III.1. Emmanuel Levinas, « la philosophie de l’hitlérisme »

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Beginning in 1933, Levinas conceived Hitlerism as a “philosophy” rather than a policy or an ideology. This allowed him to extract a conception of man, society and the truth founded on racism that transformed Hitlerism into a phenomenon that was truly unique insofar as it had no historical precedent. Our article retraces the evolution of these “reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism,” starting with Hitler’s rise to power up through the eve of the war and the implementation of the Final Solution. We look at each of the three major steps that shaped these reflections: “The Understanding of Spirituality in French and German Culture” (1933) wherein Levinas situates the origins of Hitlerism in German culture’s tendency to exalt the biological and the organic; “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1934) wherein he highlights the radical break that the racial conception of humans created with European civilization, which sees the “humanity of man itself” in freedom; and the 1935-1939 articles wherein he sets Judaism and Christianity against neo-paganism, highlighting the uniqueness of a racial anti-Semitism that “binds” the Jew to his Jewishness. In our conclusion, we discuss the prolongation of these “reflections” in his postwar works after the Final Solution, through which “National Socialism revealed the diabolical criminality, the absolute evil of that which we cannot call ‘thought.’”