Guenther, Lisa. Review of Diane Perpich's THE ETHICS OF EMMANUEL LEVINAS. NDPR (February 2009).

Perpich, Diane. The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. This is a book that many readers and teachers of Levinas have been waiting for. It offers a clear, insightful explanation of Levinas' most basic concepts -- alterity, responsibility, the face -- while also challenging some common interpretations of these concepts and advancing an original, sophisticated reading of Levinas. As such, it provides an important resource for both new and experienced readers of Levinas. Perpich locates the greatest strength of Levinas' work in its articulation of the fragility of ethics, its frustrating ambiguity in the midst of a desire for absolute ethical imperatives. Levinas demonstrates both how important it is to cut through moral ambiguity and provide an absolute, indestructible basis for responsibility, and also how impossible it is to guarantee this command absolutely. On Perpich's reading, the uncertainty of ethical life, and the commitment to ethics in the midst of this uncertainty, is crucial to Levinas' project rather than destructive of it. The scholarship in this book is impressive. Perpich draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, carefully documenting the shifts in Levinas' thought through a reading of major works and less familiar essays, as well as untranslated secondary literature from French scholars such as Jacques Rolland, Gérard Bailhache and others. She brings a fresh, critical and utterly clear voice to the growing discussion of Levinas' work in the context of normative ethical and political theory. The style of analysis is both critical and constructive. Perpich is very attentive to the gaps in Levinas' texts: the missing arguments, the lack of sufficient ground for certain hyperbolic claims, the evasion of certain questions (such as whether the animal has a face). But she also seeks to provide the grounds, to make the arguments, and to raise the difficult but necessary questions to allow for a deeper appreciation and a wider application of Levinas' ethical approach. See, for example, the perceptive discussion of universality in relation to both Levinas and feminist ethics (pp. 135-40). . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15325.