ISSN 1918-7351 Volume 2 (2010) Thinking Transcendence with Levinas: From the Ethico-Religious to the Political and Beyond Jeffrey W. Robbins Emmanuel Levinas has been credited, or at least associated, with a number of so- called “turns” in contemporary thought. The first, which still remains the prevailing reading of Levinas and which is drawn primarily from his groundbreaking work Totality and Infinity, credits him for the “ethical turn” in contemporary philosophy by the priority he gives to “ethics as first philosophy.” To simplify a great deal, before Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and more broadly poststructuralist theory and deconstructive philosophy, were seen as largely nihilistic endeavors—that is, as simply negative thought procedures containing no fundamental commitments and contributing little to the positive efforts at determining meaning, fostering shared values, and clarifying a greater understanding of the good. After Levinas, however, it has been precisely this nihilistic narrative of deconstruction that has itself been deconstructed. This reversal is something that informs not only the reading of Derrida, deconstruction, and poststructuralism, but after the Levinasian ethical turn, even ethical theory itself must answer to the radical challenge issued by that of deconstruction and must made to account to the call of the Other. As Derrida puts it in his eulogy for Levinas, our thanks to Levinas is due at least in part for his entire recasting of the ethical, for with Levinas we are faced wit h an “ethics before and beyond ontology, the State, or politics, but also ethics beyond ethics.” 1 Or, as argued by Simon Critchley, the rupture marked by the before and after Levinas in the reading of Derrida marks “a third wave in the reception of deconstruction, beyond its literary and philosophical appropriations, one in which ethical—not to mention political—questions are uppermost.” 2 We will return to the question of Levinas and the political, and more specifically, the relation of the ethical to the political, in due course, but regarding Levinas’s recasting of the 1 Jacques Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 4. 2 Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 3.