Levinas and the history of philosophy

ENLevinas has sometimes been reproached for a certain laxness toward the history of philosophy. By dint of denouncing, as the central thread of this long history, the persistence or recurrence of an ambition to totalization, he would have failed to recognize the diversity of steps articulated along its course, thus ceding to the very thing he placed in question — the prestige of the same — to the detriment of the alterity of the other. I propose to submit this alleged failure to some examination.