C. Fred Alford calford@umd.edu

Levinas and Political Theory

“Politics left to itself bears a tyranny within itself.” –Levinas [1]

Abstract and evocative, writing in what can only be described as the language of prophecy, Emmanuel Levinas has become everything to everyone. We assume we understand him, writing in much the same style, so as to say whatever we wanted to say in the first place. The Levinas Effect it has been called, the ability of Levinas’ texts to say anything the reader wants to hear, so that Levinas becomes a deconstructionist, postmodern, or proto-feminist, even the reconciler of postmodern ethics and rabbinic Judaism.

Fortunately, Levinas has not yet had much influence yet among political theorists. I say “fortunately” not because his influence would be bad (I think it would be good), but only because there is still time to avoid the Levinas Effect. The question is how to do it. How best to think about Levinas as a political theorist without succumbing to the Levinas Effect? How best, in other words, to take seriously the challenge Levinas poses to political theory?

One way to take his challenge seriously is to demonstrate that Levinas’ thinking does not fit into any of the categories by which we ordinarily approach political theory. If one were forced to categorize Levinas’ political theory, the term inverted liberalism would come closest to the mark. As long, that is, as one emphasizes the term “inverted” over “liberalism.” Levinas’ defense of liberalism is likely the strangest defense the reader has encountered. We should, argues Levinas, foster and protect

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the individual because only the individual can see the tears of the other, the tears that even the just regime cannot see. The individual is to be fostered and protected for the sake of the other individual.

Toward the conclusion of this essay I speculate about why the Levinas Effect is so powerful. In other words, I speculate about why Levinas has become so widely read and cited among a large group of postmoderns. The reason is that Levinas’ approach grants an ethical aura to the categories of difference and otherness. Levinas seems to provide a way out of the postmodern version of the paradox of relativism and tolerance. The paradox is familiar. Relativism implies tolerance, but it also implies intolerance. Relativism implies anything at all. If all beliefs are equal, then I may as well suppress some, all, or none. Or hold a lottery. Similarly, if the other is totally different from me, why should I not conclude that this makes his or her welfare irrelevant to me, a happening on a distant planet? Because, says Levinas, the face of the other bears the trace of God. Without an assumption like this, there remains an unbridgeable gap between recognition of otherness and difference and respect for otherness and difference. The gap may be bridged by arguments that are more aesthetic than deontological (for example, variety is beautiful), but aesthetic arguments for morality are, and should be, suspect.

Some who have turned to Levinas use him to grant an aura of the sacred to the other without acknowledging where the sacred comes from. Levinas’ tendency to separate his theological and philosophical writings contributes to the penchant of some postmoderns to write as if one could carry over into Levinas’ philosophy the nimbus of the theological while writing as if one had nothing to do with the other, as though one could get the nimbus without its source. In order to see this more clearly, it will help to look first at Levinas’ political theory, for there we see more clearly how extraordinary Levinas’ argument truly is.

Not just extraordinary, Levinas’ argument occasionally becomes

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bizarre, especially when writing about the real world of politics, as Levinas did for a series of articles in Esprit, a journal of progressive Catholic thought. There Levinas writes of his fear that the West may be overrun by greedy Asian hordes. Elsewhere, in his writings about the State of Israel, Levinas sometimes seems to forget all his cautions about the worship of a place. Whether there is something in Levinas’ political theory itself that leads to these derailments will be considered.

State of War, State of Nature, and the State

Though Levinas is no traditional state of nature theorist, it is useful to consider his project from the perspective of that familiar trope. Useful, but in some ways misleading. The experience of infinity that Levinas writes of is not an experience in place or time, not even the mythical place and time of the state of nature. Nor does Levinas situate his own work within the state of nature tradition, even as he frequently alludes to it. From the beginning to the end, Hobbes shadows Levinas’ project.

If the state of nature is not an image close to Levinas’ heart, then why do I begin with it? There are two reasons.

First, to avoid the Levinas Effect. Turning to an image that is compatible with Levinas’ thought, even if it is not a leading theme in his work, is a way of finding the right distance from him: not too close, not too far. Employing a trope more common to Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau than to those who most influenced Levinas, Husserl and Heidegger, is a way of gaining a little distance on our subject. I promise to caution the reader when the image of a state of nature might be misleading. With this image I am not trying to make Levinas a political theorist. That would spoil the purpose of his project, as the epigraph suggests. The trope of the state of nature is an attempt to create commensurability, which does not mean an identity, but a basis for comparison.

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Second, the image of the state of nature is not alien to Levinas. He concludes his late masterwork, Otherwise than Being, by rhetorically asking “If the egalitarian and just State proceeds from a war of all against all, or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for all?” And he begins his early masterwork, Totality and Infinity, by asking if Hobbes’ war of all is a permanent state of being. [2] Yes, he answers, which is why we must seek non-being. From beginning to end of his project, the image of the Hobbesian state of nature is waiting in the wings, the hell to which men and women are consigned when they live only in and for this world. Levinas’ difference with traditional state of nature theorists is that he collapses the state of nature, the state of war, and the state itself. For Levinas, there is little difference between these three states, which is why Totality and Infinity equates the state of war with the peace of empires—that is, with the existing world order: not just among but within states.

For Levinas, the state of nature is the realm of contracts and exchange of sentiments, the war of all against all by other means. In this order there is war and there is peace. The needs of the citizens of this world

relate them to one another and create an `economic’ system of mutual satisfaction as well as a political network of resistance, tension, war, and peace for the sake of satisfaction. Ruled by universal interest, human history is an alternation of war and peace on the basis of needs. [3]For a moment Levinas sounds like Locke. The difference is that for Locke this state may become legitimate. For Levinas it never can. Put simply, for Levinas the social contract is war conducted by slightly more civilized means, dollars and ballots, a point made by others, including Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue. For Levinas, the state of war, the state of nature, and the state are all variations on a common theme, characterized by Levinas in terms of a “Cain-like coldness,” which sees the world in terms of freedom or contract. Ordinary human relations of affection and trust are

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mere transfers of sentiment (transferts du sentiment), as Levinas disparagingly calls them, a selfish exchange in the market of sentiments. [4]

Three propositions about the state define Levinas’ project: peace is impossible within the state; peace is possible only beyond the state; going beyond the state to find peace cannot mean leaving the state behind. All three propositions are reflected in the title of article published shortly after his death, “Beyond the State in the State.” The transcendence of the state must somehow take place within the state, even (or especially) the State of Israel, about which Levinas wrote several essays. [5] The question, of course, is whether all this wordplay leads to anything substantial.

