on the political character of basic questioning, at least from a certain point of view, puts the Talmud—by contrast with prophetic ethics—in the same category as politics. This explains Levinas’s choice of the Talmudic commentaries to convey his political thinking, but only partly, because traditional philosophy is also a questioning system. Thus, we need to inquire into other possible explanations.
The Talmud, as Whitehead might put it, is a commentary on the Torah somewhat in the way that European philosophy is a commentary on Plato. The Talmud, however, does something that philosophy often neglects: it examines the law in the light of particular cases. The Talmud confronts the apodictic law with concrete situations. As Levinas writes, “The Talmud, according to the great masters of this science, can be understood only from the basis of life itself” (QLT 20; NTR 8). As such, Talmudic commentary does not merely explain the Law but deconstructs it, tests it, strengthens it, and sometimes overturns it. Likewise, Levinas’s Talmudic commentaries reinforce and confront the ethical call with particular situations.31 Levinas calls this method “paradigmatic modality”: “Without fading before their concepts, things denoted in a concrete fashion are yet enriched with meanings by the multiplicity of their concrete aspects” (ADV 127; BTV 103).32 The readings ask the question: What does ethics mean in situations that involve more than the ego and the other? What does ethics mean, therefore, in concrete situations that are, by definition, non-ethical? Levinas chose not to take his examples from contemporary everyday life but borrowed cases drawn by the rabbis from the everyday life of their time or from their imagination. For Levinas, these cases become paradigms.
In short, another reason Levinas focuses on the Talmud to formulate his own political thought is his need for paradigms: specific cases that he can use to concretize and test—or try—his absolute ethics. This trial of ethics is of the utmost importance. According to Levinas, general and absolute ideas must be tested by particular cases in order to avoid becoming ideologies:
The great strength of the Talmud’s casuistry is to be the special discipline which seeks in particular [cases] the precise moment at which the general principle runs the danger of becoming its own contrary, namely, [the discipline that] watches over the general in light of the particular. This protects us from ideology. Ideology is the generosity and clarity of the principle, which have not taken into account the inversion that awaits this generous principle when it is applied. (ADV 98–99; BTV 79)
The pages that follow constitute a commentary on Levinas’s commentary on another commentary. My approach is textual and interpretative more than historical; I search for the “overall unity” and the “central ideas” (NLT 11; NewTR 50) of Levinas’s thinking in the readings. As he said about his own reading method, “Our first task is therefore to read [this corpus of work] in a way that respects its givens and its conventions, without mixing in the questions arising for a philologist or historian” (QLT 15; NTR 5). Through this process, I will aim to elucidate Levinas’s often obscure language in the readings and show that despite many digressions and contradictions, the readings display a coherent political thought.
Overview of This Book
As noted earlier, I take as a starting point Levinas’s three answers to the paradox of the “entrance of the third party” and discuss them in light of a close examination of the Talmudic readings. I show that the Talmudic readings embody a political pragmatism that complements, revises, and challenges the utopian analyses offered in Levinas’s phenomenological works, namely, in his ethics.
Levinas’s first response to the paradox of the “entrance of the third party” is that ethics is the “foundation of justice” and the source of a “better justice” to be found within justice. This point raises the question of precedence: Who comes first—the ego, the other, or the third party? But also what comes first—ethics or politics; transcendence or essence? Throughout his work, Levinas makes it clear that precedence does not mean temporal anteriority, because ethics is a relation to an “immemorial past” (TA 277; TO 355). In other words, the precedence of ethics does not contradict the chronological anteriority of ontological questions. Levinas’s originality lies partly in his moderating chronological anteriority by ethical precedence. He is also original in his ability to moderate ethical precedence by chronological anteriority. Indeed, if, in the phenomenological works, ethics always seems to be stopped or reduced or, at least, put to trial by the entrance of the third party, in the Talmudic readings ethics most often appears within the framework of politics’ chronological anteriority.33 In the readings, I show, Levinas tried to do two things that he could not do in the phenomenological books: first, prevent politics from bringing about the failure of ethics; and second, construct politics positively, and not as the interruption and collapse of ethics.
Chapters 1, 2, and 3 analyze the main processes in this construction of a concept of politics that uses ethics but goes beyond it. In Chapter 1, I deconstruct Levinas’s writing endeavor and show that in the context of his thought, the readings have the function of “the other writing.” Having in his youth ventured into literature, and then chosen philosophy to express the rupture of ontology, Levinas still felt the need for a mode of expression distinct from that of traditional philosophical works, one that would disturb ethics itself. This is, therefore, a third reason why Levinas chose the Talmud to express his political thought: the readings constitute a genre subject to different constraints and impositions compared with Levinas’s phenomenological style. This disturbance in form sustains a disturbance of content: the readings are political, and interrupt ethics.
Chapter 2 formulates Levinas’s conception of the political in the Talmudic readings. The political is viewed as concern for the other’s hunger, a concern that Levinas associates with the “liberal state.” To a large extent, however, this concern constitutes a reversal and a criticism of the liberal problematic of rights, and leads to the expression of another kind of social contract, based on Levinas’s idiosyncratic understanding of justice. For Levinas, justice, politics, and the law sometimes seem almost synonymous. It is important to note, however, that Levinas’s understanding of justice changed from the time of Totality and Infinity to that of Otherwise than Being (PM 171). In the earlier texts, justice means the ethical relation, namely, the infinite responsibility of the ego for the other. In the later texts, justice means the consideration of the third party, namely, the calculation of what is owed to and expected by each side in the relationship. Justice in the Talmudic readings, however, is synonymous with neither ethics nor politics but consists in the relationship between the two. Therefore, it does not constitute a fixed category but rather forms an evolving correlation, the process of a “justice which desires a better justice” (PM 177)—an equitable order responsive to particular cases—that I will call a non-indifferent or merciful justice.34
In Chapter 3, I establish the distinction between Levinas’s conception of politics and his understanding of the social. In his resolute criticism of the social, Levinas strongly condemns certain aspects of the liberal tradition and of the indifferent individualism that characterizes modern urban life. Politics, however, appears to be the only possible solution to the anonymity and absence of solidarity that pervade the social.
Levinas’s second response to the paradox of the “entrance of the third” is that justice contains a necessary violence. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I analyze Levinas’s understanding of political violence, which is distinct from the evil that appears
