Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 40: August 2000

Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 40: August 2000

The Politics of Statehood

vs.

A Politics of Exodus:

A Critique of Levinas’s Reading of Kierkegaard

Mark Dooley

Newman Scholar of Theology

University College Dublin

Ireland

(This paper was initially written in response to an invitation to address the Kierkegaard Society of Great Britain on November 13, 1999. I am grateful to John Lippitt for his help in arranging my visit to Cambridge, and also to my friends Roger Poole and George Pattison for their instructive and incisive comments and criticisms. Indeed, I wish to thank all of those who were in attendance for their helpful interventions.)

This article argues that Levinas’s acerbic reading of Kierkegaard in “Existence and Ethics,” is predicated upon the erroneous assumption that when Johannes de Silentio called for a suspension of the ethical, he was inaugurating a violent tradition of philosophizing with a hammer, one which culminated in Heidegger’s collusion with Nazism. In the first half, I argue in favor of Levinas’s contention that Heidegger’s predilection for National Socialism stemmed from his disregard of the Judeo-Christian, or biblical, tradition of mercy and justice. In the second half, I try to show that what separates Kierkegaard from the likes of Nietzsche and Heidegger (philosophers of ‘the hammer’), is the fact that he was the first thinker to tap the resources of the biblical tradition of openness to the other – the very tradition which Levinas himself commends. I end by suggesting why I think Kierkegaard is a more useful thinker, in both an ethical and political sense, than Levinas.

These days, with rare exception, most publications on Martin Heidegger are dedicated to the project of ascertaining the extent to which his philosophy was instructed by the ideology of National Socialism. A debate rages between those who argue that a clear demarcation must be made between the man and the philosopher, on the one hand, and those who believe that such a demarcation is indefensible on the other. While I have a certain sympathy with the former, in as much as I do not wish to see some of the most important philosophical insights of this century being buried beneath manifold layers of historical data, I find myself nevertheless firmly ensconced amongst those for whom Heidegger’s Nazi past says a lot about certain undesirable elements of his thought.

Let me be more specific. I admire Division One of Being and Time,[i] as I do the early lectures on the theme of phenomenology in a hermeneutic direction, a move which I perceive as being the most philosophically efficacious of our time; I am less enamoured, however, of Division Two of his magnum opus, as I am of An Introduction to Metaphysics,[ii] and most of the later writings, with the possible exception of his essay on Gelassenheit.[iii] In Division Two of Being and Time, and more patently in An Introduction to Metaphysics, we see

a masterful merging of Heidegger’s politics with his philosophy, one which was never to be formally renounced or repudiated up to the time of his death in 1976. No one, especially in the light of Hugo Ott’s stark findings, will convince me that if I read between the lines of these texts I will inevitably stumble upon some form of proto- or crypto-ethics. For even when he appears to be writing in an ethical vein, Heidegger is usually more concerned with the well-being of trees and things than with the welfare of his fellow man.

Long before Ott began to shed light on Heidegger’s dubious past, Emmanuel Levinas had already identified a pernicious side to this thinker, a side which championed the Teutonic spirit as that which would bring to a glorious climax the destiny of mankind. Anything which was alien to such a spirit had no place in the story of Being. The history of Being, as told by Heidegger, was thus predicated upon an excision of everything non-German, except, of course, her direct spiritual antecedents, the Greeks. It can be argued without much difficulty, that Totality and Infinity[iv] was written as a response to this side of Heidegger; while Levinas has placed on the record his admiration for this thinker’s concretizing of Husserlian phenomenology, he nevertheless recognizes the deleterious consequences of Heidegger’s Greco-German vocabulary of Sein. He is unable, that is, to read Heidegger’s statement in An Introduction to Metaphysics, to the effect that Germany “is the most metaphysical of nations” (IM, p. 31), one which “must move itself and thereby the history of the West beyond the centre of their future ‘happening’ and into the primordial realm of the powers of being” (ibid., p. 32), as nothing short of a dangerous totalitarian pronouncement. Furthermore, he interprets Heidegger’s talk of Germany’s “historical mission” (ibid., p. 41), and his contention that “along with German the Greek language is…at once the most powerful and spiritual of all languages” (ibid., p. 47), as concrete proof of this Seinsdenker’s preference for Greco-German supremacy and hegemony.

