Levinas equates being and totality with war

Evidence

Echoing Carl Schmitt, who defined the political as the “ever present possibility of conflict … the ever present possibility of combat,” Levinas insists that philosophy is a response to the “permanent possibility of war.” “We do not need obscure fragments of Heraclitus,” Levinas continues, “to prove that being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought.” Thus, “does not the experience of war and totality coincide, for the philosopher, with experience and evidence as such?” Thought as totality, being constitutes the space of the same as the permanent possibility of its own destruction. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Levinas’s ‘permanent possibility of war’ directly echoes Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy definition of the political; surfaces again in Anidjar’s genealogical bridge between the theological and the political enemy.