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HENT DE VRIES

of the ego) but rather radicalizes Hegel’s conception of totality, which comes to express
reason, indeed, the reasonableness of the real—but not intelligibility and a more emphatic
sense of giving reasons (to the Other)—as such. Exteriority to the system can be found in
the idea of the Infinite alone. Yet this idea, Moses concludes, precisely because it ‘‘sur-
passes all thought,’’ can give itself ‘‘only indirectly, in a roundabout way or a displace-
ment, in which it shows itself, as if by metonymy, through a lived experience: that of the
revelation of the exteriority of others’’ (p. 230).
Drawing upon many of the premises of Mose`s’s interpretation, Hent de Vries’s con-
tribution asks what are the theologico-political stakes in two of the most challenging
engagements that have accompanied Levinas’s life-long philosophical project: the inter-
pretation of Scripture, inDifficult Freedomand the Talmudic lectures, and his elliptical
and often indirect confrontation with Spinoza, the thinker who at first glance would seem
to epitomize the metaphysical counterposition to Levinas’s thought by giving perhaps the
most consistent expression of the philosophy of the same.



At this point, let me attempt to formulate a third preliminary conclusion, closely related
to the first—which distinguished ‘‘political theology,’’ on the one hand, as thescientiaof
the elusive and absolute that governs and often unconsciously drives and inspires, or
destabilizes and terrorizes, the public domain (the ‘‘theologico-political’’), and, on the
other hand, especially in its plural dimension, as the name and description of the many
diverse forms in which this ‘‘empty’’ notion or open dimension can become dogmatically
fixated, socially reified, and aesthetically fetishized. On both counts, descriptive and nor-
mative aspects of the analysis should be differentiated in principle, even though they
inevitably interfere with—indeed, mutually presuppose and solicit—each other.
Two extreme positions in a distinctively ancient and modern tradition can be dis-
cerned along a broad spectrum. From the ‘‘implicit theology of the political’’ discussed,
for example, by Schmitt inPolitical Theologyto the ‘‘politology, sociology, and anthropol-
ogy implicit in the theological and in religious discourse in general’’ of which Jakob
Taubes speaks in his interpretation of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, inThe Political
Theology of Paul, political theology assumes a now descriptive, then normative content
and orientation.^114 Both perspectives, however, often also respond to profoundly meta-
physical—both messianic and historical materialist—intuitions, such as, for example,
those expressed in Benjamin’s ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment’’ and his ‘‘Theses on the
Concept of History.’’^115
Schmitt states that all decisive concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are ‘‘secu-
larized theological concepts,’’ a formulation that implies a claim concerning the genesis
of the political and the ‘‘neutralization’’ of the religious. Theological concepts, in this
view, have been, whether slowly or suddenly, transposed into the realm of the body poli-

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