Levinas’s critique of Heidegger is founded upon his belief that there is an alternative to the latter’s contention that “[t]he interhuman relationship emerges with our history, with our being-in-the-world as intelligibility and presence.” “The interhuman realm,” argues Levinas “can also be considered from another perspective – the ethical or biblical perspective which transcends the Greek language of intelligibility – as a theme of justice and concern for the other as other, as a theme of love and desire which carries us beyond the finite Being of the world as presence” (EI, p. 56). Against Heidegger, Levinas maintains “that philosophy can be ethical as well as ontological, can be at once Greek and non-Greek in its inspiration” (ibid., p. 57). To appropriate Derrida’s felicitous phrase, one taken up and used to optimum effect by Jack Caputo,[v] Levinas’s thought serves to expose the Greek, and hense the German language of presence, to the “jewgreek” language of justice. In so doing, he is concerned to demonstrate, pace Heidegger, that while philosophy is “essentially Greek, it is not exclusively so” (ibid., p. 55), and that “[w]hat we term the Judeo-Christian tradition…proposed an alternative approach to meaning,” one which refuses to consider truth as something “which is present or co-present” or “which can be gathered or synchronized into a totality which we would call the world or cosmos” (ibid., p. 55).

For Levinas, philosophy needs to be exposed to its other, to what the Greco-German tradition has elided in its quest to privilege presence. The need for such exposure comes from the fact that this tradition has lost its ethical sensibility, its responsiveness to the call of everything which is non-Greek or non-German. The upshot of this claim is simply that if Heidegger had retained his fidelity to the Judeo-Christian tradition in which he was acculturated, the disastrous coalition with the Nazis might never have occurred. In Heidegger’s case, the elision of all things Judeo-Christian was not just a philosophical menoeuvre stricto sensu, but one which led to an actual expulsion of Jews, to an eradication of everything which impeded the progress of Germany’s historical mission. Levinas’s modus vivendi took the form of a quest to deconstruct the history of being, to thwart the progress of the great historical mission of which Heidegger spoke, by showing that the so-called Greek tradition is always already contaminated by the Jew and the Christian, and by attesting to the fact that the cries of the prophets will continue to resound come what may. For him, the borders separating Jerusalem and Athens had begun to crumble and disintegrate long before Heidegger set out to retrieve the great Greek arche.

Heidegger’s longing for purity, his tall tale of being’s historical mission, and his belief that German and Greek languages are the most profoundly spiritual, echoes in many ways Hegel’s longing for pure identity, his grand narrative of world-historical becoming, and his tendency to deify the German state above all others. The most striking comparison between the two men, however, is their mutual disdain for, what Lyotard calls, les juifs,[vi] or, the jews. In the sense in which it is employed by Lyotard, les juifs symbolizes all those, irrespective of religion or race, who have been silenced, brutalized, marginalized, or displaced. As Jack Caputo, John Van Buren and Theordore Kisiel[vii] have each shown, the young Heidegger’s appreciation of the New Testament was predicated upon his belief that the biblical world was one in which struggle and difficulty prevailed. The tough lesson of the New Testament, according to this reading, was that we must take up our crosses and forge ahead in the face of life’s inexorable hurdles. As such, the ethics of love for the least among us was considered, in good Nietzschean fashion, to be for the weak alone. In other words, even before Heidegger had renounced his Catholicism, or even before any talk of the nation’s destiny and historical mission had made its way into his lexicon, he had, as Caputo tells us, “managed to read the New Testament from one end to the other with his eye set on the categories of care and difficulty and never to have noticed the lepers and the lame, the blind and the beggars, the widows and the withered hands, the healings and the hungry crowds.”[viii] What Heidegger was blind to was the social gospel of the New Testament, its plea on behalf of the deprived and dispossessed. His early appreciation of scripture, thus, stems from his admiration of Jesus as friend of the poor, of what John Dominick Crossan calls “the nuisances and nobodies,” [ix] but from his admiration of Jesus’s gallant struggle in the face of temporal adversity. The cross symbolizes valor, strength, and bravery. While Paul Tillich managed to show how Heideggerian ontology could be rendered socially useful, Heidegger himself had no such ambition in mind. Consequently, while Being and Time, especially Division II, is punctuated by classical Christian categories, such as “fallenness,” “guilt” etc., it is singularly devoid of the most essential elements in the ministry of Jesus, the marginal Jew.

