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The Wolin review was thoroughly superficial, disingenuous and philistine, in a word, trashy. The books and culture section of "The Nation" is usually the most interesting part, but, like the rest, is not immune to a certain bien-pensant complacency, which mars editorial judgments. It's hit-or-miss there.

But some points of misapprehension in the review should perhaps be addressed. For one thing, Levinas' work is at once thoroughly dependent on Heidegger's precedence and a throrogh-going critical excoriation and repudiation of Heidegger's work, and there is every evidence that Levinas is fully and scupulously aware of that,- (and its precedents, such as, e.g., Hegel and Kierkegaard),- and measures his intentions accordingly.

And the notion of an Oedipal relation to Sartre is ridiculous. Levinas was among the very first to introduce Husserl, then Heidegger into French academic/intellectual discussion and it was from his articles on Husserl that Sartre first got wind of phenomenology. The two men knew each other and maintained personally cordial relations throughout, but Levinas was always on a much different wavelength and scarcely influenced by Sartre. The effort to tar Levinas one way or another with Sartre or Heidegger just betrays a lack of any philosophical depth of engagement with any of the three.

But leaving philological points aside, the misconstrual of Levinas' basic philosophical intentions runs rampant throughout the review. To begin with, he took phenomenology as the most advanced and refined form of Western philosophical reason to date and Heidegger as its deepest and most consequential expounder, but sought to measure up with and criticize it on its own privileged ground. The modal relation to the other qua other that is at the core of his whole work is precisely an "essential" source of meaning-constitution that phenonemological intentionality, by its very "nature" or principle, covers over in laying claim to its meaning-constitutive performances.

In short, Levinas is conducting an anti-phenomenological critique of phenonemological reason on the basis of its own grounds and resources.

And surely the claim to "fundamental" ethics as first philosophy is to point out that ethical norms of rightness and justice take place in a different dimension from ontological or epistemological norms of truth, (appealing, as he would put it, to a goodness beyond being), such that any transformations that might occur in them, biographically or historically, do not derive from truth conditions or circumstances of application, (in ironical agreement with both Heidegger and Sartre and their respective failures to convincingly derive any body of ethical thinking from their claimed ontological insights).

Further, the point to the claim to "fundamental ethics" is that it educes the unexpungible, irremissible sources of ethical normativity rather than constituting a systematic rational prescriptive ethics in the conventional style, which can and no doubt would disrupt and exceed any such rational system, without laying waste to human freedom, unless that is conceived as a self-insistency of the "will".

Nor is there any theological dependency here, for not only does Levinas insist, more or less together with Kant, on the strict independence of morality from any religious belief, but he is a persistent critic of any theology, which, as a logos about theo, partakes of the very Greek tradition he is countermanding. To further complain about Levinas reliance on exorbitant "rhetoric" in the place of supposedly rational (argumentative?) discussion badly misses Levinas' own explicit discussion of his "method" of "exorbitation", since it is impossible to somehow get outside of language to get at its sources or grounds of meaning, while Levinas strictly refuses any theoretical approach to language and meaning, such as structuralism.

Last, but not least, to claim the Levinas' "fundamental ethics" is rebarbative to any "rational" politics is a howler of unfathomable idiocy. Not only does Levinas deal squarely and extensively with the issue of "the third" who is other to the other as intrinsic to any human social condition, but he explicitly states in interviews that the next step beyond his own work is "political ontology", though he declines to don the mantle of political thinker, as perhaps beyond his scope and competency. But it is not hard to discern the political intent and purport of Levinas' work: namely, to delimit the realm of the political through a consideration of the pre- and post-political. His work is clearly attached to a certain politics of secular republicanism, as the only political order that can resist and withstand the murderousness of ideologies by maintaining an order of civic peace through imperfect but remediable (political) justice. In that respect, to let a certain, perhaps justifiable hatred of aspects of Heidegger and/or "post-structuralism" lead one to tar Levinas with the former, while extolling the legacy of Sartre is not merely ironic, but the height of absurdity and the compounding of follies.

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