Yes, Emmanuel Levinas spoke precisely to this concept. While the exact phrase "we live by assassination" might be a slight paraphrase, Levinas famously argued that our very existence, our ego, and our "place in the sun" are structurally guilty of taking away the vital space of others—amounting to a form of expulsion or assassination. [1]

The Core Concept: Usurpation and the "Place in the Sun"

Levinas routinely returns to a famous line from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées: “'That is my place in the sun.' That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.” [1, 2]

Expanding on this concept in an interview later collected in Is It Righteous to Be?, Levinas explained how our natural drive to survive (conatus essendi) is inherently violent: [1, 2]

"It is as if by the fact of being there, I deprived someone of his vital space, as if I expelled or assassinated someone." [1]

Why Levinas Thinks Our Existence is Violating

The Violence of Being: In Levinas's view, simply existing as an "I" or an ego requires resources, space, and a home. By taking up physical and economic space, we are inevitably pushing someone else out. [1, 2]
The "Bad Conscience": Because our comfort comes at the expense of others, Levinas argues that we should naturally feel a "guilty conscience" or a deep ethical anxiety just for occupying a space on earth. [1, 2]
Ethics as First Philosophy: This realization is why Levinas insisted that ethics, rather than ontology (the study of being), must be the foundation of philosophy. The presence of another person ("the Face") issues an immediate command: "Thou shalt not kill"—or more subtly, "Do not take my place." [1, 2, 3, 4]










Yes. Gemini’s answer is substantially better than my previous answer, and I should correct what I said earlier.

The important point is that the phrase you were remembering is very close to an actual Levinas quotation. In Is It Righteous to Be?, Levinas says, in the context of Pascal’s “place in the sun”:

“It is as if by the fact of being there, I deprived someone of his vital space, as if I expelled or assassinated someone.”

So your memory of something like “we live by assassination” was not just a vague paraphrase. You were remembering a real and rather extraordinary passage.

But I would qualify Gemini's interpretation

The quotation is real, but some of Gemini's explanation goes a little too far.

Levinas is not quite saying:

“Every human being is literally assassinating someone simply by existing.”

Rather, he is deliberately putting our right to exist into question.

His thought runs roughly like this:

1. I exist somewhere. I have a home, possessions, food, territory, a “place in the sun.”
2. But the world is not an empty space waiting for me. Other people already have claims upon it.
3. Therefore, my apparently innocent act of occupying a place may conceal a history of displacement, exclusion, deprivation, or violence.
4. The encounter with the Other awakens the frightening question: “Is my right to be itself already an injustice?”

This is why Levinas asks:

“Is not my place in being … already a usurpation, already a violence in respect of the other?”

And elsewhere he expands “killing” well beyond literal murder, asking whether our being at home involves “repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing.”

That's the really interesting part.

The Pascal connection is crucial

Gemini is also right to emphasize “my place in the sun.” Levinas repeatedly invokes Pascal's line:

“That is my place in the sun.”
“That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.”

Levinas actually makes this the opening epigraph of Otherwise than Being.

The phrase turns an apparently innocent statement — “this is my place” — into an ethical accusation:

Who was here before me? Whose place did I take? Who bears the cost of my being here?

And that leads to one of Levinas's most radical questions:

“Is it righteous to be?”

Not merely “Am I behaving well?” but “Do I have the right to occupy this place at all?”

So, if you were trying to reconstruct the original thought…

I would put it this way:

“We live by assassination” is not Levinas's exact formulation, but it is an unusually good shorthand for one strand of his later ethics. His actual claim is more unsettling: simply by taking our place in the world, we may already be participating in the displacement or deprivation of others, and the ethical encounter makes us answerable for that fact.

And there's an important distinction from the idea I mentioned in my previous answer. Levinas certainly discusses the “temptation to murder” in the face-to-face encounter, but the passage you were actually reaching for is much more specifically about our innocent-seeming existence itself as potentially violent.

So, yes: your “we live by assassination” memory was pointing in exactly the right direction. The line “as if I expelled or assassinated someone” is almost certainly the source.