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Totalité et infini: Essai sur l'extériorité
« On conviendra aisément qu'il importe au plus haut point de savoir si l'on n'est pas dupe de la morale. La lucidité - ouverture de l'esprit sur le vrai - ne consiste-t-elle pas à entrevoir la possibilité permanente de la guerre ? L'état de guerre suspend la morale ; il dépouille les institutions et les obligations éternelles de leur éternité et, dès lors, annule, dans le provisoire, les inconditionnels impératifs. Il projette d'avance son ombre sur les actes des hommes. La guerre ne se range pas seulement - comme la plus grande - parmi les épreuves dont vit la morale. Elle la rend dérisoire. »Texte décisif, Totalité et infini figure parmi les oeuvres majeures de la philosophie du xxe siècle.
352 pages, Pocket Book
First published January 1, 1961
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About the author
Emmanuel Levinas
148 books404 followersEmanuelis Levinas (later adapted to French orthography as Emmanuel Levinas) received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania. After WWII, he studied the Talmud under the enigmatic "Monsieur Chouchani", whose influence he acknowledged only late in his life.
Levinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in 1924, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met Martin Heidegger. Levinas became one of the very first French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
According to his obituary in New York Times,[1] Levinas came to regret his enthusiasm for Heidegger, because of the latter's affinity for the Nazis. During a lecture on forgiveness, Levinas stated "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."[2]
After earning his doctorate Levinas taught at a private Jewish High School in Paris, the École Normale Israélite Orientale, eventually becoming its director. He began teaching at the University of Poitiers in 1961, at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in 1967, and at the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He was also a Professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. In 1989 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy.
Among his most famous students is Rabbi Baruch Garzon from Tetouan (Morocco), who learnt Philosophy with Levinas at the Sorbonne and later went on to become one of the most important Rabbis of the Spanish-speaking world.
In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals surrounding Jean Wahl as a leading French thinker. His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas' terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (which Lévinas called "ontology"). Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth".
Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."[3]. At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one's freedom, to affirm or deny.[4] One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of this otherness.
In Levinas's later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued that our responsibility for the other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."[5] This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Levinas maintai
Levinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in 1924, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met Martin Heidegger. Levinas became one of the very first French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
According to his obituary in New York Times,[1] Levinas came to regret his enthusiasm for Heidegger, because of the latter's affinity for the Nazis. During a lecture on forgiveness, Levinas stated "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."[2]
After earning his doctorate Levinas taught at a private Jewish High School in Paris, the École Normale Israélite Orientale, eventually becoming its director. He began teaching at the University of Poitiers in 1961, at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in 1967, and at the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He was also a Professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. In 1989 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy.
Among his most famous students is Rabbi Baruch Garzon from Tetouan (Morocco), who learnt Philosophy with Levinas at the Sorbonne and later went on to become one of the most important Rabbis of the Spanish-speaking world.
In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals surrounding Jean Wahl as a leading French thinker. His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas' terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (which Lévinas called "ontology"). Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth".
Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."[3]. At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one's freedom, to affirm or deny.[4] One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of this otherness.
In Levinas's later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued that our responsibility for the other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."[5] This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Levinas maintai
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January 12, 2018
Altering the very first sentence of this extraordinary and highly original book, I quote: "Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by freedom." I have, of course, replaced the word "freedom" for "morality." In altering the sentence, however, as I hope to show, I have not altered the central theme of the book (first published in French in 1961). This is so, not because morality and freedom are interchangeable, as many maintain, but, quite the contrary, because in questioning freedom, Levinas addresses morality. Understanding the role of freedom in Levinas might be one of the keys to understanding this complex, subtle, and very difficult (to understand) post modern philosopher, who constantly invokes Plato and Descartes throughout this book as well as Abraham (who departs his home never to return) in contrast to Ulysses (or Odysseus who goes on adventures only on the way home).
For centuries philosophers have debated as to whether we are free or not; and if we are, as to what freedom might mean. Levinas asks however, perhaps for the first time, whether or not freedom is valid or justified; and if it is, how so. In Levinas freedom is never negated but radically questioned and transformed, like many other philosophic terms he employs.
To examine freedom, he says, is to "trac[e] back to what precedes freedom" (Totality And Infinity (TI) 85). The movement of tracing freedom back to the prior condition, the movement of a "critique" which he says is "the essence of knowing" (85), leads to the critique of the same and to (the primacy of) the Other. To critique freedom is to recognize that knowledge does not begin with the 'I think,' from the sovereign positioning of the I that stakes a claim (as if standing erect on a land all alone, all by himself, overlooking the horizon for his exploit) but from the Other, or more precisely, in one's relationship to the Other, the relationship which Levinas describes in various terms throughout the book as face, teaching, language, metaphysics, ethics, and, most importantly, as the idea of the infinite. These terms are, of course, from the common coinage in philosophy, except for the term "face." But what he means by them is highly unorthodox and original, if not provocative. After all, he did say later: "How can such a research be undertaken without introducing some barbarisms in the language of philosophy?" (Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence (1974), 178).
A life of an ego, the I, is freedom in enjoyment (happiness), labor, and dwelling. It is a life lived however in dependency in separation or independence (Section II). Life is always already a transcendence. No totality or system can reduce it to an integrated whole or unity. It cannot be reduced to pragmatic use or to a numeric unit within the vast system of commerce, industry, administration, or history. The self is already infected by that which cracks open the totality, by the interiority or unicity that opens to exteriority, by that which remains irreducible to a system, to a network of significations, or to a horizon (Husserl) or to a world (Heidegger). Levinas thus proposes a fundamentally and radically different ontology and analysis of being in contrast to and against his two great mentors, Husserl and Heidegger, while still heavily relying on their language and method (i.e., admittedly on Husserl's phenomenology). (Levinas, who sat in Husserl's last class he taught before retiring, introduced Husserl in France, which Derrida in his tribute to Levinas (Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas) describes as thus having caused an axiomatic change in French philosophy.)
But what Levinas endeavors to say in the book moves beyond ontology and its method, daring the whole western philosophic tradition that holds: 'Not to philosophize is still to philosophize' -- the phrase attributed (though controversially and doubtfully) to Aristotle and taken up by Derrida in his strategic opposition to Levinas. See Levinas's God and Philosophy in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings and Derrida's Violence and Metaphysics in Writing and Difference.
In any event, returning to our theme, freedom in relationship to the Other reveals itself as arbitrary and violent--that is, unjustified. How so?
The argument is more succinctly stated in his later work, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence (OB, 1974), where Levinas says, paraphrasing Hobbes, that being is imperialistic and as such is at war with one another: "Being's interest takes dramatic form in egoisms struggling with one another, each against all, in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another and are thus together." OB 4. Being's move (geste d'être) or its essence is "interesse" or "interested," he says (Id.), as a predator is interested in the prey in the evolutionary scheme of natural selection. The impulse of being or essence is to "fill[..] up every interval of nothingness which would interrupt its exercise." Id. Borrowing from Spinoza, Levinas coins the impulse: conatus essendi. (See Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, Part III, Proposition 6: “Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.” Proof: […] it opposes everything that can annul its existence…; and thus, as far as it can and as far as it is in itself, it endeavors to persist in its own being.” Proposition 7: “The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.”
(With the term essence and its reference to being as different form beings, to Sein as distinguished from Seiendes, to esse as distinguished from ens; and with its reference to "eidos, eidetic, eidetically, or nature, quiddity, fundamental, etc" (OB xli), Levinas indicts the entire western philosophy of being as imperialistic and violent. But, following Plato, he seeks to move beyond being, toward the Good which, according to Plato, is said to lie beyond being exceeding in dignity and power. IT 102, 103; The Republic, 509d.)
That conatus essendi or the impulse of being is freedom is already anticipated in the following sentences found in Totality And Infinity: “the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other” (TI 45); the impulse “to maintain oneself against the other, despite every relation with the other to ensure the autarchy of an I” (TI 46); or more sweepingly, “the determination of the other by the same” (TI 85); or “Every being is an exercise of being” (TI 85/112); or simply, the “imperialism of the same” (TI 87); or “This imperialism of the same is the whole essence of freedom” (TI 87). Freedom is conatus essendi, the very impulse of being to maintain itself and to persist in itself in its own being, negating the other and the otherness of the other. But is freedom --“the virility of a free ability-to-be” (Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-Of-The-Other, 207)--justified?
To condemn freedom as imperialistic, as in Sartrean gesture, would be a bit too hasty; and to deny it altogether while talking ethics would be to preach masochism. Freedom of the I is egoistic and thus violent insofar as it negates the non-I. Sartre has already shown this with precision. In the face to face I am free to close myself up in egoism, like an oyster recoiling onto itself, or to open myself up for the Other in becoming "the one-for-the-Other," as Levinas puts it repeatedly in OB. I can shut or open my door to the stranger who knocks at the door ("The possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows" (TI 173).) Freedom of choice is not at issue here but of the will (TI 218-240) that becomes infinite responsibility before the Other, more passive still than any other passivity, as Levinas says again and again in OB. But will is also equivocal, capable of betrayal. TI 231.
(I am not prepared go into a delicate but profound parallelism that may exist here between Levinas and Kant with respect to the notion of freedom. To what extend, on one hand, does the notion of autonomy in Kant falls prey to Levinas' critique of freedom? To what extend does it suggest responsibility that is more passive still than any other passivity, on the other? Can we escape the fact, as it were, of reason? Doesn't the practical fact destine us as moral beings, like a fate? The fact of reason is our fate. We as rational beings are destined to be moral. We do not choose to be moral because we are always already moral, that is, autonomous. But, again, isn't autonomy the autarchy of the same, the very gesture of being in its effort to stay within the same, to be determined on its own by its own law or logic, negating all possibility of the Other? But consider this remarkable sentence: "The presence of the Other, a privileged heteronomy, does not clash with freedom but invests it" (TI 88).)
Levinas, while allowing for an indictment of imperialistic freedom, is too subtle a thinker to foreclose other directions he traverses in TI. To see this, we must go back to his brilliant analysis of the self in Section II.
The analysis of the I (in freedom) in enjoyment, labor, and in dwelling, as undertaken in Section II, allows for two further profound possibilities: (1) the (ethical) hospitality directed straightforwardly toward the Other--in view of the public (that is, outside home or in the home totally dedicated and opened to the Other in service) and in justice--who comes knocking at my door as my neighbor (Section III); and (2) the discrete feminine welcome maintained in the intimate of home in private and behind the closed doors, leading to another type of transcendence: eros, fecundity, paternity, filiality, and fraternity (Section IV). The ethical welcome in which the home is opened and rendered wholly to the service of the Other, and the feminine welcome in which home becomes a place of "a delightful lapse in being" (TI 155) in the privacy of the closed doors are two distinct tracks of transcendence, both of which presuppose the otherness of the Other or transcendence. The Other, the vous, my neighbor, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow, speaks and comes to me from on high as the face (the formal structure of which is the idea of the Infinite); whereas the gentle Other, the tu, of the feminine, who comes in caresses in silent cooing and coquetry ("a language without teaching, a silent language, an understanding without words, an expression in secret" Id.) refers to another type of transcendence by which, like Sarah, the birth of nations (i.e., fecundity, paternity, filiality, and fraternity) beyond one's time and epoch, beyond totality and history, is possible.
