Tom Wolfe in Back to Blood (BB) has breathed new life into the “emotion[ly] anesthetized” contemporary fiction by celebrating feeling, emotion, sensibility, and responsibility for the Other in the same way that Emanuel Levinas has revived ethics of sensibility in the twentieth century by recognizing sensibility as being more ethical towards the Other than those ethics found solely on pure reason. In this paper we argue that while Back to Blood is generally in keeping with Levinasian ethics of sensibility, it also challenges the limitations of Levinas’s approach and gets closer to Luce Irigaray’s ethics of Eros which is based on love and respect both for one’s self and the Other.
