The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians

‘‘Love Strong as Death’’

‘‘Love Strong as Death’’ Levinas and Heidegger J E F F R E Y L . K O S K Y In philosophy and in theology, as in all else, the question we pose and how we pose it can make all the difference. In the case that concerns us (Emmanuel Levinas and his relation to two particular religious traditions: Judaism and Christianity), recognizing this basic fact about our investigations seems as pressing as ever. My own approach to the issue assumes that we are led astray when we put the question in such a way as to ask whether or not Levinas is a Jewish philosopher, whether or not he offers a Jewish conception of God, or whether or not such and such a Levinasian concept comes from Judaism, the Judaism he learned and to which he never abandoned his commitment . On one hand, the answer to all these questions is ‘‘yes’’: Levinas practiced Judaism, and he was indeed a philosopher; therefore, since a philosophy cannot suspend the position of the philosopher, he must be a Jewish philosopher and we can find the marks of this Judaism throughout his philosophy such that his thought becomes an exemplary instance of an alteration of philosophy by its encounter with alterity, its Jewish other. But sometimes the obvious blocks a questioning that might get closer to things at issue. Perhaps these ways of posing the question, having already been of great service and undeniably useful to our understanding of Levinas , now shift a reader’s attention from other questions. Do they entail a normative investigation of what Judaism is, or what makes one a Jew? And would this question mean losing sight of what Levinas might offer for Jewish and Christian theologians, not to mention the noncommitted? 108 One could instead try to read Levinas’s text in an effort to think with him so that we can better approach the things at hand, things that he saw and tried to put into words. Along these lines, a better question might be: What can Jews, Christians, and the noncommitted learn from Levinas about matters at issue for them? Levinas’s significance for religious and/or theological thought is seen not by asking whether he is theological or not, not by asking whether he belongs to Judaism or not, but by discussing the things that he lets us see. The issue I propose in this essay is ‘‘love strong as death,’’ an issue of concern to members of both Jewish and Christian traditions, and perhaps equally to those committed to neither. Whether or not his account of this love strong as death is Jewish, Christian, or neither is, for this essay, beside the point. We, as readers, confront Levinas’s text from our own positions as a Jew, a Christian, a resolutely secular, or some confused commitment to them all. We can learn much about ourselves and our own positions from our response to the challenge his text poses: To what extent do our commitments to these traditions admit alteration by confrontation with Levinas? To what extent do our commitments to these traditions refuse to budge and not let us accept anything from Levinas beyond a certain point? What do our responses to both these questions tell us about ourselves and the world we inhabit? At the outset of an essay on love strong as death in Levinas, I have to admit that his thoughts on love are very incomplete. After a decade-long protest against using the term, chiefly because he thought it compromised the asymmetry of ethics and responsibility, he comes very late in his career to adopt it in a positive sense. Why? Perhaps that is all we can ask. Perhaps we are looking for too much if we look to Levinas for a developed concept of love, yet we can surely indicate the motivations for and the effects of his adopting the term. Does Levinas’s hesitancy before and eventual motivation for adopting love strong as death into his thought provide any resource for Jews, Christians, and the noncommitted concerned to think about love and death . . . perhaps even to think together? I I propose a starting point that might seem inappropriate to the concerns of this volume: namely the philosophy of subjectivity. This is to approach love strong as death as neither Jew nor Christian. Adopting this manner of approach to Levinas, we might find him truly ‘‘between Jews and Christians ,’’ so that both Jews and Christians might...