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CHAPTER 2

Levinas’s Conception of Politics in the Talmudic Readings

Much work has been dedicated to Levinas’s shift from the dual relation between the ego and the other to the triangular relation between the ego, the other, and the third party—namely, from ethics to politics. It has been shown that Levinas seems to tell a story that starts with the face-to-face encounter and is then transformed by the entrance of the third:¹ “The responsibility for the other is an immediacy antecedent to questions, it is proximity. It is troubled and becomes a problem when a third party enters” (AE 245; OB 157). However, Levinas insists that the third has always been there. He or she is not an addition to the dual relation but materializes in the face of the other from the beginning. As Levinas writes, “The epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity” (TI 234–235; TI’ 213).² Put differently, at one and the same time Levinas says that ethical responsibility is prior to the entrance of the third, and that the third appears with the other.³

One way to resolve this apparent contradiction is to argue that the “third in the face of the other” is a metaphor—that the existence of one other attests to the possible existence of many others. By this reading, the face of the other hints at the future presence of another other—it includes a third in potentia. In such a case, as Bernasconi puts it, “whatever political philosophy one finds in Levinas would be derived from his ethics as a modification of it.”⁴ Politics, as a potential or actual dis-location of the model of the ethical duo, would always be an interrupted ethics, a troubled ethics, a lesser ethics.

The problem is that this interruption is necessary and ineluctable. There is no way to remain—even for a minute—in the ethical face-to-face encounter because, as quoted above, “the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.” The idea of the “third in the face of the other” implies the impossibility of pure ethics and the inexorability of plural relationships. If so, Levinas’s conceptualization of unadulterated ethics may be considered a sterile game, and even a logical failure. What is the point of analyzing a situation that has never existed, and will never exist by definition? One could lament that Levinas did not spend less time on ethics and more time on its necessary “modification,” which is our social life.

A second way to resolve the contradiction is to say that the appearance of the third takes place in parallel to the ethical meeting—that ethics and politics coexist but on different levels. In this case, however, one wonders how this coexistence allows for the “antecedence” of the ethical face-to-face. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a preliminary answer to this question, one that will become clearer over the course of the book.

I argue that in the Talmudic readings, ethics mirrors the Hobbesian state of nature. In so saying, I subscribe to C. Fred Alford’s important claim that “from the beginning to the end, Hobbes shadows Levinas’s project.”⁵ However, my understanding of how Levinas mirrors Hobbes is different from Alford’s. For Alford, Levinas “collapses the state of nature, the state of war and the state itself.”⁶ The “place” that Alford chooses as a metaphor for this triply collapsed state is an apartment in which a doorbell rings: the other is at the door waiting to be met.⁷ He defines Levinas’s so-called state of nature as the “civilized” experience of urban individualism (which he calls “cosmopolitanism”), disturbed by the intrusion of the other. The ethical meeting constitutes the end of the state of nature, which was a sociopolitical state. For that reason, Alford interestingly refers to Levinas’s political views as “inverted liberalism.”⁸

While I agree that the apartment and doorbell make an excellent metaphor for Levinas’s ethical meeting, my reflection on the “state of nature” in Levinas goes in another direction.⁹ What I mean in saying that ethics mirrors Hobbes’s state of nature is that like Hobbes’s natural right, ethical responsibility is logically and normatively anterior to politics but not chronologically anterior to it. Indeed, it is manifested only in politics. It is an a priori purity that includes in itself its own impossibility as purity and that can be manifested only in its impure version, the political world. This is not to say that Levinas’s ethics and Hobbes’s state of nature are similar in content. To the contrary: their contents are opposed, and it is for this reason that I say that they mirror each other. I will here develop this argument, focusing principally on the Talmudic readings “Judaism and Revolution” (DSS 11–53; NTR 94–119), “Model of the West” (ADV 29–50; BTV 13–33), and “The Will of God and the Power of Humanity” (NLT 9–42; NewTR 47–77).

The Contract

“Judaism and Revolution” is a reading of a discussion found in the Talmudic tractate Baba Metsi’a, folio 83a–b.¹⁰ The mishnah quoted in Baba Metsi’a 83a decrees that working hours and workers’ meals should be regulated by local custom, that is, neither by arbitrary will nor by universal law. The mishnah declares: “He who hires workers and tells them to begin early and finish late cannot force them if beginning early and finishing late does not conform to the custom of the place. Where the custom is that they be fed, he is obligated to feed them; where it is that they be served dessert, he must serve them dessert.”¹¹ The phrase “conform to the custom of the place” means that local custom limits the employer’s generosity as much as his power, as is clear from a later part of the mishnah, which holds that promises to workers are also restricted by the custom of the place. Workers may expect neither less nor more than what custom dictates.

