Dialettica della complicità

Una rilettura delle riflessioni sull’hitlerismo di Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

This contribution offers a reading of an important early text by Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism”, written in 1934, just months after Hitler's rise to power. I aim to show that Levinas’s analysis is grounded in a phenomenological interpretation of corporeal experience, drawing upon the existential structures identified by Heidegger in “Being and Time”. This will reveal the extent to which Levinas’s Reflections remain situated within a Heideggerian “ontological-political paradigm”. I argue that the essential operation of this paradigm – when approached genealogically – consists in uncovering a relationship of deep co-dependence, ambiguous proximity, and dangerous complicity where a metaphysical or vulgar perspective would perceive isolated, abstract, and seemingly opposed motives. At a more strictly ethical level, this genealogical framework generates two fundamental outcomes, both discernible in Levinas’s position: first, the replacement of the gesture of “accusation” with that of a “topographical survey” (Agamben); and second, the development of a posture marked by the concept of “escape,” driven by what Abensour calls “an unparalleled vigilance against false exits.”