"The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas produced a considerable body of work, most notably Totality and infinity and Otherwise than Being, as well as a series of texts devoted specifically to Judaism. Yet Levinas would not have achieved his current status and influence were it not that his probing of the ethical relation to the other continues to raise more questions than it answers, and this within quite different orders of intellectual inquiry. Thus it is this Levinasian motif of the encounter with the other that was chosen to serve as a principle both of unity and diversity for the present volume" -- from book cover.

Draws attention to the enigmatic missed encounter between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan, and articulates the theoretical stakes and practical consequences of such a disjunctive encounter for ethics.

This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.

Two of the most creative and compelling thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, first encountered each other in the 1920s and began a friendship that was to span over seven decades. Their subsequent exchanges of ideas and shared concerns, as well as their significant differences and influence on one another, have profound implications for the work of each. Encountering the Other represents the most sustained analysis to date of the intersections of structure and content in Blanchot and Levinas's most representative and complex works.

Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity is a monumental work of phenomenological enquiry that goes on to assert the centrality of ethics to philosophical thought. This Reader's Guide provides a detailed explanation of the work, breaking down the occasionally intimidating but always inspirational content of Totality and Infinity for non-specialist readers, unpacking the complexities of Levinas' thought with clarity and rigour. Ideal for students coming to Levinas for the first time, the book offers essential guidance, outlining key themes, approaches to reading the text, the reception, and influence of the work, and recommends secondary reading materials.

This book provides a clear and helpful overview of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most significant and interesting philosophers of the late twentieth century. Michael L. Morgan presents an overall interpretation of Levinas' central principle that human existence is fundamentally ethical and that its ethical character is grounded in our face-to-face relationships. He explores the religious, cultural and political implications of this insight for modern Western culture and how it relates to our conception of selfhood and what it is to be a person, our understanding of the ground of moral values, our experience of time and the meaning of history, and our experience of religious concepts and discourse. Includes an annotated list of recommended readings and a selected bibliography of books by and about Levinas. An excellent introduction to Levinas for readers unfamiliar with his work and even for those without a background in philosophy.

"This volume contains Proper Names and its companion piece On Maurice Blanchot. Together they provide and important philosophical consideration of a wide range of modern writers and thinking, including Buber, Derrida, Kierkegaard and Proust."--Book jacket.

"This exhaustive look at Levinas's primary texts, both his philosophical writings and writings on Judaism, brings together his various perspectives on time and concludes that we can extract a coherent and consistent conception of time from Levinas's thought, one that is distinctly political. Thus, this study elucidates Levinas's claim that time is actually constituted via social relationships"--Provided by publisher.

The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word "God" can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English translation for the first time. Among Levinas's writings, this volume distinguishes itself, both for students of his thought and for a wider audience, by the range of issues it addresses. Levinas not only rehearses the ethical themes that have led him to be regarded as one of the most original thinkers working out of the phenomenological tradition, but he also takes up philosophical questions concerning politics, language, and religion. The volume situates his thought in a broader intellectual context than have his previous works. In these essays, alongside the detailed investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, and Buber that characterize all his writings, Levinas also addresses the thought of Kierkegaard, Marx, Bloch, and Derrida. Some essays provide lucid expositions not available elsewhere to key areas of Levinas's thought. "God and Philosophy" is perhaps the single most important text for understanding Levinas and is in many respects the best introduction to his works. "From Consciousness to Wakefulness" illuminates Levinas's relation to Husserl and thus to phenomenology, which is always his starting point, even if he never abides by the limits it imposes. In "The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other," Levinas not only addresses Derrida's Speech and Phenomenon but also develops an answer to the later Heidegger's account of the history of Being by suggesting another way of reading that history. Among the other topics examined in the essays are the Marxist concept of ideology, death, hermeneutics, the concept of evil, the philosophy of dialogue, the relation of language to the Other, and the acts of communication and mutual understanding.