The notion of social invisibility designates the heterogeneous set of processes of exclusion, discrimination and dehumanization that give certain individuals the feeling of not being seen. They are invisibilized on account of their professional precarity, their clandestinity or their spatial relegation, but also of their gender, their sexuality, their race, their age or their disability1. Religious minority communities are also invisibilized, and among them the Jews.
The two paradigms that have come to prevail in defining social invisibility seem at first sight adequate for describing Jewish invisibility. Following Axel Honneth, social invisibility has been defined as a denial of recognition symbolically expressed by the fact of “looking through” another2. Jewish invisibility is then a contempt that denies Jews any dignity in their Jewishness — whether one thinks of it as religion, culture or sensibility — or their socio-political rights tied to their citizenship. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, others understand it above all as an exclusion from the sphere of public-political appearance3. Jewish invisibility is thus conceived as exclusion from the public space in dramatic forms of ghettoization (exclusion of bodies), or else in forms of assimilation or forced conversion (exclusion of identity).
While these two competing conceptions bring indispensable resources to the understanding of Jewish invisibility, they have their limits and shortcomings: 1° they present only a negative definition of invisibility as a defect or privation of social visibility; 2° they understate the violence intrinsic to such visibility, at work in stigmatizing gazes and in tyrannical surveillance apparatuses4; 3° they do not describe the lived experience of invisibility; 4° they do not take seriously the strictly visual aspect of this invisibility and therefore do not think the type of vision necessary for its abolition.
Emmanuel Levinas is not known as a thinker of the social and of vision. On the contrary, his philosophy is often considered abstract, ahistorical and iconoclastic, privileging listening over vision. In this article, we shall attempt to show the resources that Levinasian thought offers for describing the phenomena of social invisibility from the standpoint of the Jewish condition. Filling the gaps in the conceptions of Honneth and Arendt evoked above, Levinasian ethics proposes: 1° a positive definition of invisibility as irreducibility to vision; 2° a critical theory of vision inspired by the Jewish tradition; 3° a description of invisibility lived as a Jew; 4° a description of resistance to visibility and of the sensible vision that guarantees Jews a visibility without violence.
We shall first present the Levinasian definition of invisibility, correlative to a critique of the violences produced by social visibility. We shall then turn to the two principal forms of Jewish invisibility in liberal democracies: assimilation (non-visibility) and antisemitism (hyper-visibility). Levinas finally enables us to think, on the basis of Hebrew sources, another type of vision capable of “seeing” the Jews in their invisibility.
Social Invisibility and Ethical Invisibility
The publication of his Carnets de captivité (Captivity Notebooks) and his Conférences inédites (Unpublished Lectures) reveals to us that Levinas worked throughout his oeuvre on a theory of vision and of light5. From his commentaries on his masters Husserl and Heidegger to Autrement qu’être (Otherwise than Being), Levinas makes vision the paradigm of a theoretical relation to being. Drawing on the essential traits of sight such as distance, immediacy and luminosity, Levinas designates by “vision” the whole set of acts that rest on an objectifying representation (Husserl) or an unveiling understanding of beings (Heidegger).
This vision, whether theoretical or ontological, proceeds by way of adequation, assimilation and appropriation. It “is, in effect, essentially an adequation of exteriority to interiority: exteriority is reabsorbed into the soul that contemplates.”6 Participating in a “philosophy of the Same,” vision is the sense par excellence of the neutral, of totality, of interiority and of immanence. This phenomenology of vision becomes critical when it calls into question “the hegemony of vision”7 which tends to contaminate all the domains of existence to the point that the intelligible and the meaningful are limited to such a reductive visibility.
Yet Levinas means to describe “phenomena” irreducible to any objectifying representation or unveiling understanding. Among ordinary phenomena and intramundane entities, there are beings whose alterity, singularity and transcendence are incommensurable with any identification, universalization and immanentization. “Invisibility does not indicate an absence of relation; it implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea.”8 We shall call “ethical invisibility” this definitive resistance of human subjectivity to ordinary visibility.
