“Difficult Freedom”: Levinas, Language and Politics
Michael Bernard-Donals
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics (April 2005)
In Emmanuel Levinas’s major theoretical works, rhetoric –
like politics and ontology – is depicted as a system of thought
regularizes quotidian elements of being that are most certainly
not regular. Rhetoric in the Greco-Roman tradition, for Levinas,
fundamentally understood the relation between world and word as
one in which notions of language and community were so
regularized as to lull citizens into a false consensus and an
equally false sense of security. It was no wonder that national
systems founded upon traditional notions of democracy often
found themselves bound into knots trying to negotiate
incommensurable positions – party against party, group against
group, individual against individual – positions that led to
bothersome and sometimes violent strife.
Instead of epistemology or ontology, Levinas proposed
ethics as first philosophy. Understanding how we orient
ourselves toward others in both reasonable and unreasonable ways
would help us in turn understand how those orientations
sometimes conformed with or resisted what we thought of as
“essence” or “being” or “truth” in the Greco-Roman tradtion.
But Levinas’s position depends on individual relations, and
works antisystemically: this is why Alain Badiou and Gayatri
Spivak worry that Levinas rejection of traditional notions of
rhetoric and politics render his ideas useless for social
thought.
But this worry ignores his writings, in Difficult
Freedom, on politics, Judaism, and the state of Israel, writings
on what could only be called realpolitik.
Today I’ll explore
the relation between Levinas’s understanding of language and
politics, and how Israel can be seen as a case in point for such
a politics’ successes and failures.
One of Levinas’ principal ideas is that of hospitality and
welcoming, one related closely to his notion of proximity.
Playing on the double meaning of the French term hôte as both
“host” and “guest”, Levinas’ writes that when an individual
engages another in discourse, he acts at once as host and as
guest. Derrida, apropos of Rosenzweig, explains (in Adieu, for
Emmanuel Levinas) that there is a law “that would make of the
inhabitant a guest [hôte] received in his own home, that would
make of the owner a tenant, of the welcoming host [hôte] a
welcomed guest [hôte]” (42).
The displacement involved here is
not just a conceptual or epistemological one; it’s also,
potentially, a physical one.
When the individual engages the
other, she is both at home and in exile, neither completely
apart from, nor completely a part of, the community or the
location from which she speaks.
The host is a not only a host or a guest; the host [hôte]
is also a hostage [ostage].
[T]he host is a hostage insofar as he is a subject put into
question, obsessed (and thus besieged), persecuted, in the
very place where he takes place, where, as emigrant, exile,
stranger, a guest from the very beginning, he finds himself
elected to or taken up by a residence before himself
electing or taking one up. (Derrida 56)
In political terms, there is no place the subject can
comfortably call home, or domicile, or community, or nation.
Though she may speak from a location that is home, or domicile,
or nation, her relation to that place, like her relation with
the other, isn’t “natural,” a point of origin from which
everything else may be understood.
The state, not unlike the
biblical cities of refuge, should be seen as places for the
exile – the individual “put into question” – to find respite and
in what is beyond being and the utterance, be redeemed (see
Beyond the Verse 38-47).
While the subject’s relation to the other is always fraught
and always tenuous, what raises the stakes is the presence of a
third party to whom both the speaker and the other are also
responsible.
The third – “the neighbor and the one far off”
(Isaiah 57:19) – introduces the notion of justice and, in turn,
politics.
Levinas puts it this way:
contradiction in the saying ….
consciousness.
“The third introduces a
A question of conscience,
Justice is necessary, that is, comparison,
coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling…” (OTB 157).
Anything I might do or say will be seen, even only potentially,
by the third, and forces me to compare my act with other acts
and utterances that might be carried out by someone I do not
know.
It forces “a weighing, a thinking, a calculation, the
comparison of incomparables, and consequently, the neutrality –
presence or representation – of being” (“Peace and Proximity”
168).
It is this thinking, the comparison of incomparables,
that allows the ethical actor to think the radical individuality
of his act as something other than solitary or unique, and that
makes politics possible.
Israel, from its inception, functioned something like a
biblical city of refuge in the aftermath of the Shoah for the
wave upon wave of immigrants from abroad that would eventually
form its citizenry.
In it Levinas saw a testing ground for the
ethics and politics he lays out in the philosophical works.
