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.[304]Levinas published Beyond the Verse in 1982.In the Foreword, he notes that the last three pieces, called collectively “Zionisms,” deal explicitly with the relation between politics and ethics and with the conflict between Israelis and Arabs.[305] I want to look at the essays first with regard to the larger themes, the relation between politics and religion or ethics, the necessity of the political, and the risks of political corruption.“The State of Caesar and the State of David” was written in 1971, and, as Caygill notes, it summarizes Levinas’s thinking of the 1960s.[306] Levinas begins by discussing texts that acknowledge the need for the state.But, he says, “the State of Caesar, despite its participation in the pure essence of the State, is also the place of corruption par excellence and, perhaps, the ultimate refuge of idolatry.”[307] Levinas does not spell out these corruptions in concrete, analytic terms.This is neither his style, nor would such enumeration lend itself to the textual and interpretive tactics of the essays.We can nonetheless look for hints.For example, Levinas recognizes that according to certain Talmudic scholars the form of the pagan state involves various features that are in tension with the messianic ideal: The state is jealous of its sovereignty; constantly seeks hegemony; is imperialist, totalitarian, and conquering; can be oppressive; and is attached to a realist egoism.[308] It seeks adoration and fidelity.Furthermore, the state is grounded in a contradiction; it “subordinat[es] some men to others in order to liberate them.”[309] Thus, Levinas recognizes that all forms of government, even those grounded in a social contract, involve subordination of some by others and run the risk of oppression, domination, and persecution.“By serving the state, one serves repression; by serving repression, one becomes a member of the police force.”[310] Domination and conflict are endemic to political life.If they can be mitigated or reduced, then the state and the lives of its citizens are bettered, but the risk is always present that they will not be mitigated.In social networks, justice can never be perfect, but it can be the plumb line for institutions, policies, and practices.When it is not, division and enmity dominate.Still, in public life politics is required to organize and distribute, to protect and control, to act in behalf of goodness and to facilitate acts of kindness and concern.Levinas notes that one does not save oneself by rejecting the political altogether, for the tension between freedom and exploitation is something “against which the very person who refuses the political order is not protected, since in abstaining from all collaboration with the ruling power, he makes himself party to the obscure powers that the State represses.”[311]At the end of the essay, Levinas calls attention to comments of Dan Avni-Segré, an Italian Jew teaching in Haifa, which he had heard at the Ninth Colloquium of French Jewish intellectuals.Segré had discussed the infancy of Jewish politics in Israel and the hopes for the future; he had spoken of a “monotheistic politics” as the “culmination of Zionism” – a task “beyond the concern to ensure a refuge for those who are persecuted.”[312] This messianic ideal of what for Levinas would be a just state marks out a place between corrupt power politics and a facile and careless moralism.[313] In 1971, it was one way of talking about what messianism could bring to politics in the Jewish state.I do not think that Levinas’s conception of messianism and politics is unique to Judaism and the State of Israel.Messianism involves all those commitments that are concerned with our responsibilities to others; it is about realizing ethics in our lives.Politics is about the institutions of organized social life that enable us to live together and with one another.Politics should have a messianic vision; it should be guided by ethical conscience and by the hope that its institutions and its citizens will live just lives.Messianism and politics are both unavoidable features of all of our lives.In the life of the Jewish people and in Zionism, these ideas operate in a specific way.For Levinas, the Bible and the Talmud often reflect on the engagement of the political and the messianic, and, after the Nazi destruction and with the establishment of the modern State of Israel, these issues have a precise, concrete reference.Israel is not a unique state in many ways, but it does arise with a great weight of historical specificity.Its challenges are not its alone.[314] But they are emblematic of what modern states ought to confront and meet.On Levinas’s reading, the Jewish people carries a special burden to enact its persecution through just institutions and, in the State of Israel, to embody them.Israel is the name of this people’s return into history and, at the same time, of the political and messianic opportunities for us all.For these reasons, the concrete problems that face Israel are of signal importance, and it is necessary to see how Levinas grapples with them.Here the central issue is how Levinas deals with engagement with the face of one’s enemy, and this means how Israel ought to deal with its Arab neighbors in general and the Palestinians in particular.As Caygill puts it, “[I]f the State of Israel ignores human rights, then this means that through a brutal irony of history the prophetic mission of Israel becomes endangered by its own adoption of the form of the state.”[315] The two major texts in which this challenge is most markedly faced, if at all, are “Politics After!” (1979) and the radio interview “Ethics and Politics” (1982).Caygill argues that in these texts Levinas’s judgment of the Palestinians and Arab nationalism is ambivalent.[316] At one point, commenting on “Politics After!”, Caygill says that we have every right “to expect a more nuanced sense of historical development from Levinas, and a more explicit acknowledgment of the possibility that the past and present of the State of Israel is capable of ruining the promises of the future.”[317] That is, Levinas may take politics to be necessary for ethical messianism and Israel to be historically devoted to creating a just social and political order, but no state is immune from corruption or failure, Israel included.Can Levinas recognize such a possibility? Even if the Holocaust recommends a special role for Jewish self-defense in Israel, surely, by Levinas’s own very high standards, self-defense cannot be a blanket justification for all political practices, even repressive and horrific ones.As Caygill accurately points out, the issue came to a head for Levinas with the massacre of Palestinian refugees – men, women, and children – at the camps at Sabra and Shatila in September 1982.[318] In a radio conversation with Shlomo Malka and Alain Finkelkraut, less than two weeks after the events, Levinas was called upon to say something about responsibility, and, to say the least, he was evasive [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]