16. The locus classicus of this tendency is Jacques Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79–153, which popularized Totality and Infinity and set the tone for much of the subsequent commentary on it. Derrida canvases various points in Totality and Infinity where Levinas seems to commit the same “totalizing” errors which he faults in Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, and Derrida more generally raises the question of whether Levinas respects the limits he himself sets with regard to the comprehensibility and expressibility of the other.

17. Levinas’s interest in this crisis is understandable, given his biography. Levinas was not himself a Holocaust survivor. However, he did witness firsthand the cruelties perpetuated against the Jews by the Nazis in that he spent the bulk of World War II in an intensive Nazi labor camp for Jewish prisoners of war. Moreover, his entire family, all Lithuanian Jews, were murdered over the course of the war. Finally, his early philosophic mentor was Martin Heidegger, who, infamously, was the leading philosophic spokesperson for the National Socialist Party in Germany in the early thirties. It is understandable, then, that Levinas would be preoccupied with the question of how people manage to forget the good and how various conceptual systems lend themselves to facilitating this amnesia.

18. Michael Morgan’s Discovering Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) is perhaps the most notable effort to bring Levinas into conversation with Anglo-American philosophy. Prior to Morgan, a handful of prominent figures in analytic philosophy had begun to take an interest in Levinas, such as Hilary Putnam and Stanley Cavell. Their writings on him, though, tended to be limited reflections on how elements of his thinking resemble ideas in their own work. Morgan’s book is the first to develop a comprehensive interpretation of where Levinas stands in relation to analytic philosophy. Simon Critchley notes that an effort was also made in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas to achieve a “balance between the more usual phenomenological or Continental approaches to Levinas’s work and more analytic approaches.” See Putnam’s “Levinas and Judaism,” 33–62 and Bernstein’s “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy,” 252–267 in The Cambridge Companion for examples of approaches that are more analytic.