In the case of Hegel the situation is somewhat different, but no less regrettable. Unlike Heidegger, Hegel never renounced his Christianity, neither did he endeavor to downplay its importance in the world-historical drama. His tragic mistake was to have seen to it that the cunning of reason nullified what were perceived by him to be the most offensive features of Jesus’s Jewish lineage. As mediator (Der Mitte), Jesus’s purpose was to dialectically negate the alienation symptomatic of the Jewish faith, and, in so doing, bring to fruition and harmony the one true Christian religion. As with Heidegger, Hegel’s negation of the figure of the Jew served only to take the sting out of Jesus’s message of social justice. For Hegel, Jesus does indeed preach love and forgiveness, but this is love, neither for the outsider nor for those least like us, but for our brothers and sisters within the Christian community or within the Christian state. Jesus, on this reading, is more Greek than Jew, more spiritual than revolutionary, more in the shadow of Plato than in that of Abraham.

What is underscored by this comparison between Heidegger and Hegel, is that when the figure of the victim or the outsider is either ignored or erased, there are unfortunate ethical and political consequences. In both Heidegger’s Greco-Germanic tale of the nation’s historical mission and Hegel’s story of world history, there is not a single paragraph reserved for the voiceless victims, for what Paul Ricoeur calls “the anonymous forces of history.”[x] Both are stories of how a state or a people became great, either because it had Being on its side, or, as with Hegel, because it held a privileged place in a divine design. Once the cut of the Jew gave way to Greek harmony and integrity, or once the Judeo-Christian tradition, which emphasized “justice and concern for the other as other,” was incorporated into the Greco-German tradition of presence and intelligibility, hope for les juifs soon faded.

The reason why Levinas is so important in this regard is because he constantly reminds us that philosophy does not have a single lineage running from the Greeks to the Germans. It has many different strains, not least of which is the Judeo-Christian heritage. In the midst of Teutonic bombast, Levinas urges us to recover the biblical tradition of philosophizing, that which emphasises responsibility to widows, orphans, and strangers, to the call of the afflicted and the wretched, those for whom no paragraph has been reserved in Hegel’s system, or those who have yet to hear the call of Being. He looks to Heidegger’s notion of “gathering” (Versammelung), and to Hegel’s domesticizing of God into the fabric and laws of the state, as proof positive of what happens when one radically denies “the rupture between the ontological and the ethical” (EI, p. 66).

