Reflections on Levinas’s ‘Reflections on thePhilosophy of Hitlerism’Introduction

Emmanuel Levinas is probably best known as the philosopher whoreintroduced ethics into Continental philosophy. His two major worksTotality and Infinity1 and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence2 have had enormousimpact on such thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Marion. What is perhaps less well known is that his earlywritings were haunted by certain political themes, particularly thetheme of Nazism. Indeed this remained true throughout his career.Speaking of his work he says that: ‘It is dominated by thepresentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror.’3

In this paper I want to examine his early paper ‘Reflections on thePhilosophy of Hitlerism’4 and show how his understanding of Nazismis connected with a certain conception of the body. I will also useother works written around the same period in order to clarify hisclaims.

On Escape

If we look at Levinas’s early work On Escape5 we will see that it toocentralises concerns with the body, and specifically with bodilyneeds. Needs, or more specifically need in the singular, areconstrued in terms of the need to escape, the need for, what Levinasthere calls ‘excendence.’6 Need is a need to get the hell out. I

1 Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority Translated by AlphonsoLingis (Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1969)2 Emmanuel Levinas Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence Translated by AlphonsoLingis (Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, 1998),3 Emmanuel Levinas ‘Signature’ in Difficult Freedom Translated by Seán Hand(The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 1997), p. 2914 Emmanuel Levinas ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’ Translatedby Seán Hand Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 1 (autumn, 19905 Emmanuel Levinas On Escape Translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2003) Published in French under thetitle De l’évasion (Fata Morgana, 1982)6 Ibid, p. 54 A footnote tells us that the word ‘excendence’ is ‘modelledupon “trans-scendence,” adjoining “ex-” or “out” to the Latin scandere , “toclimb”. OE, p. 115

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will take up the question of precisely what we are in need of escapefrom presently.

Needs are usually understood in terms of a lack, something like agap yearning to be filled. The model here would be hunger. The emptystomach is felt to be an uncomfortable void that a good dinner wouldfill. In thus sating ourselves our being would once again feelreplete and thus content. As Levinas writes: ‘In the first place,need seems to aspire only to its own satisfaction.’7 Here this verynotion of conceiving need in terms of a lack is phenomenologicallychallenged, as Levinas remarks: ‘That would suppose that need isjust privation.’8 This is an error that he explains in this manner:

And yet this whole psychology of need is a bit hasty. Ittoo quickly interprets the insufficiency of need as aninsufficiency of being. Thus it assumes a metaphysics inwhich need is characterised in advance as an emptiness ina world where the real is identified with the full. Thisis an identification that threatens any thinking thatcould not distinguish between existence and the existent,all thinking that applies to the one what instead shouldhave meaning for the other.9

What Levinas is saying is that the error in question arises becausewe do not properly apply the ontological difference, the distinctionbetween existence and the existent, or, as Heidegger10 would say,between Being (Sein) and beings (das Seiende). In ignoring thisdistinction we are led to identify ‘the real’ with the ‘full’. Inother words, this presupposes an ontology which does not firstinquire into the fundamental nature of Being itself, but, instead,interprets Being (Sein) in terms of beings (das Seiende). Levinascontests this identification in ways similar to Heidegger. Thehastiness of the psychology therefore derives from not examining theBeing of the entity that has need. But rather understanding such aBeing as an entity, one existent among others. In so doing it iseasy to conclude that this Being has the same kind of Being as those

7 Ibid, p. 588 On Escape, p. 569 Ibid, p. 5810 See Martin Heidegger Being and Time Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985). I will return to this connection with Heidegger later.

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entities that Heidegger would call present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit).That is to say — very roughly — in understanding human beings as ifthey were objects, albeit objects of a very special kind, and thisis so because instead of examining the nature of the Being of thatentity which we ourselves are, an understanding of that Being aspresent-at-hand, our usual representative of existents, and of theworld as likewise present-at-hand, and thus as presence, is simplyinherited and taken over from the metaphysical tradition. Levinasassociates need with our being or existence, that is, he considers itan ontological category (close to what Heidegger would call an‘existential’), whereas this ‘hasty psychology’ attributes needs to theexistent qua existent, and thus understands it as an ontic category.

