"On being 'The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany': Dwelling with Animals after Levinas"
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In this, as in so many other ways, Levinas anticipates Derrida, for whom Heidegger’s extraordinary statement represents an object lesson in what he calls “the ideology of difference.�? In attempting to deconstruct this ideology, with its insistence upon “a single limit between white and black, Jewish and non-Jewish,�? animal and human, Derrida is not arguing that difference is irrele-No, no I am not advocating the blurring of differences. On the contrary, I am trying to explain how drawing an oppositional limit itself blurs the difference, the differance and the differences, not only between man and animal, but among animal societies-there are an infinite number of animal societies, and within animal societies and within human society itself, so many differences. eRH 183) Ideologies of difference are, in the end, ideologies of “homogeneity�? (RH 184), strategies and discourses that suppress uncontainable and irreducible variation in the name of an impossibly pure distinction between the same and the other. Criticizing Heidegger’s philosophical and political investment in such purity, his high-minded distaste for mixing it up with more earthly others, Levinas will say that “Dasein … is never hungry.�?16 From this utterly anorexic perspective, Heidegger risks blurring the difference between a meal and a corpse, while at the same moment and in the same gesture ferociously reinscribing the oppositional limit between those who are in a position to practice a fundamental ontology and those who are not. Speaking not from the relative safety of Bremen, but from behind the barbed wire of Camp 1492, Levinas cannot afford to make such sacrifices, dissolving as they do the difference between life and death for people and animals alike.
