An Ethics of Relationality:

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95) is undoubtedly the most celebrated champion of an ethics of responsibility towards the other. What is often forgotten is what motivated Levinas to criticise and re-found traditional ethics: the desire to unmask and demolish the roots of genocide from within Western society. As one of the few in his family (who were mostly in Lithuania when the war broke out) to survive the Shoah, Levinas’ critique of Heidegger, who symbolises the Western tradition of ontology, was both political and personal. In his earliest writings on the rise of fascism in Germany, he revealed how the ontological roots of Western culture are exclusionary and potentially genocidal (Levinas, 1934). While exclusion does not inevitably lead to genocide, it is a necessary first step, which — as such — needs to be stopped before it has the potential to escalate into any form of violence. This is precisely the claim that Levinas sought to make when he stated that:

The crime of extermination begins before murders take place, that oppression and economic uprooting already indicate its beginnings, that the laws of Nuremberg already contain the seeds of the horrors of the extermination camps and the ‘final solution’. (Levinas, 1990: 27)