A book, even a fragmentary one, has a center which attracts it. This center is not fixed, but is displaced by the pressure of the book and circumstances of its composition. Yet it is also a fixed center which, if it is genuine, displaced itself, while remaining the same and becoming always more hidden, more uncertain and more imperious.

But the essence of literature is precisely to evade any essential characterization, any affirmation which would stabilize or even realize it: it is never already there, it is always to be rediscovered or reinvented. It is never even certain that the words ‘literature’ or ‘art’ correspond to anything real, anything possible, or anything important.

In Emmanuel Levinas’s book – where, it seems to me, philosophy in our time has never spoken in a more sober manner, putting back into question, as we must, our ways of thinking and even our facile reverence for ontology – we are called upon to become responsible for what philosophy essentially is, by entertaining precisely the idea of the Other in all its radiance and in the infinite exigency that are proper to it, that is to say, the relation with the [other]. It is as though, there were here a new departure in philosophy and a leap that it, and we ourselves, were urged to accomplish.