It is a wonder then, given his jewgreek sensitivities and the nature of his hyper-ethical critique of ontology and metaphysics, that Levinas should read Kierkegaard as he does. For is it not a fact that Kierkegaard was the first thinker in the histories of both theology and philosophy, to notice the ethical impoverishment of metaphysical system-building and of grand ontological schemes? Was he not the first to privilege singularity above universality, or “the poor existing individual” above the established order? Moreover, did he not prefigure and anticipate Levinas’s own excavation of the Judeo-Christian roots of Greco-German philosophizing? Kierkegaard was, above all else, an ethico-religious thinker, one for whom the blood, sweat, and tears of everyday “factical” life was paramount. His upbraiding of Hegel was a consequence of what he perceived as the risible attempt to develop a world history without affording a single page to any particular existing individual. Unlike Hegel and Heidegger, Kierkegaard does not consider the New Testament to be any less relevant to our self-understanding than the works of the Greeks or his German contemporaries. For him, indeed, the New Testament is no less ethically instructive than Aristotle’s Ethics or Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In fact, it is even more suggestive given its grounding in the world of concrete practical affairs. This is why Kierkegaard endeavors to rescue religion, and especially the Christ-figure, from the labor of the negative in Hegel’s speculative account of consciousness; his belief is that philosophy will become genuinely useful only after its supposed superiority over religion is discredited. His objective is to allow philosophy and religion to bleed into one another so as to ensure that singularity is never consumed by universality, or, and this amounts to the same thing, that ethics keeps metaphysics in check. For these reasons, Kierkegaard must surely rank as the first significant jewgreek, the first thinker whose work was a hymn sung in the name of those without a name.[xi]

These similarities notwithstanding, Levinas still considers Kierkegaard more Greek than Jew. He sees value in Kierkegaard’s work only in so far as it emphasizes the ineradicable nature of existence in the face of “totalizing thought,” the concrete manifestation of which would take the form of “political totalitarianism in which we would cease to be the source of our own language and become mere reflections of an impersonal logos…”.[xii] He follows this up, however, by inquiring as to “whether this return to a subjectivity which holds itself aloof from thought, that is to say from truth in perpetual victory…could not itself give rise to further acts of violence?” (EE, p. 28). Now, when Levinas employs this word “violence” with respect to Kierkegaard, he does not mean some form of intellectual violence, but violence stricto sensu; instead of interpreting Kierkegaard’s passion for subjectivity as a truly jewgreek gesture, one which has profound ethical, religious, and political consequences, he sees it as an egoistic drive for blissful isolation. When Kierkegaard says that “truth is subjectivity,” he adjures, according to Levinas, “relations to exteriority” in favor of “inward dramas.” Such a “suffering truth does not open us out to others, but to God in isolation” (ibid., p. 30). Once the struggle for inwardness is given priority over one’s relations with others “it participates in the violence of the modern world, with its cult of Passion and Fury” (ibid.). This is why, on Levinas’s reading, Kierkegaard adopts an “impulsive and violent style, reckless of scandal and destruction,” one which, even before Nietzsche, gave free rein to those who would philosophize with a hammer. As such, it “aspired to permanent provocation, and the total rejection of everything…”. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s writings anticipated and presaged the “verbal violences” of National Socialism, and also “the various ideas which it promoted.”

It is truly difficult to understand why a thinker like Emmanuel Levinas would so vehemently accuse such an obvious fellow-traveller of fuelling the fires of National Socialism. How he came to believe that Kierkegaard’s ironic, subtle, sensitive, and humorous work “brought irresponsibility in its wake and a ferment of disintegration” (ibid., p. 30), is a matter of immense speculation. I think perhaps the most likely reason is the fact that Kierkegaard was, for much of this century, considered by many, including Levinas himself, to be Heidegger’s spiritual forefather. Such a view still persists in many respectable quarters. My belief is that in many ways Levinas blamed Kierkegaard for unleashing the demons in Heidegger’s head, demons which would eventually force him down the road of moral turpitude. Levinas’s intransigent and trenchant opposition to Kierkegaard can only be adequately explained against this background. For in Kierkegaard’s thought Levinas identifies the same will-to-presence as evidenced in Being and Time; the essential selfishness of Dasein as “a being which is concerned for [only] its own being” (EI, p. 62), as a being whose fundamental desire for “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit), derives, according to Levinas, from Heidegger’s formative study of Kierkegaard’s notion of “a subjectivity in tension over itself, and existence as concern for one’s own existence, as a torment over oneself” (EE, p. 34). Such narcissism, such love of one’s self, derives from Kierkegaard’s objection to the ethical as that which is “essentially general,” as a set of universal rules which would lead to the dissipation of the self’s individuality, of the self’s secret (ibid., p. 34). Consequently, he disavows being-with-others in favor of realizing one’s ownmost possibilities with authentic Dasein, as one for whom being-with-others is merely a distraction from the ultimate aim of coming to self-presence, as the fault of Kierkegaard and his wanton abandonment of the ethical. Had Heidegger not been seduced by Kierkegaardian thought, with its “intransigent vehemence and its taste for scandal” (ibid., p. 31), the dire rapprochement with the dark forces might well have been averted. Having been so seduced, however, Kierkegaard’s “hard and aggressive style of thinking,” warns Levinas, “could now be taken seriously as a kind of justification for violence and terror” (ibid.).