The transcendence for Levinas is always earthly, material, and bodily. It is a relation (that of the idea of the Infinite) which takes place "within the unfolding of terrestrial existence, of economic existence" (TI 52), a relation in which one cannot approach the Other with an empty hand, a relation in which one offers the world to the Other in word (TI 209), or a relation in which one can outlive one's time in the I of the son ("the son is not me; and yet I am my son" TI 277). In all these relations freedom is not denied but invested for the service of the other "as responsibility and gift of self" in which "an I that has arisen in enjoyment as separated" would be capable of facing or welcoming the Other. IT 208, 209.
We may ask: what kind of argument is Levinas offering here (for freedom, the Other, and for transcendence, among others)? He certainly engages in patient and brilliant phenomenological analyses in the manner of Husserl and Heidegger, as he does with respect to enjoyment, labor, home (Section II), will, death, time (Section III), or eros, fecundity, paternity (Section III). Using his analysis of freedom as an example, which occurs sporadically throughout the book, I propose that the argument develops like an hinge: it always leads to one or the other direction. As he does with reason, philosophy, rationality, etc., Levinas swings his analyses of freedom back and forth between the positive sense and the negative, between freedom as sovereign power of the I and the infinite capacity for responsibility. He drives his analyses in these two directions alternately, as can be seen in the following sentence which also summarizes his view on freedom: "Freedom, the event of separation in arbitrariness which constitutes the I, at the same time maintains the relation with the exteriority that morality resists every appropriation and every totalization in being" (TI 302). The very terrestrial transcendence is freedom.
Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence
For centuries philosophers have debated as to whether we are free or not; and if we are, as to what freedom might mean. Levinas asks however, perhaps for the first time, whether or not freedom is valid or justified; and if it is, how so. In Levinas freedom is never negated but radically questioned and transformed, like many other philosophic terms he employs.
To examine freedom, he says, is to "trac[e] back to what precedes freedom" (Totality And Infinity (TI) 85). The movement of tracing freedom back to the prior condition, the movement of a "critique" which he says is "the essence of knowing" (85), leads to the critique of the same and to (the primacy of) the Other. To critique freedom is to recognize that knowledge does not begin with the 'I think,' from the sovereign positioning of the I that stakes a claim (as if standing erect on a land all alone, all by himself, overlooking the horizon for his exploit) but from the Other, or more precisely, in one's relationship to the Other, the relationship which Levinas describes in various terms throughout the book as face, teaching, language, metaphysics, ethics, and, most importantly, as the idea of the infinite. These terms are, of course, from the common coinage in philosophy, except for the term "face." But what he means by them is highly unorthodox and original, if not provocative. After all, he did say later: "How can such a research be undertaken without introducing some barbarisms in the language of philosophy?" (Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence (1974), 178).
A life of an ego, the I, is freedom in enjoyment (happiness), labor, and dwelling. It is a life lived however in dependency in separation or independence (Section II). Life is always already a transcendence. No totality or system can reduce it to an integrated whole or unity. It cannot be reduced to pragmatic use or to a numeric unit within the vast system of commerce, industry, administration, or history. The self is already infected by that which cracks open the totality, by the interiority or unicity that opens to exteriority, by that which remains irreducible to a system, to a network of significations, or to a horizon (Husserl) or to a world (Heidegger). Levinas thus proposes a fundamentally and radically different ontology and analysis of being in contrast to and against his two great mentors, Husserl and Heidegger, while still heavily relying on their language and method (i.e., admittedly on Husserl's phenomenology). (Levinas, who sat in Husserl's last class he taught before retiring, introduced Husserl in France, which Derrida in his tribute to Levinas (Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas) describes as thus having caused an axiomatic change in French philosophy.)
But what Levinas endeavors to say in the book moves beyond ontology and its method, daring the whole western philosophic tradition that holds: 'Not to philosophize is still to philosophize' -- the phrase attributed (though controversially and doubtfully) to Aristotle and taken up by Derrida in his strategic opposition to Levinas. See Levinas's God and Philosophy in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings and Derrida's Violence and Metaphysics in Writing and Difference.
In any event, returning to our theme, freedom in relationship to the Other reveals itself as arbitrary and violent--that is, unjustified. How so?
The argument is more succinctly stated in his later work, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence (OB, 1974), where Levinas says, paraphrasing Hobbes, that being is imperialistic and as such is at war with one another: "Being's interest takes dramatic form in egoisms struggling with one another, each against all, in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another and are thus together." OB 4. Being's move (geste d'être) or its essence is "interesse" or "interested," he says (Id.), as a predator is interested in the prey in the evolutionary scheme of natural selection. The impulse of being or essence is to "fill[..] up every interval of nothingness which would interrupt its exercise." Id. Borrowing from Spinoza, Levinas coins the impulse: conatus essendi. (See Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, Part III, Proposition 6: “Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.” Proof: […] it opposes everything that can annul its existence…; and thus, as far as it can and as far as it is in itself, it endeavors to persist in its own being.” Proposition 7: “The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.”
(With the term essence and its reference to being as different form beings, to Sein as distinguished from Seiendes, to esse as distinguished from ens; and with its reference to "eidos, eidetic, eidetically, or nature, quiddity, fundamental, etc" (OB xli), Levinas indicts the entire western philosophy of being as imperialistic and violent. But, following Plato, he seeks to move beyond being, toward the Good which, according to Plato, is said to lie beyond being exceeding in dignity and power. IT 102, 103; The Republic, 509d.)
That conatus essendi or the impulse of being is freedom is already anticipated in the following sentences found in Totality And Infinity: “the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other” (TI 45); the impulse “to maintain oneself against the other, despite every relation with the other to ensure the autarchy of an I” (TI 46); or more sweepingly, “the determination of the other by the same” (TI 85); or “Every being is an exercise of being” (TI 85/112); or simply, the “imperialism of the same” (TI 87); or “This imperialism of the same is the whole essence of freedom” (TI 87). Freedom is conatus essendi, the very impulse of being to maintain itself and to persist in itself in its own being, negating the other and the otherness of the other. But is freedom --“the virility of a free ability-to-be” (Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-Of-The-Other, 207)--justified?
To condemn freedom as imperialistic, as in Sartrean gesture, would be a bit too hasty; and to deny it altogether while talking ethics would be to preach masochism. Freedom of the I is egoistic and thus violent insofar as it negates the non-I. Sartre has already shown this with precision. In the face to face I am free to close myself up in egoism, like an oyster recoiling onto itself, or to open myself up for the Other in becoming "the one-for-the-Other," as Levinas puts it repeatedly in OB. I can shut or open my door to the stranger who knocks at the door ("The possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows" (TI 173).) Freedom of choice is not at issue here but of the will (TI 218-240) that becomes infinite responsibility before the Other, more passive still than any other passivity, as Levinas says again and again in OB. But will is also equivocal, capable of betrayal. TI 231.
(I am not prepared go into a delicate but profound parallelism that may exist here between Levinas and Kant with respect to the notion of freedom. To what extend, on one hand, does the notion of autonomy in Kant falls prey to Levinas' critique of freedom? To what extend does it suggest responsibility that is more passive still than any other passivity, on the other? Can we escape the fact, as it were, of reason? Doesn't the practical fact destine us as moral beings, like a fate? The fact of reason is our fate. We as rational beings are destined to be moral. We do not choose to be moral because we are always already moral, that is, autonomous. But, again, isn't autonomy the autarchy of the same, the very gesture of being in its effort to stay within the same, to be determined on its own by its own law or logic, negating all possibility of the Other? But consider this remarkable sentence: "The presence of the Other, a privileged heteronomy, does not clash with freedom but invests it" (TI 88).)
Levinas, while allowing for an indictment of imperialistic freedom, is too subtle a thinker to foreclose other directions he traverses in TI. To see this, we must go back to his brilliant analysis of the self in Section II.
The analysis of the I (in freedom) in enjoyment, labor, and in dwelling, as undertaken in Section II, allows for two further profound possibilities: (1) the (ethical) hospitality directed straightforwardly toward the Other--in view of the public (that is, outside home or in the home totally dedicated and opened to the Other in service) and in justice--who comes knocking at my door as my neighbor (Section III); and (2) the discrete feminine welcome maintained in the intimate of home in private and behind the closed doors, leading to another type of transcendence: eros, fecundity, paternity, filiality, and fraternity (Section IV). The ethical welcome in which the home is opened and rendered wholly to the service of the Other, and the feminine welcome in which home becomes a place of "a delightful lapse in being" (TI 155) in the privacy of the closed doors are two distinct tracks of transcendence, both of which presuppose the otherness of the Other or transcendence. The Other, the vous, my neighbor, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow, speaks and comes to me from on high as the face (the formal structure of which is the idea of the Infinite); whereas the gentle Other, the tu, of the feminine, who comes in caresses in silent cooing and coquetry ("a language without teaching, a silent language, an understanding without words, an expression in secret" Id.) refers to another type of transcendence by which, like Sarah, the birth of nations (i.e., fecundity, paternity, filiality, and fraternity) beyond one's time and epoch, beyond totality and history, is possible.
The transcendence for Levinas is always earthly, material, and bodily. It is a relation (that of the idea of the Infinite) which takes place "within the unfolding of terrestrial existence, of economic existence" (TI 52), a relation in which one cannot approach the Other with an empty hand, a relation in which one offers the world to the Other in word (TI 209), or a relation in which one can outlive one's time in the I of the son ("the son is not me; and yet I am my son" TI 277). In all these relations freedom is not denied but invested for the service of the other "as responsibility and gift of self" in which "an I that has arisen in enjoyment as separated" would be capable of facing or welcoming the Other. IT 208, 209.
We may ask: what kind of argument is Levinas offering here (for freedom, the Other, and for transcendence, among others)? He certainly engages in patient and brilliant phenomenological analyses in the manner of Husserl and Heidegger, as he does with respect to enjoyment, labor, home (Section II), will, death, time (Section III), or eros, fecundity, paternity (Section III). Using his analysis of freedom as an example, which occurs sporadically throughout the book, I propose that the argument develops like an hinge: it always leads to one or the other direction. As he does with reason, philosophy, rationality, etc., Levinas swings his analyses of freedom back and forth between the positive sense and the negative, between freedom as sovereign power of the I and the infinite capacity for responsibility. He drives his analyses in these two directions alternately, as can be seen in the following sentence which also summarizes his view on freedom: "Freedom, the event of separation in arbitrariness which constitutes the I, at the same time maintains the relation with the exteriority that morality resists every appropriation and every totalization in being" (TI 302). The very terrestrial transcendence is freedom.
Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence
September 13, 2025
“Un livre de Levinas ne se lit pas, il se médite.” C’est une boutade évidemment, mais elle contient un fond de vérité.
Ce livre, que j’ai achteté il y a vingt ans, je l’ai médité pendant tout l’été, posément, section par section, en France pendant les vacances en famille, en Belgique dans mon fauteuil et dans notre petit jardin et en Finlande dans la nature le long d’un lac majestueux.
J’ai souligné un tiers du livre et j’ai relu certaines sections au moins trois ou quatre fois (les pages sur la jouissance, et celles sur le recueillement sont parmi les plus belles que j’aie jamais lues dans un livre philosophique; le dernier chapitre “Au-delà du visage” j’ai dû le relire aussi plusieurs fois tellement j’avais le sentiment de ne pas tout à fait comprendre).
C’est un livre boulversant et tellement beau qui, lentement, calmement, petit à petit, mais irrésistiblement change la perspective du lecteur sur ce que signifie “être un être” humain.
Le style est très particulier aussi; répétitif, posé, didactique et poétique à la fois, avec des phrases qui se chevauchent plus qu’elles s’enchaînent.
C’est un livre auquel je vais retourner plusieurs fois, j’en suis sûr, et dont les phrases résonneront encore très longtemps dans ma tête.
Ce livre, que j’ai achteté il y a vingt ans, je l’ai médité pendant tout l’été, posément, section par section, en France pendant les vacances en famille, en Belgique dans mon fauteuil et dans notre petit jardin et en Finlande dans la nature le long d’un lac majestueux.
J’ai souligné un tiers du livre et j’ai relu certaines sections au moins trois ou quatre fois (les pages sur la jouissance, et celles sur le recueillement sont parmi les plus belles que j’aie jamais lues dans un livre philosophique; le dernier chapitre “Au-delà du visage” j’ai dû le relire aussi plusieurs fois tellement j’avais le sentiment de ne pas tout à fait comprendre).
C’est un livre boulversant et tellement beau qui, lentement, calmement, petit à petit, mais irrésistiblement change la perspective du lecteur sur ce que signifie “être un être” humain.
Le style est très particulier aussi; répétitif, posé, didactique et poétique à la fois, avec des phrases qui se chevauchent plus qu’elles s’enchaînent.
C’est un livre auquel je vais retourner plusieurs fois, j’en suis sûr, et dont les phrases résonneront encore très longtemps dans ma tête.
June 17, 2016
This work of philosophy shows how ethics is based on one’s relationship with an other, which is accomplished in the form of a welcome, including gift-giving and respect, rather than with violence, that is, any attempt to dominate or make use of an other.
What is most striking about the book is how poetic it is, how it makes use of poetic devices such as wordplay and repetition, and how it depends on the experience of reading the book rather than on proving what is asserted. The book, therefore, approaches the reader much as Levinas says others should be approached: through the gift of teaching.
The book is difficult to read. Much of it is best experienced the way music is: by letting it flow over you rather than trying to make complete sense of it. The struggle is worth it, because this is the sort of book that can change your view of ethics, and much else besides.
What is most striking about the book is how poetic it is, how it makes use of poetic devices such as wordplay and repetition, and how it depends on the experience of reading the book rather than on proving what is asserted. The book, therefore, approaches the reader much as Levinas says others should be approached: through the gift of teaching.
The book is difficult to read. Much of it is best experienced the way music is: by letting it flow over you rather than trying to make complete sense of it. The struggle is worth it, because this is the sort of book that can change your view of ethics, and much else besides.
December 8, 2008
Levinas applies Phenomenology to Buber to argue that Ethics begins with the intrusion of the face of another human into the confines of consciousness.
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October 30, 2015It's rather unquestionable how much impact Levinas had on French philosophy. And his argument is, at times, fascinating. It's just that I disagree with the initial premise so much that I disagree with so many ideas that Levinas extracts from that premise. Was it a worthy intellectual exercise to read? Yes, absolutely. It's just that to really get it, you have to put yourself in the shoes of a Talmudic scholar who survived the Holocaust, and deeply wanted to wash phenomenology clean of the dirt Heidegger had dragged it through. And at the end of the day, I find Merleau-Ponty's brand of phenomenology just that much more reasonable.
February 19, 2008
Levinas has put love into philosophical terms. I don't mean romantic love. I mean love as in the giving of oneself for the well-being of all others.
December 27, 2007
Every time I read this, I realize how my understanding of Levinas is partial.
August 14, 2022
A mostly interesting read. Levinas' goal in this book is to provide a phenomenology of alterity; that is, he wants to figure out what it means for us to encounter another person as someone other. Just as Heidegger sought independence from the tradition preceding him, so Levinas will do the same, seeking to subvert both Husserl and Heidegger, both of whom, he believes, have been too egocentric, i.e., too self-centered. Yet Levinas will repeatedly insist that he is not against subjectivity; rather, he is saying that subjectivity, regardless of its apparent independence, is always constituted intersubjectively. Dasein is always already Mitsein. Traditionally, the Other has always been thought of as other than myself, and therefore subordinate, but Totality and Infinity tries to reverse this, making the Same—Levinas' term for the ego/self—subordinate to the Other.
Section II, "Interiority and Economy," is by far the best part of the work, in my opinion. I would say it is the best phenomenological writing I have read so far, not just in its description but also its validity. This book has a lot of gems sprinkled throughout, although you have to work hard to retrieve them. For example, I particularly liked his concept of atheism, as expressed by Gyges; the Other as my teacher, who solicits my responsibility; the ambiguity of hatred; interiority; and the infinity of the Other. Each of these things have given me much to think on.
That being said, I did not rate this a 5/5 owing to both style and substance. Levinas has some interesting things to say, yet his writing—or at least, this translation—muddles it quite a bit. Either I am stupid or Levinas is a confusing writer. Sometimes I wonder if he even knows what he is saying (although that goes for all phenomenologists, frankly). Section 1 of the book is unnecessarily complex, especially as an opener; Section 2 is really great because it is more concrete; and then from Section 3 onward, it becomes laborious again. By the end, I was just hoping to get through the book, running my eyes over the pages without really comprehending them. Again, as with most phenomenologists, Levinas can be pretentious often, writing things that sound poetic or thought-provoking, but which seem to have little substance. His writing about femininity, domesticity, and love, for example, were kinda sus (e.g., the female constitutes the intimacy of the home, LOL 💀), and I had no idea what he was saying. And with regard to actual arguments, Levinas, like Heidegger, can make assertions without really providing any reasons—he kinda just says them. For all his emphasis on the priority and asymmetry of the Other, I feel like Levinas undersells the fundamental fact of reciprocity; he repeats over and over again how the Other is the Master, how he (the Other is almost always masculine) exerts his transcendence to the point of inequality, etc., yet he rarely remarks on the fact that the Other is beholden to the Same in the exact same way. He wants to justify the Other in the face of the self so much in order to avoid tyranny that he creates a tyranny of a new kind. Additionally, the Other, because he is infinitely transcendent and resistant to thematization, becomes the very universal which Levinas abhorred, lacking in particularity—although Levinas will say the Other is unique. But what distinguishes one Other from another Other besides the fact of alterity, otherness? His criticisms of Heidegger were insightful at times, but I also feel like his distaste toward him—which, to be fair, is kind of justifiable and understandable—were excessive, preventing points of agreement where they exist and sometimes coming off as unfair.
All that being said, the parts of this that I did understand are really intriguing, and I will definitely be engaging with Levinas more as a result.
Section II, "Interiority and Economy," is by far the best part of the work, in my opinion. I would say it is the best phenomenological writing I have read so far, not just in its description but also its validity. This book has a lot of gems sprinkled throughout, although you have to work hard to retrieve them. For example, I particularly liked his concept of atheism, as expressed by Gyges; the Other as my teacher, who solicits my responsibility; the ambiguity of hatred; interiority; and the infinity of the Other. Each of these things have given me much to think on.
That being said, I did not rate this a 5/5 owing to both style and substance. Levinas has some interesting things to say, yet his writing—or at least, this translation—muddles it quite a bit. Either I am stupid or Levinas is a confusing writer. Sometimes I wonder if he even knows what he is saying (although that goes for all phenomenologists, frankly). Section 1 of the book is unnecessarily complex, especially as an opener; Section 2 is really great because it is more concrete; and then from Section 3 onward, it becomes laborious again. By the end, I was just hoping to get through the book, running my eyes over the pages without really comprehending them. Again, as with most phenomenologists, Levinas can be pretentious often, writing things that sound poetic or thought-provoking, but which seem to have little substance. His writing about femininity, domesticity, and love, for example, were kinda sus (e.g., the female constitutes the intimacy of the home, LOL 💀), and I had no idea what he was saying. And with regard to actual arguments, Levinas, like Heidegger, can make assertions without really providing any reasons—he kinda just says them. For all his emphasis on the priority and asymmetry of the Other, I feel like Levinas undersells the fundamental fact of reciprocity; he repeats over and over again how the Other is the Master, how he (the Other is almost always masculine) exerts his transcendence to the point of inequality, etc., yet he rarely remarks on the fact that the Other is beholden to the Same in the exact same way. He wants to justify the Other in the face of the self so much in order to avoid tyranny that he creates a tyranny of a new kind. Additionally, the Other, because he is infinitely transcendent and resistant to thematization, becomes the very universal which Levinas abhorred, lacking in particularity—although Levinas will say the Other is unique. But what distinguishes one Other from another Other besides the fact of alterity, otherness? His criticisms of Heidegger were insightful at times, but I also feel like his distaste toward him—which, to be fair, is kind of justifiable and understandable—were excessive, preventing points of agreement where they exist and sometimes coming off as unfair.
All that being said, the parts of this that I did understand are really intriguing, and I will definitely be engaging with Levinas more as a result.
October 18, 2010
Another college book. I read this my senior year. Obviously most of it has been lost to memory. What has not been lost is the conversation I had eating warm johnnie bread, drinking stolen wine and talking about the Other with my roommate and another friend well into the night. Levinas' project is fascinating because he is trying to take the existiential phenomenology that Heidegger develops and argue that Alethia is structured by the ethics of the other. Much of this ultimately tends to be too mystical for my tastes and it ultimately drove me to Critical Theory. Nonetheless this is a great piece of philosophy and I have to say that this is a necessary read for the 20th Century continental tradition.
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August 21, 2023Waanzin
December 1, 2020
Put down the book at 40%. Tiresome, boring, very, very redundant - it is simply a slog to get through. And the content isn't all that original nor that complex. It's just put in a very dense, complicated and inaccessible manner (as with most other continental philosophers of the twentieth century).
