I would like to elucidate the connection between three kinds of violence: violence committed by someone, by myself or Emmanuel Lévinas, or even by the state in response to this initial violence; “violence against violence,” a paraphrase of a famous hesitation by Lévinas concerning the use or right to violence (droit à la violence ¹ ); and third, a violence that lingers in the mouth and throat, that aftertaste – lingering taste, goût, and disgust, degoût – of violence, of which Lévinas speaks in his 1963 Messianic Texts – cet arrière-goût de violence ² or un quelqonque arrière-goût de degoût [a kind of aftertaste of disgust]. ³