Central to the Being of the entity in question (ourselves), whatHeidegger calls Dasein, is the idea of thrownness (Geworfenheit). Thisis Heidegger’s notion that we are abandoned to a world we had nopart in choosing which gives to existence its character offacticity. In a later work Levinas explains how these Heideggerianideas are come together:

The most profound thing about Being and Time for me is thisHeideggerian distinction. But in Heidegger there is adistinction, not a separation. Existing is always graspedin the existent, and for the existent that is a humanbeing the Heideggerian term Jemeinigkeit [mineness] preciselyexpresses the fact that existing is always possessed bysomeone. I do not think Heidegger can admit an existingwithout existents, which to him would seem absurd.However, there is a notion—Geworfenheit—“expression of acertain Heidegger,” according to Jankelevitch—that isusually translated “dereliction” or “desertion.” One thenstresses a consequence of Geworfenheit. One must understandGeworfenheit as the “fact-of-being-thrown-in” …existence.It is as if the existent appeared only in an existencethat precedes it, as though existence were independent ofthe existent, and the existent that finds itself thrownthere can never become master of existence. It isprecisely because of this that there is desertion andabandonment.11

11 Emmanuel Levinas Time and the Other Translated by Richard A. Cohen (DuquesneUniversity Press, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, 1987), pp. 44-45

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Geworfenheit, which I prefer to translate as ‘thrownness,’ is forHeidegger, a structural element in Dasein’s being-in-the-World.Dasein’s thrownness (which is also translated as ‘dereliction’) refersto the fact that it did not choose its existence but always alreadyfound itself existing. In another early writing on Heidegger,Levinas explains:

Dereliction, the abandonment to imposed possibilities,gives to human existence a character of fact in the mostspecific and most dramatic sense of the term, inrelation to which the empirical “facts” of science areonly derivative; it is a fact that is understood as suchby its affectivity. Having being thrown into the world,abandoned and delivered up to oneself—such is theontological description of “fact”.12

This being a fact is also termed by Heidegger ‘facticity’ and Dasein’sthrownness into its facticity is revealed to it by its affectivityor moods (Stimmungen). These are specifically existentialist themes.

What I would like to insist upon is that part of the aforementionedfacticity—a very important part— is the fact of having a body, and havinga body, it might be argued, is the most primordial fact of ourexistence. But it is a fact that Heidegger overlooked or neglectedto thematize. It is this that is Levinas’s subject matter.Thrownness specifies the original groundlessness, and thus absurdity,of existence. It identifies the vertiginous fact that we cannot getbehind our facticity and convert it into our free assumption. Wecannot will or chose ourselves from the ground up and thishumiliates our freedom. It is precisely this situation that Levinasis specifying in the first line of On Escape: ‘The revolt oftraditional philosophy against the idea of being originates in thediscord between human freedom and the brutal fact of being thatassaults this freedom.’13 Facticity is this ‘brutal fact of being.’Absurdity in this sense has its roots not in the nothingness thatunderpins thrownness rendering Dasein a null basis of a nullity asHeidegger would have it: ‘It itself, being a basis, is a nullity ofitself.’14 But for Levinas, absurdity has its roots in the raw fact12 Emmanuel Levinas ‘Martin Heidegger and Ontology’ translated by the Committee of Public Safety Diacritics 26.1 (1996) 11-32, p. 2413 On Escape, p. 4914Martin Heidegger Being and Time, p. 330

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of existing without respite. The body, as a brutal fact, as theweight of existence, constitutes the raw presence of need. It is notsimply a nullity because it is an absence of possibility, rather itpredates all possibilities, is seen as a brute presence that willperpetually return to haunt all our projects with the stupidity ofan undemonstrated premise, when we are tired, or ill, or hungry ormerely affected in some way.

So it is in relationship to thrownness that Levinas first approachesthe question of need. Yet we should not make the mistake of thinkingthat this is a psychological question, it is strictly and cruciallyontological. Thrownness does not specify a disposition of the human(Dasein) qua psychological being, or qua finite being, but elaboratesan element of Being as such:

The banal observation that man is by birth engaged in anexistence he neither willed nor chose must not be limitedto the case of man as a finite being. He translates thestructure of being itself.15

Levinas begins a phenomenology of need by pointing out that ‘Needbecomes imperious only when it becomes suffering. And the specificmode of suffering that characterizes need is malaise, or disquiet.’16

He introduces need via the affective disposition which reveals needto us, and this affective disposition is an access to our own beingmore direct than empirical knowledge. As he insists, need trulymakes itself felt (‘becomes imperious’) when it is experienced as amode of suffering: as ‘malaise or disquiet.’ Thus the disquiet ofhunger, for example, is the pangs and yearnings for food. This ‘for’specifies the fact that the hunger is directed onto the world insearch of an object of satisfaction (off we go to the kitchen); thatit has an intentional structure. As Levinas puts it: ‘Need turnstowards something other than ourselves.’17 But Levinas wants to focuson the moment of malaise itself, on how it is, as Levinas will put

15 On Escape, p. 6916 Ibid, p. 5817 OE, p. 58

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it ‘in the instant in which it is lived.’18 Primarily he will pointout that: ‘Malaise is not a purely passive state’ but rather:

