Ethics for Scapegoats - The Problem with Levinas’s Universalization of Judaism

This article treats the thought of Emmanuel Levinas as an intervention into a Jewish-Christian theological framework. It begins by reading Levinas’s secular ethics as theorizing a distinction between what I call “self-other” relations characteristic of a violent totality, and “I-Other” relations through which one takes ethical responsibility for another. The paper then maps this distinction onto a Christian-Jewish difference that, I argue, Paul and the rabbis structured as unbridgeable, and that prefigured the Jew as something of a Christian scapegoat. Levinas’s intervention is to universalize the Jewish figure’s responsibility, and he conceives of this universalization as a solution to totalized violence and to Jewish scapegoating. Levinas’s gesture thereby bridges the Christian-Jewish difference, but it simultaneously infinitizes the exceptional value of the Judaic. The paper argues this ultimately has the effect of creating a Jewish exceptionalism more extreme than even the rabbis (or Paul) intended.