Levinas’ ‘Totality and Infinity’: A Reader’s Guide 9781472524393, 9781472529954, 9781474219150, 9781472534125

Table of contents :
FC
Half title
Also available from Bloomsbury
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Foreword
Author’s Note
1 Overview of themes and context
The phenomenological method of Totality and Infinity
Levinas as a Jewish philosopher
2 Reading the text
Preface
The Same and the Other
Interiority and Economy
Ethics and the Face
Beyond the Face
Conclusions
3 Reception and influence
The problem of presentation
The problem of politics
The problem of the feminine
The problem of religion
4 Further reading
Notes
Index

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Levinas’ ‘Totality and Infinity’

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Reader’s Guides Bloomsbury Reader’s Guides are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

Titles available in this series: Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’, Edward Halper Aristotle’s ‘Politics’, Judith A. Swanson and C. David Corbin Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’, Christopher Norris Berkeley’s ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’, Alasdair Richmond Berkeley’s ‘Three Dialogues’, Aaron Garrett Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘What is Philosophy?’, Rex Butler Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, Eugene W. Holland Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’, Joe Hughes Derrida’s ‘Writing and Difference’, Sarah Wood Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, Stephen Houlgate Heidegger’s Later Writings, Lee Braver Hume’s ‘Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’, Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien Kant’s ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’, Fiona Hughes Kant’s ‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason’, Eddis N. Miller Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’, Clare Carlisle Kuhn’s ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, John Preston Locke’s ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’, William Uzgalis Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, Miguel Vatter Mill’s ‘Utilitarianism’, Henry R. West Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Christa Davis Acampora and Keith Ansell Pearson

Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, Douglas Burnham and Martin Jesinghausen Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, Clancy Martin and Daw-Nay Evans Plato’s ‘Republic’, Luke Purshouse Plato’s ‘Symposium’, Thomas L. Cooksey Rawls’s ‘A Theory of Justice’, Frank Lovett Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’, Sebastian Gardner Schopenhauer’s ‘The World as Will and Representation’, Robert L. Wicks Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’, Arif Ahmed

A READER’S GUIDE

Levinas’ ‘Totality and Infinity’ WILLIAM LARGE

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © William Large, 2015 William Large has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For Sally Stone

CONTENTS

Foreword  xi Author’s Note  xiii

1 Overview of themes and context  1 The phenomenological method of Totality and Infinity  4 Levinas as a Jewish philosopher  10

2 Reading the text  15 Preface  15 The Same and the Other  22 Interiority and Economy  47 Ethics and the Face  77 Beyond the Face  100 Conclusions  113

3 Reception and influence  119 The problem of presentation  120 The problem of politics  123 The problem of the feminine  125 The problem of religion  126

4 Further reading  129 Notes  135 Index  141

FOREWORD

I first encountered Levinas’ Totality and Infinity as an undergraduate at the University of Essex. I was a student of Robert Bernasconi. How lucky I was to have such an expert guide and wonderful teacher. Since then I have never stopped trying to understand Levinas and this book. Even when I try not to write about Levinas, I always end up coming back to him. Why, such a long time ago, did this book have such a hold on me, and more than any other book propel me into philosophy? Of course, why one book and not another, why one thinker and not another, affects you is personal and contingent. We all have our different paths into philosophy. First of all, I think, it was his style. However difficult he was, Levinas always wrote in his own voice and about the world surrounding him. I was amused, for example, that here was a philosopher who spoke of love-bites. Second, having become by then quite sceptical of ethics in the traditional sense, he completely renewed for me what this word meant. The experience of the other as the basis of ethics, and the transformation of subjectivity this entails, still seems to me – which of course does not mean I have no criticisms whatsoever – true. The best way to understand a philosopher is to teach him or her. So many students throughout the years have suffered my teaching of Levinas’ Totality and Infinity. Although there are several good guides on his work as a whole, there is nothing specific on this book, and though we might be sceptical of guides and commentaries (especially if the reader believes thereby that they do not have to read the original), I do think the reader needs a helping hand. Perhaps, above all, because Levinas (and why should he) does not give any context to his philosophy. He fully expects his reader to be conversant with the history of philosophy, and Husserl and Heidegger in particular. This context needs explanation, and only then does the originality of Levinas’ ethics emerge.

xii Foreword

I will finish with one last word about the style of Totality and Infinity. I wrote above that one of the reasons I was attracted to Levinas (even before I had fully understood it, if one can ever fully understand a philosopher, or anyone for that matter), was his style. I can imagine for someone else this might be the very reason why they would not and could not read him. Totality and Infinity is a phenomenological book of a kind. It does not offer us a system of ethics or even a rational basis for our ethical choices (do not expect to be told how to solve ethical dilemmas). It describes, coming back to it again and again obsessively, the one and the same experience of the other who calls my self-interest into question by demanding a response from me. I have decided, in this commentary, rather than attempting to reconstruct Levinas’ argument logically, to track the order of his narration. The benefit of this approach is that the reader can follow the journey, with all its irregularities and byways, of the book itself. Also, if the reader so chooses, and there is a particular difficult passage, they can go straight to this part without having to read this book as a whole. The disadvantage of this approach is that, if a reader starts at the beginning and goes to the end, then, like Totality and Infinity itself, this can lead to a lot of repetition. Perhaps, with such an odd and difficult book like Totality and Infinity, however, this is not such a bad idea. Having already acknowledged Robert Bernasconi and my students (especially my students at the University of St Mark and St John, and the University of Gloucestershire), I would also like to thank those who, from the first years, have helped me along the way: Lilian Alweiss, Simon Critchley, Lars Iyer, Thomas Wall, Philip Goodchild, Paul Grosch, David Webster and Lisa Guenther. Without the intimate other of our home, Sally Stone, nothing would have been possible.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

All references to Totality and Infinity in the text are given by page number. The translation used is Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). There are two words for ‘other’ in French, autre and autrui. Generally speaking, one uses the first to speak of things and the second of persons. Generally, also, Levinas tends to use the pronoun autrui to designate the other in the text. Since there is no such difference in English, the translator has translated ‘other’ with a capital. I have avoided this procedure, because I believe it substantializes the other, and transforms them into something mysterious and otherworldly. It is clear that Levinas is describing the other as another person and, if he does speak of them as autre, then I will make that clear in the exposition. One other difficulty of language is the absence of the gender-neutral third-person pronoun in both French and English when speaking of persons. Is the other an ‘it’, ‘he’ or ‘she’? It would be strange to speak of the ‘other’ as ‘it’, because of the very impersonality of discourse that Levinas avoids, but to speak of the other as ‘he’ at one time and ‘she’ at another would be confusing to the reader. To avoid this awkwardness I refer to the other as ‘they’ or ‘them’, although strictly speaking this is not grammatically correct. There is a philosophical problem here beyond the grammatical one, as many readers of Levinas know, since in his work he will speak of the other as ‘she’. I shall discuss this more substantial matter in the commentary below. All use of italics in quotations from Totality and Infinity are emphasis in the original.

CHAPTER ONE

Overview of themes and context Totality and Infinity was originally published in 1961. Ironically, considering its subsequent impact and fame, when Levinas first submitted the manuscript to the French publisher Gallimard it was rejected. Subsequently, through the support of the French philosopher Jean Wahl, he submitted it as a thesis for his Doctorat d’Etat (a French higher-level qualification that allows one to teach at a university). The former was reputed to have said about the thesis that ‘we are here to evaluate a thesis about which other theses will be written’.1 His prophecy has not proved to be wrong. You only have to look at any bibliography to see that there have been countless theses, books and articles written about this work. Of course, in the end, a book has to stand on its own merits, and just because it is fashionable and read today does not mean it will be in the future. What value does Totality and Infinity have? It reminds us of the importance of ethics by placing it in the concrete experience of the other. Today we might have the tendency to be suspicious of ethics because we are aware of the duplicity of our norms and moral codes which are the mask for political and economic power. When even corporations have ethical codes, we might think that the very basis of ethics has been compromised. Yet anyone looking for a formula to live would find Totality and Infinity disappointing. One of the great difficulties of reading this

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book is that what Levinas means by ethics is not usually how we understand it. What is normally suggested to us by ethics I would call ‘morality’. Morality is the laws and principles you and I might live by, and through which we might judge others who have failed to do so. When we argue whether abortion is right or wrong, or distinguish between passive and active euthanasia, it is these rules we are debating. There are also the further philosophical arguments about what are the ultimate principles which these choices depend upon. Do our moral laws have their source in our reason, such that they would be true of everyone, or are our moral choices instead based upon our character that is socially and historical rooted? This is not what Levinas means by ethics, and nor will one find in his work the discussion of ethical principles and foundations that one would find in a traditional university course or textbook. This does not mean that there is no relation between ethics and morality for Levinas (he would probably call the latter ‘justice’ rather than ‘morality’), but ethics, as the concrete experience of the other, is always first, and if our moral discussions are to have any basis, then they have their source in an ethical experience rather than in reason, or a particular history or community. The big difference between Levinas’ approach to ethics and the traditional way to think about morality is that the former begins with the experience of the other, whereas the latter starts with the self and works outwards. Let us imagine, for example, that we start with the rationalization of a moral action. I first begin with an intention, and then subsequently determine, through a process of universalization, whether such an action is moral or not. Even if I do not think morality is grounded in rationality, but is rather a virtuous activity that evolves through moral experiences, then such a character is still a character of an individual. It is I who acts morally, and it is I who must decide, tragically or not, whether my actions are moral. For Levinas, on the contrary, ethics begins not with the self but with the experience of the other. It is not I who decides to be ethical, rather I am forced to be ethical despite my wishes or intentions. Ethics has its source not in the will or freedom, but in the demand of the other who impels me to account for my actions, even in my refusal to do so. Whatever moral codes I might or might fail to live by, and



Overview of themes and context

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whatever moral decisions I have to make, have their source in this ethical reversal. We like to think, perhaps, that philosophers will tell us how to live, or will make our decisions for us in advance, but this is not what Totality and Infinity offers. It is not a moral guide. Not only might the content of Totality and Infinity initially disturb our ordinary understanding of ethics, so might its style. Some might describe it pejoratively as poetic and literary because it does not put forward a standard philosophical argument. Rather than persuasively putting forward a case for ethics, it seems merely to describe repetitively the same experience of the other. Yet this is perhaps to misunderstand its methodology. Totality and Infinity is a work of phenomenology. Levinas does not really explain why this is the case (they are rare moments in the book where he actually reflects on his method). Moreover, he seems to take it for granted that his reader is acquainted with phenomenology, whereas it is more probable they are not. So the first task we must accomplish is a preliminary understanding of this phenomenological method. This does not have to be too technical (like most philosophical methods, phenomenology produces its own specialized vocabulary), because Totality and Infinity does not depend on a detailed knowledge of phenomenology. However, we are never going to understand the evidence of Levinas’ argument, even if in the end we reject it, if we do not have some grasp of its phenomenological claims. One other fundamental objection against Levinas’ work is that not only is it merely poetic, but it is also prophetic (and perhaps for the critics of this work the two go together). Totality and Infinity is just a book of Jewish philosophy and therefore cannot be taken seriously as a philosophical work, since true philosophy should have a universal rather than a dogmatic appeal. This accusation is not just that Levinas is Jewish, since every philosopher must be someone, but that his religious beliefs somehow infect his philosophical arguments (so much so that they are not really arguments at all), and that anyone who agrees with them must also share these beliefs. Totality and Infinity is, therefore, a Jewish book for Jews, rather than for every reader. So not only to we have to explain why this book is universal, but also why labelling it ‘Jewish’ in the pejorative sense misses the mark.

