The paper presents the importance of cogito in the phenomenology of Levinas' Totality and Infinity. It starts with the hypothesis that the “fear of being enchanted”, as a direct consequence of the freedom of a self that has detached itself from the Whole, symbolically expresses the situation of European humanity in the face of two temptations: a) the subject can put himself at the service of Totality, affirming a will of power that will culminate paradoxically with his dissolution; b) the temptation of "paganism", that is, the nostalgia for very old "states of mind", characterized by relations with elemental forces, whose reflexes in politics and contemporary society will be tragic. The subjectivity that makes the cogito experience is situated between these two temptations. She discovers, astonished, that both can merge into a tragic complicity.
