Toward a Femininity of Temporality: Emmanuel Lévinas on Time and Otherness #

In Emmanuel Lévinas’s arguments on time and otherness, we see a possibility of re-evaluating temporality in a gendered view. Female, as a special kind of absolute other, a passive and welcoming figure, is constructed over a transcendental and metaphysical femininity in Lévinas’s early works. Lévinas criticizes Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” for its supreme masculinity, returns to Bergson, and ponders temporality in an ethical way, pointing out it is based on a face-to-face relationship, an irreciprocity of “my time” and “the time of the other as other.” This temporality can be understood under a nonviolence tradition of thought. However, Lévinas’s arguments on the commandment “thou shalt not kill” and fecundity show his inability to construct a subject with time consciousness other than male. Thus, a femininity of temporality is ready to come out but not actually established.

Introduction: The Relationship between Time and Femininity #

“What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.” (Augustine 1912: 239) The pursuit of philosophical conception of time has never ended since Saint Augustine’s famous questioning. From Isaac Newton’s absolute view to Albert Einstein’s relative view of time, scientific advances have also inspired many philosophers to rethink the question. Henri Bergson, as a foregoer among them, first proposes that we should make a clear distinction between the scientific concept of time (as a projection through time into space) and the intuitive time consciousness of our real life (as a pure duration, durée) (Bergson 2001: 180, 231, 233, 240). Though Bergson himself fails to give us a clear definition of what pure duration is, or to some extent it may never be well defined, he still provides some hints of how to discover it. As he notes, pure duration is “the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” (Bergson 2001: 100) Therefore, pure duration relates to everyone’s private life, their own feelings. In other words, it is hard to translate to a language that we can speak to the public.

Though Bergson’s theory on time has been widely criticized or even misunderstood¹, it has still influenced numerous thinkers, especially the French ones, throughout the 20th century. On one hand, philosophers like Gilles Deleuze advocates a “return to Bergson,” taking him as a predecessor of phenomenology and philosophy of difference (Guerlac 2006: 173). On the other hand, this return, with the “theological turn of phenomenology” as Dominique Janicaud (2000: 88) concludes, should also face criticism for its intuitionism or even mysticism (Anderson 2015). Despite the debates on whether temporality should be examined under a “rigorous science” (in Husserl’s sense) or a more private and intuitive experience, we may turn to another question under this construction: Does temporality has a gender? Or to be clear, has someone ever discussed temporality, or time consciousness, in a gendered view? If the consciousness of time is the basis of our self-consciousness, it should be criticized under a feminist view with the premise that all “selves” do have gender, and unfortunately, they have been always masculine. If we don’t review and criticize this masculine premise, such a theory of time and the self would collapse.

Emmanuel Lévinas, though may have not done so intentionally, gives us an example of pondering temporality in a gendered view. In his writings such as Totality and Infinity (first published in 1961) and Time and the Other (first published in 1947), Lévinas discusses a temporality based on enjoyment, dwelling, and fecundity, under the premise of the existence of the Other. Though his arguments, based on a male-centric view of self, are still sexist by the introduction of the other, he opens up a new horizon for feminist theorists.

Though some philosophers preceding or concurrent with Lévinas have been discussing the problem of female and femininity, Lévinas’s writings are still groundbreaking. Psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists may be the first ones to put real-world gender expression and sexuality into ontological arguments. Carl Jung’s description of anima and animus, the two primary anthropomorphic (thus gendered) archetypes of the unconscious mind, indicates the actual reciprocity of the two types of sex/gender. According to Jung, it is normal to have a masculine figure (archetype) in female’s mind and vice versa. Jung’s theory opposes the Freudian androcentric dogmatism, but his fundamental presumptions may not be justified under the scope of psychology itself as a natural science. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his Phenomenology of Perception, shows his agreement with some detailed examples and explanations in psychoanalysis but argues that the body itself is a sexed being as a whole thus we cannot study sexuality separately (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 174). However, Merleau-Ponty has not explained why and how sexuality differs from other kinds of intentionality, such as those manifested by language or physical movement. Simone de Beauvoir, in her The Second Sex (first published 1949), argues that women are considered the “second sex,” the “Other,” which was defined, and thus contemned by men. Her arguments are mainly based on an existentialist viewpoint, but they have not answered whether an authentic femininity exists other than a mere social construction. In contrast to those theorists, Lévinas discusses the metaphysical (and maybe theological) position of female and femininity. We will see in the following chapters how Lévinas goes beyond them, and what questions have remained.

