Levinas underground: Dostoyevsky, "De L’évasion," and the devil

ENVal Vinokur points up some striking parallels between the situation of Dostoyevsky’s famous narrator in Notes from Underground and that of human beings in general, who according to Levinas are walled in on themselves and find themselves unable to escape their own being. At the same time, Vinokur presents the Russian figure of the devil as a representation of this need to escape, and also the biggest obstacle in the way of escaping. Vinokur suggests that the equivalent of this diabolic figure in Levinas’s philosophy is self-preoccupation, which is the very definition of a lack of ethics.