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Levinas, Spinoza, and the Theologico-Political Meaning of Scripture
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Levinas, Spinoza, and the Theologico-Political Meaning of Scripture Hent de Vries At intervals of about ten years, Levinas devoted articles to Spinoza.1 At first glance, these readings stand out for their critical, indeed, polemical tone. In his 1955 ‘‘The Case of Spinoza,’’ Levinas accepts Jacob Gordin’s summary verdict: ‘‘Spinoza was guilty of betrayal [il existe une trahison de Spinoza]’’ (108 / 155–56). Indeed, in this text we find an even more startling hypothesis, that, by ‘‘proposing that Spinoza’s trial be reopened ,’’ Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, was, Levinas surmises , ‘‘seeking to question—more effectively than the missionaries installed in Israel—the great certainty of our history; which ultimately, for Mr. Ben-Gurion himself, preserved a nation to love and the opportunity to build a State’’ (110 / 157). Levinas gives as the main reason for his condemnation that Spinoza sought to overcome Judaism with Christianity, then Christianity with a philosophical wisdom considered to represent the proper—that is, the intellectual—love of God. Spinoza thus ascribes no more than a transitory role to Judaism in the general economy of being, even while retaining a quasi-permanent role for ‘‘religion [religio],’’ more precisely, piety, in the form of obedience and charity. But in the same articles the harsh judgment about Spinoza’s ‘‘betrayal ’’ is mitigated and qualified in importantly nuanced ways, to the extent that Levinas praises Spinoza’s writings, especially the TheologicoPolitical Treatise and the Ethics (despite their major blind spot in a probable ignorance of rabbinic literature, especially the Talmud), for their remarkable, albeit largely latent, ‘‘anti-Spinozism.’’ It is this ‘‘antiSpinozism ’’ that Levinas, relying on Sylvain Zac’s Spinoza and the Interpretation of Scripture,2 seeks to bring out. In Spinoza, the argument goes, Spinozism and anti-Spinozism keep each other, if not in balance, then at least in a necessary relation of partial correction. This, I would like 2 32 THEO LOGICO-PO LITICAL MEANING OF SCRIPTURE to suggest, by implication, inversion, and simple extension gives Levinas’s anti-Spinozism —the metaphysical position with which he is most often identified—a remarkable element of Spinozism, as well. Here I would like to bring out this intellectual horizon and ethical aim, which is characterized by what Levinas comes to call ‘‘interiorization.’’ Specifically, I will ask whether or to what extent this horizon and ethical interiorization presuppose an interrogation of the theologico-political or, what amounts to the same here, of the theologico-political meaning of Scripture. I am fully aware that the textual basis for such a comparison or confrontation is extremely limited. Extensive and explicit discussion of Spinoza’s scriptural and directly metaphysical writings—let alone of his smaller treatises or letters—is almost entirely absent from Levinas’s major works. Exceptions are his remark, in his 1961 magnum opus, Totality and Infinity, that the thought of the other is ‘‘at the antipodes with Spinozism’’ and his adoption and extension, in his second major work, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, published in 1973, of one of Spinoza’s most important concepts, the conatus essendi. Taken to its extreme, the conatus is used there to express a deplorable and inevitable ontological truth, namely, the bad positivity and negatively valorized plenitude of being and its self-centered interest as such. Spinoza, Levinas writes, is the ‘‘philosopher of being, of being explaining itself by its unfolding,’’ or again, for Spinoza: The divinity of being or nature consists in the pure positivity of esse, in the very strength of its being, which expresses itself in the deductive engendering of natura naturata. This is an unsurpassable force or rationality, for there is nothing beyond that positivity and that conatus, no value in the sense of a surpassing of being by the good; it is a totality without beyond, affirmed perhaps more deeply than in Nietzsche himself—a totality that is but another name for the non-clandestineness of being, or for its intelligibility, in which inner and outer coincide.3 Indeed, Levinas’s whole later thought seems increasingly organized around a critique of Western ontology, egology, and all philosophies of the ‘‘Neuter,’’ which he sees as premised upon and culminating in this peculiar Spinozistic affirmation of the striving or desire (the conatus or appetitus) of all things, whether living or inanimate, to persist in their being. One of the central axioms underlying the edifice of the Ethics formulates this assumption succinctly: ‘‘The striving by which each being strives to...