THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL MEANING OF SCRIPTUREphilosophy declares to be final and where it claims to reign without division [or
sharing,partage]. This gives it its power to survive at the end of philosophy....
Spinoza—while substituting, in theEthics, a philosophy for the religion of the Bible—
was careful to retain in this philosophy the incontestable plenitude of the Scriptures.
Spinozism was one of the first philosophies in which absolute thought also tried to
be an absolute religion. (117 / 167–68)Formally, but—as Deleuze says in his commentaries on Spinoza—not numerically
distinct, philosophy and religion are thus considered to be two complementary, parallel
sides of one and the same phenomenon, which is the quest for thevera vita, the true way
of life, in other words, a spirituality that has nothing ethereal but is deeply steeped in
affect and thereby, perhaps, betrays its ‘‘difficult freedom.’’ Yet what the parallelism sug-
gests, Levinas goes on to say, is that, in the final analysis, it is already implicit in Spinoza’s
own account that:
Philosophy does not engender itself. To philosophize is to move toward the point
where one sees the light as it illuminates the first meanings, which nonetheless already
have a past. What Spinoza called the Word of God projects this clarity and carries
language itself. The biblical commandments concerning justice are no longer a sub-
lime stammering to which a wisdom transmittedmore geometricowould restore abso-
lute expression and context. They lend an original meaning to being. (118 / 169)Irreducible, the scriptural commandments are no less constitutive of being—including
the being that we are—than the causal nexus among bodies or among ideas that Spinoza
postulates as much as he deduces in axioms and definitions of his supposedly fully deter-
ministic system. Starting out from the doctrine of the univocity of being, of which Duns
Scotus (as Deleuze reminds us) was the most original defender—and whose presupposi-
tions Levinas by and large accepts in his negative evaluation of the telos of Western being
in its totality and ‘‘essance’’—Spinoza’s system does not fully realize its wider implica-
tions. Yet in its acknowledgment of Scripture and the ‘‘minimal creed’’—the ‘‘Word of
God’’—it signals exteriority, or, what comes down the same, ‘‘ethical interiority,’’from
within.
This is not to forget that Levinas believed Spinoza to be ignorant of Talmudic modes
of reasoning, which do not model truth according to the fixed laws of Nature but, on the
contrary, presuppose a continuing discussion, a production of sense and hence of revela-
tion (in analogy with thecreatio continuaof which Christians—up to Descartes and the
occasionalists—continued to speak). In his response to Richard McKeon, Levinas insists
that ‘‘even though he knew medieval Jewish philosophy and certain Kabbalistic writings
perfectly, Spinoza had had no direct contact with the pre-medieval work of the Talmud.’’^9
And yet, Levinas continues, it is quite possible that:
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