EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"(fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

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Ortega y Gasset, J. "La idea de principia en Leibniz ... ", Obras
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Ortega y Gasset, J. Obras Completas. Madrid: Revista de
Occidente.
Ortega y Gasset, J. "Prologo para alemanes", Obras Completas,
Vol. VIII.
Ortega y Gas set, J. ~Que es el conocimiento?, Madrid: Revista
de Occidente/Alianza, 1984.
Ortega y Gasset, J. "~Que es filosoffa?", Obras Completas,
Vol. VII.
Ortega y Gasset, J. "Sobre el concepto de sensaci6n", Obras
Completas, Vol. I.
Zubiri, X. El Sol, March 8, 1936.
Zubiri, X. Ensayo de una teona fenomenoldgica del juicio.
Madrid: 1923, p. 8.
Zubiri, X. Inteligencia sentiente, Madrid: Alianza, 1980.
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Zubiri, X. Inteligencia y razon. Madrid: Alianza, 1983.

Secondary Literature
Benavides, M. De la ameba al monstruo propicio. Madrid:
UNAM, 1988.

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF

"FACE TO FACE"/THE RELIGIOUS TURN 1
INTRODUCTION

In the preface to The Phenomenological Movement: A

Historical Introduction, Herbert Spiegelberg acknowledges that the main innovation of the third edition to his
work is the inclusion of a new chapter on Emmanuel
Levinas. Spiegelberg states:
Previously Levinas had been mentioned only in his
historical role as one of the early links between French
and German phenomenology and as a co-translator of
Husserl's Cartesian Meditations into French. Only a brief
note in the Supplement had hinted at his independent
philosophical development. Now his academic rise and an
additional major work have made it clear that his thought
and especially his original type of phenomenology call for
fuller treatment. (xliii)

A. A. Bello et al., Phenomenology World-Wide

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2002

409

Cerezo, P. La voluntad de aventura. Barcelona: Ariel, 1984.

Conill, J. El crepusculo de la metafzsica. Barcelona: Anthropos,
1988.
Conill, J. El enigma del animal fantdstico. Madrid: Tecnos,
1991.
Conill, J. El poder de la mentira. Nietzsche y Ia pol{tica de la
transvaloracion. Madrid: Tecnos, 1997.
Fowler, Th. B. "Introduction to the Philosophy of X. Zubiri",
The X. Zubiri Review 1(1998), pp. 5-16.
Garragorri, Paulino. "Nota preliminar" in J. Ortega y Gasset,
Investigaciones psicoldgicas, Madrid: 1979.
Gracia, D. Voluntad de verdad. Barcelona: Labor, 1986.
Marias, J. Ortega. Circunstancia y vocaci6n. Madrid: Revista de
Occidente, 1973.
Orringer, N. Ortega y sus fuentes germdnicas. Madrid: Gredos,
1979.
Pintor, A. "El magisterio intelectual de Ortega y Ia filosoffa de
Zubiri", Cuadernos salmantinos de filosofza !0 (1983), 55-78;
Pintor, A. "Zubiri y Ia fenomenologfa", Realitas III-IV (1979),
389-565.
Pintor, A. "La 'maduraci6n' de Zubiri y Ia fenomenologfa",
Naturaleza y Gracia XXVI/2-3 (1979), 299-353.
Pintor, A. Realidad y verdad. Salamanca: Universidad Pontifica,
1994.
Regalado, A. El laberinto de Ia razon: Ortega y Heidegger.
Madrid: Alianza, 1990.
San Martin, J. (ed.). Ortega y la Fenomenologza. Madrid:
UNED, 1992.
Spiegelberg, H. The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical
Introduction. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969 (2. ed.).

Levinas' rise to a position of eminence within the

international philosophical world has been further confirmed since Spiegelberg wrote these words in 1982. The
place Levinas now occupies within the history of the phenomenological movement is unquestionably one of the
highest importance. In his Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas,
Jacques Derrida accurately gives us a sense of the enormity ofLevinas's a?uvre: "It is so large that one no longer
glimpse its edges .... One can predict with confidence that
centuries of readers will set this as their task" (3-4). One
of the most lucid and coherent expositions of Levinas'
thought can be found in Stephan Strasser's essay
"Emmanuel Levinas: Phenomenological Philosophy,"
excerpted and translated by Spiegelberg, and included in
the third edition. However, Levinas continued to write and
publish important work in the decade postdating the
Spiegelberg volume. Although at times the reader will
notice some factual corrections, the present essay is not an

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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE" !THE RELIGIOUS TURN

attempt to improve upon Strasser's piece, but rather to

include material that postdates his publication and to offer
an alternative reading of Levinas based in part upon his
later writings. The more recent material published by and
about Levinas indicates more clearly the way in which
Levinas understood his own philosophical itinerary.
Additionally, since the time of Strasser's publication,
Levinas, through a series of interviews, revealed some
of the elements of his biography that bear upon his philosophy, and therefore are also included here. While his
specifically Jewish writings are not considered as a
separate subject, the path that he so often describes as
"otherwise than Greek," including the relevance of his
reflections on the Talmud for his ethics are here introduced.
The originality of Levinas' s thinking, his use of
language, and the richness of his phenomenological
descriptions do not easily yield a summary of his research.
Given the enormity of his philosophical task, his work has
already been subjected to a variety of interpretations,
responses, and applications. As Levinas' s thought continues to be recognized as one that challenges every student of phenomenology, the secondary literature has
grown exponentially in the past two decades. A selective
bibliography of primary and secondary sources can be
found appended to this article. A glossary of some of the
key terms introduced by Levinas is also included.
BIOGRAPHY

The life of Emmanuel Levinas was affected and shaped

by some of the epochal events of the twentieth century.
His own thinking may be viewed in part as a response to
the crises and catastrophes that produced so much suffering in the world around him. Regarding his own philosophic biography Levinas writes a single statement that
is to remain permanently associated with his life and
work: "It is dominated by the presentiment and the
memory of the Nazi horror" ("Signature" 291).
Levinas was born in Kovno, Lithuania, on January 12th
1906. Kovno had for centuries been recognized as one of
the main centers of Talmudic scholarship, and Levinas's
childhood was dominated by a traditional Jewish atmosphere that was itself a way of life. His father, Yechiel,
owned a bookshop, and Levinas's relation to books was
first nourished here. He learned to read the Jewish Bible
in the Hebrew language in which he was tutored.
Reflecting back on the Judaism of his childhood, Levinas
describes it in the following way: "the spiritual essenceand this remains a quite 'Lithuanian Judaism'-rested for
me not in mystical modes but in a tremendous curiosity
for books" (Elevations 116).

Levinas's family was forced to leave Lithuania in

1915, along with the other Jews of the Kovno district, as a
result of an edict from the Czarist government. The following year, the family settled in Karkhov, Ukraine,
where Levinas attended public high school. It was from
this distance that Levinas witnessed the disintegration of
the Czarist regime and the beginning of the Soviet
Revolution. In the aftermath of the Revolution, civil war
ensued, accompanied by outbreaks of anti-Semitism that
engulfed the Ukraine. These orchestrated pogroms, led by
the Ukrainian nationalist Semeon Petlura, resulted in the
murder of over 100,000 Jews. While the Levinas family
survived this upheaval, they chose to return in 1920 to the
familiarity and comparative safety of Lithuania.
Levinas remained in Kovno for the next three years
where he enrolled as a student in a Jewish RussianLanguage Gymnasium. It was during this time that he
developed an abiding love for the Russian classics, from
Pushkin to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and also "the great
writers of Western Europe, notably Shakespeare" whose
descriptions of human existence prepared him for his
encounter with philosophy (Ethics and Infinity 22). These
initial pre-philosophical experiences he would subsequently regard as a first contact with "the meaning of the
human" (ibid). In 1923, Levinas left Kovno and enrolled
at the University of Strasbourg. It was at this time that he
absorbed the French language as his own, while also
devoting himself to the study of German and Latin.
During the same period, he met and was befriended by
Maurice Blanchot, who later emerged as one of France's
eminent literary critics. Blanchot would remain a lifelong source of intellectual inspiration for Levinas, and
Levinas in turn would leave his mark upon the writings
of Blanchot.
Levinas first became interested in Husserl's phenomenology in 1927. He traveled to the University of Freiburg
for the academic year 1928-29, where he studied with
Husserl, who was teaching his last public course, and with
Heidegger, who was teaching his first courses at Freiburg,
and "who was then the leading light in German phenomenology and philosophy" (Face to Face with Levinas
14). In 1929, Heidegger singled out Levinas to serve as
his second in his famous debate at Davos with Ernst
Cassirer, the eminent Kant scholar. At that time, as
Levinas later remarked, "My admiration for Heidegger is
above all an admiration for Sein und Zeit. I always try to
relive the ambience of those readings when 1933 was still
unthinkable" (Ethics and Infinity 33). While Levinas
would always retain his admiration for Heidegger as the
author of Being and Time, he would later regret the
assistance which he had given him in light of Heidegger's

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{I'HE RELIGIOUS TURN

subsequent political act1v1ty. Heidegger' s involvement

with the Nazi regime would force Levinas to reformulate
the foundational importance of ethics to philosophy.
In 1930, Levinas published his prizewinning doctoral
dissertation: The Theory of Intuition in Husser!' s Phenomenology. During this time, he married Raissa Levy, a
childhood friend. He became a naturalized citizen of
France and received a position in the French army.
Throughout most of the 1930s, Levinas worked as a
teacher and administrator at the Alliance Israelite
Universelle, a French-Jewish organization dedicated to
the education of Jews in countries under the influence of
France, especially in North Africa.
Levinas served in the French army as a translator of
German and Russian. With the help of Maurice Blanchot,
Levinas 's wife and daughter escaped from Paris to
Orleans, where they were given refuge in a monastery.
Levinas's entire family of origin, including his mother, his
father, and his brothers, were murdered by the Nazis and
their collaborators in Lithuania. Levinas himself was
captured and transported to a prisoner-of-war camp for
French Jewish soldiers near Hanover, Germany, where he
performed forced labor. In Difficult Freedom, Levinas
comments on his incarceration, and acknowledges that the
French uniform protected him and the seventy in his unit
of Jewish prisoners-of-war from Hitlerian extermination.
He recalls that "the other men, called free, who had
dealings with us or gave us work or orders or even a
smile-and the children and women who passed by and
sometimes raised their eyes stripped us of our human
skin." The only creature who recognized the prisoners as
human beings was a dog. Levinas explains: "He would
appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us upon
return jumping up and down and barking with
delight ... For him, there was no doubt that we were
men ... This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany,
without the brain needed to universalize maxims and
drives" (152-53). Levinas' subsequent philosophical
reflections on the Holocaust are born of these searing
personal experiences and observations.
After his liberation, Levinas produced three important
works in quick succession: Existence and Existents, begun
in the stalag; Time and the Other; and Discovering Existence with Husser! and Heidegger. These works represent
the emergence of Levinas' s own philosophic path. In the
late 1940s Levinas began to immerse himself in the study
of the Talmudic texts in the presence of a master teacher,
Mordechai Shoushani. This period marks the beginning of
Levinas' philosophic recovery of the Hebraic tradition,
and the alternative approach to philosophy that he would
later inscribe in the phrase "Otherwise than Greek."