Imagining that Levinas is writing about the state of nature is one way of answering this question. I locate Levinas’ state of nature in an apartment, not the most familiar place to locate the state of nature, but one that makes perfect sense once one recognizes that Levinas draws no distinction between the state of nature and civilized society. The cosmopolitan man or woman living in an apartment in Paris, and the Indian living in the woods of North America to whom Locke refers as exemplifying the state of nature, are both denizens of the state of nature according to Levinas. (Cosmopolitan is no compliment for Levinas, not only because of its association with modern anti-Semitism, but because even the cosmo-polis remains a polis, a place.) [6]

Lest this equation of the state of nature and civilized society seem apt when applied to Levinas, but inapt when applied the traditional state of nature theorists, recall that it is Locke who stressed the continuity of these two states (which is why dissolving the government does not lead to anarchy). Similarly, C. B. Macpherson argues for the virtual identity of these two states as markers not just for markets, but for the individuals who inhabit them. For Macpherson, the mark of possessive individualism, which joins not just Hobbes and Locke, but the state of nature with civil society, is

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not material acquisitiveness, but the “conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities.” [7] It is precisely this that Levinas challenges. Or rather, it is precisely this with which Levinas agrees, which is why he deems it is necessary to move beyond both state and nature.

Sitting in your apartment, suddenly the door bell rings. What could that portend? As you walk to the door you are distracted, still thinking about your latest project. It takes you a moment to recognize your neighbor at the door, the one who lives upstairs; as soon as you recognize his face you invite him in. You talk for a while. He tells you his problem, you tell him what you might do to help him. You share some pleasant conversation, and soon enough your neighbor leaves. What you originally experienced as an interruption you now experience as a pleasant interlude, in which some understanding has passed between you and your neighbor. Or so it seems to you. [8]

Instead of immediately returning to your work, or allowing the memory of a pleasant interlude to linger, Levinas asks that you try to recapture the shock of the other’s intrusion, the moment when you were first confronted with the other person’s face, but before you recognized him. What did you experience in this fraction of a second? You experienced, says Levinas, an encounter with the other in all his or her immediacy, but with none of his or her particularity. The face (visage, but occasionally face), says Levinas, is naked and vulnerable, common to all humans and absolutely unique at the same time.

The result of your encounter is an experience of unmediated otherness so shocking that for an instant it must have shattered your ego. Was it not an irruption, not just into your life, but into the order of your world? Did you not feel that a door had been opened into another world, not just into the hallway of your apartment building, but into infinity?

It cannot have been an entirely pleasant experience, but perhaps it

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was not so unpleasant either. The world of your apartment, your desk, and your work is fulfilling, but limited. You soak up the morning sunlight that pours in through the big windows, and at night the sparkling lights of the city make it seem as if you live in an enchanted world, ready to meet your needs. But occasionally the thought crosses your mind that there might be more to life than this.

If one were going to characterize your life prior to the encounter at the door in terms of traditional state of nature theory, it would probably come closest to that of Rousseau. Not his “noble savage,” but the earliest stages of civilization that follow, when men and women live together in families and towns, “maintaining a golden mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our vanity.” [9] The epigraph that introduces Levinas’ Otherwise than Being, his late masterwork, is from Pascal. “`That is my place in the sun.’ That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.” This sounds like Rousseau talking about the advent of private property, only for Levinas’ what spoils things is not property, but the individual’s belief that he owns himself.

Strikingly similar to Levinas is Rousseau’s emphasis on the narcissism of this earliest stage of civilization, in which men and women use each other without acknowledging their dependence, their need for others. It is not just property, but mutual dependence, which spoils this idyllic state. Or as Levinas puts it, “in enjoyment I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am . . . outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate.” [10] Levinas puts it this way because he wants awareness of separateness without awareness of difference, for that would imply that there is a totality that encompasses self and other through which we know both at once. For Levinas, I know others in my world, having intercourse with them, but they remain part of the wallpaper of my life, present but unnoticed. Until, that is, they frustrate me.

Though your apartment hardly sounds like Hobbes’ state of nature, it

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is not so far away from that construction either. The state of nature is an idea of great subtlety. About Hobbes’ state of nature, Sheldon Wolin writes that it is not so much a place of violence as a state of subjectivity, what Levinas calls humanity’s natural narcissism (narcissisme). As Wolin puts it, “to describe the state of nature as a state of subjectivity rather than as simply the absence of sovereign power points to Hobbes’ belief that” what marks the state of nature is not just, or even primarily, war and violence, but the primacy of subjective reason, the reason that sees the world as prey, the subject of my will and reason. This perception is, for Hobbes, naïve, not the result of strategic or scientific thinking, but the narcissistic nature of man. Levinas would agree completely, which is why men and women must be lifted out of nature if peace is to be possible. [11]

Though you live a satisfying existence in your apartment, something is missing from your life, and your encounter with the face at the door reminds you of what it is: the rest of the world, one that extends to infinity. When you heard the doorbell ring it could have been anyone, a world of infinite possibilities at your door. Or at least so you might have imagined for a moment. For a moment the order of your world was exposed to the disorder of infinite possibility. Your neighbor could have been anyone, needing anything, asking everything. (Levinas began as a phenomenologist, and sometimes writes about possibility as a human project. Here “possibility” refers to the shattering intrusion of otherness that disrupts my ego and opens me to eternity. In this regard, “possibility” is a category on the border of human experience, an encounter barely knowable as experience.)

Levinas’ work is a reflection upon this moment of infinite possibility, though it is I, and not Levinas, who locates this moment in time, and it is I who makes it a reflection. Levinas would call it an imperative, the experience a command to serve the other. For Levinas it is an experience that comes from somewhere beyond “scientific” time, which is why one cannot say that it occurs prior to becoming an adult, a responsible human

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being, or whatever. It is prior to everything. In this regard, to call Levinas’ apartment a state of nature could be

misleading if one were to assume that the experience of answering the call at the door exists in the same way that the encounter with the other exists. These experiences belong to different orders of being, or in the case of the encounter with the other, non-being. For Levinas, one is born into the state of nature and a relation to infinity at the same time; only from the perspective of human history is nature prior.

For this reason it would be a mistake to characterize the encounter with the other as an experience that lifts you out of the state of nature. One follows the other only because that is how I have to tell the story step by step, as time is linear. In reality you were always already in thrall to the other; you just didn’t know it yet. It is the encounter with the other at the door that reminds you of what you already knew, although that puts it too much like Plato’s anamnesis. Levinas understands the encounter in terms closer to the medieval nunc stans, an encounter beyond time. The result is not so much to lift you out of nature as to expose you to the heavens above. Levinas calls it an experience of exteriority.

If the image of an apartment is misleading in some respects, in others it is not. Indeed, it is Levinas’ own image. As Derrida reminds us, Levinas writes about doors (porte) a lot, the door almost always representing an opening to infinity, one about which we have a choice whether to open or close it. (The cover of Derrida’s Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas displays an image of an open door.) As Levinas puts it,

the separated being can close itself up in its egoism, that is, in the very accomplishment of its isolation. And this possibility of forgetting the transcendence of the other—of banishing with impunity all hospitality . . . from one’s home attests to the absolute truth, the radicalism, of separation . . . . The possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows.

