Ab-Originality: Radical Passivity through Talmudic Reading

In this chapter, Hand claims that Levinas seeks to overcome some of the contradictions inherent in the postulation of absolute passivity, and in the course of this revisioning to critique some contemporary notions of freedom, by appealing culturally and performatively to Talmudic reading. In a post-war re-signification of his Judaic heritage, Levinas here not only seeks to enact ethical saying but also to re-turn residual assumptions and solutions derived from philosophy about the modalities of radical passivity. But instead of a choice being established, which would merely recategorize the problem, Hand argues that Levinas tries to imply a relationship between phenomenological and Talmudic traditions, which allows him to describe and perform an anachronism or ab-originality on which a practice of radical passivity may then be grounded.