Otherwise than Laïcité? Toward an agonistic secularism in Levinas

ENIn the article we are shown that the two themes are woven together in the very fabric of Levinas’s thinking. Historically, this has been a matter of the emergence of a dimension of life that either detaches itself from the religious or only is set apart from overtly religious action and consciousness within a composite way of life. In the Anglophone world, we know something of this development under the heading of what is called “secularism” or, at the existential level, our “secularity” - which perhaps corresponds with what in Totality and Infinity is defined as the “atheism” of the subject. In (post-)Christian France, the rise of lakite has been a generally Catholic and Protestant concern. It has also been alloyed with the broadly liberal current of French politics. Readers of Levinas are accustomed to the thought that his philosophical works open a way to reflection on the existential problem. According to Cauchi, it is to his Jewish writings that we must turn for help with the social and political problem. Here of course his essay passes close to some features of what is argued by Nicholas Brown’s essay on the promise of Levinasian ethics for enriching the premises of liberal democracy. But whereas Brown finds something of an ally for Levinas in Michael Walzer, Cauchi puts Levinas in discussion with Chantal Mouflfe and William Connolly. Mouffe, Connolly, and Levinas have in common an insistence on plurality as the irreducible condition of human community, and thus the original source of every moral and political demand. But whereas for Mouflfe and Connolly this defines politics by agonism, Levinas underwrites the political with ethics. Cauchi asks us to consider whether the agonism of modern democracy is an essential feature of what Levinas is willing to recognize as the secular.