ABSTRACT
What if the prophet were also a political theorist? What if he didn’t respect the boundaries that divide Athens from Jerusalem? Would we dare to listen to him when he talked about politics? Or are prophets simply too disruptive of all the known distinctions? In one sense, the question is too late. Emmanuel Levinas is already in. Jacques Derrida opened the door, first criticising Levinas, and then eulogising him.2 Since postmodernism is so influential in academia, it is no wonder that Derrida’s endorsement (if that is what it was) made Levinas respectable, a theorist of otherness and difference like a hundred other postmoderns. Or so it might seem. Abstract and evocative, writing in what can only be described as the language of prophecy, Levinas has become everything to everyone. We pretend we get it, writing in much the same style, so as to say whatever we wanted to say in the first place. The Levinas Effect it has been called, the ability of Levinas’s texts to say anything the reader wants to hear, so that Levinas becomes a deconstructionist, postmodern, or proto-feminist, even the reconciler of postmodern ethics and rabbinic Judaism. Fortunately, among political theorists, there is still time to avoid the Levinas Effect. The question is how to do this. How best to think about Levinas as a political theorist without succumbing to the Levinas Effect? How best, in other words, to take seriously the challenge Levinas poses to political theory? One way is by showing Levinas’s incompatibility with a widely known and respected work in political theory, a work with which Levinas’s work would seem to have much in common. The work is Iris Marion Young’s ‘The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference’. Like Levinas, Young is a critic of totality, which is said to eliminate otherness in the name of the same. Now, at least one critic has put Levinas and Young on the same page in political theory.3 This is not surprising. For some time now postmoderns and deconstructionists have had an affinity for Levinas.
