1. See Levinas, “Transcendence and Evil,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 175–186. See esp. p. 182 for his discussion on how evil produces a “de-neutralization of being.”

2.. Critchley, “Introduction,” Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 27.

3. Grossman completed Life and Fate in 1960, but it was immediately confiscated by the KGB and was not published until the early eighties, after it was smuggled out of the Soviet Union. Levinas frequently cites the novel in interviews he gave in the eighties as exemplifying his philosophic outlook.

4. Levinas, “In the Name of the Other,” in Is it Righteous to Be?, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 188–199. See esp. p. 191. See also Levinas, “The Other, Utopia, and Justice,” in Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 223–233. See esp. pp. 231–232.

5. Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 805.

6. Here I should acknowledge a worry one may have about my presentation of Levinas in this Prologue, and perhaps more generally in this book. One might worry that I am romanticizing Levinas in neglecting to stress the violent, confrontational elements of the encounter with the other. To be clear, my intent is not to ignore the ways in which the encounter with the other involves violence, destabilization, or confrontation, and it is worth noting that Levinas stresses these associations in later writings, particularly Otherwise than Being.

Nor is my intent to romanticize Levinas elsewhere in this book. Simon Critchley has pointed out that there is tendency among Levinas scholars to lapse into “homage” and “discipleship”—to affect a certain breathlessness in discussing Levinas and to uncritically accept his ideas. I am also troubled by this tendency. While I defend Levinas, I hope to avoid the trap of devolving into hagiography. I do not dwell on moments where he makes claims on matters of ethical or political significance that trouble me only because my aim is to defend him against critics who allege that he has nothing valuable to say on such matters whatsoever.