ABSTRACT
Levinas’s work is an attempt to discover, to shed light on, what ‘stays beyond’ totality. The task of philosophy, Levinas says, is to ‘proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks up, a situation that conditions the totality itself. Such a situation is the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other.’1 When philosophy proceeds beyond totality, discovering its exteriority, it reaches the ethical relation, the relation with the other, the absolute and unjustified responsibility for the other, and this means that philosophy reaches the ethics as a condition of possibility of ontology. The principal question I pose here is whether ‘the political’ in Levinas’s thought is placed on the level of what, in Otherwise than Being he calls ‘justice’ – defining it as ‘comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling, order, thematization, the visibility of faces (. . .) a co-presence in an equal footing as before a court of justice’2 – or whether it is placed on the level of the ethical encounter where, as Levinas says in Totality and Infinity, my spontaneity is called into question by the presence of the other.3 Ultimately what we are trying to understand is whether, for Levinas, the political has its place inside or beyond totality. In the last pages of Totality and Infinity Levinas writes:
‘In the measure that the face of the Other relates us with the third party, the metaphysical relation of the I with the Other moves into the form of the We, aspires to a State, institutions, laws which are the source of universality. But politics left to itself bears a Tyranny within itself; it deforms the I and the other who have given rise to it, for it judges them according to universal rules, and thus as in absentia.’4
