ABSTRACT
Speaking about his friend Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas said that ‘he gave the impression of a man without opportunism’.1 The same could surely be said of Levinas himself. For most of his career he taught and worked in the shadow of others, in particular in the shadow of his French contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He took pleasure in the ‘new tone’ and ‘speculative power’2 of their work and watched with admiration as French existentialist phenomenology blossomed. Sartre had a ‘dynamism’ he admired and Merleau-Ponty especially ‘held my interest’.3 Jacques Derrida was typically content to regard phenomenology as an inheritance that could do without its two most famous French exponents. Levinas, by contrast, retained a genuine admiration for them, and his own work does not ignore their presence or contribution.
