The State and politics in a post-colonial, global order : reconstruction and criticism of a Levinassian perspective

Abstract

The aim of this article is to formulate a credible interpretation of what Levinas' general perspective would have been on the State and politics in the current post-colonial, global order - a context about which he wrote very little explicitly. This will be done in full recognition of the eminent position that the ethics of the face-to-face relation with the other plays in the constitution of the political in his work. A reading of Levinas' interpretation of (aspects of) Lévy-Bruhl's and Lévi-Strauss' ethnographies will serve to gain access to Levinas' most pressing concerns. These are the threats posed to the other by the tendencies of identitary totalitarian violence and of indifference in the use of political power. It will be argued that these concerns are to be considered as shaping his philosophical project decisively. Having established this clearly political form of his work, attention will be given more directly to the question of statelessness, understood as the undermining of State sovereignty. From the reconstructed Levinassian perspective, the undermining of State sovereignty would be subject to an ambiguous evaluation. This in turn makes a reconstruction of a Levinassian 'negative political theology' possible. The article concludes with a serious indictment of the implications of Levinas' understanding of just politics and of sovereign power.