Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas' textual practice is of daunting strangeness and complexity. One aspect troubling to many interpreters is his frequent reference to suffering and persecution. This dissertation traces these themes through Time and the Other, Totality and Infinity, and his late masterpiece, Otherwise than Being. It establishes this disturbing language as a key to his work---from the role suffering plays in revealing the possibility of a relationship with alterity, in Time and the Other, to Otherwise than Being where persecution effects a reversal of subjectivity , pushing subjectivity back into its otherwise. ;Essential as it is to the argument presented by the text, this language is also key to the ethical move which throws us out of the text. Understanding the arguments put before us, we find ourselves faced not with the more typically post-modern strategy of a denial of closure, but with a closure that we feel obligated to deny. The work achieves coherence and is nevertheless challenged---ethically, by the suffering of the Other. We are brought to a "diachronic reading"---a double reading setting up a restless oscillation in which the genuine coherence achieved by the text is challenged, not by its own failure, but from without. In the case of Otherwise than Being, this challenge is represented by the dedication, from outside the text proper haunting our every attempt to rest within an abstract, philosophical interpretation. The speaking of this challenge from the Other, brought by the persecuted to the world, occurs as prophecy---the only way, in the face of suffering, human solidarity can nonetheless be ethically proclaimed. ;Intertwined with our attempt to enact a diachronic reading is the question of theodicy; is suffering justified through the relationship between suffering and goodness? Again we see a progression through Levinas' work; as the language about suffering becomes increasingly severe, the question of theodicy becomes ever more pressing. With the diachronic reading, we see that the questioning of theodicy---of any claim of coherence established despite or out of suffering---is itself an example of the incursion of ethics, the in-breaking of the Good