LEVINAS: JUDAIC FAITH AS POST-MODERN:

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FOR LEVINAS: the Judaic intellectual: “freedom” passes through these “8” steps:

1. “Masculine” individualistic violence of the unconscious of forming ecstatic intuitive units of meaning.
2. “Feminine” conjugal bond of being for “psyche”, through figuration based on uniting Epekeina-horizon with units of meaning in a pre-cognitive thought-picture.
3. Reaching “Understanding” through dialogue and interpretation, relying on prophetic-traces of promised messianic-era; and finding the “Epekeina-other” defined as the irreducible identity of “being” or “I AM”.
4. Articulated notion of “Investiture” (his version of “incarnation”); through a negation of the numinous concept of the sacred as revealed in the theatro-logical presentation of Moses on Sinai.
5. Then a taking-up of the name “ISRAEL”, as the exiled-self, relating to “humanity” before any “landscape” or geographical place.
6. Then taking up the modality and designation of “PHARISEE”; as the “writer-of-praxis”; who couples epistemology with speech and differentiation; in dialectical relationship.
7. Finally, the act of writing as “breathing-through-literature”. Similar to Derrida here. Writing can change history. Get literary and poetic work out there in the world where it can create alterity.
8. Lest we forget; now we inscribe our psyche-tablet in the “return” from “free-act”.

For Levinas the “Talmud” itself is an expression of Judaic-philosophy. Synthesizing Jewish Revelation with Greek thought. (p. 15). Therefore the “self” begins with the “traces-of-meaning” within this historical text and returns to it, after working through the “8” moments of “freedom” for new “inscribing”. He is doing that with this treatise. 60 pages are dedicated to structure, then he gives us 40 pages of commentary.

The Talmud has two parts: “Mishnah”- oral instruction & “Gemara”- elucidation and commentary. The “Gemara” includes “Aggadic-statements that address “interpretation”. This interpretive work is reawakened for Levinas. Thus the evolution of this treatise. The Pharisees favored the Talmud, but the Sadducees rejected it. That is why Levinas states that “Pharisee” is the name to be taken-up by the “writer-of-praxis”.