Levinas's Ethical Politics

Michael L. Morgan

Description

Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas's thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas's ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings—including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state—which are controversial reflections of Levinas's political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas's political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds.

Preface
Part I. Overview
1. Tears the Civil Servant Cannot See: Ethics and Politics
2. Judaism, Zionism, and the State of Israel
Part II. Philosophical Articulation
3. The Third Party: Transcendental Ethics and Realistic Politics
4. Ethics as Critique
5. Responsibility for Others and the Discourse of Rights
6. Liberalism and Democracy
Part III. Ethics, Politics, and Zionism
7. Teaching Prophetic Politics: Ethics and Politics in Levinas's Talmudic Lessons
8. Zionism and the Justification of a Jewish State
9. Ethics, Politics, and Messianism
10. Levinas's Notorious Interview
Part IV. Defense
11. Levinas and His Critics
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of religion

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780253021182
• Langue: English

Extrait

LEVINAS S ETHICAL POLITICS
The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies
Sponsored by the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns
Jewish Studies Program
Indiana University
Sander L. Gilman
Jews in Today s German Culture
Arnold M. Eisen
Taking Hold of Torah: Jewish Commitment and Community in America
Omer Bartov
The Jew in Cinema: From The Golem to Don t Touch My Holocaust
David G. Roskies
The Jewish Search for a Usable Past
Geoffrey H. Hartman
The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Samuel D. Kassow
Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive
Hilary Putnam
Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein
Vivian Liska
When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature
LEVINAS S ETHICAL POLITICS
MICHAEL L. MORGAN
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Michael L. Morgan
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morgan, Michael L., [date], author.
Title: Levinas s ethical politics / Michael L. Morgan.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Series: The Helen and Martin Schwartz lectures in Jewish studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015046060 | ISBN 9780253021069 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253021106 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253021182 eb
Subjects: LCSH: Levinas, Emmanuel. | Ethics. | Political science-Philosophy. | Political ethics.
Classification: LCC B2430.L484 M674 2016 | DDC 172.092-dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046060
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
To my brother, Fred
RABBI, TEACHER, SCHOLAR
CONTENTS
Preface
PART I. OVERVIEW
1 Tears the Civil Servant Cannot See: Ethics and Politics
2 Judaism, Zionism, and the State of Israel
PART II. PHILOSOPHICAL ARTICULATION
3 The Third Party: Transcendental Ethics and Realistic Politics
4 Ethics as Critique
5 Responsibility for Others and the Discourse of Rights
6 Liberalism and Democracy
PART III. ETHICS, POLITICS, AND ZIONISM
7 Teaching Prophetic Politics: Ethics and Politics in Levinas s Talmudic Lessons
8 Zionism and the Justification of a Jewish State
9 Ethics, Politics, and Messianism
10 Levinas s Notorious Interview
PART IV. DEFENSE
11 Levinas and His Critics
Conclusion
Notes
Index
PREFACE
Readers of Emmanuel Levinas will not proceed far in their study of his writings and his thought without coming across the criticism that his central idea about the face-to-face relation and interpersonal responsibility is irrelevant-to our daily lives, to social relations, and to politics. About ten years ago, in the course of writing Discovering Levinas , I cited the off-hand comment of Richard Rorty to this effect: that Levinas s face-to-face is of no public, political, or social importance at all-simply a mere nuisance. 1 This virtually gratuitous criticism of Levinas is but the most flamboyant and striking example of an objection regularly leveled against Levinas s highly abstract and seemingly mystifying expressions and ideas. Unlike Rorty, who gave no indication of actually having read and studied Levinas with care and sympathetically, there are others who have and who still come away with such a criticism. To the student of Levinas, the criticism of his irrelevance to daily life and especially to social and political life hovers as a constant worry-or what ought to be. It certainly was for me, and while I was convinced that it was mistaken, it took a good deal of time for me to gather up the will and the effort to try to confront it head-on.
