to the vegetal and animal indifference to suffering. Chapter 4 shows that, in the Talmudic readings, Levinas is no pacifist: political violence—expressed in repression and thematization—is never evoked as a reason to reject political institutions, which are necessary to build a society promoting a non-indifferent justice: a justice that will moderate its own violence. By contrast with violence, however, evil, in the readings, is resolutely rejected as the manifestation of injustice and as the impossibility of justice. As I argue in Chapter 5, political violence contributes to fighting evil and must not be confused with it. Evil, in the Talmudic readings, appears in three contexts: (1) it is related to a certain conception of deprivation and privacy, namely, it is identified with a misappropriation of homes and nations; (2) it is related to deception, namely, to ideology and idolatry; and (3) it is linked to animality, namely, to a certain idea of essence. In Chapter 6, we see how Levinas’s understanding of evil in nature may help us build what we can call a cautious environmentalism. It enables a reassessment of our relationship to nature that avoids both egoistic anthropomorphism, which destroys nature, and the romantic enthusiasm that regards all things natural as more “authentic” and morally superior to anything made by human beings.
Levinas’s final answer to the paradox of ethics and politics involves the possibility of “improving universality itself.” At stake here is the relationship between the conception of a non-indifferent justice and the self-definition of political entities—namely, the link between non-indifferent justice, general laws, and national aspirations. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on these questions, first through the highly debated question of how Levinas understood Zionism, and then through the general issue of political messianism, which includes Levinas’s treatment of the concepts of Law and History. In both chapters, I show that Levinas’s political thinking is indebted to Hegel and, indeed, that Levinas’s conception of messianism is the foremost expression of his dialogue with Hegel.
The final chapter sums up the original political story told in the Talmudic readings. Here, I discuss the possible links between this story and the two major political trends of modernity, socialism and liberalism. I conclude by arguing that Levinas’s political thinking was a reconceptualization of the French notion of laïcité, reworked by Levinas’s idiosyncratic understanding of religion.
A Technical Note on the Talmud
This book deals not with the Talmud per se but with Levinas’s work and rhetoric, and deep knowledge of the Talmud is not a prerequisite for engaging with the following chapters. Nevertheless, a few words about the Talmud will be helpful for readers not familiar with this work.
The Talmud comprises two corpuses of texts—the Mishnah and the Gemara (both terms come from roots meaning “to study,” in Hebrew and Aramaic, respectively). In the Jewish tradition, these texts are called the Oral Law, because they began as oral teachings that were written down and edited at a time of persecution and dispersion. The Mishnah, a restatement of biblical legal teachings, was completed at the beginning of the third century CE, and it consists of the teachings of generations of rabbinic sages called Tannaim. It is divided into six “orders” (sedarim), which themselves are divided into “tractates” (mesekhtot), then further subdivided into “chapters” (perakim) and, within those, paragraphs called mishnayot (sing.: mishnah). Therefore, the term “Mishnah” means both the book itself and (with a small “m”) its smallest unit, which consists of a specific idea or legal opinion with, sometimes, an accompanying terse debate.
The Gemara is a body of commentaries on the Mishnah. One version was written and redacted in the Land of Israel (the Jerusalem Talmud) and the other, better known and more studied, in Babylonia, modern Iraq (the Babylonian Talmud), by generations of sages called Amoraim. They were completed in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. In modern publications of that immense book, which comprise twenty huge volumes, the smallest unit is a double-sided printed page, or folio, identified by a page number with the letters a and b to indicate the two sides (recto and verso.)35 The Gemara is organized as a set of commentaries on the various mishnayot, which are quoted within the text of the Gemara. These commentaries fall into two categories: halakhah and aggadah. The former is made up of law-oriented controversies aimed at delineating specific rulings, while the latter constitutes a corpus of stories, myths, folklore, and anecdotes. The two kinds of commentaries are interwoven within the text, and both often range far from the mishnah under discussion, sometimes contradicting it and frequently raising apparently unconnected themes.36
Another word readers will encounter in the following pages is “midrash.” A midrash is an exegesis of biblical verses, whether in the realm of halakhah (where the midrash comprises a story that leads to a legal ruling) or aggadah (a story aimed at conveying a lesson or moral). Collections of midrashim exist outside the Talmud, but many midrashim can be found within the Talmud (i.e., the Gemara) itself, as part of both the halakhic and aggadic literature. The important point, as we look at Levinas, is that a midrash or commentary is never a paraphrase but a development of meaning that goes in unexpected directions.37 As Levinas puts it:
The strict contours of the verses outlined in the Holy Scriptures have a plain meaning which is also enigmatic. A hermeneutics is invited whose task is to extricate, from within the meaning immediately offered by the proposition, those meanings that are only implied. Do these extricated meanings have enigmas themselves? They in their turn must be interpreted on different modes. And in the search for new teachings, hermeneutics incessantly returns even to those verses which, though already interpreted, are inexhaustible. (ADV 7; BTV x)
CHAPTER 1
The Talmudic Readings
From Literature to Politics
Few philosophers produce multiple distinct kinds of philosophical writing. Some, like Maimonides and Camus, wear many hats, and under each one write a different body of work (Maimonides was a philosopher, a physician, and a rabbi; Camus was a novelist, a playwright, a journalist, etc.). Others, like Heidegger and Derrida, extend their philosophizing to the interpretation of literary texts or artworks, dealing with different disciplines but always in a philosophical way. Spinoza wrote philosophical treatises but also a Hebrew grammar, and we could jestingly imagine that, influenced by Levinas, he might have called this grammar and his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus his “confessional writings.” Levinas is in the original situation of being defined by himself and others solely as a philosopher but having written and published two explicitly separate corpuses of work.
The Talmudic readings stand out in Levinas’s philosophical corpus—some would say, alongside his philosophical corpus. Their peculiar position derives from three points: they were conceived as spoken lectures; they are commentaries on Talmudic texts rather than independent philosophical arguments; and these texts are aggadic narratives, namely, literary anecdotic stories. For these reasons, emphasized by the fact that they were published separately from the phenomenological books, the readings are unique in Levinas’s work. In this chapter, I explore this difference and argue that the readings constitute Levinas’s challenge to his philosophy. By this, I mean a double challenge, as in what Derrida calls a “double genitive”:1 Levinas’s philosophy is challenged by the Talmudic readings, and itself presents a challenge, thanks to the Talmudic readings. This challenge will prove to be the substance of Levinas’s political thinking.
In the first part of the chapter, I trace Levinas’s positions on representation
