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
