Abstract:

Levinas employs the term justice primarily as elimination of discrimination and privilege. He uses the term as equality, justice of a fair law system. Secondarily he expresses an ethical claim fort he term justice. Although ‘justice’ is used for determining the relationship with the third person, Levinas does not hesitate to name the realtionship with the other as ‘justice’. The relationship with the ‘Third Party’ relates us to politics, state, legality and a civic order. The Other, on the other hand, leads this order to interruption and discontinuity. The meaning of justice in the encounter with the Other is also the limit of the State. Here Levinas emphasizes that the realtionship with the Other cannot be differentiated from the relationship with the third party. Rather, he discusses that the justice which comes from the relationship with the Other puts a limit to our limitless responsibility for the third party. The person whom one is responsible for is unique and the responsible person cannot hand over his responsibity. Thus, the responsible person is also unique. In this context, Levinas passes from a relationship which lacks counterpartness to a relationship where equality and counterpartness exist amongst the members of a society. His search for justice assumes such a novel relationship. No matter how much justice is institutionalized and continued by the state, it stems from the other people’s transcendantal thoughts about ‘widowed, orphan and the foreign’. For Levinas, the genuine nature of justice appears when subjectivity conceives itself as the responsibility. Because only in this situation can the justice transcends the whole, and become the thing that is justice itself. Hence as much as the laws representing the whole, justice can extend beyond the written laws.

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