ABSTRACT
Upon closer inspection, Levinas and his thought are beset by prejudices that cast a disparaging shadow over his well-known exposure of the violence at the very heart of Western philosophy, the reductive tendency of the Self to reduce, subject or "colonize" all forms of alterity that cross its path. This chapter discusses the better known Levinas-as-ethical-thinker by surveying his notions of the self, the Other understood as radical alterity, ethical subjectivity and the nature and (im)possibility of ethical agency. Within this context, Levinas's conceptualization of racism as the most extreme form of moral evil will prove to be instructive. Levinas conceives of the being of the self in terms of the Spinozian conatus essendi, that is, the persistent concern with its own existence. To navigate the moment of transition from the ethical to the political, Levinas invokes the Judeo-Christian trope of the messianic, which functions to signal a sort of pure futurity.
