Einsatzgruppe and Collaborator Horror: Thinking the Holocaust’s “Explicit Presence” in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

Abstract Levinas scholars agree that his work was affected by the Holocaust and reflects a philosophical response to it. Yet Levinas only rarely mentions the Holocaust in his major philosophical writings, so how is what Levinas called “Holocaust horror” registed in his work? Here the author argues that scholarship says little about this because it has paid only scant attention to the tragedies of Levinas’s life and because it understands the Holocaust almost entirely through the lens of Auschwitz and the death camps. The author shows that Levinas’s major works show many traces of the brutal, face-to-face violence characteristic of the Holocaust’s early stage, when killing formations known as the Einsatzgruppen, along with local collaborators, murdered almost all of the Jews of Lithuania, including Levinas’s parents and brothers. Traces of this specific horror—much more than industrial killing in death camps—are registered in Levinas’s philosophy.