(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