What Kierkegaard, and consequently Heidegger, failed to notice was that “being a Self means not to be able to hide from responsibility” (ibid., p. 32), from the solicitation of Others. The face of the Other, for Levinas, stymies the will-to-presence by calling the self into question. For the Other is “poor and destitute, and nothing that touches this Stranger can be indifferent to the Self” (ibid., p. 33). Indeed, to be chosen by an Other “involves the most radical commitment conceivable: total altruism”; such responsibility is that “through which the Self is emptied of all imperialism and egoism – including the egoism of salvation…” (ibid.). The ethical, thus, is far from being a generality which would dissolve subjectivity. Rather, the self is confirmed by virtue of the fact that the Other requires the self for its support. It is, therefore, “promoted to a special position on which everything else depends” (ibid., p. 32).

The import of Levinas’s critique of Kierkegaard should not be underestimated. Even commentators usually considered sympathetic have, at times, reinforced the main points of Levinas’s tirade. Jack Caputo, for example, a thinker who has an abiding passion for all things Kierkegaardian, has placed on the record his belief that Heidegger’s early Freiburg period, the period during which most of the groundwork for Being and Time was put into place, was “held captive by the spiritual militancy of Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard” (Theologia Crucis, p. 1). This is, to be sure, an inadvertent reference to Levinas’s negative appraisal of Kierkegaard’s thinking as being “hard and aggressive.” What interpretations of this form make clear is that in many respected quarters Levinas’s unfortunate reading of Kierkegaard has regrettably caught on.

For my money, however, Levinas missed what is most essential in Kierkegaard – his jewgreek ethics of singularity. The common comparison made between Kierkegaard and Heidegger, a comparison which I have argued guided Levinas’s take on the former, has always seemed more than a little dubious to me. For one thing, Kierkegaard’s philosophy is heavily punctuated by a Christian ethics of love, something which, given Heidegger’s admiration for Nietzsche, is starkly absent from Heidegger’s work. Secondly, Kierkegaard’s antidote to, what he termed, “despair”, was life lived in imitation of Christ. There is no such ideal standard to save Heideggerian Dasein from the desperate plight of “fallenness” – Heidegger’s synonym for “despair”. Thirdly, and most importantly, Kierkegaard’s self is not one which is in agony over its own self, or one which sacrifices the exterior world so as to rest in splendid isolation with God. Quite to the contrary, the self is one which is constantly putting itself into question in an effort to engender more concrete relations with one’s neighbors.

As I suggested above, Kierkegaard was just as troubled as Levinas by those philosophical systems which privileged the Greek will-to-presence over the Judeo-Christian effort to realize justice and concern for the other. His critique of Hegel was driven by an ethico-religious scruple, a critique which was stimulated by the systematician’s denigration of the alienated Jew and the negation of the Christ-figure. What Levinas failed to notice was that Kierkegaard’s biting appraisal of Hegel could easily have been applied to Heidegger with equal force and efficacy. That is, Levinas was blind to the fact that what most frightened Kierkegaard was any attempt to deify or divinize the state, the established order, or what he calls in The Concept of Irony, the “given actuality.” Talk of the “historical mission” of a state, or of the Geist of world history, was bound to send shivers up his stooped spine. For in either its secular or religious variations, a divinized state implies terror.

