Valerie asked:

I have to write a paper on Emmanuel Levinas. I am reading his book Entre Nous and I am having a
hard time with it. I have been searching the net for a review of this book in order to get a better
understanding of it and I have yet to find a site that has one. If you could possibly tell me a little about
the book so I can understand it better it would be greatly appreciated.

Entre Nous is a late collection of essays by Levinas and some interviews with him. It is not a book of
which one can say, "it is about this." The essays have various themes and topics (suffering, love,
religion, culture, justice, human rights) — all driven, of course, by Levinasian themes.

The best thing to do would be to look into an introduction to Levinas in order to get a handle on his
questions and their contexts. Terry Veling, a professor with a good knowledge of Levinas, has
recently written a straight-forward and authoritative article entitled "Facing Me" for the Melbourne
Age.Here is an extract:

According to Levinas, we experience the transcendence of life primarily in the face of the human
person. Every face we encounter is a face of otherness. Every face says, "I am other to you." Every
face says, "I am not you." Every face says: "Don't kill me, don't absorb me into your world, don't
obliterate me by making me the same as you. I am other. I am different. I am not you."

The face of the other breaks into my world and calls out to me. I am not an I unto myself, but an I
standing before the other. The other calls forth my response, commands my attention, refuses to be
ignored, makes a claim on my existence, tells me I am responsible. And this always. I will never be
freed from the face of the other. So much so, that we are never released from the other's speaking to
us and calling forth our response. As the haunting phrase of Matthew's gospel says, "the poor you will
always have with you" (26:11). And as Levinas says, "it is impossible to evade the appeal of the
neighbour, to move away." The human person "faces" me, and this "toward me" is both a profound
appeal against my indifference to your naked vulnerability, and an accusation that prohibits my
violence toward you.

"Being faced" means finding ourselves faced by a continual requirement of responsibility to and for
the other. Even a casual reflection on our lives will reveal how bound we are to others, how constantly
we are beset by the demands of obligation and the requirements of love - to family and friends, to
those we work with, to neighbours and strangers, to those in our society whom we do not know yet
whose claim on our lives we feel nevertheless.

This is a simple and yet increasingly stunning thought for me. The face of the human person, those
that I encounter every single waking day of my life - on buses and trains, in the streets, at work, on
television - everywhere, everyday, the "other" is before me, facing me. Perhaps this is what is meant
when the biblical tradition says that humanity is made in the "image of God"...

Matthew Del Nevo

http://www.sicetnon.com