There are many reasons to raise critical questions about the relationship between the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and the wider intellectual reaches of colonialism. In fact, to begin, it might be worth musing over some interesting dates and their coincidences. The year Levinas published Existence and Existents (1947) and the year before Time and the Other comes into print (1948), the wide-circulation edition of Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land appears on the intellectual scene and Léopold Senghor publishes the famous anthology of ‘new black poetry,’ Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. Just after En découvrant, Frantz Fanon publishes Black Skin, White Masks and the very same year Levinas drops Totality and Infinity, his first magnum opus, Fanon publishes Wretched of the Earth. No doubt, Levinas wrote and lived in troubled and troubling times for France. At once the hypostasis of the subject and the volcanic force of the marvelous, at once the interruption of metaphysical totality and the violent confrontation with colonial totalization – what a curious collision-which-was-not-one of ideas. I find these publication occasions curious for the simple reason that, despite the books, voices, and movements exploding around him, Levinas seems utterly unaware of and unconcerned with the accusing face of the political.