ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 addresses the ethical procedure in a reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought, highlighting the specificity of the ethical treatment of alterity in comparison with the universalist orientation of politics. Whereas politics affirms universal axioms of freedom, equality and community, thereby subverting the immanent orders of worlds and opening them to the possibility of transformation, the ethical procedure responds to the singular alterity that overflows any possible order of the world. If ethics consists in responsibility to the other, politics rather concerns the production of the same, i.e. the leveling of worldly orders to maximize freedom, equality and community within them.
