Levinas's Politics

Justice, Mercy, Universality

Annabel Herzog

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812296808
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Historia y teoría política

A compelling account of politics and social philosophy in Levinas's Talmudic commentaries Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a French philosopher known for his radical ethics and for his contribution to Jewish thought in his commentaries on Talmudic sources. In Levinas's Politics, Annabel Herzog confronts a major difficulty in Levinas's philosophy: the relationship between ethics and politics. Levinas's ethics describes the encounter with the other, that is, with any other human being. For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter is a relationship in which the ego is commanded by a transcendent and unquestionable order to take responsibility for the other person. Politics, on the other hand, presupposes at least three people: the ego, the other, and any third party. Among three people, nothing can be transcendent; on the contrary, everything must be negotiated.Against the conventional view of Levinas's conception of the political as the interruption and collapse of the ethical, Herzog argues that in the Talmudic readings, Levinas constructed politics positively. She shows that Levinas's Talmudic readings embody a pragmatism that complements, revises, and challenges the extreme ethical analyses he offers in his phenomenological works— Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being, and Of God Who Comes to Mind. Her analysis illuminates Levinas's explanations of the relationship between ethics and politics: ethics is the foundation of justice; justice contains a necessary violence that must be moderated by mercy; and justice, general laws, and national aspirations must be linked in an attempt to "improve universality itself."

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 in general, and on writing in particular, to show that from his earliest to his latest texts, he reflected on the difference between philosophy and other mediums for expressing ideas. In the second part of the chapter, I focus on Levinas’s distinction between “said” and “saying,” which is arguably the most important but also the most tortuous conceptual distinction of his work. This distinction between “said” and “saying” explains the need, within Levinas’s work, for another kind of writing. In the last part of the chapter, I show that the readings reflect the interplay of “said” and “saying” that characterizes, according to Levinas, a livable politics.

Levinas on Representation and Style

Levinas wrote few works on artistic representation and literature. Some are early, like the chapter titled “Exoticism” in Existence and Existents and the essay “The Other in Proust,” both published in 1947 (EE 83–92, EE’ 52–57; NP 117–126, PN 99–105); “Reality and Its Shadow,” published in 1948 (RO 107–127; RS 1–14); and “Persons or Figures,” published in 1950 (DL 170–174; DF 119–122). Later works include “The Prohibition Against Representation and ‘The Rights of Man,’” published in 1984 (AT 129–147; AT’ 121–130), and “De l’oblitération,” published in 1990. The recent publication of the third volume of Levinas’s diaries and unpublished manuscripts, Eros, littérature et philosophie, which comprises unfinished novels and poems written in Russian, helps round out our understanding of Levinas’s position on art and literature.² From these texts emerges an ambivalent and even self-contradictory view of aesthetic representation.

On the one hand, Levinas expresses strong criticism of art, on the grounds that it is anti-ethical. In the most extreme formulation of this position, found in “Reality and Its Shadow,” he rejects what he regards as the predominantly Hegelian conception of aesthetics, in which “artistic expression rests on cognition” and “is identified with spiritual life” (RO 107, 126; RS 1, 12).³ Under this Hegelian conception, says Levinas, “what common perception trivializes and misses, an artwork apprehends in its irreducible essence. It thus coincides with metaphysical intuition.… Thus, an artwork is more real than reality” (RO 107; RS 1). Echoing Plato’s condemnation of poetry, Levinas contends that this Hegelian notion is false: art is neither a super-reality nor even a form of knowledge. Moreover, echoing the biblical interdiction of idolatry, he argues that art constitutes a “captivation [ensorcellement] or incantation” (RO 111; RS 4)—namely, a magic spell that does not open itself up to dialogue and, hence, impedes a subject’s openness to the other (RO 109; RS 2).⁴

What Levinas means here is that works of art impose feelings and impressions on people, who receive them passively and egoistically. Art does not lead to interaction with others, and, hence, engaging with a work of art is an act of disengagement and disinterestedness.⁵ It is also a “stoppage [arrêt] of time” (RO 119; RS 8). That is, the act of giving one’s attention to a work of art creates a category of time that is “below” time, “an interruption of time by a movement going on the hither side of time” (RO 109; RS 3), in which fate replaces freedom (RO 121; RS 9–10). In engaging with art, people lose their agency in time, or their freedom, which is a condition of being open to the other. For Levinas, therefore, the Hegelian conception of art is problematic from both an epistemological and a moral point of view. It pretends that art is more real than reality when, in fact, it resides in reality’s shadow; and it “liberates the artist from his duties as a man” (RO 109; RS 2). As a result, art is always a form of idolatry: “The petrification of the instant in the heart of duration … is the great obsession of the artist’s world, the pagan world” (RO 123; RS 11).