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[12]About truths and images so abstract and metaphysical they boggle the mind, homey images are essential—for Levinas, and for us all. Striking is that even the state of nature is a homey image for Levinas—an image of our corrupted natural state which is daily transcended every time we are moral. “All the transfers of sentiment which theorists of original war and egoism [a reference to the state of nature] use to explain the birth of generosity could not take root in the ego were it not, in its entire being, or rather its entire nonbeing,” subject to infinity. [13]

Assume you open your door. How might you respond to this experience of the infinite? You feel shocked, maybe a little scared, but according to Levinas you also feel gratitude for being released from your little world of pleasures and worries. It is a defeat of your self-satisfied little world that is ultimately a victory, as you now belong to another. You feel small and insignificant, but not devalued, because your life now has a purpose, to serve the other. For the first time in your life you are free. Not to do what you want, but to put your very being into question, and so open yourself to the encounter with the other. For Levinas, that is the true meaning of freedom, the investiture of freedom he calls it, as though you were a knight sent on a sacred quest to serve the other. [14]

It is unnecessary to infer how Levinas understands the place of freedom in the experience of answering the doorbell, for he tells us, defining ethics as the calling into question of my freedom. [15] Does this mean that ethics is more important than freedom? No, it means that I find my freedom in serving the other. Freedom is heteronomy, not autonomy. (Does this not make it impossible to call Levinas a liberal, even an inverted liberal? Not necessarily.) Not because freedom is servitude, but because in serving the other I open myself to the infinite, the absolutely other. “But the calling into question of this wild and naive freedom for itself [an implicit reference to Sartre], sure of its refuge in itself, is not reducible to a negative moment.

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This calling into question of oneself is in fact the welcome of the absolutely other.” [16] This welcome is my passage to freedom.

Prior to your exposure to the other you existed in your own little world, like the apartment in which you were working before the doorbell rang. Others existed, they met your needs, but they were part of the background. One might say the same thing about your self. It is only with your exposure to the other that you come to be, including to be free. Not, however, by means of what Hegel called the dialectic of mutual recognition, in which you define yourself through struggle with another. Dialectic requires dialogue, contact, even struggle, and across the infinite space that divides us there can be little human contact. Levinas calls it a “relationship without relation.” An encounter takes place, but it is “without relation,” as the other remains absolutely other. [17]

The face of my neighbor at my door renders me guilty as one who has done less than he could. (Here I must change grammatical subjects, for I may only talk about my guilt, never yours, says Levinas) I can never do enough, because doing enough would require that I know the other’s needs as I know my own, and it is precisely this reduction of the other to the same that Levinas would avoid. The best I can do is devote myself to serving the one whose true need must forever elude me. Once I am exposed to the other, I can never return to my desk and forget about the other, no matter how much I might want to. The other has intruded itself between me and myself. Responsibility is persecuted subjectivity, the only way in which subjectivity may be known, as the prosecution of the narcissism of the I. “The word I means to be answerable for everything and for everyone,” says Levinas. [18]

This, says Levinas, is real humanism, one that knows that it is the other human who comes first, defining me as the other’s hostage. I am able to be (that is, experience my own subjectivity), only as a hostage to the other. The subject comes into existence only through its exposure to the

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other, which is what Levinas means when he defines subjectivity as the other in the same. “The psyche in the soul is the Other in me, a malady of identity.” [19] A malady of identity it may be, but it is the only identity there is, hostage-being. I am responsible to the other because my existence as individuated, self-conscious subject depends entirely on my relationship to the other. Before that I was not much different from a contented cow, but one that drank up the milk of the world. In the three states of nature, men and women are not much different than cattle for Levinas, like the cattle to whom Plato refers in The Republic (586a-b), greedily eating one moment, kicking and butting each other with hooves and horns of steel the next.

Levinas’ Political Theory

The question is unavoidable. Is not Levinas describing a religious encounter, like that of Saul on the road to Damascus? “We oppose to the objectivism of war a subjectivity born from the eschatological vision.” [20] Shouldn’t we keep experiences like this out of politics? Isn’t this what the last six hundred years have taught us? Levinas doesn’t think so. His work is an attack on the idolatry of politics in the name of a pre-political ethics rooted in a primordial relationship between two humans, a relationship that I have described in terms of answering the ringing at the door. Confronted with the other, I have but two choices: to kill him, or serve him. By kill Levinas means not just murder, but any refusal or neglect of the obligation this encounter asserts.

Confident that reason can justify and found an objective order that preserves and protects the freedom of all (or some), political theorists busy themselves applying universal laws. The result is often peace, and sometimes what is called justice. But even justice may be violent, as it recognizes not needy and vulnerable individuals (the meaning of the face of the other, naked and exposed), but types, statuses, and roles, such as a

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citizen with the right against self-incrimination. By treating everyone the same, justice actually participates in what Levinas calls totalization, subjecting individuality and uniqueness to universal categories.

Justice is the signal virtue of mass democracy, and a decidedly ambivalent one. Treating everybody the same is better than invidious discrimination, but it violates the humanity of your particularity. You don’t deserve to be treated like everybody else; you deserve to be treated like you. “We call justice this face to face approach, in conversation.” [21] What exactly this means–what exactly this could mean–for the practice of politics is, of course, the question. It seems as if Levinas is confusing realms: what we owe to individuals, and what we owe to politics. But perhaps what looks like confusion is the consequence of the fact that Levinas uses categories subtly different than those political theorists are used to.

“There are, if you like, the tears that a civil servant cannot see: the tears of the Other.” This consideration alone–that rational and justifiable hierarchy does not see the individual–is the exoneration of subjectivity in Levinas’ work. Some one must be there to see the tears. “The I alone can perceive the `secret tears’ of the Other, which are caused by the functioning–albeit reasonable–of the hierarchy.” [22] This is Levinas’ non-liberal defense of liberal individualism. The individual is the greatest value, but only because he or she can see the tears of the other. What modifications (or should I say transformations?) must our political theory undergo to find a place for this Aufhebung of liberalism?

Most of Levinas’ political theory is quite ordinary, at least on the surface, assuming institutions and laws like those we live under in the Western democracies today, including bureaucracy. This is because political theory is not about two people, but many, represented by the third (le tiers), the other to the Other. “The Other and the third party, my neighbors, contemporaries of one another, put distance between me and the other and

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the third party.” [23] The introduction of the third, the introduction of political theory, changes everything . . . and nothing.

One seldom turns to politics with such a deep sense of relief. Not just because the tone of Levinas’ politics lacks the hyperbole of his ethics, but because politics, the introduction of the third, saves us from being consumed by the infinite need of the other. I may owe the other everything, but when there are many others I must distribute my obligations among them. “To the extravagant generosity of the for-the-other is superimposed a reasonable order . . . of justice through knowledge,” is how Levinas puts it in “Peace and Proximity,” his most sustained treatment of ethics and politics. [24] Furthermore, when there are many others I too become an other, to whom still others have obligations. I must be willing to sacrifice myself, but others may not ask it of me.