Literature has shown the possibility of re-reading Lévinas from a feminist point of view. Though Beauvoir (1989:xi) criticizes Lévinas for his “man’s point of view, disregarding the reciprocity of subject and object,” it may be a straightforward criticism that “fails to engage with Lévinas’s overall philosophical project, which is to elevate the notion of the alterity above the notion of totality.” (Chanter 2001: 2) Also, Beauvoir’s criticism is mainly based on Lévinas’s early works, in which he had not developed a complete system of metaphysics and ethics of alterity as in Totality and Infinity. By the introduction of alterity, Lévinas sets the female and femininity to a higher metaphysical position than his predecessors. Though it still presupposes a masculine subject, the subject-object relation Lévinas intends to build quite differs from those in traditional philosophy “of totality.”

In this article, we will analyze Lévinas’s arguments on time, the other, and femininity, to show how he inspires us that a feminine temporality is possible. We start from the female figure as an “absolutely other,” then move to a transcendental femininity, and finally, relate these gendered descriptions to his philosophy of time.

Female as an “Absolutely Other” #

At the beginning of Totality and Infinity, Lévinas urges the importance of alterity. In his view, the previous tradition of western philosophy is a tradition of totality, in which the “other” has long been neglected. The term “alterity” indicates an inclination, a “metaphysical desire” toward “the absolutely other.” (TI 33) In the most basic sense, the other is something else to the subject, or in Lévinas’s word, “the same.”

It is difficult, or even impossible to give an accurate definition of the other in Lévinas’s sense. However, we can summarize from his text what “the other” always refers to. First, the other is a necessary presumption or logical step of the existence and the world of the self. William Large (2015: 45) argues that the other is similar to the Cartesian God, which is nevertheless not a fine definition of it. According to Lévinas’s reconstruction of the history of philosophy, Descartes is one of the few philosophers, or maybe even the only one who has discussed infinity, “possess[ed] the idea of infinity is to have already welcomed the Other,” and “discover[ed] a relation with a total alterity irreducible to interiority.” (TI 93, 211)

Besides the infinity, the Cartesian God, the other can also refer to other people that exist in our everyday life. In this case, rather than autre, Lévinas mostly uses the French word auturi (the personal other, the you). Some translators may use “other” and “Other” to distinguish the two (see TI 24n), but for the convenience of discussion, we will only distinguish these two strictly in quotations. We should note nevertheless that sometimes the distinction is not clear and the term auturi can also refer to infinity, especially when it is personalized.

Lévinas writes, “The absolutely other is the Other.” (“L’absolument Autre, c’est Autrui.”) (TI 39) He attempts to show the linkage between other people in daily life and the abstract, transcendental infinity. The most common point is their irreducibility to the same or the subject. We should note that, although the other is “metaphysical,” (TI 87) it is not ontological. Lévinas seldom uses the term “existence” or “being” to describe the other. Actually, he only writes in one place “the existence of the Other,” in which he uses this term just to criticize Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein (TI 89). Lévinas argues that the real first philosophy is ethics rather than ontology because the latter is “a philosophy of power.” (TI 46)

Now we can move to our central question: how and why does female show its significance rather than other kinds of the other? Lévinas writes, “[T]he other whose presence is discreetly an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome which describes the field of intimacy, is the Woman. The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation.” (TI 155) Apparently, Lévinas supposes that women are passive and restricted in family affairs, which we would definitely disagree with within a feminist review of the real world. Now we should not involve ourselves in the detailed discussion of characters such as passivity or attachment to family, but first to take a look at the main structure of Lévinas’s theory. What is significant here is that the word “other” is in its normal form (autre) rather than personal form. Does Lévinas refer to a kind of transcendental femininity instead of the women in the real world?

