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Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy is extensive enough that a complete treatment of it is beyond the scope of this book. It will have occasion to address many of the themes and topics central to his thought—ipseity, alterity, illeity, responsibility, substitution, and sociality among them. This chapter examines Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity, providing a general summary of his philosophical project, especially his relation to ontology. It sets the stage for an encounter with Gabriel Marcel by articulating Levinas's version of the intersubjective relationship or, as he usually terms it, the relation of the same to the other. Finally, it describes alterity as seen by Levinas and addresses the role of justice and love within his work. Needless to say, the question of otherness will be ever present in these considerations.

In “Creature Discomforts”, Jeffrey Hanson argues that, contrary to other interpretations, the trope of creation ex nihilo plays, with some minor changes and development, a significant role throughout Levinas’s writing rather than being abandoned after Totalityand Infinity. Levinas uses the trope of creation ex nihilo in a primarily ethical, rather than ontological, sense: first, to underscore the absolute and immemorial character of the ethical demand to which we are called by the Other and, second, to stress that the singularity of the ethical subject cannot be absorbed in any totality: “only creation establishes a truly separate subject.”

This chapter continues the discussion in Chapter 5, showing how the possible impossibility that is discourse is illuminated and deepened in Levinas's analysis of temporality. It proposes, by means of a tentative agenda, to inquire as to whether any answers, or any clues to answers, to the question posed by Levinas at the very end of the main text of Totality and Infinity — “Is this eternity a new structure of time, or an extreme vigilance of the messianic consciousness?” — can be gleaned by examining what his later work, Other Than Being or Beyond Essence, has to say about time.

This chapter examines the issues of otherness in relation to Edouard Glissant's account of entanglement. It suggests that an interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas as a post-Shoah thinker opens up important points of contact and contrast with Glissant's treatment of the Middle Passage, trauma, and the Caribbean problem of beginning. The chapter also argues that a rereading of fecundity and futurity in Levinas's Totality and Infinity exposes a nascent sense of continuity in Levinas's thought which cannot be found in Glissant's account.

This chapter presents Levinas's idea of discourse, as proposed in the pages of Totality and Infinity, as providing a description of the conditions of possibility for interparadigmatic dialogue, that is, for engendering a dialogue in situations where the common logos that would mediate a dia-logos cannot be effectively located, and thus cannot perform its mediatory function. Following Levinas's own definitions, the chapter defines discourse as “an original, non-allergic, ethical relationship with alterity productive of a meaning capable of founding communal meaning,”. The exposition follows the elements of this definition in dealing with the way in which the separated terms requisite for discourse (the relation as “non-allergic”) are, for Levinas, evinced, first, in the ethical separation (transcendence) of the other from the same and from the system that, as the same, it operates; and secondly, in the separation of the same from any system of totality.

This chapter examines how Royce could make the ethico-religious dimension of his temporalism explicit by incorporating certain insights from Emmanuel Levinas's phenomenology. It addresses a serious problem with Royce's ethics and how that problem causes his ethics to be an inadequate mode of expressing his ethico-religious insight. The serious problem with Royce's ethics is that it neglects the origins of ethical experience. The chapter dedicates an entire section to outlining Royce's temporalism, as shown in the second volume of The World and the Individual and his 1910 essay “The Reality of the Temporal”. The chapter then examines Royce's ethics from the standpoint of Levinas's phenomenology, as articulated in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, Or Beyond Essence.

This chapter looks in detail at the work of Emmanuel Levinas. It argues that although he does not often discuss the Holocaust explicitly, it is central to Levinas's thought and to postmodern thought more generally defined. The chapter outlines the historical role of the Holocaust in Levinas's thought, and its change over time. It then shows how the thought of the Holocaust saturates Levinas's work, from the smallest sentences, to his larger organizing concepts, to his stands on issues such as aesthetics and war, to the overall aims of his philosophy. It then offers a view on Levinas as a philosopher of ambivalence, and argues that, as a result of the Holocaust, he takes up original positions in relation to reason, truth, and the task of philosophy, which in turn shape our response to the Holocaust.

The introduction begins by exploring how Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy has been taken up by film theorists to date. Much of this scholarship centres on Levinas’s theories of the Other as found in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), particularly the ‘face’ of the Other, which theorists have discussed in relation to visualre presentation. Levinas developed his ethics, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), into a performative account of what it feels like to be responsible for the Other. Accordingly, Performing Ethics through Film Style takes a similar approach with film, linking the performativity of Levinas’s writing style with the capacity of films to perform a Levinasian ethics of responsibility for the Other through their styles. The introduction brings in performativity theory – including J. L. Austin’s speech acts, Jacques Derrida’s originary performativity and Judith Butler’s theories of language in the socio-political sphere – to enhance this study of performativity in Levinas and film. And it sets up the subjects of the chapters to follow: the films of the Dardenne brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader. Studying these directors in relation to Levinas shows how films can perform ethics through a wide variety of styles.

