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“... Jean-Marie Benoist, Edmond Jabès, Joseph Riddel, Michel Servière, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman and Emmanuel Levinas. Six of the pieces are published here in English for the first time. The editors, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, are sensitive to what might be ‘impolitic’ or ‘morbid’ about such a collection, but their introduction amply and ...”

“... and a host of others, including Edmund Jabès (1991), Louis Marin (1992), Sarah Kofman (1994), Emmanuel Levinas (1995) and Jean-François Lyotard (1998). In the last of these essays, for Lyotard, it is not his own death that preoccupies him, but rather his ‘debts’. These are authors that he could not do without, ones with and through whom he ...”

“... it must have been heaven. And one of the lucky ones was a 22-year-old Jew from Lithuania called Emmanuel Levinas. He had been born in 1906 – which made him just six months younger than Sartre – and after spending his youth in the Ukraine became a student in Strasbourg, where he gained a licence in philosophy, adopted French as his first ...”

“... of her chief complaints after he has gone is that he has taken with him her copies of the works of Emmanuel Levinas. She herself almost has an affair with a former student, but manages not to, and becomes, perhaps, the person she used to think she was, only more human. Huppert gets all this across in amazing ways, and Hansen-Løve backs her up with some ...”

“... Nibelungenlied, torture manuals and scholarly works on clergy clothing – she doesn’t mention Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, the face speaks; it ‘renders possible and begins all discourse’. ‘The first word of the face,’ he says, is ‘Thou shalt not Kill.’ It’s always easier to ignore a ...”

“... of this conviction. With essays by Derrida, Etienne Balibar, Luce Irigaray, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze, this book both established the distinctly French provenance of the dead-subject argument and, in characteristically French fashion, ‘put into question’ that argument itself by implying that another ‘who’, rather ...”

“... Jews. It is significant that both authors should include in their intellectual genealogy the late Emmanuel Lévinas, who first introduced Judaism into French philosophical discourse. What does it mean to be Jewish in France today? It cannot simply involve going back to the old model of the ‘Israelite’ who conscientiously subscribed to Napoleon’s ‘Let ...”

“... he can’t follow parts of some of the books he annotates, books such as Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas, but that he is sometimes able to respond to particular sentences in the parts that defeat him. The admission is unusual, and endearing. I am unable, as it happens, to follow some of his annotations – to persuade myself, for instance, that ...”

“... setting them up for combat is itself an act of violence. I’m reminded of an essay in which Emmanuel Levinas says that Hegel’s praise of the sense of sight for fostering an ungrasping sense of life is specious: because sight, in Hegel’s account of it, is the mere abstraction of seeing. The solitude of a mute glance upon the object, while it can ...”

“... had been too naive – too anxious to come to Paris to meet Sartre, I reflected. There was talk of Emmanuel Levinas being involved, but, like the Egyptian intellectuals whom we’d been promised, he never showed up. In the meantime all our discussions were being recorded and were subsequently published in a special issue of Les Temps modernes (September ...”

“... His earliest writings were on 20th-century French intellectual history: erudite studies of Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Pierre Vidal-Naquet. But he always had an interest in foreign policy as actually practised and in 1999, while still a graduate student, he interned at Clinton’s National Security Council, beguiled by the ...”

“... their gods and sacrifice to their gods’. There is an ironic Midrashic commentary, mentioned by Emmanuel Levinas in Nine Talmudic Readings (1990), in which the Talmudists placed demons – spirits without bodies – inside Noah’s Ark. ‘These are the tempters of postdiluvian civilisation,’ ...”

“... insistence that ‘you can think only in the language of the other,’ a notion he borrowed from Emmanuel Levinas, was an implicit critique of Heidegger’s belief that ‘you can think only in your language, your own language.’ But deconstruction also owed a lot to Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, and Derrida was prickly when critics put it to ...”