Nancy Levene

Levinas's beginnings: ethics, politics, and origins

It is commonplace in philosophy, political theory, and theology to speak of the other and the problem of the identity of the West. No one has done as much to foreground the language of the other in recent years as Emmanuel Levinas, whose works have sparked a renewed interest in ethics across the humanities. Moreover, few have advanced as forceful a critique of European otherness, not only its exclusivity (whereby the other is marginalized) but also its hegemony (whereby the other is absorbed). I explore Levinass critique of Western ethical thought in order to try to pinpoint what exactly he offers to post‐Hegelian reflection on the other, focusing on his insistence that equality must be grounded in the asymmetry of ethics. The question is: does this take one further than Europe, modernity, the West? If so, where is one thereby going? If not, what is novel or important in these claims?

Traces of History in St. Anselm

This paper is a schematic consideration of the relationship between reason and history through the figure of St. Anselm of Canterbury, the very exemplar, one might suppose, of the pre-modern absence of historical consciousness. I argue that while Anselm may offend a maximal number of contemporary scholarly habits of mind, whether historicist, secular, or simply argumentative, he is at the front lines of a classic question recently posed by Alain Badiou, namely how much can one think outside of ones time? This question expresses an anxiety concerning both what it is possible and/or permissible to think at any given time and what time or history have to do with thinking as such—an anxiety neatly symbolized, I claim, by the leaden specter of the ontological argument. What, it might rightly be asked, is Anselms argument to us? A provocation, certainly; a theory, possibly.

Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (review)

J. Samuel Preus’s Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority is the culmination of the author’s long-standing interest in the nexus of several fields: the history of biblical scholarship, the origins of the study of religion as a secular discipline, and the study of Spinoza and his early modern context. Coming on the heels of his earlier article on Spinoza’s contemporary interlocutors,1 Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority brings together Preus’s three principal interests into a cogent and readable account of Spinoza’s project in his anonymously published Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.2 Spinoza is a crucial figure for Preus. As a thinker who gave us one of the first historical readings of the Bible, Spinoza inaugurated not only the modern study of this text but also the modern study of religion more generally. He coupled hermeneutic and conceptual innovations with a powerful political argument for the freedom and democracy which he felt went hand in hand with them. Preus’s book enters the field of Spinoza studies with a welcome focus on the 17th-century context of these achievements. The book has two main aims. The first is to investigate ‘‘the rise of a critical, historical and comparative study of scriptures independent of their theological interpretation from Jewish or Christian ‘insider’ perspectives’’ (p. ix). This aim, Preus notes, extends his earlier inquiry in Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (1996), a book that, as its title suggests, explores the emergence of the study of religion as a theory and a discipline irrespective of theology. In Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority, the focus is on the history of the demotion of Scripture from its status as a uniquely privileged book, making way for its comparison with other ancient texts and with other religions. ‘‘Spinoza,’’ Preus writes, ‘‘was the first to accomplish this’’ by making the claims about the Bible’s status simply one more historical fact about it, like its languages and its contents. In this light, ‘‘theology, rather than