ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Emmanuel Levinas's conception of the ethical-political relationship, as a precursor to identifying what it entails for his conception of the political. Levinas's insistence that the ethical relation resides in the face-to-face relation is justifiably famous and has long over-shadowed his political thought. While Levinas initially appears to posit the ethical-political relationship in oppositional terms so that the ethical is privileged over the political, the return to the political from this privileging means that the ethical-political relationship must be thought in terms of entwinement, albeit with a privileging of the ethical aspect. To develop the implications of this, the chapter presents Levinas's comments on the difference and relationship between the notion and State of Israel. The difference and relationship between the ethical and political, notion and State of Israel point to a conception of the political that is caught between failure and redemption; it is the movement between the two that generates its meaning.