Bottom line: The post-World War II world needed an emphasis on humanity and humanism and a primacy of ethics over the obsession with and rigidity of objective/positive science. For Levinas, the face of the Other carries with it a revelation that destroys the whole western intellectual tradition which is characterized by an obsession of totalizing everything. Ever since Plato universality (Reason, World-History, etc.) was the norm, but this overlooked the fact that universality is a derivative from a more original experience of other human beings - confronting us, as Ego's, with an alien Otherness that refuses to be totalized (i.e. captured in words, categories or concepts).
By going back to this otherness of the Other, we experience an Infinity, just like ourselves, but which cannot be captured by us. According to Levinas, this conjunction of Self and Other prohibits any totalizing tendency which we might have. Our intersubjective existence - our lives with other human beings - is the foundation of everything, which seems to grant ethics the primacy over everything else. By going back to ethics - as opposed to science and theology - Levinas attempts to lay a new foundation which centres around the humanity of us and the other. And in so doing, he offers a basis on which post-World War II Europe could philosophically recuperate.
I can see the value of this work, I understand its main theses, and I also grasp the historical context and importance it might have had, but I simply abhor the quasi-religious language Levinas uses throughout the book in order to do what Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre already did. He emphasizes his differences with all these (and then some) thinkers, but I fail to see the hugeness of different viewpoints. For example, Husserl's European Crisis basically argues along the same lines and someone like Sartre also leans heavily towards some of the more profound conclusions of Levinas (for example the centrality of the look of the other, the separation between Self and Other, etc.).
And for all its complexity and density, this work simply offers less originality and the (permit the metaphor) electricity of ideas than works of Heidegger and Sartre, or even Husserl.
Perhaps I'll re-read this work in the future, but I seriously doubt it.
Bottom line: The post-World War II world needed an emphasis on humanity and humanism and a primacy of ethics over the obsession with and rigidity of objective/positive science. For Levinas, the face of the Other carries with it a revelation that destroys the whole western intellectual tradition which is characterized by an obsession of totalizing everything. Ever since Plato universality (Reason, World-History, etc.) was the norm, but this overlooked the fact that universality is a derivative from a more original experience of other human beings - confronting us, as Ego's, with an alien Otherness that refuses to be totalized (i.e. captured in words, categories or concepts).
By going back to this otherness of the Other, we experience an Infinity, just like ourselves, but which cannot be captured by us. According to Levinas, this conjunction of Self and Other prohibits any totalizing tendency which we might have. Our intersubjective existence - our lives with other human beings - is the foundation of everything, which seems to grant ethics the primacy over everything else. By going back to ethics - as opposed to science and theology - Levinas attempts to lay a new foundation which centres around the humanity of us and the other. And in so doing, he offers a basis on which post-World War II Europe could philosophically recuperate.
I can see the value of this work, I understand its main theses, and I also grasp the historical context and importance it might have had, but I simply abhor the quasi-religious language Levinas uses throughout the book in order to do what Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre already did. He emphasizes his differences with all these (and then some) thinkers, but I fail to see the hugeness of different viewpoints. For example, Husserl's European Crisis basically argues along the same lines and someone like Sartre also leans heavily towards some of the more profound conclusions of Levinas (for example the centrality of the look of the other, the separation between Self and Other, etc.).
And for all its complexity and density, this work simply offers less originality and the (permit the metaphor) electricity of ideas than works of Heidegger and Sartre, or even Husserl.
Perhaps I'll re-read this work in the future, but I seriously doubt it.
March 16, 2021
*unutrašnjost je odbijanje da se preobrazimo u jedan čisti pasiv koji ima svoje mesto u jednom tuđem računovodstvu. (41)
*oko ne svetli, ono govori (51)
*Pažnja= odgovor na poziv. ((83)
*Uživanje: vlastito drhtanje Jastva. (95)
*Telo: sušto samoposedovanje. (98)
*Lice sebe znači. (120)
*UŽIVANJE je vlastiti događaj jednog bića koje je rođeno, koje prekida mirnu večnost svoje spermalne i materične egzistencije da bi se zatvorilo u jednu osobu koja, živeći od sveta, živi pri sebi, kod kuće. (127)
*Kuća ima svoj pogled na ulicu ali i svoju tajnu. (135)
*štostvo: (šta/ko je to?) (155)
*JEZIK kroz koji jedno biće egzistira za jedno drugo biće predstavlja jedinu mogućnost egzistiranja jedne egzistencije koja je više od svoje unutrašnje egzistencije. (160)
*Sudbina ne prethodi istoriji, nego je njena posledica. Sudbina, to je istorija istoriografa, istorija kao priče preživelih koji interpretiraaju dela mrtvih, tj. koriste ih. (205)
*Odbijanje da se drugome služi svojim životom ne isključuje činjenicu da mu se služi svojom smrću. (206)
*Sva oštrina BOLA leži u nemogućnosti da umaknemo, u nemogućnosti da sebe u samom sebi zaštitimo od samog sebe. (214)
*Izgovoriti JA - potvrditi nesvodivu singularnost u kojoj se dalje održava apologija - znači imati jedno povlašćeno mesto u odnosu na odgovornosti u kojima me niko ne može zameniti i od kojih me niko ne može osloboditi - Ne moći se povući - to se zove JA. (221)
*Mišljenje sebe čuje. (246)
...
*oko ne svetli, ono govori (51)
*Pažnja= odgovor na poziv. ((83)
*Uživanje: vlastito drhtanje Jastva. (95)
*Telo: sušto samoposedovanje. (98)
*Lice sebe znači. (120)
*UŽIVANJE je vlastiti događaj jednog bića koje je rođeno, koje prekida mirnu večnost svoje spermalne i materične egzistencije da bi se zatvorilo u jednu osobu koja, živeći od sveta, živi pri sebi, kod kuće. (127)
*Kuća ima svoj pogled na ulicu ali i svoju tajnu. (135)
*štostvo: (šta/ko je to?) (155)
*JEZIK kroz koji jedno biće egzistira za jedno drugo biće predstavlja jedinu mogućnost egzistiranja jedne egzistencije koja je više od svoje unutrašnje egzistencije. (160)
*Sudbina ne prethodi istoriji, nego je njena posledica. Sudbina, to je istorija istoriografa, istorija kao priče preživelih koji interpretiraaju dela mrtvih, tj. koriste ih. (205)
*Odbijanje da se drugome služi svojim životom ne isključuje činjenicu da mu se služi svojom smrću. (206)
*Sva oštrina BOLA leži u nemogućnosti da umaknemo, u nemogućnosti da sebe u samom sebi zaštitimo od samog sebe. (214)
*Izgovoriti JA - potvrditi nesvodivu singularnost u kojoj se dalje održava apologija - znači imati jedno povlašćeno mesto u odnosu na odgovornosti u kojima me niko ne može zameniti i od kojih me niko ne može osloboditi - Ne moći se povući - to se zove JA. (221)
*Mišljenje sebe čuje. (246)
...
November 24, 2020
so challenging, so lovely. levinas really came for the necks of everyone in the western tradition from aristotle to hegel and heidegger, but he was sure to do so in a nice way lol
November 26, 2018
Totality and Infinity is the most difficult text I have ever read. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian-born French thinker who was one of the most influential postmodernists for much of the twentieth century, is quite intentionally unlike any other philosophy any other philosopher has produced. For many of his readers, Levinas provides the “ethics” postmodernism so desperately needs, whereas for others, Levinas is incomprehensible, unphilosophically mystical, and in fact fails to provide an ethics as that term is traditionally understood. I first came to Levinas as a sophomore in a poverty studies class on ethics, in which we read both philosophical ethicists and thinkers from the Abrahamic faiths who address social justice concerns. I could hardly wrap my head around his philosophical approach, let alone the most important themes in his work, such as the Same and the Other, the face-to-face, responsibility, or substitution. Yet Levinas enthralled me precisely because I could not understand him; I felt as if there was essential truth buried beneath his obscure, often hyperbolic prose that had only started to conceal itself each new time I approached his philosophical texts. Levinas therefore became the subject of my poverty studies capstone project, written as a senior, wherein I attempt to explicate Levinas for philosophical ethicists in the analytic tradition who may wish to mobilize Levinas for social justice discourse; I thereby defend Levinas’s “ethics” as a viable framework with which to view poverty issues. As a master’s student, Levinas is once more at the center of my research, this time into environmental ethics and the ethics of time. Finally, in my statement of purpose for Ph.D. applications, I outline my desire to work with Levinas even more, perhaps as the subject of my dissertation. With Levinas, there is always more to learn, always another perspective from which to interpret his work. I reckon a lifetime spent with Levinas could not exhaust such interpretive possibilities.
Despite this extensive preoccupation with Levinas, I had never read the entirety of Totality and Infinity. I had, of course, read its most essential sections, most notably “Ethics and the Face,” the heart of the book that posits Levinas’s distinctive characterization of the ethical and the I-Other encounter. Yet I was hitherto somewhat terrified to read the entire text, which is discursive and intense; it essentially tries to do philosophy unlike it had ever been done before. Unfortunately, it is impossible to really understand Levinas’s philosophical project without Totality and Infinity’s other elements, especially its discourse on enjoyment and, after “Ethics and the Face,” “The Ethical Relation and Time.” Moreover, there are considerable portions of Totality and Infinity in which Levinas reverts to the philosophy of the Same, i.e. Western philosophy since Plato, and without acquaintance with these sections, it is difficult to see how, or why, Levinas moved in such different philosophical directions after Jacques Derrida responded to the book with his seminal article, “Violence and Metaphysics.” In order to fully appreciate Levinas and how he evolved as a thinker, Totality and Infinity is indispensable; it is also one of the most important texts in the history of Western philosophy.
It is critical, I think, to appreciate how the way in which Totality and Infinity is written reflects the nature of the philosophical discourse therein. Colin Davis, in an excellent introduction to Levinas, writes, “his texts are assertive and propositional . . . paradoxical or perhaps just plain inconsistent. . . . The encounter with the Other is an experience which is not an experience . . . a relationship which is not a relationship; and anyway this encounter is not an event which can be located in time or the history of the subject.” So what is one to do with Levinas? Is such “philosophy” merely nonsense? Or, if it is not, then why, as Davis ventures, “does he need to be so difficult?” In order to answer such concerns, one must appreciate the task Levinas sets for himself with Totality and Infinity. It represents an attempt to think beyond the parameters of traditional philosophical discourse, marked by its failure to think of the Other as Other, as alterity which the subject can never know or comprehend, conceptualize or thematize. Western philosophy has since Plato has conceived of reality as a totality in which all that “there is” is subsumed in être, immune to an encounter with infinity, an idea that exceeds or overflows any idea which we, as subjects, can comprehend. Descartes first indicated a new direction for philosophy with his notion of the infinite as an idea put in us by God, yet derived from this a proof for the existence of God. Levinas, on the other hand, seeks to explore the infinite itself, that which is outside, or exterior to, all of reality, which is separate and apart from the totality that is the object of traditional philosophical inquiry. There are considerable obstacles to this new type of philosophical examination, however: what does it mean to think of the Other as Other, unknowable and incomprehensible, when philosophy requires thematization and conceptualization? “What is at stake here is whether the text has the character of a totality, in which even apparent contradictions or breaches can ultimately be shown to be part of the whole,” Davis writes, “or an infinity, in which the whole is revealed as inhabited by what it cannot contain.” Alterity is thus both the theme of Levinas’s text and the key to its textual performance, since “to expound alterity would also be to expose it . . . as an object of reflection,” and this is precisely what Levinas tries to avoid, albeit not always successfully. So there are real reasons for the difficulty of Totality and Infinity that relate to the most fundamental aspects of Levinas’s philosophical project; to dismiss it as incoherent, continental rubbish is to miss at least a major part of Totality and Infinity’s primary thesis.