Nearly everything Levinas writes comes against the backdrop of
those events -- the destruction of the Jewish communities of
Europe in the Final Solution, and the war of 1947-8 that led to
the creation of the Jewish state.
“My biography,” he writes at
the conclusion to Difficult Freedom, “is dominated by the
presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror” (291).
Levinas
is actively working against a notion of politics in which the
name of the individual is subsumed – and in the case of the
Final Solution, erased – by the name of the universal, where the
“we” of nation, or community, or race eliminates that which
resists naming.
Levinas works from the opposite assumption:
all action produces a surplus, all action and utterance resists
the name. What should be eliminated is a politics which reduces
the excess to a repetition of the same.
Israel, as both domicile and as nation, makes room for both
the individual – the host (hôte) – and the universal; it aspires
to provide a refuge for all comers.
Because Israel was founded
essentially by strangers – by those who had arrived from Europe
in the generations before the UN Partition Plan and by those who
had arrived immediately after the war – and by fellow-Jews, it
is Judaism, rather than national community, that establishes the
“universality” of the nation.
not exactly universal:
And yet that Judaism is itself
the Jew, because he is “exiled on this
earth,” discovers his fellows “before discovering landscapes and
towns” (DF 22).
unity of a “we”.
Individuals matter more than geography, the
If Israel is to become a political entity, it
must see itself as “non-original, stripped of all local colour”.
Such a country must lose its “’curiosity’ value, [and thus it
becomes] increasingly difficult to define [itself].”
Though Israel’s residents may be able to conceive of what
he calls a “supernatural order,” they see themselves as
residents and usurpers; Israel is a home to aliens and an
instigator of exile.
“What is signified by the advent of
conscience, and even the first spark of spirit, if not the
discovery of corpses beside me and my horror of existing by
assassination?” (100).
To act ethically and politically at once
is to understand one’s actions as both radically individual and,
through justice, universal:
Israel and the Bible both
understand the founding of an ethical community must take place
“inside [the situations of wars and slavery and sacrifices and
priests] which it must assume in order to overcome them” (101).
As such, the citizen of such a state “uproot[s himself] from his
recent past … and seeks his authenticity” (164).
This doesn’t
mean ignoring wars and slavery, sacrifices and priests; it means
that the citizen has to act ethically in the face of all this –
uprooting himself from the context in which he finds himself
mired – in order to act justly in his encounters with his fellow
citizens, one by one.
It is only in such a particularism – in
such a notion of authenticity found in justice – that the
citizen of any state, let alone the state of Israel, might also
become a member of a broader community.
In what may be his most important essay on contemporary
Judaism and politics – “Judaism and the Present” – Levinas
writes that “Judaism, disdaining false enternity, has always
wished to be a simultaneous engagement and disengagement” (213).
He has in mind here Sartre’s notion of engagement, in which the
one who is politically engaged is separatge from – disengaged –
from the consensually-built community in which he otherwise
resides.
The tension that results creates what Levinas calls a
“negation” of human essence, and it’s just this negation that
Levinas sees as foundational for Judaism and an Israeli state.
It must be “a non-coincidence with its time, within
conincidence: in the radical sense of the term it is an
anachronism, the simultaneous presence of a youth that is
attentive to reality and impatient to change it, and an old age
that has seen it all and is returning to the origin of things”
(212).
The most obvious sign that such a politics is possible
is in Israel’s understanding of the law and of its foundational
text, the Torah.
In the study the law there is the potential
for a “permanent revision and updating of the content of the
Revelation where every situation within the human adventure can
be judged” (213).
The law, the text, and the utterance aren’t
static but are constantly subject to revision, to noncoincidence, in every utterance or iteration.
The law doesn’t
warrant the state and its politics, but interrupts it. “To love
the Torah more than God,” a phrase Levinas uses as the title for
one of his more curious essays, means that though we may see the
law as foundational, that very law denotes an absence:
in the
case of the Torah it is the absence of God; in the case of the
law, it is the absence of a point of origin.
requires constant negotiation.
Such a law
To love the Torah more than God
is a “protection against the madness of a direct contact with
the Sacred that is unmediated by reason” and “a confidence that
does not rely on the triumph of any institution,” the triumph of
politics for itself.
It’s only through engagement with
individuals in all the vulnerability that it implies that those
individuals might engage one another with a view toward justice.
The question with which to conclude is how such a politics
can be made possible.
There are three fundamental hurdles to
such a politics, in Israel or any other national community.
