This essay addresses itself I see as an element of irresponsibility in Levinas' thought. I will argue that, while it is generally assumed that Levinas' stress on the radical alterity of the other is respectful of difference, in fact Levinas leans towards a universalizing ethics that is not open being informed by the dissimilar other, and that, moreover, privileges a particular culture in an insufficiently critical, and therefore irresponsible, manner. These shortcomings in Levinas' approach the other who is different from oneself, I will also maintain, are not incidental. Rather, they point some difficulties at the very heart of Levinas' notion of the absolute alterity of the other. In light of these difficulties, I will suggest that, where the issue is responsibility towards the specific difference of the other, this responsibility is better served by a model of dialogue involving an interplay of alterity and recognition, a dialogue which always supposes the relative, rather than absolute, alterity of the other. A common interpretation of Levinas' teachings on alterity supposes that Levinas' account provides an alternative the sort of that reduces the other the same. Against all such violent forms of tolerance, it is sometimes suggested, Levinas proposes a respect for the Other that maintains him in his otherness, where otherness includes dissimilarities. Consequently, his writings are thought promote an ethics which does not base moral obligation upon the possibility of recognizing a like identity. An article by A. T. Nuyen, entitled Trouble with Tolerance, provides. a good example of this reading of Levinas. Nuyen claims that the modernist and humanist ideal of tolerance is predicated on understanding the other. It therefore focuses on similarities, encouraging us to think that those who differ from us racially, sexually, culturally are `really the same as us.'2 The result is that anything that does not fit the tolerated identity is either forced conform or eliminated. According Nuyen, what is needed is an ethics that teaches us welcome the other not as `one of us,' oVe of the same, but as the source of irritation. He believes that Levinas offers precisely such an ethics, one that respects differences and preserves alterity. Jerome A. Miller, in Intelligibility and the Ethical, confirms the above interpretation of Levinas.5 He argues that, given a certain model of intelligibility, achieving an understanding of the other, the stranger, requires translating this stranger terms and patterns of meaning that are already intelligible us.' Levinas, Miller suggests, makes us aware that, on this model of intelligibility, to render the foreign intelligible we apparently have cognitively appropriate her, colonize her, make her over into something that is finally indistinguishable from is already our own.7 This procedure, with its violent struggle for appropriation, is a form of war. By pointing out how attempts know the other always involve such violence, Levinas' critique places us before the following set of alternatives: Either we make the Other intelligible us by homologizing her that with which we are already familiar, or we let the Other be in her radical Otherness and do not try understand her: either intelligibility through violence or a peace that does not only surpass all understanding but suspends it:' Miller's use of the feminine pronoun in these remarks clearly implies that Levinas' account of alterity has positive implications for feminism, which one would then expect be reflected in Levinas' treatment of the feminine other in the texts where he broaches this theme. It is difficult, however, reconcile such interpretations of Levinas with certain remarks made by him, both in interviews and in published works, remarks that appear be very much at odds with the view that Levinas embraces and promotes an openness is foreign. …