Description:

Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969) describes how subjectivity arises from the idea of infinity, and how infinity is produced in the relationship of the self with the other. Levinas says that ontology enacts a relation with being which reduces the other to the same.

Review

Totality and Infinity is a parricide committed with the father's own knife. Emmanuel Levinas takes the phenomenological method as Husserl bequeathed it and Heidegger refined it, and turns the instrument against the conclusions its makers had drawn from it — most pointedly against the thesis that the comprehension of Being is what philosophy fundamentally does. In Levinas's telling, that thesis names not a discovery but a violence: the prior comprehension of any being under the horizon of Being is the prototype of all reductions of the Other to the Same. The book's most distinctive accomplishment is to argue, while remaining faithful to phenomenological description, that ethics is first philosophy — and to do so not as a moral exhortation but as a formal claim about how a separated subject is even possible.

The position worth defending about this book is that its boldness and its strain are the same gesture. Levinas pushes the method past its own conditions: he wants to describe phenomenologically what cannot, by phenomenology's own lights, be a phenomenon — the face of the Other, which signifies before it appears, commands before it is recognized, and instructs from a height the I could not have generated from itself. The book is at its best when this self-limiting gesture is performed openly; it is at its most vulnerable when the descriptions accumulate as if they were simply offering more phenomena rather than gesturing toward the edge of what the method can hold. The reader who recognizes this is reading the right book.

The premise can be stated with austerity. Subjectivity, Levinas argues, is not the self-positing of a cogito that subsequently encounters others; it arises from the idea of infinity, and infinity is produced — the verb is operative — in the relation between the I and the Other. Ontology, the discipline that thinks beings under the unifying horizon of Being, gathers what it considers into a totality and so cancels the very alterity it claims to comprehend. To do philosophy after this diagnostic is to invert the order of priority: the relation to the Other comes first, before knowing, before being, before any system in which the I would figure as one term among others. The whole architecture of the book is the working-out of that inversion.

That working-out begins, in the opening section on the Same and the Other, with a diagnostic indictment of the philosophical tradition. Parmenides' priority of unity, Platonic recollection, Hegel's dialectical gathering, Heidegger's analytic of Dasein: Levinas reads these as so many variants on a single gesture, the absorption of what is other into the structures of the same. The diagnostic is sweeping, and the sweep is part of the argument. If totality is a recurrent structure rather than a particular doctrine, then resisting it cannot consist in choosing one school over another. The very form of "school" — terms gathered under a common genus — is what is in question. Against this, Levinas does not propose another grand system; he proposes a relation, and he excavates the formal model for that relation from an unexpected source.

The unexpected source is Descartes — specifically the third meditation's idea of infinity, the thought in the thinker of a content the thinker cannot contain. Levinas's retrieval of this figure is the book's hinge. By going behind Kant and the German idealists to a moment in seventeenth-century rationalism, he finds a structure that legitimates non-thematic alterity within the phenomenological tradition: an idea whose ideatum exceeds it, a presence that does not collapse into representation. The Cartesian formal model lets Levinas describe the relation to the Other as a relation with infinity without lapsing into mysticism or theology. It is a remarkable bit of philosophical recovery, and it organizes everything that follows. Where one might expect a twentieth-century critique of fundamental ontology to lean on resources closer to hand, Levinas reaches behind them to a pre-Kantian rationalist commitment and re-tools it for use inside post-Husserlian description.

What follows the diagnostic and the formal model is the long, patient genealogy of interiority that occupies the second section. This is the part of the book most easily overlooked and most central to its argument. If the eventual face-to-face encounter is to be a relation between separated terms rather than between moments of a single totality, the separated I must itself be a positive accomplishment, not merely a logical placeholder. Levinas describes how a subject becomes interior. The starting point is not perception, not care, not being-in-the-world; it is enjoyment, the pre-intentional life of "living from" — bread, light, air, the elements taken in as sensuous nourishment before they are objects of anything. The body's relation to the world begins as savor, not as project. Already here the book is doing something unusual within phenomenology: it is offering a description of sensibility that is neither Husserlian intentional analysis nor Heideggerian existential analytic.

From enjoyment Levinas moves to the elemental — the milieu in which one bathes rather than the field of objects one constitutes — and then to the dwelling, where this section's most contested and most generative descriptions arrive. The home is not, for Levinas, one object among others. It is the condition of interiority and economic life, the place where the immediacy of enjoyment is suspended so that labor and possession become possible. He names the quality of welcoming discretion that characterizes the dwelling the feminine, and there is no honest reading of the book that can sidestep how much philosophical work the sexed asymmetry of these passages is asked to do. The feminine here is offered as a structural moment of subjectivity rather than as a social or political proposal, and Levinas's defenders rightly insist on this; but a structural moment named in sexed terms is not thereby exempt from the questions sexed naming has always invited. Later analyses of eros and of paternity — the I that is itself and other in the child — extend the same idiom. The work these passages do, articulating an interiority capable of hospitality and a time capable of futurity, is real; the cost of the idiom in which they do it is also real. A reader who finds the cost too high is not failing the book, and a reader who absorbs the structural point should not pretend the cost is invisible.