411

Levinas is not indifferent to the rich phenomenological

content of the Talmudic tradition which permitted him
over the course of the next many years to reflect on a
variety of subjects such as hunger and nourishment,
injustice and forgiveness, suffering and redemptionsubjects too often submerged in the history of philosophy.
However, Levinas tended to keep his philosophical and
Talmudic reflections quite separate, at least in an overt
sense, until after he had established himself as a philosopher of the first order through the publication of Totality
and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being: Beyond Essence.
In 1951, Levinas authored the important article "Is
Ontology Fundamental?" representing his clearest break
with Heidegger as a philosopher. In 1961 he received his
first academic appointment at the University of Poitiers,
followed in 1967 by a position at Nanterre, a branch of the
University of Paris. In 1974, Levinas published Otherwise
than Being which represents a radicalizing of his phenomenological work and ensured the international reputation that Totality and Infinity had already established.
His teaching career culminated in a position as Professor
of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1973, where he continued to teach and remained a Professor Emeritus until
1979. In 1986, Levinas published Of God Who Comes to
Mind, a work that would serve to provide a new model for
the relation of philosophy to theology. In each of these
works, Levinas continued to propel the human subject
toward that which is beyond or outside of himself. By this
time, Levinas had demonstrated that there is a third
alternative between absolutism and the humanism of the
enlightenment, a theism that is also a radical humanism:
the humanism of the Other. During the last years of his
life Levinas taught at the lnstitut Catholique in Paris.
Levinas' s philosophic writings span over sixty years.
The originality and rigor of his thinking secured for
Levinas a position of eminence in Europe and continue
gain him ever greater recognition throughout the philosophic world. Levinas continued to write both new and
important philosophic texts in the last years of his life. In
addition, he produced a series of commentaries on the
Talmud and the status of morality, especially in light of
the Holocaust, and opened up new horizons for phenomenological inquiry. Emmanuel Levinas died in Paris
on the 25th of December 1995.
EXPLORATIONS IN PHENOMENOLOGY

When considering his philosophical influences, Levinas

singles out the great masters Plato, Descartes, and Kant,
and the twentieth-century luminaries Bergson, Husserl,
and Heidegger. The philosophy of Henri Bergson made a

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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

strong impression on Levinas. In Face to Face with

Levinas, he observes: "In 1925, in Strasbourg University,
Bergson was being hailed as France's leading thinker."
Levinas credits Bergson's theory of concrete duration (la
duree concrete, as a contribution to philosophy of lasting
importance. Levinas adds: "Indeed, it was this Bergsonian
emphasis on temporality that prepared the soil for the
subsequent implantation of Heideggerian phenomenology
into France" (13).
In Discovering Existence with Husser!, Levinas gives a
clear indication of the importance that he attributes to the
work of Edmund Husserl. He refers to Husserl as the
creator of phenomenology and then describes its project:
Phenomenology means the science of phenomena. All
things given, shown or revealed to our gaze are
phenomena. But then is everything a phenomenon
and every science a phenomenology? Not at all. What
is given to consciousness only deserves the name
phenomenon if one grasps it through the role it plays
and the function it exercises in the individual and
affective life of which it is the object. (33)
Levinas makes it a point to place the philosophical
revolution affected by Husserlian phenomenology in a
historical perspective:
[phenomenology] reverses the scientific attitude.
Newton's physics precisely turns away from the subject
for the greater glory of the object. It decrees the
expulsion of every so-called subjective element from
the object. For example, it wipes out from space every
subjective heresy: "top" and "bottom: "righC and
"left: "far" and "near! Thus purified, objective space
and the objective world see no limits to their ever-purer
objectivity. (33)
Here Levinas recognizes the existential importance of
the attempt by phenomenology to recover the meaning of
spatiality from its purified and overly reduced objectivism
where there would be neither a sense of direction or distance or placement recognizable by and for the human
subject.
The immediate effect of the first phase of Levinas'
encounter with phenomenology in the early 1930s
resulted in the publication of translations and texts that
made Levinas the recognized authority in France on the
subject of phenomenology. These efforts include a collaborative translation of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations
and The Theory of Intuition in Husser!' s Phenomenology,
the first systematic examination of Husserl's thought in
French. This latter work also served as Levinas' s doctoral
dissertation. Levinas had already published a serious
study of Heidegger in La Revue Philosophique in 1932,
and it is clear that he was preparing to write a book-length

study following Heidegger's adaptation of Husserl's philosophy. However, this project was put to the side with
Hitler' advent to power in 1933.
While Levinas continued to publish articles on Husserl
and Heidegger in the 1930s, he also authored "Some
Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism" in 1934.
Levinas had already begun to rethink his relation to
Heidegger, the philosopher whom one could not bypass in
the twentieth century if one were to aspire to do serious
work after the publication of Being and Time. In Ethics
and Infinity, Levinas describes Heidegger's analysis in
Being in Time of "anxiety, care and being-towarddeath... as a sovereign exercise of phenomenology"
(39). For Levinas, Heidegger's methodological contribution consisted in verbalizing existence: "It aims at
describing man's being or existing, not his nature." In this
respect Levinas indicates that Heidegger expresses elements of a philosophical anthropology that awakens
and delineates the awareness of the patterns of human
existence.
However convincing and brilliant Heidegger's analysis, Levinas, by steps almost imperceptible in the early
stages of his work in the thirties and forties, emerges as
Heidegger's most serious philosophic critic. Levinas' own
original thinking offers a radical alternative to Heidegger's ontology of power. The project of fundamental
ontology becomes in Heidegger the consummate expression of a will-to-power unbounded by the other person's
claims. Subsequently, with the 1951 publication of "Is
Ontology Fundamental?" Levinas provides the first serious critique of Heidegger's insistence that ultimate or
"first philosophy" is necessarily and inescapably ontology. Here Levinas introduces a metaphysical critique of
ontology which yields the ethical relation to the Other as
irreducible and hence of unsurpassable importance. He
elevates discourse to a place of special significance. And
he criticizes the Hegelian notion of negation whose
existential expression reveals itself as murder.
Against Heidegger, Levinas argues that one's fear for
the other, for his death and therefore his life, takes precedence even over concerns for one's own ultimate possibilities. Surely there is an undeniable interweaving of
Levinas' thinking with his life and the climate under
which his philosophy was nourished. Life is no longer to
be modeled after an existential autobiography in which
others merely make their appearances and recede. As
Levinas writes in "Signature:"
The fundamental experience which objective experience itself presupposes is the experience of the Other.
It is experience par excellence. . . the disproportion

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"(fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

413

between the Other and the self is precisely moral consciousness. Moral consciousness is not an experience of
values but an access to external being: external being is
par excellence, the Other. Moral consciousness is thus not
a modality of psychological consciousness, but its
condition. (293)

too, remained with the conception of a time either taken to

be purely exterior to the subject, a time-object, or taken to
be entirely contained in the subject" (90). The path that
Levinas is about to chart will diverge not only from
Heidegger, but also from Greek philosophy:

For Levinas, the humanism of the other person is a

precondition for the possibility of philosophy, which in
tum forms a precondition for theory, and the responsibility that grounds consciousness.

Classical philosophy left aside the freedom which

consists not in negating oneself, but in having one's
being pardoned by the very alterity of the other. It
underestimated the alterity of the other in dialogue
where the other frees us, because it is believed there
existed a silent dialogue of the soul with itself. In the
end the problem of time is subordinate to the task of
bringing out the specific terms with which the dialogue
has to be conceived. (90)

LEVINAS' S PHILOSOPHICAL ITINERARY

In the preface to Existence and Existents, Levinas notes:

These studies begun before the war were continued and
written down for the most part in captivity. The stalag
is evoked here not as a guarantee of profundity nor as
a claim to indulgence, but as an explanation for the
absence of any consideration of those philosophical
works published, with so much impact, between 1940
and 1945. (15)
In these revealing remarks, Levinas, in a sharp and
pointed manner, indicates that he will be charting his own
philosophic course. Muting his own personal reservations,
here, about the role of Heidegger's collaboration with the
Nazis, Levinas is clearly announcing his own future
philosophical itinerary, while at the same time expressing
his recognition of the changing conditions under which
philosophy must begin to think anew. As if to drive home
this point, Levinas states:
If in the beginning our considerations as far as the

concept of ontology and the relation of man to Being

are concerned are inspired in a high measure by Martin
Heidegger's philosophy, they are [nevertheless] dominated by the deeply felt need to relinquish the climate
of this philosophy. (91)
For Levinas, Heidegger's nihilism is situated ontically,
between the insensibility toward the death of the Other
and the totalitarian egocentrism inscribed in the arbitrariness of the resoluteness of the will. The future of
phenomenology in part depends on the critique of Heidegger's presentation. The philosophic path which Levinas takes from the time of the destruction of European
Jewry focuses on a critique, and at times an enlightenment
of the entire Western spiritual tradition.
Preparing the reader for his work in Time and the
Other, Levinas indicates the larger context within which
his original reflection moves by first situating his phenomenological exploration within the history of philosophy: "Traditional philosophy, and Bergson and Heidegger

In order to bring out these specific terms, Levinas

introduces the phenomenon of the il y a. The il y a, or
"there is," is an endless sequence of instants without
direction, purpose or claiming power. The il y a is
described as the consciousness of horror, the depersonalization of the subject, and the experience of an inability to
escape from existence. If there were no relation between
the self and the other, the "there is" would be completely
senseless. However, from the relation between the self
and the other arises the possibility of meaning, justice and
goodness. In Existence and Existents, Levinas begins to
explore a way of escaping the il y a through a description
of time and alterity. He asks:
How indeed could time arise in a solitary subject ... if
time is constituted by my relation to the other, it is
exterior to my instinct, but is also something else than
an object given to contemplation. The dialectic of time
is the very dialectic of the relationship of the other,
that is, a dialogue which in turn has to be studied in
terms other than those of the dialectic of the solitary
subject. (93)
For Levinas, the diachronic nature of time makes time
and alterity virtually synonymous. Here, the notion of a
time that is not one, or "diachrony" emerges. In Time and
the Other, Levinas states that "time is not the achievement
of an isolated and lone subject, but that it is the very
relation of the subject with the other" (39). In this text,
Levinas lays claim to the originality of his presentation in
a critique which reaches all the way back to Parmenides
and Plato, and whose themes will dominate, in various
ways, much of the rest of his philosophical writings:
"There is a multiplicity and a transcendence in this verb
'to exist,' a transcendence that is lacking in even the
boldest, existential analysis" (91). Anticipating the more
metaphysical grounding of these concrete descriptions in
Totality and Infinity, Levinas emphasizes that "existing
itself becomes double. The Eleatic notion of being

414

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE" {THE RELIGIOUS TURN

dominates Plato's philosophy, "where multiplicity was

subordinated to the one, and where the role of the feminine was thought within the categories of passivity and
activity and was reduced to matter" (92-93). As part of
his inquiry into the transcendence of being, Levinas refers
the reader to the concrete situations of death, sexuality,
paternity, femininity, and fecundity. He reminds the
reader that the phenomenon of fecundity has not previously been treated in a philosophical manner, and that
this omission leaves out one of the irreducible phenomena
of human existence: "The fecundity of the ego must be
appreciated at its correct ontological value, which until
now has never been done." Levinas presents paternity,
fecundity, femininity, and love as generative patterns of
human existence that are open to phenomenological
investigation. For example, the child is a paradox that
formal logic cannot explain. The child both is and is not
a continuation of the parent. In this respect the child represents an irreducible existent not completely reducible to
genetics or biology with an identity to claim as its own.
Just as Levinas raises birth to a philosophic category,
so too does he register the death of the other as being
phenomenologically irreducible. In this respect he challenges Heidegger's understanding of human finitude and his
notion that authenticity does not permit us to register the
deaths of others as something outside of our own projects.
In fact, for Levinas, the death of the other, and therefore
the life of the other can take precedence over the possibility of one's own death and at times one's own life?

