A World Without Contours

This article argues that literature is the necessary foil to Emmanuel Levinas’s development of the category of religion, as the site of relation between the same and the other. The essay tracks Levinas’s dependence on literature to illustrate alterity, but also shows that literature functions as religion’s rival in Levinas’s thought. Playing the terms of religion, literature, and philosophy off one another, the article argues, Levinas was also making an interception into a larger post-World War II debate over which of philosophy’s competing discourses, literature or religion, would win the ascendant seat in the post-war context.