ABSTRACT
Levinas also adds that the ‘state of war suspends morality ... [it] renders morality derisory’.2 It is clear why he comes to this conclusion. For him the real tragedy of war is not death, it is betrayal: it persuades us to betray our own substance – in this case our common humanity. There is a passage in Primo Levi’s book If This Is a Man which brings this out very well. A fellow inmate in the lager, already fluent in French and German, asks Levi to teach him Italian. A canto from Dante pops into his head in their first (and maybe last) lesson. ‘Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance/Your mettle was not made; you were made men/to follow after knowledge and excellence.’ To those who are condemned to die a humiliating death in the camps, Dante’s humanism seemed an era away. Yet war – though it may seem paradoxical to claim this – can create a common community of fate in which it is possible, often for the first time, to see that the traditional differences of tribe, religion, race or custom are unimportant compared with similarities all human beings share (pain and humiliation, for example). In Levinas’ case it enabled him to think of his German captors not as people wildly different from himself but as people who he could include in the range of ‘us’.
