How is universality compatible with racism? The answer-to be found in the logic of what first inspires racism involves a basic modification of the very idea of universality. Universality must give way to the idea of expansion, for the expansion of a force presents a structure that is completely different from the propagation of an idea. The idea propagated detaches itself essentially from its point of departure. In spite of the unique accent communicated to it by its creator, it becomes a common heritage. It is fundamentally anonymous. The person who accepts it becomes its master, as does the person who proposes it. The propagation of an idea thus creates a community of “masters”; it is a process of equalization. To convert or persuade is to create peers. The universality of an order in Western society always reflects this universality of truth. But force is characterized by another type of propagation. The person who exerts force does not abandon it. Force does not disappear among those who submit to it. It is attached to the personality or society exerting it, enlarging that person or society while subordinating the rest. Here the universal order is not established as a consequence of ideological expansion; it is that very expansion that constitutes the unity of a world of masters and slaves. Nietzsche’s will to power, which modern Germany is rediscovering and glorifying, is not only a new ideal; it is an ideal that simultaneously brings with it its own form of universalization: war and conquest. But here we return to well-known truths. We have tried to link them to a fundamental principle. Perhaps we have succeeded in showing that racism is not just opposed to such and such a particular point in Christian and liberal culture. It is not a particular dogma concerning democracy, parliamentary government, dictatorial regime, or religious politics that is in question. It is the very humanity of man.¹ Emmanuel Levinas

As a victim of fascism and concentration camp survivor, Levinas well understood the outcome of power and racism. In the quote above Levinas sketches out what he believed to be a critical ground of racism not in the horrific acts of racism but in the seemingly banal appeal of what he terms the “idealist liberalism” in historical Christianity. Levinas thinks that in Christianity we have a liberation of spirit, an unprecedented act of freedom in the idea. Prior to this denouement where freedom begins, the human spirit was chained to the powerlessness of the body and the brutality of the natural world. Levinas writes,

It makes it impossible to apply the categories of the physical world to the spirituality of reason, and so locates the ultimate foundation of the spirit outside the brutal world and the implacable history of concrete existence. It replaces the blind world of common sense with the world rebuilt by idealist philosophy, one that is steeped in reason and subject to reason. In place of liberation through grace there is autonomy, but the Judeo-Christian leitmotif of freedom pervades this autonomy.

The temptation the liberation of the soul from the body brings is expanse. Expanse is the exercise of power. Force is the ontic effect of power. Power does not diminish in its use; it intensifies itself in the manifestation of force. I might add, the freedom and universalization of the idea perhaps indulges the natural narcissism of human being. As the old motif goes ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. The spiritual liberation of spirit sets the conditions for infinite expansion of the ego. From this authentic epoch of being, a new man draws its first breath, the modern master and the slave emerge. The master expresses the ideal world of the soul. The slave remains bound by the shackles of the natural world, the abomination of abominations. In the clear light of reason an unbridled exercise of egoistic freedom announces itself, free, liberated, unchained from every constraint, natural and ethical determinations. In this moment, Hitlerism blinks and gazes long into an abyss and the abyss gazes back.²

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¹ Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism

Author(s): Emmanuel Levinas and Seán Hand

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 62-71

Published by: The University of Chicago Press

² I would like to thank Robert Bernasconi for an inspiring lecture last night at the University of Colorado in Denver and the occasion for my discovery of this text of Levinas.