The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians

The Disincarnation of the Word

The Disincarnation of the Word The Trace of God in Reading Scripture R O B E R T G I B B S Philosophy and theology are not only terms that are open to renegotiation in each generation, they are also terms that fit different religious communities differently. Levinas was never a theologian, but that means something quite different from saying that Kant was never a theologian (although Hegel was) or that Frege was never a theologian. It means something quite different from asking what theology continued to mean for Heidegger throughout his philosophical thinking. For Jewish thought is not oriented by the specific opposition between theology and philosophy that one can surely find in Augustine and cannot quite escape today. Indeed, I would add that both terms, therefore, are inflected by the theological community in which they are used. There is no philosophy per se, only Jewish philosophy, Protestant philosophy, neo-pagan philosophy, and of course, Catholic philosophy. Philosophy is not-yet universal, and so it bears within it an index of the way that thinking about God and metaphysics and about ethics and community transpires in the different communities in which it occurs. In that sense, Levinas is a Jewish philosopher —his thought bears many indices of its Jewish soul. Whether there is anything called theology per se is even less likely, and less likely to have any claimants, except for the most rigorous dogmatic theologians. For each of them, there is only one proper way to think about God, and their communion knows or aspires best to that way. But if our task is to reconstruct, to imagine, or even to discipline how a Jewish philosopher can contribute to Christian theology, we must see that Levinas 32 cannot view the discourse about God in the way that the Christian theologians do, nor do his protests against seeing himself either as a theologian or even as a Jewish philosopher mean what they might for Jean-Luc Marion or Heidegger. Later, I will return to this indexicality of our disciplines , and indeed, to the question of how the singularities of intellectual traditions interact with one another. But if we will end up with a question about how to read scripture, that is, how a Jewish reading of scripture might be of value for a Christian theological reading of scripture, part of what we will need to see is not only that the term theological is ambiguous but that of signal interest in reading scripture is attention to the indexicality of the community and its tradition of reading. But long before we can ascend to the complex question of how a translation from Jewish to Christian readings of scripture can occur, we will first have to explore the relation of Jewish scriptural hermeneutics to Levinas ’s philosophy, and before that, we must set forth a basic account of that philosophy, indeed, see there a specific intervention against Christian theology. Levinas takes his distance from one of the central doctrines of Christianity: incarnation. Indeed, despite what you may find in some of the secondary literature, Levinas does not view the other person, particularly his face, as an incarnation of God or of the infinite. His account of the face portrays how it disrupts the reification that our judgments impose both on the other person and on God. There, with the other’s face, I would begin, except for a short word about my own practice. For some time, I have been devoted to commentary , and there is little that can explain disincarnation of the word better than asking you to join my performance by reading along with me. I will attempt to free these words from the page before you, to let Levinas’s saying readdress in my commentary upon those words. 1. The Face and Disincarnation I will begin with a great text from Totality and Infinity. I will cite it at length, then comment upon it by re-reading. The numbering is my own addition; the translation, like all those in this essay, is my own, though occasionally adapted from Lingis’s. [1.1] Ethics is the spiritual optics. [1.2] The subject-object relation does not reflect it; in the impersonal relation that it leads to, the invisible but personal God is not approached outside of all human presence. [1.3] The Ideal is not merely a being superlatively being, a sublimation of the objective, or, in lovers’ solitude, a sublimation...