Eurocentrism and colorblindness

ENOona Eisenstadt’s “Eurocentrism and Colorblindness” moves the idea of Europe to the center. Eisenstadt takes on a straightforward issue in Levinas’s texts: what are we to make of Levinas’s exclusive preoccupation with Europe, and does that preoccupation lead to a sense of encounter with the other that is, in the end, wholly colorblind? As well, and most clearly directed to trends in Levinas scholarship, Eisenstadt outlines the reasons for such anxiety about Levinas’s Eurocentrism—a sense of betrayal by the thinker of the other, a hope for a certain politics, inconsistency of praise for and deep critique of the West, and so on - in order to rethink the question. Rather than a question of the cultural other against the familiar Levinasian texts about “all is dance” and the like, Eisenstadt narrows the cultural question and widens the textual scope. Europe, Eisenstadt proposes, functions as Levinas’s historical and political psychism. Europe animates Levinas’s cultural body, and so the complexity and even violence of that animation demand accounting. Europe is Levinas’s problematic - both as an issue to address and an issue that makes for so many problems. As well, and as perhaps the most innovative part of her treatment, Eisenstadt returns to talmudic readings that deepen our sense of Levinas’s encounter with Africa - a moment in Levinas’s work that has received very little attention. What emerges out of this rereading of Levinas on Eurocentrism, then, is a more complicated treatment of Levinas’s own discussion of Europe and its other and a critical question back to critics of Levinas: is Levinas not responsible, as per his model of a subject put in question, to the deconstruction of the familiar in his own world? And is this not precisely what he accomplishes in those very same texts that have occasioned such critical attention, even polemics?.