Totality and Infinity

The publication of Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority in 1961 provided a vital new direction for
phenomenology. Totality and Infinity represents the culmination of Levinas' s independent philosophical positions
and delineates his rethinking of the relation of time and
alterity, ethics and ontology, self and other, justice and
freedom. Levinas became the first phenomenological
philosopher to offer a distinctly alternative approach to
a field whose underpinnings remained dependent on
Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Some of these original departures are noted in John Wild's Introduction to the
English edition of Totality and Infinity. In Totality and
Infinity, Levinas embarks upon what Wild characterizes
as a "phenomenology of the other" (13). In so doing,
Levinas, while building on the work of Husserl, recognizes and responds to the egocentrism with which phenomenology had been charged. He reaffirms the priority
of the existent over existence. For Levinas, it is the Other

as existent who now occupies a position of primacy.

In this sense, Levinas could be interpreted as elevating the
"ontic" over the ontological.
It is in the elaboration of the ethical character of
Levinas' metaphysics that Totality and Infinity marks a
new chapter in the history of the phenomenological
movement. While Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had each
contributed valuable and creative descriptions of human
existence, metaphysics, as envisioned by Levinas, takes a
position beyond and outside of Being. It begins with a
relation to the Infinite that cannot be reabsorbed into
Being. For Levinas, metaphysics arises and is maintained
in desire, a desire that cannot be reduced to need. Need
belongs within a system of ontological reference, where
each being is the bearer of meaning. The preface to Totality and Infinity shows Levinas linking his metaphysical
undertaking to the phenomenon of morality, describing
its conditions for appearing, and attaching existential
importance to the subject: "Everyone will readily agree
that it is of the highest importance to know whether or not
we are duped by morality" (21). Levinas appears to be
asking whether or not morality is irreducible, despite war,
which vitiates its application; despite commerce, in which
subjects become commodities; or despite administration
that would subsume all subjects, in advance, as objects or
data exhausted in their quantification. An irreducible
phenomenon of morality would mean that morality cannot
be reduced to politics, or human beings reduced to bearers
of historical meaning or sociological function. The other
cannot be reducible to the self, nor can infinity be
encapsulated within totality. Establishing this position is
the work that Levinas undertakes in Totality and Infinity.
Levinas begins his phenomenological investigation
with an exposition and critique of totality, while positioning the sameness that dominates totality in relation to
the otherness that derives from infinity. These formal
categories of metaphysics, with their roots in the thought
of Plato and Aristotle, are immediately endowed by
Levinas with a concrete sense of urgency and existential
importance. Levinas argues that an ontology of power is
subsumed under totality:
It establishes an order from which no one can keep his
distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not
manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys
the identity of the same. The visage of being that shows
itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which
dominates Western philosophy. (21)

Levinas argues and affirms an alternative version of

philosophy in which reason cannot be employed on behalf
of injustice. He presents significant variations on the

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{rHE RELIGIOUS TURN

ontology presented by Heidegger in Being and Time and

positions his thinking outside Heidegger's ontological
paradigm altogether.
The break with ontology makes it possible for Levinas
to investigate a variety of phenomena in a new way.
Levinas takes pains to describe phenomena such as the
home, the face, and the welcome that have for the most
part been previously overlooked. He also argues against
Heidegger that such phenomena are not reducible to tools
or implements, nor are they describable only within the
realm of projects for the self. These new phenomenological categories are essential to Levinas 's critique of
Heidegger and to his endeavor to situate ethics as first
philosophy.
The home, as described by Levinas, makes it possible
for interior life to go on. "The privileged role of the home
does not consist in being the end of human activity but in
being its condition, and in this sense its commencement.
The recollection necessary for nature to be able to be
represented and worked over, for it to first take form as a
world, is accomplished as the home" (152). The home
appears to enjoy an irreducible ontological status for
Levinas. The home does more than shelter the self from
the elements. It secures for the separated self a sense of
stability, and interiority, where one can recover one's
sense of personal identity interrupted by sojourns through
the world.
The human face plays a central part in Levinas'
depiction of ethics. He shows how the face is connected to
ethics, reason, discourse, signification, and objectivity.
Levinas's contribution to raising the phenomenon of the
face to a philosophical category has both epistemic and
ethical dimensions. Epistemically, it is impossible for
one person to speak to another without making implied
or tacit reference to the human face. It is impossible for
anyone to understand anyone else, or for the speaker to
know if the meaning of what he has said was understood
without turning toward the face of the other. Here, the
other may be absent or present, the face turned toward
or away. Anonymous reason unattended by the human
face is incapable of rendering itself into the personal, the
singular, and the temporal dimensions of human existence. Prior to speech with the other is the face-to-face
encounter. It is here that original expression arises prior
to any language. It is from the face of the other that an
appeal prior to thematization appears. This appeal arises
in "the uprightness of the face, its upright exposure
without defense" (86). The face is the source of original
expression mandating a relation that opens the realm
of the ethical. The face is as necessary for meaning as
the category of quantity is for counting. In Ethics and

415

Infinity Levinas refers to the expression of the face as

"signification without context" (86). In this respect
Levinas begins to explore a distinctively non-intentional
consciousness. This is to say that for Levinas there is a
consciousness which exceeds the object of which it is
aware, or to put it in more Husserlian language, a noesis
which goes beyond the object to be known, the noema.
Like the home and the face, Levinas elevates the
phenomenon of hospitality to a metaphysical category
with vital ethical implications for the relation of the self
to the other. Hospitality arises as the welcoming of the
other to the home without divesting the other of his or her
alterity. The welcome is the first act of discourse where
the "I" turns toward the other, thus making the self
receptive to his speaking. The "welcome," then, is the
invitation to language. For Levinas, the welcoming of
the other, generosity and shame before the other, are no
longer treated as pre-philosophic layers of human existence but as transcendental conditions necessary for the
establishing of just discourse with the other. The welcome
also suggests a dimension of moral height, the asymmetry
that favors the other over the self, thereby wakening
the self to a sense of responsibility for the other. For
Levinas, the other has priority over the self, and through
discourse the self is summoned to justify itself before
the other.
Here Levinas reveals the necessity of rethinking the
unannounced premise that spontaneity is at the core of
human freedom. He searches for an alternative description
of human freedom that necessitates a critique of spontaneity, that is, of arbitrary self-assertion in relation to the
other. Spontaneity is the absolutely free exercise of one's
will, power, and self-assertion. Its unchecked expression
may serve to menace, dominate, or subordinate the other.
Levinas associates the phenomenon of spontaneity
understood as absolute freedom with the ontology of
power. "Political theory derives justice from the undisclosed value of spontaneity; its problem is to ensure, by
way of knowledge of the world, the most complete
exercise of spontaneity by reconciling my freedom with
the freedom of others"(83). The calling into question of
spontaneity by the other is for Levinas the way that one
first stumbles upon ethics. In a stunning reversal of
modem philosophical thinking, Levinas argues that justice precedes freedom. This tum arises, in part, because
only a just relation with the other makes discourse possible. Freedom, then, for Levinas, is understood as
invested in justice, which delimits it and makes it possible
and meaningful.
Phenomenologically, justice has an epistemic as well
as an ethical dimension. According to Levinas, the "I"

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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

experiences a sense of moral unworthiness before the

other:
The welcoming of the Other is ipso facto, the
consciousness of my own injustice~the shame that
freedom feels for itself. If philosophy consists in
knowing critically, that is, in seeking a foundation
for its freedom, in justifying it, it begins with conscience, to which the other is presented as the Other,
and where the movement is inverted. (86)
Here, the careful reader of Totality and Infinity will
notice that Levinas already has anticipated the problem of
the third person, the neighbor, who will emerge as the
central consideration of Otherwise than Being. He asks
how the "I" reckons with competing demands of diverse
others in the order of their respective exigencies: "if the
other can invest me and my freedom, of itself arbitrary,
this is in the last analysis because I can feel myself to be
the other of the other. But this comes about only across
very complex structures"(84). The category of exteriority
is crucial to beginning to unravel some of these complex
structures. Exteriority, irreducible to the sameness of
Beings, delineates a plurality of others, each making
claims upon me, as well as upon each other. It is through
speech that Being is pierced and that an ethical relation
with others emerges. Levinas does not disown the dialogical character of speech; rather, he insists, contra Buber's
I-Thou philosophy, on the temporal dimension of the
relation between the self and others as well as the
asymmetry of that relationship. The ethical character of
speech arises from the exteriority that is beyond the realm
of the ontological. For Levinas, equality is discovered
in the ordering of justice. The asymmetry between the
other and the self conditions the possibility of equality
and increases the responsibility of the self toward the
other. What Levinas shrinks from is a pseudo-impartiality
that would permit all people to be treated with a numeric
equality detached from either responsibility or goodness.
For Levinas, the other takes precedence over the self;
justice comes before freedom; metaphysics comes
before ontology; and above all, otherness comes prior to
sameness and infinity prior to totality. All of these philosophical reversals would remain formal and quasipropositional in character were it not that contents of the
drama of existence is enacted in and through time. The
"et" or "and" in Totality "and" Infinity binds Sameness
to the Other as time.
The renewal of what Franz Rosenzweig called
"thinking-speaking" can been seen in Levinas's account
of language. In the third major division of Totality and
Infinity, "Exteriority and the Face," Levinas articulates

his radically original theory of language and signification.

Levinas argues that language makes the universal possible, rather than presupposing it. Ethics arises as communication through discourse. Language defies the subjectobject model. In other words, the other who turns toward
me in speaking is neither an object, nor even another
subject like me. The other is the stranger. He carries a
trace of the Infinite. In this sense the other precedes
me. He forces a continuing self-critique, whereby I come
closer to understanding myself as a separated being, discontinuous with history, diachronically situated in relation
to the other. This means that I recognize that the other's
sense of urgency is different from my own.
At the heart of the self-other relationship is language,
language embodied, temporalized and expressed. As
Levinas puts it: "To be in a relationship while absolving
oneself of this relation is to speak" (Totality and Infinity
215). The asymmetry that marks Levinas' description of
the interpersonal derives from the way that the other is
always situated beyond the self. It is for this reason that
the self is called upon to respond to and for the other. This
asymmetry continues even to the realm of death. Here,
Levinas presents a severe critique of Heidegger's notion
of being-toward-death.
Heidegger affirms that only in my awareness of my
own possibility of the certainty of my finitude can I lay
claim authentically to my life as my own. This is at the
heart of his notion of authenticity, an idea that Levinas
regards as inescapably linked to the totalitarianism in
Heidegger's thinking. The "resoluteness of the will" upon
which everything depends is, for Heidegger, without
reference to any exterior being. It is located for Heidegger
in a hermeneutical circle of self-sameness with its center
in "authenticity." Heidegger's resoluteness of the will is
therefore susceptible to a potentially violent and even
murderous self-assertion of the will. The death of the
other, for the self, would signify a distraction, an inauthentic mode of existence tearing me away from my
concern for my own being and for Being. In the ontological realm of each against each, there is no reason
to reject Heidegger's description of anxiety over my own
death.
Escaping this exorbitantly hermenutical model is the
other as existent. According to Levinas, the asymmetrical
relation between the other and myself emerges, here, in
metaphysics that precedes ontological description. My
responsibility for the other precedes my relation to his
being-toward-death. In this sense, I have a responsibility
that consists in refusing to be indifferent to his suffering.
How much more so, then, am I responsible for refraining
from menacing the other or situating the other within my

