: What does ethics mean in situations that involve more than the ego and the other? What does ethics mean, therefore, in concrete situations that are, by definition, non-ethical? Levinas chose not to take his examples from contemporary everyday life but borrowed cases drawn by the rabbis from the everyday life of their time or from their imagination. For Levinas, these cases become paradigms.
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