The reason why Kierkegaard called for a “teleological suspension of the ethical” is not, as Levinas contends, because he intended to offer a justification for violence and terror, but because “the ethical” in this context refers to Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, or social morality. Kierkegaard states this quite clearly in the opening pages of Fear and Trembling. For Hegel, as I argued above, the ideal state was one in which church and established order had become dialectically harmonized in the mediation of God and his people through the intercession of the Holy Spirit (Geist). What deeply disturbed Kierkegaard about this was that it conferred divine legitimacy on the powers that be. If, as Hegel says, the laws of the state are the material manifestation of God’s divine design on earth, then they simply cannot be challenged or modified except on the basis of a divine intervention. Moreover, if God is woven so fundamentally into the fabric of the state it may be legitimately assumed that he must prefer one set of people to another, he must, that is, be given to nationalistic fervor. No wonder then, as Jim Marsh poignantly reminds us, that George Bush called on the churches of the land to sound their bells when victory was had in the Gulf war, or that presidents and monarchs regularly summon their subjects to go and fight and kill for both “God and country.”[xiii]

The idea that God is on the side of the powers that be was what most offended Kierkegaard about Hegelian philosophy. It also helped explain why Hegel had little to say in a positive sense about outsiders, displaced persons, the downtrodden–those to whom the established order usually turns a blind eye. I do not think it simply a coincidence that the figure of the Jewish Abraham, one for whom Hegel reserves his most unbridled invective, is the anti-hero of Fear and Trembling. For what Kierkegaard sought to teach through the use of the Mount Moriah narrative of sacrifice was not, as Levinas and many others tend to suggest, a lesson in religious fundamentalism, but rather a lesson in what is required if the dangers of the politics of statehood are to be avoided. For Abraham on this reading, is sundering the logic of Sittlichkeit in the name of a singular other; he is attempting, that is, to temporarily suspend the laws of the universal, of the state, so as to respond adequately to the singular other who summons him from beyond its walls. If read from this perspective, it becomes clear that Kierkegaard is far from being against the ethical, but is looking for a way in which the ethical can become self-critical.

For Levinas though, Kierkegaard is simply intent on wantonly suspending the ethical. I should have thought, however, that what ought to be emphasized here is not the word “suspension,” but rather “teleological.” The self for Kierkegaard, and once more pace Levinas, is always already embedded with others in a sociopolitical matrix. This is why he defines it as a relation of the necessary and the possible. To attempt to extricate oneself from one’s sociopolitical situation would simply intensify despair, for one would be surrendering oneself to possibility at the expense of necessity. So it is never a question of being able to abdicate from one’s social milieu in an effort either to agonize over one’s own being or self, or to achieve a one on one with God in isolation. One can, however, as Anti-Climacus instructs, “relate oneself to oneself,” which means that one has the capacity to take a critical distance from the self which one has become through birth, acculturation, etc. One can, that is, on the basis of one’s ability to imagine otherwise (Kierkegaard designates the imagination as the faculty instar omnium), envision possibilities which may change one’s world for the better. This is why I said earlier that for Kierkegaard the self is something which is constantly putting itself into question. For there must always be, on this account, a proper synthesis between the actual and the possible, between what is and what may be. Consequently, one is never at liberty to suspend the ethical, but only to telelogically suspend it. This implies coming to a realization that the state and its laws are provisional, that they did not fall from the sky, and that they can become the object of a critical imagination.