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The phenomenological method of Totality and Infinity Phenomenology was a method of doing philosophy invented by Edmund Husserl.2 Although Husserl discovered phenomenology and his name is forever associated with it, it is perhaps better to characterize it as a ‘rediscovery’. Philosophy, unlike science for example, does not discover new theories, for its questions and problems are perennial. It can, however, go into periods of decline where the subject matter of philosophy appears only to be for philosophy itself rather than the world outside of it. At such times philosophy can be dominated by professors in the university, and charlatans and faith-healers outside of it. Phenomenology is the demand for philosophy to return to its roots and its beginnings. This is not merely an historical demand, which can end up in an empty historicism, but experiential. What is the fundamental basis of our experience of the world, and how can we claim to know anything at all? Husserl’s answer to this question is subjectivity. The world only is because it is for someone. If the world did not appear to me as already meaningful then it would not be at all. The stone does not appear to the stone, or the supernova to the supernova. Things are only to the extent that they manifest themselves to someone. One of the greatest opponents of phenomenology is naturalism. Naturalism is the belief that nature has a meaning in itself (stones and supernova exist independently of their appearing to someone) and that anything that exists can be explained by natural laws, which are in turn independent of the mind that thinks them, such that Newton’s laws would still be true even if Newton or anyone else had never thought them. The dominance of naturalism, Husserl believed, had to do with the success of the natural sciences. Because the natural sciences can explain much of the phenomena we can see, it seems quite reasonable to think that they can describe the being of these phenomena as well. Today, through neuroscience, we even think our subjective experiences can be explained naturally, so that the full circle of scientific explanation will be closed (as though the neuroscientist will be able to explain the natural laws that govern the physicist’s brain when she thinks about quantum mechanics). The danger of naturalism, for Husserl,



Overview of themes and context

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is that it would lead to relativism and scepticism, which would destroy the very basis of science itself. But even if naturalism did not lead to such a disaster to thought, it is not true, Husserl would say, to the experience on which it itself, like any other theory, must ultimately depend. The successes of natural science have led to its forgetting its own experiential basis. The natural sciences treat the world as a natural object, and so they must if they are to be successful. Nature is subject to the laws of cause and effect, but it itself is a projection. This projection must have an origin. For the world to be a natural object, it first of all must appear. Such an appearing of the world is not subject to the laws of cause and effect, but is originally present. The aim of phenomenology is to describe this original presentation. Not to explain it, because it is already given (you cannot get behind the ‘givenness’ of the world, since it is already ‘there’, so to speak). If there were not such a world, then science would not be able to begin. The world is given to intuition. ‘Intuition’ is a loaded word in the history of philosophy, and for this reason liable to misunderstanding. Husserl does not mean by it an idea or image in the mind accessed through introspection, but the way in which something is presented to me. This presentation can take different forms. I can perceive something, remember or imagine it. I can be angry about someone, or I can even make judgements about a state of affairs that could be true or false. There are many ways in which the world can present itself to me, and through his different analyses Husserl attempts to capture their differences and details. At the heart of every presentation, however, is the fundamental structure of intentionality. It is at this point that Levinas’ phenomenology breaks with Husserl’s. The other is given, but it is not given in intuition, and because it is not given in intuition it is not constituted by the intentionality of the subject. The other, then, for Levinas is an ‘extra-ordinary’ phenomenon, and is not given in the way, for example, a cup or a mathematical idea is given. In rejecting the ‘principle of all principles’, which is how Husserl described the primacy of intuition, Levinas is not returning to naturalism (this is why if we are to describe his thought as a kind of ‘radical empiricism’, we have to be careful what we mean by this expression).3 Levinas would accept that any kind of scientific or even commonsense empiricism is susceptible to Husserl’s critique, either because

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it cannot adequately explain the phenomena it sees, or hidden within it is an idealism it presupposes but does not clarify. What he does not accept, however, is that the other is given in that way. One way of thinking about this difference is beginning with the opposite. What would it mean to think of the other as though it were a phenomenon like any other? I see the other in front of me. I can see that the other is not like any other object, because it appears to act, speak and think like me. The key expression in this imaginary situation is ‘like me’.4 I treat the other differently because I empathize with them. I see they are like a subject just like me, though I cannot literally occupy their minds so as to see the world as they do. What we notice in this little story is that it is I who determine the other, and not the other me. The other is only other because I relate to them in that way. I of course could fail to empathize with them and treat them as I do any other object. This constitution of the other through the self, rather than the other way around, is repeated in Heidegger’s Being and Time, though it could be argued that he too rejected, in a qualified way, Husserl’s ‘principle of all principles’. Understanding the difference between Levinas and Heidegger here will help us to grasp in what way Levinas is still a phenomenologist. Additionally, Totality and Infinity requires that the reader has some grasp of Heidegger’s arguments, since much of the book is aimed directly against them. The aim of Being and Time is to renew the question of being, which Heidegger believed had fallen into abeyance. It is to convince us only that this question is worth asking rather than answering it for us. Because we are the only beings whose being is a question for them (stones do not ask who they are and, more controversially, for Heidegger, neither do animals), we are the route into the question itself. Most of Being and Time, therefore, is a detailed phenomenological analysis of the being of human beings (which Heidegger calls Dasein). The first division describes the everyday being of this being, and demonstrates the temporal character of this being, and the second repeats this description, but now takes temporality as its starting point. When we think about the first division in relation to Husserl, what Heidegger is rejecting is a presupposition about the subject who knows or intuits. First of all, by making this subject the starting point of his philosophy, Husserl does not sufficiently investigate the being of that subject (in that way he merely repeats the unquestioning starting point of



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Descartes). Who is the subject who knows or intuits? Second, if Husserl had taken this ontology seriously, he would have seen that the theoretical subject is founded rather than founding. In other words, there is a deeper level of engagement with the world than the theoretical one, and this theoretical subjectivity is dependent on it. This deeper level is the engaged subject, or what Heidegger calls ‘being-in-the-world’. Such a self does not relate to things in terms of knowing or even intuiting them, but through use. I do first of all see the door in front of me, but use it to enter the room. Of course I can subsequently speak of seeing the door, but Heidegger shows that such a seeing is not the same as using, and in fact the former is dependent on the latter, for if there were not a world as such, then precisely the practice of seeing (which has its highest form in the theoretical sciences) would not be possible. In the same way, Totality and Infinity repeats this digging down to discover what the fundamental principles of being a self are (this might be described as its transcendental method, again being careful what we mean by ‘transcendental’ in this context). The difference is that Being and Time argues that this ground is ontological (indeed will describe it as ‘fundamental ontology’), whereas Levinas will argue that it is ethical. This difference between a foundational ethics and a foundational ontology can be seen in how both philosophers describe the relation to the other. Even though Heidegger rejects intuition as a basis for understanding the relation of self to the world, his description of being with others repeats Husserl’s. For in both cases, the other is an element belonging to the self-understanding of the self, rather than someone who radically calls into question and limits this self-understanding. In Husserl’s description, I realize that the other is like me, whereas in Heidegger’s the other belongs to the way in which I relate to my own being. I can, as Heidegger says, relate to the other authentically or inauthentically. I can free them for their own possibilities or I can try to control and dominate them.5 Notice, however, in both cases, such a path belongs to my existential project. The other is internal to Dasein’s being, even though I might not treat them in the same way I treat other things. When we come to the section ‘Interiority and Economy’ in Totality and Infinity, in which Levinas engages most explicitly with Heidegger, we shall see it is not simply a matter of Levinas rejecting his analysis of existence (basically Levinas will

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ask whether we have to accept that existence must be thought of as a finality of goals), but also this relation to the other. There is, if you like, another experience of the other in which the other is not just one element amongst many constituted by my relation to the world, whether this relation is thought theoretically, as it is in Husserl, or concretely, as it is in Heidegger. In this relation, it is not I who constitutes the other, but the other me, and it is not the other who is internal to my consciousness or understanding, but I who am interrogated. In the first case, the self is sovereign. It constitutes the world, including the others it encounters after the fact. In the second, my being is usurped by the other, as though the beginning of my existence were already for the other, before any act of comprehension or understanding. This latter structure of subjectivity is very difficult to understand, because we tend to presume the former. Indeed, when we think about the ethical subject in terms of rights, duties and virtues, it is precisely this subjectivity we presuppose. One way of understanding Totality and Infinity is that it is offering a different model of subjectivity, where the subject is already split from within (as though the other occupied my place despite me). How then does Levinas reject intuition as a basis for ethical subjectivity? In Totality and Infinity, we might speak of a major and minor way. The first is major not only because it is what Levinas himself focuses on and is his ‘principle of all principles’, so to speak, but also because this is how most read and interpret this book. The second way, as the name suggests, is marginal and subordinate, but not for that reason without interest. The difficulty of re-reading Totality and Infinity is how these two ways relate to one another. Levinas presents them as though they are complementary, but it could be argued they present radically different ways of thinking about the relation to the other, and thus the structure of subjectivity. The major way of reading Totality and Infinity is that the other ‘presents’ themselves in speech in a manner that is not the same as vision. It is only because the other speaks that Levinas can claim that my relation to the other is not based on intuition, even the intuition that is reformulated by Heidegger in Being and Time through Dasein’s self-understanding. This is why Levinas will say that the other ‘reveals’ rather than ‘discloses’ themselves in speech (p. 207). The ethical inversion of intentionality does not exist in



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the words or the objects they refer to, but the manner in which the other attends the words they speak, and in so listening to them I respond to the demand of the other. It is not that I initially comprehend the other in such a manner that I see that they are like me (or not like me), or that I understand the other in terms of my own projects, but that I respond before I comprehend or understand. Such a response, which is dependent on the presence of the other in speech, is what Levinas means by transcendence. This transcendence is not to be confused with any ontological commitment to a world hidden behind this one (which for Levinas is always the danger of mysticism), but an ethical one. On this demand is built not only the rest of the world, both the world of justice and morals, which is how we normally understand ethics, but also the world of science, reason and objectivity. It is not ontology that determines ethics, Levinas will argue in the third section of Totality and Infinity, ‘Exteriority and the Face’, but rather ethics that determines ontology. If the priority of speech is the major way of reading Totality and Infinity, what then is the minor? Our reading at this point becomes more difficult and uncertain, because Levinas himself, or at least the text that bears his name, is so. One possible way to think of the difference between the major and minor way is how Levinas uses the proper names of Plato and Descartes, who are the most heavily cited and referenced authors in Totality and Infinity. Plato represents the major interpretation, Descartes the minor. The other of speech is supported by the authority of Plato. Indeed, the very definition of speech as the ethical moment par excellence, where one attends the words one speaks, is referenced by Plato’s description of the benefits of speech over writing in the Phaedrus (p. 73). The other of transcendence, of height and teaching, is the Platonic other. Yet this is not the only other of Totality and Infinity, even if supporters and critics of Levinas can take it to be so. There is also the other of immanence, interiority and the flesh, which rather than calling into question the self from afar, already inhabits it from within. This is the other of habitation and ‘beyond the face’. This is the other that Levinas will call the ‘feminine’. Why is this other Cartesian rather than Platonic? Because what interests Levinas in Descartes is not the objective of the argument itself, but its structure. He is not in the slightest bit concerned whether Descartes has proved the existence of God, but how, in

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this particular form of the ontological argument, the ‘I think’ is already inhabited by the idea of God, though it cannot have been the origin of this idea. The ‘in’ of the word ‘infinite’ does not signify the negation of the finite, but how the infinite is contained within the finite as its very condition yet which it only discovers subsequently. For Descartes, this argument is theological, but for Levinas it is ethical. The interiority of the other in the economic existence of the self (which is how Levinas will interpret the self in the broadest sense) is already inhabited by the other, and it is this exteriority within interiority, which Levinas describes as an ‘extraterritoriality’, that makes possible the ‘openness’ of the self to the demand of the other in speech (p. 150). There is no doubt that for Levinas himself these two descriptions of the relation to the other are meant to supplement one another. The best way to think of this is in terms of the order of explanation. The narrative would begin with the self whose existence is inhabited by the feminine other that acts as the condition for the ethical relation to the other proper. The difficulty, as we shall see when we progress through the book, is that this order of explanation breaks down, because (as Levinas himself describes it) the feminine other is ambiguous. It does not go as far as the ethical relation, so it is difficult to see how it might be a ‘stepping stone’ towards it, and it also goes further than the ethical relation, so it cannot possibly be its condition.