The famous notion of “face” paradoxically designates this invisibility of the other, a face that expresses both his personal uniqueness and his mortal precarity. The face is neither a figure gathering the different parts of the visage, nor a mask covering the face with a form referring back to an identity or a social function. It is not the unveiling of a hidden divinity accessible through the impersonal mediation of an image. Levinas therefore distinguishes it from the idol or the icon, since the face interrupts the “idolatry that lurks within every contemplation.”9
From this point on, does not social visibility consist in dis-figuring the other (dé-visager), in denying his fundamental invisibility? To deprive the other of a face would amount to denying his humanity. Ethically impossible, since one cannot at once “see” the face and deny it, this reification is nonetheless the ordinary way of approaching the other. Of course, Levinas also described the face as the site of an articulation between invisibility and visibility, between the incomparable uniqueness of the other and the comparison of human beings necessary for justice, between an infinite responsibility and a solidarity-based equality10. Ethical source of the political, the placing of the face into visibility nonetheless inevitably tends to exert a violence and a tyranny upon subjects, by considering them as mere anonymous parts of a sovereign totality. At the foundation of the social order, the social visibility of the face is therefore also the condition of possibility of murder and of the extreme forms of invisibilization that are the ghetto and extermination.
The ghetto is the historical form taken by the exclusion or spatial relegation of the Jews. Yet, while it forbids at once the encounter with the face, social recognition and public appearance, the ghetto does not for all that prevent antisemitic gazes. Genocidal extermination, for its part, rests on a process of dehumanization that the very logic of vision makes possible: it is the most extreme form of invisibilization, which considers human subjects as disposable lives and cannot bear that Jews accede to any form of visibility. The “final solution” combines two invisibilizations: the extermination of bodies and the destruction of every trace of this extermination in landscapes, in histories and in memories.
In our liberal societies, these two extreme forms no longer prevail. But two other forms of invisibility still structure Jewish experience: assimilation and antisemitism. The study of these two contemporary forms provides the occasion for a Levinasian reworking of the dominant theories of social invisibility. Indeed, Levinas sees in assimilation a necessary but wounding public appearance, and in antisemitism the effect of a vital but reifying recognition.
Assimilation, or Non-Visibility
Between 1947 and 1973, Levinas devoted a series of texts to the problem of Jewish assimilation11. He does not propose there a sociological or political theory of assimilation, but a phenomenological description of Jewish existence within a liberal democracy12. The theory of assimilation rests on the distinction between the private domain and the public domain. The private domain would be that of the intimate, of religion, of the particular, while the public domain would be that of politics and of the universal. Laïcité presupposes this separation of the public-political and the private-religious. The emancipation of the Jews had already circumscribed Judaism to the sphere of intimacy and interiority, while guaranteeing legal protection to Jews as citizens.
Levinas criticizes this separation while recognizing its necessity. He does not simply praise emancipation as a historical progress. To understand the necessity of emancipation, we need to take a detour through Levinas’s philosophy. While maintaining ethics as first philosophy, Levinas seeks — as we have already sketched — to deduce the necessity of law, of institutions and of the State from their origin in the ethical relation. Justice indeed demands a placing into visibility of the invisibility of the other. From Autrement qu’être onward, Levinas will call “comparison of incomparables”13 the placing into symmetry of the asymmetrical relation to the other that allows for the recognition of his rights as a citizen equal to others.
This process of visibilization therefore proceeds through universalization, formalization and abstraction. Levinas calls “the third” (le tiers) this demand of justice that cannot be reduced to the physical presence of a third man. This third, this demand for visibility, already looks at me in the face of the other14. The problem of the political does not therefore come from the visibility it presupposes, but from the invisibilization it inevitably produces by masking the face of the other, that is, his uniqueness and his precarity. This problem is accompanied by a danger: politics has a tendency to forget its ethical source and to take itself as its own ultimate end, making visibility an end in itself indifferent to the violences it produces.
Assimilation is thus the very functioning of the social and political world. It is supposed to guarantee equality and justice among all citizens. But the appearance in the public sphere that it presupposes has a cost: Jewish non-visibility. While politics rests on an apophantic structure (to make something seen as…), assimilation makes Jews seen as citizens and invisibilizes Jews as Jews.
For Levinas, this invisibilization stems from the profoundly inegalitarian character of the norms of visibility that constitute the field of public appearance. Jewish assimilation in Western democracies takes place in predominantly Christian societies, where Jews are a minority. All existence in these societies, beneath the partition between private and public, is constituted by the sedimentations of this Christian heritage15.
