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How might one criticize the work of Emmanuel Levinas, postmodern ethical philosopher and Talmudic scholar? No one does it very well, except perhaps Jacques Derrida. Could a psychoanalytic perspective help, or would it be an alien imposition from another intellectual world? It depends on the psychoanalytic perspective.
Abstract and evocative, writing in what can only be described as the language of prophecy, Levinas has become everything to everyone. We pretend we get it, writing in much the same style, so as to say whatever we wanted to say in the first place. The Levinas Effect it has been called, the ability of Levinas' texts to say anything the reader wants to hear, so that Levinas becomes a deconstructionist, theologian or proto-feminist, or even the reconciler of postmodern ethics and rabbinic Judaism.1 Even those who disagree with Levinas generally criticize him from within the framework of his project, sharing his assumptions while trying to make Levinas more Levinassian (Davis 1996, 140).
What is lacking is criticism of Levinas' assumptions, probably because there seems to be nowhere outside Levinas' assumptions to stand, except in another land across an ocean of incomprehension. Like so many great thinkers, Levinas has created a world so comprehensive that the only choice seems to live in Levinas land, or leave it for another, a land so different they share not even a lingua franca. But all lands have things in common.
One is motherhood, a leading trope in Levinas, one of the ways in which he characterizes what he means by our infinite responsibility to the other.