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"(THE RELIGIOUS TURN

search for the meaning of Being-as Heidegger would

have it. The alterity of the other makes his death and
suffering a matter of supreme concern for me. In the
metaphysical mode that precedes ontology, the concept of
death has an inescapably interpersonal dimension. In
Totality and Infinity, Levinas stresses the social aspect of
the death of the other: "Death approaches in the fear of
someone, and hopes in someone .... A social conjuncture
is maintained in this menace" (234). In other words, death
is always relentlessly personal, and therefore, for Levinas,
approaches from outside the subject, from the sphere of
other which is irremediably social. Suffering is endured as
the ordeal of time in relation to another. "It is produced
only in a world where I can die as a result of someone and
for someone" (239). This, for Levinas, is at the origin of
morality.
Death, for Levinas, does not necessarily have the last
word. According to Levinas, death does not absolve me of
the consequences of my actions or my responsibility for
others. Expanding on subjects first introduced in Time and
the Other, Levinas introduces the notion of infinite time.
Such time has its own way of appearing, which Levinas
calls "infinition." In Totality and Infinity, Levin as uses
the example of the parent-child relationship to elaborate
the idea of infinition and its attendant responsibility:
"The relation with the child-that is, the relation with the
other that is not a power, but fecundity-establishes a
relationship with the absolute future, or infinite time"
(268). Levinas can be seen moving in the direction of a
phenomenology of transcendence where transcendence
"is time and goes unto the Other" (269). This is the case,
for Levinas, because transcendence involves a going out
of the self toward that which is beyond it. Philosophy then
is a discourse always addressed to another and "constitutes a moment of this temporal accomplishment"
(269). In this sense, Levinas welcomes the other to an
infinite and ongoing conversation that is philosophy.
Toward the close of Totality and Infinity Levinas
reiterates that the metaphysical relation of the self with
the other begins with the desire for the Infinite. The other
person, through exposure of his face, reflects this movement of infinity. The face to face relation, founded on
justice, is inherently ethical. It is the ethical relation that
"makes possible the pluralism of society" (291). At the
same time, the desire for the infinite stretches beyond
Being, and therefore death, through fecundity: "Fecundity
opens an infinite and discontinuous time" (301). Freedom,
understood as investiture, seeks its own justification in the
presence of the other. The justification that the self enacts
toward the other constitutes ethics. It is in this sense that
reason and freedom are found together and together

417

founded on justice. In this way, Levinas opens a new

discourse by concluding that "morality is not a branch of
philosophy, but first philosophy" (301).
BEYOND THE LANGUAGE OF ONTOLOGY:
TOWARD OTHERWISE THAN BEING

Despite its Promethean effort, Totality and Infinity

remains, in the eyes of Levinas, too tightly bound by the
governing categories of the tradition of philosophy. The
offending silhouette of "substance," the ontology of presence, Being, the archai or ruling principles of philosophy, at least since Aristotle's Metaphysics, must now be
more radically challenged. Methodologically, Levinas
wants to try to further free himself from his dependency
on ontological language. Unlike Heidegger, Levinas does
not seek to do this by linking time to being. Totality and
Infinity accomplishes a radical critique of ontology even if
it leaves within itself some of the scaffolding of ontological language used to frame the argument. Only by
making a move in the direction of redressing the fundamental project of modernity beginning with Hobbes,
Descartes and Spinoza, where time would be subordinate
to space, is it possible to move beyond this position. For
Levinas, this means returning to a kind of phenomenological reduction so radical that time reappears as the
transcendental condition necessary, if not sufficient, for
all philosophic inquiry.
In "Meaning and Sense," an important transitional
essay preparing for Otherwise than Being, Levinas
develops the phenomenon of "the trace" in order to move
in a direction where temporality can be described without
being tied to being. The specific purpose of the trace is to
explain how the past can be preserved, thus making
memory philosophically intelligible. Levinas uses the
trace in order to demonstrate how the past remains in the
present even if it appears as a kind of absence. In a sense
the trace represents Levinas 's struggle against an ontology
of pure presence. In so doing, he elevates the past to a
place of primacy. Most radically put, "the trace is the
insertion of space in time, the point at which the world
inclines toward a past and a time" (62). Here Levinas
delineates the way in which the trace conditions the
possibility for the continuity and the synchrony of time.
The trace serves, for Levinas, as the metaphysical fingerprint of being. The present passes by absolving itself
and permitting a distance to emerge that makes discourse
about the past, present, and future cognizable.
So radical is Levinas' treatment of temporality that
most scholars have still chosen to approach it within a
Heideggerian framework. Even Derrida can go no further

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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

than to speak about the "ontology of absence." However,

even given a phenomenological treatment of absence,
this does not mean that we are free from thinking in
spatially defined terms. What Levinas is proposing is an
exploration of time that permits us to understand the
world of objects, the natural attitude, and even spatiality
on the basis of time. If and only if it can be established
that time's passing does not vaporize into a nullity, but
leaves an indelible set of traces, is it possible to regard
present conduct as consequential, that is, as something
that exists beyond one's attitude, consciousness and
intentionality.

OTHERWISE THAN BEING OR BEYOND ESSENCE

Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence responds to

many of the lingering questions that remain from Totality
and Infinity. At the same time, it charts a path for phenomenology that it has not previously taken. The central
metaphysical challenge of the text is posited by Levinas in
the question "What is being's other?" (3). In order to
respond to this question it will be necessary for him to
introduce an entirely new and highly charged philosophical vocabulary. The new lexicon that Levinas employs
begins with the title and subtitle of the text. Levinas
argues that "essence" belongs to an ontological language
and what we might call an essentialist ontology. This is
significant because in the history of philosophy to be has
meant, as Levinas argues in "Essence and Disinterest"
that "essence is interest" (4). In other words, it is the selfinterest that is concerned most essentially with its perseverance in being, the conatus essendi. The conjuncture of
essence and self-interestedness takes on what Levinas
calls "dramatic form in egoisms struggling with one
another, each against all in the multiplicity of allergic
egoisms, which are at war with one another and thus are
together" (4). Previously essence has expressed itself
as "the extreme synchronism of war" (4). In order to
move beyond the conjunction of essence and war, it is
necessary to stretch language into novel expressions that
will permit us to understand how it might be possible to
achieve a new conjuncture of peace with reason. This
conjuncture will be dramatized in what Levinas calls
"the Otherwise than Being." In order to accomplish this
task, Levinas begins by introducing the distinction of the
said and the saying. Levinas fully recognizes the importance of ordered, syntactical, propositional discourse.
Such discourse occurs in the declarative mode of speech.
However, Levinas argues that discourse depends upon
the prior language of responsibility, where the speaker

signifies what he is intending in what Levinas refers

to as "the saying." The saying "weaves an entry of
responsibility. It sets forth an order more grave than
being, and antecedent to being" (6). The said belongs to
the language of being, and therefore belongs to the time of
synchrony, i.e., a time that is characterized by its reversibility. Conversely, the language of the saying emerges
through the time of diachrony and forces the subject into
a position to recognize itself as called upon to respond
to the other.
In Otherwise than Being, Levinas reexamines the
notion of subjectivity in a way that is different from the
one advanced in Totality and Infinity. Here the remarks of
Jacques Rolland are penetrating and incisive. Rolland
argues in a postscript to God, Death and Time that
Otherwise than Being has as its theme "the subjectivity of
the subject, whereas that of Totality and Infinity was the
alterity of the other [l' autre] or the other person [autrui]"
(234). In Otherwise than Being, Levinas is rethinking
subjectivity as it has been essentially inscribed in the
history of philosophy as "the one self which repels the
annexations by essence" (8). For only by overcoming this
perception is it possible for the subject to move to what
Levinas calls "non-indifference" toward the other. In
order to describe how subjectivity expresses itselfbeyond essence-as a responsibility for the other, Levinas
is forced to reconceive the way in which temporality
manifests itself as a diachrony of transcendence.
The emerging vocabulary of Levinas in Otherwise than
Being is ethically charged with a sense of temporal
urgency. This makes it possible for Levinas to speak in
the language of the "saying" without losing sight of the
necessity of reintegrating the trace of the saying into the
said. Here Levinas asks "Can this saying and this being
unsaid be assembled, can they be at the same time?" (7)
Such diachronic thinking forces Levinas to reflect upon
the skepticism underlying the philosophic enterprise. This
special kind of skepticism, as Levinas employs the term,
represents a return to the saying. It is benevolent, disinterested and ethically related to the Infinite. As such it
involves the very activity of speaking philosophy where
hesitations, pauses, interruptions and reiterations break up
the said. However, the language of the said is still to
be stabilized if just institutions are to be possible.
Levinas describes the relation between responsibility
and justice by reintroducing the phenomenon of the third
person. The language of the said arises only with the
appearance of the third party. The third party is the one to
whom I must speak in the presence of the other, but for
whom the other necessarily finds himself situated in the
time of synchrony in relation with the third. The third

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE" !THE RELIGIOUS TURN

party lies outside the realm of the I-thou. At the same

time, it must be possible to speak according to Levinas in
the language of responsibility. Thus language, while
directed at the other, aims beyond the other to the third
party. That is, the language of the infinite is directed
toward the third party. It is for this reason that Levinas
introduces the neologism of "illeity." Illeity is initially
referenced as both a critique of and a movement beyond
Buber's I-Thou relationship. There is a positive element,
according to Levinas, of the phenomenon of illeity that
can only be found in the 'beyond-being.' He insists "the
positive element of this departure, that which makes this
departure, this diachrony, be more than a term of negative
theology, is my responsibility for the others" (13). Subjectivity emancipates itself from essence in the dis-interested relation of the one-for-the-other. This kind of
signification comes before essence, and Levinas refers to
it as the glory of transcendence. The glory of transcendence is realized, for Levinas, in the phenomenon of
substitution.
Substitution is characterized as "the very subjectivity
of a subject, interruption of the irreversible identity of the
essence. The subject, thereby, assumes the burden for the
other even to the extent of the other's sense of responsibility. This gives an added sense of urgency to responding, not only to, but for the other. This is a responsibility
where the other knows if "I am for him" prior to any
calculation or deliberation. Such responsibility originates
from the infinite and therefore belongs to the realm of the
saying prior to the said.
A responsibility for the other is incumbent upon me
without any escape possible. In other words, the identity
of the subject comes from the impossibility of escaping
responsibility" (14). Levinas' exploration of sensibility
leads to a binding of epistemology to ethics, that will in
tum lead to a reconfiguring of the ethically charged
character of sensibility. It is as a susceptibility to the other
that sensibility recognizes itself in subjectivity as ethically
responsible. In sensibility, subjectivity recognizes its
exposure to others, its vulnerability and responsibility in
the nearness, or what Levinas calls "the proximity of
others." It is in the phenomenon of substitution that the
full reach of subjectivity and humanity open. Substitution
forces me to do more than to put myself in the place of
another either metaphorically or empathetically. This rises
to the level of signification as a "one for the other."
Levinas states that "signification signifies before showing
itself as a said in the system of synchronism ... " (77).
Levinas analyzes the move from vulnerability and susceptibility to the other, which reflecting back on itself
opens the temporality of signification. In other words, the

