Kunz's book is a wonderful read without losing the thickness of Levinas's ideas. It answered the question I've struggled with for years, if you're happy and complete, why act? He makes a clear case for moving the center of existance off the ego and onto the other. We act because need in the face of the other calls us to act. In the face of that need we have no choice but to act, even if that act is to turn coldly from those in need.

He argues for a new psychology based not on the ego as the center of the world, but on the need of the other as the center of the world.

This book radically opened up my way of being with the ideas of Levinas, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

For over ten years I had been reading this book--attempting to grasp the vocabulary which is sometimes in French, (with no page of definitions) and sometimes in English. One's task is to first keep track of ideas presented in the first chapter, then with your deep and profound pre-knowledge of Levinas, Blanchot, and Bataille, you can try to ferret out what is the strange, echoing discussion all three of them had amongst and between their works. The premise is that they DID read each other and responded in their own works to each other, but only Libertson gained some intuition of what these correlations might be. An excellent effort, hard to understand, must love exotic French theory and Martinus Nijhoff books. European all the way.