THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL MEANING OF SCRIPTUREwhich is co-extensive rather than amalgamated with the very ethical interiority Levinas
seeks to bring out. Indeed, it is as if Athens and Jerusalem were neither opposed nor
confused, but oscillate and alternate in an elective affinity that allows them to make com-
mon cause in purging superstition and idolatry:
It is to reason that Spinoza’s work offers supreme and certainly approving homage.
It is ultimately the interiority of rational relations, and their equivalence to the high-
est forms of life, that are illuminated by theEthics. Judaism cannot separate itself off
from this, just as it cannot turn its back on mathematics; it cannot remain disinter-
ested in democracy and social problems, any more than it can choose to ignore the
injuries man and things inflict on man in favor of intelligible relations, such as dia-
logue, gentleness and peace. Beyond its credo and its ritualism, Judaism in its entirety,
by means of its faith and its practices, has perhaps sought only to bring an end to
mythologies and the violence they exert on reason and perpetuate in customs.
Rationalism does not menace the Jewish faith. (107 / 153)Where, then, lies the opposition between Levinas’s and Spinoza’s projects, if their
principal disagreement is not primarily theoretical, philosophical, theological, or meta-
physical—and, we should add, if their agreement in a few remarkable points is, indeed,
near total? How could Spinoza’s metaphysical monism and Levinas’s ontological plural-
ism (which, like the Spinozistic affirmation of the univocity of being, is not based upon
any dualism or upon an analogical representation of the relationship between infinite and
finite being) reveal any convergence, parallelism, or compatibility, let alone find a shared
ground? Put differently, how could a broadly conceived causal determinism and a nar-
rowly defined indeterminism—in short, a philosophy of immanence and a thinking of
transcendence, the affirmation of positive, active affects or emotions versus the suffering
of an ever more patient passivity—make common cause at any point at all?
As Jean-Franc ̧ois Rey insightfully writes: ‘‘Far from opposing ethics and morality, as
Deleuze proposes, Levinas wants to see in the spinozist enterprise of desacralization and
de-theologization an ‘ethical interiorization.’ ’’^7 As Levinas himself formulates it: ‘‘Through
[atravers] the multiple authors whom the historical method discovers in sacred texts, the Word of God invites men to obey the teachings of justice and charity. Through [atravers]
historical criticism of the Bible, Spinoza teaches us its ethical interiorization’’ (117 /
168–69).
But is this to suggest that there is, after all, an elective affinity between the extreme
rationalism and rational mysticism of the second and especially third kinds of knowledge
(ratioandscientia intuitiva) of which theEthicsand theTreatise on the Emendation of the
Intellectspeak so compellingly, on the one hand, and the equally relentless rationalism of
Levinas’s own conception of ethical metaphysics, with its increasing emphasis on infini-
tizing desire and saintliness, on the other? Does the reference to ‘‘ethical interiorization’’
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