In this socio-historical milieu, the Jewish “life-world” (Lebenswelt) is conditioned by a spatiality, a temporality, a perception, a language constituted by the history of Christianity. Despite the separation of Church and State, Jews are immersed in the midst of churches, of the calendar, of painting and literature constituted by and constituting a world dominated by Christianity. In a relative proximity to Michel Foucault, Levinas thinks through assimilation the relations of force, the relations of power and knowledge that subject subjects to the majoritarian social norms.
The ignorance of the secularized forms of religious life within the secular States themselves was the fundamental flaw of the philosophy of assimilation. The great theorists of emancipation — such as, for example, Joseph Salvador — professed both a sincere attachment to Judaism and the conviction that the world born of the French Revolution frees itself from the Christian structures that supported society before the Revolution. There exists indeed an element of diffuse religion — intermediate between the strictly rational order of political thought and the mystical order of belief — in which political life itself is steeped. One does not think about this religious atmosphere because one breathes it naturally. It does not vanish from the simple fact of the legal separation of Church and State. The national spirit is strongly marked by the religious history that, over centuries, impregnated daily mores […]. Hence the error of assimilation becomes visible. The entry of the Jews into the national life of the European States led them to breathe an atmosphere impregnated with Christian essence. And this prepares them for the religious life of these States, foreshadows conversions. The strictly private Judaism advocated by assimilation did not escape an unconscious Christianization. National life accepted without precautions could only lead to the abdication of Judaism. In a world born of the Christian past, the Jewish religion was being transformed into an abstract confession16.
“How is Judaism possible?” — such is the question Levinas then asks himself. In this context, assimilation appears at once as a vital necessity, to protect oneself against antisemitism, and a trap leading irremediably to dissolution. And one must acknowledge that assimilation does not protect totally and that antisemitism has not disappeared. It remains that assimilation poses itself as a “trap of visibility” or a “dilemma of visibility”17: Jews have the choice between total integration through progressive assimilation, conversion to the majority religion, a more or less conscious Marranism, or a risky resistance.
The first three options are different sorts of strategies of self-invisibilization that do not call into question the relation of force that assimilation is. Striving to escape stigmatization and discrimination through strategies of flight, clandestinity or “passing,” these Jews will nonetheless never manage to rid themselves of the Jewishness that antisemites attribute to them.
As early as 1945, Levinas sees in the renaissance of Jewish culture and education the only solution for benefiting from the advantages of assimilation while resisting Jewish dissolution18. This resistance amounts to recreating a Jewish “life-world” compatible with the demands of modern liberal societies.
Antisemitism, or Hyper-Visibility
Why is the visibility of assimilation doubly trapped? On the one hand, it invisibilizes Jews in the public domain and dissolves Judaism in the private domain, and on the other hand, it cannot protect Jews from antisemitism. After 1492, conversion and Marranism are only temporary solutions: the conversos will always be, in the eyes of the antisemites, “traitors” in potentia, sub-humans indefinitely despised and assimilated to pigs (marrano means “pig” in Spanish). Extermination is only the culmination of the implacable logic of antisemitic persecution:
Among the millions of human beings who found there misery and death, the Jews underwent the unique experience of a total dereliction. They knew an experience of total passivity, an experience of the Passion. Chapter 53 of Isaiah exhausted there for them all its meaning. The suffering, which they shared with all the victims of the war, received its unique signification from racial persecution, which is absolute, since it paralyzes, by its very intention, all flight, refuses in advance any conversion, forbids any self-abandonment, any apostasy in the etymological sense of the term, and thereby touches the very innocence of the being called back to its ultimate identity19.
What is antisemitism according to Levinas? From 1934 and his “Quelques réflexions sur une philosophie de l’hitlérisme” (“Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism”), antisemitism is for him an ontology, a way of understanding being, that chains the Jew to his Jewishness. To be a victim of antisemitism is to “be riveted” to one’s body, with no possibility of escaping it. “Chained to his body, man sees himself refused the power of escaping from himself.”20 Lived subjectively in a feeling of shame that one would like to hide, this fixation is not the incorporation of a consciousness into its living flesh, but the reification of a human being reduced to a pure thinglike body. The Jew is constituted by an objectifying representation and as if reduced to an essence (eidos), at once a fixed substance and a recognizable form.
