The limitation of Levinas is not simply that of a Eurocentrist who relies on a too narrow definition of what is human, a definition that secretly excludes non-Europeans as “not fully human.”*
What Levinas fails to include into the scope of “human” is, rather, the inhuman itself, a dimension which eludes the face-to-face relationship of humans.
In a first approach, Butler may seem to be more sensitive to this aspect — say, when she provides a subtle description of Adorno’s ambiguity with regard to the “inhuman”: while Adorno is well aware of the violence involved in the predominant definition of what counts as “human” (the implied exclusion of whole dimensions as “nonhuman”), he nonetheless basically conceives “inhuman” as the depository of “alienated” humanity — ultimately, for Adorno, “inhuman” is the power of barbarism we have to fight.
What he misses here is the paradox that every normative determination of the “human” is only possible against an impenetrable ground of “inhuman,” of something which remains opaque and resists inclusion into any narrative reconstitution of what counts as “human.”
In other words,although Adorno recognizes that being-human is constitutively finite, nontotalized, that the very attempt to posit the Human as “absolute subject” dehumanizes it, he does not deploy how this self-limitation of the Human defines “being-human”: Is being-human just the limitation of human, or is there a positive notion of this limitation which constitutes being-human? 158
*One may formulate the reproach also at this level, however. Today, in our politically correct anti-Eurocentric times, one is tempted to admire Levinas’s readiness to openly admit his being perplexed by the African-Asian other who is too alien to be a neighbor: our time is marked, he says, by “the arrival on the historical scene of those underdeveloped Afro-Asiatic masses who are strangers to the Sacred History that forms the heart of the Judaic-Christian world” (DF,160)