Understanding the text as being strictly oriented toward workers’ welfare, Levinas infers that the mishnah is concerned with the “rights of the other person” (DSS 15; NTR 97; emphasis in the original). What Levinas means by “the other person” is that, in the Mishnaic text, the workers are considered not in terms of their objective status as persons or citizens but in terms of their relationship with the “I” or ego of the text, the employer. That is, the text is concerned with how we treat those whom we subjectively perceive to be outside ourselves, and whom we accordingly regard as “others.” The phenomenological assumption that lies at the origin of the expression “the other” is that the reference is always the subject-who-perceives-the-other. In this context, Levinas’s argument is that the Mishnaic ruling is not a general law about free, rational, and responsible members of the community but a law about the people that the subject perceives as his or her exteriority: “It is not the concept ‘man’ which is at the basis of this humanism; it is the other man” (DSS 17; NTR 98). That is, the law depends on the fact that people perceive others and turn toward them. Turning toward others (or intentionality in phenomenological language) lies at the basis of the ethical responsibility for the other.

In Levinas’s thought, the ego is especially responsible for the other if the other is in a lower material position. As such, up to this point in the reading Levinas seems to be describing what he famously conceptualized as the ethical situation. There are two parties, employer and employee. The first has power and the other is poor: “The other as other is not only an alter ego. He is what I am not: he is the weak one whereas I am the strong one; he is the poor one, ‘the widow and the orphan’” (EE 162; EE’ 95). Consequently, the worker’s face expresses a demand that is a command, and the employer is infinitely responsible for him.

The mishnah continues with a story. Rabbi Yohanan ben Mathia asked his son to hire workers. The son promised “food” to the workers. When he came back, his father said: “Even if you prepared a meal for them equal to the one King Solomon served, you would not have fulfilled your obligation toward them, for they are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As long as they have not begun to work, go and specify: you are only entitled to bread and legumes” (DSS 17; NTR 98). The mishnah can be understood here in a simple and practical way: be precise in your contracts because if you are not, you risk a potential dispute. If you vaguely promise “food,” your workers may demand the finest sirloin, arguing that that is what they understood by “food,” or what they used to receive from their previous employer, or what they need for dietary or religious reasons. As the father tells his son, even a feast worthy of King Solomon would never be enough! Says the mishnah, since the father and son obviously cannot afford a meal fit for kings, they must make clear that the workers will receive the minimum prescribed by custom: bread and legumes.

This story, I suggest, illustrates the narrative of the “entrance of the third.” Before, we had two parties, the employer and his employees, the former being responsible for the latter. The former, however, has now been divided in two—the employer comprises a father and son, who have individual desires and opinions. This division between different opinions is in itself the manifestation of a third party. Crucially, the third party is not one of the three in particular: it is neither the father, nor the son, nor the workers (seen as “the other”). Rather, the third party consists of the very condition of there being three voices in the story. The infinite demand of the worker/other perceived by the father and exposed in his conversation with his son generates the question of the limit and sharing of responsibility. The employer is not only defined by his responsibility for the welfare of his workers; he is also partly defined by his interest in his own welfare, or that of his family, or indeed of any other people. He must calculate what he can give to the worker/other.

To summarize the foregoing, the conversation between the father and son is a paradigm of the “entrance of the third” for three reasons. First, most simply, it introduces—or exposes—the presence of three parties in the interaction. Second, it raises questions about the degree of responsibility we hold toward others. Finally, it reveals the difference between ethics, as an infinite—or at least vague and open-ended—promise, and politics, as the calculation of what is possible. As such, in Levinas’s philosophy, the “entrance of the third” does not imply the actual presence of three parties: competing ways to treat the other appear “in the face of the other.”¹² As Fagan writes, “The ethical realm relied upon is always already political within itself.”¹³ Moreover, if in the Talmudic story the conversation between the father and son comes after the meeting between the son and the workers, namely, after the pure “ethical” meeting, in real life this chronology is immaterial. While temporal order is unavoidable in a story, in real life the son, workers, father, and everybody else coexist from the beginning. Ethics is the focus on responsibility regarded as the core of all relationships in a context in which all relationships already exist. It is in this sense that Levinas’s ethics is like the Hobbesian state of nature. Ethics is not a historical pre-political situation but that which gives meaning to the actual, phenomenal, political situation.

