Taking as its guiding thread the theme of genealogy, the book gives a broadly chronological and impressively manageable presentation of the whole sweep of Levinas's work. Balanced and finely grained, Llewelyn confronts questions of method, Heidegger, phenomenology, the theme of sensibility, religion, enjoyment, femininity, eros, justice and the political. The book reaches a stunning climax in a series of chapters that give a hesitant but tolerant discussion of the question of God in Levinas, the relation to Levinasian ethics to Nietzschean genealogy, and an extraordinary discussion of metaphor that leads into a wholly original analysis of Levinas's poetics and metaphorics.