At the same time, however, Totality and Infinity cannot ultimately escape the Western philosophical tradition it so frequently claims to move beyond. This is perhaps most manifest in the sequential narrative structure Levinas adopts in order to describe the encounter with the Other. It is critical to note that the I-Other encounter is not an empirical event in any one of our lives; it is, for Levinas, a primordial, or fundamental element of human existence that makes possible interpersonal discourse, rationality, conceptualization, calculation—in fact, all communication, all truth, and even time itself. Levinas calls the relation with the Other, or with infinity, “metaphysics,” and this metaphysics is pre-political, pre-temporal, effectively “prior” to all else. On the other hand, Levinas quite clearly states in narrative terms that prior to the encounter with the Other, i.e. the ethical relation which establishes a society and makes possible those foundational human experiences identified above, the solitary subject “enjoys” the world in sole possession of it; in fact, Levinas infers that the primordial relation by which a human subject is constituted as a subject is, rather paradoxically, in enjoyment. To complicate matters further, Levinas additionally claims that the separation of the I and the non-I, which makes possible enjoyment, derives from the encounter with the Other. In other words, even if in enjoyment “the self is described as if it were alone in the world, in fact its separate existence is possible only because the Other also exists,” Davis explains. Consequently, the most astute reader’s effort to understand subjectivity in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of a sequential narrative in time, must ultimately fail. In his attempt to show that the ethical relation is the bedrock, the most fundamental state of human subjectivity, Levinas ostensibly contradicts himself and, more worrisome, apes typical moves in the philosophical tradition (i.e. the desire to locate primordiality in existence), which he so desperately seeks to escape. In his defense, any effort to identify the most primordial aspects of human subjectivity must thematize its subject, in this case alterity, and for Levinas, thematization is exactly what he is determined to avoid. More often than not, however, when Levinas tries to eschew thematization, complication or contradiction ensues. Davis captures this paradox in the text quite succinctly: “Totality and Infinity is a work in which the textual performance, for all its difficulty . . . never quite matches the thematic call of the text to encounter the Other without the violent reduction of its alterity.” The Other is, in the end, made into a concept, and an inconsistent one at that.
Fortunately for those invested in Levinas’s philosophical project, Totality and Infinity was not the last attempt Levinas made to think of the Other as truly Other. Subsequent essays and, most especially, Levinas’s second major book, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence are extraordinary, and extraordinarily difficult to comprehend, in their philosophical and literary approach to the ideas Totality and Infinity first tried to explicate. Whether or not Levinas successfully overcomes the objection that he thematizes what he claims is unthematizable is a question for another review, and more likely for a whole set of books. Yet it is important to note that to whatever extent Levinas “fails” in Totality and Infinity, his later works would not have been possible without it. Moreover, this first major achievement opened up philosophical discourse to consideration of the Same and the Other, i.e. totality and infinity, i.e. the ethical as the source and site of rationality, where there had been only limited discourse hitherto (three of Levinas’s major influences, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber, all Jewish thinkers, in one way or another discussed totality and infinity, the I-You encounter, and subjectivity in relation to alterity prior to Levinas). To frame it differently, even if Levinas ultimately thematizes alterity in Totality and Infinity, he took seriously alterity as his primary theme for philosophical inquiry unlike any other prior thinker (his aforementioned influences did not focus on the Other and transcendence quite like Levinas, for whom alterity is fundamental to “first philosophy”). On account of its own audacious objective, then, Totality and Infinity is a revolutionary text in the history of Western philosophy that all philosophers should at least try to read.
Despite this extensive preoccupation with Levinas, I had never read the entirety of Totality and Infinity. I had, of course, read its most essential sections, most notably “Ethics and the Face,” the heart of the book that posits Levinas’s distinctive characterization of the ethical and the I-Other encounter. Yet I was hitherto somewhat terrified to read the entire text, which is discursive and intense; it essentially tries to do philosophy unlike it had ever been done before. Unfortunately, it is impossible to really understand Levinas’s philosophical project without Totality and Infinity’s other elements, especially its discourse on enjoyment and, after “Ethics and the Face,” “The Ethical Relation and Time.” Moreover, there are considerable portions of Totality and Infinity in which Levinas reverts to the philosophy of the Same, i.e. Western philosophy since Plato, and without acquaintance with these sections, it is difficult to see how, or why, Levinas moved in such different philosophical directions after Jacques Derrida responded to the book with his seminal article, “Violence and Metaphysics.” In order to fully appreciate Levinas and how he evolved as a thinker, Totality and Infinity is indispensable; it is also one of the most important texts in the history of Western philosophy.
It is critical, I think, to appreciate how the way in which Totality and Infinity is written reflects the nature of the philosophical discourse therein. Colin Davis, in an excellent introduction to Levinas, writes, “his texts are assertive and propositional . . . paradoxical or perhaps just plain inconsistent. . . . The encounter with the Other is an experience which is not an experience . . . a relationship which is not a relationship; and anyway this encounter is not an event which can be located in time or the history of the subject.” So what is one to do with Levinas? Is such “philosophy” merely nonsense? Or, if it is not, then why, as Davis ventures, “does he need to be so difficult?” In order to answer such concerns, one must appreciate the task Levinas sets for himself with Totality and Infinity. It represents an attempt to think beyond the parameters of traditional philosophical discourse, marked by its failure to think of the Other as Other, as alterity which the subject can never know or comprehend, conceptualize or thematize. Western philosophy has since Plato has conceived of reality as a totality in which all that “there is” is subsumed in être, immune to an encounter with infinity, an idea that exceeds or overflows any idea which we, as subjects, can comprehend. Descartes first indicated a new direction for philosophy with his notion of the infinite as an idea put in us by God, yet derived from this a proof for the existence of God. Levinas, on the other hand, seeks to explore the infinite itself, that which is outside, or exterior to, all of reality, which is separate and apart from the totality that is the object of traditional philosophical inquiry. There are considerable obstacles to this new type of philosophical examination, however: what does it mean to think of the Other as Other, unknowable and incomprehensible, when philosophy requires thematization and conceptualization? “What is at stake here is whether the text has the character of a totality, in which even apparent contradictions or breaches can ultimately be shown to be part of the whole,” Davis writes, “or an infinity, in which the whole is revealed as inhabited by what it cannot contain.” Alterity is thus both the theme of Levinas’s text and the key to its textual performance, since “to expound alterity would also be to expose it . . . as an object of reflection,” and this is precisely what Levinas tries to avoid, albeit not always successfully. So there are real reasons for the difficulty of Totality and Infinity that relate to the most fundamental aspects of Levinas’s philosophical project; to dismiss it as incoherent, continental rubbish is to miss at least a major part of Totality and Infinity’s primary thesis.
At the same time, however, Totality and Infinity cannot ultimately escape the Western philosophical tradition it so frequently claims to move beyond. This is perhaps most manifest in the sequential narrative structure Levinas adopts in order to describe the encounter with the Other. It is critical to note that the I-Other encounter is not an empirical event in any one of our lives; it is, for Levinas, a primordial, or fundamental element of human existence that makes possible interpersonal discourse, rationality, conceptualization, calculation—in fact, all communication, all truth, and even time itself. Levinas calls the relation with the Other, or with infinity, “metaphysics,” and this metaphysics is pre-political, pre-temporal, effectively “prior” to all else. On the other hand, Levinas quite clearly states in narrative terms that prior to the encounter with the Other, i.e. the ethical relation which establishes a society and makes possible those foundational human experiences identified above, the solitary subject “enjoys” the world in sole possession of it; in fact, Levinas infers that the primordial relation by which a human subject is constituted as a subject is, rather paradoxically, in enjoyment. To complicate matters further, Levinas additionally claims that the separation of the I and the non-I, which makes possible enjoyment, derives from the encounter with the Other. In other words, even if in enjoyment “the self is described as if it were alone in the world, in fact its separate existence is possible only because the Other also exists,” Davis explains. Consequently, the most astute reader’s effort to understand subjectivity in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of a sequential narrative in time, must ultimately fail. In his attempt to show that the ethical relation is the bedrock, the most fundamental state of human subjectivity, Levinas ostensibly contradicts himself and, more worrisome, apes typical moves in the philosophical tradition (i.e. the desire to locate primordiality in existence), which he so desperately seeks to escape. In his defense, any effort to identify the most primordial aspects of human subjectivity must thematize its subject, in this case alterity, and for Levinas, thematization is exactly what he is determined to avoid. More often than not, however, when Levinas tries to eschew thematization, complication or contradiction ensues. Davis captures this paradox in the text quite succinctly: “Totality and Infinity is a work in which the textual performance, for all its difficulty . . . never quite matches the thematic call of the text to encounter the Other without the violent reduction of its alterity.” The Other is, in the end, made into a concept, and an inconsistent one at that.
Fortunately for those invested in Levinas’s philosophical project, Totality and Infinity was not the last attempt Levinas made to think of the Other as truly Other. Subsequent essays and, most especially, Levinas’s second major book, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence are extraordinary, and extraordinarily difficult to comprehend, in their philosophical and literary approach to the ideas Totality and Infinity first tried to explicate. Whether or not Levinas successfully overcomes the objection that he thematizes what he claims is unthematizable is a question for another review, and more likely for a whole set of books. Yet it is important to note that to whatever extent Levinas “fails” in Totality and Infinity, his later works would not have been possible without it. Moreover, this first major achievement opened up philosophical discourse to consideration of the Same and the Other, i.e. totality and infinity, i.e. the ethical as the source and site of rationality, where there had been only limited discourse hitherto (three of Levinas’s major influences, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber, all Jewish thinkers, in one way or another discussed totality and infinity, the I-You encounter, and subjectivity in relation to alterity prior to Levinas). To frame it differently, even if Levinas ultimately thematizes alterity in Totality and Infinity, he took seriously alterity as his primary theme for philosophical inquiry unlike any other prior thinker (his aforementioned influences did not focus on the Other and transcendence quite like Levinas, for whom alterity is fundamental to “first philosophy”). On account of its own audacious objective, then, Totality and Infinity is a revolutionary text in the history of Western philosophy that all philosophers should at least try to read.
