I do think that there are areas in his philosophy where we should question him—such as, for example, his characterizations of femininity. See Critchley, “Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them,” in Political Theory 32, no. 2. for more on Critchley’s concerns about the state of Levinas scholarship. For feminist analyses of Levinas, see Chanter’s Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Re-reading of the Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1995) as well the collection she edited, Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). I am indebted to an anonymous reader for alerting me to the worry that I may be romanticizing Levinas.

7. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 55.

8. See for example Levinas’s Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 99–100.

9. Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 83.

10. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 75.

11. Elements of Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993) are suggestive of this type of interpretation of Levinas. See also some of Simon Critchley’s remarks in his more recent writings on Levinas, such as “Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics,” Political Theory, and Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York: Verso, 2007).

12. For example, it is hard to imagine Levinas showering the second scene from Life and Fate with praise if the woman knew she was violating a moral rule—if, say, she knew the officer was plotting to murder an innocent and if a few pages later he did so because he was finally strong enough, having eaten the bread, to perform this task.

13. See, for example, Levinas “Philosophy and Awakening” in Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 77–90. See esp. pp. 87, 89; Levinas “Philosophy Justice and Love” in Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 103–121. See esp. p. 114.

14. Levinas Time and the Other, 82.

15. 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. 192.