May 7, 2007
In this review of Howard Caygill’s recent "Levinas and the Political Eric Nelson says that it is Levinas' critique of autonomy and the constructivist recourse to the autonomous self, along with his use of messianic and prophetic language derived from the Torah and Talmud, that makes Levinas a noteworthy alternative for rethinking contemporary liberalism.
A centerpiece of Caygill’s argument is that Levinas’s ethics emerges out of the ambiguity of and need to reconceptualize the republican trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This trinity is restructured by Levinas through a radicalized understanding of fraternity. For Caygill, Levinas’s reinterpretation of fraternity on the basis of alterity and difference promises a new politics of liberty and equality. This politics is oriented and informed by—even if irreducible to—ethics via the notion of justice and the third. This strategy of reconfiguring liberalism and republicanism in the name of the other person is not without its risks. Based on his early experience of the Dreyfus Affair, where Christian fraternity aimed its hostility at Jews and the republicanism that promised their liberty and equality, and its consequences, Levinas focused on the problem of fraternity. Fraternity raises all the issues of identity, solidarity, and community that the dominant tendencies of liberal political theory attempt to bracket. For Levinas, more appropriate concepts of liberty and equality cannot be articulated without fraternity. Levinas’s questioning of national and religious self-assertion through his explorations of fraternity—with all of its promise (solidarity, love of the neighbor, etc) and danger (exclusion, forced assimilation, and annihilation)—also suggests Levinas’s relevance for our situation with its resurgent fundamentalism and nationalism.
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