The Problem with Levinas

Levinas´s idea of ethics as a relation of responsibility to the other person has become a highly influential and recognizable position across a wide range of academic and non-academic fields. Simon Critchley´s aim in this book is to provide a less familiar, more troubling, and (hopefully) truer account of Levinas´s work. A new dramatic method for reading Levinas is proposed, where the fundamental problem of his work is seen as the attempt to escape from the tragedy of Heidegger´s philosophy and the way in which that philosophy shaped political events in the last century.