What this genealogy buys, philosophically, is the figure Levinas calls separation, and which he is willing to name atheism. The I that has set itself up as interior, self-sufficient, capable of enjoyment and labor and dwelling, is a being that does not participate. It is not a moment of a Spinozist substance, not a stage of a Hegelian Spirit, not a region within Heideggerian being-in-the-world. It is apart. And precisely because it is apart, it is capable of being addressed. Revelation, in the broadest sense, requires a recipient that is not already inscribed within the source. Levinas's atheism is not denial; it is the philosophical position from which the encounter with what is genuinely other becomes possible. This is one of the book's most consequential reversals: where much of the tradition assimilates transcendence to participation, Levinas grounds transcendence in separation.

The book's central concept arrives in the third section, on exteriority and the face. The face — le visage — is the mode in which the Other presents itself, exceeding any image or concept the I forms of it. It speaks; it commands; it signifies on its own terms rather than within a horizon disclosed by the I. To describe it phenomenologically while arguing that it exceeds the phenomenal is the book's signature move and its standing risk. Levinas is not careless about this. He works in the idiom of description because he wants what is described to be available to philosophy, not abandoned to mysticism, but he marks the description's edge by insisting that what shows itself in the face overflows the conditions of showing. The reader who treats these passages as just more phenomenology misses their point; the reader who treats them as a covert theology also misses their point. They are an attempt to use a method to indicate what the method cannot contain, and the success of the attempt is judged by how stably that indication holds.

Two further moves in this section deserve attention because they recast familiar philosophical materials. The first is the analysis of discourse. Speech, on Levinas's account, is not the externalization of a meaning the I already possesses; it is reception of what the I could not have given itself. The Other speaks first, and speaks from a height. This recasts language and rationality themselves as having an ethical origin in the face-to-face, undercutting any account that begins from a solitary cogito and then asks how it can break out toward others. The second move is the rejection of maieutics. Socratic recollection — the model in which the learner already has within them what they will come to know, and the teacher only midwifes — is for Levinas a paradigm of the Same. Genuine teaching, enseignement, is the irruption of exteriority into the learner's autonomous interiority; it gives what the learner could not generate. The point is not pedagogical but ontological-ethical, and it follows directly from the priority of the Other: if the I cannot ground the relation to the Other in resources it already possesses, then learning cannot be a special case of remembering.

The fourth section, beyond the face, contains the book's most speculative material and its most distinctive challenge to Heidegger's account of finitude. Where Sein und Zeit had made being-toward-death the horizon of authentic temporality — the structural feature that gathered Dasein's existence into a finite whole — Levinas describes a different transcendence, accomplished biologically and ethically rather than through anticipation of one's end. In fecundity, in the relation between father and son, the I is its own and yet other in the child; a future that is mine without being my project breaks the closure of mortal time. The descriptions of eros are continuous with this: the beloved, the caress, the equivocal modality of a contact that is not knowledge. Whether these analyses persuade — whether they really displace being-toward-death rather than supplement it — is among the book's most actively contested questions. The phenomenology of paternity in particular reads as both an original contribution and as the place where Levinas's structural use of sexed and familial figures reaches its highest concentration. A reader can grant the formal point that there are non-mortal modes of transcendence without granting that the paternity figure is the privileged way to name them.

The book closes with the introduction of the third party — le tiers — and the derivation of justice from the asymmetrical face-to-face. This is the gesture by which Levinas connects the foundational analysis to political life. Once a third is present, the I is responsible to more than one Other, and comparison, universality, and political institutions become not only possible but necessary. Justice and the State, on this account, are not original; they arise from a prior responsibility and remain answerable to it. The State is judged by the third, not by its own self-preservation. The argument here is dense and gestural rather than systematic, and it is one of the places where a reader notices how much the book is laying down a program for ethics as first philosophy and how much of the political follow-through is reserved for elsewhere. As a hinge between the ethical and the political, the section is suggestive; as a finished political philosophy, it is plainly preliminary.

