ABSTRACT
The question of politics in Levinas’s philosophy is complicated by the term ‘transcendence’, which he uses to designate, among other things, the asymmetrical character of the ethical or ‘metaphysical’ relationship. Politics, and by extension law, necessitate an operative sense of reciprocity in order to be effective in any democratically based framework. Levinas’s notion of ethics, however, is predicated on the non-reciprocity of the ethical demand that the Other places on the self, a non-reciprocity that expresses itself most forcefully in terms of substitution, the ‘one-for-the-Other’. The heart of Levinas’s thinking can be summarised perhaps by his dictum ‘ethics is first philosophy’,3 thus binding his premise of the primacy of ethics to questions concerning the status of origin and creation, and hence of alterity and difference, concepts long linked historically to that of transcendence. Levinas’s radical rethinking of the meaning of transcendence as principally ethical invites a plethora of difficulties, especially in this time of late modern or postmodern configuration, and constitutes perhaps the most significant obstacle toward developing a political reading or, better, application of his philosophy.
