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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Inchiodati alla vita biologica. Emmanuel Lévinas e la filosofia dell'hitlerismo

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Our present consideration tries a philosophic reading of the phenomenon Hitlerism, according to the issues suggested by Lévinas in 1934, in his work Quelques reflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme. We’ll try to go through some of the theoretical cruxes which Lévinas identifies as the fundamentals of the Philosophy of Hitlerism, as he himself calls it. One of the main categories he states is the Biological Identity: according to the Hitlerism, the Ego is thought to be coincident and identical to the Biologic Body. This identity, so distant from the Christian-Judaic traditional view, becomes the unavoidable tie that links a blood community, a whole of biological bodies where members recognise each other and identify themselves in a shared “us”. As a matter of course, the biological existence is considered an opportunity for glorification on one hand, a road to damnation on the other. This comes true for Hebrew people in particular, since they are compelled to follow their own biological identity, as it has been thought. The bond to the biological identity calls into question both the western philosophical categories, by which the same identity has been fixed, and the humanity of mankind itself, which Lévinas detects in the attempt to escape from the pure natural fact. The purpose of our contribution is to show how the philosophic categories of Hitlerism, i.e. biological body, closure, biological inheritance, compulsoriness, are still acting nowadays and are an attempt on the humaneness of man.