ABSTRACT
Can love and love’s theologically inflected conceptual cognates serve to overcome the particularism of our political systems that engenders genocidal violence? This essay restages a critical encounter between historian David Nirenberg, author of “The Politics of Love and Its Enemies,” and the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas as an example of “the politics of love.” Both agree that the way we represent the political is constitutive of the form the political takes, and that denying ordinary forms of life allows the political to take a genocidal form. Lévinas undertakes to represent the political subject and political life anew: specifically, he represents the political in such a way that universal freedom and equality grow up out of the ordinary form of life that Christianity and liberalism seek to devalue, that is, historical embodiment. This alternative representation of the political shows how one comes to a concern for justice. It is a representation of the political in which the difficulty of establishing justice is seen as a proof that the pursuit of justice only leads to injustice, and we must abandon our moral-political ambitions to achieve “peace.” I hope to show that while we can live our skepticism in this regard, we needn’t. The conditions of overcoming it are given in the social-sensible origins of our being and the sincere call for justice to be heard there.
