Emmanuel Levinas o la posibilidad de un republicanismo social-libertario

Cristóbal Balbontin-Gallo

What is the actuality of Levinas' thought in political philosophy? The question has two answers. The first is related -following Foucault- to the extension of the question of "power" to the fields of social normalization, which shows a coincidence with the Levinasian concern to identify in metaphysics a totalizing movement. On the other hand, such actuality also corresponds to a necessary renewal of political philosophy in the context of the destruction of the history of metaphysics. Levinas's shrewdness was to have understood the pregnance of the forms of domination associated with ontology, in such a way that politics can no longer be thought of as it has been without betraying its very own emancipatory potential.