Questions of justice take on a new meaning with the introduction of the third. Indeed, questions of distributive justice first become possible, for there was never any question of how much I owed the other vis-à-vis myself: everything. Now I must consider how to distribute my responsibilities. While my responsibilities may be infinite, my resources, including time and attention, are not. The considerations involved are little different from ordinary procedures of distributive justice. Levinas puts it this way. “Comparison is superimposed onto my relationship with the unique and the incomparable, and, in view of equity and equality, a weighing, a thinking, a calculation.” [25] Calling distributive justice a superimposition might be read as suggesting that it is not implied by the original encounter with the other. This though does not seem correct, as Levinas suggests that others were present all along, flanking, so to speak, my original encounter with the face of the other, “where in his turn the Other appears in solidarity with all the others.” [26] If so, then we must conclude that the imperative to care for all the others is itself part of the original encounter with the other. How

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we do so is the subject of justice. The double structure of community is how Simon Critchley refers to

this aspect of Levinas’ thought, the way it seems to call us to be responsible for one and many at the same time. The community is a relationship among equals which is nonetheless based on the inegalitarian moment of the ethical relationship. In putting it this way, Critchley smoothes over the tension between saying and said, the face-to-face and the community.

To be sure, there is apparent evidence in Levinas for this interpretation. Critchley quotes Levinas as stating that justice is “an incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity”--that is the asymmetry of the face to face relationship, in which I owe the other everything. But by this Levinas does not mean that through justice “I become the Other’s equal,” as Critchley puts it. Levinas means quite the opposite: that we are all unequal before the other. [27]

Instead, of creating a symmetrical relationship among equals, Levinas constructs an aporia, or perhaps it is just an impossibility theorem: that I be responsible for all the others as I was for the one other. As Jeffrey Bloechl puts it, “it is not just this one other person who obsesses me, but all the Others too. This is more than an empirical complication: in the human face, I am commanded by all the Others at once.” [28] How can I do what cannot but must be done? This is the leading problem posed by Levinas for politics.

The introduction of the third, which appeared to be such a relief, turns to be no such thing. While the third makes me an other to all the others, insuring that I too will not be sacrificed, the third adds another other (actually, an infinite number of others) whom I must serve. “The face is both the neighbor and the face of all faces,” says Levinas. [29] Rather than relieving me from obligation, Levinas’ introduction of the third relieves political theory from having to justify what it can only serve. Politics need no longer fulfill the role it is incapable of fulfilling, that of founding philosophy. “The role assigned to philosophy is not to provide solutions, but

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to prevent the cynicism of political reason from silencing other dimensions of thought.” [30]

While the third provides only fugitive relief, another aspect of Levinas’ politics provides more lasting illumination, his critique of mass democracy. One has to look long and hard for this critique, for it is nowhere systematically developed. One finds it in some short pieces on current events written decades earlier, many for Esprit, the voice of “progressive, avant-garde Catholicism,” as Levinas put it. [31] In “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” originally published in 1934, Levinas writes of the return of paganism, the forces of race and nature, what he calls the forces of fatality. [32] In a 1956 essay, “Sur l’esprit de Geneve,” referring to a summit conference that for a brief moment promised relief from the Cold War, Levinas writes of forces without faces, by which he means nuclear weapons. In both essays the guiding idea is the same, that humans are no longer in charge of their history. We have given ourselves over to the forces of a reified nature, the forces of fatality, be they race or atomic energy.

The inhuman, which in those centuries was prodigious, came to us still through the human. The human relations that made up the social order and the forces that guided that order exceeded in power, efficacy and in being those of the forces of nature . . . . [Now] for the first time social problems and struggles between humans do not reveal the ultimate meaning of the real. The end of the world will lack the last judgement. The elements exceed the states that until now contained them . . . For politics is substituted a cosmo-politics that is a physics. [33]

In this assessment Levinas shares much with the Frankfurt School’s critique of the dialectic of Enlightenment. Both see reason and progress as leading to a return of the primitive, as the natural world is invested with new powers to reign over man. That too is paganism for Levinas. These forces also constitute a third, an alienated, inhuman other

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that threatens to make human politics obsolete. Seen from this perspective, the face takes on a new importance, last remnant of the human in an increasingly inhuman world. From the perspective of Hitlerism and the Cold War, even Levinas’ charge of paganism looks a little different. No longer a way of removing the sublime from the experience of nature (for Levinas, only the human face is worthy of our awe), pagan refers to the remythification of nature by the categories of science and pseudo-science. For a moment, paganism sounds like what the Frankfurt School called instrumental reason. One does not think first of Levinas as critic of the loss of individuality in mass democracy, but that too is one of his iterations. No defender of liberal individualism, Levinas defends the individual because only the individual can see the tears of the other.

Their analyses of the disease of Western thought are so similar, both in tone and content, including the tone that is their guilt at the self-assertion necessary to exist in this world, that it comes as a surprise that in many respects Levinas and the Frankfurt School are talking about different things. Both are concerned with the tendency toward totalization, best defined as the reduction of the other to the same, the elimination of difference. The moment one looks at their solutions, however, it becomes apparent that they mean something quite different by totality and same. Against totality, Theodor Adorno sets the particular. Levinas sets infinity. The difference could not be any more fundamental than that, or so it seems.

Reversing Kantian subjectivity, Adorno would let the object take the lead in defining itself. Yield to the object; do justice to its qualities; refrain from definition. Let the object be, approach it with utmost velleity, help it to become what it is. These are the watchwords of Adorno’s approach, whose utopian goal is, as Martin Jay puts it, “the restoration of difference and non-identity to their proper place in the non-hierarchical constellation of subjective and objective forces he called peace.” For Adorno, the subject and object remain in a tender relationship, almost like a teacher waiting

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patiently for a child to finish her long story without interrupting. Distant nearness Jürgen Habermas has called it, a useful term as long as we remember to emphasize the distance over the nearness. [34] For Adorno, beautiful otherness is principally an aesthetic experience, one that requires closeness, but not intimacy.

