Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility

"The book is straightforward and trustworthy. It does not engage in obscurantism or speak overmuch Levinasese; it does not misrepresent Levinas's ideas; and it engages with secondary sources extensively and generously. "—Reading Religion

"Cynthia D. Coe's book is a thoughtful, well-researched, and accessible contribution to the English-language scholarship on Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy."—Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Cynthia D. Coe's Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility enriches our understanding of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas without losing sight of the ethical demands that that philosophy makes on us. It is a remarkable accomplishment for which all readers of Levinas should be grateful."—Robert Bernasconi, author of The Provocation of Levinas

"This book demonstrates how important time is for Levinas's work by showing that many of his seemingly non-temporal concepts are caught up in how we live time. The claim that time has a traumatic ethical significance is integral to Levinas's conception of subjectivity, and Cynthia D. Coe, putting Levinas in dialogue with many of his interlocutors, deftly shows how this is Levinas's distinctive contribution to philosophy—as well as his challenge to the Western philosophical tradition."—Jill Stauffer, author of Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard

"Cynthia D. Coe extends Levinas's analysis of vulnerability, which he understands in highly embodied terms, into an exploration of the implications that such embodied responsibility has for our ways of thinking about mortality, gender, race, and animality. Coe never loses the subtlety and complexity of the notions involved, a pleasure to read."—Silvia Benso, editor of Levinas and the Ancients