Abstract

The following paper traces the relevance of teaching and pedagogy in Levinas’s philosophy of transcendence and ethics. By turning to his philosophy of language—including his posthumously published lectures on the phenomenology of sound and the voice—this paper addresses some difficulties with the attempt to develop a philoso- phy of education departing from his work. Education appears to be the uniquely well-suited site for an ethical philosophy, and yet any claims about education and attempts to teach ethics risk hypocrisy as a structural possibility of transcendence and teaching.