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.
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
