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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."
"What do we make of Levinas's ethics if there is no politics in his thought? Annabel Herzog's beautifully written and cogently argued book addresses precisely this question and answers that his work does contain a politics, albeit one that's easy to miss. Turning to Levinas's Talmudic readings, Herzog shows that it is in these writings that Levinas explores the relationship between his 'ethics as first philosophy' and his commitment to the political. With her exhaustive scholarship and distinctive interpretation of Levinas's corpus, Herzog has given us a book that will be required reading for anyone working on Levinas, Continental philosophy, or postwar Jewish intellectual history."
"Levinas's Politics is an original intervention in political philosophy as well as an excellent read. Annabel Herzog, in virtue of her talents as a leading political theorist, is well positioned to explicate the compelling principles at the heart of what seems to be Jewish religious discourse."
List of Abbreviations
Note on Translations
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Talmudic Readings: From Literature to Politics
Chapter 2. Levinas's Conception of Politics in the Talmudic Readings
Chapter 3. Levinas's Critique of Social "Indifference"
Chapter 4. On the Necessity of Political Violence
Chapter 5. Evil as Injustice
Chapter 6. On Nature
Chapter 7. Levinas and the Modern State of Israel
Chapter 8. Hegelian Dialectics and the Question of Messianism
Conclusion. Levinas's Concept of Laïcité
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments