Beyond Immanence

The contention of this chapter is that investigating justice and law in the wake of the philosophy of Immanuel Levinas is immensely rewarding, even if, at certain points, there are unresolvable obscurities in the philosophy in question. At the outset, it should also be said that it is not a matter of attempting to apply Levinas’s philosophy to aspects of law as the latter exists in a secular context, as some commentators have been content to do, 1 but of specifying the way that transcendence is integral to law as justice and the Good. Referring to justice in the wake of Levinas immediately raises the issue of justice as it relates to the ‘third party’, which effectively means justice as the institution of law and the legal system – justice as equality. The question has then been: How does justice as supposedly incarnate in the legal system relate to transcendence? The answer is that its relation – or non-relation – to the legal system can only be clarified following the further question: What is a good law? The notion of a good law inevitably evokes transcendence, for it is then a matter of focusing – to reiterate – on the Good. This at least is the response that will guide our deliberations in the subsequent discussion.