August 14, 2024
I don’t know if I can review this haha. What a philosopher this man is. I will never shut up about this, even if it is a love-hate-hate-love relationship.
If anyone needs some extra sources to tackle this work, I have a boatload. Totally worth it though.
If anyone needs some extra sources to tackle this work, I have a boatload. Totally worth it though.
June 30, 2024
• Introduction
• Philosophy’s attention to human experience as they are actually lived through in the concrete
Sartre has a keen sense for life as it is lived, and his work is marked by many penetrating descriptions. But his dualistic ontology of the en-soi versus the pour-soi has seemed over-simple and inadequate to many critics, and has been seriously qualified by the author himself in his latest Marxist work, The Critique of Dialetical Reason.
Merleau-Ponty's major work is a lasting contribution to the phenomenology of the pre-objective world of perception. But aside from a few brief hints and sketches, he was unable, before his unfortunate death in 1961, to work out carefully hsi ultimate philosophical point of view.
Heidegger, as the only contemporary thinker who has formulated a total ontology which claims to do justice to the stable results of phenomenology and to the liv- ing existential thought of our time.
Levinas has exhaustive knowledge of these. This work is basically phenomenological in character
• According to Levinas, I find myself existing in a world of alien things and elements which are other than, but not negations of myself.
• My primary experience is definitely biased and egocentric. I take precedence over the various objects I find around me, and in so far as my experience
• is normal, I learn to manipulate and control them to my advantage, either as the member of a group which I identify with myself or simply as myself alone. In general, these objects are at my disposal, and I am free to play with them, live on them, and ot enjoy them at my pleasure
Primordial experience of enjoyment=jouissance
• There is a strong tendency in all human individuals and groups to main- tain this egocentric attitude and to think of other individuals either as extensions of the self, or as alien objects to be manipulated for the advantage of the individual or social self. According to Levinas, neither of these egocentric views does justice to our original experience of the other person
Phenomenology of the other: The other person as he comes before me in a face to face encounter is NOT an alter ego, another self with different properties and accidents but in all essential respects like me.
The other may be an analogue to me–but not necessarily!
I may find him to be inhabiting a world that is basically other than mine and to be essentially different from me. He is not a mere object to be subsumed under one of my categories and given a place in my world.
the other as I meet him for the first time in his strangeness face to face. I see this countenance before me nude and bare. He is present in the flesh. But as Levinas points out in his revealing descriptions, there is also a sense of distance and even of absence in his ques- tioning glance. He is far from me and other than myself, a stranger, and I cannot be sure of what this strangeness may conceal.
Of course, I may simply treat him as a different version of myself, or, if I have the power, place him under my categories and use him for my purposes. But this means reducing him to what he is not. How can I coexist with him and still leave his otherness intact?
• HOW TO KEEP THE OTHER OTHER? A: Language
The questioning glance of the other is seeking for a meaningful response. Of course, I may give only a casual word, and go on my own way with indifference, passing the other by. But if communication and community is to be achieved, a real response, a responsible answer must be given. This means that I must be ready to put my world into words, and to offer it to the other.
Responsible communication depends on an initial act of generosity, a giving of my world to him with all its dubious assumptions and arbitrary features.
By speaking to the other I enter into a relation with him
But this speaking does not bind me down or limit me, because I remain at a distance from what is said.
He does not merely present me with lifeless signs into which I am free to read meanings of my own. His expressions bear his meanings
There is no difference between the active expres- sion and what is expressed. The two coincide. The other is not an object that must be interpreted and illumined by my alien light. He shines forth with his own light, and speaks for himself.
Levinas concedes that speaking and thinking is systematic, bound by logic of some kind. What he is interested in showing is that prior to these systems, which are required to meet many needs, and presupposed by them is the existing individual and his ethical choice to welcome the stranger and to share his world by speaking to him.
• This other-oriented mode of speaking and thinking will pay less at- tention to things as they appear to the separated self, and more attention to the search for what they are in themselves, in their radical other- ness, even though this is less certain and always more difficult to find. This will mean less interest in conceptual constructions and a greater readiness to listen and learn from experience.
• The basic difference is between a mode of thought which tries to gather all things around the mind, or self, of the thinker, and an ex- ternally oriented mode which attempts to penetrate into what is radically other than the mind that is thinking it.
• By communicating with the other, I enter into a relation with him which does not necessarily lead to my dependence on him. Nor does he become dependent on me. He can absolve himself from this relation with his integrity intact. Hence Levinas calls it absolving, or absolute.
• And he finds many other relations of this kind, for example, that of truth. In so far as I am related to another entity and share in its being, it must be really changed. But as classical metaphysics pointed out, in so far as I discover the truth about something, it is absolved from this relation and remains unchanged. The same is true of the idea of absolute perfection which is clearly radically other than what I am. But I can strive for such an other without changing it, or losing my own integrity, just as I can respond to another person and engage in dialogue without jeopardizing his or my own being. Levinas suggests that this may be the reason for Plato's well-known statement at Republic 509 that the good lies beyond being, and relates it to his own view that the conclusions of our basic philosophical questions are to be found beyond metaphysics in ethics. My way of existing conveys my final answer.
• Totalizers: satisfied with themselves and with the systems they can organize around themselves as they already are. Seek control and power. TOTALITY
Has dominated human history
From this point of view, only the neutral and impersonal, Being, for example, si important. "What is it?" is the most basic question that requires an answer in terms of a context, a system. The real is something that can be brought before the senses and the mind as an object. The acts of sensing, thinking, existing, as they are lived through, are discounted as subjective. A priority is, therefore, placed
on objective thinking, and the objective. The group is more powerful, more inclusive, and, therefore, more important than the individual. To be free is to sacrifice the arbitrary inner self and to fit into a rationally grounded system. Inner feelings and thoughts cannot be observed. They are private and unstable.
Men judged by their works that are visible and remain.
Since this is an inclusive system, with nothing beyond, there is no appeal from this judgment. It is final.
• Infinitizers: those who are dissatisfied, strive for what is other than themselves. Seek quality of life. INFINITY
Concedes that systematic thinking has its place, is required for the establishment of those power structures which satisfy necessary needs. But they should not be absolutized. Slavery is the dominance of the neutral and impersonal over the active and personal.
We do not need to know the other person (or thing) as he is in himself, and we shall never know him apart from acting with him. But unless we desire this, and go on trying, we shall never escape from the subjectivism of our systems and the objects that they bring before us to categorize and manipulate. We do not get rid of our thoughts and feelings by ignoring them or by any other means. But we may seek to transcend them, first as individuals and only later, perhaps, as a group. The individual person becomes free and responsible not by fitting into a system but rather by fighting against it and by acting on his own.
Have a sense of inner life as revealed in dialogue!
Infinitizers seek to separate themselves from this course of history and to make judgements of their own with reference to a standard of perfection that is radically other and transcendent. To this IDEA OF THE INFINITE, an appeal can be made
This is metaethical position, not normative ethical one.
• Preface
• Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void that would surround the totality and where one could, arbitrarily, think what one likes, and thus promote the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. It si a relationship with a surplus always exterior ot the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being, as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality and as primordial as totality.
• This "beyond" the totality and objective experience is, however, not to be described in a purely negative fashion. It is reflected within the totality and history, within experience. The eschatological, as the "beyond" of history, draws beings out of the jurisdiction of history and the future; it arouses them in and calls them forth to their full responsibility
BEING OVERFLOWING HISTORY
Existants (étants) can break with totality, enter into relation with infinity of being which exceeds totality
• The first "vision" of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision—it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics.
• The relation with infinity cannot, to be sure, be stated in terms of experience, for infinity overflows the thought that thinks it. Its very infinition is produced precisely in this overflowing. The relation with infinity will have to be stated in terms other than those of objective experience; but if experience precisely means a relation with the absolutely other, that is, with what always overflows thought, the relation with infinity accomplishes experience in the fullest sense of the word.
• Do the particular beings yield their truth in a Whole in which their exteriority vanishes? Or, on the contrary, is the ultimate event of being enacted in the outburst of this exteriority? Our initial question now assumes this form.
• THESIS
This book will proceed to distinguish between the idea of totality and the idea of infinity, and affirm the philosophical primacy of the idea of infinity. It will recount how infinity is produced in the relationship of the same with the other,* and how the particular and the personal, which are unsurpassable, as it were magnetize the very field in which the production of infinity is enacted. The term "production" designates both the effectuation of being (the event "is produced," an automobile "is produced") and its being brought to light or its exposition (an argument "is produced," an actor "is produced"). The ambiguity of this verb conveys the essential ambiguity of the operation by which the being of an entity simultaneously is brought about [s'évertue] and is revealed.
The idea of infinity is not an incidental notion forged by a subjectivity to reflect the case of an entity encountering on the outside nothing that limits it, overflowing every limit, and thereby infinite.
The idea of infinity si the mode of being, the infinition, of infinity. In- finity does not first exist, and then reveal itself. Its infinition is produced as revelation, as a positing of its idea in me.
INFINITY IS PRODUCED in the improbably feat whereby a separated benign fixed in its identity, the Same, the I, nonetheless contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive solely by virtue of its on identity.
Subjectivity realizes these impossible exigencies-the astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain. This book will present subjectivity as welcoming the Other, as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consum- mated.
To contain more than one's capacity does not mean to embrace or to encompass the totality of being in thought of, at least, to be able to account for it after the fact by the inward play of constitutive thought. To contain more than one's capacity is to shatter at every moment the framework of a content that is thought, to cross the barriers of immanence but without this descent into being reducing itself anew to a concept of descent.
• I. The Same and the Other A. Metaphysics and Transcendence
• The Desire for the Invisible
The metaphysical Other is something else entirely, a desired absolutely other
This desire characterizes a being indigent and incomplete; it coincides with a consciousness of what has been lost; it is essentially a notalgia, a longing for return. But thus it does not get at what the other is
Metaphysical desire should be:
• Not nostalgic, no prior kinship assumed, no return.
• A desire that cannot be satisfied.
• Metaphysical desire desires beyond everything that can simply complete it.
• It is a generosity nourished by the Desired, and thus a relationship that is not the disappearance of distance, not a bringing together. No remoteness or separation nourishes it.
• It does not think beforehand, it goes toward aimlessly, toward an absolute, an unanticipatable alterity, as one goes forth unto death.
• Desire is absolute if the desiring bein g is moral and the Desired invisible, non-adequated.
• DESIRE IS DESIRE FOR THE ABSOLUTE OTHER.
• To die for the invisible: this is metaphysics.
The Breach of Totality
• Metaphysics cannot be totalized, the other cannot be totalized. It is wrong if it tries. The metaphysician and the other do not constitute a simple correlation, which would be reversible.
