Foregrounding the Political in the Thought of Cohen, Buber, and Levinas

Abstract

Vincent Lloyd is a visionary in the intersecting areas of philosophy/Theory and religious/ Jewish and political thought. His invitation, which, with characteristic lightning speed, he put to me just after the advance announcement had gone out that my book, Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen and the “Neighbor,” would be published, to contribute to a forum that would put it in conversation with two other titles—Levinas’s Politics. Justice, Mercy, Universality, by Annabel Herzog, and Martin Buber’s Theopolitics, by Samuel Hayim Brody—is perfectly representative of this. Looking at our three publications alongside each other is indeed an excellent occasion for accounting for some key contemporary paths of inquiry in (Euro-)Jewish philosophy and Theory. The obvious tie is that all three of our books inquire into “politics” in and through the thought of the authors we are studying: Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. (A fourth name to be mentioned is that of Franz Rosenzweig, who, while not a direct focus of our three books, is often essential to refer to when discussing Cohen, Buber, and Levinas within the trajectories of twentieth-century Jewish thought.) Although, as indicated by my book’s title, my project was to discover how “ethics” is thought by Cohen to emerge out of “law,” the mode of inquiry into “law” that Cohen participates in is indeed at the same time a project of social and political thought. For all three of our authors, there has been, historically, limited attention to whether they contributed to questions concerning politics, or to how political concepts figured into their thinking. The names Levinas and Cohen, as well as Rosenzweig, often signified an argument for or about “ethics.” Whenever such claims have been cognizant of Jewish traditions or Jewish existence, they have also been in explicit or implicit continuity with certain modern understandings, dating from the late eighteenth century, of Judaism as an “ethical” religion or tradition, and of an “ethics of Judaism.” In a related constellation, the names Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and sometimes also Levinas, were often arranged around the Buberian notion of “dialogue,” the idea of an elemental relation between an “I” and a “You.” That relation would be understood as a model of ethical comportment toward the other, an authentic experience of, or foundational precondition for sociality. If these thinkers, along with others who have been canonical for modern Jewish thought, were especially embraced for their evocations of ethics, this went along with a historic downplaying of the categories of politics and law in Jewish self-understandings since the beginnings of Emancipation. Famously, the conditions of acceptance of Jews as