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Reading the Beyond. Lévinas – Literature, Holiness, and Politics

Can literature be political? Initially this question seems trivial, and a response in the affirmative inevitable. However, the question becomes genuinely problematic the moment we move from consideration of the pragmatic, political situation of the act of writing to direct questioning of literature’s responsibility. Can literature bear the weight of a responsibility that transcends the individual? Can politics become an organ of literature? Given the dominance of a literary theory whose critical ideological disposition casts the possibility of meaning into doubt, uncoupling the sign in its meaning from the thing signified in its materiality, a positive answer to the question is more difficult than ever. In the light of this episteme, the responsibility of literature is clearly not to seize and employ power, but to lessen power and to strip it of its falsely understood responsibilities. The Talmudic lectures of Emmanuel Lévinas that stand at the centre of the observations that follow are of unusual significance for the discussion of the relationship between literature and politics, insofar as they represent a turningpoint. They consciously choose to treat of a text that can only be understood as the literary incarnation of a political process – the transfer of the Jewish constitutional state into the Jewish community of law – that seeks the points of interaction between the hermeneutic force of withdrawal and the nationalpolitical power of the literary that give Talmudic thought its structure. The analysis that follows will attempt to lay bare the motives for, and consequences of, such an approach for our understanding of the responsibility of literature. If, as Roland Barthes puts it, language is “not the predicate of a subject which is inexpressible or which language serves to signify”, but is rather the subject of literature,1 there can be no doubt that the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, intensely concerned with the birth of subjectivity out of language, should furnish