In short, calculations about how to treat the other—namely, the questions connected to the entrance of the third—are concomitant with absolute responsibility toward the other, though they are rhetorically expressed after it. For Levinas, the employer is and remains infinitely responsible for those who are under his or her authority. He rests this point on Rabbi Yohanan ben Mathia’s reference to “the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” This formulation has two meanings. The first, universalistic, interpretation is that in the Talmud the people of Israel are “a people who has received the Law and, as a result, a human nature which has reached the fullness of its responsibilities and self-consciousness. The descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are human beings who are no longer childlike” (DSS 18; NTR 98).

The second interpretation is based on the well-known biblical story in which Abraham welcomes three strangers, giving them food and shelter, without knowing that they are angels, without inquiring who they are (Gen. 18:2–8). Indeed, Abraham’s generosity toward his guests far exceeds his initial offer of plain bread and water (vv. 4–5); what he actually prepares is fine cakes, milk, curd, and a tender calf (vv. 6–8). As a result, Abraham’s descendants are “men to whom their ancestor bequeathed a difficult tradition of duties toward the other man, which one is never done with, an order in which one is never free. In this order, above all else, duty takes the form of obligations toward the body, the obligation of feeding and sheltering” (DSS 19; NTR 99). However, is one infinitely responsible for others because these others are part of a tradition of infinite responsibility? Indeed, in the mishnah, it is the workers, not Rabbi Yohanan ben Mathia and his son, who are called “descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Levinas seems to understand the story as follows: The very presence of the descendants of Abraham reminds us of Abraham’s tradition of absolute responsibility. Their tradition of responsibility makes us responsible for them.¹⁴

Thus the presence of the other generates two parallel conditions. The first is based on the identification of the other—the workers in the mishnah—as descendants of Abraham. Abraham opened his house to his guests and, in his rush to serve them, offered even more than he had first proposed. This ancestry, according to Levinas, reminds us of our infinite responsibility toward others. In Levinas’s reading of the Talmudic story, the son’s approach to the workers is like Abraham’s to his guests: what is owed to the other is undefined and can never be enough. From this, it can be derived that all relationships are like those of Abraham vis-à-vis his guests and the son vis-à-vis his workers, because all relationships potentially involve power. Ethical responsibility for anyone over whom the ego has power or potential power—that is, for anyone—is an irreducible fact: it has, and needs, no reason because it is the sign of the transcendence that constitutes the starting point of all human relationships.

The second condition is based on the identification of the other as people whose needs and will compete with the subject’s own needs and will. When considered this way, our responsibility toward the other can never in fact be infinite, because we also have responsibility toward ourselves. The solution to this problem is a “contract” (DSS 20; NTR 100), like that in the Talmudic story, under which the workers are entitled not to “food,” with an open-ended definition, but to some kind of food.¹⁵ Within the bounds of this contract, Levinas insists that this food must be a decent, human meal, not food typically given to slaves or fit for animals.¹⁶ That is, workers are entitled to meals that respect them as human beings. This idea returns in slightly different form in a section of the Gemara immediately following the mishnah. An employer offering a salary higher than prescribed by custom should not expect longer hours but better work from his workers. As Levinas comments, the contract must respect the human condition and people’s need for sleep and free time: “The quality of my labor I am willing to discuss, but I will not bargain over my human condition, which, in this particular case, expresses itself as my right to get up or to go to sleep at the hour dictated by custom [à l’heure coutumière]” (DSS 23–24; NTR 101).

The contract is justified by the “human condition,” that is, by the workers’ “rights,” or by the “rights of the other person” mentioned above. Levinas’s use of the term “rights” here is atypical: Levinas usually describes the ethical meeting as a transcendent order that appears in the face of the other—namely, as something applied to or imposed on the subject, not as something deserved or owned or received by the other.¹⁷ Put simply, his ethics is formulated in terms of duties and not in terms of rights. In the sentence quoted above, however, Levinas clearly says that workers have a right to be protected. Even more, he speaks of “my right to get up,” and so forth, using the first-person singular, claiming a right—“my right”—that seems to express the pure conatus of the self. How should we make sense of this selfish “right”?

