Gary, I confess I haven't read much of Levinas, though his thought seems to run through Blanchot and Derrida (and in slightly different ways, from what I can gather). Where would you recommend I start?

Hi Matt,

I'm in the same position as you. Starting from ground zero.

Maybe we can do it together? At the moment I'm just digging around on the internet. At the moment it is a bit.

I'll dig around and find an "easy" Levinas text. I will use this as my guide.

By the way I love Long Sunday. Excellent.

We'll see if the comments work this time.

Probably the best text to start with Levinas is Totality and Infinity. It's also his most important work. A lot of Derrida directly or indirectly references this work. Derrida, I think, becomes more and more Levinasian as time goes on - especially in his late period. (Say the work in the 80's and 90's) Levinas also responds to Derrida's paper in "God and Philosophy." It's actually very worthwhile paper to read. For a good introduction to Levinas, outside of Totality and Infinity I'd suggest Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical WRitings edited by Peperzak, Critchley and Bernosconi. It includes "God and Philosophy" along with a lot of other excellent writings spanning his career.

Be aware though that Levinas is also a Rabbi and tends to use a lot of Talmudic and probably Kabbalistic imagery at times.

Levinas' work, particularly beginning with his Clark
from what I can make out Levinas' Totality and Infinity (1969), is a critique of Heidegger and Husserl.

It would appear that Levinas is concerned that Western philosophy has been preoccupied with Being, the totality, at the expense of what is otherwise than Being, what lies outside the totality of Being as transcendent, exterior, infinite, alterior, the Other. Levinas wants to distinguish ethics from ontology.

I can get that kind of transgression or going beyiond. But it all goes hazy on The Other--other than a calling into question of the same.

Gary, sure count me in. I'll have to get my hands on a copy (and tie up some other things) first though.

Matt,
same with me.
The text is Totality and Infinity right?

That text is not going to be easy going, as you can see from this article by Jacques Taminiaux. A hundred pages or so of the first section of Totality and Infinity is given over to defining basic concepts and principles. Ugh.

Levinas' text is marked by a close attention to Heidegger's Being and Times, and the Heideggerian analysis of the structures of the comportment of human beings: to be there in the world, thrown in our own existence and temporally projected toward our end.

That close attention is combined with a critical resistance that highlights two flaws in Heidegger's new ontology:

#the shutting of all windows upon the eternal;

#the fact that the predominance of the ontological is such that the relation to the other is no longer fundamental.

That last point is the one that interests me.