Addressing Levinas

Wealth and Justice in a U-topian Context

Wealth and Justice in a U-topian Context John Drabinski in the perspective of saintliness —Levinas Much has been said recently of Levinas’s transition from the matters of ethics to those of politics. Those discussions have centered primarily on the question of le tiers (the third), the relation of ethics to politics, and the messianic. In what follows, I want to propose a shift in theme by working from two remarks by Levinas. First, a well-known comment from “The I and the Totality”: The quantification of the human—such as the ambiguity of money makes possible—points to a new justice . . . Money lets us catch sight of a justice of redemption, replacing the infernal or vicious circle of vengeance or forgiveness.1 Second, a lesser-known remark from “Ideology and Idealism”: In the social community, the community of clothed beings, the privileges of rank obstruct justice.2 These two remarks are significant for a couple of reasons. First, they address politics in a concrete sense. Both quantification as money and the clothed, living-presence of others pose the political question in terms of the sensible presence of others and the sensible conditions of response. Second, and consonant with this notion of a concrete politics, these remarks put the political question in those terms by which I meet the Other 185 “with full hands,” so to speak. But the fact that I meet the Other with full hands has, strangely enough, had very little purchase in Levinas’s politics —either in his own reflections or in commentary on that work. What would it mean to take these two passages seriously? What would it mean, that is, to begin to think politics in terms of the injustice of privilege, specifically the privilege of wealth? My contention here will be that with these passages in mind, it is not only possible but necessary to alter the terrain of politics in Levinas, moving us away from the à-venir of messianism toward the possibility of a politics of generosity—an ethical politics. To begin, I will first consider the significance of Levinas’s remarks on utopia as u-topia. This consideration is important. It points to a Levinasian phenomenology of social spatiality as asymmetrical. This structure of social space modifies the significative origin of law, and so modifies the kind of political responsibilities that emerge from the passage from ethics to politics. This modification initiates another kind of law, a law that binds response quite differently than the law of a politics of peace. We will then be prepared to revisit, by way of conclusion, the question of wealth—that is, how the quantification of the human points to a new justice, a justice of redemption beyond vengeance and forgiveness. 1 The notion of utopia has been something of a quiet constant in Levinas’s work. Indeed, it has played a role in his philosophical and confessional writings since the 1950s. Utopia poses an important question, for it promises to provide something missing in much of Levinas’s philosophical work: an account of spatiality. In his various renderings of the ethical relation, the problem of spatiality occasions only oblique mention. The non-site of ethics to a certain extent justifies this muted treatment of space. However, the question of social space becomes genuinely urgent when we consider the political question. Because politics involves the intrigue of the interhuman with all others, the question of the structure of the space in which “we” meet is particularly acute. Multiplicity in being without totalization is the transition from ethics to politics accomplished; Levinas calls this multiplicity “asymmetrical space.”3 The mise en question of the I by the Other serves as the quasifoundation of this political space. Politics takes ethics as its “model.”4 So the space of politics is marked, albeit programmatically, by the asymmetry of ethics. The fraternal relation takes place in essentially asymmetrical space. How might this spatiality, ethical and political, be rendered ? And what help can a notion of utopia offer? 186 J O H N D R A B I N S K I On his first rendering of the issue, utopia seems to hold little promise . In the 1950 essay “Le lieu et l’utopie” (“Place and Utopia”), Levinas writes that the “man of utopia” “wants unjustly. He prefers the cheerfulness of solitary safety to the difficult task of an equitable life. In this way, he refuses the...