Totality and Infinity at 50. Edited By ScottDavidson and DianePerpich. (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 310. Price £21.99 pb.)

Abstract

Scott Davidson and Diane Perpich set high standards for the assessment of this volume. Fifty years after its publication in 1961, Levinas's Totality and Infinity is going through a ‘midlife crisis’. Scholarship on Levinas ‘sometimes seems to do little more than plow familiar terrain, remaining stuck in the rut of well‐worn interpretations and overused phrases’. One response to a midlife crisis is to exchange one's established partner for a younger model. But the editors do not recommend this solution to the ‘dull routine’ into which our relationship with Levinas has fallen. They believe that the essays they have collected will pep up our relationship with him by venturing ‘along unexplored pathways’ (p. 5). Other thinkers are introduced into the ménage – Karl Marx (by Asher Horowitz in ‘All that is holy is profaned: Levinas and Marx on the Social Relation’), Stanley Cavell (by Michael L. Morgan in ‘Emmanuel Levinas as a Philosopher of the Ordinary’), and Édouard Glissant (by John Drabinski in ‘Future Interval: On Levinas and Glissant’) ‐ but our dalliance with them will serve to reinforce, rather than diminish, our loyalty to Levinas.