III

On this reading, therefore, Kierkegaard’s is not a “politics of statehood,” but, what I have chosen to call, a “politics of exodus,” in the sense that it challenges the dominant political, ethical, religious, and metaphysical paradigms governing reality, in the name of those whose welfare they do not serve, those poor existing individuals who have not made it as far as Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, or into the grand narrative of Being. I use “exodus” not only in the pedestrian sense, but also because of its religious connotations. For it must not be forgotten, as it is by many these days, that Kierkegaard teleologically suspends the ethical, qua Sittlichkeit, in favor of the religious. The most pernicious consequence of Christianity being confused with Christendom, for Kierkegaard, was that it would take the sting out of the liberating impulses of religion. By this he meant that the only form of religion which could keep a critical check on the state power, was one which underscored what was most offensive to the ears of the established orthodoxy. Kierkegaardian religion is one which is practiced on the margins of the state or of the ethical. For it is there amongst les juifs that it finds its true vocation.

In liberating the Christ-figure from the bondage of the state, and in thus reviving the Judeo-Christian thematics of justice and mercy in a philosophical cum theological setting, Kierkegaard overturned all our best laid ethical plans. For the scandal of the God-man as ethical goal and criterion is not, as Levinas is wont to contend, that it encourages personal salvation, but that it makes the Other, especially those who are least like us, the criterion by which we ourselves shall be judged. When Anti-Climacus says that in relating itself to itself, and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that created it, he means that when the actual embedded self strives to imagine his state of affairs otherwise, or when he endeavors to teleologically suspend the ethical, qua given actuality, he ought to use the Christ-figure as a standard against which to judge the efficacy of the possibilities envisioned. In so doing, one is not led out of exteriority into some interior space, but to the world of the New Testament, a world in which singularity and difference hold sway, a world populated by outcasts and victims, migrants and tax collectors. This is all by way of saying that to imitate the God-man for Kierkegaard, amounts to standing in solidarity with, as he says, “the most wretched.”

Kierkegaard’s politics of exodus suggests that the most effective way to keep political structures from freezing over is to keep an eye on those whose singular tales of woe are bound to offend the policy makers and guardians of the law. Lifting the laws of the home or the state long enough to afford mercy to those who show up at “Immigration” at the Welfare Office, or at the church gate, is, from Kierkegaard’s point of view, a genuine work of love. Love of this type, he opines, is the means by which the law is fulfilled.

Levinas’s reading of Kierkegaard, as one who contributed in no small measure to “the violence of the modern world,” and to “the amoralism of recent philosophies” (EE, pp. 30-31), is, in the final analysis, I submit, not only regrettable, but also quite inexcusable. Long before Levinas, Kierkegaard had identified the dangers posed by philosophical and political totalities which are insufficiently critical of their own myths and origins. His preference for the Judeo-Christian approach to questions of truth and justice made him suspicious of state politics. This did not prevent him, however, from giving his thinking a political edge. It is precisely by virtue of this that I believe Kierkegaard is ultimately a more useful thinker than Levinas. I say this because for Kierkegaard, unlike Levinas, it is never simply a choice between totality or infinity. Neither is it a question of trying to step outside political totalities so as to become, as Levinas suggests time and again, a hostage of the Other to the point of substitution. For Kierkegaard, the self’s objective is to keep the borders separating oneself from the Other as flexible as possible, not, however, to dissolve them. For it is never possible to deny the self to the point of obliteration. As we have learned from Derrida, there must always be a circle of reappropriation between self and other for love to be possible. Levinas’s contention that politics is war leads him to demand of us the impossible: total altruism.

Indeed, isn’t it an irony that it was Levinas of all people who reprimanded Kierkegaard for not underlining the fact that God stayed Abraham’s hand over Isaac, so that he would not “commit a human sacrifice” (EE, p. 34), when it was Levinas himself who argued that the ethical consists in becoming a hostage to the Other unto death? I only wish Levinas had pondered on such a question before uttering those ominously unforgettable words: “What shocks me about Kierkegaard is his violence.”