State and exteriority. Reflexions about the State and the revolt on the political thought of Emmanuel Lévinas.

Abstract

The present article exposes the possibility of the revolt in the philosophy of Lévinas contrasting two forms of conceiving the State that are distinguished by the political experience that originated them: Hobbes and Lévinas'. On the one hand, we have the State thought by Hobbes, namely,the one that rises from the limitation of the latent violence amongst men and, on the other hand, we have the State as Lévinas sees it, which appears from limiting the responsibility for the other man that, in the ethic level, is absolutely unrestricted. Hobbes’s perspective represents the politics within ontology and totality that, from the Levinasian philosophy, must be broken by us. For this reason, the possibility of "another politics" opens from the State that, inspired by justice, allows the revolt in the name of that which originated it, namely: the moderation of the responsibility thanks to the emergence of a third party and the permanent tension with the exteriority. Finally, to understand how the revolt is related to both ways of conceiving the State, we shall use the notion of "escape" (philosophical gesture that expresses the desire of getting out of the being) in its both manners: necessity and promise of escape.