In Levinas's case the difficulties were compounded by the hazards of biography. In many respects, his philosophy of "Otherness" reflects his own distinctive itinerary as a perennial outsider. As a youth, Levinas was displaced from his native Kovno by the upheavals surrounding World War I. His family relocated to Ukraine, where Levinas attended high school. But the Bolshevik Revolution, and the civil war that followed, made it impossible to remain. The Levinas family returned to a newly independent Lithuania, where they hoped at last to find tranquillity. But Lithuanian nationalism had set in, making things uncomfortable for Russian speakers like the Levinases. Thus, in 1923 the family moved again, this time to Strasbourg, the French city geographically closest to Kovno.

In 1923 Levinas enrolled at the University of Strasbourg; he completed a dissertation on Husserl in 1930. But instead of pursuing a university career, as his mentors had urged in view of his prodigious philosophical talents, he took a post with the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an organization charged with acculturating Eastern European Jews and defending Jewish minorities. During the late 1930s Levinas joined the French army. In 1940 his unit was captured during France's ignominious "strange defeat" at the hands of the German Wehrmacht. It was Levinas's misfortune to sit out the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp--yet another setback for his vocational aspirations as a philosopher--although for a foreign-born French Jew, things could have been much worse.

After the war, Levinas taught at the École Normale Israélite Orientale, a preparatory school for Jewish teachers. Only in 1961, the year he completed his thèse de doctorat, was he rewarded with a university position in the provinces, at the University of Poitiers. In 1973 Levinas, now 67, received a professorship at the Sorbonne--the pinnacle of French university life. Three years later, he retired.

If fame descended upon Levinas belatedly, when it did arrive, it came in spades. And although Levinas's prowess and achievements as a philosopher are considerable, the reasons for his success are circumstantial. For it was Levinas's philosophy that provided the much needed ethical dimension that had been so sorely lacking among the structuralists.

By the 1980s the structuralist wave had fallen upon hard times. The structuralists and their "poststructural" philosophical heirs, Foucault and Derrida, had wagered everything on a withering critique of "humanism," by which they meant any theory that placed "man" at its center. (In this context it is pertinent to note that one of Sartre's most widely read postwar texts bore the title "Existentialism Is a Humanism.") In The Order of Things Foucault famously prophesied that "man" would soon be effaced like a drawing in the sand at the edge of the sea. The clear implication was that in the aftermath of man's disappearance, we would be much better off. Yet during the 1970s and '80s French intellectuals, disillusioned with communism and beguiled by Eastern European dissidence, had rediscovered "human rights." At this point it became impossible to square the circle: One could not pose as a detractor of "humanism" and simultaneously sing the praises of "the rights of man."

The rejection of the antihumanist paradigm gained momentum when the full extent of Heidegger's pro-Nazi allegiance was revealed. For it was Heidegger's radical assault on Sartrean humanism that had set the tone and provided the ammunition for the subsequent structuralist attacks.

In his 1941 essay "Recollection in Metaphysics," Heidegger declaimed, "The history of Being is neither the history of man and of humanity, nor the history of the human relation to beings and to Being. The history of Being is Being itself and only Being." Five years later, in his 1946 "Letter on Humanism," which had been addressed to a French interlocutor, he claimed that the concept of "man" was a hindrance to anyone who wanted to understand the mysteries of Being. The "Letter," a manifesto of radical "anti-Sartrism," would in many respects become the foundational text of postwar French philosophy. For Heidegger's resolute anti-Cartesianism--his rejection of Descartes's cogito as the point of departure for doing philosophy--allowed French philosophers to escape the constrictions and limitations of their own indigenous intellectual traditions. In sum, it allowed French intellectuals to be un-French.

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