Levinas against the sacred politics of love. A reply to Simon Critchley

In the 1953 “Freedom and command", Emmanuel Levinas reflect on the problem of free command and tyrannical action, based on some classic answers in the history of philosophy. Among them, Levinas highlights a particular resolution of modernity, the possibility of will impose to itself a written command as a guarantee of its freedom. He refers to the self-determination of will in the form of Law and State. However, the philosopher recognize the dormant danger in this resolution: the risk of reification of the written command as an impersonal reason, as an anonymous speech, and with it, the conversion of this work into a new tiranny. Levinas sustains that subordination of will to the written command requires discourse as the encounter of man with man, what he calls «religion». The present article aims to understand the meaning of what Levinas sustains in his text of 1953, through a comparative lecture to the one proposed by Simon Critchley about an ethic of commitment and a politics of resistance based on the experience of faith and love