In Ethical Peace

"One may wonder whether one should not construe the ideal of truth itself- which no European can gainsay- already as subordinate to an ideal of peace that, older than that of knowledge, will but open itself to the call of truth; one may wonder whether knowledge itself and the politics governing history do not find their proper place in already responding to the requirement of peace and let themselves be guided by the requirement. But peace in this case will no longer be reducible to a simple confirmation of human identity in its substantiality, anchored in itself, in its identity of I. I will no longer be peace in conformity with the ideal of the unity of One which all alterity disturbs."

"Peace in relation to alterity, irreducible to a common genus in which, already contained in a logical community, it would be only a relative activity. Peace thus independent of all appurtenance to a system, irreducible to a totality and as if refractory to synthesis. The project of a peace different from the political peace discussed above. An ethical relation that would thus not be a simple deficiency or privation of the One reduced to the multiplicity of individuals in the extension of the genus! Here, on the contrary, in ethical peace, a relation to the inassimilable other the irreducible other, the unique other. Only the unique is irreducible and absolutely other!

But the uniqueness of the unique is the uniqueness of the beloved. The uniqueness of the unique signifies love. Hence peace as love."

-Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence