Introduction It could be claimed that Levinas''s breathtaking ethical theory is reduced to nothing when confronted with the political question, and that this confrontation is intrinsic to his philosophy. To put it bluntly, Levinas''s ethics seems to be doomed from inception because of the political. Levinas''s ethics describes the encounter with the other, that is, with any other human being, which takes place on a level distinct from both cognitive reason and aesthetic experience. This face-to-face encounter consists not of acknowledging the other but of being called to responsibility for the other. In ethics, the subject substitutes itself for the "face," a metaphor for the infinite otherness of the other--that is, that which cannot be grasped by concepts, represented by memory, or felt by emotions. It is a relationship "beyond essence" in which the ego is commanded by a transcendent order to take responsibility for the other person. Politics, on the other hand, is an ontological praxis of mediation among at least three people: the ego, the other, and any third party ( le tiers ). Among three people, however, nothing can ever be absolute or transcendent; everything is thought, represented, or felt.

It follows that while the ethical substitution has the authority of a religious command (TI 30, TI'' 40; AE 139, OB 87) and implies the all-encompassing responsibility of the ego for the other, the relation between the ego and several others raises questions about duties and rights, namely, about sharing responsibility. Put simply, the presence of two people facing the ego inevitably leads to a calculation of what is due to each of them. Or to put it yet another way: ethical responsibility is anterior to all questions; politics means the emergence of questions about responsibility, and about everything else. The connection among three or more people "interrupts the face to face of a welcome of the other person, interrupts the proximity or approach of the neighbor" (AE 234; OB 150). In Levinas''s oft-quoted words,The third party [ le tiers ] is other than the neighbor but also another neighbor, and also a neighbor of the other. What am I to do? What have they already done to one another? Who comes before the other in my responsibility? What, then, are the other and the third party with respect to one another? Birth of the question. The first question of the interhuman is the question of justice. Henceforth it is necessary to know, to become consciousness.

Comparison is superimposed to my relation with the unique and the incomparable. (PP 345; PP'' 168)It is difficult to grasp what appears to be the passage from the ethical relationship to the political situation. Indeed, "the entrance of the third party" seems to undermine everything Levinas has said about ethics. Why spend so many pages describing the unquestionable and absolute responsibility of the ego for the other when the ineluctable arrival of le tiers will necessarily break all ethical constructs, leaving us full only of questions about who is responsible to whom and who comes first? When, at the end of Otherwise than Being , Levinas says "Justice is necessary [ Il faut la justice ]" (AE, 245; OB, 157)--that is, responsibility must be shared--readers may feel they have been wasting their time. The "entrance of the third party," as such, brings a disturbing anticlimax to Levinas''s emphatic ethical extremism. Not only does social life--even in its most harmless forms--put ethics in jeopardy, Levinas does not even seem to regret the entrance of the third party and the return of the ontological questions he attacked with such zeal in his ethical analysis. If all things are eventually reducible to ontological questions, why start by proclaiming a radical break from all ontological questions? However, the problem with the "entrance of the third party" is not only one of chronology. In many texts Levinas affirms that le tiers is already present in the meeting with the other.

In his words: "The third looks at me in the eyes of the other" (TI 234; TI'' 213). And: "It is not that the entry of a third party would be an empirical fact, and that my responsibility for the other finds itself constrained to a calculus by the ''force of things.'' In the proximity of the other, all the others than the other obsess me, and already this obsession cries out for justice, demands measure and knowing; it is consciousness" (AE 246; OB 158). For Levinas, therefore, the framework of all relationships can be considered to be always, and necessarily, political. There is no passage from the ethical duo to the political trio, because the trio exists from the very beginning. As Madeleine Fagan puts it, "Ethics and politics are not separable realms that corrupt one another but are necessarily inseparable and contained within one another." If so, we are tempted to ask again, why bother with ethics at all? If the basic structure of human existence is sociopolitical life, namely, if life consists of ontological relationships between three or more people, why focus on the ethical face to face and define it as preceding all relationships? There seems to be a serious contradiction or paradox here, one that is acknowledged by Levinas himself: "If everything terminates in justice, why tell this long story about the face, which is the opposite of justice?" (PM 175). Levinas offers three reasons for this contradiction:The first reason is that it is ethics which is the foundation of justice.

Because justice is not the last word; within justice we seek a better justice. That is the liberal state. The second reason is that there is a violence in justice. When the verdict of justice is pronounced, there remains for the unique I that I am the possibility of finding something more to soften the verdict. The third reason is that there is a moment when I, the unique I, along with other I''s, can find something else which improves universality itself. (PM 175)In this book, I take as a starting point Levinas''s three answers to the paradox of the "entrance of the third party" and discuss them in light of a close reading of the Talmudic readings--that is, Levinas''s "Jewish" works. I argue that this procedure is effective because it is precisely in his Talmudic commentaries that Levinas developed the implications of these answers. There may be many reasons--historical and philosophical--for Levinas''s choice to confine the gist of his political thinking to this unfamiliar genre.

Here, I suggest the following: (1) for Levinas, the questioning that characterizes the Talmudic hermeneutic is, by definition, political; (2) the Talmud provides Levinas with paradigmatic cases that give his abstract ethics a concrete substrate; and (3) in Levinas''s oeuvre, the readings constitute a different kind of writing, which disturbs his ethical philosophizing: as such they are, in themselves, political. The first two reasons will be elucidated all along the book. The third is developed in the first chapter. A Critique of the "Religious" Readings of the Readings Until a few years ago, scholars of Levinas tended to separate his work into two corpuses, the philosophical-phenomenological and the Talmudic. One group regarded Levinas as a philosopher and focused on his philosophical books, turning occasionally to the Talmudic readings for an illustration. The other saw him as an exegete of the Holy Scriptures, responsible for a renewal of theological concerns in the secularized Judeo-Christian world. Some radical readers, like Benny Levy, even contended that the philosophical and the Talmudic works contradict each other. In response to this polarization of Levinas studies, recent publications have argued for reading all of Levinas''s works together.

According to this new understanding, the differences between the two sets of works are matters of style, not of essence. That is, beyond the formal differences in language and style that differentiate philosophical treatises and textual exegesis, there is no contradiction between the two corpuses, which convey convergent meanings, supporting and completing each other. Indeed, for this scholarship, Levinas''s purpose was precisely to give modern expression to the concord between philosophy and Judaism. Levinas himself left the question open, claiming that both corpuses are philosophical, yet insisting on the distinction between them, as expressed in his choice of different publishers for the two bodies of work and in his calling the readings his "confessional" writings. I propose to reconcile these divergent views. It is clear to me that for Levinas, there is no irreducible difference between the philosophical and Jewish traditions, and that for him, they differ primarily in the realm of style and language. For Levinas, philosophy speaks Greek, by which he means both Western philosophical language and an interest in essence or ontology. By contrast, the Jewish tradition speaks Hebrew, by which he means both the rabbinic mode of interpretation and a concern for transcendent otherness, which he called "ethics.

" Both philosophy and the Jewish tradition, however, deal with the relationship between the thrust toward sameness and the concern for otherness, that is, between ontology and ethics. At the end of the day, their central questions are very close. For instance, Levinas underlined the ontological necessity perceptible in Scripture when he wrote, in the first pages of Difficult Freedom , "Here Judaism feels very close to the West, by which I mean philosophy. It is not by virtue of simple chance that the way towards the synthesis of Jewish revelation and Greek thought was masterfully traced by Maimonides, who is claimed by both Jewish and Muslim philosophers; that a profound respect for Greek knowledge already fills the wise men of the T.