Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other (review)

BOOK NOTES he can act the loyal friend rather than the seducer. He is well aware ofthe conventions ofthe conduct books and can even use their typical vocabulary, as Barbara Zaczek points out. The author devotes a chapter to Clarissa in order to demonstrate how letters can control and manipulate behavior. Richardson, she thinks, identified with the heroine and "effectively masked his own role in imposing censorship on unruly sentiments." He was, it would seem, a stem moralist who appealed to a largely female audience in a novel that is, in a sense, a novel about letter writing. Barbara Zaczek might have devoted more attention to Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), surely the finest epistolary novel after Clarissa and even richer in its range ofepistolary styles. She does refer to it in a chapter on "Deconstructing the Definition ofFemale Letters as Sentimental, Nonliterary, and Private." One might suppose that a code ofmanners, analogous to that advocated in the conduct books, was operating in prerevolutionary France. Laclos has never been seen as a moralist as Richardson was, but he has certainly been absolved ofthe cynicism once attributed to him. Is his world very different from Richardson's? Barbara Zaczek is especially interesting on Jane Austen's two early epistolary novels, Love and Friendship and Lady Susan. They are minor works by a writer who started out as a satirist "deconstructing" the literary conventions ofthe day, and not just the epistolary novel, but she seems to have been somewhat cautious about it: she "mocked the model ofa female victim manipulated by letters only in the privacy ofher own room, since neither Love and Friendship nor Lady Susan was intended for publication, and both reached the reading public only after her death." The epistolary novel seems to be associated with the theme of the "female victim" rathermore than one had suspected. As a literary convention it lasted only a century, but it brought a new kind of intimacy to the novel that would later be written by Henry James and others. Barbara Zaczek's book is very useful in tracing the circumstances that made it successful in the eighteenth century. Celso de OliveiraUniversityofSouth Carolina BOOK NOTES EMMANUEL LÉVINAS. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. xiii + 256 pp. Within the last ten years, the work of French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995) has begun to assert a significant impact on American philosophy and literary studies. In part this results from Derrida's critical ifrespectful essay Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d'Emmanuel Lévinas, which can be found in Writing andDifference (1978). This, in turn, has led to a wider assessment and appreciation of Lévinas's major texts, including the seminal Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, available in translations by Alphonso Lingis. Lévinas, for many years a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and director ofthe Ecole Normale Supérieur Israélite Orientale, was one of the first exponents ofGerman Phenomenology in France. His influence extends to Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, and Irigaray among others. Central to his thinking is the concept ofethics as first philosophy. Lévinas's position grows out ofHusserlian phenomenology, and a critique ofWestern metaVcH . 24 (2000): 182 ??? COHPAnATIST physics' notion ofunity, in which the subject-object relationship is resolved by the Same absorbing or being absorbed by the Other, the Same and the Other becoming one in some transcendental ego. Deeply influenced by Kant's ethical notion of dignity , that rational beings as ends-in-themselves have an inherent worth that cannot be exchanged for anything else, Lévinas argues for an ethics that recognizes the autonomy and independence ofthe other, what he terms "the face." "From the start, the encounter with the Other is my responsibility for him." In this, the ontology of the Other becomes the basis for ethics, bridging the modern and the postmodern, philosophy and religion, utopia andjustice. It offers an important contribution to the whole debate on the ethics ofthe Other and the ethics ofreading. A French Jew ofLithuanian origins, Lévinas has a special relationship to...