ONLINE FIRST
published on July 17, 2019
Bettina Bergo
https://doi.org/10.5840/levinas20197162
¡°And God Created Woman¡±
Questions of Justice and Ontology
This article reads Levinas¡¯s ¡°And God Created Woman¡± in light of its socio-political context, Mai soixante-huit. It explores themes from his ¡°Judaism and Revolution,¡± in which he reframed concepts of revolution, exegesis, the revolutionary, and human alienation. Following these themes, which run subtly through his Talmudic remarks on women and indirectly on feminism, I examine his arguments about a ¡°signification beyond universality¡± and the fraught relationship between formal equity in gender relations and the practice of justice, as embodied by the Antigone-like Rizpah bath Aiah and analyzed in Levinas¡¯s Talmudic reading ¡°Toward the Other.¡± I summarize the Rabbinic debate about the meaning of an extra yod in the term often translated as ¡°to create¡± in Genesis, turning to the significance of dissymmetry between the Hebrew names of ¡°man¡± and ¡°woman,¡± Ish and Isha. In light of this, Biblicist and psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony opens further insights into gender, naming, and identity.