The economic shift initiated in the 1980s, the reign of the market and the computer, often resulted in the reappearing of a “feudal legal structure... consisting of networks of allegiance.” This paradox (ultra-modernity and neo-feudalism) is rarely considered a historical tool for studying late twentieth-century philosophy. This article is a first step in that direction, using Supiot’s characterization of the period as a “shift from law to tie” to approach the work of Levinas. In Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than (...) Being, Levinas defends a revelation of or exposure to the Other directed against the “neutralization of the Other” as being, object, or phenomenon. It is meant to liberate an interpellation by the Other before and beyond any general constitution of the object by the subject. Can this shift in twentieth-century philosophy be reconsidered if we add to Levinas’s own account Supiot’s historical understanding concerning the withering-away of general normative forms in favor of personal ties of allegiance? (shrink)

In “Peace and Proximity,” like in other texts of the 1980s, Levinas develops the idea of a guilty conscience of the European. This guilty conscience would be due to a contradiction between the old seduction of Europe by a peace resting on truth and, at the same time, a long history of perpetrating a violence inherent to Europe, its achievements, and its position in the World. But Levinas asks also whether this guilty conscience of the European doesn’t have another and (...) even more urgent source in the “You shall not kill” of the Bible. As a response to this commandment, the European vocation to peace would not consist in abolishing all violence—for it might be necessary in certain cases—but in the anxiety to kill, in a tremblement and shudder, even in such cases of necessary violence. (shrink)

This essay supports Annabel Herzog’s argument that a positive politics can be found in Levinas’s Talmudic readings, often signaled by a discussion of hunger. It also raises doubts about the concreteness of this politics, noting that the moments where Levinas points to a better universal are quite gestural. Finally, it suggests that this strain of political thinking might best be understood as part of Levinas’s account of the nature of Judaism.

Levinas’s analysis of the relationship between ethics, with its uncompromising responsibility, and politics, with its compromises, is difficult. An examination Maimonides’s chapters on charity may help us understand it. According to Maimonides, one is commanded to give the poor person everything he or she lacks, including clothes, furniture, a spouse, as well as a horse and a herald. One is, moreover, required to give “with a friendly face” and to see the face of the poor person. However, it is impossible (...) to fulfill one’s infinite ethical obligation to him or her, since there are many other poor people; one thus compromises and gives a fixed sum to the city’s charity fund. The greatest charity, according to Maimonides, is the ransoming of captives, who are not only destitute but in imminent danger of death. (shrink)

In his earlier texts Levinas uses justice to describe the ethical meeting between the ego and the other, in which the ego is immediately and absolutely responsible for the other. In later texts, he turns to justice to express the socio-political relationship of the ego with many others, in which responsibility can never be absolute. An examination of the texts in which Levinas specifically focuses on justice, that is, his Talmudic readings, reveals a third understanding, one in which justice is (...) never either purely ethical or purely political. Throughout the corpus of the Talmudic readings, justice represents a concrete relation between ethics and politics. This article discusses justice as the relationship between ethics and politics, focusing on Levinas’s Talmudic examples dedicated to the question of mercy. (shrink)

It is controversial how Levinas understands the interrelation between the ethical and the political. In this article, I propose an interpretation of that relationship and then provide a reading of the film Two Days, One Night, written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, in order to enrich that proposal. Bringing into focus how a film expresses developments in philosophical thought is a delicate and subtle matter. I hope to show how a careful reading of the film and in particular (...) the interpersonal, moral, and social dynamics that it exhibits can help us to see how, in a concrete setting, a rather abstract philosophical understanding of our engagements with others has social and even political implications. (shrink)

In 1982 Emmanuel Levinas contributed a “lesson” on religion to a series in Le Monde. Intended for a general audience, Levinas’s lesson is a clear and concise introduction to his thought in general—and, in particular, to the curious persistence of the idea of God or the Infinite despite modernity. After the death of God, what remains, invoking Descartes, is the “idea of God” or even the “expectation” of God (and, so, of some greater “meaning [sens] and justification”). Between Pascal and (...) Heidegger, Levinas perhaps surprisingly insists upon the Descartes of A Discourse on the Method to emphasize the bon sens (both “good” and “common” sense) that underpins any thought that goes “to God” (à Dieu). Levinas is, here again, after what makes such thought possible, that thought that can somehow relate the finite and the infinite, that “thinks more than it can think.”. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas identifies Husserl’s lectures on the internal consciousness of time as of central phenomenological importance. However, Levinas gives two different readings of these lectures: the first argues that Husserl’s concept of the proto-impression is the receptivity of sensation that provides the basis for intentional constitution. The second reading, by contrast, argues that Husserl’s account is ultimately bound to the category of the Same, as whatever enters consciousness is not put into question. Most commentators either conflate the readings or interpret (...) them as an ambiguity in Levinas’s thought. I argue to the contrary that while Levinas sees Husserl’s account as an advance in the articulation of the otherness presented to us in the world of perception and how such otherness funds consciousness, he claims that Husserl’s presentation of internal time consciousness is unsuitable to account for the ethical relationship with the other person. Thus, Levinas’s two readings mark out how Husserl’s description of temporal consciousness can and cannot be used in articulating the ways in which the ego is decentered by otherness. (shrink)

This article reflects on the work of Emmanuel Levinas as a textual site for the critique of the notion of Jewish epistemic difference. The first part discusses critical readings of Levinas, which indicated how his Jewish otherness grounds powerful sameness, of oppressive and imperial nature. The strongest thrust of this critique is characterized as postcolonial. The second part suggests a hermeneutics perspective on Levinas’s work for a reading whereby Levinas himself anticipated contemporary critique and in response to it developed what (...) can be called a decolonial notion of Jewish difference—“decolonial Israel.” The third part offers a reading in Levinas’s work that indicates the horizon for this possible reading. (shrink)