HENT DE VRIESactivite ́s, d’emble ́e retentissantes, de l’intellect]’’ (298n.6 / 168n.1, my emphasis), from
which it absolves itself as well.
If this is so, on what grounds does Levinas accept Spinoza’s view of the ontico-
ontological specificity of the social, more precisely, of relationships that exceed the do-
main of the familial and of friendship, of love and enmity, and hence imply our dealing
with what Levinas would call the realm of ‘‘the third,’’ that is to say, of ‘‘justice’’? And
why is their meaning above all theologico-political, that is to say, expressive or revelatory
of ‘‘obedience’’ and ‘‘charity’’ rather than of any supposed theoretical knowledge or meta-
physical truth? Further, if expression is the way of the infinite (i.e., of revelation, proph-
ecy, and eschatology) from beginning to end, how could exegesis, homily, and liturgy—in
short, the whole domain of cult and, in Spinoza’s view, superstition—retain a relative
autonomy, marked by ‘‘separation,’’ indeed, by ‘‘interiority,’’ a restricted ‘‘economy,’’ of
sorts?
This is only possible ifexpression carries the principle of its own interruption—its stasis
no less than its stability—within itself. Its purely gestural (some would say performative)
Saying—which is a doing, indeed, a ‘‘doing before hearing’’—requires the fixity of a Said
that ‘‘betrays’’ it in the dual sense this term connotes: the Said conveys and distorts or
hides and obscures the Saying, and must do so necessarily. Left to its own devices, it
signals—indeed, expresses—nothing; more precisely, in its very purity it is no better than
(or distinguishable from) the worst. Strange mimicry of the best and the worst, of the
ille ́ite ́and theil y a, both of which call for the mitigation no less than for the polarity of
their opposition.
Levinas can thus rightly claim that there is a certain novelty in Spinoza’s treatment,
in theTheologico-Political Treatise, of the relationship between reason, on the one hand,
and history and the political, on the other. This novelty enables Spinoza to escape the
summary judgment that Levinas felt obliged to pass on Hegel and, more generally, on the
philosophies of the same and the Neuter, from Parmenides to the later Heidegger. Spino-
za’sTheologico-Political Treatisetestifies to a greater ambiguity: ‘‘European philosophy, in
Spinoza’s age, has not yet come to regard political life as a moment in its own unfolding
process, but Reason for Spinoza does enter [or carry with it,comporte] certain political
conditions’’ (111–12 / 159).
Spinoza and, in his footsteps, Levinas do not merely presuppose these political condi-
tions of reason, they affirm and evenjustifythem by granting them their own constitutive,
albeit limited, right. In consequence, the balanced assessment of Spinoza’s ontological
and theologico-political views that Levinas provides offers an important key to hisown
understanding, in the major philosophical writings, of the relationship between his ethico-
religious metaphysics and its Saying, on the one hand, and the public space of theres
publica—that is, of the realm of the third, of the Said—on the other.
Levinas’s position thus seems very close to the one that Y. Yovel ascribes to Spinoza
in the first volume ofThe Marrano of Reason, where he claims that ‘‘Spinoza holds that
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