Transitional Barbarism: Levinas’s Counter-Narrative and the Global South

Abstract

Post-war Paris was a popular locus of congregation for intellec- tuals affected by the wounds of coloniality. During the period of political decolonization, border thinkers across the barbaric networks engaged in lengthy debates and subverted the discourses that racialized their communities. Jews were not foreign to these discussions. Lithuanian Emmanuel Levinas, arguably one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, made a seminal contri- bution to the debate. Despite the distance he routinely took from the existentialist Marxism that was permeating society, he adopted a con- ventional negative counter-narrative in his early writings. That is, the Eastern European social theorist inverted the traditional use of bar- barism, preserving the negative valence of the term. He thus blamed the West for the atrocities committed against the alleged barbarians, exculpated Jews from these accusations entirely, and mobilized Jewish thought as an alternative. His late career, however, marks a significant turning point as he came to strongly support a second alternative, a positive counter-narrative of barbarism.¹