Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Non-Violence

In this book, Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani provides the first examination of the applicability of Emmanuel Levinas’ work to social and political movements.

Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani is a Women and Gender Studies Assistant Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga.

“Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Non-Violence is valuable in that it adds to a still limited amount of published work that tackles head on one of the greatest problems in Levinasian studies: the relation of face-to-face ethics to politics. The author develops an original argument that links Levinas’ concept of man’s ‘substitution’ and gratuitously infinite responsibility for his neighbour’s suffering to a politics of ‘justice’ via the idea of ‘non-violent ethico-political praxis.’”