Reading Marx with Levinas

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas is a profoundly influential figure in several post–World War II continental European philosophical traditions. A growing scholarship has started to explore the links between his work and Judaism and, inter alia, phenomenology, feminism, and deconstruction, but very little has been written in the English-speaking world on the connections between his thought and that of Marx. This essay is an attempt at an encounter between the two thinkers, exploring how Levinas’s radical critique of ontology in the Western philosophical traditions can be brought to bear on Marx’s antihumanist critique of capitalism as a way to think of an alternative ethical stand that starts from alterity, which is where the essay finds the spirituality of both thinkers to reside. While the theoretical planes on which they operate are different, through a difficult but necessary conversation, Levinas and Marx can pose to one another fundamental questions with crucial implications for their orientation.