The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (review)

There are no other editors better equipped to edit this book on Levinas in the well-known Cambridge Companion series. Simon Critchely and Robert Bernasconi have been some of the most attentive readers of Levinas, at once appreciative and rigorously critical of his work. Critchley gives a very accessible introduction to Levinas, focusing on some of the philosopher's key terms and loaded expressions (totality, infinity, "ethics as first philosophy," etc.). Critchley also calls attention to what he appropriately calls the "deconstructive turn" (18) in Levinas, a turn provoked in large part by Derrida's influential critique of Levinas's Totality and Infinity in "Violence and Metaphysics," in which he reproaches the latter for still using the language of ontology all the while claiming to be operating outside of it. As Critchley reminds us, the Levinas of Otherwise than Being becomes far more alert to the ways in which the ethical can take place with philosophical discourse: how the said (the refying of the ethical saying) can be perpetually un-said and re-said. Hilary Putnam discusses Levinas's relationship to Judaism, exploring, for instance, how the figure of the Jew (the Other par excellence) occupies an exemplary status in Levinas's ethics, how "in essence, all human beings are Jews" (34). Catherine Chalier's article also addresses the question of religion in Levinas, but from the perspective of his perplexing, and often ignored, Talmudic readings. She makes a compelling case for the importance of these readings to an understanding of Levinas, of a Levinas, to be sure, irreducible to the title of either (Greek) philosopher or Talmudic scholar. Berhard Waldenfels tackles the ambiguous and fleeting meaning of the face (visage) in Levinas. Rudolf Bernet revisits Levinas's powerful critique and appropriation of Husserl's phenomenological project. John Llewelyn and Edith Wyschogrod discuss Levinas's understanding of language; Llewelyn situates Levinas within his intellectual milieu, a milieu dominated by structuralism and a Heideggerian understanding of language, while Wyschogrod explores how Levinas's use of language frustrates any reduction to propositional statements, and its ultimate significance for his account of alterity. Related to the question of language and representation is Levinas's ambivalent attitude towards the concepts of art and poetry—the subject of Gerald Bruns article. Paul Davies and Richard Bernstein examine the problematic of theodicy in Levinas—the former tying theodicy to sincerity, the latter to evil (Kant is in the background of both pieces).

Stella Sanford, by far the most polemical author of the collection, is determined to discredit Levinas as an important philosopher for feminism. While feminist criticism of Levinas is nothing new (Irigaray, Chanter), Sanford is unfortunately not interested in engaging Levinas in a dialogue with feminism. Rather, she tirelessly insists that Levinas's complex notion of the "feminine" is inadequate for the aims of feminism, failing to free itself from the Western economy of the Same. Robert Bernasconi, for his part, takes up the difficult task of explaining Levinas's idea of "substitution," speculating on the kind of question(s) that might be seen as informing or motivating the latter's enigmatic thinking. In this eloquently written essay, Bernasconi moves back and forth from a reading of Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being in order to better locate the ethical moment, to better attest to the meaning of "substitution." While the earlier Levinas squarely situates the ethical encounter in the actual or concrete encounter with the Other, the latter Levinas, according to Bernasconi, avoids the potential (mis)reading that could arise from such account: that prior to the ethical situation the self was already full constituted. But by developing his idea of substitution—along with the infinite irresponsibility that entails—Levinas, still on Bernasconi's reading, argues that one's possibility of "substitution for others" (247) is a way to account for primordial openness to alterity that precedes, so to speak, the empirical encounter with the Other, shedding some light on the problem of deduction (the vexed and contested move from the transcendental to...