Idolatry: Levinas' Philosophical Critique of Ideology

For Levinas, the essence of ideology is the transgression, which is dearly forbidden by God, and which tries to see, to comprehend, to theorize, and even to imitate the divine. The overwhelming abuse of modem ideology derives from the excess of the desires and knowledge of modern people, which leads to idolatry and to the offence of the self-concealment of God. God's self-concealment reveals us his absence in order to leave the place for the other. However, modern people would like to substitute God's invisibility by their own visibility thus to inhibit and forget the invisible Other. The disappearance of the other means also that of the transcendent subject, since according to Levinas, the subject is born exactly in his response to the Other as the absolute Other. Levinas argues that, as an objective language without consideration of its hearers, ideology avoids in fact the "face to face" encounter with the Other, while the tradition of the prophets keeps the memory of this ethical dimension of language.