HENT DE VRIESests, in the maximization of pleasure, and in cultural and aesthetic expression no less than
in the discursive formation of institutional power (of science, medicine, the state, etc.).
Surely there could be no difference greater than the one between the encompassing
Spinozistic definition of desire as perseverance for all individual beings (indeed, ofesseas
interesse, as Levinas repeatedly says) and the specifically Levinasian idea of infinitizing
desire as the enigma ofdisinterestednessrevealing itself in human passivity (rather than in
what Spinoza calls ‘‘active affects’’)? Is the comparison not simply implausible, because
Levinas leaves no doubt that—since the primary basis of understanding between Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam can be found in ‘‘the Reason that the Greek philosophers revealed
to the world’’—there remains every reason to believe that ‘‘we still have more chance of
finding an unsullied [sans me ́lange] rationalism in Plato and Aristotle than in Spinoza’’
(109 / 157)? Is our attempt to read Levinas and Spinoza together not from the outset
doomed to fail? Yes and no.
Even when the early articles from which I take my lead are read through the lens of
the mature works, Levinas’s assessment of Spinoza’s betrayal and his condensation of
Western philosophy’s single essential tendency demonstrates a subtle appreciation of a
central ambiguity in this author’s intellectual and theologico-political undertaking as a
whole. This interpretation of Spinoza reveals, for Levinas, a structural ambivalence in
philosophy in general, just as, Levinas writes, ‘‘in the context of today’s French anti-
humanism, as in that of Brunschvicq’s humanist idealism of the recent past, [Spinoza]
expresses philosophy’s truth.’’^4 The ambivalence of this truth, Levinas suggests, becomes
nowhere clearer than in philosophy’s problematic—more precisely, unappeasable—
relation to Scripture, on the one hand, and to the ordering of the political, on the other.
For Spinoza as for Levinas, these two domains are inseparable. The interpretation of
Scripture yields a theologico-political meaning. The political and politics find their mean-
ing—their hermeneutic model, as it were—in Scripture.
More than a difference in nuance between Levinas’s overall critique of Spinoza’s
ontology (i.e., his understanding of God and Nature as the geometrically structured sys-
tem of an infinite chain of causes, i.e., of infinite modalizations of infinite attributes) and
his appreciation of this author’s biblical criticism in theTheologico-Political Treatiseis at
stake in the confrontation that interests me here. In fact, Levinas’s critique and apprecia-
tion of Spinoza do not exclude but rather imply each other, for reasons that I will spell
out.
But what leeway could Levinas’s appreciation of Spinoza’s theologico-political under-
standing of Scripture offer for a careful reconsideration of his apparent all-out condemna-
tion of this thinker’s larger metaphysical project, as encapsulated in theconatus essendi?
What would it mean to read Spinoza—and, by implication or retroactively, perhaps, also
Levinas—against the grainat this specific point? To answer this question, we must take a
step back and reconstruct the precise elements and general thrust of Levinas’s analysis.
Speaking of theTheologico-Political Treatise, Levinas writes:
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