In this, antisemitism consists in dis-figuring the Jews, in depriving them of all that is proper to the face: uniqueness, vulnerability, language, the prohibition of murder and the demand for political justice. From his experience of captivity, Levinas describes the lived experience of dehumanization in racial persecution:
We were no longer anything but a quasi-humanity, a band of monkeys. Strength and misery of the persecuted, a poor inner murmur reminded us of our rational essence. We were no longer in the world. […] Beings shut in their species; despite all their vocabulary, beings without language. Racism is not a biological concept; antisemitism is the archetype of all internment. Social oppression itself only imitates this model. It cloisters within a class, deprives of expression and condemns to “signifiers without signifieds” and, from then on, to violences and battles. How can one deliver a message of one’s humanity which, from behind the bars of quotation marks, would extend otherwise than as simian speech?21
However, antisemitism is not a pure and simple absence of social visibility, of unifying recognition. On the contrary, it is a form of hyper-visibility, a stigmatizing and dehumanizing recognition. Hyper-visibility and the enchainment to one’s being that one finds in antisemitism make it, for Levinas, the paradigmatic matrix of all oppressions. He does not affirm that antisemitism is found in every form of oppression but, conversely, distinguishes “the presence within antisemitism of all racial hatreds, of all persecutions of the weak, of all the world’s exploitations.”22 In oppressions of gender, of class, of race, one finds moreover this essential link between majoritarian visibility — supposedly neutral, universal and spiritual — and minoritarian hyper-visibility — marked, particularized and riveted to the body.
Fundamentally, antisemitism is an essentialism of identity. It considers Jewish identity as an essence and reduces Jewish persons to it. In a fundamental article written in the journal Esprit following the Six-Day War, Levinas takes on the antisemitic resurgence that sees in the attachment of the Jews of France to the attacked State of Israel a resurgence of the “double allegiance” according to which Judaism would be incompatible with French nationality.
In a surprising geometric analogy, Levinas recalls that if, for Euclid, “space is not unidimensional,” in the same way the identity of the Jews of France is, as for everyone, multidimensional. Against a reduction of identity to an essence and to a single aspect, Levinas proposes a little-known theory of the layering of social identity. As a matter of fact, antisemitism, in its ordinary and most extreme manifestations, proceeds by abstraction and separates Jewish identity from all the others.
Should we understand Levinasian uniqueness not as an abstract and universalist singularity, but rather as the sum of the particularities of an individual and of a surplus of singularity that makes him irreducible to this summation? Is uniqueness abstract, without context, or an incessant abstraction escaping from a precise context? Henceforth, how to see the Jews without invisibilizing them? Is a vision of Jews as Jews, that would be neither assimilationist nor reifying, possible?
Seeing the Jews in Their Invisibility
How to remedy the various forms of Jewish invisibility? How to see Jews without reproducing the vices of vision? The question of a mode of encounter or of relation other than the objectifying and totalizing gaze is a guiding thread of Levinas’s work. How to see others in their invisibility, that is, in their uniqueness and their precarity? In other words, how to be responsible for the other without his appearing to me or without recognizing him? How to see his face?
Jewish non-visibility tied to assimilation can introduce us to the negative or critical side of this vision. We have already said that resistance to assimilation requires a Jewish renaissance. This cultural and normative transformation must be accompanied by a calling into question of the injustices, the inequalities, the domination that condition the field of public appearance. To see the invisibles passes first through the critique of their invisibilization. This critique is not solely discursive or theoretical, but it also passes through acts or practices that interrupt the ordinary unfolding of social life. The ethical critique of invisibility therefore bears, in a sense, on the sedimented effects of invisibilization.
This critique must necessarily be made by the invisibles, or at least in their presence, and not as if they were absent and merely represented. The calling into question of the majoritarian social norms and of being by the victims of domination, or by their witnesses, belongs to the prophetic tradition. The vision of the invisibles therefore partakes of a “truth of testimony” rather than of a “truth of unveiling.”23
It is tied, finally, to the renaissance of Jewish culture and education that Levinas advocates, along with other intellectuals of his time24. This return to study and to Jewish tradition must not only be a nostalgic remembrance, but an active resistance to the dissolution of the Jewish condition in assimilation. This resistance has the specificity of not drawing its foundations and its objectivity from the public domain. It holds within the precarious limits of an inner life, that Levinas compares to a sukkah or to the “four cubits of Halakha (Arba Amot shel Halakha)” of one who prays, and whose values and certainties rest on no social, institutionalized morality but are easily swept away by the winds of history25.
