Between transcendent and immanent humanism: Levinas, Camus, and the struggle against totalitarianism

This work seeks to provide a systematic comparative and critical analysis of the oeuvre of Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Camus, within a specific political context, i.e. intellectual resistance to totalitarianism. Such an account is both lacking, despite the abundance of literature pertaining to intellectual adherence and resistance to totalitarianism, and crucially important, insofar as this is the first work which purports to offer an examination of two of the greatest exemplars of the ethical turn in a political context, as there is no published work which strives to establish a political dialogue (or any other dialogue for that matter) between Levinas and Camus. We begin with two brief intellectual and biographical preludes entitled Emmanuel Levinas: A brief generic biographical overview/'Portrait of the Scholar as a Young Man' and Albert Camus: From Solipsistic Nihilism to Immanent Humanism. This is in order to situate us within the relevant timeframe and intellectual and political climate for our first consideration of their respective anti-totalitarian stances, as the following chapter considers Levinas and Camus's critique of the totalitarian right ( Levinas and Camus contra Hitlerism and "Political Nietzschianism").;In the next chapter we move on to consider Levinas and Camus's critique of left totalitarianism, i.e. Stalinism and Soviet Marxism, in conjunction with their philosophical critique of Hegelian philosophy of history.;Chapter three is entitled Levinas and Camus contra Religious Fundamentalism/Answer to the Question "What is metaphysical Suicide?".;In this chapter we strive to infer from the writings of Levinas and Camus their tacit and at times explicit negation of religious fundamentalism. We conclude with an attempt at a parsimonious explication of the dualist nature of Israel and Algeria in the writings of Levinas and Camus under the title Visionary Politics/Dualist political ontology; Israel and Algeria in the writings of Levinas and Camus.