ABSTRACT
Levinas states in a 1981 interview that “politics must be able in fact always to be checked and criticized starting from the ethical [contrôlée et critiquée à partir de l’éthique]” (EI, 80). In order to accomplish such “checking,” the relation between ethics and politics needs to be examined. Even though the move from a face-to-face relation to a plurality of others happens inevitably and has always already happened, the relation is enigmatic. Levinas states that it is important to understand how a state emerges (and how the Hobbesian presentation of this emergence is fl awed) and that detaching politics from ethics may lead to tyranny.