• Transcendence cannot be reabsorbed into the unity of a system–this destroys the radical alterity of the other.
• The alterity, the radical heterogeneity of the other, is possible only if the other is other with respect
• Philosophy’s attention to human experience as they are actually lived through in the concrete
Sartre has a keen sense for life as it is lived, and his work is marked by many penetrating descriptions. But his dualistic ontology of the en-soi versus the pour-soi has seemed over-simple and inadequate to many critics, and has been seriously qualified by the author himself in his latest Marxist work, The Critique of Dialetical Reason.
Merleau-Ponty's major work is a lasting contribution to the phenomenology of the pre-objective world of perception. But aside from a few brief hints and sketches, he was unable, before his unfortunate death in 1961, to work out carefully hsi ultimate philosophical point of view.
Heidegger, as the only contemporary thinker who has formulated a total ontology which claims to do justice to the stable results of phenomenology and to the liv- ing existential thought of our time.
Levinas has exhaustive knowledge of these. This work is basically phenomenological in character
• According to Levinas, I find myself existing in a world of alien things and elements which are other than, but not negations of myself.
• My primary experience is definitely biased and egocentric. I take precedence over the various objects I find around me, and in so far as my experience
• is normal, I learn to manipulate and control them to my advantage, either as the member of a group which I identify with myself or simply as myself alone. In general, these objects are at my disposal, and I am free to play with them, live on them, and ot enjoy them at my pleasure
Primordial experience of enjoyment=jouissance
• There is a strong tendency in all human individuals and groups to main- tain this egocentric attitude and to think of other individuals either as extensions of the self, or as alien objects to be manipulated for the advantage of the individual or social self. According to Levinas, neither of these egocentric views does justice to our original experience of the other person
Phenomenology of the other: The other person as he comes before me in a face to face encounter is NOT an alter ego, another self with different properties and accidents but in all essential respects like me.
The other may be an analogue to me–but not necessarily!
I may find him to be inhabiting a world that is basically other than mine and to be essentially different from me. He is not a mere object to be subsumed under one of my categories and given a place in my world.
the other as I meet him for the first time in his strangeness face to face. I see this countenance before me nude and bare. He is present in the flesh. But as Levinas points out in his revealing descriptions, there is also a sense of distance and even of absence in his ques- tioning glance. He is far from me and other than myself, a stranger, and I cannot be sure of what this strangeness may conceal.
Of course, I may simply treat him as a different version of myself, or, if I have the power, place him under my categories and use him for my purposes. But this means reducing him to what he is not. How can I coexist with him and still leave his otherness intact?
• HOW TO KEEP THE OTHER OTHER? A: Language
The questioning glance of the other is seeking for a meaningful response. Of course, I may give only a casual word, and go on my own way with indifference, passing the other by. But if communication and community is to be achieved, a real response, a responsible answer must be given. This means that I must be ready to put my world into words, and to offer it to the other.
Responsible communication depends on an initial act of generosity, a giving of my world to him with all its dubious assumptions and arbitrary features.
By speaking to the other I enter into a relation with him
But this speaking does not bind me down or limit me, because I remain at a distance from what is said.
He does not merely present me with lifeless signs into which I am free to read meanings of my own. His expressions bear his meanings
There is no difference between the active expres- sion and what is expressed. The two coincide. The other is not an object that must be interpreted and illumined by my alien light. He shines forth with his own light, and speaks for himself.
Levinas concedes that speaking and thinking is systematic, bound by logic of some kind. What he is interested in showing is that prior to these systems, which are required to meet many needs, and presupposed by them is the existing individual and his ethical choice to welcome the stranger and to share his world by speaking to him.
• This other-oriented mode of speaking and thinking will pay less at- tention to things as they appear to the separated self, and more attention to the search for what they are in themselves, in their radical other- ness, even though this is less certain and always more difficult to find. This will mean less interest in conceptual constructions and a greater readiness to listen and learn from experience.
• The basic difference is between a mode of thought which tries to gather all things around the mind, or self, of the thinker, and an ex- ternally oriented mode which attempts to penetrate into what is radically other than the mind that is thinking it.
• By communicating with the other, I enter into a relation with him which does not necessarily lead to my dependence on him. Nor does he become dependent on me. He can absolve himself from this relation with his integrity intact. Hence Levinas calls it absolving, or absolute.
• And he finds many other relations of this kind, for example, that of truth. In so far as I am related to another entity and share in its being, it must be really changed. But as classical metaphysics pointed out, in so far as I discover the truth about something, it is absolved from this relation and remains unchanged. The same is true of the idea of absolute perfection which is clearly radically other than what I am. But I can strive for such an other without changing it, or losing my own integrity, just as I can respond to another person and engage in dialogue without jeopardizing his or my own being. Levinas suggests that this may be the reason for Plato's well-known statement at Republic 509 that the good lies beyond being, and relates it to his own view that the conclusions of our basic philosophical questions are to be found beyond metaphysics in ethics. My way of existing conveys my final answer.
• Totalizers: satisfied with themselves and with the systems they can organize around themselves as they already are. Seek control and power. TOTALITY
Has dominated human history
From this point of view, only the neutral and impersonal, Being, for example, si important. "What is it?" is the most basic question that requires an answer in terms of a context, a system. The real is something that can be brought before the senses and the mind as an object. The acts of sensing, thinking, existing, as they are lived through, are discounted as subjective. A priority is, therefore, placed
on objective thinking, and the objective. The group is more powerful, more inclusive, and, therefore, more important than the individual. To be free is to sacrifice the arbitrary inner self and to fit into a rationally grounded system. Inner feelings and thoughts cannot be observed. They are private and unstable.
Men judged by their works that are visible and remain.
Since this is an inclusive system, with nothing beyond, there is no appeal from this judgment. It is final.
• Infinitizers: those who are dissatisfied, strive for what is other than themselves. Seek quality of life. INFINITY
Concedes that systematic thinking has its place, is required for the establishment of those power structures which satisfy necessary needs. But they should not be absolutized. Slavery is the dominance of the neutral and impersonal over the active and personal.
We do not need to know the other person (or thing) as he is in himself, and we shall never know him apart from acting with him. But unless we desire this, and go on trying, we shall never escape from the subjectivism of our systems and the objects that they bring before us to categorize and manipulate. We do not get rid of our thoughts and feelings by ignoring them or by any other means. But we may seek to transcend them, first as individuals and only later, perhaps, as a group. The individual person becomes free and responsible not by fitting into a system but rather by fighting against it and by acting on his own.
Have a sense of inner life as revealed in dialogue!
Infinitizers seek to separate themselves from this course of history and to make judgements of their own with reference to a standard of perfection that is radically other and transcendent. To this IDEA OF THE INFINITE, an appeal can be made
This is metaethical position, not normative ethical one.
• Preface
• Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void that would surround the totality and where one could, arbitrarily, think what one likes, and thus promote the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. It si a relationship with a surplus always exterior ot the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being, as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality and as primordial as totality.
• This "beyond" the totality and objective experience is, however, not to be described in a purely negative fashion. It is reflected within the totality and history, within experience. The eschatological, as the "beyond" of history, draws beings out of the jurisdiction of history and the future; it arouses them in and calls them forth to their full responsibility
BEING OVERFLOWING HISTORY
Existants (étants) can break with totality, enter into relation with infinity of being which exceeds totality
• The first "vision" of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision—it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics.
• The relation with infinity cannot, to be sure, be stated in terms of experience, for infinity overflows the thought that thinks it. Its very infinition is produced precisely in this overflowing. The relation with infinity will have to be stated in terms other than those of objective experience; but if experience precisely means a relation with the absolutely other, that is, with what always overflows thought, the relation with infinity accomplishes experience in the fullest sense of the word.
• Do the particular beings yield their truth in a Whole in which their exteriority vanishes? Or, on the contrary, is the ultimate event of being enacted in the outburst of this exteriority? Our initial question now assumes this form.
• THESIS
This book will proceed to distinguish between the idea of totality and the idea of infinity, and affirm the philosophical primacy of the idea of infinity. It will recount how infinity is produced in the relationship of the same with the other,* and how the particular and the personal, which are unsurpassable, as it were magnetize the very field in which the production of infinity is enacted. The term "production" designates both the effectuation of being (the event "is produced," an automobile "is produced") and its being brought to light or its exposition (an argument "is produced," an actor "is produced"). The ambiguity of this verb conveys the essential ambiguity of the operation by which the being of an entity simultaneously is brought about [s'évertue] and is revealed.
The idea of infinity is not an incidental notion forged by a subjectivity to reflect the case of an entity encountering on the outside nothing that limits it, overflowing every limit, and thereby infinite.
The idea of infinity si the mode of being, the infinition, of infinity. In- finity does not first exist, and then reveal itself. Its infinition is produced as revelation, as a positing of its idea in me.
INFINITY IS PRODUCED in the improbably feat whereby a separated benign fixed in its identity, the Same, the I, nonetheless contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive solely by virtue of its on identity.
Subjectivity realizes these impossible exigencies-the astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain. This book will present subjectivity as welcoming the Other, as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consum- mated.
To contain more than one's capacity does not mean to embrace or to encompass the totality of being in thought of, at least, to be able to account for it after the fact by the inward play of constitutive thought. To contain more than one's capacity is to shatter at every moment the framework of a content that is thought, to cross the barriers of immanence but without this descent into being reducing itself anew to a concept of descent.
• I. The Same and the Other A. Metaphysics and Transcendence
• The Desire for the Invisible
The metaphysical Other is something else entirely, a desired absolutely other
This desire characterizes a being indigent and incomplete; it coincides with a consciousness of what has been lost; it is essentially a notalgia, a longing for return. But thus it does not get at what the other is
Metaphysical desire should be:
• Not nostalgic, no prior kinship assumed, no return.
• A desire that cannot be satisfied.
• Metaphysical desire desires beyond everything that can simply complete it.
• It is a generosity nourished by the Desired, and thus a relationship that is not the disappearance of distance, not a bringing together. No remoteness or separation nourishes it.
• It does not think beforehand, it goes toward aimlessly, toward an absolute, an unanticipatable alterity, as one goes forth unto death.
• Desire is absolute if the desiring bein g is moral and the Desired invisible, non-adequated.
• DESIRE IS DESIRE FOR THE ABSOLUTE OTHER.
• To die for the invisible: this is metaphysics.
The Breach of Totality
• Metaphysics cannot be totalized, the other cannot be totalized. It is wrong if it tries. The metaphysician and the other do not constitute a simple correlation, which would be reversible.
• Transcendence cannot be reabsorbed into the unity of a system–this destroys the radical alterity of the other.