The fact of being ill at ease [mal à son aise] is essentiallydynamic. It appears as a refusal to remain in place, asan effort to get out of an unbearable situation. Whatconstitutes its particular character, however, is theindeterminacy of the goal that this departure sets foritself, which should be seen as a positivecharacteristic. It is an attempt to get out withoutknowing where one is going, and this ignorance qualifiesthe very essence of the attempt.19

Thus, according to Levinas, need does not know the object of itssatisfaction but simply wishes to escape from its ill-at-ease-ness.But can this be right? Can we characterise hunger, for example,without reference to food? Can we conceive it simply as yearning,without these yearnings being understood as yearnings for food?Certainly to characterise something as ‘hunger’, in this specificand, we might say, literal20 sense, requires our grasping it as afelt need for food. But Levinas is not characterising it in thisspecific sense, he is not characterising need in any specific sense,but merely in the felt sense of malaise that is characteristic ofneed as such. The new born child yells and cries; he or she needssomething. The breast or the bottle is given and the child iscontent; need is satisfied. Now the child certainly could not saythat it was food that he or she wanted. Are we to assume that he or

18 OE, p. 66: This phrase, ‘in the instant in which it is lived,’ is, as Isee it, pivotal in Levinas’s early writing and specifies that the analysisis phenomenological rather than empirical. The distinction here isextremely important; it tries to specify what it is like to feel, say need,without any reference to what we ‘know’ needs are. The temporal dimensionindicated by the word ‘instant’ specifies the fact that need, or whatever,is articulated only in terms of its specific affectivity and not in itsrelation to satisfaction, which comes afterwards. The phrase (or what itimplies) carries a good deal of weight in the analyses of On Escape. Itfunctions as a kind of phenomenological reduction which ‘brackets’ orplaces in ‘parentheses’ those elements of an affective disposition which weconnect with it on the basis of empirical knowledge, as we will see byexamples. 19 OE, pp. 58-5920 I am not happy to claim that ‘hunger’ in a literal sense is hunger forfood, whereas a hunger for knowledge or love, say, are metaphorical. I seeno compelling reason why this might be so.

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she nevertheless knew this? Of course not! But then are we to denythat it was hunger that he or she felt? No. It was indeed hunger.

What Levinas is driving at is that the malaise characteristic ofneed, as it is purely felt in the present, is not a need for… wherewe might fill in the gap with a specific object. Purely and simply,of itself need is a need to get out, a need for escape. ‘There are,’he points out;

needs for which the consciousness of a well-definedobject—susceptible of satisfying those needs—is lacking.The needs that we do lightly call “intimate” remain atthe stage of a malaise, which is surmounted in a statecloser to deliverance than to satisfaction.21

Not all needs are needs for some thing; food or drink for example.The ‘shameful’ needs, the need to go to the toilet (and it isrelevant that it is shameful and surrounded by euphemisticlanguage)22 or—to use an example closer to Levinas’s text— to vomit(equally shameful) are needs that do not have an object, but deliverus from their grip by means of evacuating things from our bodies.But— and this is Levinas’s point— it is not always obvious what weneed even when we feel a need:

To be sure, it is not usually this way. But onlyextrinsic experiences and lessons can give to need theknowledge of the object liable to satisfy it, just asthey add ideas about the need’s value. Therefore, theincreasing specialisation of needs and their objects,which itself grows clearer and clearer, more and morerefined, develop only as a function of learning andeducation.23

For Levinas therefore need, in the first instance, is conceived interms of a need to escape; and not in terms of a lack. To justify,

21 OE, p. 5922 This shamefulness and the disgust at dirt, excrement and vomit—our nauseawhen confronted with them—could go some way to explaining why incharacterising the body, its passivity, in this needy sense, has generallybeing overlooked by phenomenologists. Of course such areas are notoverlooked by psychoanalytic thinkers who Levinas can in some ways be seenas confronting in this work, as we will see.23 OE, p. 59

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reinforce and clarify this contention Levinas will thematize: ‘theprimordial phenomena of need’s satisfaction: pleasure.’24

Pleasure is understood by Levinas as a temporary escape from oursense of thrownness or facticity; it lightens us and takes us out ofourselves. In pleasure we feel our very substantiality dissipatingand we leave ourselves behind. Levinas makes the point like this:‘We therefore note in pleasure an abandonment, a loss of oneself, agetting out of oneself, an ecstasy: so many traits that describe thepromise of escape contained in pleasure’s essence.’25 As such thenpleasure is seen as an escape attempt but it is a failed attempt:

Pleasure is a process; it is the process of departingfrom being [processus de sortie de l’être]. Its affective natureis not only the expression or the sign of this getting-out; it is the getting out itself. Pleasure isaffectivity, precisely because it does not take the formsof being, but rather attempts to break these up. Yet itis a deceptive escape.26

Pleasure does not achieve escape but leaves us with an all the morepronounced sense of our adhesion to our-selves.

