At the heart of Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy lie two themes closely bound together; ethics and subjectivity. Both his formulation of ethics in terms of ontology, and understanding of subjectivity whereby absolute priority is granted to the Other, have had decisive influence on the work of eminent thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and, most profoundly, Maurice Blanchot. For both Levinas and Blanchot, language is the ethical ground par excellence, and Blanchot's creative repetition of Levinas' ideas is here followed through in detail across the themes of friendship, the opposition of speech to writing, the impersonal, in a way which, it is argued, allows a possible resolution to the tensions identified in Levinas' core philosophy. This is the first major comparative study of the two thinkers. Book jacket.