Abstract
Ever since I discovered Annabel Herzog’s “Is Liberalism ‘All We Need?’ Levinas’s Politics of Surplus” in the pages of this very journal, I have closely followed her work. 1 That essay was significant for reorienting scholars’ understanding of Levinas’s relationship to Western liberalism and also to the political more broadly. Her latest book is even more impressive and significant. It is not too much to say that this book should change the way in which we understand Levinas’s philosophical output; and it does so explicitly by developing his distinct approach to politics, at least in European—“continental”—philosophical circles, from the undertheorized and underexplored so-called Talmudic writings. With notable exceptions (Oona Eisenstadt, Ephraim Meir, Michael Fagenblat, Claire Katz, and others), these writings have generally been ignored by those working on Levinas’s “philosophical” or phenomenological books like Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. In Levinas’s Politics, Herzog shows how important the Talmudic writings are to Levinas’s overall project (and to his engagement with politics more broadly), and in doing so, she also reveals how certain features of Levinas’s thought are misunderstood without this necessary supplement.
Even the most cursory reading of Levinas reveals that his concerns are “ethical” in the distinct sense that he gives to the term, where that is understood as the encounter with an Other. 2 Such an encounter demands a particular phenomenological analysis, and this is where Levinas’s work connects to earlier traditions of phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. From the former, he takes the basic methodological approach of exploring first-person consciousness, noting that it is, in Franz Brentano’s words, “intentional” (i.e., consciousness is always conscious of; an intentional act is bound up with an intentional object). Husserl’s move, explicitly with the publication of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy in 1913 (and at a very high level of generality), is to see an analysis of first-person consciousness—oriented around intentionality and the means by which different sorts of intentional objects are given—as central for philosophical understanding of various stripes. Levinas is also influenced by Heidegger in being concerned with an intentionality that appears to be objectless but, on further phenomenological analysis, reveals an object. One can clearly see this interest in Levinas’s earliest writings, especially, for example, the 1929 essay, “Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology,” where Levinas is concerned with Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety as exactly revealing something “apparently paradoxical,” 3 so that that a proper analysis of anxiety “reveals to us the mark of nothingness in the world, hidden to the eyes of contemplation . . . [but] nothingness is not in the world as an entity. It cannot be conceived . . . it can only be anguishing.” 4 In short, anxiety does have an object, but one that cannot ever appear: the nothingness of the world. Levinas’s entire (phenomenological) oeuvre explores other such intentional (nonappearing) objects, most notably the face of the other, an intentional “object” that is distinct from the appearance of the same.
This context is central for properly situating the significance of Herzog’s book, which fundamentally assumes and begins with this story, in order to gloss the relationship between this phenomenological exploration of the encounter with the other and the fact of politics, which in Herzog’s words is “an ontological praxis of mediation among at least three people: the ego, the other, and any third party” (1). Apart from the basic political and philosophical—not to mention political philosophical—issues that arise from the relationship between ethics and politics in Levinas, Herzog further considers Levinas’s core aspirations as a thinker. With regard to the former, the standard line is generally that “the framework of all relationships can be considered to be always, and necessarily political” (2), because “there is no passage from the ethical duo [phenomenology] to the political trio, because the trio exists from the very beginning” (2). Admitting this, however, puts a lot of pressure on Levinas’s aims altogether—after all, if politics is primary in this way, what exactly is the function or aim of Levinas’s phenomenological account? Is it a mere philosophical curiosity, and if so, “why bother with ethics at all?” (3). Levinas’s own aims—as a thinker “after Auschwitz,” as responding to one of the most gruesome eras of human existence—suggests he was not simply engaged in a “mere” philosophical analysis. Such questions bring us to a point about Levinas’s core aspirations: oftentimes, Levinas’s rhetoric is sharply critical of any sort of dialectical approach and understands it to close off exactly the sort of ethical experience and phenomenological analysis just mentioned. Naturally, a sharp and seemingly insurmountable opposition between Levinas and dialectics thereby emerges. 5
Herzog’s book queries such dualisms and presents us with a unique approach, culled from his Talmudic writings, to the relationship between ethics and politics in Levinas’s thought. This approach also forces us to reconsider more broadly our understanding of Levinas the philosopher, and especially his relationship to dialectical thinking, 6 which forces us also to rethink the relationship between Hegel and Levinas and is in fact one of the most impressive and unique features of this book. Such nuance and sensitivity, both to the topics at hand and to Levinas’s writings, is a hallmark of Herzog’s work and is especially rewarding to read in Levinas’s Politics. Moving through chapters on Levinas’s views of the political (chapter 2), the social (chapter 3), the necessity of violence (chapter 4), evil (chapter 5), nature (chapter 6), Zionism (chapter 7), and messianism (chapter 8), the book forces us to rethink Levinas’s method (as purely phenomenological, seeing it instead as also dialectical) in order to better understand that he does not intend for ethics to exist divorced from politics, or vice versa. This should change our understanding of both Levinas’s most fundamental commitments while allowing us to situate his thought among a much wider range of contemporary topics and debates.
