Political Levinas

Levinas’ thinking is above all rooted in an ethical concern, which seems to lift him to heights beyond the political fray. Yet at certain key points in his work, we find bold political considerations that can enlighten our action in the present. Here, Jean-François Rey introduces us to this side of the philosopher that is too often overlooked.

 

           

Emmanuel Levinas is first and foremost a philosopher. If he occasionally speaks of “politics”, he does so as a philosopher. As rare as they are, his explicit contributions to journals and symposia never give rise to actual analyses of the present, but rather to comments, often pithy and directly related to his own research. Such is the case of an article published in the Temps modernes, in which he welcomes Egyptian President Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem: “Politics afterwards”^[1]. In it, Levinas speaks of peace as an open, realistic promise, rather than an analytical grid based on geopolitics or power relations. Yet, make no mistake, this “afterwards” is not a sign of disdain or contempt for politics. On a broader level, a rereading of his annual contributions to the French-language symposia for Jewish intellectuals reveals elements of political philosophy. Yet each time, these are presented as “Talmudic readings”, for which he apologizes for his incompetence! Using an extract from the Gemara as a starting point, he sets out, in his own language, but always respecting the logic of the text, reflections on political philosophy that are far more precise and daring than in his major philosophical opuses (“Totality and Infinity” -1961, “Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence” -1974, “Of God Who Comes to Mind” -1982). The same is true of his study on the nature and future of the State: “Caesar’s State and David’s State”, in which he sketches out a possible overtaking of the Roman State, balanced in its law, towards a pre-Messianic State.^[2] It is here that we grasp the complexity and audacity of a “political” Levinas. However, these “case studies” must be read in conjunction with his major philosophical works.

For Levinas, man is not wolf for man, but man for other man.

Simultaneously reading the 1961 and 1974 opuses with the Talmudic readings, published as early as the 1970s, one can find a very fine thought of the State seen through a veritable “Against Hobbes”, to use Miguel Abensour’s expression. It is not without consequences for today’s readers to refer to it, particularly in France. To agree with Hobbes that the State is the great Leviathan that inspires terror and submission in the various armed clans fighting against each other, would be to validate the only logic of authoritarian domination that can be read in ministerial speeches, where priority is given to “security concerns” and “restoring order”. If, for Hobbes, the quasi-original landscape of human cohabitation left to its own devices would be that of the war of all against all, where man is “a wolf to man”, for Levinas this is a misleading a priori. Compared to Hobbes, Levinas’s political philosophy will appear naive and “disarming” to the realists of the balance of power. For Levinas, man is not wolf for man, but man for other man. This is not an angelic reading, but an effort to extricate oneself from a fantasized vision of the original war, consubstantial with authoritarian discourse on both the right and the left, a contemporary representation of which can be found in a reading of Carl Schmitt. For Levinas, if it were necessary to contain and limit, it is not to an original violence that we should refer, but rather to a disposition of man for other man which, without limitation, would turn to “hemorrhaging”: solidarity, hospitality, welcoming the stranger. On this last point, for Levinas, being a host to the foreigner is a matter of “exposure” to others, not as a threat to our autochthony, but as a fraternal and militant welcome. If we are to define a policy of welcome, it’s not by putting forward irrational fantasies of “submersion”, but by limiting, when necessary, each person’s exposure. If it consumes me in its very obligation (“welcome the stranger”), it’s because of the plurality of beings to be rescued. Far from a logic of “quotas”, basing politics on welcome and its practical modalities means recognizing as a basic political fact that plurality is not primarily a question of numbers, and that a limit can be given to the generosity of the for others.

For, if there is an other of the other, and others among many others, we must introduce the notion of a Third, “as before a court of justice”^[3]. With the “comparison of incomparables”^[4], Levinas enters the realm of politics, which, without ceding anything about the other, makes justice not a pure institution of the rule of law, but, as a matter of priority, an instance where everyone accepts to be compared, weighed and judged. This is an original position that cannot be deduced from either Aristotle or John Rawls. Yet, most of the time, this “extravagant hypothesis”^[5] is shrugged off rather than examined serenely, given the difficulty the legitimate violence of the state has in extricating itself from its origins against a backdrop of civil war. When Levinas echoes the famous words, “pray for the State, for without it, men would swallow one another”, he is not regressing to a Hobbesian observation, but situating his own thinking at the level of a State whose proper name is Rome: if Rome balances itself, provisionally, through its law, by putting an end to civil wars, Rome is far from having the last word. Levinas doesn’t give us the final word either, but opens up a line of thought and research that leads us beyond law, to politics as the only intelligible horizon for social relations.

The naked brutality of Hitler’s hordes was intended to break with the entire history of culture as emancipation.