In his 1985 essay “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other” (HS 175–187; OS 116–125), Levinas defines the rights of man in a way that chimes with his definition of ethics:

These rights are, in a sense, a priori: independent of any power that would be the original share of each human being in the blind distribution of nature’s energy and society’s influence.… Prior to all entitlement: to all tradition, all jurisprudence, all granting of privileges.… Is it not the case that the a priori may signify an ineluctable authority, older and higher than the one already split into will and reason … the authority that is, perhaps—but before all theology—in the respect for the rights of man itself—God’s original coming to the mind of man. (HS 176; OS 116–117)

Here, Levinas brings together respect for the rights of man and the ethical command. He continues in the same vein: “The rights of man manifest the uniqueness or the absolute of the person, despite his or her subsumption under the category of the human species, or because of that subsumption” (HS 177; OS 117). The rights of man are synonymous with the infinite and divine command in the face of the other.

Returning to the workers of “Judaism and Revolution,” we now understand that in using the vocabulary of the social contract, Levinas clarifies the relationship between ethics and politics. The workers’ rights correspond to the ethical command in the face of the other. Like Hobbes’s natural right, they are “anterior” to all human agreement. However, the contract—which, as in all contract narratives, follows the statement of rights—is the only guarantee of these rights. A natural right exists before any contract but cannot be fulfilled without a contract. Ethics—the workers’ right to have someone take absolute responsibility for them and to receive unlimited food—is not phenomenally anterior to the contract that promises some food (but not “any food” and not “any quantity of food”). The worker’s unlimited right to food cannot be implemented before being limited by a contract that stipulates what kinds of food and how much food will be offered.

Note that ethical responsibility can be found in both conditions—that is, in that which considers the workers as descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and that which treats the worker-employer relationship as requiring a contract. In the first case, however, ethical responsibility is “pure” but vague and unrealizable. An open-ended promise invites preposterous and unreasonable demands; “food” that means “all food” or “infinite food” also means, in concrete situations, “no food.” In the second, ethics appears in the form of rights that are fulfilled thanks to the contract’s specific clauses.

In short, like Hobbes, Levinas believes that sustainable life must be secured by a contract designed around the protection of rights. However, for Levinas the only way to truly protect rights is to focus first on the rights of the other. As he writes, “It is then not without importance to know if the egalitarian and just State in which man is fulfilled (and which is to be set up, and especially to be maintained) proceeds from a war of all against all, or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for all” (AE 248, OB 159; PP 346, PP’ 169). Against a conception of the contract meant to protect the subject, he proposes a contract that is meant to protect the other: “In opposition to the natural perseverance of each being in his or her own being (a fundamental ontological law), care for the stranger, the widow and the orphan, a preoccupation with the other person. A reversal of the order of things!” (AHN 74; ITN 61).¹⁸ That is, according to Levinas a contract instituted by subjects fearing their own violent death will result in a society of egoists, while a contract aimed at protecting everybody’s neighbors will result in care for everybody.¹⁹ Interestingly, though, the Levinassian contract does not limit violence; rather, it limits charity and responsibility.²⁰ It does not end the terror that some people exert on others but the self-sacrifice of the ego to the other: “The contract does not put an end to the violence of the other. It does not abolish an order—or disorder—in which man is a wolf toward man. In the wolves’ forest, no law can be introduced. But it is possible, when the other man is in principle infinite for me, to limit the extent of my duties to a degree, but only to a degree. The contract is more concerned with limiting my duties than with defending my rights” (DSS 20; NTR 100).²¹

We could say that in Hobbes’s state of nature, natural rights are not respected enough, while in Levinas’s ethics they are too respected. In both situations, however, the subject would not survive without a contract: In Hobbes’s state of nature he would most likely be killed by his neighbor, while in Levinas’s ethics, he would most likely sacrifice himself. In both cases the subject needs a contract that will secure his or her life. The contract that safeguards and defends the neighbor is not only for the neighbor’s benefit—it also protects the subject.

Non-Indifferent—or Merciful—Justice

At first sight, the Talmudic extract that Levinas examines in “Model of the West” is more esoteric than the passages he interprets in “Judaism and Revolution.” The mishnah quoted in Baba Metsi’a 83a and the paragraphs from the Gemara that follow it deal with employment law; the extract that Levinas addresses in “Model of the West,” from Menahot 99b–100a, focuses on the so-called showbread, or “bread of display”—the twelve loaves or cakes of bread that, according to the Bible, were to be displayed by the priests in the desert Tabernacle and then in the Temple in Jerusalem (Exod. 25:23–30; Lev. 24:5–9). The mishnah that introduces the Talmudic text details the weekly ritual in which the priests ceremonially removed the old loaves that had been displayed for the previous seven days on a table of gold and replaced them with fresh loaves. The mishnah ends with a few words about the rules for consumption of the old loaves by the priests. The Gemara then clarifies and expands on the Mishnaic introduction to the topic.²² The digressions of the Gemara are as spectacular as in most parts of the Talmud and lead, among other things, to a reflection on Greek “wisdom” or philosophy.

It is in this context that Levinas’s reading focuses on two interrelated topics: time and politics. After a brief introduction, Levinas starts the reading proper by quoting Exodus 25:30: “And on the table, you shall set the bread of display, to be before me always.” It is this last word, “always,” that prompts the first question raised in the Gemara: on occasion, time must have elapsed between the removal of the old loaves and their replacement by the new. How, then, can the bread be said to have been before God “always”? It is also this notion of “always” that captures Levinas’s imagination.

To elucidate the meaning of “always,” Levinas defines Jewish time as “permanence” (ADV 33; BTV 17), “duration which never wears out” (ADV 36; BTV 21). This he contrasts with the “‘historical meaning’ that dominates modernity” (ADV 33; BTV 17). Levinas adopts here the framework of Rosenzweig’s critique of Hegel in The Star of Redemption. We will return to the influence of Hegel and Rosenzweig on Levinas in Chapters 7 and 8. Here, suffice it to say that Rosenzweig contests Hegel’s fusion of spiritual and political existence in the historical process, and the universalization of that fusion. For Rosenzweig, Hegel’s conception of history is relevant only for Christianity. By contrast with the Christian presence in historical time, the Torah “lifts the people out of all temporality and historical relevance of life, it also removes its power over time.” Therefore, the Jewish people “purchases its eternity at the price of temporal life.”²³ The Jews have a spiritual, not temporal, life; they exist not in history but in eternity.²⁴

Levinas echoes Rosenzweig’s answer to Hegel already in the preface of Totality and Infinity, in which he famously acknowledges that Rosenzweig is “too often present in this book to be cited” (TI 14; TI’ 28). In that preface, Levinas reflects on the opposition between war and peace, according to which war must be understood in the Hegelian context of universal History and peace as “eschatology” beyond history (TI 7–8; TI’ 22–23). It is in “Model of the West,” however, that Levinas explains the concrete implications of the ethical dimension of time, which are, unexpectedly, political. His rhetoric is hesitant, as if he were taking time to elucidate an argument that is far from clear:

Does not Israel attach itself to an “always”—in other words, to a permanence in time.… And instead of remaining a word, a purely theoretical view or doctrinal affirmation … do not this predilection and this signification of the always call for a whole structuring of concrete human reality and a whole orientation of social and intellectual life—perhaps justice itself—which would render only such a signification possible and significant? But before entering into such a serious debate, I still owe an explanation to the critical minds present in this room, who might precisely be surprised that such serious and topical problems are being treated in the context of bread and tables. (ADV 33; BTV 17; emphasis mine)

If, as Hegel and Rosenzweig agreed, history and politics come together, and if, as Rosenzweig argued, the Jewish people lives in “eternity,” can the Jewish people experience a “concrete human reality” and a “social and intellectual life”? Levinas’s response is: such a concrete life with others will come precisely from that which is apparently most foreign to it—the ritual of the bread, symbolizing permanence. The abstruse details of the Temple ceremony become, in Levinas’s reading, the key for building a well-organized society. Citing a midrash about the furnishings of the Temple, three of which had frames or “crowns,” Levinas claims that the table on which the bread was displayed symbolizes political sovereignty: “The crown of the table is thus the royal crown. The king is he who keeps open house; he who feeds men. The table on which the bread is exposed before the Lord symbolizes the permanent thought that political power … is vowed to men’s hunger.… To think of men’s hunger is the first function of politics. That political power should be thought of from the point of view of men’s hunger is rather remarkable” (ADV 34; BTV 18).

Levinas has accomplished another “reversal of the order of things” (AHN 74; ITN 61), a reversal of both Hegel’s and Rosenzweig’s arguments. Reality can be dissociated from Hegelian history, which is a history of egos fighting for preponderance, namely, a history of wars. There can be a political order outside of this history—a political order Levinas founds on the rituals that Rosenzweig conceptualized as a-political eternity. However, having rejected both Hegel and Rosenzweig, Levinas reaches a conclusion that is not far from being Hegelian: the political life of the Jews realizes their spiritual life.²⁵ The table on which the ceremonial loaves are presented in the Temple represents both a spiritual (i.e., ethical) ideal and a political order together.