The answer may be apparently yes. At the first mention of femininity, Lévinas clearly indicates reciprocity and transcendence in his description. “Femininity—and one would have to see in what sense this can be said of masculinity or of virility; that is, of the differences between the sexes in general—appeared to me as a difference contrasting strongly with other differences, not merely as a quality different from all others, but as the very quality of difference.” (TO 36) We can conclude from these words that, (1) he considers femininity equally important as masculinity or virility, and (2) the sexual difference is in a critical metaphysical status other than any other differences.

We can also learn from above the similarity between Lévinas’s woman as the other and Jung’s anima, a subconscious archetype (as mentioned in the introduction chapter). Since human subconsciousness is also incomprehensible, if we separate it and suppose it is a completely different thing, or “persona” (remember we cannot recklessly use the term “existence” now!) from the subject, then we jump from Jung to Lévinas. Though they may have not met with each other, literature shows the tight connection between Jung’s archetypes and phenomenologists’ being-in-the-world, as they both indicate “one’s relation to the world rather than as hypothetical entities.” (Brooke 2015: 154) To some extent, Lévinas has solved the problem that Jung fails in his analytical psychology because the latter insists on the bodiliness of the archetypes. However, to presuppose a kind of femininity or masculinity without concrete bodily experiences may also cause new troubles, which we may further discuss later.

Since we have found that in Lévinas’s description femininity is reciprocal to masculinity, the difficulty now is to make them distinguishable again under the whole structure of his philosophy of alterity. As we mentioned above, rather than the subject or the same, the other is not an object or not even a simple existence that can be comprehended by Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Therefore, the same and the other are irreciprocal—the other has its unquestionable priority in this asymmetric structure. In the following chapters, we will show how the urge to bridge the gap between the reciprocity of femininity and masculinity, and the irreciprocity of the same and the other, can lead us to the quest for a feminine temporality.

Getting Rid of a Masculine Temporality: Between “My Time” and “the Time of the Other” #

Concerning the problem of temporality, the biggest opponent of Lévinas is Heidegger. In his early works, Heidegger argues that it is death that gives time its meaning. The realization of mortality of Dasein, or human is the realization of one’s own temporality, thus its authentic being. Being toward death is the synonym of being in the world, under which Dasein worries (sorgt) about its own being and arranges its life by the use of things ready-to-hand.

Both Beauvoir and Lévinas criticize Heidegger’s analysis of temporality. Beauvoir in her The Ethics of Ambiguity summarizes that, for Heidegger, the future “is the definite direction of a particular transcendence and it is so closely bound up with the present that it composes a single temporal form.” (Beauvoir 1991: 116) Thus it is like a “Future-Thing,” a real existence, instead of a preview. Such an idea, according to Beauvoir, has led to various wrong historical movements which canceled the freedom of one and others (Arp 2000: 74). Beauvoir and Lévinas both criticize the inclination of substantialization under Heidegger’s arguments on temporality. Instead, they both think about temporality ethically. Through the ethical viewpoint, we can find that every kind of interpretation of temporality is correspondent to a single way of life. Beauvoir’s criticism of Heidegger prepares for her ethics of care, while Lévinas advocates an ethics of alterity. However, Lévinas differs from Beauvoir. He claims that his philosophy of the other is “entirely different from what the existentialists propose,” and also from Marxists (TO 79). In Time and the Other, he argues that the face-to-face relationship is the condition of time.

