For a wisdom of insubmission

notes on decolonial ethics in Levinas and Bergson

Abstract

In this article, we try to show resonances that bring together the ethics of Levinas and Bergson from a meaning that seems common to both: disobedience. The development of this intuition through the paths of the philosophers in question leads us to the discovery that ethics, removed from all moralism and understood as a radical and undeniable responsibility, either as infinity or as openness, reveals itself as a wisdom of insubmission. To raise the problem of obedience, we recall the concept of banality of evil developed by Arendt in the famous Eichmann case, as well as Stanley Milgram’s experiment of obedience in the context of authority in the fields of moral psychology. Finally, we propose that the unsubmissive character of ethics referred to by Levinas and Bergson is important for a decolonial interpretation of these authors.