Volume 11, Issue 1, Fall 2006
Cynthia D. Coe
Pages 257-273
Contesting the Human
Levinas, the Body, and Racism
In his 1934 essay “Some Thoughts on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,”
Levinas identified two major movements within contemporary culture:
liberalism and Hitlerism. At one level, these two movements are in strict
opposition, but Levinas’s later work explores the way in which liberalism
is implicated in the “hatred of the other” that pervades Hitlerism. In this
paper, I argue that Cartesian dualism underlies two sorts of anxieties, both
of which are expressed as racism. Levinas’s reconception of the body as ethically
significant overcomes this dualism, and thus seems to hold promise as
a method for undoing contemporary manifestations of racism.