How can time consciousness base itself on a face-to-face relationship? As we mentioned above, Bergson’s idea of time as duration has its risks of being too private and mystical to talk about, thus a lack of publicity, or in Lévinas’s lexicon, alterity, may occur. Though Lévinas highly praises Bergson for “put[ting] forward the proper and irreducible reality of time” and “having liberated philosophy from the prestigious model of scientific time,” his interpretation of temporality has already gone beyond Bergson (EI 27 – 28). While Lévinas sees hope in Bergson’s time theory, he implies his discontent with Heidegger because Heidegger increases the anxiety of people in the age of technology, while Bergson is optimistic somehow, and they show a “radical difference.”

Thus, at least from Lévinas’s own viewpoint, his philosophy of time is optimistic, compared to the Heideggerian pessimism. Lévinas refuses Heidegger’s “being toward death.” In his later work Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (first published in 1974), he criticizes in an even sharper tone, “Mortality renders senseless any concern that the ego would have for its existence and its destiny. It would be but an evasion in a world without issue, and always ridiculous.” (OB 128 – 129) Rather than Heidegger, Lévinas concerns more about the “right to be,” the “ethical meaning of the justice of being,” instead of “the ontological meaning of the comprehension of this extraordinary verb.” (OG 171)

Unlike Heidegger, Lévinas’s argument on time consciousness starts with the concept of enjoyment and fecundity, instead of worrying and death. In Totality and Infinity, he discusses in more detail. To sum up, enjoyment and fecundity both postpone the death. In Lévinas’s view, death is not a kind of anxiety that occurs at every moment at present, not an event that belongs to the subject, but beyond the subject. Thus, death has the properties of the “other.” He writes, “My death comes from an instant upon which I can in no way exercise my power.”

But how can these analyses relate to our previous question of the face-to-face relationship, and thus the issue of gender? We should point out that Levina’s criticism of Heidegger’s Dasein also targets its underlying masculinity.

In Time and the Other, Lévinas writes, “Being toward death, in Heidegger’s authentic existence, is a supreme lucidity and hence a supreme virility.” (TO 70) Therefore, we see in Lévinas’s philosophy that virility is the synonym of lucidity. The lucidity enables the visibility of all substances. It is the universality of reason: “The possible reversal of objectivity into subjectivity is the very theme of idealism, which is a philosophy of reason. Subjectivity is itself the objectivity of light.” (TO 65 – 66) However, when everything is brought to light, the alterity also diminishes. Violence against the other occurs. Therefore, we can understand why in the preface of Totality and Infinity, Lévinas argues, lucidity “consist[s] in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war.” (TI 21)

The possibility of an ethics of nonviolence is also the possibility of a feminine temporality. Judith Butler, in her book Precarious Life, attests to the former by the concept of the face. In Lévinas’s words, the face is “the epiphany of the Other.” (TI 253) It urges the subject to take responsibility for the other. Therefore, the face can also be taken as a primordial language: “It speaks, it is in this that it renders possible and begins all discourse.” (EI 87)

In addition, we can notice from the text that the face of the other is always a weaker figure than us, the subject: the face of “the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.” (TI 251) Therefore, the face always gives the commandment to the subject in a passive position. Butler (2004: 132 – 133) writes,

“[T]he face, strictly speaking, does not speak, but what the face means is nevertheless conveyed by the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It conveys this commandment without precisely speaking it. It would seem that we can use this biblical command to understand something of the face’s meaning, but something is missing here, since the ‘face’ does not speak in the sense that the mouth does.”

The commandment “thou shalt not kill” indicates the most fundamental meaning of the face. According to Lévinas, to kill is not only prohibited but also ethically impossible. The ethical relationship between the subject and the face has been established at first and it transcends all the cognition.

The commandment “thou shalt not kill” lays the foundation for temporality. Different from Heidegger, the subject experiences first the death of the other, rather than the mortality of itself. Since the Heideggerian temporality is depicted as “a supreme lucidity and hence a supreme virility,” Lévinas’s temporality can be treated as a challenge to this virility, thus showing a possibility of feminine time consciousness.