How to recognize Jews without this recognition being either universalizing or particularizing? How to see the Jew both in his invisible uniqueness and in his Jewishness, without riveting him to it either in antisemitism or in communitarianism? For Levinas, only religion — which for him designates the relation of face-to-face (panim-el-panim) with the other — is capable of recognizing the other in his singularity, beyond the reciprocal and universalizing recognition of politics26. Beyond the State and human rights, this ethical “recognition” respectful of the uniqueness of the other person would be messianic and not historical27. Messianic recognition will not occur at the end of time, but each time that universal recognition does not sacrifice the uniqueness of the person.
Menahem, the fourth presumed name of the Messiah — these names define messianism — characterizes messianic times as an era in which the individual accedes to a personal recognition beyond the recognition he holds from his belonging to humanity and to the State. It is not in his rights that he is recognized, but in his person, in his strict individuality. Persons do not disappear into the generality of an entity […]. I thus join the famous Talmudic apothegm that, in the same spirit, states: “On the day when truth is repeated without concealing the name of the one who first uttered it, the Messiah will come.” On the day when truth, despite its impersonal form, will keep the mark of the person who expressed himself in it, when its universality will preserve it from anonymity, the Messiah will come. For this situation is messianism itself28.
Does messianic “recognition” still have something in common with social recognition? In a difficult passage of Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity), Levinas calls “judgment of history” the objectifying and universalizing recognition within the socio-political world. It renders individuals visible in their absence, like a judgment in absentia. History and politics treat subjects as dead things by integrating them into a whole of which they are only anonymous parts29.
The violence of this mortifying placing into visibility that dis-figures persons is moreover itself invisible to the eyes of history and politics, so that “the invisible par excellence is the offense that universal history does to particulars.”30 By opposition, the “judgment of God” is the only one capable of seeing the invisibility of the subject, that is, his uniqueness beyond the sum of his particularities.
What must one understand by this divine judgment? Levinas does not have in mind here an ordeal, a religious trial proving the innocence of the accused through divine assistance in overcoming a test. The “judgment of God” refers to a vision of the invisible coming from the invisible, in other words a vision from uniqueness to uniqueness, from face to face. It is produced concretely in the gaze of the other, in the ethical interpellation of our infinite responsibility for others31. Thus, Levinas means nothing other when he speaks of “vision of the face”: to see the face means not only to make oneself responsible for the other, but to place oneself at the service of social justice32.
After having reconstituted the Levinasian theory of this “vision” of the invisible, let us return to the Jewish condition. To see Jewish invisibility would consist in “recognizing” Jews in their singularity by fighting against the injustices that affect them, in considering oneself responsible for these injustices. Then vision is no longer merely an objectifying perception of an identity, but a critical awakening that enjoins to socio-political action. Totalité et infini is the description of such a vision33.
But, what does it still have in common with ordinary vision? It is customary to think this vision of the face as the listening to the divine prohibition of murder. To see the face of the other would be to hear “Thou shalt not kill,” in a kind of bat kol, the divine word that touches us after the end of prophecy.
On the contrary, it seems to us that Levinas, in explicitly privileging the visual register, insists on the richness of a plurality of possible visions: in addition to the ordinary gaze, there would also be a sensible, non-objectifying, traumatic vision that would be capable of being affected by the uniqueness and the precarity of others. It would no doubt find its model in Revelation, in the vision of the burning bush or the face-to-face of Moses with God.
The Torah is given in the Light of a face. The epiphany of the other is ipso facto my responsibility toward the other: the vision of the other is already an obligation toward him. Direct optics — without the mediation of any idea — can only accomplish itself as ethics34.
