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  • A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism
  • Claire Katz
A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism, by Michael Fagenblat. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 320 pp. $70.00 (c); $24.95 (p); $24.95 (E-book).

In his elegant book, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism, Michael Fagenblat negotiates the two bodies of Levinas's writings and argues that instead of viewing the phenomenological readings in opposition to the Jewish readings, we should instead see the phenomenology as offering not simply a philosophy of Judaism, but a phenomenology of Judaism. As Fagenblat rightly articulates, simply describing the ethical relationship phenomenologically does not explain its origin. Since it is the case that many people claim not to experience the obligation as described, responding to the opposition might take more effort and different explanations than have been recently provided. His methodology allows us to consider "origin" in Levinas's conception of ethical subjectivity and responsibility.

In the first three chapters, Fagenblat offers a close examination of the role of creation in Levinas's project. He turns to Levinas's use of the il y a, first articulated in his 1946 essay by the same name (p. 211, n. 9), and argues that the il y a is a "phenomenological interpretation of the famous elements in Genesis 1:2 that are already there before the act of creation: the tohu wa'bohu, variously translated as the 'unformed and void,' 'a formless waste,' or 'welter and waste'" (p. 37). Fagenblat then mobilizes this interpretation to support his argument that for Levinas the il y a signifies a time before ethics. That is, the story of chaos preceding creation is not a story about natural creation; it is a story that provides a moral account of the origins of the world (p. 37). Putting this claim more strongly, Fagenblat asserts that Levinas's famous and most widely used phrase, "ethics precedes ontology," is "best understood in terms of the covenantal structure of creation" (p. 65). It is not that creation is simply ethical but rather that creation in Levinas's understanding of the term, and [End Page 188] that of Judaism, implies a covenant. Fagenblat concludes this interpretation of creation with the following claim: "What matters for Levinas is not whether this structure of ontological culpability is called secular or religious but that the covenantal structure of creation is acknowledged" (p. 66).

In Chapter Five, "Secularizing the Covenant," Fagenblat recalls that his book is making the following argument: that "what Levinas calls 'ethics' is best understood not as a secularized philosophy of religion in general but as a secularized moral theology of Judaism in particular" (p. 140). That chapter argues that "the term 'religion' itself, in Levinas's philosophical writings, hermeneutically draws from a specifically Judaic understanding of the term" (p. 140). The significance of this point is that many scholars point to Levinas's use of the term "religion" as signifying something other than Judaism, that is something other than religious. They say that if he had meant religious in a conventional sense, he would have used "God," which of course he does, but those references are often dismissed as irrelevant. To be clear, Levinas is not stating that morality or ethics derives from God in the way that we often hear the relationship between religion and ethics discussed.

My point, and I believe this is Fagenblat's point, is not to say that Levinas is offering a theology. He is not. But to concede that this is not a theology, that is that God is less important or not important in the origins of the ethical, does not also mean that religion in some traditional or specifically Jewish sense of the term is rendered insignificant. Connecting this chapter back to his discussion of creation, we can see that Fagenblat's argument ties together the fundamental and indispensable role of religion in Levinas's own understanding of the ethical, and thus we are led back to the question of how one becomes an ethical subject in the sense that Levinas means.

Fagenblat's argument relies on the significance of covenant within the Jewish...

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