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As anyone who has tried to find their way through Levinas's texts will remember, these texts are like a moving mine-field. What disconcerts the reader is not just that they proceed "with the infinite insistence of waves on a beach", as Derrida remarked, and therefore would have less of a "treatise" than of a "work of art" in which each returning wave, as it recapitulates itself "also infinitely renews and enriches itself". The problem is rather that although all of these waves look alike and are often describedby Levinas with the same word, they are in fact very different. Overlooking these differences can be fatal; it will inevitably mean that one finds oneself caught up in the midst of the intrigue of what Levinas calls"the infinite'at the very moment that one thinks one has finally found an exit. Derrida, as we shall see in our next chapter, was perhaps amongst the first to fall prey to this illusion. But he certainly wasn't the last. Indeed, it would seem as if a whole generation of Levinas readers lost their nerve well before he did. These readers think that the plot — which is but another word for"intrigue'behind Levinas's philosophy is unnecessarily complex and, in fact, willingly confused. They doubt that Levinas is justified in using the same word — "l'infini" — to refer to both God and the Good and they suspect him of smuggling in an "ethico-metaphysical" agenda into his "quasi- phenomenological descriptions of radical alterity"². They think that we can have these descriptions without the "non-human back up" which Levinas

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-4467-4_10

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