Violence deeper than violence

Of Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas, Gillian Rose wrote, “The separation in their work of the lesson of love or perficient commandment from the actualities of law or coercion suffuses their ethics with an originary violence that has been borrowed from the political modernity which they refuse to historicize.”

That opens several pathways for further reflection:

1) Rose assumes that love, law and coercion belong together. Love is never without power. As she writes in Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life , it is the nature of love that “we are at the mercy of others and . . . we have others in our mercy.”

2) She assumes that the disruption of love from law and coercion is itself an act of original violence, a violence more deeply embedded than the various violences that these thinkers are trying to escape. In fleeing violence, they ensure that violence is written on the foundation stones.

3) The violence of separating law and love is of a piece with modern politics, and is in fact borrowed form “political modernity.”

4) The means for escaping this violence is to historicize political modernity, that is, to recognize that it is a contingent political formation, and not the very definition of politics as such. There can be, perhaps have been, orders in which love and law were of a piece, orders that escaped the broken middle of modernity.