The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians

Excess and Desire

Excess and Desire A Commentary on Totality and Infinity, Section I, Part D J E F F R E Y B L O E C H L Levinas could be disarmingly clear about his position regarding Christianity . Explaining himself in a 1983 conversation in Geneva, he observed: ‘‘I say of the face of the neighbor what the Christian says of the face of Christ.’’1 This, of course, is only a singular expression of what was barely unstated in numerous passages dating at least from the 1950s, wherever Levinas invoked a messianism that is concretized specifically in ethics. But a messianism it truly is, and one that is clearly not without a robust conception of God sustaining it. ‘‘It is for man to save man,’’ he wrote, ‘‘the divine manner of tending to misery does not consist in God intervening there.’’2 As Levinas’s readers have had to learn, this God who does not intervene is in fact central to his thinking, which shoulders the task of reinstating God and goodness after the twilight of the idols, the destruction of onto-theology, and, not least, the collapse of classical theodicy. Between Levinas and Christianity, the thesis of certain possibilities present already in any human face and not only in the singular face of Jesus Christ must go hand in hand with the idea that God does not explicitly intervene in our affairs and yet somehow does leave each of us bound to one another in a vocation to justice. Where the Christian invokes the gift of Jesus Christ as the way and the means to justice, Levinas calls us to recognize that this gift is given already in human plurality as such. This difference in the domain of ethics, furthermore, cannot be considered apart from an accompanying difference between the conceptions of religious transcendence to be found in, respectively, the restricted 188 messianism of a unique Incarnation the general messianism of the other person. This cannot be the occasion to entertain the essential complexities of even a simplified Christology. I therefore propose to address this second but more profound difference from only one side of the discussion: what sort of God abides in mystery not before and beyond a single and unrepeatable Son, but before and beyond the entire community of children? I True religion, Levinas often insists, takes place in our relation with the other person.3 Any attempt to situate his conception of the religious is therefore inseparable from an attempt to situate his conception of the ethical , and indeed the latter must arguably come first. One might begin with some attention to his conception of heteronomy: subjectivity, the individual human being, neither provides itself with its own law nor, however, conducts itself in the absence of any law whatsoever. In the philosophy of Levinas,4 this is asserted not in order to deny the possibility of living as if one were autonomous, but instead to contest the viability of that way of life—and indeed, its desirability. It is giving nothing away to state up front that Levinas challenges the pursuit of individual autonomy first of all with a view to recognizing the rights and well- being of the other person , for whom one is said to be responsible already before any pretense of self-rule. What tends to receive less attention is his accompanying suggestion that the pursuit of autonomy also commits each person to a conception of personal freedom that turns out to be unsustainable. The freedom of someone who is intent on determining his own course of action and way of life solely under his own powers is a freedom that must give meaning to everything it meets; this freedom, says Levinas, is in need of constant renewal and, indeed, ceaseless movement, without possibility of ever granting itself rest. The underlying thought could hardly be simpler: generally speaking, one may truly rest only on something that does not depend on oneself. In the terms of Levinas’s existential analysis, this must be a presence that comes with its own meaning. Of course, and according to the ethical inflection of the argument, such a quieting presence would also be a commanding presence, since its approach would signal an end to the assumption that the subject is the center and locus of all meaning. Henceforth, and as the price of lasting peace, the subject must somehow come to terms with the fact that it does not and cannot have emprise over...