Not distant nearness, but a “relation without relation” marks the encounter with the other in Levinas’ work. If Levinas has a motto, it is these lines from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which he quotes more than a dozen times throughout his work. “Every one of us is guilty before all, for everyone and everything, and I more than others.” For Levinas, the only ethical relationship between you and me is one in which I become your hostage, persecuting myself for your sins as Levinas puts it. Anything less, or more, is egoism in disguise. By contrast, Adorno’s account of distant nearness sounds positively cuddly, a term one would otherwise not associate with Adorno, though Habermas once used the term anschmiegen (snuggle) to describe Adorno’s ideal relationship to nature. [35]

Israel, Asia, and “There Is”

In Levinas and the Political, Howard Caygill compares Levinas’ silence on the subject of the State of Israel to Heidegger’s silence on Germany. [36] Caygill is unfair, and not just because Levinas was a citizen of France, not Israel. It’s unfair because Levinas was not silent about Israel. He spoke out a lot, even if he didn’t say what Caygill would have him say. Nevertheless, one can appreciate Caygill’s concern. For Levinas, state and place are pagan idols, virtual totems. According to Levinas, the greatest critic of Heidegger, the philosopher of place, was Yury Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who first orbited the earth, showing the potential of technology to transcend the archaic spirits of place. [37] In light of this analysis, asks

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Caygill, how can Levinas write that the foundation of the State of Israel marks “one of the greatest events of internal history, and, indeed, of all history?” [38]

There is no simple answer, certainly not one that can be traced here. Suffice to say that when Levinas writes of Israel, sometimes he refers to the state, and sometimes to the bearer of a prophetic history, a state that is more and less than a state, comprised too of the Diaspora, who should serve to keep the state honest to its ideals. It is in this context that Caygill criticizes Levinas, citizen of the Diaspora, for his “too eloquent” silence. It would be more accurate to criticize Levinas for occasionally writing about real states, and so running the risk of confusing the State of Israel with Israel. Sometimes Levinas does this. As often, Levinas reminds us not to, as when he concludes an interview on ethics and politics by stating “a person is more holy than a land, even a holy land, since, faced with an affront made to a person, this holy land appears in its nakedness to be, but stone and wood.” That is, an idol. [39]

If Levinas’ writings about Israel are generally albeit imperfectly nuanced, the same cannot be said of his few brief writings about Asia and Asians. “Under the greedy eyes of these countless hordes who wish to hope and live, we, the Jews and Christians, are pushed to the margins of history.” Why would Levinas write this? Why would this great lover of the other refer to “the rise of countless masses of Asiatic and underdeveloped peoples . . . who no longer refer to our holy history, for whom Abraham, Isaac and Jacob no longer mean anything?” [40] Did they once? Why would Levinas caution Russia (he means Russia, the European power, not the Soviet Union) during the cold war not to

drown itself in an Asiatic civilization . . . . The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from which there does not filter any familiar voice or infliction, a lunar or Martian past. [41]

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Is Levinas out of his mind? Caygill speculates that Levinas real target here is Arab nationalism in

conflict with the state of Israel. Not Asia but Egypt is Levinas’ concern. That seems far fetched, especially since it is not to Egypt but China that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are strangers. Certainly Levinas has become unglued. Those who turn to Levinas for inspiration must determine whether there is something in his metaphysics that leads him to these bizarre conclusions, or are his views about Asia a personal quirk?

They are more than a quirk. The difference between Levinas and the Frankfurt School points to the reason why. For the Frankfurt School, the goal is a new relationship with being (to use this troublesome abstraction), one marked by terrible caution, what Adorno calls velleity, the weakest kind of desire, but a desire for being nonetheless. For Levinas, on the other hand, the goal is to escape from the terrible burden of being, what Levinas calls il y a, “there is,” existence without existents, as Levinas puts it. [42]

Søren Kierkegaard writes that we dread “the presentiment of something that is nothing.” [43] We dread nothingness, our own non-being. Levinas is writing about an experience that is in important ways the opposite of Kierkegaard’s, the presentiment of nothing that is something, the absence of everything that returns as a presence that threatens to drown me in being. “There is” is being without nothingness,” says Levinas. [44] “There is” means to be locked in being with no escape, no exit. About the experience of “there is,” Levinas writes

My reflection on this subject starts with childhood memories. One sleeps alone, the adults continue life; the child feels the silence of his bedroom as `rumbling.’ It is something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise. . . . Existence and Existents tries to describe this horrible thing, and moreover describes it as horror and panic. [45]

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Though Levinas tells us that the idea of “there is” occurred to him for the first time while he was in the Stalag (Levinas was imprisoned in a camp for French officers during World War Two), the experience evidently began in his childhood, during those long nights in which he could not fall asleep.

Though Levinas practically invites us to interpret “there is” as a psychological phenomenon, it is best to resist the temptation. On the contrary, “there is” is not a psychological phenomenon because all that makes an experience psychological, that is subjectively knowable, is overwhelmed with the dread of mere existence, mere being. “It is not,” says Levinas, “a matter of escaping from solitude, but rather of escaping from being.” [46] The path that winds through “there is” may seem a strange detour from Levinas’ anxieties about Asia, but the detour soon rejoins the main road. Levinas is at risk of experiencing reality, what is often called being, as a creepy, threatening thing, ready at any moment to swallow one up. One is reminded here of Sartre’s Roquentin, sitting on a bench in the park beside a chestnut tree, suddenly experiencing the roots of the tree as monstrous, about to absorb him in their mere being.

For Sartre, the other is the death of me. [47] Levinas would agree. The difference is that for Levinas this is good. My death is my salvation, the death of my ego that opens me to infinity. Here finally is an exit from being, says Levinas, in an explicit reference to Sartre. Just answer the doorbell and it’s there, relief from the horror of “condemnation to perpetual reality, to existence with `no exits.’” [48] (Levinas published De l’évasion three years before Sartre’s Nausea; Levinas and Roquentin suffer from much the same malaise.)

For the most part, Levinas deals with the experience of “there is” through the construction of exits. This “evasion,” as Levinas calls it, constitutes ninety-nine percent of his project. Occasionally, however, when confronted with those most alien of human beings, who know nothing of the

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promise of Abraham, Levinas writes of Asians as though they were about to swallow him up, erasing all distinctions, so that “soon no one will bother any more to differentiate between a Catholic and a Protestant or Jew and a Christian.” [49] Levinas is Roquentin in China, anxiously waiting to be devoured by the “two billions eyes that watch us.”

Something deeply disturbing lies near the heart of Levinas’ metaphysics. The question we must answer is whether this destroys what is of value in his political theory. I do not believe it does. On the contrary, I believe that Levinas’ political theory is the best part of his project. What our considerations mean is that we must approach Levinas’ political theory not just with wonder, but caution: not just about what he says about Asians, but about his deep commitment to escape from being that motivates his lapse.

Substitution and Inverted Liberalism

Recall Michael Sandel’s brilliant deconstruction of Rawls. Ostensibly a theory of justice based on an account of how rational individuals would choose in ignorance of their own position in any future society, Sandel points out that Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in effect assumes that individuals do not own or possess their own selves. Instead, they “participate in one another’s nature,” as Rawls puts it in characterizing the ideal community. [50] Whatever the merits of Sandel’s argument, it has nothing to do with what Levinas calls substitution. On the contrary, Levinas insists on the narcissistic quality of my life in my apartment before I confront the other, a quality that I never completely lose. If I needed others too much, if I blend with them, then I cannot devote myself to their service. If I did not exist as a separate individual, I could not see their tears.