Levinas as a Jewish philosopher The jump from phenomenology to the accusation that Levinas is only a Jewish philosopher (or worse, not a philosopher at all) is not as great as one might think, because one aspect, or version, of this indictment is that he is not a phenomenologist because he smuggles in religious content.6 Evidence in phenomenology is self-experience, how something appears to me. All cultural, historical, metaphysical or even scientific theories are to be bracketed, so that the phenomenologist only attends to what appears (or specifically the ‘how’ of what appears). Does not Levinas’ allusion to religious ideas, such as ‘creation’ for example, in Totality and Infinity betray such a bracketing? Moreover, is the description of the ethical relation to



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the other not really an account of a possible experience, but merely the importing of religious values (the Jewish commitment to the ‘stranger, widow and orphan’, for example, that Levinas refers to many times in Totality and Infinity [p. 215]) into an everyday affair? We solve the paradox of the phenomenological description of what cannot be described by retorting that what is inaccessible is not a reality at all but merely a religious ideal (which we might or might not think is important). Our denunciation appears even more valid when we go and read Levinas’ Talmudic writings, which make no bones about their confessional status, and they seem to contain the very same ethical obligation to the other that his more apparent philosophical writings do. There are many ways of answering this charge. You might argue that the purity of the phenomenological reduction is itself questionable. Does not every writer write from some place or other? Why should the fact that Levinas is Jewish be any more relevant than that Heidegger is German, or Badiou French? There is no doubt that there are some people who would make the very same negative attributions, but many philosophers would argue that despite these cultural peculiarities, the truth of what they write stands on its own right. Otherwise every philosophical dispute would be in the end ad hominem. In this regard, you might reply to those who attack Levinas as being merely a Jewish writer that they are attacking the person and not the philosopher. I do not think, however, that this is what is at stake in their judgement. The real problem is that the subject matter of his philosophy is in fact Jewish, and its claim to truth has its source in Judaism because there could be no other source, not whether Levinas is Jewish or not, since the answer to that is quite obvious. Ethical transcendence is nothing but the concealed authority of a Judaic revelation. It would be the same as saying that there is no such thing as Dasein, and that Heidegger’s analysis is merely the introjection of a Germanic romanticism into a claim of the universal transcendental structure of human beings, which no doubt some think. The reply to this tribunal of reason has to be subtle and nuanced. When it comes to a judgement we want things to be black and white. Either Levinas is a Jewish writer or not. Either Heidegger is a Nazi or not. It would be absurd to respond that Levinas is not Jewish. I do not even think Levinas’ defence that his philosophical and religious writing can be read apart is defensible.7 Not only is

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Totality and Infinity a Jewish work, but the more one understands the Jewish Talmudic tradition, the more one grasps the work itself.8 However – and this is the important fact – this does not mean that the experience of which it speaks must itself be Jewish. This is even the case if we assert, as Levinas himself does in many of his Talmudic interpretations, that this experience is spoken of and witnessed more in specifically Jewish writings than in Western philosophy. The central theme of Totality and Infinity is that ethics is not first of all a normative practice where a rational self recognizes certain principles or the efficacy of moral behaviour, but the exposure to the exorbitant demand of the other who faces and speaks to me. To respond to this demand, which must be prior to any deliberation or weighing up of self-interest, is the ethical moment, without which even the most principled and efficacious morality could descend, at best, into an empty legalism, and at worst, as we have seen throughout our history, the most atrocious barbarism. The book itself circles obsessively around this ethical moment. Does this mean that this experience is merely one of words? I do not think so. The analogy I would like to make here is to Heidegger’s ‘destruction’ in Being and Time, because I believe that the same method is at work in Totality and Infinity, though in the first case it is explicit, whereas in the second it is not. This is because they are both faced with the same problem: how is a phenomenology of what has been forgotten, repressed and covered over, to the point of being invisible, possible? It might seem perverse to attempt to explain Totality and Infinity through Being and Time when, at least in terms of the ostensible argument, they could not be more opposed to one another. The opening of Totality and Infinity asks the question whether we are not duped by morality (p. 21). In other words, does ethics exist? This beginning is analogous to the first pages of Being and Time, which asks whether it is possible even to understand the question of being.9 Both authors are asking us to think about something they believe we have forgotten, no longer understand or even accept is pressing any more: one, the question of ethics; the other, the question of being. Both are faced with the same problem: how they can convince their readers of the significance of a question, when the tradition that has been handed down to them has rendered it invisible. The answer is the same in both cases, and it is given in Heidegger’s description of the ‘destruction’.10



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First, one has to show that there is an experience here of something we have forgotten. This is the phenomenological element of the method. Again, in both cases, it is a matter of returning to the everyday (for what other evidence could there be?) to show what it is that the tradition has covered over. Phenomenology must reawaken the everyday to exhibit the strangeness that has been deadened by half-understood and inadequately digested metaphysical and scientific explanations. Yet you cannot approach this experience empty-handed. For how could one describe it but from the tradition that has been handed down to you? What tools would you use if they were not there already? So the other side of this method of ‘destruction’ is to show that the tradition that we thought was obscuring this experience from us is not as monolithic as we were first taught. The very tradition that concealed the question from us is fissured and cracked so as to let some light of this experience shine through. For Heidegger, this means we have to read the tradition in two ways (the famous deconstructive reading): one, to show how the dominate tradition determines in advance how we approach the everyday so as to close off certain questions; but the other, to dredge up from footnotes, marginalia, contradictions and paradoxes how there is another reading that opens up other ways of thinking. So to every Plato, there is another Plato, to every Kant another Kant, and so on. This is not just a matter of an immanent critique of a tradition, but also that there are other ways of speaking about the everyday, through poetry and art, for example, or other cultures outside of Western thought. These two sides of the ‘destruction’ always go together: the phenomenological, as the appeal to the everyday; and the hermeneutical, as the deconstruction of the dominant tradition. This is the same for Levinas as it is for Heidegger. The difference between them is that Levinas is a lot more coy, in a way that perhaps he should not have been, about the hermeneutical than Heidegger. It is as though Levinas almost pretends there can be an appeal to the everyday experience of the other without the hermeneutical work that would even make such an appeal meaningful to us. Yet it is there in Totality and Infinity, if one looks for it. So, for example, just as Heidegger might appeal to Kant as precursor to the temporal horizon of the question of being (even if Kant himself had misunderstood his own project at this point), so too Levinas calls upon Descartes and Plato to explain the transcendence of the other.

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Just as Heidegger would say that Kant did not ask the question of being, indeed he is part of the tradition that closed this question down, so too Levinas is not claiming that Descartes or Plato have described the experience of the other, but that there are resources within the text that would help us to do so, because they are all that we have. However – and this is the important point – just as Heidegger, and more so in his later writing, will go beyond philosophical texts in order to elucidate the experience of being, turning to the poetry of Hölderlin, the Pre-Socratics and the paintings of Van Gogh to name a few, so Levinas will turn towards the Bible and the Talmud. What is crucial here is not to collapse the phenomenological and the hermeneutical, and this is exactly what those who accuse Levinas of being Jewish do. To evoke the meaning of the everyday that has been obliterated by the sediment of worn-out and halfunderstood concepts, I might refer to a verse from the Bible, or to a Talmudic teaching, but this is not say that the everyday experience itself is Jewish and would only be of interest to Jews, just as it would be absurd to say that just because Heidegger quotes German poetry, then the experience of being is peculiarly German. Such an assertion would destroy the very basis of philosophy as such, let alone phenomenology. To distinguish between phenomenology and hermeneutics is not to say that they are not everywhere and at every time intricately involved and intertwined with one another, and that their borders are not extremely porous. It would always be up for debate, for example, whether at a certain point in an argument hermeneutical material had not been pirated into a phenomenological description. This is the constant dogmatic temptation of philosophy, whether it is Jewish contraband or not. Equally – and this is perhaps Levinas’ seduction – one can fall into the trap of an appeal to a pure phenomenology without hermeneutics. In this one instance, maybe, Heidegger was more aware of the dangers than Levinas.

CHAPTER TWO

Reading the text Preface Totality and Infinity begins with a preface. Prefaces are always the most difficult part of any book to read because they presuppose we already know the concepts and ideas that determine the argument of the work (and are usually for that reason written by the author last). It might, therefore, be tempting to skip them altogether, or, in starting to read them, become defeated by their difficulty and never finish reading the book after the first few pages. Without them, however, we would have no sense of direction at all and it is perhaps better to accept their intrinsic opacity, and that our understanding will arrive at a later stage in our reading. Reading the preface and the introduction to Totality and Infinity is compounded by two additional problems: the first is Levinas’ style, and the second is the absence of any context. However philosophers might argue about it, there is no one way to write philosophy. Sometimes one hears that one ought to write philosophy clearly and rigorously. Surprisingly, even when one reads the famous texts in the history of philosophy, very few seem either clear or rigorous, or at least not in the way that one might expect it. One has to work at reading philosophy, and every philosopher has their own style and rigour. Through reading one initially might have to struggle with their style and rigour, which at first might seem daunting and even off-putting. Many people fail to read a philosopher for just that reason. Not because they

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do not understand it, but because they cannot get used to the way a philosopher writes, or they cannot understand the form of their argument (the turf wars of philosophy are full of such ignominious defeats, which are sometimes, if strangely, claimed to be victories, as though there were no shame in admitting that one had not read someone). They are defeated, if you like, even before they have begun. Levinas, as I have explained in the context to his work, writes phenomenologically. The aim of his writing is to convince you of an experience. It does that through description. This explains the rather repetitive rhythm of his work. It circles around the same experience again and again approaching it from different directions. Part of this descriptive method is that it is poetic, because it is trying to capture in language what exceeds conceptual explanation (this is the ultimate formal paradox of the work: how can it put into words what it says cannot be put into words). For those of us who are used to a more logical and axiomatic approach to writing philosophy, we will immediately be suspicious of this descriptive and poetic phenomenology. We might be tempted to say that it is more like literature than philosophy. The second problem is that Levinas does not really give us any context for his ideas. The reader will notice immediately, especially if they are used to reading academic philosophy, that there are virtually no footnotes: indeed Levinas appears to make a virtue of their absence when he writes, for example, that Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption is not cited because if he had done so it would have been on virtually every page (p. 28). This does not mean that there are no philosophers who are not important for its argument (we shall see that the names of Plato and Descartes are essential), but Levinas does not arrive at his topic through the history of philosophy first of all but only subsequently. The history of philosophy is used to illustrate the argument that has already been advanced rather than as a way into it. This is a result of the phenomenological method. We describe the experience, and then we compare it to our understanding of philosophy. There are two issues with this way of doing things. First of all, our knowledge of philosophy might hinder rather than help us and, second, Levinas’ understanding of philosophy will appear highly idiosyncratic. The latter, however, will only be a problem for us if we think that Levinas is trying to get these philosophers right



