Every significant writing project begins with some sort of anxiety. Perhaps about a philosophical problem, a matter of particular political or cultural urgency, or, as with the present project, concern about the fate of a thinker.

The origins of this project are really quite simple. It begins with a worry about Levinas scholarship, a worry that he, like so many others in the European tradition, labors with too much locality and too little interest in the transnational context of culture, politics, and, indeed, the whole of social reality. A worry that the religious dimensions of Levinas's work only condemn his insights to an even more insular world of ideas. A worry that his legacy might go the direction of nationalists and defenders of the myth of Europe and, more recently, Israel. These worries come from trends in scholarship, to be sure. They have to do with articles, books, conferences, and institutes, where the associations of a name with places on the conceptual and political map are formed. But these worries also come from the conflicted and conflicting aims of Levinasian theory. Levinas's work is caught between two very different, very tense aspirations. There is, on the one hand, the language of first philosophy, subjectivity-time-space-embodiment as such, and so on. Whatever the emphasis on the singular, Levinas is genuinely talking about the drama of the interhuman, how the intrigue of our lives with others structures the meaning of thinking and being at – with all due caveats in place – its very foundations.