Fecundity and Natal Alienation: Rethinking Kinship with Levinas and Orlando Patterson

I n his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas raises important questions about the subject’s relation to nature and to history. He argues that Western conceptions of freedom as a liberation from the constraints of the body and from the weight of the past — however powerful and important these conceptions may be — are unable to offer an adequate response to the Nazi appeal to a feeling of being bound to one’s body and to a historical destiny by virtue of one’s “blood” or the biological heritage of one’s “race.” This appeal to the felt dimensions of an embodied historical existence was effective in 1930s Germany not only because of contingent social, economic, and political factors, but also because Hitler was able to mobilize a new philosophical perspective, hitherto unknown in the West: a philosophy that took the feeling of embodiment seriously, not merely as an obstacle to be overcome but as an inescapable weight and even a fate from which consciousness is unable to separate itself without some degree of self-deception or superficiality. For Hitler and his followers, the body was not merely attached to a person’s spirit or soul, but rather “formed the very foundation of his being” (RPH 67). This foundation was not neutral but constitutive; it imparted a meaning and a direction to the individual’s life, and it