Levinas verstehen

Emmanuel Levinas has left an extremely challenging body of work. Corine Pelluchon manages the feat of writing a very readable introduction without sacrificing its argumentative depth, while also placing its own emphasis on medical ethics and ecology. The relationship between ethics and politics is re-illuminated, and the understanding of freedom as one provided by the Other is challenged against the classical and contemporary theories of freedom and made the centre of a conception of subjectivity characterised by corporeality and vulnerability. The question of whether to read and understand Levinas as a religious thinker is explicitly left open by the author.