In substitution, I am called upon to put myself in the place of the other, answering for everything the other has done, becoming responsible

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for everything the other needs. Substitution is not, for Levinas, a type of moral choice. On the contrary, substitution is not just pre-moral, but pre-conscious. Substitution stems from the primordial experience of the other, an experience that precedes my relationship to myself. “The relationship with the non-ego precedes any relationship of the ego with itself.” [51] This does not mean that I am not a separate being, with my own ego. On the contrary, Levinas insists on my separateness. If I were not separate, I could not substitute myself for the other. I would in some way already be the other, like Sandel’s selves who flow through one another.

Substitution defies the distinction between separate and fused. The other is already in me, closer to me than I am to myself, but the other is not me. The other is my saving grace, an alien presence that allows me to open myself to the world, a foreign body that wedges itself between me and my ego, and so allows me to escape my narcissistic soul by devoting myself to the other in me (l’autre dans le même). [52]

Substitution is generally characterized and criticized by those who study Levinas in phenomenological and psychological terms. Isn’t substitution too masochistic, too deindividuating, too extreme? Here it is more useful to consider the political implications of substitution. If the other is already in me, but not only not me, but infinitely distant from me, then Levinas has not developed a communitarian challenge to individualism. On the contrary, substitution implies a non-liberal justification of the key assumption of liberalism, the supreme value of the individual. If only the individual can see the tears of the other, then the individual must be preserved at all costs; not for the sake of the individual, but rather for the other. [53]

Because his focus is on ethics (that is, the relationship of one person to another), because in the end this is the only relationship that counts for Levinas, could one not argue that Levinas’ teaching is compatible with the softer forms of authoritarianism—authoritarianism with a human face as it

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might be called. This authoritarianism would leave its subjects room to devote themselves to each other, as long as they leave the politics to others. Yugoslavia under Tito might be an example. Citizens did not live in daily terror; they were more materially secure than in many countries, including some Western ones; and they had time and place and space to care for each other, if they chose. (The irony of this example does not escape me.)

The compatibility of Levinas’ teaching with the softer forms of authoritarianism is an interesting proposition, but for two reasons it does not work. First, Levinas says it doesn’t. Nowhere does he suggest he is anything other than a democrat, and if he worries aloud about whether “liberalism is all we need to achieve an authentic dignity for the human subject,” he never suggests that what lies beyond liberalism has anything to do with leaders and states. [54] About Asians and several other matters Levinas runs off the rails, but never about democracy.

Secondly, and more to the theoretical point, the distinction between the other and the third is not truly temporal. The third was always already there. “The third looks to me in the eyes of the Other . . . It is not that there first would be the face, and then the being it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice. The epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.” [55] The third was there all along, which means that all along my problem was to balance my obligation to you and all the others. Since I too am a third to all the others, I may not be sacrificed for them, even if I choose to sacrifice myself. Explicating the phrase “I am responsible for the persecutions that I undergo,” the epitome of substitution, Levinas declares that this position cannot be generalized. It applies only to me. My relations, my people, are already others, and for them I demand justice. “To say that the Other (Autrui) has to sacrifice himself to the others (les autres) would be to preach human sacrifice!” [56]

In such a world, there is no place for authoritarian rule, however

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benign. The first is the other, the second is me, and the third is all in others at once. There is no room and no place for a fourth, the ruler or party. The only argument one might possibly make along these lines is that in Levinas’ world there is really no place for politics period, and it is precisely this that makes his account dangerous. To ignore politics doesn’t make it go away, as good Marxists learned long ago. But Levinas doesn’t ignore politics, as I shall show.

From the perspective of substitution, there is only one political question: how do I make my infinite obligation to the other social? That is, how do I distribute my infinite obligation to the other in a world of others? As equally as possible seems to be Levinas’ answer, though in his later work he stresses my obligation to my neighbor, no longer the abstract other, but a real person near me. This raises some difficult issues, including that of weighing my obligation to stranger and neighbor. Theoretically my obligation to each is infinite; practically that cannot be. How to parse the difference?

Levinas will not answer. Doing so would require a universal ethics like Kant’s, or at least a universal formula. All Levinas will do is state that there is no solution, only a unique obligation to a multiplicity of others. There is no solution because Levinas’ entire project is to challenge principles, contracts and the like as instances of a totalizing tendency, the tendency to reduce the individual to an instance or status. Instead of universal principles, justice is founded on the infinite responsibility of each for all the others. It is the task of politics, in conjunction with tradition, to work out the details.

The last sentence puts it too simply. Custom, law and habit are the frames within which we act on our responsibilities. Without these frames, we could not act on our responsibilities because we could not act in a calculable, reasonable and predictable way. This is what Levinas means when he writes of “beyond the state in the

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state.” Levinas’ conservatism is real, and entirely practical. On the other hand, it is the whole point of the face that it is anarchic intrusion into the world, shattering all frames and forms. Think here of the word of the prophet.

In The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur writes of prophecy in terms of the tension between infinite demand and finite commandment. We think of the prophet as the one who utters a demand aimed at the sinful human heart. Consequently, it is a demand that can never be met. The result is to place God at an infinite distance from man, the One who accuses. But, that is not the whole story. For a long time, Biblical critics “failed to recognize this rhythm of prophetism and legalism. They also displayed an excessive contempt for legalism . . . This tension between the absolute, formless, demand and the finite law, which breaks the demand into crumbs, is essential.” Consider Moses. At the moment when “Moses is supposed to promulgate the moral and cultural charter . . . it is to the inner obedience of the heart that he appeals.” (Deuteronomy 6, 11, 29, 30) [57]

Levinas is no law giver. Levinas is a prophet in precisely that sense explicated by Ricoeur, albeit one who adopts a series of increasingly abstract formulations: not only for the word of God, but for the experience of God. An anthropomorphic God is transformed by Levinas into an abstract experience of excess so extreme that it shatters all my categories. The story about answering the doorbell is an attempt to characterize this experience, God as a shattering experience of otherness. Behind this experience, or rather shadowing this experience of the other, is an encounter with Illeity (illéité), a neologism coined by Levinas, and formed on the Latin or French for he. Illeity is God. One way to think about Illeity is in terms of its relationship to the il y a, with which it is linguistically coupled. “Might one then infer that the il y a mimes the transcendence it occludes?” asks Edith Wyschogrod. [58] Yes, and God is the opposite of mere being. More than that we cannot say, even as we surround an ineffable He-ness with a

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thousand stories. One of these stories concerns the everlasting tension between

Jerusalem and Athens. “Both the hierarchy [by which Levinas means law, state, and bureaucracy] taught by Athens and the abstract and slightly anarchical ethical individualism taught by Jerusalem are simultaneously necessary in order to suppress violence,” says Levinas, referring not just to physical violence, but to every way of living that does not put the other first. But while hierarchy and ethical individualism are both necessary, Levinas concludes that in our era the “protest against hierarchy” must take precedence. [59] In our age, violence is more likely to be the result of the smoothly functioning system than its breakdown. Ethical revolution is today more important than building up the institutions of law and justice, even as there might come a day when this was not the case.