419

other approaches me before he speaks. His approach is

first registered in the sensibility of the subject. It is in
this way that the other turns the subject around and toward
the other.
On the basis of proximity thus understood, Levinas has
presented a spectacular reversal of the natural attitude.
"Never could 'psychological signification draw the infinite spaces out of their silence" (81 ). Still, this is only the
first signification which must link itself to language
through the third party and therefore to justice. This
new conjuncture of reason and responsibility for the
other emerges as justice when the saying stabilizes itself
in a theme, in the time of synchrony where the common
language of the said has been spoken. The sense of infinite responsibility leads to the expressions of justice, in
tum to just institutions, laws and expectations of reasoning together, in short, to rationally peaceful society. Of
course, these finite expressions of justice are always
susceptible to being perfected. This is where saying
interrupts just discourse and yet makes it possible to open
onto a future.
Through his description of the diachrony of the saying
and the said, Levinas has advanced a new phenomenology
of communication. Communication cannot begin in the
ego. For Levinas, this would mean that every Other
would be perceived, as it is for Sartre, only as a limitation
to a free subject, which would therefore always invite
the possibility of war, domination and precaution. For
Levinas, unlike Buber, the Self is not limited to becoming
a nexus of relations. Rather, the self is elevated in its
subjectivity to a unique and non-transferable core of
responsibility. Clearly, a new concept of the self is also
emerging here. This is a self that expresses and limits
itself in the saying. According to Levinas, the self
becomes conscious of itself in responding to the other. In
Otherwise than Being, the subject is argued to be constituted in his or her uniqueness by the other. The
uniqueness at the core of the self is expressed as an
untransferable and irreplaceable center of responsibility.
This differs from the description of the isolated or separated self of Totality and Infinity. In Otherwise than
Being, the self exists in becoming a responsibility for the
other. As Levinas says: "the Self is a sub-jectum: it is
under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything .... to be one's self, the state of being a hostage, is
always to have one degree of responsibility more: the
responsibility of the other" (116-17). The key is in
the enlarging of the phenomenon of responsibility
where responsibility extends not only to my unintended
acts, but to responsibility for the intentions of the
Other. This is at the heart of substitution. In substitution,

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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

the "for-the-other" emerges completely. This is a primary

thesis of Otherwise than Being.
For Levinas, subjectivity and alterity are spoken
together. In his exploration of the diachronic relation with
the other, Levinas moves beyond the reach of Rosenzweig's speaking-thinking and concerns himself with the
origins of the phenomenon of speech before it is deposited
in the lapidary language of the said.
Levinas argues that it is proximity that binds sensibility
to sense. As Levinas puts it, proximity "is to be described
as extending the subject in its very subjectivity, which is
both a relationship and a term of that relationship" (86).
Here, Levinas introduces the phenomenon of obsession. It
is only as proximity besieges the subject that the absolutely exterior other is near to the point of obsession.
Obsession for Levinas is a complete passivity, a rendering
into the grammatical and existential mode of the accusative. Obsession renders the subject infinitely responsible,
beyond its own intentions, even for what it does not
will. In the concrete sense, this means, for Levinas, that I
bear a responsibility for what others do, even against me,
in the persecution I am forced to undergo. In Levinas, an
Introduction, Colin Davis explains this succinctly in the
following way: "I am persecuted because I cannot escape
the dominance of the other person over me" (80). It is the
recurring character of obsession that breaks open the limits
of identity. Levinas writes, "This wound in the subject,
that begins in sensibility, opens me to responsibility for
the other" (120). Sensibility, rather than merely referring
to the first registering of neutral sensory experience, is
now reconceived in a more radical way as a susceptibility,
a vulnerability, and an exposure to the Other. It is through
this exposure that one begins to configure, perceive, and
give sense to one's cognitive life.
The phenomenon of responsibility does not displace
the central role that justice plays in Totality and Infinity.
Rather, responsibility occupies an ongoing, almost
incessant place in language. Levinas argues that to speak,
at its pre-original level, is to be responsible for others. The
reestablishing of the saying in the said makes it possible
to found economic, legal, and social justice. This, in turn,
makes room for a kind of justice for the self as well as the
other, the neighbor and the third party. The rationality of
transcendence has been broached by Levinas through
phenomenology. It presents "the defection of identity ...
as a for-the-other in the midst of identity: it is the inversion of being into time, the subversion of essence begins
to signify before being, the disinterestedness of essence"
(153). Before moving back to the conjuncture of responsibility with justice from the saying to the said, the
anarchic character of responsibility prior to commitment

without a present, without an ongm, must be further

exposed. This occurs through the "iteration of exposure
... as expression, sincerity as saying ... " (Otherwise than
Being 153). In this saying the said begins to emerge
through re-iteration always moving first to what is
furthest, to the third party who is other to the neighbor
and therefore makes justice for me also possible.
Toward the close of Otherwise than Being, Levinas
makes it clear what it means to speak as an ethical subject
in the first person singular. He does so by interrupting his
own philosophic discourse in the following statement:
"And I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all
the discourses are stated, in saying it to one that listens to
it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse
says, outside all it includes. That is true of the discussion I
am elaborating at this very moment" (170). Levinas, here,
indicates that in Otherwise than Being he has been
speaking philosophy to the reader and to the other.
Levinas characterizes his phenomenology of transcendence, that is, philosophy, as a "fine risk" (170).
This does not mean that Levinas has absolved himself
of the necessity for explaining keeping the relation
between the self, the other, the neighbor, and the third
person. The infinite responsibility of the saying must be
reinstalled within the language of totality, of the said, if
just institutions are to be possible in this world. However,
the relation between the other and the third person is one
of synchrony where coming together, reasoning together,
and creating a peaceful and stable society is realized. The
presence of the third person forces a common discourse.
The third person preconditions the neighbor and the other,
thus making room for me also, for my claims, for a
symmetry in which democratic forms express themselves.
However, it is in this sense that we may say that language
arises posterior to expression with the appearance of the
third person. Such synchrony is required to give just
institutions continuity, stability, and coherence. This does
not mean that Levinas reverts to the realm of totality in
which the subject might free itself of the position of
infinite responsibility. On the contrary, it is from the
saying that the said can emerge and maintain itself. It is
from the time of diachrony that the time of synchrony
makes simultaneity and the time of sociality possible.
Justice, in its turn, must be rendered finite in order to
realize itself. However, in order for justice to appear, it
must reflect the conjuncture of peace and reason that
issues from the expression of the face of the other.
Levinas describes the relation between responsibility and
justice by reintroducing the phenomenon of the third
person. Levinas calls the "illeity of the third person," the
condition for the irreversibility of time.

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE" {THE RELIGIOUS TURN

PHENOMENOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE

In the preface to the second edition of Of God Who Comes

to Mind (1986) Levinas acknowledges that he has been
reproached for not taking up questions of theology. He
responds:
We think, however, that theological recuperation
comes after the glimpse of holiness, which is primary.
This is all the more true that we belong to a
generation-and to a century-for which was reserved
the pitiless trials of ethics without consolation or
promises; and because it is impossible-for us, the
survivors-to witness against holiness, in seeking after
its conditions. (ix-x)
Here, Emmanuel Levinas appears to be searching for
the conditions of holiness just as he previously sought to
describe the conditions of knowledge and ethics. Is it
possible, then, to speak in the language of transcendence
without recourse to onto-theo-logy? Levinas does not, he
insists, take leave completely from phenomenology. In
fact, in Of God Who Comes to Mind, Levinas asserts that
his inquiry into the holy may be understood as philosophy
in the strict sense. How is this possible?
It is through the approach of phenomenology that
Levinas moves to metaphysics: the beyond of being. At
the core of the argument in "God and Philosophy," the
centerpiece of Of God Who Comes to Mind, Levinas takes
issue with the position that the approach to the God of
philosophy and to "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob" cannot be reconciled. He argues that such opposition is itself philosophically based upon ontological
categories wherein the phenomenon of Transcendence
cannot be approached. Levinas searches for a way that
does not commit what we might call the ontological
fallacy, a problem to overcome for theology as well
as philosophy. As Levinas notes, this obstacle is
inscribed within the history of philosophy: "the history
of Western philosophy has been a destruction of transcendence" (56).
In philosophical discourse prior to Levinas, God can be
thought of only as the exception to the categories governing an ontology of immanence and this Exception must
itself be situated within the move or "gesture of Being."
God, then, is reduced to a being within the unfolding
gesture of Being. Rational theology depends upon the
same kind of error that it originally sets out to rectify. "If
the intellection of the biblical God, theology, does not
reach the level of philosophic thought, it is . . . because in
thematizing God, theology has brought him into the
course of being, while the God of the Bible signifies in an
unlikely manner the beyond of being, or transcendence"

421

(56). Here, Levinas concludes that the "faith" of rational

theology-however unknowingly-has tied itself to the
imperfect opinions of an uncritical, philosophical ontology. In other words, Levinas rejects the opposition
between the God of philosophy and the God of the Bible,
thus putting the reader on notice that he is searching for an
alternative approach to transcendence.
For Levinas, rational theology reduces transcendence
to complete intelligibility or dogma. While Levinas
rejects such a reduction, he nonetheless proposes an
ethical-religious stance that obligates the self in relation
to the other. An extreme vigilance that expresses itself
in what Levinas calls "insomnia" would be the "I" in a
state of wakefulness resisting the fall into the impersonal
matrix of being. This condition, not to be confused with
the inability to sleep, is a readiness to be called by and
made answerable to the other.
"Insomnia," understood as vigilance for-the-other,
permits otherness-in-sameness as a non-alienating consciousness. Levinas insists that insomnia, understood as a
primarily ethical meta-category, is irreducible. Transmuted into wakefulness it appears without intentionality.
Levinas refers to this wakefulness as "a non-content"
Infinity (59). Wakefulness without intentionality emerges
as dis-interestedness. This breaks the simultaneity of
consciousness resting within itself. In this way it differs
dramatically from reminiscence. Here, Levinas intimates
a critique of the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis. "Reminiscence is the extreme consciousness that is also universal presence and ontology ... " (60). This description
of the hold that "universal presence and ontology" enjoys
in the West extends, with variations, for Levinas from
Plato to Husser!. In order to explore Levinas's view further, it necessary to consider being as pure act, i.e., "pure
presence" for Aristotle, the sense of self-presence that
accompanies the "I think" in Kant's transcendental unity
of apperception, and the doctrine of intentionality in
Husser! where intelligibility or meaning is rediscovered
completely in consciousness present to itself. Common to
all these positions is the refusal to break with immanence,
and therefore an absence of Transcendence.
Levinas' s philosophic move toward transcendence calls
not for the abandonment of phenomenology, but rather for
pushing the phenomenological approach to its limits.
Levinas achieves this end by beginning with what is
already beyond the finite, thus making it possible to speak
philosophy in terms of the criteria of measure, order and
sense. This requires an ongoing "deformalization of time"
as Levinas calls it. Only by beginning with the Infinite do
the contours of the finite begin to emerge. How then does
the Infinite appear? For Levinas, the infinite appears as a

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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