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in the way a scholar of Plato or Descartes might, but for Levinas the experience always comes first and the history of philosophy second (so, for example, we shall see later that Levinas will use Descartes’ description of the ‘evil genius’ to explain how we would experience reality without the other that is not really its purpose in Descartes’ text [pp. 90–2]). The peculiarity of Levinas’ style and the absence of any context in itself perhaps justifies the need for this commentary. What Levinas leaves out is perhaps my task to put back in without losing the urgency of the experience Levinas wants the reader to feel. The first line of the preface sets the question for the whole of the rest of the work. ‘Everyone will readily agree’, Levinas writes, ‘that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality’ (p. 21). The key word here is ‘morality’. What do we mean by morality? The usual way we think about it is in terms of rules and laws. We ask ourselves whether they really exist or not. Is morality what makes us different from animals, and if it is, what is the status of it? Is morality merely subjective or cultural, or objective and universal? These are the kinds of philosophical questions we might ask. We might also think, once we have discovered the answers to these questions, that we can then apply our moral theory to certain situations: is abortion right or wrong, is euthanasia ever acceptable, and so on. If this is what you think morality is, then at best you are going to be confused by Levinas’ answer to this question, or at worst disappointed. If this is what morality is, then Levinas would reply we are duped by it, because what we find when we actually examine our moral motivations is that, rather than governed by justice, they are determined by self-interest. We speak in the language of morality, but our actions are those of domination and power. Or, even if we think that justice is real, then we see it is too weak to do anything against the powerful. One way that Western philosophy speaks about the illusion of morality is through the permanent state of war. Levinas is referring here both to the historical situation and to ontology. The reality of war, as we know too well, undoes morality both in terms of the horror it visits upon individuals, but also in terms of the universal principles justifying it, which in the end corrupts these very principles themselves – a defilement that leads to the unshakable conclusion that they were never real in the first place

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and that reality itself is war. Is this not, Levinas reminds us, the very starting point of Greek philosophy in the thought of Heraclitus (p. 21)? Here we find a general equivalence, which will be contested in this book, of politics, war and reality. If there is no alternative to ontology, then we will have to accept that we are duped by morality and war is our permanent condition. Yet war destroys both friend and foe, for it does not recognize the humanity of either. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. The opposite of war is peace, but we would need to think of peace in a wholly different way, otherwise it would merely be the hiatus between two wars. Rather than a continuation of history, peace would have to break with history completely. Peace would have to go beyond politics and being. Levinas signals this rupture with the religious language of a messianic eschatology (p. 22) (he will also end Totality and Infinity with a reference to the messianic [p. 285]). Here we come to the first problem of Levinas’ text. How are we to interpret the religious language of Totality and Infinity? Do we have to be religious to accept the argument? The answer to this must be ‘no’, because it is to get everything the wrong way around. Levinas’ ethics is not justified by religion; rather, any meaning there could possibly be of religion must be ethical. ‘Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation’, as he writes later, ‘represents not the superior form but the forever primitive form of religion’ (p. 79). Thus, when we come to words like ‘messianic’ and ‘eschatological’, we should not first of all think they are religious and then wonder what relation they have to ethics, but that they are for Levinas from the very beginning ethical, and only subsequently would they have a religious significance. What then is the ethical meaning of a ‘messianic eschatology’? The answer to this question is the role of history to which Levinas will come back again and again throughout Totality and Infinity. History is always the justification of the victors. ‘Prophetic eschatology’, on the contrary, is forever on the side of the victims, even if they are not heard – not so as to defend an alternative history, but to break with history itself. The Day of Judgement, then, is not a moment coming at the end of time, which cleanses history of its evils once and for all, but an exterior viewpoint in which history must be answerable outside of its own narrative. Such an alternative perspective is not a ‘world beyond this world’, which



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is never what Levinas means by ‘transcendence’, but part of the experience of this world. Who judges history? Not I. For such a judgement would be complacent and self-serving. It is the suffering of others, the victims, that remains as the reminder of a different reality. It is perfectly possible to forget this. Our major histories are testimony to this oblivion, but if it is possible to acknowledge the suffering of others, then permanent war is not the only truth, and we are not ‘duped by morality’. What would be the evidence that such an alternative exists? It is not enough just to bemoan the existence of war and suffering. What proof do we have that peace is possible? It is not to be found in philosophical concepts or political slogans, but in the ‘face of the other’ and speech. It is in my non-violent relation to others that we will discover a counter-history (or perhaps better an ‘ahistory’) to the history of war and its justification. Yet if there is such an experience, then the very notion of experience itself will have to be rethought. For why would this experience of the other be any different from any other experience I have, and are not my experiences of the world part of the very totality, the very reality, that Levinas argues suppresses the significance of the suffering of others and reduces them to concepts and numbers on a spreadsheet? Would I not always describe the face through concepts I apply universally, the colour of your skin, the shape of your nose, the sound of your voice? How can I experience the irreducibility of the singularity of the other without making them part of my world, a world Levinas describes as essentially violent? To make sense of the peaceful relation to the other, Levinas borrows the idea of the infinite from Descartes. This loaned expression is going to be an important part of the argument of Totality and Infinity, as it was for Descartes and Plato, the most influential philosophers on this work, so we will return to this idea throughout our exposition, but it is worthwhile, at this very early juncture, to be clear about what this idea means. First of all, for Levinas, the infinite is not a mathematical concept in the sense of an extensive magnitude that is counted by an endless series of numbers. In the context of Descartes’ proof of the existence of God (this is the exact source of Levinas’ appropriation), infinite means perfection. God is the greatest being that can be conceived. If Levinas takes Descartes’ expression, this does not mean he agrees

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with Descartes’ proof. It is not the content of the ontological argument that concerns him, but its form. It suggests that the object of the idea (the ultimate perfection) is greater than the idea of it. It is this divergence of the object of the idea and the idea of the object (in Descartes’ Latin, the ideatum of the idea) that Levinas applies to the experience of the other. What is different between my experience of the cup on my table and the face of the other is that in the former case the experience of the object is reduced to my idea (the idea of the cup), whereas, in the latter, the face of the other resists my idea of it. My experience of the other as other is thus very different from my experience of anything else in my world, and it is this difference that ensures that the other is not just one more part that I add to its totality. It is important not to intellectualize this resistance of the other to my conceptualization. It is not that the difference of the other defies me at the level of thought, as though if I just thought more or had the concepts, then I would be able to think it. The difference is in the experience of the other, which is more than any idea or concept I have of them. For Levinas, this experience is the ordinary occurrence of speech. He has to convince us there is such an experience, which we have all had. The truth of the argument rests on this alone. It is not a logical one. Whether you agree with Levinas or not will be dependent only on whether your own experience corresponds with what he describes. This explains Levinas’ ambivalent relation to phenomenology. In one sense, Totality and Infinity is a phenomenological work, if we understand phenomenology as the description of experience, as in Husserl’s famous slogan ‘back to the things themselves’, which means to describe things as you experience them. But for Levinas, Husserl’s phenomenology is too intellectualist to explain what he wants to describe, for it always reduces experience to my experience and to my thoughts about this experience.1 Thus, the reality of the cup on my desk is made possible by my idea of the cup, and rather than the experience of the cup being a surplus to the idea, it is the idea that is surplus to experience. As we described in the previous chapter, just as much as Levinas will want to break with Husserl’s phenomenology, so too does he distance himself from Heidegger’s famous reformulation of this method in Being and Time. Although, like Levinas, Heidegger replaces Husserl’s conceptual analysis of experience



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with a more concrete one, nonetheless, for Levinas at least, Heidegger’s description of the relation to the other repeats the basic prejudice of the phenomenological tradition that the other is part of my experience, rather than apart from it. For, as Heidegger explains, my concern for the other belongs to my interest in my own authenticity first of all. I care for the other only because my existence matters to me and not because they call this existence into question and demand I interrogate myself. For Heidegger, the voice of conscience comes from within and not from outside.2 We shall see that Heidegger (perhaps even more so than Husserl) will be the main philosophical adversary of Totality and Infinity. Strangely enough, even though Levinas is thought of as the philosopher of the other, it is subjectivity that he wishes to rethink in Totality and Infinity. ‘The book’, he writes, ‘then does present itself as a defence of subjectivity, but it will apprehend the subjectivity not at the level of its purely egoist presentation against totality, nor in anguish before death, but as founded in the idea of infinity’ (p. 26). The relation to the other has two sides. On the one side, there is the ‘face of the other’, which is the unique experience of the other human being who calls my existence into question and judges me. But on the other, there must also be a self that is capable of being questioned. Totality and Infinity is as much about this self (the whole of Section II, ‘Interiority and Economy’ concerns it) than it is about the other. How are we to think of a self that is neither like Husserl’s ego nor Heidegger’s Dasein, obsessed with its own death, and which is open to the experience of the other as other, but at the same time does not reduce this experience to its own reflection upon it? This, for Levinas at least, is what is contained in the idea of infinity. There can be an experience of the other that is not reducible to an idea of having that experience, where my experience of answering to the demands of the other overflows my idea (even as it is presented in this book) of it, just as for Descartes the reality of God (His perfection) exceeds any definition. Even though Levinas questions the authority of reason and philosophy, this does not mean that he merely appeals to naivety as a countermeasure. If ethics is not found in reason, as it is traditionally, it does not follow that we should give up on reason altogether. Rather than doing away with justice, politics and society, Levinas will argue that they have their roots in ethics.

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It is our obligations to one another that are the source of our rights, and not our rights that are the source of our obligations. There are three moments here that are basic to the structure of Totality and Infinity. First, existence or being, which is described through the reality of subjective life; second, the interruption of that subjectivity through the demand of the other; and finally, which is perhaps sometimes forgotten by readers of Levinas, the re-institution of society through ethics. The organization of the book is loosely based on these three moments. Section II, ‘Interiority and Economy’ describes subjectivity, and Section III, ‘Exteriority and the Face’, the other two moments, the ethical relation to the other, and society and justice. We say ‘loosely based’, because these three moments are also repeated throughout the work as a whole. The last section, ‘Beyond the Face’, as is announced by the title, is more problematic with regards to the composition of the work, because in some sense it exceeds its argument and complicates the initial presentation of the ethical relation. Just as we might read the preface again once we have finished, so too this last section might make us think again about its content, which has to do with the meaning of the feminine and fecundity, and whether there are two different ways in which the relation to the other is presented. No doubt we shall have to return to this issue. The next section, ‘The Same and the Other’, can be read as the introduction to Totality and Infinity. It outlines the basic concepts and the method. In some ways, though less so than the preface, it can be, for the first-time reader, since one is rather thrown into the deep end, quite daunting. New words, and old words with new definitions, are thrown at you thick and fast, and the eccentric and idiosyncratic method is less laid out than alluded to. So, as with the preface, the reader will have to accept they might be treading water at the beginning, but hopefully will be able to stretch out and swim as they progress through the book.