This adhesion to self is precisely what transcendence, as itfunctions in Levinas’s later philosophy, will be designed to escape.Here we are witness to its nascent formation and we will see how itis formulated against a political background. This bondage is theseemingly irrevocable bond to our own being. This is so becausewherever we go or whatever we do we always take our selves with us:

Existence is an absolute that is asserted withoutreference to anything else. It is identity. But in thisreference to himself [soi-même], man perceives a type ofduality. His identity with himself loses the character ofa logical or tautological form; it takes on a dramaticform, as we will demonstrate. In the identity of the I[moi], the identity of being reveals its nature asenchainment, for it appears in the form of suffering andinvites us to escape. Thus, escape is the need to get out

24 OE, p. 6025 OE, p. 6126 OE, p. 62

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of oneself, that is, to break the most radical and unalterablybinding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même].27

This bondage is a bondage to our bodily facticity. I now want tolook more closely at the conception of the body that thispresupposes.

Freedom and Fate

We can give a more concrete content to the rather abstract way theidea of escaping from one’s own existence is deployed in On Escape,‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’ (1934).28 This will alsohelp us specify the political dimension of Levinas’s thought, whichwe have already mentioned, but are not in a position to develop inany detail.

Although we have specified the body as the locus of the need to escapewe have not entirely clarified how the body is to be conceptualisedin order for the felt need to escape to become central to ourexperience of it. Indeed we have deployed Heidegger’s notion ofthrownness to specify the burdensome weight of attachment that theself feels in relation to its existence. But this notion functionsin Heidegger to specify the historical legacy that Dasein as being-in-the-world inherits from the past and does not involve the notionof the body that we bring into this world or that we are. We havequickly specified that Levinas is extending the notion of thrownnessas he finds it in Heidegger to incorporate our body and we havegiven reasons why this is so. Yet it still remains to bedemonstrated in detail that it is precisely in terms of our bodilybeing that Levinas tries to undercut Heidegger’s notion of Dasein asthe fundamental incarnation of human subjectivity, if we can put itthat way. It is also necessary that we engage in some reflection asto the precise concept of the body that is here operative, since itis clear that this is not, on the one hand, the biological notion,and on the other not the conception of the body as active I can,understood as ability, as it is deployed in Merleau-Ponty’sphilosophy. That it is not the latter can be seen from the fact thatthe notion of the body as I can would map much more tidily ontoHeidegger’s notion of understanding (Verstehen) than that of

27 Ibid, p. 5528 Emmanuel Levinas ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’ Translatedby Seán Hand Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 1 (autumn, 1990), pp.62-71

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thrownness; for it is by virtue of ability that the body canmanipulate the equipment that goes to make up its world. That it isnot the former is clear from the fact that as a phenomenologistLevinas is still concerned with the lived body, even if the way it islived is not identical to its role as ability.

As with On Escape the question of freedom opens the ‘Reflections onthe Philosophy of Hitlerism.’29 But despite being ostensiblyconcerned with a political movement the type of freedom that is inquestion is not identifiable with political freedom. Rather it is aform of freedom, which in philosophy is called free-will, in whichthe human will is seen as able to choose a course of actionindependent of the solicitations of external circumstances. Thisstands in opposition to a notion of man30 as swept along by a destinywhich holds him in its grip. Levinas is opposed to the notion ofdestiny as he considers it to features in the ‘out-ahead-of-oneself’characteristic of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein. Now we encounter itin terms of man as the outcome of his history and thus we should seethis as a criticism of Heidegger’s notion of historicity:

For history is the most profound limitation, thefundamental limitation. Time, which is a condition ofhuman existence, is above all a condition that isirreparable. The fait accomli, swept along by a fleetingpresent forever evades man’s control, but weighs heavilyon his destiny. Beneath the melancholy of the eternalflow of things, Heraclitus’s illusory present, there liesthe tragedy of the irremovability of a past that cannotbe erased, and that condemns any initiative to being justa continuation.31

This way of seeing things locates our struggle for freedom against abackground of a history that weighs us down to the point ofoverwhelming us. The present shrinks to an extensionless point, inwhich we can find no elbow room, by being crushed by a past whichcondemns our actions to being nothing but the fulfilment of a blind

