Freedom and justice in the works of Emmanuel Levinas: the experience of the impossible

Levinas' philosophical questioning is founded on the principle of the indetermination of Being and of its impossible identity to subsequently open onto a morality of the Other proposed as an absolute rule. This double standard, at once negative and prescriptive, is apparent throughout the work of the thinker on the secularisation of Judaism. However, if the world escapes all attempts at definitive capture, how can one rely on Levinas to comprehend the manifestations of perfect evil on the one hand, and, on the other, what becomes of the effort of reflection ultimately aiming to render justice? Yet, in the extent where incrimination presupposes identity, that is to say the minimal stability of existence in guilt, what does Levinas' reflection offer as possibilities to put the Holocaust into perspective? Does justice not imply strong identity between aggressor and victim? The aim of this paper is to undertake a rereading of Difficile liberte to answer these questions and to demonstrate how, in the end, a discourse on Being re-emerges implicitly in the theological and philosophical approaches of the thinker par excellence of alterity. The idea is to give a critical contribution to unveil both the tension between liberty and justice and the dead ends inherent to his distinction between metaphysics and ontology.