• The alterity, the radical heterogeneity of the other, is possible only if the other is other with respect
May 9, 2025
After several years I finally decided to get into Levinas since everyone on my friendlist seemed to have read him. My previous exposure with Levinas was through Badiou's critical assessment of his "privileging" of the ethical (difference/multiplicity) over the political (sameness/unity) in Ethics. I'm not a fan of drawing sharp distinctions between ethics and politics (and the equivocation of any collective political project with a sort of totalising program) and when I picked up this text I wasn't really expecting to have my reservations overturned. It was quite fortunate that the essay regained its momentum (somewhat) towards the end or else I might have given up on it.
Now, the essay definitely starts off strong, promising a rectification of the Husserlian and the Heideggerian accounts of noesis noema or content form structure of intentionality and of intentionality as primal disclosure of Being (Existence) to beings (existents) respectively. The idea of infinity (content) overflows the mind, and bears witness to that which exceeds the same. On the other hand, neither can the participation in the neutral Being made possible by the latter's revelation to privileged existents be considered the fundamental phenomenon. By emphasizing the radical, atheistic autonomy of separated existence (i.e. existents as immediate and consummate enjoyment, what Kant would call the realm of "sensibility"), Levinas draws our attention to something more primordial than intentionality which is the I's encounter with the Other's "face"to which egoistic enjoyment betokens but does not thereby negate itself in doing so. Force is always already compromised by the Law (thou shall not kill). The Other is not my equal, nor a reflection of the I to be dialectically subsumed for the I seize hold of absolute freedom. The Other is superior to me and casts its glance from a dimension of "height". This means, contra Heraclitus, that war is assuredly not the father of all things. For war presupposes the aforementioned transcendence in which the I is always solitary and naked before the judgement of a concrete Other (perhaps a neighbor?), not before the tribunal of anonymous and impersonal Reason. If murderous violence justifies itself by itself, it is still justifying itself before the Other--its feeling of impotence betrays its shame and guilt before the Other. Phenomenology or better yet transcendentally inflected phenomenology therefore demonstrates that ethics is first philosophy and that ethics take precedence over ontology.
While there are occasional flashes of brilliance this essay suffers from too much description and not enough justification. Specifically, when Levinas talks about the supposed "impotence" of force in the presence of the Other in order to disarm the ontology of war glorified by the likes of Nietzsche, one cannot help but get the impression that the scenarios he describes are too steeped in realm of the social for them to serve as occasions from which one can 'deduce' notions of rigorous philosophical significance. Simply put, the curiously far reaching and iffy conclusions don't seem to follow from the premises quite in the way Levinas makes them out to be. Likewise, I was unconvinced by Levinas deduction of "fecundity" or the concrete mode of the survival of the I in one's progeny which accomplishes the movement of Desire. Levinas insists that these notions have their extra biologival or extra sociology dimension which is precisely that of fundamental ontology, except here fundamental ontology coincides with ethics. Still, Levinas' contrast between need, which indicates lack and Desire (metaphysics), in which one strives and obsessively longs for something which isn't something one needs necessarily, is one of the stronger points in the essay and really drives home the lesson that existents/separation/atheism/interiority/time is a positive fact because they in a certain sense effectuate or concretize the transcendence of the Other.
As a side note, I noticed that Levinas pretty much grapples with the same antinomies Schelling tried to resolve in his Freedom Essay. In fact striking comparisons can be made between Levinas' pure past (what he calls posterior anteriority) and Schelling's transcendental past that never was.
Now, the essay definitely starts off strong, promising a rectification of the Husserlian and the Heideggerian accounts of noesis noema or content form structure of intentionality and of intentionality as primal disclosure of Being (Existence) to beings (existents) respectively. The idea of infinity (content) overflows the mind, and bears witness to that which exceeds the same. On the other hand, neither can the participation in the neutral Being made possible by the latter's revelation to privileged existents be considered the fundamental phenomenon. By emphasizing the radical, atheistic autonomy of separated existence (i.e. existents as immediate and consummate enjoyment, what Kant would call the realm of "sensibility"), Levinas draws our attention to something more primordial than intentionality which is the I's encounter with the Other's "face"to which egoistic enjoyment betokens but does not thereby negate itself in doing so. Force is always already compromised by the Law (thou shall not kill). The Other is not my equal, nor a reflection of the I to be dialectically subsumed for the I seize hold of absolute freedom. The Other is superior to me and casts its glance from a dimension of "height". This means, contra Heraclitus, that war is assuredly not the father of all things. For war presupposes the aforementioned transcendence in which the I is always solitary and naked before the judgement of a concrete Other (perhaps a neighbor?), not before the tribunal of anonymous and impersonal Reason. If murderous violence justifies itself by itself, it is still justifying itself before the Other--its feeling of impotence betrays its shame and guilt before the Other. Phenomenology or better yet transcendentally inflected phenomenology therefore demonstrates that ethics is first philosophy and that ethics take precedence over ontology.
While there are occasional flashes of brilliance this essay suffers from too much description and not enough justification. Specifically, when Levinas talks about the supposed "impotence" of force in the presence of the Other in order to disarm the ontology of war glorified by the likes of Nietzsche, one cannot help but get the impression that the scenarios he describes are too steeped in realm of the social for them to serve as occasions from which one can 'deduce' notions of rigorous philosophical significance. Simply put, the curiously far reaching and iffy conclusions don't seem to follow from the premises quite in the way Levinas makes them out to be. Likewise, I was unconvinced by Levinas deduction of "fecundity" or the concrete mode of the survival of the I in one's progeny which accomplishes the movement of Desire. Levinas insists that these notions have their extra biologival or extra sociology dimension which is precisely that of fundamental ontology, except here fundamental ontology coincides with ethics. Still, Levinas' contrast between need, which indicates lack and Desire (metaphysics), in which one strives and obsessively longs for something which isn't something one needs necessarily, is one of the stronger points in the essay and really drives home the lesson that existents/separation/atheism/interiority/time is a positive fact because they in a certain sense effectuate or concretize the transcendence of the Other.
As a side note, I noticed that Levinas pretty much grapples with the same antinomies Schelling tried to resolve in his Freedom Essay. In fact striking comparisons can be made between Levinas' pure past (what he calls posterior anteriority) and Schelling's transcendental past that never was.
June 14, 2016
D'après Sartre, l'enfer c'est les autres. D'après Levinas, le visage de Dieu, c'est les autres ce qui explique pourquoi le pape Jean Paul II a encouragé les catholiques à lire les textes de Levinas.
Il faut comprendre que "Totalité et Infini" est très difficile à comprendre. Si vous n'avez pas suivi quelques cours de philosophie à l'université, je vous conseille de lire "Ethique et infini" avant d'entreprendre ce livre qui constitue un défi de taille.
Il faut comprendre que "Totalité et Infini" est très difficile à comprendre. Si vous n'avez pas suivi quelques cours de philosophie à l'université, je vous conseille de lire "Ethique et infini" avant d'entreprendre ce livre qui constitue un défi de taille.
November 6, 2007
Levinas has rekindled my faith that it is possible to act ethically and be a generally "good" person without subscribing to any particular codification of religion. Amazing book, if you can get through it. It made my head hurt!
January 18, 2026
4.5; hardcore
December 4, 2023
li só « le même et l’autre »
April 1, 2013
Levinas restores the phenomenological inseparability of the philosophical and the theological in the face of the Other in this deeply ethical work. This work is hard to read. It takes vigor and commitment to get through it. I would recommend, first, just pushing through the entirety of the work before stopping and sorting it all out. This work is not linear. There is a lot of back-and-forth, and it really must be read as such. Otherwise, an amazing work whose heaviness ought not be ignored.
August 31, 2007
Certainly, an incredibly difficult book--but definitely one well worth the effort. Levinas presents so much to contemplate in a way I find other (alter, perhaps) than in most other forms of expression. The ideas presented here must be continually remembered and reflected on, in my view--very highly recommended.
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February 21, 2021Snadno se shodneme, že je nanejvýš důležité vědět, zda nás morálka nevodí za nos.
January 9, 2024
i didn't understand a word of it, but it was amazing <3
August 9, 2025
Ce livre tente d’aborder l’expérience et le constat qu’à l’intérieur des choses, il y a quelque chose de différent qui les déborde, qui ne peut être capturé ni par les pensées ni par la perception, et avec lequel pourtant nous avons déjà vécu, nous avons déjà vu. Cette chose est appelée l’Autre, Autrui, mais aussi l’Infini.
Ce livre cherche également à montrer que toute théorie est dépassée par la richesse, la décentralisation et le caractère dissimulatoire du langage. Dans les mots, ou dans les choses du monde entendues comme des mots, il y a toujours une altérité qui résiste à la thématisation. Cette altérité est aussi appelée l’Autre, Autrui, mais aussi l’Infini.
D’ailleurs, ce livre essaie de montrer que l’éthique n’a pas de sens sans tenir compte du visage d’autrui, de l’expérience de cette altérité vécue dans la rencontre en face à face avec autrui, qui devient Maître, car si l’autre n’était pas Maître, nous ne lui devrions rien. Cette réalité que l’on découvre à travers les visages est aussi l’Autre, Autrui, mais aussi l’Infini.
D’une certaine manière, l’idée centrale de ce livre est que la religion constitue le fondement de toutes les relations sociales, épistémiques et éthiques de l’homme. Cependant, sans les expériences mystiques ou spirituelles qui l’accompagnent, ce livre se sentirait orphelin.
Ce livre cherche également à montrer que toute théorie est dépassée par la richesse, la décentralisation et le caractère dissimulatoire du langage. Dans les mots, ou dans les choses du monde entendues comme des mots, il y a toujours une altérité qui résiste à la thématisation. Cette altérité est aussi appelée l’Autre, Autrui, mais aussi l’Infini.
D’ailleurs, ce livre essaie de montrer que l’éthique n’a pas de sens sans tenir compte du visage d’autrui, de l’expérience de cette altérité vécue dans la rencontre en face à face avec autrui, qui devient Maître, car si l’autre n’était pas Maître, nous ne lui devrions rien. Cette réalité que l’on découvre à travers les visages est aussi l’Autre, Autrui, mais aussi l’Infini.
D’une certaine manière, l’idée centrale de ce livre est que la religion constitue le fondement de toutes les relations sociales, épistémiques et éthiques de l’homme. Cependant, sans les expériences mystiques ou spirituelles qui l’accompagnent, ce livre se sentirait orphelin.
April 6, 2021
4 stars for getting through this challenging and insane book for school, but also feeling like I've learned something?
May 14, 2021
Another one in desperate need of a reread, but eventually I just have to move on from the first read.
Read
September 18, 2023Schwere Lektüre, daher werd ich mich mit einer Bewertung zurückhalten. Levinas Konzept der 'Exteriority' bleibt sehr spannend und bedarf definitiv weiterer Lektüren
December 20, 2024
favorite from my existentialism course!! probably because i stress read it and listened to 1000 youtube professors explain it!!
also, worth reading judith butler’s critiques / work on levinas.
also, worth reading judith butler’s critiques / work on levinas.
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