The tension between prophecy and justice, the claims of the other and the claims of all the others, abides. There is no solution, no answer, just “permanent tension and ambiguity,” as Bloechl puts it. [60] Justice remains a dangerous business, as likely to subdue the particular as serve it. But what is the alternative? It seems too easy to conclude, as one commentator does, that for Levinas “philosophy serves justice by both thematizing difference and reducing the thematized to difference.” [61] To be sure, it is Levinas himself who says this, always a good source for a sympathetic critic. [62] But that doesn’t automatically make it right. Levinas downplays the radicalism of his own teaching, making it more symmetrical than it is, contributing to the formalism to which Caygill refers. Not symmetry but impossibility is the mark of Levinas’ political theory, in which philosophy serves justice by reminding us that its task is impossible–to treat each and every other as though he or she were my world. Levinas would teach us to live with this impossible task without telling us how.

For all its strangeness, Levinas’ account has room for politics. Politics is important because politics is not just about the administration of things,

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but the rationalization of justice–the calculation and weighing of infinite responsibility, no small matter. Levinas puts it this way in a late interview.

Ricoeur, in le Monde, speaking of the recent English elections, expressed his sorrow that, in England, a majority of people, having what they need, vote as landlords, as no one is concerned about the poor. [This is] one of the dangers of democracy: the permanent exclusion of a minority that always exists. [63]

This is not the teaching of an unpolitical man, even if his conclusion is not merely political. On the contrary, in an implicit reference to the state of nature theorists Levinas argues that the state exists for those who cannot fight for their own being, who are absent from the state. [64] Derrida interprets this as meaning that the justice of the state is measured by how well it cares for the alien, the metic, the non-resident. However, Annabel Herzog seems closer to the spirit of Levinas (and Ricoeur) when she writes that Levinas is first of all thinking of the poor, the hungry, the naked, and the homeless. From this perspective, the distinction between citizen and non-citizen is blurred, and that comes closer to Levinas’ own thinking. [65] Not citizen versus non-citizen, but person who can represent him or herself (his or her being) versus person who cannot. That is Levinas’ basic political distinction, one not lacking in subtlety.

Here is the dilemma. The state should feed, clothe, and house the poor. For the state to care for the poor, the poor must be made subject to bureaucracy, rendered faceless, less than fully human. If the state does not do this, the poor may go hungry, naked, and homeless. There is no solution, only “a reversal of the order of things!” [66] Somehow the state must become the place where individuals, one by one, become hostage to those in greatest need. About this “somehow” Levinas neither elaborates nor offers examples. It is this “somehow” state that I have called inverted liberalism. Levinas and his followers have used the terms utopia, surplus, and even “democracy to come” to characterize this same state.

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If there is place for politics in Levinas’ work, this does not make him a political theorist, though there is certainly a tendency among more recent interpreters of Levinas to make him one. As Critchley puts it in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, for Levinas “ethics is ethical for the sake of politics–that is, for the sake of a new conception of the organization of political space.” [67] My interpretation leans in the other direction. The origin of Levinas’ ethics in the face to face relationship imposes impossible demands on politics. That is why political theorists should be interested in him. Not because he is relevant to political theory, but because he isn’t.

Critchley is one of those postmoderns referred to in the introduction, a theorist of difference and otherness who finds in Levinas one who grants an ethical nimbus to the category of the other. Levinas, says Critchley, puts the self into question, allowing the self access to otherness. This statement about Levinas, which is true, is used to argue that the work of both Levinas and Derrida rests upon an “unconditional categorical imperative of affirmation,” one that produces a reading that commands respect for the other. [68]

Ignore, if you will, the move from people to texts, a move which itself deserves scrutiny, but not here. What is clear is that the affirmation of the other in Levinas’ work stems not merely from the otherness of the other, but from the sacredness of the other, the way in which the face of the other carries with it the trace of a God who has no name but Illeity, and no qualities, only infinite difference and distance. Without this trace, the affirmation of the other might as well be the negation of the other. Otherness is itself not valuable, except perhaps in the aesthetic sense that a diverse world is more interesting and pleasing to many than a uniform one. (Otherness is not tantamount to diversity, of course; a world filled with many others may be.) But there is not a hint of this argument in Levinas.

There is a related misreading of Levinas that would achieve much the same end by a less circuitous route. It is the more popular misreading,

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running something like this. When we open ourselves to the experience of the radiant human face, we open ourselves to an experience that combines sympathy for humanity with an awe that reminds us of the awe humans feel in the presence of the holy. Faced with an experience that combines human relatedness with sacred awe, we find we cannot kill or harm the other. [69]

There is enough evidence for this reading in Levinas that it would be more accurate to call it a partial and incomplete reading rather than a misreading. Nevertheless, Levinas cannot bear this reading either, as it implies too much mutuality on the one hand, too much a vision of man made in God’s image on the other. Levinas would explode the myth of mutuality and with it the myth of a supreme being, one capable of being characterized by any image at all, let alone a human one. A supreme non-being comes closer to the mark as far as Levinas is concerned, and that category does not lend itself to an experience of human mutuality, as Derrida has argued. [70] The experience of the human face as infinitely other, and so deserving of my worship, as God is, is itself a religious experience, one that should not be sociologically parsed or theoretically parceled out.

Is Levinas’ project the intrusion of Jerusalem into Athens, the insertion of infinity where it has no place, political theory? It could be argued. Indeed, it is not clear that political theory, as opposed to the ethical practice of politics, remains a distinct enterprise in Levinas’ account, though presumably each of us needs help in the rigorous weighing of our infinite responsibilities to others–not exactly the stuff of philosophy and public policy studies, though perhaps it should be.

The term “each of us” may surprise, as though the task of political theory were to help each of us, one by one, be more responsible for others. This comes closer to the mark for Levinas. Though Levinas is no liberal, aspects of his political theory come surprisingly close, as I have suggested. The reasoning, though, is entirely different. Against “liberalism,” which

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Levinas both embraces and rejects, as we have seen, Levinas opposes none of the usual categories, but “secrecy,” a surprising choice. With the term “secrecy” Levinas is not talking about privacy or isolation, but the “secrecy which holds to the responsibility for the other.” [71] Responsibility is an intimate relationship. While it maybe rationalized, even bureaucratized, Levinas suspects that in the end it is mass society, in all its guises, liberal and totalitarian, that is the great enemy of responsibility, for mass society compromises the privacy of the soul.

Would liberal democracy change its institutional structure, or only its meaning, under Levinas’ political theory? Evidently “only” its meaning. If the individual is valuable because only the individual can see the tears of the other, then everything changes, and everything remains the same as far as liberalism is concerned. It would be as if one scooped out the old liberal structure, filling it up with new substance, the experience of being hostage, even as the structure continued to look the same from the outside. From the outside liberal democracy looks the same because its goal remains the same, to protect the autonomous individual, which includes allowing him or her some say in how he or she is governed. What has changed is the meaning and purpose of individual existence: not to serve or express oneself, but to serve others. For this the individual still needs to be fostered and protected much as before, albeit for different reasons–so that he or she can dedicate him or herself to the tears of the other. Wittgenstein said that philosophy leaves everything as it is. Levinas would leave the institutions of liberal individualism much as they are, so that everything else might change.