   

That Levinas was aware of the fragility of our democracies founded around the rule of law is clear from his 1934 article in Esprit: “Some reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism”.^[6] If he uses the term “philosophy” to describe the Nazis, it’s not out of carelessness, but to show that Nazism is the most radical break with the whole movement and all the philosophical schools that have nourished Western thought and culture, whether expressed in Christianity, Enlightenment philosophy and thoughts of social emancipation, or in Marxism. The naked brutality of Hitler’s hordes was intended to break with the entire history of culture as emancipation. Much later, when he prefaced an American reprint of the 1934 article, he saw in it the expression of an “elemental evil”, i.e. a reality – both thing and concept – in which we breathe with increasing difficulty, and which offers only murder as a prospect.^[7] After the war, Levinas was read as a leading political author by men grappling with Stalinist totalitarianism; in particular by the Czech drafters of Charter 77: Ian Patocka, Vaclav Havel and Ian Sokol, who were familiar with his work. Imprisoned or marginalized, these men and women incorporated into their struggle an author they saw not as an experimental political thinker, but as a call to freedom and wisdom. In Ian Sokol’s view, it was not wrong to see Levinas as a “social democrat” in the noble sense of the term.

And it is perhaps to Levinas that we should now turn again, at a time when “illiberal” democracies threaten to sweep Europe away, and when Trump is causing both the consistency and dignity of the Political to collapse. As early as 1961, in an underrated passage from Totality and Infinity, Levinas evokes the “pathetic of liberalism” which “consists in promoting a person insofar as he represents nothing else, that is, precisely a self”.^[8] A fine definition of the rule of law, which is not institutionally based on its apparatus, but on a philosophical notion of the individual as Self. The liberal state,” writes Levinas, ‘is a category of ethics’.^[9] He is well aware of the limits and aporias of political liberalism. If he stresses its “pathos”, it’s because he is aware of its fragility, its ever-potential disappearance, but also of its often underestimated link to sensibility, illuminated by the phenomenological notion of “pathic”. Today, we would speak of public emotions, phenomena typical of demonstrations of attachment to freedom, but always threatened with a tragic overtaking by violence. Today’s “illiberalism” uses liberalism itself to extinguish its critical charge. Levinas cannot be accused of ignoring the pitfalls of liberal thought. As early as 1934, he was confronting the possible disappearance of liberalism under the blows of Nazism: “absolute freedom, that which accomplishes miracles, is banished for the first time from the constitution of the spirit”.^[10] For Levinas, it is the enchainment to the body that Nazism manifests, in its own way. Marxism, on the other hand, retains the “power to shake off social enchantment”. Born in Lithuania, Levinas hailed the Russian Revolution as a hope for liberation from his youth. Later, he would call Stalinism “the alienation of disalienation itself”.

Levinas presents the somewhat unusual figure of an “an-archist” sobered by libertarian agitation. Just as he may surprise those who give in too easily to the seductions of an impatient messianism.

If he sees liberalism as the conquest of freedom, it also refers to the concrete, sensitive possibility of enjoying private life, apart from public life, a withdrawal that alone justifies property as collection and reception. This is the language used in 1961, but it immediately reveals its ambiguity: the house can close itself off to the stranger, the “home” can turn into exclusion. The sensitive dimension is all too often overlooked, for which Levinas also uses the term “erotic” (sometimes dismissively hailed as “stained-glass eroticism”). More fundamentally, he refutes the dehumanizing dryness of the DASEIN which, in Heidegger, “never goes hungry”.

In the course of Talmudic readings, taken up again in volumes, a beyond-the-State perspective is finally fleshed out, one that does not call into question assumed liberalism. The ethical category deepens: it’s not a question of doing without the State, but of seeing that it is not original, in the sense that it cannot take shelter behind an ARKHE that would put it beyond the reach of criticism. Levinas presents the somewhat unusual figure of an “an-archist” sobered by all libertarian agitation. He may also surprise those who would give in too easily to the seductions of an impatient messianism. After many voices from the Talmud, he clearly shows that we must make room for the “directives of the hour”, i.e. political action. And to do this, we must put ourselves “on leave from the absolute” in the name of the absolute itself. A difficult task: to avoid exposing ourselves to crimes committed in the name of the absolute. Not to jeopardize the fragile edifice of the liberal state, which cannot close in on itself: it is only a dimension that he calls, echoing his reading of Paul Celan, a utopia “like a clearing where man shows himself”.^[11]

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Jean-François Rey

 

Bibliography: Levinas’s “Talmudic readings” are collected in :

• Quatre lectures talmudiques, Minuit, 1968
• Du sacré au saint, Minuit, 1977
• L’au-delà du verset, Minuit, 1982
• A l’heure des nations, Minuit, 1988
• Nouvelles lectures talmudiques, Minuit, 1996