ISSN 1053-699X print; ISSN 1477-285X online/03/020123-16 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1053699032000321420 The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, August, 2003, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 123–138 Levinas, Benjamin, and the Oppressed Annabel Herzog University of Haifa, Israel Passages and Impasses Any attempt to read Levinas and Benjamin conjointly might, at first glance, seem somewhat contrived. Levinas was an ethical philosopher and Benjamin’s work is generally seen as literary criticism. It would be more than trite to observe that Benjamin’s interest in Romanticism and Marxism does not match Levinas’s phenomeno- logical influences and that his mystical attention to Kabbalah is rejected by Levinas, who preferred Talmudic sources. Furthermore, Benjamin and Levinas wrote during different historical periods: the “pile of ruins” watched by the horrified “Angel of History” in 1940 seems benign in comparison with the mounds of ashes faced by the witness of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. All of this explains why an affinity between these authors has been noted, but never explored at length. 1 In this paper, I will attempt to explore this affinity, which appears in spite of the clear differences between these two thinkers. I will examine what could be called passages or correspondances in the Baudelairean sense between the thought of Benjamin and Levinas. At this point, I do not intend to add to the discussion about the connections between critical theory and post-structuralist readings of Levinas, which would exist despite the dispute between Habermas and postmodernists. 2 The affinity that I wish to analyse is not immediately extendable to trends of thought, although such an extension could be attempted in future discussions. As I interpret them, Levinas and Benjamin converge in E-mail: aherzog@poli.haifa.ac.il 1 See Rebecca Comay, “Facies Hippocratica”, in Ethics as First Philosophy; The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 223; Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity; Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London, New York: Verso, 1999), pp. 154–155; Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History; Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 5–6; C. Fred Alford, “The Opposite of Totality: Levinas and the Frankfurt School”, Theory and Society, vol. 21, no. 2 (April 2002), p. 232; Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption. Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). 2 See The Problems of Modernity; Adorno and Benjamin, edited by Andrew Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) and Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence; Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Moreover, see Derrida’s reading of Benjamin in “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67.