Now we can go back to the problem of reciprocity we have asked at the end of Chapter 1. We see that for Lévinas, the temporality seems to be built only at the side of the subject rather than the other because the other serves the subject by its face and discourse. However, Rudolf Bernet (1998: 137 – 149) discusses the difference between “my time” and “the time of the other” and argues that, for Lévinas, ethical responsibility supposes “a new concept of time that is irreducible to the time of remembering and history.” Therefore, the time of ethics is “the time of the other as other.” The reciprocity is built, or at the same time broken to a kind of irreciprocity, because the time of the other is always prior to “my time.” We can also see this irreciprocity in Of God Who Comes to Mind (second edition published in 1986), where Lévinas argues that the identity of the subject “is the ‘non-interchangeability,’ the uniqueness, the ethos of the irreplaceable […] This is an ethos of the irreplaceable going back to this responsibility.” (OG 168 – 169) Though the establishment of time requires a face-to-face relationship which is in its form seemingly reciprocal, the other takes its ethical priority to force the subject to face with it. In Lévinas’s description, the female is on one hand passive and concealed, and on the other hand, shows her welcoming of the human. The twofold of femininity corresponds to the twofold of the time of ethics, thus the time of other.

Toward a Femininity of Temporality: Lévinas’s Failure to Construct a Female Subject #

But still, if we want to go further beyond Lévinas, there are quite a few questions to be solved. First, in the previous discussion, the subject is always masculine. Is it possible to replace it with a feminine subject? Second, in Lévinas’s system, the fear of death is replaced by the transcendence of fecundity, while the latter is a relationship only between father and son. How can we examine it in a feminist view? Third, since we have discovered the relationship between temporality and an ethical life, does it diminish the universality of our own interpretation of time? And finally, how can these seemingly abstract analyses contribute to the empirical world?

For the first question, Butler’s re-interpretation of Lévinas may help. She expressed her doubts by asking: “Why would it be that the very precariousness of the Other would produce for me a temptation to kill?” (Butler 2004: 134 – 135) Paradoxically, Lévinas’s idea of nonviolence presupposes the primordial hostility between the subject and the other. In Butler’s recent work The Force of Nonviolence, she advocates an “ethos of nonviolence,” which differs from both moral philosophy and moral psychology. From Butler’s view, the question “why do we seek to preserve the life of the other?” does not have a straightforward answer. In other words, the question itself may not be proper. The proper question is, “what leads any of us to seek to preserve the life of this other person?” (Butler 2020: Chapter 2.) To sum up, Butler gives us a more positive attitude toward the original relationship between one and the other in general by putting it into brackets. It is the act between two singular persons, not an “absolutely other.” This reduction can be considered as a switch from a masculine subject to a feminine (or at least not limited to masculine) actor, and a new kind of temporality occurs in the interaction.

For the second question, we should first realize that Lévinas’s model is “an alternative notion of paternity” from the traditional psychoanalytic description. The latter is filled with threats, while the former is a model of love and promise. However, the promise has its own purpose, which is summarized as a “paternal election,” according to Kelly Oliver. The father has his own desire of extending his mortal life to a “future,” which in Lévinas’s theory requires “a total transcendence, the transcendence of trans-substantiation.” (TI 267) By the process of trans-substantiation, the other becomes the self. In short, the son is the father. Lévinas says, “He is me a stranger to myself.” Oliver (2001: 239) points out that the trans-substantiation is not just a process that occurs between the father and his all sons because it is limited to two singulars: “The fact that he is a son is not what makes him unique; he is unique because he is this son chosen from among brothers. All children are brothers, but only this one is my son.” Therefore, the radical alterity should be assured, and the daughter of the father is actually “other enough to open up an infinite future.” She criticizes, “If there are no daughters, then there will be no more sons.” Lévinas’s system of temporality based on fecundity must come to an end if daughters are not considered.

