Bearing the Other and bearing sexuality: women and gender in Levinas's "And god created woman"

ENDeborah Achtenberg offers us the instructive reminder that this theme can also be probed in Levinas’s Jewish writings. One would be hard put to find a text that reaches more deeply into ancient sources than Levinas’s 1972 talmudic commentary, “And God Created Woman.” At first glance, the central claim of that text contains no surprises for Levinas’s reader: our humanity precedes our sexuality and gender, which, as forms of being human, thus are equal. But Achtenberg is keen to read the Torah itself with or alongside Levinas, and in doing so she comes to a question of considerable importance for anyone interested in a justice that would be more than an abstraction from the concrete experience of suppression or marginalization. It is one thing to say that women and men are fundamentally equal; it is another thing to insist on social practices in which that equality is realized. This of course prompts reflection, as it were, back on Totality and Infinity, which by the time of the talmudic commentary was already a decade old. Perhaps the later text amends some of what is most controversial in the earlier one.