A Singular Justice

Abstract

The problem of the relation between ethics and politics in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is, above all, the problem of a singular justice: can there be an abstract principle or law that does justice to the absolute singularity of the other who faces me? Levinas has often suggested that, left to itself, politics becomes tyranny insofar as it is an impersonal justice which judges according to universal rules, without regard for the singularity of this other. Justice, he argues, is able to retain a meaning--that is, to remain just-only where it is oriented to and by the ethical relationship, only where it is checked and criticized starting from the ethical relation to a face.' But is such an ethically informed politics possible if "ethics" indicates a relation to transcendent alterity, or to unmediated singularity, and "politics" refers to a relation under the law, necessarily mediated, abstract, and universal? Can there be an ethical politics, or do the terms of this relation exclude one another with a rigor and systematicity whose logic would be unbreachable? In Adieu a Emmanuel Levinas,2 Jacques Derrida extends his recent reflection on the political (undertaken in such works as Of Spirit, Specters of Marx, and Politics of Friendship) through a consideration of the problem of ethics and politics in Levinas's thought. The volume is composed of two essays: the first, titled simply "Adieu," was delivered at Levinas's funeral in December of 1995; the second, "A Word of Welcome," was the opening address one year later at a conference in homage to Levinas held at the Sorbonne. In this latter address, Derrida proposes a re-reading of Levinas's ethics as a meditation on "hospitality" and "the welcome," and takes as his guiding concern the relation between an "ethics of hospitality" and a "law or a politics of hospitality" (Adieu 45). As is well-known, Levinas's thought devotes far less attention to the problem of the political than it does to the question of the meaning of the ethical. While a redescription and reinterpretation of the ethical relationship as a relation to absolute alterity is undeniably central to Levinas's two major works, comparatively little is said in these same texts about the political relationper se, or about the central themes and questions of political theory. It is often asked, in consequence, whether Levinas's ethics can serve as the ground for politics, and what sorts of determinate political institutions and systems would be consistent with or derivable from his description of the relation to the Other. The originality of Derrida's manner of posing the question of the relation of ethics to politics consists, first of all, in abandoning this canonical form of the question and the figure of a "legitimating foundation" on which it depends (Adieu 45). Derrida writes, Let us assume, concesso non dato, that there is no assured passage, following the order of a foundation, following the hierarchy of founding and founded, of principial originarity and derivation, between an ethics or a first philosophy of hospitality, on the one hand, and a law or politics of hospitality on the other. Let us assume that one cannot deduce from Levinas's ethical discourse on hospitality a law and a politics. (Adieu 45-46) The idea here is not simply to dismiss the possibility of grounding politics in ethics; nor is it to claim that Levinas's rethinking of the ethical, in particular, cannot serve as the ground for a determinate politics or political theory. Indeed, Derrida admits that the question of such a foundation in relation to Levinas's thought is "surely serious, difficult, and necessary" (Adieu 45). However, he also argues that in this canonical form, the question is overdetermined, since it occludes any understanding of the relationship between politics and ethics in terms other than those of a foundation. Derrida's suspension of the question of a foundation is effectively an attempt to see the question of the relation of ethics to politics as itself "suspensive" (Adieu 45), that is, as permitting no resolution that would establish the primacy of one term over the other. …