About This Site
What this is
The Levinas Bookshelf (book.themodel.be/levinas/) is a book guide for people who want to reach Emmanuel Levinas — and for anyone who has opened one of his masterworks cold and been defeated by it. This English edition selects five titles currently available on amazon.com and presents them in a reading order that won't defeat you — from the accessible interviews of Ethics and Infinity, through a study and a reader, to the two masterworks, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. A Japanese edition is also maintained, alongside sister shops such as The Socrates Bookshelf and the general Philosophy Bookshelf.
The editorial room's settled experience is simple: get the first book wrong and people walk away from philosophy for good. Levinas is a special case of this. Arrive at a treatise without the framework of the Other, the face, totality and infinity, and his singular prose stops you at the threshold — long before the reward. That is why we treat the design of the reading order as the most important thing we do.
The one honesty note that shapes this site
Levinas is genuinely difficult, and the two masterworks are difficult even for trained readers. We do not pretend otherwise. Where a book is an accessible interview, a scholarly introduction, or an anthology, the review says exactly what it is and what role it can honestly play — a door, a map, a bridge — and it never dresses up a beginner's guide as the thing itself. The two treatises are marked Advanced, and we say plainly that reading them without the earlier books as footing is the usual road to giving up.
How books are chosen and rated
- Judgements about the works themselves rest on the editorial room's first-hand reading and bibliographic checking. Star ratings are our own; no Amazon customer reviews are reproduced.
- Where a book is an introduction, a study, or an anthology, the review says exactly what it is and what role it can honestly play. A guide is scaffolding, not the building — and we say so.
- All descriptions, summaries and reviews are written by us; no publisher copy is reproduced.
- We avoid verbatim quotation from the translations under review. Where we present Levinas's terms or the gist of a passage, we mark it as our own editorial summary rather than passing it off as a reproduction of a published translation.
- Cover images are jacket-style images of our own design and differ from the actual covers.
- Prices and availability change, so we do not print them; always check the Amazon product page.
Amazon link disclosure
As an Amazon Associate, this site (The Levinas Bookshelf) may earn from qualifying purchases.
Book links on this edition go to product pages on Amazon (amazon.com). If a purchase is made through them, this site may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Commissions never influence the ratings — recommending books you will actually finish, rather than books that merely sell, is in the end what serves readers best.
Privacy policy
This is a static site; no personal information is collected server-side. The browser's localStorage is used solely to count link clicks (to improve the ranking's accuracy); that data stays in your browser and is never transmitted. Once you follow a link to Amazon, Amazon.com's privacy policy applies.
Contact
For corrections and inquiries, please use the contact address on our sister site soqdoq.com.