The immediate stimulus was a conversation with Seyla Benhabib in New Haven in the fall of 2012. At the time Seyla was immersed in the controversy in Germany over Judith Butler and the awarding of the Adorno Prize and, at the same time, was in the process of writing a critical review of Butler s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism . At lunch we talked about both, and I was surprised at Seyla s willingness to accept Butler s interpretation and use of Levinas and in fact to endorse it. To me, Butler was clearly confused, if not manipulative, and I left lunch convinced that one day soon I ought to take up the whole issue of Levinas s political relevance. I had read Howard Caygill s influential book, and I knew Simon Critchley s work well. And I was familiar with the many objections to Levinas s purported Eurocentrism and his embarrassing comments on China and other cultures. But I felt that a more generous reading that was nonetheless serious and not simply fawning admiration had yet to be given. My conviction was nursed along by ongoing discussion of Levinas and politics with Carmen Dege, then a graduate student working with Seyla and someone who knew Levinas s writings and had strong views about the issues. Carmen sat in on my course at Yale on Levinas, and we talked all semester long about the political implications of Levinas s ethical insight. We also discussed at length drafts of Seyla s review, which eventually was published in Constellations . 2 I left Yale in the spring of 2013 for the University of Toronto and a reading group on Levinas, where I continued to think about ethics and politics in Levinas, sharing thoughts with Sol Goldberg, Simone Chambers, and others. When Jeff Veidlinger, then director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University-my home for nearly thirty-five years-invited me to deliver the Schwartz Lectures at Indiana in the spring of 2014, I decided without much deliberation that I had a subject, and in March and April of that year I gave two lectures, Tears the Civil Servant Cannot See, one on ethics and politics in Levinas, the other on Levinas on Zionism and the State of Israel. These have become chapters 1 and 2 of this book, which is an expanded version of those lectures.
Levinas calls his way of thinking a form of Platonism. It is a claim that could easily be misunderstood. Platonism, after all, is a multidimensional and complex tradition, with many facets and richly diverse. To understand what Levinas means, however, we need to focus on the Republic and especially on book 6, where the ultimate subject of study and the preeminent locus of the order of nature and society is called the Form of the Good. To Levinas, this Platonic formulation stands for the primacy of the ethical for all human experience and the determinative role that the ethical plays vis- -vis our cognitive achievements and our social and political goals. As Levinas looks back to Husserl, Heidegger, and the tradition of Western philosophy, he takes Plato to have stood for this commitment to the centrality or primacy of the good, of ethics and morality, and he sees his own thinking to be a twentieth-century return to this affirmation. 3 Moreover, his return to this Platonism is made all the more salient and urgent by the fact that it is a determinative feature of a philosophical reorientation not only to the tradition of Western philosophy but also to twentieth-century society and culture, to modernity, and to recent historical events. For Levinas s Platonism is as much about life as it is about thought, indeed more so, for it is the core of his response to the century of atrocities, horrors, and suffering that he associates with World War I, the rise of totalitarianisms and fascisms, the discovery, use, and threats of nuclear weapons, ongoing genocides, and so forth-all of which is represented by the metonymy, the Holocaust, Auschwitz, the death camps. It is the central thesis of Richard J. Bernstein s essay on Levinas and radical evil that all his thought is a response to Auschwitz and the Nazi death camps, and there is some truth in such a claim. 4 What interests me here is the point that for Levinas, philosophy and ethics are a response to life, to the particular historical and political events that constitute concrete experience. Levinas s claim about his Platonism, then, is not an endorsement of a kind of world-denial or Gnosticism; Levinas does not admire the Plato of the Phaedo in this respect. To be sure, the face of the other person is one-perhaps the central-exemplification of transcendence in human experience. But transcendence for Levinas is not beyond the world and history; rather it is in it, for it is present in all face-to-face human encounters and relations. And it is the fulcrum of the ethical, which is also present foundationally in all human experience. This is Platonism; it is Levinas s Platonism, and it speaks directly to all those who object that Levinas s thinking is irrelevant and a mere nuisance.
The Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are deeply influenced by Levinas. Their most recent film, Two Days, One Night , an extraordinary accomplishment, is, on my reading, a compelling expression of a Levinasian ethical sensibility. The film begins on a Friday, when Sandra, who has recently been released from a hospital where she has been treated for depression and has been on leave from her job at a small factory, is informed by a co-worker and friend that Sandra has lost her job. While she has been o