The Same and the Other Section I, ‘The Same and the Other’, is divided into three main parts: ‘Metaphysics and Transcendence’, ‘Separation and Discourse’ and ‘Truth and Justice’, and a small concluding section, ‘Separation



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and the Absolute’. It contains the whole argument of Totality and Infinity, condensed in form, of the three moments we have previously outlined: the existence of the self; the relation to the other; and the reversal of ethics and ontology. It does not lay them out, however, in a linear and systematic way. In the first part, ‘Metaphysics and Transcendence’, Levinas explains the particular logic of the ethical relation through his re-interpretation and re-definition of the philosophical terms ‘transcendence’ and ‘metaphysics’. The key difficulty here is that these words are heavily loaded. We might think we already know what these words mean in the history of philosophy, and it will be important to understand, since Levinas will be both playing with and against this history, what they mean for him. In the next part, ‘Separation and Discourse’, Levinas will underline the fact that there can be no relation to the other that is not a relation to the self. With the focus on Levinas as the philosopher of the other, it can be forgotten that the self is just as important. What is the existence of the self that is called into question by the other, and who is this self? This part lays out some of the themes that will be investigated in greater depth in the section ‘Interiority and Economy’, which has been the object of less attention by readers of Totality and Infinity than the pages directly on the ethical relation, but are as just as important, although as we shall see they complicate the naive reception of his work. For the self to respond to the other it must have its own life, but equally, for the other to be truly other, it must be apart from the self. This then is the peculiar form of the ethical relation. The two terms of the relation, self and other, relate to one another and at the same time are separate from one another. To use Levinas’ paradoxical and enigmatic expression, the ethical relation is a ‘relation without relation’ (p. 80). A ‘relation without relation’ is the very opposite of a totality. In a totality, the parts that make up that totality are unified through a third term that treats them as the same. For Levinas, at least, this is traditionally the way that Western philosophy has thought about reality. Parts are always parts of a whole. Think of the way, for example, that we use concepts. Concepts treat individuals as examples of the same genus or species. One leaf is the same as another leaf when thought through the idea of ‘leaf’, and in the same way one human being is the same as another human being, when thought through the idea of humanity. There is, then, in

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conceptual thought, always a violence done to the singular. The individual leaf is lost in the universality of the idea of ‘leaf’, and the singularity of the other, in the idea of humanity. You notice that even ideas which might on the surface appear to be neutral, like ‘humanity’, contain, ethically speaking, some level of violence. Usually in their application, we define what belongs to humanity by what does not. The possibility that we might relate to someone directly without the mediation of concept is not, for Levinas, given to us by thought. Every singularity escapes its concept. It is what the concept has to control and repress by abolishing difference. If I can relate to the other as an individual and not as a part of the whole, then it must be something I can experience. This is what Levinas means when he says that separation (this ‘relation without relation’) is concretely produced. The everyday experience of the irreducible singularity of the other, who calls into question my existence, and which is the source of justice in the world, is speech. Not the thought or description of speech, but speaking itself, the difference between an indirect speech that speaks about something and direct speech that speaks to someone. This brings us to the third and final moment of Levinas’ argument. Direct speech precedes indirect speech. Or, direct speech is what makes indirect speech possible. This is perhaps the reverse view of how we traditionally think about the relation between knowledge and ethics. We think we first must understand the world and ourselves and from that understanding create an ethical rationalization. For Levinas, it is the other way around. It is because we are ethical that we have such an understanding or reason. Justice does not follow on from truth, conforming to the order of the title of the third part of this section, but truth from justice. I speak about the world because I first speak to someone, and this speaking is pre-eminently ethical.

Metaphysics and Transcendence When we normally think about the word ‘metaphysics’, we associate it with the more abstract and ideal aspects of philosophy. If we know about the history of philosophy, we also might connect it to the famous lectures of Aristotle with the same title, and remember that metaphysics is the study of being. This is not



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how Levinas uses the word. He takes its meaning back to Plato’s famous phrase of the ‘Good beyond being’ in the Republic.3 The key for Levinas is the expression ‘beyond’. Metaphysics is the desire for that which is beyond my immediate reality – what we might call transcendent (from the Latin verb transcendere meaning ‘to surpass’). This has traditionally meant some other world or existence beyond this one. So we might think, in this regard, of Plato’s Forms that exist beyond the world of our immediate sensations, or of some mysterious realm of the afterlife (the two being linked for Plato, but which have been reinforced by our Christian heritage). This is precisely the opposite of what Levinas means by these words, and the confusion is that he borrows them from Plato, but he does not mean them in the same way. What Levinas takes from Plato is that metaphysics is a desire, and it is the desire for what is ‘absolutely other’ (p. 33). The source of this is Plato’s Symposium, which describes philosophy as the love of wisdom that is forever out of our reach (similar to erotic love). Ultimately, for Plato, although philosophy involves human dialogue, it is the search for an ontological and not ethical truth. The aim of his philosophy is to know what reality is. For Levinas, on the contrary, philosophy is not the love of wisdom, but the wisdom of love.4 It is ethical and not ontological. Thus we need to understand the expressions ‘metaphysics’ and ‘transcendence’ ethically and not ontologically, otherwise we might be led to the mistaken conclusion that Levinas is arguing that the experience of the other is something mystical or spiritual, which could not be further from the truth. To explain ethical metaphysics, Levinas does indeed start where Plato does, the reality of love. He distinguishes between how we experience desire (in the sense of eros) and need. When I say I need something, then I am expressing a lack that requires filling. This is very different from desire or love. If I desire or love someone, Levinas and Plato say, then the more of them I have the more I love them. ‘Metaphysical desire’, Levinas writes, ‘has another intention; it desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness – the Desire does not fulfil it, but deepens it’ (p. 34). There is no doubt that many confuse the one with the other. They desire the other in the same way they desire chocolate ice cream, but the whole point of the speeches in Plato’s Symposium is to show that the two are not the same.5 To love another and to love

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truth are not the same as needing something that one would know one could possess and, after having done so, no longer desire it. The difference between Plato and Levinas is that Plato treats human love as merely a metaphor I leave behind once I have reached wisdom. For Levinas, on the contrary, metaphysics is only the relation to the other whom I do not seek to possess or satisfy a need. Such another comes to me from a position of ‘height’. This dimension does not signify a dominance or superiority of the other in terms of power, but its resistance to my grasp that Levinas describes as the ‘invisible’ (p. 34). Again we might fall into the temptation of interpreting these words as referring to a reality beyond this world and there is no doubt that they have this connotation. Yet, as we shall see, what the ‘invisible’ portrays is not a peculiar metaphysical realm beyond our sight that we could only see if we had the eyes to see, but the ordinariness of speech and what this ‘height’ is, is the presence of the other in the words they speak. If we interpret these words ontologically, then we are going in the direction of the mystical and not ethical Plato. What Levinas concentrates on is the Plato of speech and dialogue (the ethics of speech that is the condition of thought), and not the Plato of the Forms that culminates in the mystical tradition of neo-Platonism. Ethical transcendence is the distance between the desired and the desire that can never be crossed. Only from within this relation is this possible. As soon as one stands outside of it, then one cannot experience this separation. I can experience the space between you and me, but not the one between you and another, because in so doing I am treating you as equals. Like the social researcher who reports the conversations between participants in their study, or the anthropologist the religious rituals of a tribe, those who face me are not singular individuals but parts of a whole whose mechanism and dynamics I am trying to work out (the very demand of anonymity underlines their facelessness). Yet we have the tendency, supported by philosophy since Hegel, to think that the anonymous whole is the truth of the individual. I am only to the extent that I belong to a group or a community that makes sense of this existence. The other is in whom I recognize my own identity and through which this identity is constructed. When someone asks me who I am, is this not how I respond when I reply, for example, that I am ‘male, white and English’? This presumes that the first relation to my self is one of thought and self-reflection and these are not already



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subsequent to a more concrete occupation of the world, what Levinas calls the ‘concreteness of egoism’ (p. 38). I do not first of all think the world into existence or represent it to myself. Rather I live in it and this ‘living in’ is something that I do. I take possession of the world by making a place within in it. ‘Dwelling’, Levinas writes, ‘is the very mode of maintaining oneself ’ (p. 37). Identity, the famous ‘I am I’, is not something one thinks from the beginning but what one has to achieve, and thus also what one can lose. This is why the difference between the I and the other is not an opposition, as though the I were simply ‘not-other’ or the other ‘not-I’, but a concrete disturbance and rupture of the world I have built for myself. It is not enough to respect the other for Levinas, for this only makes them part of my world. Rather my interiority, this comfortable bourgeois existence, has to be broken in from within. I have to respond to the other. Without this there is no ethics. From my side, my self is not an abstract thought but the lived concrete existence of having a home in this word and all that entails. The other is not just another self, either a friend or an enemy, whom I can label and describe and thus domesticate even if they are frightful and terrifying, but that which unsettles the very core of my being. This is why Levinas writes that ‘alterity is possible only starting from me’ (p. 40). The ‘face to face’ and speech is the very experience of such a collapse, where the force of the experience of the other causes me to question my very occupation of this world. If we think of the other as merely opposite to me, then they are still included in our conception of the world, just as if I think of myself as white and you as black, or any other cultural difference. ‘Transcendence’, as Levinas writes in the title of a very important element of this part, ‘is not negativity’ (p. 40). This goes back to how we understand the Platonic phrase ‘the Good beyond being’. The ‘beyond being’ is not the same as ‘not being’. We should not confuse the superlative with negation. The other is not just everything I am not, but more than me. This is also how we should interpret the difference between the infinite and the finite. The ‘in’ of the infinite is not the negation of the finite, as though the infinite followed from the finite, but more than the finite, as though the infinite preceded it. What is negated and what negates belong together as a pair, but the superlative and what it surpasses does not. This is why the metaphysical, Levinas writes, ‘is prior to the

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negative and affirmative proposition; it first institutes language, where neither the no nor the yes is the first word’ (p. 42).6 One way of thinking the precedence of metaphysics, which is more than simply a negation, is in its priority over ontology. Western philosophy, Levinas argues, sees metaphysics as subordinate to ontology, to the knowledge of reality. We have already seen this is the case with Plato, where the ethics of dialogue and relation is left behind for the sake of the knowledge of the Forms and the singularity of the other is lost in the anonymity of the concept. In every case of the priority of ontology over ethics, we are always faced with the same manoeuvre: sacrifice the individual for ‘a third term, a neutral term’ (p. 42). This third term could be God, or self-consciousness, or even Heidegger’s being, but we always think of the parts as members of a whole that constitutes them, and never as separate from that whole. Is there another way of conceiving knowledge? Must we always sacrifice the individual for the system? Is this just a necessary, unfortunate consequence of thought? There is another way of thinking about theory that does not annul difference and that is as critique. Clearly Levinas has Kant in mind when he suggests this, especially in the latter’s statement of the priority of practical over theoretical reason, but he gives this precedence his own particular flavour.7 It is not self-critique that ultimately questions the dogmatism of thought, but the suffering of others. What we have seen in the history of philosophy has been precisely the opposite. Thought begins and ends with itself, and if it does entertain critique it is only to make itself stronger. Socrates only questions the slave-boy to discover what he already knew. Plato’s sun chases away the shadows only to reveal that everything is the same. Such ‘imperialism’ is even more apparent in phenomenology (p. 44). There is no distance between the subject and the object, because the origin of the latter is to be found in the former. Whatever meaning the object has, has its source in the subject. ‘Philosophy’, Levinas writes, is an ‘egology’ (p. 44). Rather than overturning this primacy of the subject, Heidegger’s concrete analysis intensifies it, for the meaning of being is the self-disclosure of an individual Dasein.8 Reality only has its significance in relation to the meaning of our being. The unrevealed horizon is always discovered to be ourselves again. Truly there is nothing new under the sun.



