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 strictopposition, but Levinas’s later work explores the way in which liberalismis implicated in the “hatred of the other” that pervades Hitlerism. In thispaper, I argue that Cartesian dualism underlies two sorts of anxieties, bothof which are expressed as racism. Levinas’s reconception of the body as ethicallysignificant overcomes this dualism, and thus seems to hold promise asa method for undoing contemporary manifestations of racism.