"trace" that has already pierced the simultaneity of selfpresence. It is the past, or more precisely the trace of the
present in the past, that positions the "I" in the realm of
the accusative. This means, therefore, that my responsibility extends beyond my own intentions, beyond my
own consciousness of the past. The "Infinite-in-me" as
Levinas calls it, renders the "I" to a state of "pure passivity." Aware that the "I" is so severely conditioned as
to be what Levinas calls "created," the awakening to this
condition already positions the "I" as a "me." In awakening the "I" to the accusative mode of subjectivity, what
is exterior to consciousness, what consciousness can never
quite contain, also makes responding to this exteriority
possible. Here, the diachronic sense of time appears in the
awareness that the other was there before me. I recognize
myself as called upon to respond to the others who obsess
me with their exigent appeals and demands. Understood
as a respondent, the "I" can recognize itself as chosen, as
singled out by a non-transferable responsibility. Signification appears now in order of exigency. In this way,
Levinas begins to chart a way to understand meaning in
terms of importance to some one.
Levinas's philosophic moves, so original in their formulation, have vital implications for reconfiguring the
task of philosophy. Levinas charts a course which charges
philosophy with responsibility for describing the conditions that make ethical life possible. This has far-reaching
practical, moral and political implications. Levinas argues
philosophically for benevolent non-indifference toward
the other and urges a philosophically inescapable position
that must answer affirmatively to the question: "Am I my
brother's keeper?"
In Of God Who Comes to Mind Levinas discusses the
philosophical error in the thinking of Cain that makes
murder possible. The simple evocation of brotherhood is
not sufficient to prevent murder:
Biological human fraternity, considered with the
sober coldness of Cain, is not sufficient reason that
I be responsible for a separated being. Sober, Cainlike coldness consists in reflecting on responsibility
from the standpoint of freedom or according to a
contract. (79).
Levinas reaffirms his argument that one's responsibility for the other comes prior to one's freedom. Levinas's
description of ethical life forms the core of his phenomenology of transcendence. Levinas begins his quest for
transcendence in a precisely philosophical manner. For
Levinas, metaphysics arises as a desire for the Infinite. It
is a desire that cannot be reduced to mere need. It is in
this sense that the Infinite bestirs us, rips us out of our

inertia, and moves us beyond the simultaneity of selfpresence. Levinas says that "love is only possible through
the idea of the Infinite" (67). Such love, born of transcendence, is beyond eroticism and interestedness for the
beloved. Love (a term that Levinas uses with great discretion), even when it tries to grasp the other, always finds
the other slipping away. For Levinas, what is unique in the
beloved is that which is beyond the finite and therefore
ungraspable. Levinas, then, begins his philosophy of the
infinite with a registering of that which is unknowable.
However, this does not nullify, but rather enables the
inter-human drama that makes us responsible one for the
other.
Here Levinas approaches transcendence as love for the
neighbor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger--even the
beloved. The ultimate expression of love is in the "near,
yet different" that Levinas calls Holy (68). With extraordinary directness Levinas reformulates the "otherwise
than being." In the language of a via eminentiae elevation
to the good, even the holy is expressible in what Levinas
calls "the humanism of the other man."
The last two lecture courses of Emmanuel Levinas
were edited and annotated by Jacques Rolland, and published under the title God, Death, and Time. These lectures are based upon student notes and therefore quite
condensed. The first course on 'Death and Time' provides
Levinas' distinctive view of these vital subjects within the
context of some of modem philosophy's seminal thinkers,
including Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Fink, Bloch and above
all, Heidegger. Levinas crystallizes the main question of
the course in the opening of the first lecture: "In question
in this course is, above all, time. This is a course on the
duration of time." As such, the text can be utilized to help
the reader understand Otherwise than Being.
Levinas argues in God, Death and Time that where the
philosophic scandal of death has not been ignored altogether, time has been thought on the basis of death. This is
indeed the signature of the philosophy of finitude. Levinas
sees in Bergson's duree, time as lived and irreducible.
Bergson's presentation prepares the way for a phenomenological analysis of temporality. Here Levinas reencounters Heidegger's thinking. Whereas the ecstatic
phases of human temporality would be authentically
unified for Heidegger on the basis of resoluteness in the
face of one's own death, Levinas refuses to regard the
death of the other as inauthentic.
Elevating the death of the other beyond the realm of
the inauthentic, as Heidegger would have it, forces a
re-thinking of the Heideggerian notion of authenticity.
The other, for Heidegger, is merely a diversion from my
facing the inevitability of my own being-towards-death.

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"!IHE RELIGIOUS TURN

Is not indifference toward the other, thereby, prescribed

by Heidegger? What stops this indifference from a tum
toward an interestedness accompanied by absorption into
my own project, which can result ultimately in the
negation or annihilation of the other?
It is by emphasizing the diachronic nature of time that
Levinas recognizes the death of the other as an event of
irreducible importance. Describing time as diachrony
makes it possible to think of death on the basis of time
rather than time on the basis of death. When death is
understood as the unknown, for both the Other and the
self, it is possible to reinvestigate the ethical relation
with the other on the basis of the infinite demands placed
upon the self within the context of one's own finite
temporal existence.
Here meaning is understood in the context of the time
left. Such time, deformalized, means that the death of the
other can be elevated even beyond my own. This is one
of the most essential differences between Levinas and
Heidegger. For only by taking the death of other with utter
philosophic seriousness is an ethical relation, one prior to
the neutrality of Being, possible.
The second set of lectures entitled "God and OntoTheo-Logy" clearly prefigures Levinas's last milestone
text, Of God Who Comes to Mind. Here Levinas first
reconstructs Heidegger's critique of theology by investigating Heidegger's claim that philosophy prematurely
becomes theology as soon as God is identified with
ultimate being or reality. In this sense, Levinas sees in
Heidegger's reading of Aristotle the beginning of "the
European philosophy of being as being becomes theology" (God, Death, and Time 123). According to
Heidegger, Being, in its truth, is immediately vaporized as
a question and instead becomes "the universal foundations of being, by a supreme Being, a founder, by God"
(123). Levinas clearly breaks with Heidegger on the most
ultimate level by arguing on the contrary that God signifies
the other of being.
Heidegger' s thoughts still belong essentially to the
ontology of power that has dominated the West. In
opposition to Heidegger, Levinas posits that "to contrast
God with onto-theo-logy is to conceive a new mode, a
new notion of meaning. And it is from a certain ethical
relationship that one may start out this new search" (125).
To inquire after God on the basis of ethics does not reduce
God to ethics, but rather, on the contrary, accounts for the
possibility of religious life itself. In other words, to ask
what makes totality possible is at the same time to ask
what makes the possibility of intelligibility appear as
well. According to Levinas, it is Infinity expressing
itself through its trace in the finite-the metaphysical

423

relationship par excellence-that makes it possible for us

to speak in the common language of philosophy. Furthermore, Levinas is explaining how God is other than
and different from the neighbor. God is the alterity that is
prior to the alterity of the other person-"prior to the
ethical compulsion to the neighbor" (224). Levinas
describes God as transcendence "to the point of absence,
to the point of the possible confusion with the agitation of
the there is" (224). The there is is pure immanence.
Transcendence makes this immanence possible. This
appears to be the philosophic basis of Levinas' s argument
for identifying the infinite with pure transcendence and
therefore as God. However, according to Levinas it is still
possible to speak of bearing witness to and for the Glory
of the Infinite. What does he mean by bearing witness?
"Bearing witness does not thematize that of which it is
the Infinite, and as such it can be a witness only of the
Infinite" (196-97). Bearing witness has powerful ethical
implications. We try to take refuge from responsibility by
hiding in the concept. This represents Levinas' s very
perplexing, but original refusal of the ethical as the
universal: "Contrary to what Kierkegaard thought, the
'ethical stage' is not universal; rather, it is the stage in
which the 'me' forgets its concept and no longer knows
the limits of its obligation" (196). This more expands the
realm of the ethical by contracting it. In other words, all
obligations bear on me, personally.

REITERATIONS: DISTILLATIONS, NEW DIRECTIONS:

INTERVIEWS AND COLLECTED ESSAYS

A number of interviews are found in collections of essays

assembled by Levinas presenting diverse profiles on a
variety of subjects toward the close of his philosophic
career, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These texts
include Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, Proper
Names, Alterity and Transcendence, Outside the Subject,
and In the Time of the Nations, a text devoted largely to
issues in Jewish philosophy. Here we will introduce only
some of the most salient subjects and themes explored by
Levinas in some of his later works.
For Levinas, speaking philosophy expresses an infinite
conversation whose future does not announce itself in
advance. It is extremely important to note that to
re-iterate, to say again, is to keep these words saying what
they still intend by taking continuing responsibility for the
texts already authored. The interviews given by Levinas
to serious interlocutors permit a greater mobility for the
intention of saying to be addressed also to the third
person, the reader. Levinas speaks with an unusual

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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"ffHE RELIGIOUS TURN

mixture of patience for his questioner, and a sense of

urgency regarding the existential necessity to respond to
the suffering of the twentieth century, to which he was so
often the witness. Despite his mastery of the Western
philosophic tradition, or perhaps because of this mastery,
he seldom strays from the junctures that shape the lives
of human beings. The same tradition of philosophy in
which he is so much at home, permits him to think beyond
its self-defining limitations, and in so doing to open a
vein of inquiry where the advance of philosophy
implies the elevation of what he calls the humanism of
the other.
As is the case with the best of teachers, Levinas awakens the other to a living encounter, pointing the student
beyond himself toward the Infinite. However open the
space of speech, Levinas goes beyond the level of
encouraging questioning. Ethically, language is the other
prior to a context, and is therefore devoid of presuppositions. The continuing response I am called upon to give to
the other constitutes "me" as an ethical subject answerable to and responsible for the other to an unimaginable
degree. Levinas' s reiterations are not mere repetitions,
but the forward movement of an itinerary.
What Levinas appears to be searching for is a language
adequate to express the urgencies of human existence.
The reiterations in dialogue, then, represent his continuing
attempt to express again what has been said before; to
make room for the reader to enter a temporal context
along with the author where both can proceed together in
the pursuit of wisdom. This is a way of reconceiving
philosophy in terms of temporality, and phenomenology
as a discourse open to transcendence. In Totality and
Infinity Levinas puts it in the following way: "philosophy
itself constitutes a moment of this temporal accomplishment, a discourse always addressed to another. What
we are now exposing is addressed to those who shall
wish to read it. Transcendence is time and goes onto the
Other" (269).

Entre Nous
In Entre Nous, Levinas speaks of exploring the intersubjective relation in the transcendence of the 'for-theother,' thus encapsulating what he calls the ethical
subject. It is the ethical subject that initiates the entre
nous. For Levinas, all thinking is of the other and for
the other. This has technical and epistemological relevance and serves as a kind of exhortation for the reader.
Among the more original contributions in Entre Nous
are "Useless Suffering," Levin as' meditation on human
suffering; "Philosophy, Justice and Love," an interview

that helps to clarify some of the salient social, ethical

and political implications of Levinas' later thinking; and a
succinct reflection on "Non-intentional Consciousness,"
which deals with questions of phenomenological method.
"From One to the Other: Transcendence and Time" presents the philosophic determination of the idea of culture
and a critique of Eurocentrism. This critique originates
from an invocation of metaphysical pluralism, founded
upon the irreducibility of ethical life, where difference
is argued to be a function of otherness, and uniqueness is
discussed as non-transferable responsibility at the core of
the singularity of the human subject. "Dying for" is a
meditation on a non-egoistic form of self-sacrifice and
the primacy of the death of the other. In two important
dialogues, "Thinking of the Other," and "The Other,
Utopia and Justice," Levinas invites a sustained interrogation of some of the most fundamental complexities
of his later thinking.
In these essays, as elsewhere, Levinas, without
preaching, speaks about the importance of philosophy
guided by benevolence in the face of the legacy of the
sufferings of the twentieth century and the burden that
they impose upon the future of philosophy. Above all,
Levinas is concerned with disconnecting philosophy from
violence. In "Useless Suffering" Levinas argues against
rationalizing the sufferings of others. He juxtaposes this to
my own efforts to make sense out of my own suffering.
The moral height of the other, however, prohibits me from
superimposing a premature justification for the sufferings
of others on whose behalf I may intercede, but in whose
name I cannot speak. Therefore I can forgive, pardon, and
absolve only the one who persecutes me. I am not permitted to do so for the other without his or her consent. In
this way, Levinas rejects as premature any recourse to
systems based upon theodicy. Commenting on human
suffering, Levinas asks the reader: "consider the outrage it
would be for me to justify my neighbor's suffering" (98).
For myself I can choose such a course. For the other, this
is beyond the path of mere rationalization and shows an
ultimate insensibility toward the other. Reckoning with
human suffering requires no less than a reconfiguration of
the essential nature of human intrigue as a social and
political drama. For Levinas, the war of each against each
and all against all must be viewed as subordinate to the
relation he calls the "for-the-other". It is in this sense that
it would be possible to justify the ways of God to the
other as well as to myself. Refusal to justify the other's
suffering marks Levinas's response to Nietzsche's "death
of God" theology. There is no theodicy that I may impose
upon the others who exceed my attempts to justify the
ways of God. Levinas absorbs Nietzsche's warning of

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

making a virtue into a necessity. However, he does so

without abolishing the idea of the good as transcendent.
Here again, the opening up of time proves to be decisive.
As he states in "Philosophy, Justice and Love," "in
my responsibility for the other, the past of the other,
which has never been present 'concerns me:' it is not
re-presentation for me" (115). Levinas goes on to explain
the reason for this by again resorting to an unrelenting
phenomenology of human time: "the past of the other
and, in a sense, the history of humanity in which I have
never participated, in which I have never been present,
is my past" (115). The future, on the other hand, is different. "It is not my anticipation which is already and like
the imperturbable order of being, as if it had already
arrived, as if temporality were a synchrony" (115). Levinas
links the future to the phenomenon of prophecy as a
philosophical idea that can be articulated through phenomenological inquiry: "the future is the time of prophecy which is also an imperative, a moral "order, herald
of an inspiration" (115). Levinas makes the ethical relationship with the other depend upon the diachronic relation between the past and the future in which each have
their own sense of time, responsibility and signification.

