I bought a copy of Levinas's Entre Nous Thinking-of-the-Other this afternoon. The book is a collection of essays written over a long period of time starting from 1951--'Is Ontology Fundamental'. As I came to understand in beginning to read expressed in Totality and Infinity Levinas’s phenomenology of existence focused on intersubjectivity and asserts the primacy of ethics. It is the ethical turn in French philosophy in which ethics is accessible through the human experience of the other open to all.

Levinas’s insistence on the ethical as the foundation for the human self hinges largely on the concept of the other, who transcends the self’s natural solipsism and penetrates the totality of history through the face, and whose gaze beckons us to realm of the infinite, thus summoning us to follow the imperative of ethics. It is this concept of the other as the central reference for ethics that has become the hallmark of Levinas’s philosophy.

In the essary 'Is Ontology Fundamental' levinas writes:

Thus we are responsible beyond our intentions. I t is impossible for the attention directing the act to avoid inadvertent action. We get caught up in things; things turn against us.That is to say that our conscioussness, and our mastery of reality through consciousness, do not exhaust our relationships with reality, in which we are present with all the density of our being. It is the fact that, in Heidegger's philosophy, our consciousness of reality does not conicide with our dwelling in the orld that has created a strong impression in the literary world.