For the third and the fourth questions, we should review our attempts to construct a feminine view of temporality. When talking about gender expression, we may meet some wicked problems. Does femininity in itself consist of a gender bias? Should we use terms such as “masculinity” or “femininity” after we realize that gender expression is more and more diverse than these two kinds? Or, according to Stella Stanford (2002: 148), “Can there be a feminist ‘feminine’?” Lévinas’s clear rejection of “the idea that the notion of ‘the feminine refers to empirical women’” arouses a greater conflict. For Stanford’s question, we suggest that the term “feminine” or “femininity” be used as a reclamation of a masculine world and its type of philosophy, thus a “feminine” type of theory is something that rejects the totalized masculine point of view, which is, in Lévinas’s lexicon, the “lucidity.” The face, instead, provides us a sense that something can be displayed with ambiguity.

However, it is somehow disappointing that in Otherwise than Being, Lévinas does not say anything about sex or gender. Why does Lévinas finally abandon basing his theory on a metaphysical femininity and eros? Diane Perpich (2001: 30) notices the shift from the subordination of the feminine and sexual difference to a neutral or masculine other. She points out that this shift is accompanied by the shift from bodily caress to language. On the contrary, Stella Stanford (2002: 149) points out that this shift may not be voluntary. Instead, it owes to “the impossibility of the separation of the philosophical category of the feminine and the formal structure of sexual difference from its empirical referent,” which shows Lévinas’s failure. For us, though the possibility for time theory to discover its own femininity is well-proven under an irreciprocal (see Chapter 2) and nonviolence (see above) perspective of otherness, we are still unsure whether it is reflected in our empirical world. Further studies should be conducted in the field of society and history, and literature and arts.

References #

Lévinas’s Philosophical Writings #

(EI) Lévinas, Emmanuel (1985) Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Cohen, Richard A., Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press.

(OB)          (1991) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Lingis, Alphonso, Dordrecht: Springer.

(OG)          (1998) Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bergo, Bettina, Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

(TI)          (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, Alphonso, Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press.

(TO)          (1987) Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Cohen, Richard A., Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press.

Other References #

Anderson, Pamela Sue (2015) “Bergsonian Intuition: A Metaphysics of Mystical Life,” In: Philosophical Topics, Vol. 43, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, pp. 239 – 251.

Arp, Kristana (2000) “A Different Voice in the Phenomenological Tradition: Simone de Beauvoir and the Ethic of Care,” In: Fisher, Linda, and Embree, Lester (ed.), Feminist Phenomenology, Dordrecht: Springer.

Augustine (1912) Confessions, trans. Hammond, Carolyn J.-B., Vol. 27, LCL, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Beauvoir, Simone de (1989) The Second Sex, trans. and ed. Parshley, H. M., New York: Vintage Books.

         (1991) The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Frechtman, Bernard, New York: Carol Publishing Group.

Bergson, Henri (2001) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. Pogson, F. L., Mineola: Dover Publications.

Bernet, Rudolf (1998) “My Time and the Time of the Other,” In: Zahavi, Dan (ed.) Self-Awareness, Temporality, and Alterity, Dordrecht: Springer.

Brooke, Roger (2015) Jung and Phenomenology, London and New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso.

         (2020) The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind, London and New York: Verso.

Chanter, Tina (2001) “Introduction,” In: Chanter, Tina (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Lévinas, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Guerlac, Suzanne (2006) Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John, et al., New York: Harper & Row Publishers.

Janicaud, Dominique (2000) “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” trans. Prusak, Bernard G., In: Janicaud, Dominique, et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, New York: Fordham University Press.

Large, William (2015) Lévinas’ ‘Totality and Infinity,’ London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Massey, Heath (2015) The Origin of Time: Heidegger and Bergson, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2012) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Landes, D. A., London and New York: Routledge.

Oliver, Kelly (2001) “Paternal Election and the Absent Father,” In: Chanter, Tina (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Lévinas, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Perpich, Diane (2001) “From the Caress to the Word: Transcendence and the Feminine in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas,” In: Chanter, Tina (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Lévinas, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Stanford, Stella (2002) “Lévinas, feminism and the feminine,” In: Critchley, Simon, and Bernasconi, Robert (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.