The paper seeks to establish a kinship between the philosophy of Levinas and the theology of liberation. In their separate domains, these two enterprises reveal to us a portrait of late, twentieth-century intellectual work which refuses to abandon eschatological urgency. Philosophy and theology may meet, outside of both of their own homes, on a journey toward the other, in ethics.

Emmanuel Levinas argued for the priority of the ethical - over the theoretical-Other, vis à vis the prevailing modern, ideatistic philosophies of totality. This essay argues that too facile a turn from epistemology to ethics, however, risks eviscerating the very role that theory - as “critical” - plays in the sustenance of the valuation of the Other. An altemative understanding of theory, the essay proposes, hinges on the negative dialectics of Adorno.

The subject is under siege. In many disciplines the self that modem thought established and fortified has fallen to critique. But while many explore the implications for epistemology, for literary theory, for psychology, or for history and social thought, few writers have pondered the question in terms of ethics. After all, ethics must rest on a subject, a person who makes choices and decides for various reasons to commit acts in one’s own name. l suggest that ethics can survive the fracturing, de-centering, deconstructing of the self? A selection of passages from Marcel and Levinas is offered, with commentary.

I aim here to confront texts of Levinas and Sartre in an attempt to rethink the relation of the poIitical to the ethical in the early eighties in France. The method is essentially to try to think a passage from one domain into the other without privileging poIitics over ethics or vice versa while uncovering their organic and dialectical interaction, a subject that an only be touched upon via the bridging metaphor of a Visage that can liberate oneself from the totalization of egoity. My purpose, thus, is not to confront Levinas and Sartre but to allow them to embark on a dialogue constructed around the paradigm of the question of the Other.