Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Fagenblat is Lecturer in the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University.

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A COVENANT OF CREATURES

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface: Judaism as a Philosophical Way of Life...............................................xiAcknowledgments...............................................................................xxvii1 Levinas's New Creation: A Philosophy of Judaism, Without and or between.....................12 From Chaos to Creation: The Genesis of Ethics...............................................333 Ethics in the Image of God: Anthropology ex Nihilo..........................................67INTERLUDE: From Moral Creators to Ethical Creatures: Levinas's Kehre..........................974 Ethical Negative Theology...................................................................1115 Secularizing the Covenant: the Ethics of Faith..............................................1406 The Ambivalence of Fraternity: Ethical Political Theology...................................171Conclusion....................................................................................195Notes.........................................................................................199Bibliography..................................................................................251Index.........................................................................................273

Chapter One

A PHILOSOPHY OF JUDAISM, WITHOUT AND OR BETWEEN

The Jew is split, and split first of all between the two dimensions of the letter: allegory and literality. -Jacques Derrida

A Philosophy of Judaism?

When asked, as he frequently was and, indeed, from the earliest occasions, Emmanuel Levinas rejected the notion that he was "a Jewish philosopher." His arguments and conclusions made claims independent of his particular confession of faith and religious affiliation. They are, he proposed, independent of all confessions of faith and religious affiliations; they are phenomenological analyses of "the thing itself," the thing of ethics. The Other-that thing of ethics-is not a Judaic or even a religious phenomenon. And if religion in general and Judaism in particular agree on the significance and manifestation of ethics, that is because they have caught sight of something in the thing itself rather than because philosophy is an apology for religion or doctrine. To avoid confusion, and in addition to protesting, Levinas chose different publishers for his philosophical writings from those he chose for his Jewish ones. Although several fascinating footnotes in Otherwise than Being hint at an unwritten commentary Levinas kept to himself, in the philosophical corpus he generally avoided discussion of Jewish sources, lest they be mistaken for "proof texts," as if a text could prove anything about ethics itself. In principle, even though Levinas was a practicing and learned Jew, he claimed to write as a philosopher and asked to be read as one.

It was Gabriel Marcel, as one of the examiners of Levinas's doctorat d'tat, Totality and Infinity, who was perhaps the first to make the "alarming comment": "Why do you always say 'the other' when you know that the term exists in the biblical tradition as 'the neighbor'?" We do not know how Levinas responded to his Christian interlocutor; one imagines a slight wink or a wry smile, an unstated acknowledgment of a Judeo-Christian fidelity that philosophers, especially Parisian ones, ought to share only in secret. Ricoeur, another Christian philosopher, likewise thought Levinas was concealing his Judaism in his philosophical cloak.

There are no quotations from the Bible-except one or two maybe-in Totality and Infinity. It's Plato. It's Descartes. And when he reads in Plato that the idea of the Good is beyond Being, he is thinking of the unpronounceable name, and he makes a kind of short-circuit that is never named as such. That the unsayable and the Good of Plato are superimposed at a point that itself cannot be named, is something that I sense to be very deeply buried, something profoundly dissimulated and always said indirectly.

Two of France's leading Christian thinkers, then, suggested that Levinas secretes his Judaism amid his philosophy. Other Christian thinkers outside France, along with Jewish thinkers in the united states and Israel, agree that Levinas's philosophy is intimately if not entirely bound to his Judaism. And while these commentators regard Levinas's secret Judaism as making an important contribution to contemporary philosophy, several notable philosophers regard the religious element as a fatal flaw or even a bluff, behind which stands an antiphilosophical rhetoric of blind faith, dogmatism, and piety.

Neither Philosophy

Sometimes such critics protest at the generally religious thrust to Levinas's thought; at other times they imply the problem lies in its specifically Judaic character. Almost always the argument has the following form: Levinas's ethics is based on a metadivision between the categories of the other and the Same. He himself locates ethics, Judaism, and revelation in the category of the Other, while he places reason, history, and ontology in the realm of the Same. By his own lights, then, there is an alienation or a "diremption," as Gillian rose calls it, between the spirit of ethics and the world of reflective, deliberative action in which this so-called "ethics" is determined as action, politics, and law. Where Levinas sees ethics as the blind spot of philosophy, a point at which philosophy cannot see itself seeing the world, these philosophers contend that his version of ethics actually blinds philosophy by imposing the sense of an exteriority invisible to the light of consciousness and reason. In Judith Butler's estimation, Levinas's account of ethics involves "a demand that is not open to interpretation" and is therefore no more or less "uncritical and unthinking than an acquiescence to an ungrounded authoritarian law." On the basis of a similar appraisal Dominique Janicaud concluded that "such a dogmatism could only be religious." What Levinas calls "ethics" would belong to the realm of faith, indeed, to a particular type of faith set apart from reason or thought. Alain Badiou concurs:

Lvinas's enterprise ... is entirely bound up with a religious axiom; to believe that we can separate what Lvinas's thought unites is to betray the intimate movement of this thought, its subjective rigor. In truth, Lvinas has no philosophy-not even philosophy as the "servant" of theology. Rather, this is philosophy (in the Greek sense of the word) annulled by theology, itself no longer theology (the terminology is still too Greek, and presumes proximity to the divine via the identity and predicates of God) but, precisely, an ethics.... to put it crudely: Lvinas's enterprise serves to remind us, with extraordinary insistence, that every effort to turn ethics into the principle of thought and action is essentially religious. We might say that Lvinas is the coherent and inventive thinker of an assumption that no academic exercise of veiling or abstraction can obscure: distanced from its Greek usage (according to which it is clearly subordinated to the theoretical), and taken in general, ethics is a category of pious discourse.

While this condemnation of the "essentially religious" element in Levinas's ethics is indeterminately labeled, within the context...