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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. It thus coincides with metaphysical intuition.… Thus, an artwork is more real than reality” (RO 107; RS 1). Echoing Plato’s condemnation of poetry, Levinas contends that this Hegelian notion is false: art is neither a super-reality nor even a form of knowledge. Moreover, echoing the biblical interdiction of idolatry, he argues that art constitutes a “captivation [ensorcellement] or incantation” (RO 111; RS 4)—namely, a magic spell that does not open itself up to dialogue and, hence, impedes a subject’s openness to the other (RO 109; RS 2).⁴

What Levinas means here is that works of art impose feelings and impressions on people, who receive them passively and egoistically. Art does not lead to interaction with others, and, hence, engaging with a work of art is an act of disengagement and disinterestedness.⁵ It is also a “stoppage [arrêt] of time” (RO 119; RS 8). That is, the act of giving one’s attention to a work of art creates a category of time that is “below” time, “an interruption of time by a movement going on the hither side of time” (RO 109; RS 3), in which fate replaces freedom (RO 121; RS 9–10). In engaging with art, people lose their agency in time, or their freedom, which is a condition of being open to the other. For Levinas, therefore, the Hegelian conception of art is problematic from both an epistemological and a moral point of view. It pretends that art is more real than reality when, in fact, it resides in reality’s shadow; and it “liberates the artist from his duties as a man” (RO 109; RS 2). As a result, art is always a form of idolatry: “The petrification of the instant in the heart of duration … is the great obsession of the artist’s world, the pagan world” (RO 123; RS 11).

On the other hand, Levinas’s own work is full of literary references, which he employs for emphasis or to illustrate ethical situations and arguments. He admired the works of Shakespeare, Proust, Dostoyevsky, and others, and there is reason enough to suppose that he enjoyed music and painting no less than other philosophers and intellectuals of his time. Last, his own flourishing and emphatic style seems at times more poetic than strictly “philosophical.” In this, he reminds us of Plato, who condemned the poets but had his own poetic style—and of Socrates, who rhetorically rejected rhetoric.

To explain the contradiction between Levinas’s positions on art, some scholars have claimed to discern an evolution in his views, from a negative perception of art in the early texts to a reevaluation of it in the mature body of work.⁶ It has also been argued that Levinas seems to make a distinction between literature and fine or visual art. The former, this argument goes, would avoid artistic idolatry because it is made of language, which constitutes the relation to the other.⁷ Yet Jill Robbins observes a tension that operates “within each of [Levinas’s] texts about art,” from the beginning to the end of his philosophical journey.⁸ Regardless of any possible evolution of his views or any distinction between (visual) art and literature, Levinas’s writings reflect a real conflict between two opposing conceptions of art, one that sees art as ethical and one that sees it as anti-ethical.

Robbins shows that Levinas’s criticism of idolatry (also called “the mythical” or “the mystical,” and sometimes “the magical”) in art is consistent throughout his entire work.⁹ But what do these terms (idolatry, the mythical, the mystical, and the magical) actually mean? To answer this question, let us turn to the Talmudic reading “Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry,” published in In the Time of the Nations in 1988. In that late text, Levinas explains that idolatry was conceptualized for the first time in the book that defines itself precisely against it, the Hebrew Bible or Torah, which created both the category of idolatry and that of its opposite, “religion.”¹⁰ Idolatry, in this context, means closure—“some secret closing up of the soul”: the impossibility or the interdiction of exegesis (AHN 70; ITN 57). It consists of clinging to the immanence of meaning and refusing to look for what transcends it through commentary and dialogue. Idolatry is therefore the adoration of sameness. What idolaters see in every image, in every event, and in every word of God is, in effect, what they want to see, namely, themselves.

By contrast, “religion” or Torah is the possibility or even the requirement of interpretation, which is the ability to go beyond one’s own cognition or understanding. Interpreting means, if you will, leaving the mind’s comfort zone, the place where everything makes immediate sense. It consists of letting the text uproot the reader from what was meaningful in the first place. If so, the Torah contests not only idolatry but also the activity of essence or ontology, which in all situations aims at finding resemblances and at ascertaining sameness. “Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry” is arguably Levinas’s clearest explanation of the similarity, and perhaps equivalence, between idolatry and ontology. Like idolatry, ontology functions in an immanent dimension (AT 130; AT’ 122), and it seeks to transform difference into sameness. Ethics (the aspect of Torah that combats idolatry) is therefore openness to transcendence and otherness, while ontology is closure within presence.