29 On Escape opens with the sentence: ‘The revolt of traditional philosophyagainst the idea of being originates in the discord between human freedomand the brutal fact of being that assaults this freedom.’(OE, p. 49)30 I use the male gender here because I am paraphrasing Levinas whocontinually does so.31 Emmanuel Levinas ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ p. 65

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fate. Whereas: ‘True freedom, the true beginning would require atrue present, which, always at the peak of a destiny, foreverrecommences that destiny.’32 We are here witnessing an articulationof the notion of thrownness understood in terms of being weigheddown by the past and an enunciation of what would be required if wewere to be free of such thrownness. Again it would seem that thetarget is Heidegger, the reference to time as a condition of humanexistence is a clear enough allusion. And the sense of history as akind of destiny, in which the human is located before subjectivityemerges, is identified with the Greek notion of fate or moїra. Anunderstanding of the possibility of freeing oneself from thisburdensome past is, according to Levinas, first given in Judaism:

Judaism bears this magnificent message. Remorse—thepainful expression of a radical powerlessness to redeemthe irreparable—heralds the repentance that generates thepardon that redeems. Man finds something in the presentwith which he can modify or efface the past. Time losesits very irreversibility. It collapses at the feet of manlike a wounded beast. And he frees it. 33

It is therefore by virtue of the Judaic notion of repentance whichallows us to change course and ultimately free ourselves from ourown past: just as a convict pays his or her dues and is then nolonger held further responsible for the crime. It is this that isconsidered a new start and it is connected with the possibility thatwe are not subjects in the sense that we adhere to our past, ouridentities are not tied absolutely to our past deeds andexperiences, but that there arises a notion of a soul free forethical remorse and change. Ultimately this notion finds itsdecisive expression in the Christian good news of the Cross.

The Cross sets one free; and through the Eucharist, whichtriumphs over time, this emancipation takes place everyday. The salvation that Christianity wishes to bring uslies in the way it promises to reopen the finalitybrought about by the flow of moments of a past that isforever challenged, forever called into question, to go

32 Ibid 33 Ibid

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beyond the absolute contradiction of a past that issubordinate to the present.34

It is in the possibility of a free soul, independent of familialties and a personal past, which Levinas sees the innovation of theJudeo-Christian tradition of the West in its opposition to the Greeknotion of fate or moїra. Yet this freedom is hard won and dependsupon the possibility of ‘tearing up the bedrock of naturalexistence.’35 It is this conception which lies at the base of theChristian notion of the soul and, undoubtedly, the notion as itappears in Cartesianism. In other words this conception of the soulis not derived from introspective consciousness but from an idea offreedom which allows for choice being a commencement independent ofthe past.

It is due to the power given to the soul to free itselffrom what has been, from everything that linked it tosomething or engaged it with something [engagée], so itcan regain its first virginity.36

Such a notion of the soul if it is linked by Levinas to a Judeo-Christian tradition is also derived from a Socratic tradition and italso features in Stoicism. We can link this idea of the soul to thenotion of autonomy, where it finds its fullest expression in Kant,and it is here linked to the liberal tradition which is thepolitical counterpart to the autonomous soul.

If the liberalism of these last few centuries evades thedramatic aspect of such liberation, it does retain one ofits essential elements in the form of the sovereignfreedom of reason. The whole philosophical and politicalthought of modern times tends to place the human spiriton a plane that is superior to reality, and so creates agulf between man and the world…In place of liberationthrough grace there is autonomy, but the Judeo-Christianleitmotif of freedom pervades this autonomy.37

Once again the notion of autonomy is contrasted with the notion of afate in which we are locked. Such autonomy is expressed by the fact34 Ibid35 Ibid 36 Ibid, p. 6637 Ibid

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that man does not experience himself as presented with possibilities‘as a series of restless powers that seethe within him’ but ratherthey present themselves as ‘logical possibilities…to a dispassionatereason that makes choices while forever keeping its distance.’38 Itis precisely this distance from being that allows the soul thespiritual latitude it requires for the exercise of free-will: Verymuch the Kantian picture.

Marxism

According to Levinas it is Marxism that is the first doctrine tocontest this view of the human. In Marxist theory the self isconceived as to some extent at the mercy of material forces.Therefore the order of priority is reversed; man and hisconsciousness (and equally his conscience) are a product of socialcircumstances. The idea of man transcending his social circumstancesand the density of his destiny is condemned as illusion. Thus in TheGerman Ideology we find:

The phantoms formed in the human brain are also,necessarily, sublimates of their material life process,which is empirically verifiable and bound to materialpremises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the restof ideology and their corresponding forms ofconsciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance ofindependence.39

In other words: ‘Being determines consciousness.’40 But even inMarxism, grasping the nature of the material circumstances ofcapitalist society helps to liberate consciousness from thedelusions of its alienated existence. Thus freedom is regained byknowledgeable political praxis. Indeed the inspiration for much ofMarxism appears to be profound moral outrage at social injustice andexploitation. Yet this presupposes some moral distance betweenconsciousness and its material circumstances. It is at this pointthat Levinas will introduce the body.

