Although Levinas’s thinking has generated substantial attention for its emphasis on the irreducibility of alterity, an unconditional responsibility for others, and “ethics as first philosophy,” his accentuation of war and suffering, and hence “evil” in a capacious sense, as endemic to existence, has attracted less notice. In this paper, I explore the originality of Levinas’s reflections on evil in his essay “Transcendence and Evil” against the backdrop of his earlier identification of the “evil of being” and historical conceptions of evil as “privation of the Good” and theodicy. In shadowing the biblical Book of Job, Levinas’s insight into the “transcendence of evil,” with its tear in the fabric of being and disruption of subjectivity, represents, as explored in this paper, a striking departure from his previous considerations on evil and categorical rejection of theodicy, in its secular and theological forms, while nonetheless insisting on the redemptive breakthrough of the Good at the heart of darkness.

This article reconsiders the influence of Rosenzweig’s thought on Levinas’s work in the light of the captivity notebooks (Carnets de captivité), as well as the lectures given shortly after the war at the Collège philosophique. Levinas’s ongoing dealings with Rosenzweig are discussed in two ways: first, by analyzing the articles he explicitly dedicated to Rosenzweig and, second, by identifying elements of Rosenzweig’s thought in Levinas’s work that are not explicitly mentioned therein. By combining these two approaches, I show that Rosenzweig’s work offered Levinas an ontological narrative that contrasts with Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, and it motivated a concept of a new mode of transcendence linked to Judaism. Language, as spoken words produced face-to-face, plays a crucial role in this context: just as it opens up the mute Self into a loving Soul in The Star of Redemption, it is the face that speaks in Levinas, opening up the relationship to the Other and the “beyond of being.”

What is the relationship between prisons designed to lock people in and suburban fortresses designed to lock people out? Building on Jonathan Simon’s account of “homeowner citizenship,” I argue that the gated community is the structural counterpart to the prison in a neoliberal carceral state. Levinas’s account of the ambiguity of dwelling—as shelter for our constitutive relationality, as a site of mastery or possessive isolation, and as the opening of hospitality—helps to articulate what is at stake in homeowner citizenship, beyond the spectre of stranger danger: namely, my own capacity for murderous violence, and my investment in this violence through the occupation of territory and the accumulation of private property. Given the systemic nature of such investments, the meaning of hospitality in the carceral state is best expressed in abolitionist social movements like the Movement for Black Lives, which holds space for a radical restructuring of the world.

On 26 July 2016, Satoshi Uematsu murdered 19 and injured 26 at a caregiving facility in Sagamihara, Japan, making it the country’s worst mass killing since WWII. In this article, I offer an analysis of the Sagamihara 19 massacre. I draw on the work of Julia Kristeva and Emmanuel Levinas to argue that claims about disability experience are insufficient to justify normative projects. In short, disability is normatively ambiguous.

“The gift of bread from my mouth” serves as a byword for “Levinasian ethics,” the precise meaning of which is often taken for granted. It is not at all clear that a prescriptive ethics could ever be derived from these passages; it is also a hyperbole for responsibility. Discussion of this figure almost universally ignores the parallel, and explicitly ethical, discussion of Isaiah 58, where the breaking of bread represents the perplexity of hunger, the rejection of oppression, and the proximity of God. The breaking of bread is not a self-standing account of ethics but is paralleled by the ethics of the broken fast. The “gift of bread from my mouth” helps to explain the repeated references to fasting throughout Levinas’s authorship. The varying figures of the broken bread frame an ontological drama: sensibility, separation, proximity, and diachrony—and presses the sense that possession and the ego are ethically futile, as the alterity of hunger is proximal or “at the core” of the subject.

This article reads Levinas’s “And God Created Woman” in light of its socio-political context, Mai soixante-huit. It explores themes from his “Judaism and Revolution,” in which he reframed concepts of revolution, exegesis, the revolutionary, and human alienation. Following these themes, which run subtly through his Talmudic remarks on women and indirectly on feminism, I examine his arguments about a “signification beyond universality” and the fraught relationship between formal equity in gender relations and the practice of justice, as embodied by the Antigone-like Rizpah bath Aiah and analyzed in Levinas’s Talmudic reading “Toward the Other.” I summarize the Rabbinic debate about the meaning of an extra yod in the term often translated as “to create” in Genesis, turning to the significance of dissymmetry between the Hebrew names of “man” and “woman,” Ish and Isha. In light of this, Biblicist and psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony opens further insights into gender, naming, and identity.

This paper attends to Emmanuel Levinas’s criticism of the univocity doctrine as it pertains to Baruch Spinoza and in view of Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation. The analysis will have a narrow focus on univocity because it will exclusively treat the univocity of cause in Spinoza and its ethical and political implications. Narrowing the approach will illustrate the importance of the doctrine in Levinas’s minor engagements with the modern philosopher and its convergence with Deleuze’s project in Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy: namely, the univocal relation between Substance and the modes. Although both Levinas and Deleuze will converge on basic observations about the univocity of cause, they will depart at significant moments on the implications of the doctrine itself. The analysis will acknowledge Deleuze’s reflections on the Ethics, but it will focus on Levinas’s critique and indictment of Spinoza’s thought—that it eliminates singularity and that it is in itself a justification of perpetual war.