The book opens, finally — and the preface is one of its most striking pieces — under the sign of war. War, in this framing, suspends morality and reduces persons to bearers of forces in a field of objective historiography. Philosophy that takes its bearings from the events of war risks being complicit with totality, since war is precisely the moment when individuals are gathered into a single comprehensible field and treated as terms of it. Against this, Levinas opposes an eschatological peace — not the truce of belligerents within a totalizing history, but a relation with infinity that judges history from beyond it. The preface places the entire argument under the question of whether morality is mere illusion after the experience of totalitarian war, and the book's answer is that morality survives only if ethics is first philosophy, only if the face-to-face responsibility is more original than any totality history can construct. The frame is unmistakably written from within the twentieth century. It is also, by the book's own categories, contested: a reader can find the diagnostic of war compelling and still wonder how an eschatological peace cashes out in any concrete politics that does not simply defer to the State it was meant to judge.

To place the book in its traditions is to triangulate at least four. It is phenomenological in method, but a phenomenology turned against itself: intentional analysis is used to describe a face that exceeds the noesis-noema structure, an enjoyment that precedes the constituting ego, an elemental that has no form of an object. It is post-Heideggerian and in that sense existentialist in vocabulary, taking up world, dwelling, being-with, and being-toward-death and reworking each so that ontology becomes a regional case of a more original ethical relation. It is rationalist in its most consequential structural move, the Cartesian retrieval of the idea of infinity as the formal hinge of non-totalizing transcendence. And it stands as a precursor of the post-structuralist refusal of totality — though Levinas's refusal is not made in the name of difference as such but in the name of an asymmetrical ethical relation, which is a different thing. There is also a register the canonical traditions do not quite hold: a Jewish biblical and Talmudic sensibility, in which the figures of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and prophetic address inform the ethical vocabulary. Levinas does not argue confessionally in this book — the categories are deployed philosophically rather than theologically — but a reader who hears nothing of that register hears the book partially.

The closest interlocutor, throughout, is Heidegger, and the relation is more interesting than simple opposition. Levinas inherits much: the suspicion of representational thinking, the centrality of pre-theoretical comportment, the conviction that the philosophical tradition has misdescribed something fundamental. The dispute is over the priority of what has been missed. For Heidegger, the question of Being; for Levinas, the relation to the Other. Levinas's wager is that the priority of Being is itself a totalizing gesture and that the genuine wonder lies elsewhere. Reading the two side by side, one feels the strain of a thinker who has accepted nearly every premise of his interlocutor and disputed only the order — and that the dispute over order is decisive. Husserl is the next interlocutor: Levinas honors the method but argues that the Fifth Cartesian Meditation's account of the alter ego remains within the philosophy of the Same and cannot do justice to the Other. Hegel is the structural antagonist whose dialectical synthesis Levinas refuses by insisting that the Same–Other relation has no common genus. Sartre is closer to the surface than he sometimes appears: Levinas's face is in part a polemic against the Sartrean look, which makes the Other an objectifier of the I in shame and conflict, by describing instead a face whose primary mode is ethical command and welcome. And Buber is a near neighbor whose I–Thou Levinas resists for one decisive reason: the relation is asymmetrical. The Other comes from a height; the I is responsible without symmetrical claim; reciprocity is not the original ethical structure but at best a derivative one.

What the book gets right is the demonstration that a philosophy of subjectivity that begins from a solitary cogito cannot recover what it has excluded by stipulation. Levinas's positive proposal — that the I is welcomed into being by the Other, that responsibility is not chosen but elected, that freedom is invested rather than foundational — is the kind of inversion that does not just add to a debate but reframes it. The reframing has been generative: subsequent work in ethics, philosophy of language, political philosophy, and even philosophy of religion has taken from Levinas a vocabulary in which transcendence can be spoken without dogma and ethics can be grounded without naturalism. What the book gets wrong, or at least underwrites with too little caution, are some of the same moves that are most distinctive. The sexed structure of the descriptions of dwelling, eros, and paternity asks more of a metaphorics than it is reasonable to expect a metaphorics to deliver, and a critical reading has to register that without dismissing what the analyses accomplish. The eschatological frame of the preface, suggestive against the horizon of mid-century totalitarianism, leaves the political consequences underspecified; the gesture toward the third and the State at the end gestures more than it grounds. The phenomenology-against-phenomenology of the face risks becoming a stylistic posture if the strain of the gesture is not constantly renewed.

This is a book for the reader who wants to know whether philosophy can describe an encounter that is not a kind of knowing, and who is willing to follow a difficult sustained argument to find out. It rewards patience with the second section's genealogy of interiority more than first-time readers expect; the face-to-face passages of the third section are unforgettable but only fully intelligible against that genealogy. It should be read by anyone working on phenomenology after Heidegger, on the foundations of ethics, on the philosophy of intersubjectivity, on the question of how to speak of transcendence without theology, or on the relation between pre-political responsibility and political institutions. It should be read with its weaknesses in view, especially the sexed asymmetries of its central descriptions and the gestural character of its political conclusions. What it offers is not a system that can be adopted intact, but an inversion — ethics before ontology, the Other before the I — that, once one has thought it through, is hard to unthink.