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On the one hand there is the philosophy of power, the dominant discourse of our tradition, that begins with the self and works outwards, and, on the other, an ethics of justice, that begins in the counter-direction from the outside and works inwards. In the first, the other is either subsumed within a totality (we are all the same), or worse, annihilated and murdered. In the second, it is the authority and expansion of self in all its forms that is interrogated. ‘The effort of this book’, Levinas writes, ‘is directed toward apperceiving in discourse a non-allergic relation with alterity’ (p.  47). This does not mean that we give up on reason altogether and simply mouth sentimental banalities about the suffering of others, for if that was so why would Levinas even bother writing Totality and Infinity? To reject the priority of ontology over ethics is not to dismiss it altogether, but to reverse their relation. Aristotle was wrong, and Heidegger after him, to claim that being is the first question of philosophy, a dogma that is one of the main targets of Totality and Infinity, because without the society of others philosophy as an activity would not be possible. The search for truth, objectivity and intelligibility is not given up, otherwise the whole project would undermine itself (how would Levinas have written the book without them, or you read it? It is still a book of arguments, claims and evidence), but their ground, their impulse, lies outside of them. Metaphysics is not comprehension. It is not the thought of being. It is the desire for the other who transcends me.

Separation and Discourse Without the separate existence of the self, there would be no one to whom the other would make a demand, whether it would be heard or not. This separate existence Levinas explains in terms of what he calls psychism and enjoyment. The order of the explanation, however, is different from its logic. What comes first in terms of the exposition is second in terms of the condition. First of all, Levinas describes the existence of the self, but this existence is not possible without the other. He calls this peculiar inversion the ‘posteriority of the anterior’ (p. 54). This greatly complicates our reading of Totality and Infinity, for we might think that we are presented with a simple linear narrative. Why it is not that

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straightforward is because the self, who has not yet encountered the other, already has a relation to others that it has forgotten. The separate existence of the self is therefore a kind of necessary forgetfulness. One way that this posterior anteriority is experienced concretely is language. At first hand, speech would appear to be that which is most personal and intimate to me. Is not what it is to be me most revealed in my speech, both to myself and others? But what comes first: my speaking or my response to others? Levinas will argue that speaking is first of all a response (in this way it requires anteriority, something already said). I speak because the other addresses me and is present in their discourse. If language is first of all a response to the other, then we also need to think again about what we mean by truth. We think of truth as a belief about the world. I make a statement about something and it is either true or false. Propositions and statements being true about the world already require, for Levinas, the social existence of truth. Speaking the truth about things (reason and objectivity) means that speaking truth to others is already important to me. We have seen from the previous part that without the separation of the terms in the relation, the self and the other would be part of the same totality and merely parts of a whole. ‘Correlation’, Levinas writes, ‘does not suffice as a category of transcendence’ (p. 53). This requires that both terms are equally separate, though not separate in the same way. The separation of the self Levinas describes as ‘psychism’ (p. 54). Such psychism does not represent a modality of thought, but ‘a way of being’ (ibid.). It is not what the self is as labelled from the outside, but how it is as separate from the other. Just as with Descartes’ exposition in the Meditations, however, what comes first in terms of the exposition is not first in terms of the argument. So when reading this text, we come first of all to the cogito, the famous ‘I think therefore I am’. It is only subsequently we learn that this subjectivity is in fact dependent on the existence of God. In the same way, although Levinas first of all describes the separated existence of the self, we later discover that without the relation to the other, this existence would not have been possible. It is important to understand how far this analogy goes for Levinas. He is not saying that the psychism of the self is the same as Descartes’ cogito, for the latter is a matter of thought, whereas the former, as we shall see, is one of enjoyment and the body.



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Moreover, the idea of infinity, the relation to the other, is not God, nor is Levinas’ ethics dependent on the ontological argument for the existence of God. What is decisive here is what is ‘logically absurd’, that ‘the After or the Effect conditions the Before or the Cause: the Before appears and is only welcomed’ (p. 54). It is this ‘posterior anteriority’ that preserves the separation of the terms. Not only because of what conditions appear secondarily, but, in so doing, the separation of the conditioned is not lost. It is as important to retain this separation of the self, as it is the transcendence of the other (and, in fact, more pages of Totality and Infinity are spent describing the former than the latter). The active existence of the separated self has no concern for others and lives in enjoyment outside of history and any totality. It does not take the other to set me free from any regime. I am already free irresponsibly. My inner life, my interiority, already resists any system that would seek to absorb its difference. In relation to time, this is the instant of my present, both forgetful of its obligation to others that make this possible, and the future, where existences other than my own may arrive. Whenever we come across time in Totality and Infinity, we must always have Heidegger in mind, and particularly Being and Time. For what it is to be for Heidegger is to be in time. My being is essentially temporal. I am thrown ahead of myself into the future and through this I take up my past and seize my present. Concretely this means that I must face my death and resolutely choose who I am to be. Levinas’ description of existence as enjoyment is set against this authenticity as the ultimate sense of life. It is also to question whether my death is decisive. Is this end the only significant end or is there a continuation of existence beyond my own that is more important? The time of fecundity, which is this temporality of generations, where death is not the final victory but birth, is not the same as historical time. The flow of generations is not the universal objective time where each individual existence is lost. To objectify the self is to already conceive it as dead, as though it had no existence. Against the anonymity of death there is a life that lives for itself. Only when we are dead are we all the same, like a heap of corpses. This is why, for Levinas, living is not about death but the very opposite, resisting death to very last moment of my breath, dying, and not Heidegger’s famous ‘being-towards-death’, where I survey my existence as though I was already dead and my

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being part of historical being. To have time is to have one’s own time. Historical time robs each one of us of our own time; we are ‘transformed into a pure loss figuring in an alien accounting system’ (p. 56). To place history first is to think that a life can only be comprehended in a history that encloses it. It is to sacrifice a life for life. Each of us has a secret existence that escapes any historical narrative whose sweep fails to capture the individuality of a life. Each of us is an ‘I’, but this ‘I’ is not an abstraction. It is a real life that bears a proper name. That we can speak of each other in the third person, in a neutral objective language, does not destroy the reality of the first person. It is only because each of us has their own time, their own inner life, their own interiority, which is not the same as reflection, that time is not the totality of history, where time is the time of everyone and no one. Equally, it is because each of us has our own time that society is not the fusion of individuals but a plurality of different selves. The absolute separation of a life from any totality that would seek to comprehend and totalize it Levinas calls ‘atheism’. It would surprise many who think of him contemptuously as a merely a religious thinker that he defends atheism so adamantly. It is not a stage one goes through in order to be stronger later on. Atheism defines what it means to be a separated self, and without a separated self, there would be no ethics. ‘One lives outside of God’, Levinas writes, ‘at home with oneself; one is an I, an egoism. The soul, the dimension of the psychic, being an accomplishment of separation, is naturally atheist’ (p. 58). For the truth of atheism is the refusal of any fusion or union with some divine order. How else has the murder of countless lives been defended by a hypocritical theism except that we are meant to believe that this has been sanctioned by God, whose intentions are only open to the priests who understand them? If there is any sense to another meaning of religion, which Levinas will again allude to at the end of this part, then atheism will be a necessary element of it and not its opposite. Such an atheism is not an atheism of thought, as though one had reflected on the existence of God and come to the conclusion that He does not exist. Atheism is the instinctive expression of the self whose concern is only for its own life. Psychism, the interiority of the self, is not to be confused with self-consciousness. It is not thought but sensibility. A life is first of all lived before it is reflected upon, even if it is reflected upon. The individuality of a



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life is its ‘living from’. As soon as a life becomes the object of a thought, then it is lost. What is multiple, a plurality of different lives becomes one within a unity. ‘Sensibility’, Levinas writes, ‘constitutes the very egoism of the I’ (p. 59). Enjoyment, which is the meaning of ‘living from’, is not the thought of enjoyment. It is not the thought of a cold beer on a hot summer’s day, but the cold beer on a hot summer’s day, not the thought of the wind against my face, but the wind against my face. Not the feeling as something sensed, which has already been reduced to a concept or a thought, but the very feeling itself. Does this mean, then, that we have to give up every truth? For does truth not require words and concepts, and is not the truth of a feeling the word that names it? Is not Levinas’ book made up of words and am I not trying to explain its ‘truth’ to you? Truth is not just the agreement of a proposition with the world. It is a relation between speakers. I speak or write the truth to someone. Propositional truth is not first but dependent upon this relation. For that reason without sincerity truth would not be possible, and it is not error that undermines truth (the non-agreement of a statement with reality) but deception. Truth, then, for Levinas, is linked to desire. I seek truth as movement outwards towards the other, and not as the reduction of the world to myself. This would mean that truth and cognition are not one and the same. To seek truth, first of all, would not be to know the world, but to desire the other who transcends me. Truth, therefore, is not an answer to a need, but a surpassing of one self, of ‘a thought’, Levinas writes, ‘that at each instant thinks more than it thinks’ (p. 62). Truth, as the relation to the other, is not one more item added onto my existence. My existence is already complete. In my enjoyment of the world, I do not need the other. I am satisfied. To desire truth is to want more than this satisfaction and this is only possible in relation to the other. As we have already said, this is similar to Plato’s description of love in the Symposium, where he rejects Aristophanes’ description of love as the ultimate completion of the self. Yet, in the end, even Plato does not go far enough, because the object of his desire is not the other but what the soul represents, immortality. This is the difference between politics and religion. In politics, we are equals in the face of an idea. In religion, we are separate, face to face. The latter, Levinas argues against Plato, is the condition of the former and not the other way around.

