Exceptional Justice, Violent Proximity

Abstract

Discussions of the relationship between Levinas’s philosophy and politics or law typically envision an engagement of Levinasian ethics with a conception of justice drawn from the Kantian, liberal tradition. However, there has been increasing recognition of a strange proximity of Levinas’s thought to quite another perspective on the juridical-political, that of Carl Schmitt. For instance, in Levinas and the Political, Howard Caygill observes that

War and the political assume a proximity in Levinas’s thought that were it recognized would prove extremely uncomfortable for liberal readers accustomed to keeping war — as the alleged pathology of civility — separate from peace. The proximity of war and politics is a thought that brings Levinas closer to the thought of Clausewitz and Carl Schmitt than to the liberal ethical theory issued from Kant.¹