HENT DE VRIESrabbinic writing and the Kabbalah, and beyond the Talmud and its oral tradition. That
relevance extends into literature, poetics, philosophy and even everyday speech (undoing
its rhetoric and restoring its drama).
Spinoza, we saw, ‘‘had no direct contact’’ with the proper argumentative style of the
Talmud, its ‘‘ ‘ontology’ of meaning.’’ Yet a critical question imposes itself here. Is it
possible that the model of exegesis, hermeneutics, and inspiration that Levinas attributes
to the Talmud presupposes the very ontology of ‘‘expression’’ that, according to Deleuze,
organizes (and unsettles) the Spinozistic system, as well as a long lineage of thought that
runs from Neoplatonism via Duns Scotus, Hume, and Leibniz all the way up to Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and the philosophy ofDifference and Repetitionitself? After all, the polysemy
of Talmudic exegesis is not so very different, Levinas says, from the methods Rudolf
Bultmann and Paul Ricoeur adopt in their engagements with the New Testament, just as
it is co-extensive with literature, that is to say, with the ‘‘coming and going from text to
reader and from reader to text’’ that forms ‘‘the distinctive feature [le propos] of all written
work, of all literature, even when it does not pretend to be Holy Scriptures.’’^20 Levinas
writes that the ‘‘unique structure’’ and ‘‘genre’’ of the Talmud is that ‘‘It maintains prob-
lems in a state of discussion. Theses oppose each other, yet they remain, to use its own
expression, ‘the words of the living God.’ It authorizes [accre ́dite] the idea of asingle
spirit, despite the contradictions of dialogues which have no conclusion. An open-ended
dialectic which does not separate itself from the living study whose theme it becomes.
This study reflects and amplifies the disturbing dynamism of the text.’’^21 If there is a
‘‘polysemy of meaning,’’ it thus takes the form of aninfinite modalizationof the Word,
whose effect—or, as Levinas says, ‘‘result’’—is from the outset indistinguishable from the
‘‘origin,’’ which is nothing outside them. As Levinas will suggest throughoutTotality and
Infinity, there is no existing infinite, in and for itself, which preexists only to subsequently
reveal—or, in the Spinozistic idiom, express and modalize—itself in its creation (or to its
creatures). In the response to McKeon, Levinas writes:
The various epochs and the various personalities of the exegetes are the very modality
in which this polysemy exists. Something would remain unrevealed in the Revelation
if a single soul in its singularity were to be missing from the exegesis. That these
renewals may be taken as alterations of the text is not ignored by the Talmudic
scholars.^22It is interesting to note that, in this context, Levinas recounts a Talmudic suggestion,
according to which the teaching of the School of Rabbi Aquiba would be incomprehensi-
ble to Moses while nonetheless constituting his very own teaching. A critical question
arises here. Might not the same hold true for Levinas’s teaching with respect to Spinoza,
or, if we are allowed the temporal inversion, for Spinoza with respect to Levinas? Would
not their respective teachings, while incomprehensible in terms of each other,express each
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