ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, Introducing Levinas, proceeds in a manner that is performative of the imperatives attendant on his philosophy. Hence, it does not provide a (mere) listing of biographical dates or facts, or a focused, linear narrative of the intellectual and scholarly trajectory, but asks first what it means to introduce or present someone to another. The chapter poses pertinent questions about the relationship of the person to the work, about the social, cultural, and historical pressures on the person and their work, and about our responsibilities towards those we introduce or present to others in their absence. As such, the chapter attempts to demonstrate some of the philosophical issues Levinas grapples with in his work without necessarily giving conceptual or philosophical terms and names to those issues. The intent is to tell a story of Levinas’s life and surround, his work and his times, his loves and his disappointments, in a way that involves the reader affectively and by sensibility to the extent that it also does the cognitive and reasoned intellectual.
