Levinas Between Ethics and Politics (review)

Abstract

In this complex and provocative work, Bettina Bergo questions what might be termed problems of transposition in Levinas's thought, the gaps or fissures opened by the move from a formal ethics grounded in the transcendence of the other person to the demand for justice in the realm of politics. Is the Good other than and beyond being so that everyday existence becomes secondary or, per contra, do the conditions for ethics arise within the sphere of ontology? Can we discern an elevation within existence itself accessible in and through justice? If so, would the difference between self and other not be obliterated? Still another problem of transposition is that of converting rabbinic thought that, for Levinas, subjects the cause-and-effect mode of reasoning to ethical judgment into philosophical discourse. How, he asks, do the Hebraisms in which prophecy and messianism are couched manifest themselves in Greek, the language of philosophy? If an Ethic of ethics requires the evacuation of the subject who sacrifices himself in the interest of the other as Levinas insists, is the agency required for participation in economy and polity subverted?