Israel, as a state that is inescapably religious (and in
Levinas’s writing it’s hard to separate “Judaism” from
“Israel”), might serve as a model for other national entities
with a religious character:
east,
the Islamic states in the
middle
particularly Iran, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia; the Catholic
countries of Europe, particularly Ireland, Poland, and Italy;
and,, increasingly, the United States with its conservative
politics heavily inflected with a religious fundamentalism of
its own.
The difficulty is to separate the “universalism”
implied by religious belief – regardless of the exclusionary
character of their belief systems – and the particularity of an
ethical social law. Cleary, looking at the state of
parliamentary politics in Israel today, this hasn’t happened
yet.
One reason why it hasn’t is that the state hasn’t
reconciled itself to being both host and guest, host and
hostage.
Israel is not the only nation having trouble dealing
with this issue:
recent work in diaspora studies and on the
influence of emigration on world culture and politics has
suggested that this century more than any other might be seen as
one of both cosmopolitanism and of exile.
And it is
fundamentally difficult to understand oneself as both a stranger
and a host, which is precisely what the state of Israel has
become:
torn between establishing a city of refuge for Jews
around the world and erecting barriers to the stranger, Israel’s
policy for the Palestinians has become abhorrent in the eyes of
many of its own citizens.
Repulsed by Paul Claudel’s question –
“What does all this Bedouin caper matter to us?”
-- Levinas
warns that we are perhaps prisoners of “outmoded sociological
categories” (131).
The way out of the conundrum is to
understand that the problem of suffering is what each individual
faces and thus has in common.
To approach the other is to
become exceptionally vulnerable, and to do so exposes the
individual to the possibility that she will be rebuffed, in some
cases violently.
This was, in fact, the horror of the Shoah,
which haunts Levinas and Israel:
the “we” of National Socialism.
haunts Israel.
the individual was crushed by
But this same horror also
While he recognizes that “the Arab peoples would
not have to answer for German atrocities, or cede their lands to
the victims of Hitler” (131), Levinas also recognizes that Arabs
have ceded their land, often involuntarily, and also suffer.
Though the right to a birthplace is important, the “local
colour” of the landscape is less important than engagement.
“Every survivor of the Hitlerian massacres – whether or not a
Jew – is Other in relation to martyrs.
[Each one] is
consequently responsible and unable to remain silent” (132;
emphasis in original).
Suffering, non-coincidence, and
survival require engagement on the part of each individual,
regardless of their location of origin or their personal or
national affiliation with the dead.
To obey the obligation to speak and act, both ethically and
politically, one may have to find another language.
Lyotard and
Blanchot suggest something similar, that after Auschwitz, the
disaster which has ruined everything, the language of history
and of politics may not do justice to the future.
It is only in
such a language that a reality may be written which, if it
doesn’t establish a foundation for political thought, clearly
establishes the ethical ground on which such a politics might he
enacted. It remains to be seen whether, in the language of
displacement and of patient and painful encounters with
individual others, a politics will emerge that will abandon
claims to the land, or to language -- in Hebrew terms to yad
v’shem – in favor of claims on individuals as hosts, hostages,
and guests.
The problems of nation states, and in particular
the problems of Israel and its Palestinian neighbors, seem
intractable.
But if Levinas is right, it is in squarely facing
the neighbor as the person who demands justice that gives a
politics of hope a chance.
Works Cited
Blanchot, Maurice.
Ann Smock.
The Writing of the Disaster.
Trans.
Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques.
Adieu: to Emmanuel Levinas.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
Stanford U P, 1999.
Trans.
Stanford, CA:
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt.
and Ethics.
__________.
Getting it Right: Language, Literature,
Chicago: U Chicago P, 1992.
Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society.
Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1999.
Levinas, Emmanuel.
Otherwise than Being; or Beyond Essence.
Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne U P,
1981/1998.
__________.
Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne U P, 1969.
__________.
Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism.
Sean Hand.
__________.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 1990.
Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures.
Trans. Gary D. Mole.
__________.
Trans.
London: Athlone Press, 1994.
“Peace and Proximity.” Trans. Peter Atterton and
Simon Critchley.
Writings.
Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical
Ed. Adrian Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert
Bernasconi.
Bloomington: U Indiana P, 1996.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois.
The Differend: Phrases in Dispute.
Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele.
P, 1988.
Minneapolis: U Minnesota