THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL MEANING OF SCRIPTUREother more faithfully than each of them could do on its own? But also, paradoxically, could
not the Talmud unwittingly anticipateboth, just as both, even in their most philosophical,
supposedly nonscriptural writings, echo, mimic, recreate—albeit, precisely, by ignoring
this—the Talmud, in turn? In other words, might not the very model of exegesis, herme-
neutics, and inspiration that Levinas attributes to the Talmud presuppose the ontology of
‘‘expression’’ that, according to Deleuze, organizes (and unsettles) the Spinozistic system?
And how distinct is Talmud (in Levinas’s reading) from any other written work, from
any other ‘‘production of sense’’? Levinas writes: ‘‘If Spinoza, the genius [genial] Spinoza,
had intimately known the life of the Talmud, he would not have been able to reduce this
ontology [i.e., the polysemic production of meaning] to a bad faith on the part of the
Pharisees, nor explain it away by the fact that ‘many more ideas can be constructed from
words and figures than from the principles and notions on which the whole fabric of
reasoned knowledge is reared’ (nam ex verbis et imaginibus long plures ideae componi
possunt quam ex solis principiis et notionibus, quibus tota nostra naturalis cognitio supers-
truitur; chap. 1).’’^23 A different logic—of revelation qua expression and modalization
through cultural-cultic forms of life—is at work here. Yet it resembles the very Spinozistic
expression of the infinite substance (of God or Nature) in the infinite (and infinitely
modalized) attributes. In both scriptural and philosophical models, the absolute origin or
cause is nothing outside (i.e., before or beyond) its ‘‘result,’’ that is to say, its effects,
which, in turn, are not independent of their interpretation—their idea, their imagination,
their perception, their affect, their understanding, their comprehension, their intuition.
In Levinas’s view, the ‘‘imaginative faculty’’ is not what ‘‘constitutes the social world.’’
It is not ‘‘the source of human diversity,’’ of ‘‘the differences between how we live,’’ as
political theorist Steven B. Smith suggests.^24 The ‘‘social imaginary’’ is above all construed
religiously, more precisely, theologico-politically. Beyond the tripartite epistemological
and ontological distinction between the three forms of knowledge, Spinoza, in Levinas’s
interpretation, thus indirectly allows for a fourth domain that links to all three kinds of
knowledge without itself constituting knowledge, whether adequate or inadequate:
The Word of God therefore opens up a dimension that is proper to the Spirit and
like no other. We must not confuse it either with Philosophy or with Science or with
Politics.
Spinoza the rationalist would have seen this admirably. Philosophical systems,
scientific and political doctrines can, depending on the age, rally souls around this
Word. The Word remains independent even while being able to attach itself to these
doctrines for a while. (298n.6 / 168n.1)Levinas, using a curious terminology, speaks further of an ‘‘innexionof the Word to the
activities—which resound from the outset—of the intellect [innexion de la Parole aux
PAGE 245245.................16224$ CH10 10-13-06 12:35:20 PS