This paper is a response to Fagan's argument that Levinas's attempt to build an ethics, separated from politics, is misconceived. I take issue with her claim that the separation is untenable because the Third is always present in the encounter with the Other. I maintain that this conclusion fails to appreciate Levinas's attempt to resolve the apparent contradictions in his greatest work, Otherwise than Being. My approach, consciously in the Levinasian tradition, is elliptical in the sense that I seek not (...) simply to explain why her thesis is a misreading of his thinking but to demonstrate why the separation of ethics from politics is essential to it. Levinas's quest for an unproblematized ethics is a response to the collapse of belief in a transcendental deity, an inevitable outcome of the Shoah, and leads him to locate the divine in the face of the Other. This has to be a solitary encounter, a dyadic relation of Self to the Other, as the pre-cognitive genesis of ethics that accords precedence of the Good over the classical philosophical obsession with the True. (shrink)

Blamelessly, most commentators attempt to deduce the political theory of Levinas from his interhuman philosophy. In contrast to the perceived state of ethical life in contemporary politics, the attractiveness of the asymmetric obligations owed by the ego to the Other make the deductive project seem urgent. But an inductive analysis of Levinas’ philosophy yields troubling prerequisites, including rigorous theocracy and a form of sociability in which no epistemological clarity is permitted that could determine in situ interpersonal duties. Such unfamiliar politics (...) enable the celebrated ethical relation of self for the Other. Designed as a polemic with the presumption that politics not ethics is first philosophy, the insights of the inductive analysis of Levinas’ thought will come as no surprise to observers who worry that power and sovereignty cannot be summarily excluded from social or even ethical relations. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Fagan's argument that Levinas's attempt to build an ethics, separated from politics, is misconceived. I take issue with her claim that the separation is untenable because the Third is always present in the encounter with the Other. I maintain that this conclusion fails to appreciate Levinas's attempt to resolve the apparent contradictions in his greatest work, Otherwise than Being. My approach, consciously in the Levinasian tradition, is elliptical in the sense that I seek not (...) simply to explain why her thesis is a misreading of his thinking but to demonstrate why the separation of ethics from politics is essential to it. Levinas's quest for an unproblematized ethics is a response to the collapse of belief in a transcendental deity, an inevitable outcome of the Shoah, and leads him to locate the divine in the face of the Other. This has to be a solitary encounter, a dyadic relation of Self to the Other, as the pre-cognitive genesis of ethics that accords precedence of the Good over the classical philosophical obsession with the True. (shrink)