The Body

38 Ibid39 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels The German Ideology Edited by C.J. Arthur(Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1970), p. 4740 Emmanuel Levinas ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’, p. 67

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A view that was truly opposed to the European notion ofman would be possible only if the situation to which hewas bound was not added to him but formed the veryfoundation of his being. This paradoxical requirement isone that the experience of our bodies seems to fulfil.41

Yet it is not just any experience of the body which might indicatesuch a view. The tradition to which we have been referringunderstands the body as part of the external world, albeit a part towhich we are inseparably glued until death. ‘The body is anobstacle. It breaks the free flight of the spirit and drags it backdown to earthly conditions, and yet, like an obstacle, it is to beovercome.’42Thus the spiritual tradition of the West has fostered theidea of the ‘eternal strangeness’43of the body. Yet for all itsstrangeness the body remains essentially intimate to us. Indeed incertain circumstances we feel ourselves identified with our bodies:

Do we not affirm ourselves in the unique warmth of ourbodies long before any blossoming of the Self that claimsto be separable from the body? Do these links that bloodestablishes, prior to the birth of intelligence, notwithstand every test? In the dangerous sport or riskyexercise in which gestures attain an almost abstractperfection in the face of death, all dualism between theself and the body must disappear. And in the impasse ofphysical pain, is it not the case that the sick manexperiences the indivisible simplicity of his being whenhe turns over in his bed of suffering to find a positionthat gives him peace?44

Phenomenologically our experience of the body in ‘dangerous sport orrisky exercise’ is one of total identification and in the experienceof extreme pain wherein we are unable to settle, we notice how thebody and the self form an ‘indivisible simplicity.’ These examplesare however distinct. In the first case the identity can bespecified in terms of the self being concentrated into the body it

41 Ibid42 Ibid43 Ibid 44 Ibid, p. 68

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identifies with. This fits well into the account of the I can given inMerleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.45 In the second case howeverwe feel ourselves riveted to our bodies and yet at the same time indesperate need to escape. It is this second one to which Levinaspays the most attention. It is this experience that is described inOn Escape. We will return to the notion of the body in terms of the‘links that blood establishes’ presently. But there are otherexamples of situations in which we feel a certain identity with ourbodies: dancing and certain erotic experiences wherein one losesoneself by feeling the self dissipating into the body and even beyondits obvious contours. This is the condition that we havecharacterised in terms of pleasure in our reading of On Escape. Insuch situations the self is no longer experienced phenomenologicallyas being situated somehow in the head; rather it is somehow diffusedabout the body and even beyond into the environing world. Thisconstitutes the apparent escape of pleasure specified in On Escape.

The Self Chained to the Body

Levinas does not here develop these point at any length butspecifies that the nature of the body understood in itsidentification with the self indicates the inadequacy of the liberalconception of subjectivity. Since by downplaying the body’s role inour lives to yet another external circumstance it misunderstands andthus alienates us from crucial bodily ways of being:

The body is not only a happy or unhappy accident thatrelates us to the implacable world of matter. Its adherenceto the self is of value in itself. It is an adherence that one does notescape and that no metaphor can confuse with the presenceof an external object; it is a union that does not in anyway alter the tragic character of finality.46

The notion of spirit or self is not therefore conceived as thatwhich is separate from the body, in the way Descartes understood it.Rather the whole of the content of spirit originates, on thisreading, by virtue of the fact that there is a struggle to free oneself from the body. Acertain notion of the self originates in this struggle.

45 Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception Translated by Colin Smith (Routledge, London, 1989) 46 Emmanuel Levinas ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ p. 68

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But there is another way of dealing with this problem of theidentity of the body with the self and that is to insist upon it.Essentially, for Levinas, this is the Hitlerian move. As a theory ofthe body which is essentially biological it sets aside the wholenotion of autonomy in exchange for the idea of the body as thevehicle for hereditary forces:

The mysterious urgings of the blood, the appeals ofheredity and the past for which the body serves as anenigmatic vehicle, lose the character of being problemsthat are subject to a solution put forward by thesovereignly free Self. Not only does the Self bring inthe unknown elements of these problems in order toresolve them; the Self is also constituted by theseelements. Man’s essence no longer lies in freedom, but ina kind of bondage [enchaînement]. To be truly oneself doesnot mean taking flight once more above contingent eventsthat always remain foreign to the Self’s freedom; on thecontrary, it means becoming aware of the ineluctableoriginal chain that is unique to our bodies, and aboveall accepting this chaining.47

