What does it mean to put the Other first – to enact the simple ‘after you!’ of politeness in which I remove myself from the center in order to clear space for the Other's movement and life – as a fully developed theory of knowledge, ethics, and politics? What does it mean to claim, as Levinas does, to have overturned the force and power of two and a half millennia of Western philosophy with what is weakest and most vulnerable? What can be done with a philosophy whose most generous reading puts everything on the most precarious foundations imaginable? That is, what does Levinas's work ultimately mean for philosophy?

Levinas's work has been received in a few different registers. There is, of course, first and foremost the astonishing power of ethical language and the evocation of the Other as the anchor of moral consciousness. Difference, for Levinas, is not simply a random or marginal exception to the general rules of experience. While the Other surely stands out as exceptional in the synthetic flow of egoic life, that exceptionality functions as a foundational claim, even as Levinas carefully distinguishes his sense of originary or foundational from the fantasies of the tradition.