Five problems in Levinas’s view of politics and a sketch of a solution to them

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. From the relative obscurity in which his work languished until the mid-1980s, Levinas is now widely seen a great philosopher whose influence extends far beyond the professional confines of philosophy. His work is read in religious studies and theology, sociology, aesthetics, literary and cultural theory, and even in political theory. This is all very nice. But the problem with this explosion of interest is that much of the work on Levinas tends to confine itself to exegesis, commentary, comparison with other thinkers and, at its worst, homage. This is finally dull and produces only discipleship and scholasticism. It would be a savage irony indeed if Levinas scholarship suffered the same mind-numbing fate as much Heidegger scholarship. Our relation to a major thinker has to be critical. In my view, politics is the name of a critical point in Levinas’s work, perhaps the critical point or even the Achilles’ heel of his work.