To return to Levinas’s formulation in “Reality and Its Shadow,” ontology, like idolatry, is a stopping, or arrest, of time. Or as he says in later texts, ontology is “synchrony” while ethics works as “diachrony” (EI 48; EI’ 56). Diachrony is the possibility of transcendence in time, a “disjunction of identity where the same does not come back to the same” (AE 88; OB 52). In that context, the transcendence proposed (or created) by the Torah, that is, the openness to otherness and, hence, the possibility of interpretation, fractures idolatry and ontology both in relationships between human beings and in relationships between a reader and her book.¹¹ In both domains, the subject can be either petrified into presence and fate (RO 123; RS 11) or open to interpretation—that is, to the other.

Idolatry, meaning the petrification into presence and fate that occurs when we engage with a work of art, acts through rhythm. Rhythm is “the way the poetic order affects us.… Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it” (RO 111; RS 4).¹² By rhythm, Levinas does not mean a feature of music and sound but the essence of the aesthetic experience, in which the subject becomes passive and participates in the world like a thing: “[The subject] is among things as a thing, as part of the show.” His or her consciousness is “paralyzed in his or her freedom” (RO 112; RS 4). Therefore, “art’s bewitching [ensorceleurs] rhythms” are a prison that only ethics can break, because by definition ethics is the power of rupture (DL 408; DF 293).¹³ We find the same rejection of rhythm and its partner, dance, in interviews of the late 1980s—one by Christoph von Wolzogen and the other by Raoul Mortley. In the latter interview Levinas declares: “I often say, though it’s a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks.… All the rest—all the exotic—is dance.”¹⁴ We will return at the end of this book to this “frankly racist aside,” as Critchley calls it, and to other similar comments by Levinas.¹⁵ What interests us at this point is the distinction made between situations that generate active dialogue and interpretation, and experiences in which agency is transformed into passive involvement.

It is remarkable that in the texts cited above—both the early and the late—Levinas attacks “passivity,” while in seminal texts he uses that word to celebrate the ethical attitude.¹⁶ Ethical passivity, or “radical passivity,” as Wall calls it, is the openness of the subject to otherness. In Levinas’s famous expression, it is the “substitution for the other through responsibility” (AE 181; OB 114).¹⁷ Hence, the notion of ethical passivity designates an activity of the subject on behalf of the other (AE 182; OB 115). However, there exists another passivity, which Levinas rejects as anti-ethical. This “inert passivity” (AE 181; OB 115) is that engendered by rhythm. It constitutes an anti-ethical attitude because, in it, the subject withdraws from his or her responsibility for the other.

In sum, there are two kinds of passivity and disinterestedness: the ethical kind, which is responsibility for the other, and the artistic kind, which constitutes a withdrawing from responsibility. We can now understand better Levinas’s criticism of art in “Reality and Its Shadow.” It is through rhythm that art leads to inert passivity, namely, to disengagement from responsibility. This view is found not only in Levinas’s early texts but throughout his entire body of work, up to his 1988 interview with Francoise Armengaud, published in De l’oblitération, which deals with Sosno’s sculptures. There Levinas says, “Beauty’s perfection enforces silence without taking care of the rest. It is the guardian of silence. It lets things happen [il laisse faire]. Here are the limits of the aesthetic civilization.… [Here is] what makes people indifferent to the suffering of the world and keeps them in this indifference” (DO 8). But does this imply that all art leads to anti-ethical indifference? Does art always generate inert passivity?

In De l’oblitération, Levinas answers that art can lead either to inert passivity or to “obliteration.” Obliterative art shows the incompleteness of reality (DO 18). It “denounces the easiness or light insouciance of beauty and recall[s] the damage [usures] attendant on being, the ‘repairs’ that cover it and its crossings out [ratures], visible or hidden” (DO 12). Obliterative art, like Sosno’s sculptures, shows the “secret” of being, its “drama,” namely, the fact that being is open to otherwise than being (DO 30). It can therefore be regarded as a “window” onto ethics (DO 26).¹⁸ As Levinas puts it, “Obliteration interrupts the image’s silence.” Thanks to its incompleteness, such art leads to dialogue and breaks the closure of idolatry. It transforms the synchronic arrest of time into diachrony. As a result, “obliteration leads to the other” (DO 28).