On the other hand, Levinas’s own work is full of literary references, which he employs for emphasis or to illustrate ethical situations and arguments. He admired the works of Shakespeare, Proust, Dostoyevsky, and others, and there is reason enough to suppose that he enjoyed music and painting no less than other philosophers and intellectuals of his time. Last, his own flourishing and emphatic style seems at times more poetic than strictly “philosophical.” In this, he reminds us of Plato, who condemned the poets but had his own poetic style—and of Socrates, who rhetorically rejected rhetoric.

To explain the contradiction between Levinas’s positions on art, some scholars have claimed to discern an evolution in his views, from a negative perception of art in the early texts to a reevaluation of it in the mature body of work.⁶ It has also been argued that Levinas seems to make a distinction between literature and fine or visual art. The former, this argument goes, would avoid artistic idolatry because it is made of language, which constitutes the relation to the other.⁷ Yet Jill Robbins observes a tension that operates “within each of [Levinas’s] texts about art,” from the beginning to the end of his philosophical journey.⁸ Regardless of any possible evolution of his views or any distinction between (visual) art and literature, Levinas’s writings reflect a real conflict between two opposing conceptions of art, one that sees art as ethical and one that sees it as anti-ethical.

Robbins shows that Levinas’s criticism of idolatry (also called “the mythical” or “the mystical,” and sometimes “the magical”) in art is consistent throughout his entire work.⁹ But what do these terms (idolatry, the mythical, the mystical, and the magical) actually mean? To answer this question, let us turn to the Talmudic reading “Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry,” published in In the Time of the Nations in 1988. In that late text, Levinas explains that idolatry was conceptualized for the first time in the book that defines itself precisely against it, the Hebrew Bible or Torah, which created both the category of idolatry and that of its opposite, “religion.”¹⁰ Idolatry, in this context, means closure—“some secret closing up of the soul”: the impossibility or the interdiction of exegesis (AHN 70; ITN 57). It consists of clinging to the immanence of meaning and refusing to look for what transcends it through commentary and dialogue. Idolatry is therefore the adoration of sameness. What idolaters see in every image, in every event, and in every word of God is, in effect, what they want to see, namely, themselves.

By contrast, “religion” or Torah is the possibility or even the requirement of interpretation, which is the ability to go beyond one’s own cognition or understanding. Interpreting means, if you will, leaving the mind’s comfort zone, the place where everything makes immediate sense. It consists of letting the text uproot the reader from what was meaningful in the first place. If so, the Torah contests not only idolatry but also the activity of essence or ontology, which in all situations aims at finding resemblances and at ascertaining sameness. “Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry” is arguably Levinas’s clearest explanation of the similarity, and perhaps equivalence, between idolatry and ontology. Like idolatry, ontology functions in an immanent dimension (AT 130; AT’ 122), and it seeks to transform difference into sameness. Ethics (the aspect of Torah that combats idolatry) is therefore openness to transcendence and otherness, while ontology is closure within presence.

To return to Levinas’s formulation in “Reality and Its Shadow,” ontology, like idolatry, is a stopping, or arrest, of time. Or as he says in later texts, ontology is “synchrony” while ethics works as “diachrony” (EI 48; EI’ 56). Diachrony is the possibility of transcendence in time, a “disjunction of identity where the same does not come back to the same” (AE 88; OB 52). In that context, the transcendence proposed (or created) by the Torah, that is, the openness to otherness and, hence, the possibility of interpretation, fractures idolatry and ontology both in relationships between human beings and in relationships between a reader and her book.¹¹ In both domains, the subject can be either petrified into presence and fate (RO 123; RS 11) or open to interpretation—that is, to the other.

