In his refreshingly lucid study Origins of the Other, Samuel Moyn aptly characterizes Levinas's approach to ethics as "crypto-theological." By this term Moyn highlights Levinas's intrinsic ambivalence concerning the tension between his secular, phenomenological intentions and his covert eschatological aspirations. In response to the mood of profound cultural despair provoked by World War I, the 1920s witnessed a major theological revival. It is this phenomenon, Moyn contends, that formed the crucible for Levinas's distinctive approach to ethics.

One of the virtues of Moyn's book is that he discovers the origins of Levinas's notion of Otherness where few before him have thought to look. Previous commentators have assumed that the major catalyst for Levinas's thinly veiled theological ethics was Franz Rosenzweig's so-called New Thinking, epitomized by his 1921 classic The Star of Redemption. But Moyn points out that Levinas never read Rosenzweig until the mid-1930s. Secondly, whereas Rosenzweig insists that we can gain something akin to reliable theological "knowledge," Levinas's notion of the Other expressly shuns cognitive methods and pretensions. Instead, the face of the Other possesses the status of a revelation: It mandates a prediscursive, wholly transcendent ethical claim.

In order to decipher the "origins of the Other," Moyn suggests we examine instead the 1920s German Kierkegaard revival, as represented by Karl Barth's "dialectical theology." We know that Levinas avidly read Barth during the 1920s and '30s. In steadfast opposition to the secularizing vogue of historical biblical criticism, Barth reconceived divinity, in Moyn's words, as "qualitatively different from finite, everyday objects." As "Other," God is "'transcendent' and opposed to the immanent." As Moyn perceptively concludes: Despite the philosopher's manifold protestations to the contrary, "Levinas may never have given up the habit--the hankering for God's command that he merely internalized to the human realm--of theology."

Philosophically, Levinas has been accurately described as the "anti-Sartre," and it is easy to see why. Whereas Levinas's philosophy idealizes Otherness, Sartre's thought inherently mistrusts it. In Being and Nothingness the Other signifies little more than a limitation or obstacle to the freedom of the For-Itself. In Sartre's view, the Other's gaze is inherently objectifying. It seeks to turn the For-Itself, or consciousness, into an In-Itself, or something inert. The literary pinnacle of Sartre's suspicion of the Other is the play No Exit, where the realization dawns that "hell is other people." Levinas's anti-Sartrean animus helps to account for some strange philosophical moves on his part--to wit, the exaggerated glorification of Otherness.

One of the reasons behind Levinas's immense popularity in France has to do with his copious writings on Jewish themes. Traditionally the French conception of citizenship has been rigorously assimilationist and thus unreceptive to considerations of "difference." The classical statement of this view coincided with revolutionary debates during the 1790s over whether or not Jews should be recognized as citizens. As one delegate, Clermont Tonnerre, expressed it: "We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals." In other words: The Jews are welcome to join us as long as they leave behind their particularity as Jews.

In the post-1968 years, however, this sentiment began to change. As has often been remarked, many ex-'68ers gravitated from Mao to Moses. Latching on to their long-repressed Jewish origins was a way of providing meaning and orientation once the wave of left-wing revolutionary fervor had subsided. The most celebrated example was former Maoist student leader (and Sartre confidant) Benny Lévy, who abandoned revolutionary politics for orthodox Judaism. Suddenly, assimilated French Jews, following the lead of North African Sephardic immigrants who had previously lived in self-enclosed religious communities, began to feel comfortable openly avowing their Jewish identities. Given the persecutions their families had endured at the hands of the Vichy regime, they felt they were entitled to recognition, not just as citizens but also as Jews.

Paradoxically, the new spirit of "Jewish communitarianism" found support in Levinas's approach, which had managed successfully to straddle the fence between two very different cultural spheres: the world of French academic philosophy and that of Jewish religious traditions. For one of Levinas's claims to distinction as a Jewish thinker was that he broke with prior generations of assimilated Jewish scholars--from Moses Mendelssohn to Hermann Cohen--who tried to demonstrate the compatibility of Jewish learning with the canons of European secular thought. Instead, Levinas's uniqueness lay in his attempt, by recourse to phenomenology, to translate Old Testament ethical precepts directly into philosophy, while bypassing the Greek preoccupation with "first philosophy," or ontology. In this respect, his influence on a younger generation of Franco-Jewish intellectuals that had matured in the postwar years was inestimable. Both Benny Lévy (who died in 2003) and the omnipresent philosopher-essayist Alain Finkielkraut studied with Levinas. Lévy's final book, Être juif (Being Jewish), is a sustained engagement with Levinas's religious thought. Six years ago Lévy, Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy, in a tribute to their late maître, established an Institute for Levinas Studies in Jerusalem.

Still, Moyn's well-placed suspicion that Levinas never abandoned his original theological habitudes and longings raises some troubling questions about the uncritical veneration that has characterized the reception of his work. As with Heidegger, Levinas's bloated rhetorical mode suggests privileged access to the ultimate truths of Being and existence. But this discursive posture is hardly conducive to open debate. Philosophy advances by the critical discussion and examination of truth claims. Instead, Levinas's writing encourages an attitude of submissive adulation. Not surprisingly, most of the thousands of articles and monographs that have appeared on his work display a fawning exegetical reverence. It is as though one were dealing with Holy Writ or Scripture rather than a work of secular thought. Nor do Levinas's proclamations concerning the "aristocratism of true knowledge" and the "necessity for a secret thought" inspire confidence in the democratic potentials of his philosophy. The Levinas reception seems terminally frozen in a quasi-adolescent cheerleader mode. As Nietzsche recognized, "One repays a teacher poorly if one remains a disciple."

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