We should not be too quick to conclude that for Levinas there are two kinds of art, one that is good (because it leads to ethics) and one that is bad (because it is idolatry). In De l’oblitération, Levinas explains that obliteration is the opposite of the “magical operation” of art. But he still wonders whether obliterative art can ever have the same ethical depth as a human face (DO 20). Put differently, uncertainty remains even about obliterative art. Art of such a kind might be a window onto ethics, but Levinas is not sure that this is so. This uncertainty recalls an earlier ambivalence in the 1947 essay “The Other in Proust.” As Robbins shows, Levinas’s distinction between idolatry and art leading to ethics is conceptualized there as the contrast between poetry and prose: “Neither poetry nor prose represents for Levinas a genre of art but originary experiences, for the prose in question is nothing other than the sobriety, the gravity of ethical language.”¹⁹ In “The Other in Proust,” Levinas compares “poetic” incantations negatively to the “prose” of philosophy (NP 118; PN 100). However, Levinas seems to hesitate. When he finally calls Proust a “poet of the social” (NP 121; PN 102), he concludes that his poetry situates “the real in a relation with what forever remains other—with the other as absence and mystery. [Proust’s most profound teaching] consists … in inaugurating a dialectic that breaks definitively with Parmenides” (NP 123; PN 105).²⁰ Therefore, poetic incantations are now regarded as ethical. While in De l’oblitération Levinas is uncertain about the ethical aspect of obliteration, in “The Other in Proust” he is uncertain about the magical aspect of poetry. From the beginning to the end of his œuvre, Levinas wonders whether works of art lead to ethics or to idolatry, and never reaches a final decision.

This indecision stems from the fact that, for Levinas, all forms of art include an idolatrous and an ethical side, or, rather, an idolatrous danger and an ethical potentiality. Indeed, “two sides” may be too strong a term. One could argue that these are not two distinct and competing aspects of the work of art but two ways of approaching the selfsame attribute: the same feature leading to two possible behaviors. In “Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry,” Levinas says that the Torah is at the same moment an affirmation of “religion” and a rejection of idolatry. One could infer from this that the Bible describes ethical moments alongside unethical ones. However, Levinas immediately rejects this reading and formulates a more radical thesis: there is a risk of idolatry toward the Torah itself. The Torah that denounces idolatry can itself become an idol. Therefore, “Torah” means “the reading or study of a text that protects itself from eventual idolatry of this very text, by renewing, through continual exegesis—and exegesis of that exegesis—the immutable letters and hearing in them the breath of the living God” (AHN 71; ITN 59). Idolatry is not a defined set of events and rituals distinct from an ethical set of events and rituals but a way of approaching something that can also be approached ethically.²¹ As Levinas writes in another Talmudic reading, “The question of ontology will thus find its answer in the description of the way Israel receives the Torah” (QLT 90; NTR 41). There are different ways to receive the Torah, of which two are ethics and the “idolatry of the letter” (QLT 19; NTR 7).

Does this mean that the Torah and the work of art contain a similar ambivalence? It certainly does not mean that art and Torah are the same thing. Torah is the truest expression of the fight against idolatry, while art can lead to either idolatry or ethics. The Torah stands against an idolatry that menaces everything including itself, while art is a priori indifferent to its possible ethical or non-ethical effects. However, the comparison between art and Torah is fruitful in making us realize that ethics and idolatry are intertwined. Their knot constitutes the greatest challenge of Levinas’s philosophy, as he will have to avoid the risk of idolatry and ontology in his own writing.