The vision of the face would not be the representation of a visage, but the sensibility to the unjust sufferings that affect others. Certainly, there is no recipe or method to anticipate the vision of the face, which is always unforeseeable, and certainly, the vision of the face is not reserved for a familial or national framework limited to our close ones. But to see invisibility always presupposes, including in the case of Jewish invisibility, suspending our ordinary gazes and “perceiving the ‘secret tears’ of the Other that the functioning, even rational, of the hierarchy makes flow.”35
On the heterogeneity of this category, see Stéphane Beaud et al., La France invisible, Paris, La Découverte, 2008.↩︎
Axel Honneth, La lutte pour la reconnaissance (The Struggle for Recognition) (1990), trans. P. Rusch, Paris, Folio, 2013 and “Invisibilité : sur l’épistémologie de la ‘reconnaissance’,” trans. Fr. Gollain, Ch. Lazzeri, O. Voirol, Réseaux, no. 1, 2005, p. 3957. See in this Honnethian lineage, Guillaume Le Blanc, L’invisibilité sociale, Paris, PUF, 2009; Benno Herzog, Invisibilization of Suffering: The Moral Grammar of Disrespect, Cham, Springer, 2020 and the work of Olivier Voirol, including “Invisibilité et ‘système’. La part des luttes pour la reconnaissance,” in Christian Lazzeri and Alain Caillé (eds.), La reconnaissance aujourd’hui, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2009, p. 321346.↩︎
Hannah Arendt, Condition de l’homme moderne (The Human Condition) (1958), trans. G. Fradier, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1961. In an Arendtian vein, see Borren, Marieke, “Towards an Arendtian Politics of In/visibility,” Ethical Perspectives, no. 2, 2008, p. 213237; Étienne Tassin, “Visibilité et clandestinité : des ‘disparus’ en régime libéral,” in Hourya Bentouhami and Christophe Miqueu (eds.), Conflits et Démocratie: Quel nouvel espace public ?, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2010, p. 41-54; Jean Claude Bourdin, “La invisibilidad social como violencia,” Universitas philosophica, vol. 27, no. 54, 2010, p. 1533.↩︎
Nicole Aubert and Claudine Haroche (eds.), Les tyrannies de la visibilité, ERES, 2011.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, Œuvres complètes, tome 1. Carnets de captivité, Paris, Grasset/IMEC, 2009 and Œuvres complètes, tome 2. Parole et silence, Paris, Grasset/IMEC, 2009.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité (Totality and Infinity) (1961), Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2012, p. 328.↩︎
David M. Kleinberg-Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.↩︎
Totalité et Infini, p. 22. One finds elsewhere in Levinas other similar definitions of invisibility: “Invisibility results, not from the incapacity of human knowledge, but from the inaptitude of knowledge as such — from its inadequacy — to the Infinite of the absolutely other, from the absurdity that an event such as coincidence would here have” (Emmanuel Levinas, Le Temps et l’Autre (Time and the Other) (1948), Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1979, p. 10). Or again: “The invisible is not in fact the ‘provisionally invisible,’ nor what for a superficial and rapid gaze remains invisible, and that a more attentive and scrupulous inquiry could render visible; or what remains unexpressed like the hidden movements of the soul; or what, gratuitously and lazily, one affirms as mystery” (Totalité et Infini, p. 272).↩︎
Totalité et infini, p. 187. On the critique of ontology as idolatry, see Emmanuel Levinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps (God, Death, and Time), Paris, Grasset, 1993, p. 187-191.↩︎
See already in Totalité et Infini, p. 234-235. One finds this ambiguity theorized above all in Autrement qu’être: “The face obsesses and shows itself: between transcendence and visibility/invisibility […]. And it is because the third party does not come empirically to disturb proximity, but because the face is at once the neighbor and the face of faces — face and visible — that, between the order of being and that of proximity, the link is irrefutable” (Autrement qu’être, p. 245 et sq.). We return below to the notion of “the third” in Levinas.↩︎
See Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté. Essais sur le judaïsme (Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism), Paris, Albin Michel, 1963, hereafter DL.↩︎
“But toward what type of existence does assimilation tend? Can it be characterized by the simple desire not to single oneself out, to participate in the life of nations? Is it reducible to a phenomenon of general sociology in which a minority dissolves into a majority that engulfs it and fascinates it by its power and its very value as majority? Perhaps. But it is legitimate to bring sociological causality back to its spiritual signification. (…) We would like to attempt something else: to characterize the ontological signification of this existence of the non-Jewish world toward which assimilation acceded” (Emmanuel Levinas, Être juif (Being Jewish) (1947), Paris, Payot-Rivages, 2015, p. 52-53).↩︎
Autrement qu’être, p. 33 and p. 246-247.↩︎
Totalité et infini, p. 234-235.↩︎
