One of the most bewildering points that Levinas makes concerns subjectivity and the self. He says that primordially the self or person is passive because it is responsible before anything else. First and foremost, I am summoned and called into question. In Kantian terminology, the self is heteronomous before it is autonomous. It is passive before it is active. Subjectivity is accusation, hostage, obsession, and the like. These features are likely to seem so strange that one can hardly grasp what they mean or even what they might mean. This chapter is our opportunity to discuss them and to show that they are extreme and provocative but not at all as bizarre and unintelligible as they first appear.

Shortly, we shall have to consider the story of how modern culture, at least from the seventeenth century, has come to enshrine the subject, the individual, the autonomous, free, rational self, as the fountainhead of knowledge, morality, politics, culture, and even religion. Levinas does not ignore or denigrate this self or this conception of the self as the autonomous, rational individual, but he does reconsider its most fundamental dimension, its essential character, and how that dimension reverberates throughout its existential and historical career. To be sure, he believes that this new understanding of the unique individual person as passive and responsible echoes from the ancient past, but in the modern world it is preempted by another view – modern, individualist, and powerful.