| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Samuel Moyn. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 268. $29.95.
In the 1970s, concomitant with the rise of poststructuralism and the priority this wide-ranging theoretical approach placed on "the Other," Emmanuel Levinas was belatedly consecrated as one of the great moral thinkers of the twentieth century. Samuel Moyn's text is a careful archaeology of the painstaking process of the transformations in Levinas's oeuvre from his enthrallment with Heideggerian ontology to his celebrated affirmation of the primacy of ethics and "the Other" as constitutive of the self and society. Moyn's rigorous, learned, and lucidly written work takes the reader on a breathtaking foray into interwar German discussions of philosophy and theology, reorienting the scholarship on Levinas by suggesting that this iconic figure of French and Jewish thought was more influenced by Protestant thinkers than by his Jewish upbringing or the Holocaust in formulating his widely resonant conception of "the Other."	1
Written in the style of a mystery, Moyn's book unearths the genesis of the history of the concept and theme of "the Other" in the arcane discourse of twentieth-century post-Kantian philosophy and theology, which he explains in clear but nonreductive terms. Doing so, he debunks the myth of Levinas's primal Jewishness as the source of his insistence on ethics as first philosophy. Moyn reveals instead "an orthodox Heideggerian and ardent disciple of the great German philosopher" (p. 92) whose itinerary was halted by his master's enthusiasm for the Führer and who found in the primarily Protestant theological debates of interwar Germany a means to transcend the limits he came to apprehend in Heidegger's nonetheless brilliant critique of the Western philosophical tradition, especially the ways in which it reified the autonomous, rational subject as the measure of all things.	. . .

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