To Murder the Other. Ethics, Violence and Power in Emmanuel Lévinas’ Philosophy

• Main Author: Valeria Campos Salvaterra
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: CENALTES 2019-05-01
• Series: HYBRIS: Revista de Filosofía
• Subjects: lévinas, ética, violencia, asesinato, poder
• Online Access: http://revistas.cenaltes.cl/index.php/hybris/article/view/274

<p class="Hybristtuloingles">Lévinas’ theses about violence are frequently entangled with his notion of totality. I state that even though violence is linked to Lévinas’ critique of philosophy of totalization, is not reducible to it. While totality refers to power and domination, violence refers to the extreme situation of murder as a final solution. This presupposes that totalization is really powerless concerning the other’s alterity, which paves the way to establish a new and paradoxical logic regarding the relationship between the same and the other. The new logic has the commandment ‘you shalt not kill’ as a principle of action, which shows that violence is the first problem that ethics has to deal with. Nevertheless, Lévinas’ ethics is not naïve enough to propose an original non-violence. Following Derrida and answering to his demands, I show how Lévinas’ ethics can be understood as a <em>critical violence of the violence of murder</em></p>