In some circles being labeled a 'positivist' is among the worst kinds of insults. I assume that this is true of the (expanding?) circle of folk who engage with Levinas.
So this review amused me, and also made me wonder about the possibility of a now-invisible history from Comte (now largely unread and stereo-typed) to Levinas. I quote from Kavka's review without further comment:
"Both near the end of Levinas's second magnum opus, Otherwise than Being (1974), and in the 1951 essay cited above, Levinas placed "theology" and "religion" in contradistinction to each other. And yet to infer from this that Levinas posited some kind of religious path in which performing ethical acts led to a state of affairs in which "God is found" (313) -- much like Martin Buber, who wrote in I and Thou (1923) that "whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being and carries to it all the beings of the world finds him whom one cannot seek" -- is in my view to misunderstand Levinas. At one point (311f.), Cohen approvingly quotes the section of the 1951 essay in which Levinas distinguished between theology and religion. There is an important and unmarked ellipsis in Cohen's quote. The full quote appears below:
This tie to the other, which does not reduce itself to the representation of the Other but rather to his invocation, where invocation is not preceded by comprehension, we call religion. In choosing the term religion -- without having pronounced the word God or the word sacred -- we initially have in mind the meaning that Auguste Comte gives to this term in the beginning of his System of Positive Polity. Nothing theological, nothing mystical, lies hidden behind the analysis that we have just given of the encounter with the other (BPW, p. 8).
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