Levinas and Writing

Avoiding the risk of idolatry means avoiding closure. In Levinas’s terminology, it means disrupting the “said.”²² By “said” (dit), Levinas means the linguistic expression of things—the manifestation of presence through discourse. Given that the other interrupts presence and, accordingly, cannot be grasped by concepts, the ethical relationship between the ego and the other is not a “said” but a “saying” (dire). “Saying” recovers both the intentionality of language toward the other and the difference between this intentionality and the ontological “said.”²³ “Saying” is “dedication to the other” (AE 223; OB 143). It is a form of language that does not reduce the other to known categories and, hence, does not turn otherness into sameness.²⁴

However, a philosophical text is, by definition, a “said.” Put differently, in his work, Levinas necessarily employs ontological language—language that creates closure. To express the distinction between “saying” and the “said,” and to emphasize the ethical facet of “saying,” he must use concepts, namely, a “said.” This paradox is central in his work and acknowledged at length in Otherwise than Being: “Every contesting and interruption of this power of discourse is at once related and inverted [invertie] by discourse.… In relating the interruption of the discourse or my being ravished from discourse, I retie its thread.… Are we not at this very moment in the process of deleting the exit that our whole essay is attempting to take, thus encircling our position from all sides?” (AE 262; OB 169).²⁵

If so, the core of Levinas’s philosophical project will be the attempt to write in a way that interrupts the “said,” while knowing that the “said” must have the final word.²⁶ Two questions must be asked: (1) How does Levinas interrupt his own “said”? (2) What is the status of the final word of his “said”? To the two already mentioned levels on which ethics may have the power to shatter ontology—the relationship between human beings and the relationship between a reader and her book—we must add a third: the relationship between a writer and his writing. We may therefore wonder whether Levinas’s effort to interrupt his own “said” is congruent with ethical practice in general. More exactly, we wonder whether ethics as philosophy (what Levinas does in his written works) and ethics as meeting the other (what people do when they encounter another human being) are the same. To explain this point, I will focus on three commentaries of Levinas’s distinction between the “said” and “saying”—those of Derrida, Nancy, and Ricœur.

In “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” Derrida asks how Levinas “manage[s] to inscribe or let the wholly other be inscribed within the language of being, of the present, of essence, of the same, of economy etc., within its syntax and lexicon, under its law” (ECM 166; AVM 150). He answers that the solution need not involve going beyond language. Indeed, Levinas’s writing is open to the other, “in such a way that it is less a matter of exceeding that language than of treating it otherwise with its own possibilities.” In a close reading of Otherwise than Being, Derrida shows how Levinas uses repetitions that dis-locate discourse both spatially and temporally. These spatial and temporal moves create a series of tears (déchirures), knots, and hiatuses, which Derrida calls a seriasure (series and erasure) (ECM 182; AVM 167). In such a process, each philosopheme is “disarticulated, made inadequate and anterior to itself, absolutely anachronic to whatever it said about it” (ECM 185; AVM 170).

Derrida’s reading of Levinas’s literary style echoes his own description of différance: “Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be ‘present,’ appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element.”²⁷ 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 beraitot in their discussions of the Mishnah just as they do mishnayot (the written opinions of the Mishnah), giving equal status to both. The Amoraim thus have access—or present themselves as having access—to knowledge that, without their intercession, would have been lost to later (medieval or modern) readers 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 interiority of a “beautiful soul.” My condition—or my un-condition—is my relation to books.… Language and the book that arises and is already read in language is [est] phenomenology, the “staging” in which the abstract is made concrete. (ADV 9; BTV xii–xiii)

The readings are the mise-en-scène for the interaction of abstraction and concreteness, where, in this quotation at least, it appears that the former means pure ethics and the latter pure politics. However, in other texts Levinas posits that ethics is concrete and politics is abstract universalization: “The entry of the third is the very fact of consciousness … the finitude of essence accessible to the abstraction of concepts” (AE 246; OB 158). Here again, use of the same terms (abstract and concrete) for both ethical and ontological contexts may lead to confusion. We must therefore understand that “concrete” and “abstract” are synonymous neither with ethics nor with ontology. What is “abstract” is anything considered from a philosophical point of view, while “concrete” refers to anything that is lived in real life. The readings are meant to join these two domains in a method that Levinas calls “paradigmatic,” in which ideas are never separated from their examples (QLT 21, 48; NTR 8, 21): “My effort always consists in extricating from this theological language meanings addressing themselves to reason … it consists of being preoccupied, in the face of each of these apparent new items about the beyond, with what this information can mean in and for man’s life” (QLT 33; NTR 14). We will now see in what follows how, in the Talmudic readings, this paradigmatic method allowed Levinas to elaborate on his conception of politics.