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I felt I had a duty to understand what he was saying about ethical responsibility, but could not do it on my own. I often found myself just as perplexed by the secondary literature on him and the familiarity with contemporary European philosophy it assumed. Since then, I have had much time to study Levinas and recent European philosophy, and I no longer feel this frustration. Yet I do worry that the esotericism of some of the scholarship on Levinas prevents his writings from achieving the influence they deserve, and one of my aims is to explain his ideas as clearly as I can. So, it troubled me that my book’s point seemed to become more distant the harder I tried to clarify it.
However, I had a more significant reason for worrying. What drew me to Levinas was the note of moral urgency in his writings. I had the sense when I first read him that he was issuing a personal call to responsibility to me, his reader. A friend tipped me off to him as I was graduating from college, and I read Totality and Infinity for the first time while living as a graduate student in Chicago. I recall reading the discussion of morality and violence in the preface to Totality and Infinity one evening and feeling compelled to put the book down and to stare out the windows of my apartment. I could not have explained what I had read, but I felt I understood that it had said something about the need to put the book down, to stare out those windows, and to honestly face the world on the other side of them—a world where people are victimized far too routinely; where, for example, one out of every three women will be sexually assaulted; where one out of every three African American men will be imprisoned; where, chances are, the clothes you are wearing as you read this were sewn by a woman who did not receive enough money for her labor to buy herself the food she needs to survive; where each of us, it often seems, can excuse our indifference if we are eloquent enough to craft an elegant political justification or stubborn enough to pretend not to notice; and where the only thing able to block this process is the fragile awareness that each of us is incomparably precious and that some incalculable crime is done whenever any of us suffers.