This chapter presupposes the bond between philosophy and Judaism without attempting to develop this line of analysis in detail. It shows a deep and unmanifest connection between a specific rabbinic text and the structure of Totality and Infinity, such that the former provides a homologue of the latter as an exposition of egology and alterity. The rabbinic text is a miniature (in a sense yet to be specified) of Emmanuel Levinas's work. The chapter turns first to the meaning of miniaturization, then to some traditional interpretations of Hillel the Elder's seminal maxim that are widely separated in time: that of Rabbi Nathan, possibly dating to the third century, and that of the nineteenth-century rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Finally, the chapter considers the way in which the structural articulation of Totality and Infinity both conceals and reveals its homologue, Hillel's saying and the commentaries upon it in Pirke Aboth.

Emmanuel Levinas signals the importance of hospitality for his approach to ethics and religion about two-thirds of the way through his first major work, Totality and Infinity. This chapter traces a turn in Levinas's thought that indicates a “being toward God.” It finds that in his work after Totality and Infinity, Levinas emphasizes that hospitality to the Other involves a passivity that has been habitually covered over. Nonetheless, this chapter asks whether hospitality does not involve a certain initiative on the part of the subject. It argues that this misses the “exorbitant hospitality” demanded by the Other according to Levinas. Finally, this chapter tackles the problem of gender that arises in Levinas's terminology wherein responsibility seems to rest on a binary opposition between Man and Woman. Not only does the divine Other exceed ordinary constraints, but Levinas's notion of gender also seems to transcend normal practical constraints, pointing to a sort of “impossible gender” to accompany “unconditional hospitality.”.

This chapter explores Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of love along with a reading of Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima, mon amour. Hiroshima, mon amour affixes Levinas' ethics. Levinas recognizes the significance of erotic love for the subject and ultimately for inter-human relations. His description of erotic love indicates an interlacing of egoistic pleasure and selfless engagement with the other in the sexual relation. In Alain Resnais' and Duras' film, Hiroshima, mon amour, it is the experience of passionate, obsessional, devoted love for a particular other that grounds and informs the selfless ethical love of every other. It has become clear that the feminine other of the erotic relation (in Time and the Other) offers a model or a prototype for the alterity of the other of the ethical relation (in Totality and Infinity).

This chapter argues for the centrality of futurity for all of Levinas’s thought. It begins by explaining the central role that the future plays in the early works, focusing especially on Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity. However, the emergence of the notion of the trace (around 1963) suggests that the absolute surprise characteristic of both our encounter with alterity and the future has in fact always already happened. This would seem to suggest that the encounter with the Other is not futural, but in the past. The chapter ends by explaining that Levinas’s later account of time as diachrony retains a necessarily futural aspect, such that the time of substitution, the “pre-history of the I”, remains an essentially futural temporality.

This chapter begins by taking into account alternative views of the ethical subject in Levinas's thought by turning first to its emergence following the coming into being of an autonomous self, depicted principally in the opening sections of Totality and Infinity; and next to its meaning in the context of time and language, as described in his essay “Substitution.” This view is further developed in his major work Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. The chapter then considers the works of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille as they bear upon the relation of the individual subject to an economy of the sacred, a self that will be shown to bear striking affinities with the pre-ethical self of Levinas. Finally, it recasts the radical self-giving of Levinas's ethical subject in terms of prodigality and parsimony as they are framed in the conceptual language of classical economics in order to examine some outcomes of unfettered profligacy. The goal is to reconfigure Levinas's ethical subject as one who not only gives but who also stores, not in order to keep but in order to bestow.

This chapter looks at two early Dardenne films, Je Pense à Vous (1992) and La Promesse (1996). The gap between these two films proved momentous in the Dardennes’ career, as they were able, after the critical, commercial and, in their eyes, personal failure of Je Pense à Vous, to rethink their approach to film style, which led to La Promesse, the true ‘beginning’ of their career as it is commonly known and their first explicit engagement with Levinas’s ethical philosophy. The chapter considers this radical change in film style to be akin to the distinction that J. L. Austin, in his lectures on performativity, makes between constative and performative uses of language, the first being description and the second being performance. The chapter begins by positing a parallel between the shifts in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy from the descriptions of Totality and Infinity to the literary performance of Otherwise than Being and the Dardennes’ reconfiguration of their style between Je Pense à Vous and La Promesse. This will show how, just as Levinas sought to clarify his ethics by deploying a more overtly performative style, so the Dardennes achieve a similar, Levinasian style in their filmmaking in La Promesse.

This chapter discusses how the new generation of French philosophers rejected humanism because it is an anthropocentric ethics in essence, which prevents man from going beyond the scope of the nature of human beings. It is stated that modern mentality is progressing towards the path of making man the essence of the world, and that the knowledge of man is often associated with ethics or politics. The chapter also presents Emmanuel Levinas' ethics and the notion of ethical responsibility, as written in his book Totality and Infinity. Levinas' work seems to oppose Deleuze's and the two are viewed as reflections of the transcendence-immanence dichotomy of French philosophy.