On Election: Levinas and the Question of Ethics as First Philosophy

Abstract

The idea of ‘election’ cannot be approached, it seems, through traditional or classical philosophical conceptuality. This idea requires another type of discourse. Not simply because this idea refers to an entirely other body of texts, that of the Biblical tradition, but more radically since it commands another modality of thought which must at once suspend and pursue philosophical concepts to the point where they express themselves otherwise than according to the rationality of their own deployment. In truth, the idea of ‘election’ calls thus for a redefinition of the rapport between singularity and universality, one no longer structured and circumscribed by ‘truth’, but rather inspired by a novel and irreducible modality of ‘justice’. A ‘justice’ which opens to the possibility for an ‘ethics’, not as ‘communicative dialogue’, ‘mutual recognition’ or a series of established and rationally grounded laws, but a ‘place’ of incessant and irresolute, non-intentional and unconditional exposition to the Other.

Keywords:

• election
• responsibility
• singularity
• alterity
• universality

Notes

1 E. Levinas, A l'heure des nations (Paris: Minuit, 1988), p. 198.

2 D. Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Paris: Editions de l'éclat, 1988).

3 E. Levinas, Autrement qu'être, ou au-delà de l'essence (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1974), p. 190.