Notable Quotes

The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives. In advance its shadow falls over the actions of men.

Opening of the Preface, establishing war as the fundamental challenge to morality that the entire work seeks to answer — war, morality, politics, violence

The true life is absent. But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi. It is turned toward the 'elsewhere' and the 'otherwise' and the 'other.'

Opening of Section I, defining metaphysics as the movement toward what transcends the familiar world — metaphysics, transcendence, desire, alterity

The metaphysical desire has another intention—it desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness—the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it.

Distinguishing metaphysical Desire from need; Desire is not a lack to be filled but an aspiration that grows with its object — desire, goodness, infinity, need

To know amounts to grasping being out of nothing or reducing it to nothing, removing from it its alterity. This result is obtained from the moment of the first ray of light. To illuminate is to remove from being its resistance.

Critique of ontology as a philosophy of power that reduces the other to the same through comprehension — knowledge, ontology, power, alterity

We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics.

The definition of ethics as the primordial response to the Other, prior to ontology — ethics, spontaneity, the Other, freedom

Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues in the State and in the non-violence of the totality, without securing itself against the violence from which this non-violence lives, and which appears in the tyranny of the State.

Levinas's argument that Heideggerian ontology, by subordinating the ethical to Being, leads inevitably to tyranny — ontology, power, state, tyranny

We live from 'good soup,' air, light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep, etc. These are not objects of representations. We live from them. Nor is what we live from a 'means of life'... They are always in a certain measure objects of enjoyment, presenting themselves to 'taste,' already adorned, embellished.

Opening of the analysis of enjoyment, establishing that life's relation to its contents is neither representation nor utility but enjoyment — enjoyment, life, nourishment, sensibility

Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being: thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun.

Describing how the love of life constitutes the very substance of separated existence, prior to any ontological determination — life, happiness, love, separation

Freedom consists in knowing that freedom is in peril. But to know or to be conscious is to have time to avoid and forestall the instant of inhumanity.

On the relation between freedom, consciousness, and the perpetual risk of dehumanization — freedom, consciousness, time, inhumanity

Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry. Food can be interpreted as an implement only in a world of exploitation.

A pointed critique of Heidegger's existential analytic for ignoring the dimension of enjoyment and need — Heidegger, hunger, enjoyment, exploitation

The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp. This mutation can occur only by the opening of a new dimension.

The central description of the face as that which exceeds all power and opens the ethical dimension — face, resistance, power, ethics

This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in his face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: 'you shall not commit murder.'

The ethical command that emanates from the face as the first word of language and the foundation of all meaning — infinity, murder, face, commandment

To leave men without food is a fault that no circumstance attenuates; the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary does not apply here.

Quoting Rabbi Yochanan to illustrate the absolute, irrecusable character of responsibility before the face of the Other — responsibility, hunger, justice, obligation

The I is a privilege and an election. The sole possibility in being of going beyond the straight line of the law, that is, of finding a place lying beyond the universal, is to be I.

On the singular responsibility that constitutes the I as irreplaceable—morality requires the unicity of the subject — subjectivity, responsibility, election, morality

The caress consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet.

Phenomenology of eros—the caress as a relation with what is beyond all possession and all knowledge — eros, caress, future, transcendence

I do not have my child; I am my child. Paternity is a relation with a stranger who while being Other is me.

On fecundity as transcendence—the child as the concrete realization of infinite time and the overcoming of death — paternity, fecundity, identity, transcendence

Being is exteriority. The very exercise of its being consists in exteriority, and no thought could better obey being than by allowing itself to be dominated by this exteriority.

A key thesis of the Conclusions—truth is not panoramic disclosure but the face-to-face encounter with what exceeds me — exteriority, being, truth, transcendence

This 'curvature of space' is, perhaps, the very presence of God.

The 'curvature of intersubjective space' that inflects distance into height, making the Other always above me, is identified with the divine — God, intersubjectivity, height, ethics

Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy.

The culminating thesis of the work, inverting the traditional subordination of ethics to ontology — morality, first philosophy, ethics, ontology

To enjoy without utility, in pure loss, gratuitously, without referring to anything else, in pure expenditure—this is the human.

On the non-systematic, gratuitous character of enjoyment that distinguishes human existence from mere biological functioning — enjoyment, gratuitousness, humanity, expenditure

The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these qualities, but kath'auto. It expresses itself.

The face as what exceeds every representation, every image, every concept—expression as irreducible to form — face, expression, representation, infinity

Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation represents not the superior form but the forever primitive form of religion.

Levinas's radical claim that authentic religion is ethics—relations with God must pass through relations with human beings — religion, ethics, interhuman, God