ABSTRACT
Emmanuel Levinas is associated more with ethics than hermeneutics; and yet a large part of his output consists of Talmudic commentaries in which he displays remarkable imaginative brilliance as a reader. On the basis of a close reading of one of his commentaries, ‘The Damage Caused Fire’, it is possible to develop a kind of Levinasian ethical hermeneutics in which violence figures prominently both as a theme and as a characterisation of the potentially abrasive relation between text and reader. The chapter then compares Levinas's interpretive practice with aspects of the work of Heidegger, Gadamer and Levinas. Whilst Levinas shares some common ground with all three, his implicit hermeneutic stance also entails a distinctive sense of the extreme authority of the commentated text (at least when it is the Talmud), coupled with an acknowledgement of the interpreter's inadequacy. This hermeneutics is related to Levinas's ethics insofar as both require an openness to the commanding voice of the Other. At the same time, interpreters are called upon to take responsibility for their readings and the errors or misjudgements which may come with them.
