Abstract

The idea of God in Levinas is resonant of the First Testament: a voice from higher above that clamors: Thou shall not kill; the unsettling call of the Infinite that commands us to leave the familiar towards the unknown, like “Abraham’s journey who left alone, towards all—from particularity to universality—under the threat of nights and the hope of days, in the words of Maurice Blanchot. Hard, long path of justice.”1 God in Levinas thus echoes the Kantian practical postulates, framing the ethical injunction as both divine and unquestionable, and will constitute his answer to the imperative of Auschwitz. Though necessary, the law of the State is insufficient to resist the violence of tyranny. Ultimately, the sanction against murder is enforced by God, the Invisible made visible through the face of the Other. As such, justice for Levinas consists not only in serving the latter, but to do so unconditionally because he opens up to the divine. Ethics is thus articulated as the movement towards an Other who reveals an absolute difference alone capable of interrupting the homogenizing impulses of politics.