“The part is unequal indeed between Christianity, which even in the secular State is present everywhere, and Judaism, which does not dare to show itself outside, held back by the scruple of breaking, by such indiscretion, the pact of emancipation […]. The secular city incorporated into its secularized substance the forms of Catholic life. Between the strictly rational order of political existence and the mystical order of belief, intermediate realities exist in a diffuse state, half-rational, half-religious. They penetrate this political life. They steep it as in lymph. Churches integrate themselves into landscapes that always seem to await them and to sustain them. One does not think about this Christian atmosphere, as one does not think about the air one breathes. The separation of Church and State did not dissipate it. The rhythm of legal time is marked by Catholic festivals; cathedrals orient cities and rites. Art, literature, morality whose classical bedrock lives off Christian themes, still feeds itself off these themes […] The entry of the Jews into the national life of European States led them to breathe an atmosphere wholly impregnated with Christian essence. And this foreshadowed the baptisms” (“Comment le judaïsme est-il possible ?” (1959), DL, p. 367-368).↩︎
“L’assimilation aujourd’hui” (1954), DL, p. 382-383.↩︎
On the trap of visibility, see Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish), Paris, Gallimard, 1975, p. 233-234. Author of L’invisibilité sociale (Paris, PUF, 2009), Guillaume Le Blanc defines this “dilemma of visibility” of minority subjects facing disciplinary power thus: “either to maintain oneself in an extreme visibility where the required attitude would rather be invisibility, or on the contrary to efface oneself in invisibility, insofar as the risk is to be still too visible when one is nevertheless on the way to becoming invisible” (Guillaume Le Blanc, “Une manifestation sans manifeste ? La voix précaire de Bartleby,” Raisons politiques, vol. 68, no. 4, 2017, p. 25).↩︎
“The Western Jews of the years 1945-1960 will not have manifested their essence by converting, by changing their names and saving money or making a career. They have continued the Resistance, in the absolute sense of the term” (“Judaïsme et temps présent” (1960), DL, p. 291).↩︎
“Une religion d’adultes” (1957), DL, p. 28.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme” (1934) in Les imprévus de l’histoire, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1994, p. 40.↩︎
“Nom d’un chien ou le droit naturel” (1975), DL, p. 234.↩︎
“L’espace n’est pas à une dimension” (1968), DL, p. 389.↩︎
“Vérité du dévoilement et vérité du témoignage,” in Le témoignage, Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1972, p. 101-110, modified in Autrement qu’être under the title: Subjectivité et Infini, pp. 167-218.↩︎
See Perrine Simon-Nahum, “‘Penser le judaïsme’. Retour sur les Colloques des intellectuels juifs de langue française (1957-2000),” Archives Juives, vol. 38, no. 1, 2005, p. 79-106.↩︎
See the very beautiful text “Honneur sans drapeau,” Les Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 6, June-August 1966, p. 1-3, reprinted under the title “Sans nom” in Noms propres (1976), Paris, Le Livre de poche, coll. “Biblio essais,” 1987, p. 177-182.↩︎
“Politics tends toward reciprocal recognition, that is, toward equality; it assures happiness. And political law completes and consecrates the struggle for recognition. Religion is Desire and not at all struggle for recognition. It is the possible surplus in a society of equals, that of glorious humility, of responsibility and of sacrifice, the very condition of equality itself” (Totalité et Infini, p. 58).↩︎
See Emmanuel Levinas, “L’État de César et l’État de David” (1971), in L’au-delà du verset. Lectures et discours talmudiques, Paris, Les éditions de Minuit, coll. “Critique,” 1982, p. 216 et sq.↩︎
“Textes messianiques” (1960-1961), DL, p. 135-136.↩︎
“The judgment of history is uttered in the visible. Historical events are the visible par excellence; their truth is produced in evidence. The visible forms a totality or tends toward one. […] The invisible is the offense that inevitably results from the judgment of visible history, even if history unfolds reasonably […]. The invisible, ordering itself into totality, offends subjectivity, since, by essence, the judgment of history consists in translating every apologia into visible arguments and in drying up the inexhaustible source of singularity from which they flow and which no argument could overcome. For singularity cannot find a place in a totality” (Totalité et Infini, p. 272-273).↩︎
Totalité et Infini, p. 276.↩︎
Totalité et Infini, p. 273.↩︎
“This temptation of murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ And to hear: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ is to hear: ‘Social justice’” (“Éthique et esprit” (1952), DL, p. 23).↩︎
“Ethics is an optics. But a ‘vision’ without image, deprived of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or intentionality of a wholly different type, that this work tries precisely to describe” (Totalité et Infini, p. 8).↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “La tentation de la tentation” (1964), in Quatre lectures talmudiques, Paris, Les éditions de Minuit, coll. “Critique,” 1968, p. 104.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendance et hauteur” (1962), in Liberté et commandement, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1999, p. 97.↩︎