Idolatry, meaning the petrification into presence and fate that occurs when we engage with a work of art, acts through rhythm. Rhythm is “the way the poetic order affects us.… Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it” (RO 111; RS 4).¹² By rhythm, Levinas does not mean a feature of music and sound but the essence of the aesthetic experience, in which the subject becomes passive and participates in the world like a thing: “[The subject] is among things as a thing, as part of the show.” His or her consciousness is “paralyzed in his or her freedom” (RO 112; RS 4). Therefore, “art’s bewitching [ensorceleurs] rhythms” are a prison that only ethics can break, because by definition ethics is the power of rupture (DL 408; DF 293).¹³ We find the same rejection of rhythm and its partner, dance, in interviews of the late 1980s—one by Christoph von Wolzogen and the other by Raoul Mortley. In the latter interview Levinas declares: “I often say, though it’s a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks.… All the rest—all the exotic—is dance.”¹⁴ We will return at the end of this book to this “frankly racist aside,” as Critchley calls it, and to other similar comments by Levinas.¹⁵ What interests us at this point is the distinction made between situations that generate active dialogue and interpretation, and experiences in which agency is transformed into passive involvement.

It is remarkable that in the texts cited above—both the early and the late—Levinas attacks “passivity,” while in seminal texts he uses that word to celebrate the ethical attitude.¹⁶ Ethical passivity, or “radical passivity,” as Wall calls it, is the openness of the subject to otherness. In Levinas’s famous expression, it is the “substitution for the other through responsibility” (AE 181; OB 114).¹⁷ Hence, the notion of ethical passivity designates an activity of the subject on behalf of the other (AE 182; OB 115). However, there exists another passivity, which Levinas rejects as anti-ethical. This “inert passivity” (AE 181; OB 115) is that engendered by rhythm. It constitutes an anti-ethical attitude because, in it, the subject withdraws from his or her responsibility for the other.

In sum, there are two kinds of passivity and disinterestedness: the ethical kind, which is responsibility for the other, and the artistic kind, which constitutes a withdrawing from responsibility. We can now understand better Levinas’s criticism of art in “Reality and Its Shadow.” It is through rhythm that art leads to inert passivity, namely, to disengagement from responsibility. This view is found not only in Levinas’s early texts but throughout his entire body of work, up to his 1988 interview with Francoise Armengaud, published in De l’oblitération, which deals with Sosno’s sculptures. There Levinas says, “Beauty’s perfection enforces silence without taking care of the rest. It is the guardian of silence. It lets things happen [il laisse faire]. Here are the limits of the aesthetic civilization.… [Here is] what makes people indifferent to the suffering of the world and keeps them in this indifference” (DO 8). But does this imply that all art leads to anti-ethical indifference? Does art always generate inert passivity?

In De l’oblitération, Levinas answers that art can lead either to inert passivity or to “obliteration.” Obliterative art shows the incompleteness of reality (DO 18). It “denounces the easiness or light insouciance of beauty and recall[s] the damage [usures] attendant on being, the ‘repairs’ that cover it and its crossings out [ratures], visible or hidden” (DO 12). Obliterative art, like Sosno’s sculptures, shows the “secret” of being, its “drama,” namely, the fact that being is open to otherwise than being (DO 30). It can therefore be regarded as a “window” onto ethics (DO 26).¹⁸ As Levinas puts it, “Obliteration interrupts the image’s silence.” Thanks to its incompleteness, such art leads to dialogue and breaks the closure of idolatry. It transforms the synchronic arrest of time into diachrony. As a result, “obliteration leads to the other” (DO 28).

We should not be too quick to conclude that for Levinas there are two kinds of art, one that is good (because it leads to ethics) and one that is bad (because it is idolatry). In De l’oblitération, Levinas explains that obliteration is the opposite of the “magical operation” of art. But he still wonders whether obliterative art can ever have the same ethical depth as a human face (DO 20). Put differently, uncertainty remains even about obliterative art. Art of such a kind might be a window onto ethics, but Levinas is not sure that this is so. This uncertainty recalls an earlier ambivalence in the 1947 essay “The Other in Proust.” As Robbins shows, Levinas’s distinction between idolatry and art leading to ethics is conceptualized there as the contrast between poetry and prose: “Neither poetry nor prose represents for Levinas a genre of art but originary experiences, for the prose in question is nothing other than the sobriety, the gravity of ethical language.”¹⁹ In “The Other in Proust,” Levinas compares “poetic” incantations negatively to the “prose” of philosophy (NP 118; PN 100). H...