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To say the truth comes from the ethical relation rather than founds it is not an anti-intellectualism, but is to give to the search for knowledge its proper condition and foundation. Knowledge requires a thinker who seeks the truth. This impetus, Levinas argues, springs from the desire for the other. It is the opposite of the unification of the knower and the known that typifies any totality. Truth requires speech. It is empty without the interpellation from the other who asks ‘what do you know?’ The first step in the search for truth is to know that you do not know, but to accept that means you have listened to someone. Heidegger famously described truth in Being and Time as disclosure.9 Like Levinas, he too rejected the priority we give to propositional truth. To speak about the world, Heidegger insisted, the world first of all has to be disclosed to us, has to be visible and be there. Disclosure, for Levinas, however, is an event that belongs only to me and not to my relation to the other. The other who questions me is not part of my visible world. Speech is not the same as vision. ‘The absolute experience’, Levinas writes, ‘is not disclosure but revelation’ (pp. 65–4). Levinas is very precise in what he means by revelation (which perhaps, unfortunately, still has connotations of something visible). It is the presence of the speaker in the words they speak (or, more precisely, the presence of the other in the words they speak). Revelation is expression. The other who interrogates me is not the person I see standing before me (this is just one more object in my visual world I could describe to you, and you too could see whether my description of them was true or not), but is just this enigmatic presence. This is perhaps the most difficult point to conceive in Levinas’ work. Speaking is not the same as seeing.10 ‘The eye’, Levinas writes, ‘does not shine; it speaks’ (p. 66). Of course we do use words to describe the visual world, but this does not mean that words and things are the same. We could interpret this gap theoretically by saying that there is always a distance between what is and what we say (the perennial conflict in philosophy between realism and anti-realism), but Levinas describes it ethically. The relation of speech is not the same as vision, because the former is ethical and not cognitive. To respond to the other ethically is to reply to their voice and not to how or what they appear as. It is difficult for us to make this distinction, as Levinas will argue later, because the whole tradition of Western philosophy is so dominated by visual models that we even speak about speech as though it were an object of



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vision (as though the understanding of words and what they refer to were first and not my response to someone who speaks). This relation to the other is very different from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s description of it. For Husserl, the other is the same as me. The basis of the relation is empathy. I place myself, so to speak, in the shoes of the other. I attempt to see the world in their eyes, but in so doing I eradicate their difference. In the same way, Heidegger’s analysis of ‘being-with’ in Being and Time is essentially one of intersubjectivity. The other is the same kind of being as myself, and whether I relate to them positively or negativity, I do so as part of my own project, and they likewise to me. To relate to the other differently means to relate to them as other than myself, rather than as the same as me. This relation can be found in the work of Buber and Marcel (and Levinas remarks that Durkheim’s conception of the religious already contains this non-reciprocal relation to the other). What makes Levinas’ interpretation different, however, is that he emphasizes the asymmetry of the relation to the other. I am not the other to the other, and the other is not an I to me. For Levinas, Buber’s famous I–Thou relation is symmetrical.11 The I is both I and thou depending where it is placed in the relation. This is to replace a concrete relation with a formal grammatical one. The experience of the heterogeneity of the other is always interpellation. The other speaks to me and I respond. The ‘other’ and ‘me’ are not interchangeable. It is only when I think of the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ outside of this relation that I can imagine they are substitutable, and that I am some ‘other’ for someone else. But this is not an ethical relation. It is what it is; merely a thought. ‘The invoked’, Levinas writes, ‘is not what I comprehend: he is not under a category. He is the one to whom I speak’ (p. 69). This is the difference between writing and speech. In writing, the same and the other are equivalent. In writing, I use concepts and categories and treat every person as belonging to the same totality. All the great systems of thought are the products of writing. It is only in speech that I can have this direct exposure to the other who resists my own conceptualization. I might write of this experience later, but even then the actual experience would be lost, because as soon as I attempted to describe it, it would vanish in the very words I use. What the written word lacks is the very presence of the other in the words they speak. For even if I might attempt to imagine

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the author who has written them, the words I am now reading are testimony to their absence. Not every conversation is ethical. Many times we approach the other in order to manipulate or even ignore them. Such a violence, however, is already predicated on the presence of the other, for it is them I am trying to deceive. It aims at the face even though it seeks to obliterate it. Insincerity is only possible because of sincerity, like Kant’s famous categorical imperative where we can only tell lies because first of all there are people who speak the truth. Truth is a social relation before it is cognitive one. To speak the truth is to justify oneself to the other, which means they are someone who matters to me. Before it is an economic concept of distribution, justice is ethical and social. Conversation precedes objectivity and is not made possible through it. We think that to make sense of the world we have to speak about it. We have to say true sentences that describe the way things are. But every ‘speaking about’ is always a ‘speaking to’, and without this sincerity this activity would not be possible. This is why Levinas argues that ethics is the condition of objectivity and reason, and not objectivity and reason, ethics. This is the great difference between his description of ethics and the theories of ethics we are used to. For every ethical theory is an objective and rational account of ethical actions. When Levinas says that ethics precedes reason, he does not mean it is a substitute of reason, and that we can give up giving a rational account of reality. This would be to confuse speaking about and speaking to. Rather, he is insisting that rational discourse would not be possible without the ethical relation of speech. It is as though we have forgotten that the discussion of forms in Plato’s dialogues was first of all a conversation, so fixated are we on the content of that conversation rather than the conversation itself. Without speaking there would be nothing spoken about, but that speaking is first of all ethical (it is a relation to the other who is present in the words they speak), even when it seeks to undo this relation through the myriad forms of everyday and totalitarian violence. ‘Language,’ Levinas writes, ‘far from presupposing universality and generality, first makes them possible. Language presupposes interlocutors, a plurality’ (p. 73). In speaking to the other I respond to their freedom, but this freedom is not the same as political freedom, which treats me and the other as the same. The freedom of the other is their freedom



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from me, from the tyranny of concepts and categories that annul difference, plurality and singularity. This is the difference between the other and a thing. Things disappear in their function. I do not see the door I walk through to enter a room unless it is unexpectedly locked, but the other is other to the extent they resist both my use and comprehension. The other is neither a thing present to me nor something I handle. If the thing resists me then it does so by its uselessness. It escapes any finality I might impose on it. I can find no place for it in my world. The other is foreign not because I cannot place them, but because they speak. The nudity of the face is not the same as the bareness of a thing whose concept or use I do not know, for it speaks to me. It is the frankness of conversation. Even the nakedness of the human body speaks in a way that a thing could not.12 The difference between language and the visible is not one of words. That I speak, for instance, and the thing does not. It is only the presence of the other in speaking that is the surplus over and above the mere presence of a thing. As Levinas will write later, ‘a hand or the curve of the shoulder – can express the face’ (p. 262). It is this presence of the other, which Levinas describes as ‘destituteness’, that demands my response, and not the words they might speak, for it does not matter what they say (p. 75). Language is not first of all a description of the world, but generosity and openness to the other. The presence of the other calls into question my enjoyment of my world in their presence in speech. Of course I am free to ignore this interruption, but even this is recognition of their presence. Nonetheless, the complexity of social existence, economy and money is dependent on this relation. It is not in the intentions of the subject where the origin of objectivity is found, but in the movement towards the other. The world is rational because it is shared and not a solitary existence. ‘The generality of the Object’, Levinas writes, ‘is correlative with the generosity of the subject going to the Other’ (p. 76). Heidegger argues that the basis of our cognitive relation to objects is not intentionality but use. I must already be involved in the world before I represent it. The world is something that first of all matters to me before I picture and describe it. For Levinas, as we shall see, it is not use that determines our relation to things but enjoyment, and what allows for the progression from enjoyment to representation is the ethical demand of the other. It is because the thing is a gift given to the other that it can become more than a possession I enjoy and

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consume as a possible vehicle for thought. ‘Things figure’, Levinas writes, ‘not as what one builds but as what one gives’ (p. 77). We share a world not through consumption but speech. Rejecting the priority of thought does not mean that the relation to the other is mystical or mythical. Language and atheism are the basis of the ethical relation, which means that both terms in the relation, the self and the other, absolve themselves from the relation at the same time as they are in this relation. The mystical and the mythical, on the contrary, are always a fusion and union of terms. The mystic yearns to become one with God, the myth-maker one with nature. This is why Levinas argues that monotheism, rather than being the opposite of atheism, requires it. Just as much as the other absolves themselves from ethics, so too does God from religion. God is not visible. He is not a being that must be sought in the sky or the earth, but speaks. The only rational religion is a religion of ethics. Not in the sense that Kant meant as a necessary postulate of practical reason, but as the experience of the destitution of the other, in the biblical phrase that Levinas is fond of using, ‘the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan’. ‘God’, Levinas writes, ‘rises to his supreme and ultimate presence as correlative to the justice rendered unto men’ (p. 78). This does not mean that the other is God, but only that any meaning that the word ‘God’ has can only be found in our ethical relation to others. I do not prove the existence of God through the ethical relation as though what is lacking objectively can be substituted ethically. Rather, religion, or better the language of religion, its traditions, practices and rituals, only has a justification in the services rendered unto others. ‘Everything’, Levinas writes, ‘that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation represents not the superior form but the forever primitive form of religion’ (p. 79). Every objectification of the other is a reduction of the other to the same and a destruction of their singularity. The other is always more than I can say about them. This is the meaning of the idea of infinity. Any idea I might have of the other, my experience of them always overflows it, just as in Descartes the idea of God is greater than the thought that thinks it. The surplus of the other over the idea of other is not itself a formal abstract idea, but a concrete experience. It is speech or, better, conversation. Only as the one who addresses me and who is present in the words they speak does the other exceed my apprehension of them. On the one



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side, there is the self, who is spoken to, and on the other, the other who speaks. The first Levinas calls ‘separation’, and the second, ‘transcendence’. Section II of Totality and Infinity, ‘Interiority and Economy’ describes the first, and Section III ‘Exteriority and the Face’, the second. This book itself, Levinas seems to suggest, in the last words of this section, is also addressed to the other as reader and ‘interlocutor’ (p. 81), and although writing about the ethical relation cannot be the same as the address of the other in the ethical relation, it nonetheless has its ultimate origin there, for without the original summons and demand of the other to break with the enjoyment of the day, critique, the calling into question of the self that is the source of self-reflection and philosophy, would never have been possible.

Truth and Justice This part of the introduction concerns the third moment of the argument of Totality and Infinity: the reversal of the relation between ethics and ontology. Of course we have already come across this thesis before. At its heart is the status of truth. Philosophy begins with epistemology and ontology, and from there it derives an ethics. Traditionally, truth is agreement. Underneath this agreement, Levinas discerns violence, which is the domination of the other by the same. Knowledge seeks to construct the world in its own image. What this search for knowledge forgets is that such a solitary pursuit has its origin in a social relation. In seeking the truth, I have always been dependent on the other who is not one more item added to my conceptual schema. Truth must be justified, but Levinas gives justification an ethical and not merely epistemological flavour. The demand of the other breaks my egotistical possession of the world and it is this rupture that is the original impetus for knowledge. The relation between the self and the other is one between unequals. It is the other that calls me into question, not I the other. This goes against one of the fundamental ideals of political thought, freedom. In the ideal of freedom, the I and the other are treated the same. We recognize in each other the same rights and the same humanity. These principles are meant to be the basis of our institutions and laws. Yet going back to Levinas’ words in the

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preface, should we not be surprised that these very same principles are the ones we use to wage war? Levinas makes us wonder whether beneath these fine words there is also violence against the other. What is first for Levinas are not rights but obligations, and if we have rights then they have their source in obligation. He calls this priority of obligation ‘creation’. Again, as elsewhere in Totality and Infinity, we should not confuse this with a theological concept. Creation for Levinas does not mean creatio ex nihilo, but signifies the original dependency of the self on the other, which is what the reversal of ethics and ontology means. I am not first. The self is already dependent on the other before its own existence.13 The limit of knowledge is not self-reflection, but my relation to the other. If philosophy is critique after Kant, then its meaning is not self-justification, but justification before the other. What philosophy sees as first, objectivity and reason, is second. This does not mean we should give reason up, as though ethics and irrationality were one and the same, but understand it is ‘founded’ rather than ‘founding’. Heidegger himself in Being and Time, against Husserl, argued that cognition was not our first, or even fundamental relation to the world.14 Our understanding is concretely embodied in existence before the world becomes an object for contemplation. We can understand Levinas’ description of the self as an intensification of this movement. Neither Heidegger nor Levinas are arguing for the abandonment of cognition, but Levinas goes further than Heidegger in arguing that it is not just grounded in my everyday existence, which is historically constituted, but in my relation to the other, who transcends both my practical use of things and their examination. It is ethics not ontology that fundamentally grounds and anchors knowledge as an activity. Finally, in this part, Levinas repeats the argument of Totality and Infinity through the argument of Descartes’ Meditations. This can serve as a useful repetition of Levinas’ argument as a whole. My relation to the other is not first of all cognitive. I do not recognize the other by listing certain properties or qualities. I cannot say of the other that they are other to me because of the shape of their nose or the colour of their skin, and it makes no sense to ask ‘what is the other?’. Instead of cognition, which is a relation of sight rather than language, the relation to the other is one of speech. The other speaks to me and demands a response. This is what Levinas means by ethics. Can we speak of truth in this



