Levinas’s ethics of the other sets a limit where the neighbor becomes an enemy

Evidence

It is perhaps in the suggestive context here offered by Derrida that one could read Levinas’s terrible answer in 1982, following the massacres at Sabra and Chatila, to the following question: “For the Israeli, isn’t the ‘other’ above all the Palestinian?” Levinas does not quite explain why, but he recoils from the question and rejects it: “My definition of the other is completely different.” Where there is war (“if your neighbor attacks”), Levinas seems to say, the other is not the other, but the enemy-alterity, but “with another character.” Thus it would be only “in alterity” that “we can find an enemy.” Levinas says: “The other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong” (Levinas, “Ethics and Politics,” 294). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 828

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Schmitt on the friend/enemy distinction and to the reader’s broader theme of how ethical frameworks handle the political enemy — resonates with ‘On Sacrifice’ about who counts as neighbor. — connects to: Levinas made the Self-Other relationship philosophy’s central concept — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 625
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Levinas’s own Jewish identity and the Israeli context quietly structure what looks like a universal ethical claim?
• SEED: Angle for an essay: ‘the enemy in alterity’ — how universal ethical systems draw their boundary lines at exactly the point where politics enters.