Proper Names
Proper Names contains a collection of essays by Levinas
on such thinkers as Buber, Derrida, Kierkegaard, Proust
and Maurice Blanchot. There is also a touching essay
devoted to Father Herman Leo Van Breda and the debt
which future phenomenologists owe to his pains in
creating, maintaining and disseminating the work of the
Husserl Archives.
Proper Names was first published in France in 1975
and dates from the same time as God, Death and Time.
Levinas begins Proper Names with a description of the
breakdown of the human order in the catastrophes and
crises haunting the twentieth century. He speaks more
openly of the importance of formulating a response to the
breakdown of language: "at no other time has historical
experience weighed so heavily upon ideas, or at least
never before have the members of one generation been
more aware of that weight" (34). Showing a pronounced
and keen awareness of the conditions leading to this critical time, Levinas offers his own characterization of the
post-modem age:
Now theories on the death of God, the contingency of
humanness in philosophical reflection and the bankruptcy of humanism-doctrines already voiced by the

425

end of the last century-have taken on apocalyptic

proportions. The new anxiety, that of language cast
adrift, seems to announce without periphrases-which
are henceforth impossible, which are henceforth
impossible or deprived of all persuasive force-the
end of the world. (4)
As an alternative to the nihilism that follows from this
condition, Levinas proposes the humanism of the other
man. In Proper Names, Levinas diagnoses the disintegration of contemporary life from some of its linguistic
indications. As he states, "Time no longer conveys its
meaning in the simultaneity of sentences. Statements no
longer succeed in putting things together" (4). He refuses
to believe that this signifies the death of philosophy, that
is, its much-discussed inability to deal with the larger
questions concerning the meaning of human life. He
explains why each of the articles included in the volume is
attached to a proper name. He urges the reader to keep in
mind the irreducibility of a proper name that attaches to a
human face. This is the someone with whom I can speak
philosophy. As he says almost longingly, "Perhaps the
names of persons whose saying signifies a face-proper
names in the middle of all the common names and commonplaces--can resist the dissolution of meaning and
help us to speak" (4). Levinas ties the importance of
proper names to the recovery of the saying prior to the
said where we are always speaking philosophy to someone. The said by itself can convey fields of knowledge,
systems of thought, or being. However, it is necessary
to join the said with the saying if we are to understand
why it is that we are responsible for what we say. Only
in this way is it possible to understand the meaning of
what is most urgent, most important and therefore most
meaningful.
There is one essay that stands out as the exception
that demonstrates what happens when proper names are
effaced. It is an article entitled "Nameless." It refers to
a time between 1940 and 1945 where all the institutions
of justice had been suspended, and where proper names
were reduced to an inhuman series of numbers branded
on the arms of the concentration camp victims. In
"Nameless," Levinas asks us to rethink the role of philosophy in general, and phenomenology in particular in
the aftermath of the Holocaust. He argues that when I
express non-indifference toward the other, my uniqueness
returns to me. I become aware of my irreplaceability
rather than being alienated. It is in this sense that it is
possible to again begin speaking philosophy. By elevating
ethics to the rank of first philosophy, Levinas has
embarked upon the task of restoring to philosophy its own
good name.

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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE" {THE RELIGIOUS TURN

ALTERITY AND TRANSCENDENCE

Alterity and Transcendence includes twelve texts

authored by Levinas from 1967 to 1989. It was first
published in 1995, the last year of his life. The thrust of
the work as a whole is in the direction of a philosophy of
transcendence which absorbs but does not synthesize
his previous work, and in which the social, political
and religious implications of his philosophy are further
delineated.
In Alterity and Transcendence Levinas emphasizes
that transcendence indicates both a crossing over (trans)
and also an ascent (scando ). As Pierre Hyatt notes in his
preface, "Transcendence would appear to be the marker
of the paradox of the relation of what is separate" (ix).
This, for Levinas, represents ascent. What does "ascent"
signify beyond the moral height of the other person? We
may describe the ascent as a "surplus of morality." The
phenomenology of transcendence, then, begins with the
neighbor and my responsibility for this the "third" person
who appears "before" and "after" the second or the youto whom I am obliged completely. Here, Levinas ventures toward the perfectly other. Earlier, in Totality and
Infinity, Levinas had characterized religion as the refusal
to engage in the reduction of the Other to the Same. The
motive force behind these philosophical moves is to enact
justice responsibly. Bleak times cannot compel us to give
up on the phenomenon of transcendence.
There is in Alterity and Transcendence a further distillation and reiteration of some of the signature themes
of Levinas's later writings. For example, in "Philosopher
and Death" he allows himself to be interrogated about
questions on the importance of the way "we are answerable not only for the death of the other, but for his life
as well" (167). Levinas remains very much concerned
with taking responsibility not only for one's own life, but
for the life and death of the other. This is not expiation by
proxy for the other. This means that I am willing to
substitute myself for the other even to the point of selfsacrifice to preserve the humanity of the other.
OUTSIDE THE SUBJECT

In Outside the Subject, Levinas assembles a number of

essays on important contemporary thinkers including
Buber, Rosenzweig, Jean Wahl and Merleau-Ponty.
Returning to the subject of the task of phenomenology,
Levinas shows through his essays in this text that he has
not left behind his original concerns to understand human
subjectivity, and to rediscover the world prior to its
scientific mapping without negating the accomplishment
of mathematical thinking. In this respect it is notable

that Levinas returns to a question that he asks at the end of

his first work on Husserl and to which he has spent a
good part of his philosophic life responding: "There is no
doubting that Husser!' s magnificent discovery of affective
and axiological intentionality (without which the entire
non-theoretical, lived experience of consciousness would
lapse into 'hyletic content') contains the affirmation of a
'doxic element' that resides within all positionality"
(p. 157). The phenomenological itinerary of Emmanuel
Levinas has remained faithful to Husser! by enlarging its
affective and axiological dimensions. By enlarging the
scope of phenomenology, by orienting philosophy 'outside the subject,' Levinas has bequeathed a rich legacy to
phenomenology and philosophy.
THE LEGACY OF LEVIN AS'S
PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY

The contribution Levinas makes to the history of phenomenology and philosophy remains to be fully understood, appreciated and elaborated. As Derrida puts it:
The reverberations of this thought will have changed
the course of philosophical reflection in our time, and
of our reflection on philosophy, on what orders it
according to ethics, according to another thought of
ethics, responsibility, justice, the State, etc., according to
another thought of the other, a thought that is newer than
so many novelties because it is ordered according to the
absolute anteriority of the face of the Other. (Adieu to
Emmanuel Levinas 4)

The proliferation of courses, commentaries, conferences and centers devoted to Levinas's work testifies to
the importance that Derrida ascribes to his thought.
Levinas has secured for himself a distinctive place
within the phenomenological movement. He has remained
faithful to the original project of phenomenology as
envisioned by Husserl, while at the same time enlarging
the scope of phenomenological investigation. Furthermore, by providing an alternative to Heidegger's ontology
of power, Levinas has forced a rethinking of the relation between ethics and ontology. By raising ethics to the
place of first philosophy, the charge of moral relativism
against phenomenology has been stilled. By engaging in
a phenomenology of transcendence, the realm of the
religious, the surplus of ethical life, has been restored to
rigorous phenomenological investigation. By advancing a
philosophy where reason works in the service of peace,
Levinas opens for phenomenologists of the twenty-first
century a way of doing philosophy that rises beyond the
ontological imperialism of the west. Phenomenology, like
intentionality, has opened onto a sense of the infinite

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{l'HE RELIGIOUS TURN

where the philosophy of human finitude has been given

its full recognition but no longer remains the last word
spoken only to oneself.
What Levinas has accomplished sixty years after his
initial meeting with Husserl is to enlarge the inquiry of
phenomenology to absorb some of its most original
findings while at the same time opening up a future
that perhaps spills beyond its original intention. Levinas
has not only helped to put to rest the withering political
assaults against the phenomenological movement. He has
helped to strengthen phenomenology against the accusations of moral relativism, egocentrism, and historicism by
rejuvenating the phenomenon of the good that is 'otherwise than being' in relation to time. Levinas's original
investigations have opened new frontiers for phenomenological discovery. The conjuncture of peace and reason,
which dominates so much of Levinas's post-Holocaust
thinking, also calls for a reconsideration of the Greek
philosophical enterprise from Plato to the present. It is in
this respect that Levinas has turned phenomenology
toward the formative texts and thinking of the Hebraic
tradition where ethical responsibility is assigned
a prophetic sense of urgency. Furthermore, by opening
the Talmud to phenomenological reflection, the fundament of the tradition that celebrates 'being Other'-God,
there is a renewed philosophic significance. Nonetheless,
it remains necessary to speak in the common language of
philosophy for us to appreciate a tradition different from
the one set in motion by the Platonic Socrates. There is a
steadily increasing recognition of Levinas' s importance as
an original philosopher who has remained faithful to the
teaching of traditional Judaism. Levinas has been recognized as the most important of the post-Holocaust Jewish
thinkers whose own thought has been rigorously formulated in the context of his (phenomenological) reading
of the Talmud. Levinas has advanced a kind of questioning that makes it possible to respond to the complexities and crises of the contemporary era. Levinas has
elevated the encounter between Judaism and philosophy
to the highest level by rethinking the project of philosophy and by securing a place for the Talmud within the
pedagogy of the human sciences.
Within the field of Levinas scholarship, important
contributions have been made by Edith Wyschogrod,
Alphonso Lingis, and Richard Cohen, who have worked
to make the thought of Levinas accessible to Englishspeaking readers. Cohen, Wyschogrod, and Lingis tend,
like Blanc hot, Levinas' s lifelong friend, to see his phenomenological explorations as the elaboration of a single
project with different emphases. Here there is a division
with another school of Levinas scholars influenced by