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Notes

1. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 300.

2. Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 159. “l’Etat égalitaire et juste” is how Levinas puts it in the French original, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Paris : Livre de Poche, 1990), p. 248. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 21-30.

3. Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1993), p. 19. I am quoting Peperzak, not Levinas, but their views here (and generally) are identical.

4. “Cain-like coldness” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 71. “Transfer of sentiments,” in “Substitution,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, 79-96 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 91. Levinas cites Hobbes as an example of this way of thinking in the note (36) to this passage.

5. “Beyond the State in the State,” in New Talmudic Readings, ed. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 79-107. A couple of Levinas’ articles on Israel can be found in a collection of mostly religious readings by Levinas titled Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, translated by G Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994).

6. Derrida comments on Levinas’ distaste for cosmopolitanism in

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“Welcome,” in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 15-123, p. 88. From time to time, Jews have been associated with cosmopolitanism, as though they were a people without sufficient loyalty to a place, what is called nationalism.

7. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 3.

8. This is my version of Levinas’ example in “Enigma and Phenomenon,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 65-78. Levinas is fond of images of dwellings and doors, as Derrida points out in “Welcome,” pp. 26-27. The story about answering the doorbell, as well as my comparison between Levinas and the Frankfurt School, are drawn from my recent book, Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis (Wesleyan, CT and London: Wesleyan University Press and Continuum Books, 2002).

9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men” (Second Discourse), in The First and Second Discourses, translated by Roger Masters and Judith Masters, 77-228 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), pp. 150-151.

10. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 134.11. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,

1960), p. 258. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 81. Levinas uses the term narcissism frequently and causally, to capture humanity’s utter self-centeredness in the state of nature. I use it in the same casual way here.

12. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 172-173; quoted in Derrida, “Welcome,” p. 96. The question Derrida raises for Levinas in this essay (Derrida has always raised the hardest questions for Levinas) is whether in the act of opening the door and welcoming the other I have appropriated the space on which the other stands. To receive another is to say “you are welcome in my place.” But what makes it mine to begin with?

13. Levinas, “Substitution,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 79-96, p.

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91.14. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 302-304.15. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 43.16. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 33-

64, p. 54. 17. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 80.18. Levinas, “Substitution,” p. 90. 19. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 69.20. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 25.21. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 71. The statement is italicized in

the original. 22. Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Basic Philosophical

Writings, 11-31, p. 23. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 157. 24. Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” in Basic Philosophical Writings,

161-169, p. 169. 25. “Peace and Proximity,” p. 168.26. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 280. See too Otherwise than

Being, pp. 16, 160. 27. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 158. Simon Critchley, The

Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 2nd edition (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1999), pp. 46, 231. Ed Wingenbach, “Refusing the Temptation of Innocence: Levinasian Ethics as Political Theory,” in Strategies (1999) volume 12: 219-238, pp. 226-227.

28. Jeffrey Bloechl, in “Ethics as First Philosophy and Religion,” in The Face of the Other and The Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Jeffrey Bloechl, 130-151 (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 143. Bloechl made a number of helpful comments on an earlier version of my manuscript.

29. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 160. 30. Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Notre Dame, Indiana:

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University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 144. It is Davis, I believe, who first used the term “Levinas Effect.”

31. Howard Caygill, “Levinas’ Political Judgment: The Esprit Articles,” in Radical Philosophy, no. 104 (November/December, 2000): 6-15, p. 7. All translations from the French are from Caygill.

32. Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” in Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn, 1990): 64-71, translated by Seán Hand.

33. Levinas, “Sur l’esprit de Geneve,” in Les imprévus de l’histoire (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), 159-165, p. 164.

34. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), p. 43. Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 68.

35. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), vol. 1, p. 512.

36. Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 159.

37. Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), pp. 231-234, p. 233.

38. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 187. Caygill, Levinas and the Political, p. 172.

39. Levinas, “Ethics and Politics,” in The Levinas Reader, edited by Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), 289-297, p. 297.

40. Levinas, “Jewish Thought Today,” in Difficult Freedom, 159-166, p. 165.

41. Levinas, “Le Debat Russo-Chinois et la dialectique,” in Les imprévus de l’histoire (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), pp. 171-172.

42. Levinas, Time and the Other, translated by Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 50.

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43. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, translated by Walter Lowrie

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 38.44. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 50.45. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, translated by

Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 48.46. Ethics and Infinity, p. 59, author’s emphasis.47. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes (New

York: Philosophical Library, 1956), pp. 221-223. Sartre, Nausea, translated by Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 125-129.

48. Levinas, “There is: Existence Without Existents,” in The Levinas Reader, 29-36,

p. 34. 49. Levinas, “Jewish Thought Today,” in Difficult Freedom, p. 165.50. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1971), p. 565. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

51. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 118.52. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 111.53. In Levinas and the Political, Caygill (pp. 3, 169) argues that

Levinas is a republican, pointing out that fraternity is Levinas’ core concern, as when Levinas writes about “a freedom in fraternity . . . through which the rights of man manifest themselves concretely to consciousness as the right of the other, for which I am answerable,” in Outside the Subject, translated by Michael B. Smith (London: the Athlone Press, 1993), p. 125. But the fraternity about which Levinas writes has little to do with the fraternity of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Not just because Levinas transforms fraternity from comradeship to solidarity with the victim, but because

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substitution is not fraternity, but a much more distant nearness. “A relation without relation,” Levinas calls it, and that seems about right.

54. In Levinas’ 1990 Preface to “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” p. 63, quoted in Annabel Herzog’s, “Is Liberalism `All We Need’? Levinas’s Politics of Surplus,” in Political Theory, vol. 30, no. 2 (2002): 204-227. In thinking through Levinas’ liberalism, I have been helped by Herzog.

55. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 213. 56. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 99.57. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, translated by Emerson

Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 54-62, 59-61.58. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical

Metaphysics, second edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), p. xiii.

59. “Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 24, his emphasis.

60. Bloechl, “Ethics as First Philosophy and Religion,” p. 144.61. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, p.

235. 62. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 165. 63. Levinas, “Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other,” in Entre nous: On

Thinking-of-the-Other, translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 201-206, p. 205.

64. Levinas, At the Time of Nations, translated by M. B. Smith (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 61,

65. Derrida, “Welcome,” pp. 71-74. Herzog, “Is Liberalism?” pp. 218-219.

66. Levinas, Time of Nations, p. 61. 67. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, p.

223. 68. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, pp.

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4-5, 41.69. Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and

Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 208-217.

70. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

71. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, pp. 79-81.

Biographical StatementC. Fred Alford is Professor of Government and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has taught since 1979. Author of a dozen books on moral psychology, his most recent book is Levinas, the Frankfurt School, and Psychoanalysis. He is currently finishing up a book manuscript on freedom.

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