The Ambiguity of the Real: Levinas in the Court of Law

In his earlier texts Levinas uses justice to describe the ethical meeting between the ego and the other, in which the ego is immediately and absolutely responsible for the other. In later texts, he turns to justice to express the socio-political relationship of the ego with many others, in which responsibility can never be absolute. An examination of the texts in which Levinas specifically focuses on justice, that is, his Talmudic readings, reveals a third understanding, one in which justice is never either purely ethical or purely political. Throughout the corpus of the Talmudic readings, justice represents a concrete relation between ethics and politics. This article discusses justice as the relationship between ethics and politics, focusing on Levinas’s Talmudic examples dedicated to the question of mercy.