Abstract

Chanter’s book offers a wide array of articles assessing whether Levinas’s thoughts about the feminine and otherness hold any promise for feminist approaches in philosophy. Setting the tone for the book, Chanter’s introduction begins by charting the parameters of a controversial debate surrounding Levinas’s writings. As a launching pad, Chanter employs de Beauvoir’s well-known footnote about Levinas’s treatment of the feminine, noting how many of the commentators’ problematize de Beauvoir’s interpretation of Levinas’s early writings. De Beauvoir chastises Levinas for defining women against the backdrop of men such that the female sex seems derivative, secondary. Woman, writes de Beauvoir, “is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential. He’s the Subject, he is the Absolute—She is the Other”. As most of the contributors to this volume reveal, Levinas’s writings are more complicated than de Beauvoir intimates. Because she fails to place Levinas’s comments in the context of his overall framework, de Beauvoir neglects to recognize that Levinas’s ideas about the feminine disturb and call into question the primacy accorded to patriarchal visions of totality connected with a “virile” and conquering masculine ego. Further, Levinas refuses to define the feminine vis-à-vis masculinity. Far from “reducing women to replicas of men”, Levinas highlights that the feminine is not a complement to the masculine, nor is it comparable to it under a unifying scheme which could judge it as inferior.