In other words rather than seeking to resolve the problem that thelag between the body and the self creates, the Nazi solution is akind of final one, it is to insist that this distance is in fact afall into a state of untruth. Therefore Hitlerism is conceived byLevinas to be an attack on the very notion of free-will as thepossibility separating the self from the world and from its ownbody. The central problem with this notion of the self, from thepoint of view of what Levinas calls the ‘Germanic ideal,’48 is thatin creating such a distance the self finds a space in which it isable to lose all sense of identification with a heritage or anideal. This allows for the malaise of scepticism to creep in to aman’s blood: ‘Scepticism is a basic possibility for the Westernspirit.’49In other words the possibility of not attaching oneself toany ideal brews the possibility of deception including self-deception. The self removes itself from its roots in the world andin so doing it creates a situation wherein it has the power to

47 Ibid, p. 69 48 Ibid, p. 7049 Ibid, p. 69

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commit itself only on the basis of a free decision. But in so doingit thereby allows itself the possibility of not committing itself atall. The new conception of man as intimately connected to the bodyto the point of identification becomes an ideal of sincerity. Theliberal spirit becomes an object of suspicion and the society formedround it is considered inauthentic:

From this point on, every social structure that announcesan emancipation with respect to the body, without beingcommitted to it [qui ne l’engage pas], is suspected of being arepudiation or a betrayal. The forms of modern societyfounded on the harmony established between free willswill seem not only fragile and inconsistent but false anddeceitful. The assimilation of spirits loses the grandeurof the spirits triumph over the body. Instead, it becomesthe work of forgers. A society based on consanguinityimmediately ensues from this concretisation of thespirit. And then, if race does not exist, one has toinvent it!50

The freedom of reason is thereby challenged by the appeal to adeeper truth about the human. This truth should no longer be seen as asimple fact about the human but should be understood as theimmediate coincidence of a fact and a value. The body is no longerseen as part of the world from which the self distinguishes itselfbut as that which is the self in its authentic life. The body andthe self thereby gain a seriousness which draws our bodily beinginto the political arena under the banner of race. Without thisimmediate unity to a body, a history and a soil a people becomeincapable of true commitment: ‘Sincerity becomes impossible and putsan end to all heroism. Civilization is invaded by everything that isnot authentic.’51

The Link with Heidegger

Though Heidegger’s name do not appear in this paper it is clear byallusion that the parallels between his philosophy as Levinas readsit, and this interpretation of Nazism are very pronounced. If wewere to remain in any doubt on this point then the preface thatLevinas wrote for its republication in Critical Inquiry in 1990 makes50 Ibid 51 Ibid, p. 70

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this plain. There he explains that he is convinced that NationalSocialism ‘lies not in some contingent anomaly within humanreasoning, nor some accidental ideological misunderstanding’ rather:

The article expresses the conviction that this sourcestems from the essential possibility of elemental Evil intowhich we can be led by logic and against which Westernphilosophy had not sufficiently insured itself. Thepossibility is inscribed within the ontology of a beingconcerned with being [de l’être soucieux d’être]—a being, to usethe Heideggerian expression, “deme s in seinem Sein umdieses Sein selbst geht.”52

It follows that the reason that Levinas specifies Hitlerism as aphilosophy— an otherwise quite dubious claim— is precisely because itconsist in a possibility of the human soul which derives from acertain logic, and that this logic is linked to the kind of logicthat led to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Specifically we shouldbe struck by the Heideggerian concept of facticity. Facticity, as wehave observed, specifies that Dasein is thrown into its world. Moreprecisely it is determined as not simply being a fact among facts butas being intimately amidst or embedded in its world and thusinseparable from the values with which the world is already imbued.This new way of conceiving of subjectivity refuses notions like ‘thehuman’ or ‘the self’ since these are mere derivatives of thisoriginal situation. Indeed the very idea of ‘subjectivity’ can beseen as an inauthentic derivative of this primordial unity ofDasein’s being. Just as the Nazi’s, on Levinas’s reading, requiredan understanding of man which conceived him in his original unity,Heidegger was also in the business of articulating such an originalunity. We need also to note the intimate connection to Heidegger’snotion of thrownness, which specifies the structure of facticity andwhich we have spent some time on in this section. We have also seenthat Levinas understands the ‘out-ahead–of-oneself,’ characteristicof Dasein’s projection, in terms of a fatalism which takes on theshape of the Greek moїra. The very fatalism that he also identifieswith the pre-autonomous notion of man as locked in his destiny. Itis here also that he locates that ‘elemental Evil’ to which we willreturn later. Of course it is true that Heidegger rejected theracial interpretation of Dasein’s being. But in a way the Hitlerian52 Ibid, p. 63

