the BORG sent me this in email, it's pretty "heavy":

"Emanuelis Levinas (later adapted to French orthography as Emmanuel
Lévinas) received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania. After
WWII, he studied the Talmud under the enigmatic "Monsieur Chouchani,"
whose influence he acknowledged only late in his life, without giving
all the credit due. The Torah taught by Levinas is basically the Torah
he learned with Monsieur Chouchani.

Lévinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in
1924, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French
philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University
to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met
Martin Heidegger. Lévinas became one of the very first French
intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by
translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their
ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of
Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and
En Découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.

According to his New York Times obituary, Lévinas came to regret his
enthusiasm for Heidegger, because of the latter's Nazism. During a
lecture on forgiveness, Lévinas stated "One can forgive many Germans,
but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult
to forgive Heidegger."[1]

After earning his doctorate Lévinas taught at a private Jewish High
School in Paris, the École Normale Israélite Orientale, eventually
becoming its director. He began teaching at the University of Poitiers
in 1961, at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in 1967,
and at the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He was
also a Professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals
surrounding Jean Wahl as a leading French thinker. His work is based
on the ethics of the Other or, in Lévinas' terms, on "ethics as first
philosophy." For Lévinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made
into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics
(which Lévinas called "ontology"). Lévinas prefers to think of
philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the
literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics
becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where
ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of
responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth."

Lévinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the
encounter with the Other. For Lévinas, the irreducible relation, the
epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a
privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and
distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself
in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial
phenomenon of gentleness."[2]. At the same time, the revelation of the
face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know
one's freedom, to affirm or deny. One instantly recognizes the
transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an
attempt to take hold of this otherness.

In Lévinas' later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued
that our responsibility for-the-other was already rooted within our
subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the
preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the
highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."[3]
This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence
(chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Lévinas maintained that
subjectivity was formed in and through our subjected-ness to the
other. In this way, his effort was not to move away from traditional
attempts to locate the other within subjectivity (this he agrees
with), so much as his view was that subjectivity was primordially
ethical and not theoretical. That is to say, our responsibility for-
the-other was not a derivative feature of our subjectivity; instead,
obligation founds our subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a
meaningful direction and orientation. Lévinas' thesis "ethics is first
philosophy", then, means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of
knowledge is but a secondary feature of a more basic ethical duty to-
the-other.

The elderly Lévinas was a distinguished French public intellectual,
whose books reportedly sold well. He had a major impact on the young
Jacques Derrida, a fellow French Jew whose seminal Writing and
Difference contains an essay, "Violence and Metaphysics," on Lévinas.
Derrida also delivered a eulogy at Lévinas' funeral, later published
as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of
Levinas's moral philosophy. Here, Derrida followed Bracha L.
Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and
transformed his own earlier reading of this subject accordingly"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_L%%C3%%A9vinas

"It was mainly during the fifties that Levinas began to work out a
highly original philosophy of ethics with the aim of going beyond the
ethically neutral tradition of ontology. Levinas's first magnum opus,
Totality and Infinity (1961), influenced in part by the dialogical
philosophies of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, sought to
accomplish this departure through an analysis of the "face-to-face"
relation with the Other. At the center of the work is the claim that
the Other is not knowable, but calls into question and challenges the
complacency of the self through Desire, language, and the concern for
justice. This claim and others were further elaborated in Levinas's
second magnum opus, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), an
immensely challenging and sophisticated work that seeks to push
philosophical intelligibility to the limit in an effort to lessen the
inevitable concessions made to ontology and the tradition. It is this
work that is generally considered Levinas's most important
contribution to the contemporary debate surrounding the closure of
metaphysical discourse, much commented upon by Jacques Derrida, for
example."

http://home.pacbell.net/atterton/levinas/

ok i lied. (the BORG did not email me this) i do that often. but i
probably lie less than lots of other people do.

HTH.