Title
Contesting the Human: Levinas, the Body, and Racism
Document Type
Article
Department or Administrative Unit
Philosophy and Religious Studies
Publication Date
Fall 2006
Abstract
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.
Recommended Citation
Coe, C. D. (2006). Contesting the Human: Levinas, the Body, and Racism. Epoché, 11(1), 257–273. https://doi.org/10.5840/epoche200611118
Journal
Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy
Rights
© 2006.
Comments
This article was originally published in Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.
Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download from ScholarWorks @ CWU.