Lévinas on Justification of Violence

Abstract

This article deals with the concept of violence as developed by Lévinas. On the one hand, I deal with violence understood as the encounter with the other, mainly as the basis for an economy of violence. On the other hand, I examine the relationship of three dynamics of violence: a) a third party’s violence; b) my own violence, i.e. Lévinas’ violence; c) violence by the State as a reaction to the first kind of violence. Once that relationship is explicated, I will try to explore “violence against violence”, by echoing Lévinas’ well-known hesitation about a “right to violence”. I will finally tackle what has been called “the aftertaste of violence”, “cet arrière-goût de violence”. In order to analyze this reminder of violence as much as to include the question of third-parties in Lévinas, I will deal with questions that spread out of phenomenology through a loyal and resistant reading of Husserl.