To see the import of these Talmudic writings, it is important to understand the basic relationship between them and Levinas’s phenomenological writings (both ought to be profitably considered philosophical): the former is meant to test the latter (9), offering a sort of lab (my word) wherein readers may explore the broader general, phenomenological claims within a practical, political context. Levinas is so committed to this method that such particulars can sometimes be presented in order to “challenge the ethical analyses” that appear in his phenomenology (5). What we are presented with are thereby two differing approaches and perspectives. If Herzog is right, then Levinas scholarship—because it has only seen the Talmudic writings as a sort of “confessional” autobiography and thereby irrelevant to the philosophy—has in fact closed itself off to another crucial strand within Levinas’s thought. Herzog stresses this point when she notes that an exclusively ethical world—one bereft of the perspective of politics—in fact cannot exist, for such a world “would be empty of people . . . because the ego would have sacrificed himself/herself to the other” (41). Both perspectives are thereby necessary for a proper analysis of our world.
Herzog begins with a view, explored in the Talmudic writings, whereby both politics and ethics are minimized and not taken seriously. Namely she begins with what is termed a “social indifference,” in which can be found “a society of disconnected individuals” (45, 47), such that neither ethics nor politics play a significant part. Herzog and Levinas mean to indict the traditional liberal perspective wherein politics and ethics are largely bounded by the (interests) of the market. As Herzog puts it, because of an indifference outside of the ego, “Western cities—namely, the members of modern liberal society in its entirety—are, in some way, unintentional killers, half guilty” (49). Such a view is problematic both because it causes suffering and because it runs counter to the ethical analysis in Levinas’s work; it “neither realizes ethics nor leads to politics” (54). While she doesn’t use this terminology, such a view shows that acknowledgment is central to Levinas’s entire philosophical analysis as an orienting category toward the other (the acknowledgment required for love or for murder or for anything in between). 7
Furthermore, while politics may be inherently violent (55–63), it is nonetheless required for opposing evil. In light of the arguments of the Talmudic writings, evil is exactly a situation where “an unattainable relationship between ethics and politics” arises, wherein “ethics and politics cannot coexist” (64). Prioritizing this claim underscores the stakes of Herzog’s book: understanding the ways in which politics and ethics can coexist is central to combatting various forms of evil (which themselves are best understood by the distinct ways in which ethics and politics come to be split apart). Herzog’s rendering of evil serves as a sort of linchpin for her book and allows her to discuss new approaches in Levinas’s work to nature and environmentalism (80–94), Zionism (95–107), and messianism (108–125), which each reach dead ends when projects within their domain are considered along axes that view them purely instrumentally (politics) or purely idealistically (ethics). Evil—and thereby the centrality of a “merciful justice” that is guided by a modulation between politics and ethics (127)—forces us to acknowledge that dialectical thinking, or the “dialectics of the Talmud” (124), has an important place in Levinas’s thought, all without denying a basic orientation that rejects any imputed triumphalism to such dialectics (as is often imputed to Hegel). 8
In conclusion, I want to note one moment where Herzog’s innovative reading invites more exploration. In one of the Talmud readings, Levinas notes that “political power wants to expand, it wants to be empire” (92). Such claims can profitably place Levinas into a particular tradition of modern political theory from Hobbes to Hegel where geometry is invoked at crucial points (such a tradition involves Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, among others). When Levinas claims that the world “is not a Euclidian space open to conquest” (93), he explicitly places himself in opposition to this tradition; Levinas’s invocations of the “height” of the other in the phenomenological writings and his claim that “the origin of space is in speech” (100) thereby become immediately relevant to a political theory that would contest such a reliance on geometric homogeneity within politics. Such claims, of course, require more elaboration, especially in elaborating Levinas’s exact place within political theory in light of this, and that is a project for the future, albeit one that will benefit from Herzog’s book.