Back to the Other Levinas: Alain P. Toumayan's Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem of Difference in Blanchot and Levinas

Since the exultant reception of Levinas’ work, particularly in the United States, an imposing obstacle to this oeuvre has steadily been erected. It is not Levinas’ complicated, often unstated philosophical disputations, nor his exhortatory style, nor even the originality of his argument that constitute the most formidable obstructions to his work today. On the contrary, the greatest difficulty today is the ease with which Levinas is arrogated, a facility that risks making him so accessible as to be wholly irrelevant. The ubiquity in contemporary intellectual circles of an “ethics of the other” leads, from ever diverse paths, directly to Levinas; and it is just this that prevents us from reading him well