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racial interpretation, on this reading, is derivative from theinitial unity of the body. This is why Levinas remarks of race thatif it did not exist then it would have to be invented, because thereis a clear sense in which it does not exist and thus was invented for thisprecise purpose. A more fundamental objection to this linking wouldbe that Heidegger says virtually nothing about the body. This istrue and we have seen that the association between the body andthrownness was an innovation of Levinas’s. But if he is right, thenit is a natural extension and we have seen in what direction itleads his thinking. This is precisely the sense, as I understand thesituation, in which he claimed that ‘at the beginning ourreflections are in large measure inspired by the philosophy ofMartin Heidegger.’53 We can take it that it is this direction of histhinking that he believes will ‘sufficiently insure itself’ againstthe return of this ‘elemental Evil.’ It is for this reason that histhought is also ‘governed by a profound need to leave the climate ofthat philosophy.’54Yet we should not therefore conclude that thisinvolves a turning back to some notion of autonomy as we have up tonow conceived it: ‘We must ask ourselves if liberalism is all weneed to achieve an authentic dignity for the human subject.’55Hisanswer to this is clearly negative and this is largely due to theinsights of Heidegger’s thinking. Thus his leaving of the climate ofthat philosophy is governed ‘by the conviction that we cannot leaveit for a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian.’56

The ‘Truth’ of Racism

The notion of an enchainment due to blood, soil and race is groundedupon a challenge to the notion of the Western spirit as theattachment to ideals. Such attachment is based upon the freedom of areason that approaches the ideal as something outside itself towhich it may freely commit. The notion of an ideal, as the correlatea free reason, is connected to the possibility of persuading. Thecapacity to accept the truth of an ideal, as we saw in theintroduction, is a function of the autonomy of the reasoningsubject. But when subjectivity has renounced its freedom and findsits ‘truth’ in the very enchainment to the body, which is understood

53 Emmanuel Levinas Existence and Existents, p. 454 Ibid 55 Emmanuel Levinas ‘Reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism,’ p. 6356 Emmanuel Levinas Existence and Existents, p. 4

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in terms of race, and the opposition to which is the very definitionof spirit, then it seems thereby to renounce truth. Truth by itsvery nature professes to universality, whereas the body in thissense, despite its consanguineous links, is stubbornly particular.In short: ‘How is universality compatible with racism?’57 The pointhere is that this new notion of what it is to be human brings withit a new notion of truth. Yet ‘the new type of truth cannot renouncethe formal nature of truth and cease to be universal.’58 In this waya new kind of universality emerges which is not the universalitywhich is associated with the ideal. ‘Universality must give way to the idea ofexpansion.’59 In other word the spreading of the ‘ideal’ of a racistideology takes place on the basis of force and this force isextended and thus universalised by expansion.

But force is characterised by another type ofpropagation. The person who exerts force does not abandonit. Force does not disappear among those who submit toit. It attaches to the personality or society exertingit, enlarging that person or society while subordinatingthe rest. Here the universal order is not established asa consequence of ideological expansion; it is that veryexpansion that constitutes the unity of a world ofmasters and slaves.60

The upshot of this is of course that the ‘truth’ of such a societyfinds itself only in war and conquest, and the ‘ideal’ of such asociety is not given in a constitution but in the person of theFührer. There is a sinister echo of this when Heidegger insisted inNovember 1933: ‘Let not propositions and “ideas” be the rules ofyour Being [Sein].’ Rather:

The Führer alone is the present and future German realityand its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now onevery single thing demands decision, and every actionresponsibility.61

57 Emmanuel Levinas ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ p. 7058 Ibid 59 Ibid 60 Ibid, pp. 70-7161 Martin Heidegger an ‘Address to German Students’ (November 3, 1933) inRichard Wolin (Editor)The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, (The MIT Press,Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993), p. 47

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Levinas is here attempting to establish an ideological connectionbetween Heidegger’s work and the ‘philosophy’ of National Socialism.Not in order to condemn Heidegger, but in order to show that aphilosophy which remains attached to ontology is able to connect toa destiny and a violence that it may not have conceived veryclearly. The possibility of such violence is not therefore writtenon the face of a philosophy, so to speak, but can be discovered andthis requires thought.

The diabolical is endowed with intelligence and enterswhere it will. To reject it, it is first necessary torefute it. Intellectual effort is needed to recognise it.Who can boast of having done so? Say what you will, thediabolical gives food for thought. 62

62 Emmanuel Levinas ‘As If Consenting to Horror,’ Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter1989), p. 488

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