427

Derrida's reading of Levinas. Commentators such as

Bernasconi, Critchley, Davis, and to a lesser extent
Peperzak, emphasize a major depature between Otherwise
than Being: Beyond Essence and the works that precede it.
Levinas's influence has already extended beyond the
academy. The new Czech Republic has been reconfigured
by its founder, Vaclav Havel, along Levinasian principles
under which morality would guide politics in the search
for democracy. In Poland Cardinal Karol W ojtyla
recognized Levinas as a Philosopher of eminence. He and
Professor Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka of the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning shared thoughts on his writings. Later, as Pope John
Paul II, he encouraged others to read the works of Levinas
and to engage his thinking most seriously. The first
explorations of Levinas as providing "an alternative paradigm" for clinical psychology have already been initiated.
Contemporary Western theology bears the trace of
Levinas' s thinking. As the Talmudic scholar Daniel
Epstein has observed: "Levinas has framed the philosophic language within which Jewish thought will now
engage the Western philosophic tradition". 3 Benny Levy,
former assistant to Sartre and a significant force in his
own right has, along with Rabbi Shmuel Wygoda, established an institute for Levinas Studies in Jerusalem to
encourage research in the application as well as the theory
of Levinas' philosophic and Talmudic thinking.
CONCLUSIONS

Reading Levinas places enormous demands upon the

reader's attention. Levinas, especially in his later years,
emphasized certain features of his thinking that he wanted
to keep before the reader's mind. There is no summary text,
nor could there be. In the first place it would assume that
there is a last word to philosophy, an answer that would
exceed the questions he asks with such urgency. Levinas's
conception of philosophy begins with moral consciousness,
where responsibility of the one-for-the-other becomes primary. There is growing agreement that the future of phenomenology in particular and philosophy itself will find its
first challenge in the twenty-first century in its encounter
with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In this sense,
Levinas welcomes the reader as a critic who has not yet
spoken for himself. Together, the author and the reader,
and therefore the critic, create the distance necessary for
the possibility of an infinite conversation moving philosophic speech along. The itinerary of the movement from
same to other reverses the philosophic move toward the
eternal return of the "I" of self-identification that reaches
its apotheosis in the system of Hegel. "Freedom, reduced to

428

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

the identity of the Same cannot repress the Desire for the

absolutely other" (Basic Philosophic Writings 12). What is

at stake is the elevation of peace over war. Levinas
reiterates the path of rediscovery that permits us to
understand how the "idea of the infinite is asserted over
being and ontology" (12). The foundation of this path
requires an analysis where the other calls the freedom of
the "I" into question. This dramatic re-visioning of the
relationship between self and Other alters the traditional
concept of self-knowledge. The subject bears the weight of
all the others. "Each is responsible for each and I more so,
than all the others." (Ethics and Infinity, p. 101). This is the
consequence of morality.
A Copernican tum has taken place in Levinas' thinking
where the self can no longer be assumed to be at the center
of its own phenomenological universe. The elevation of
otherness over sameness, of infinity beyond totality, of
ethics to priority over metaphysics delineates the daunting
challenge that Levinas opens for philosophy in the twentyfirst century. His thinking has revitalized the phenomenological movement in several directions. The revolutionary
aspects of his thought return us to an encounter with
the burden of the history of philosophy in its own language,
but with more stringent and demanding criteria. This
includes a conversation with the most inspired thinkers
of the contemporary era. The unexamined possibilities
within the phenomenological movement and the full
reach of its promise remain to be explored. While the
style of Levinas's thinking has surely affected the contemporary landscape in indelible ways, it is not at all clear
that Levinas was searching for disciples, at least in the
sense that one might speak of 'Levinasians.' Rather, we
express our appreciation for his legacy by continuing the
infinite conversation that moves philosophic speech along,
closer to a time where reason and peace will work together.

The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell,

1989).
"Philosophy and Awakening," trans. by Mary Quintance in Who
Comes After the Subject?, Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and
Jean-Luc Nancy (eds.), (New York and London: Routledge,
1991), 206-16.
Levinas: Basic Philosophic Writings, edited by Adriaan T.
Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Rober Bernasconi (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1996).
Of God Who Comes to Mind (1982), trans. by Bettina Bergo
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), trans. by
Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).
Time and the Other (1947), trans. by Richard A. Cohen
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987).
Totality and Infinity (1961), trans. by Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969).
Secondary Sources:
Cohen, Richard. Elevations: The Height of the Good in
Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
Davis, Colin. Levinas: An Introduction (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1996).
Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP,
1999).
Strasser, S., "Emmanuel Levinas (Born 1906); Phenomenological Philosophy." In H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological
Movement. Pha:nomenologica 5/6. (The Hague-Boston, Nijhoff,
1982), 612-49.
Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa (ed.), Phenomenological Inquiry,
Vol. 24: "Levinas in a Humanistic context" (Belmont: The
World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and
Learning, 2000).
NOTES
1

RICHARD SUGARMAN

University of Vermont, United States

Texts specifically cited in this work are:
By Emmanuel Levinas:
Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (1963, 1976), trans. by
Sean Hand (London: The Athlone Press, 1990).
Discovering Existence with Husser/ (1949, 1967), trans. by
Richard A. Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988).
Ethics and Infinity (1982), trans. by Richard A. Cohen
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985).
Existence and Existents (1947), trans. by Alphonso Lingis
(Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1978; reprinted in 1988 with minor corrections).
God, Death and Time ( 1993 ), trans. by Bettina Bergo. (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2000).

2
3

Support for preparing this paper was made possible in part by

Dean Joan Smith and Associate Dean Donna Kuizenga
through the Dean's Fund of the College of Arts and Sciences,
as well as Professor William Paden, chair of the Department
of Religion at the University of Vermont. Additional support
was provided by the Humanities Center at the University of
Vermont and its director, Professor R. Thomas Simone. Erin
Menut made important editorial contributions and interventions. Both she and Timothy Shepard worked tirelessly on the
preparation of this manuscript along with Natalie Havlin, and
Matthew Geiger assisted with the Glossary and Bibliography.
I am very much in their debt.
Republished with permission of Phenomenological Inquiry.
Discussion with Daniel Epstein, Jerusalem in April, 2001.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

A comprehensive list of works by and on Levinas up to 1989

is given in Roger, Burggraeve, Emmanuel Levinas. Une
bibliographie primaire et secondaire (1929-I985 ), avec compliment 1985-1989. Leuven: Peeters, 1990.

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{I'HE RELIGIOUS TURN

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Morgana, 1995. (Alterity and Transcendence, trans. by
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Levinas, Emmanuel. Du sacre au saint: Cinq nouvelles lectures
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Heidegger. Paris: Vrin, 1974.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-ii-1' autre.
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Levinas, Emmanuel. Hors sujet. Montpellier: Fata Morgana,
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Morgana, 1994 (two articles first published in 1953 and 1962).
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1975 (Proper Names, trans. by Michael B. Smith. London:
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Routledge, 1991, pp. 206-16.
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Blanchot, Maurice. Infinite Conversations, trans. by Susan
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Bernasconi, Robert and Simon, Critchley (eds.). Re-reading
Levinas. London: Althlone Press, 1991.
Chalier, Catherine. Figures du feminin. Paris: La Nuit Surveillee, 1982.
Chalier, Catherine and Abensour, Miguel (eds.). Emmanuel
Levinas. Cahiers de l'Herne 60. Paris: 1991.
Cohen, Richard (ed.). Face to Face with Levinas. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1986.
Cohen, Richard. Elevations: The Height of the Good in
Rosenzweig and Levinas. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1994.
Davis, Colin. Levinas: An Introduction. Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1996.
De Boer, Theodor. Tussen filosofie en profetie. De wijsbegeerte
van Emmanuel Levinas. Baarn: 1976.

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ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 1999.
Derrida, Jacques. "Violence et metaphysique: Essai sur Ia
pen see d 'Emmanuel Levinas," in L' Ecriture et Ia difference.
Points, Paris: Seuil, 1967, pp. 117-328.
Finkelkraut, Alain. The Wisdom of Love, trans. by Kevin
O'Neill. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Friedman, Maurice. "Interrogation of Martin Buber," in Sydney
and Beatrice Rome (eds.). Philosophical Interrogations. New
York: Harper & Row, 1964, pp. 23-26.
Greisch, Jean and Rolland, Jacques (eds.). Emmanuel Levinas:
L' Ethique comme philosophie premiere. Paris: Les Editions
du Cerf, 1993.
Handelman, Susan A. Fragments of Redemption: Jewish
Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and
Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
Kunz, George. The Paradox of Power and Weakness: Levinas
and an Alternative Paradigm for Phsychology. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1998.
Laruelle, Fran'<ois (ed.). Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, Paris:
Place, 1980.
Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Bracha. "What Would Eurydice Say?
Emmanuel Levinas in Conversation with Bracha LichtenbergEttinger," trans. by J. Simas and C. Ducker. Paris: BLE
Atelier, 1997.
Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. Meditations erotiques: Essai sur Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Balland, 1992.
Peperzak, Adiraan. To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1993.
Petrosino, Silvana and Jaques, Rolland. La Verite nomade:
Introduction aEmmanuel Levinas. Paris: La Decouverte, 1984.

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA'S
PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE
BIOGRAPHY

Born in Marianowo Poland into a family that was a

part of Poland's landed nobility, as a high school student
A.-T. Tymieniecka's was first introduced to philosophy through readings and discussions of Kazimierz
Twardowski's Der Gegenstand der Vorstellung, a work
recommended to her by the local philosopher Wladyslaw
Horkawy. Horkawy had been a student of Twardowski's at
Lwow, and Twardowski had been a student of Husser!.
(Tymieniecka, 1989, 180-181), Profoundly impressed by
Horkawy's commitment to Husserlian themes, particularly
his emphasis upon the absolute objectivity of the principles of justice and morals, Tymieniecka entered Roman
lngarden's seminar at the University of Krakow and was
initiated into the Husserlian phenomenological tradition.

Poirie, Francois. Emmanuel Levinas: Qui etes-vous?. Paris: La

Manufacture, 1987.
Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-meme comme un autre. Paris: Seuil, 1990.
Strasser, S. Jenseits von Sein und Zeit. Eine Einfilhrung in
Emmanuel Levinas' Philosophie. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978.
Strasser, S. "Emmanuel Levinas (Born 1906); Phenomenological Philosophy." In H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement. Phrenomenologica 5/6, The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1982, pp. 612-49.
Sugarman, Richard I. Notes Toward a Metaphysics of Otherness,
in Phenomenological Inquiry, Vol. 24, Belmont: The World
Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and
Learning, 2000.
Wahl, Jean. "Interview by Levinas," A Short History of Existentialism, trans. Forrest Williams and Stanley Maron, New
York: Philosophical Library, 1949, pp. 47-53.
Wild, John. "Introduction" in Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel
Levinas, trans. by A. Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univeristy
Press, 1987.
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Wright, Tamra; Hughes, Peter and Ainley, Alison. "The Paradox
of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas," in The
Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, R. Bernasconi
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Wyschogrod, Edith. Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical
Metaphysics. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974.

In Ingarden, she discovered both a congenial philosophy

and close intellectual friendship that continued until his
death. She studied with Ingarden at Krakow from 1945 to
1947. At Krakow, she also studied logic with Zawirski and
Ajdukiewicz and befriended Alfred Tarski (Tymieniecka,
1989, 182-184).
Her education continued at the Sorbonne, with research
at the University of Fribourg, and the College d'Europe,
Bruges. In 1952, she received her Ph.D. in letters from the
University of Fribourg, where her graduate director was
Joseph Bochenski, 0. P. He, too, became a life-long
friend and sounding board, and was instrumental in
introducing her on the European intellectual scene and
into the company of such luminaries as Jean Wahl, L.
Landgrebe, E. Fink, H. L. Van Brede, A. de Waelhens and
V. Schluck, among others (Tymieniecka, 1989, 182).
During this period, she was a spirited defender of lngardenian eidetic phenomenology against both the prevailing
transcendentalism and the rebuffs of other continental