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situation? For is not truth something we apply to our statements about things and not our speaking to someone? It is true that I can speak the truth to someone. I can say that there is a tree over there and there really is a tree. Yet can we say of the speaking itself that it is true? Is there not a truth of speaking that is not the same as the truth of propositions? We might say of someone, for example, that they are sincere. Is this not a speaking truthfully, which might lead to saying true things, but is not the same as that activity? In speaking to someone, do I not have to justify myself to them? Is there not, Levinas asks, a relation between truth and justice in speaking, and does not this justice have an ethical sense? This is not traditionally how philosophy thinks about truth. Truth is thought of in terms of reflection and self-criticism rather than speech. Even in Plato, dialogue is finally substituted by the monologue of the soul speaking only to itself. Self-criticism starts from the self and discerns what the limits to knowledge are. If my freedom is called into question, then it is only because there is some obstacle confronting it. This is where political theory begins. What are the limits to my freedom either internally or externally? For Levinas, on the contrary, consciousness of my limits does not begin in self-reflection but in my becoming aware of the other who questions me. I question myself because they question me. The other, then, is not a fact or obstacle to my freedom that I ought to recognize in order to become myself (that we are not enemies, after all, but mutual subjects). The constraint is not theoretical, a duty taken upon myself because I realize that self-interest is not sufficiently self-interested, but a concrete experience. The limit to my power announced in the commandment against murder is not first of all a self-imposed duty, but an injunction coming from the outside in the other who faces me. To experience the other as other is to feel this impossibility of murder, which the other forces upon me not because they are more powerful than me, but precisely the opposite, in their powerlessness and vulnerability. ‘Morality’, Levinas writes, ‘begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent’ (p. 84). Ethics, then, is the very opposite of an existentialism that begins with the freedom of the self and experiences the other as a threat or violence. We are not condemned to be free, as Sartre famously said. On the contrary, our existence is only justified in the inversion of our freedom. Philosophy and critique do not begin

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and end with the self, as though the world was my creation, but lead back to the other. The self is not a creator but created. Ever since Kant, the cognitive relation to the object has been grounded in the self’s relation to itself. This is the same in Husserl, where it is the cognitive act that determines the meaning of the object. Even in Heidegger, Levinas will argue, it is the understanding of Dasein that shapes the meaning of the world. The ultimate condition of knowledge, for Levinas, is not this self-relation, but the demand the other places upon me. We think of critique as self-critique, as reflection and contemplation, whereas Levinas reinterprets it ethically as interrogation and an appeal that comes to me from outside rather than from within. I do not know the other, for then they would just be part of the known world I already possess, I welcome them. It is this welcoming that makes possible the very knowledge that forgets and abolishes it. It is not reason that founds society, but society reason. The history of philosophy has always moved in the opposite direction. It has always dreamed of a society that could be founded in the impersonal reason of the state, where the difference between me and the other is abolished, and the plurality of existence is lost in the whole. Freedom, then, becomes the paradox where even the freedom of the I is sacrificed for a higher cause, and rather than tyranny being freedom’s opposite, they become identical to one another. It is only the relation to the other that breaks with this neutral order, because in speech, both the I and other, are separate terms. ‘Speaking’, Levinas writes, ‘implies a possibility of breaking off and beginning’ (p. 88). Levinas repeats his argument by rehearsing Descartes’ Meditations. Along with Plato, Descartes is the most heavily quoted philosopher in Totality and Infinity. This does not mean Levinas is a Cartesian, or at least not in any simple or direct sense. He adopts the form of Descartes’ arguments but not their content. Thus, as in the ontological argument, it is not the proof of God’s existence that matters to him, but the peculiar logic of the idea of the infinite as it is presented in Descartes’ text, where the idea of God is greater than the idea of that idea, as though the cogito could think more than it is possible for it to think. For Descartes this is the bridge to the outside and allows him to reclaim everything that was lost in radical doubt. For Levinas, on the contrary, the idea of infinity is not a proof of the existence of the other (the other is always a concrete experience and never an idea), but Descartes’



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argument allows him to express the paradoxical nature of the ethical relation. The same could be said of his use of Plato. Levinas is not concerned with the metaphysical Plato of the theory of Forms (indeed we could say that the ethical relation is the rejection of such a theory, where the individual is merely a ghost of the form that represents it). What matters to Levinas is the Plato of the dialogues, where philosophy is conversation. Dialogue, Levinas argues, is primarily ethical before it is ontological. There is no doubt, however, that there is a tension between these two names. The way that the relation to the other is explained through the idea of infinity in Descartes is not quite the same as the other in speech. In the first, the other inhabits the self from within, just as the idea of God inhabits the cogito, whereas in the second, the other comes to the self from afar. I do not think that Totality and Infinity ever resolves this tension between these two portrayals of the other, and this can explain one of the difficulties of its interpretation. The solitary world of the I would be silent. For what need would there be to speak? The fact that when we are alone we speak to ourselves is because we live already in a world shared. A being that can experience itself as solitary and alone is one who already exists with others. A wholly private language that was truly private would not be made of words and sounds but would be silent. Such a silent world would be anarchic. How could I trust my perspective on the world unless I could test it by others’ expectations? Although philosophy might portray the search for knowledge as a solitary pursuit, it has in fact always been a social affair. We seek to understand the world together. Truth, then, is dependent on trust. This, Levinas says, is the lesson of the figure of the evil genius in Descartes’ Meditations.15 Having realized I cannot trust my perceptions, Descartes imagines that I at least would be able to fall back on the certainty of my ideas. I might not be sure what I see outside of me, but surely 2 + 2 would always equal 4? But what if these ideas, which I thought were certain, had been placed in my mind by an evil genius, and the truth was that 2 + 2 equalled 5? How would I know that this was not the case? The purpose of Descartes’ argument is to make us question the basis of certainty. In the end he will solve it through the ontological argument. A just God would not create a world such that 2 + 2 would not equal 4. This just God, so to

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speak, cancels out the existence of the evil genius. This is why the ontological argument is crucial for him. As we have already said, Levinas does not turn to Descartes so as to prove the existence of the other, as though the other were just like Descartes’ God. The other does not have to be proved. It is part of my experience. Of course it is up to Levinas to convince of us this, but he does so descriptively and not logically. Levinas would no more need to prove that the other exists than a phenomenologist has to prove that the cup exists in front of your eyes or that the world is real. Rather he uses Descartes’ argument to imagine what the world would be like if the other I relate to were not ethical but malicious (and in that case the other would just be another self like me). His point is that, in such a world, knowledge would not be possible because what gives my experience of the world its solidity is the relation to the other. I do not just perceive the thing in front of me but name it, and naming requires the pre-existence of a community of speakers who share that name. At the very heart of this community, Levinas is saying, is the ethical relation. Without sincerity, the world we experience as meaningful would dissolve into apparitions and phantasms. This sincerity, as we have already seen, lies in the particular way the ethical other is present in the words they speak. Levinas is very clear about this, and repeats it many times throughout Totality and Infinity. The ethical moment or surplus is not the words the other speaks, but the way in which the other speaks. This does not have to do with the tone or force of the speech, but how the other is present in speech. Levinas calls it ‘signification’ or ‘signifying’ (in French, signification and significance).16 We need to distinguish this presence of the other in speech from the division of the sign into the signifier and signified. The signifier refers to the word itself, like the word ‘cat’, and the signified, what is represented in that word (the idea of the cat). What Levinas means by signification or signifying refers to neither of these elements. It has nothing at all to do with signs. It is, rather, the very utterance itself, or more precisely the presence of the speaker in their speech, that they ‘attend’ the words they speak. It is this ‘attention’ that is the ethical surplus of language. The difference, then, between the ethical other and the evil genius is not that one speaks and the other does not, but that the former is present sincerely in the words they speak, and the other is not. It is this sincerity that gives an orientation to the world. I am speaking to you sincerely because you demand a



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response from me. Sincerity is the basis of our knowledge of the world, though it itself is not an item of knowledge, because it is the ethical foundation of those relations to others that makes such a pursuit possible in the first place. We shall see later, however, that the priority of the presence of the other in speech will lead to a very deep problem in our interpretation of Totality and Infinity. For surely both I and the other are present in the words we speak in the same way? What then would be the difference between us? On the one hand, Levinas will argue, there is something distinctive about the presence of the other in speech, and our understanding of the world is dependent on it. This distinctive nature of the other’s presence he calls ‘teaching’. And yet, at the same time, I am also meant to be present in my speech. ‘Attention’, Levinas writes, ‘is attention to something because it is attention to someone’ (p. 99). This attention would be the same both for me and the other, yet what is the difference between my presence in my words and the presence of the other in theirs? In describing the ethical relation in terms of speech, has not Levinas ended up abolishing the difference between the terms in the relation, which he says is the very basis of its asymmetry? Would he not at least have to demonstrate what the difference between these ‘presences’ might be? We shall need to return to this troubling question when we examine the reception of Levinas’ work at the end of this book. The last part of the section, ‘Separation and Absoluteness’, is a recapitulation of the argument so far, and acts as a brief précis of Totality and Infinity. We start with the separated subject, the concrete existing self. This subject moves outside of itself to the other. This movement is not initiated by itself but through the demand the other makes on it. That the self can be called into question by the other that transcends it Levinas calls the infinite. The infinite is not an idea for Levinas. It is not a definition of the other, as though the other were similar to the Cartesian God, which is proved to exist through supposedly necessarily logical steps. The infinite is not thought but experienced. This is what Levinas means when he says that the infinite is produced, and ‘society accomplishes it concretely’ (p. 102). Though the other and the self are in a relation, this relation is not a unity. ‘The same and the other’, Levinas writes, ‘at the same time maintain themselves in relationship and absolve themselves from this relation, remain

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absolutely separated’ (p. 102). This paradoxical relationship can only be experienced concretely in speech. At the level of thought it is not possible, since as soon as one thinks the same and the other together then one would do so through a third term that would unify them, for everything that I could say about the other, I could also say about myself and vice versa. This is why the words Levinas uses, such as ‘metaphysics’, ‘transcendence’ and so on, to describe the other are not definitions of an essence, but merely testify or bear witness to the concrete experience of the other. They are not its replacement. As Levinas explains in the preface, this is the particular form of the phenomenological method adopted in this book (p. 28). In Husserl, every intentional relation to an object is hidden by horizons that remain invisible to it. It is the aim of the phenomenological method to make these visible. But as such it is an unending task, since equivocation belongs to the phenomenon itself, as though behind one horizon there was always another. Levinas takes this phenomenological investigation one step further – not simply to show that behind one thought there is always another, but behind thought itself there is an experience that remains forgotten, but which is the very basis of thought. Levinas calls this method a ‘deduction’ (p. 28). Western philosophy (‘from Parmenides to Spinoza and Hegel’ [p.  102]), for the most part, starts in the opposite direction. It attempts to understand the concrete through thought and not thought through the concrete. For this very reason it asks ‘what does the other mean?’, and in so doing applies a concept or category to the experience. It sees plurality and multiplicity as a falling away from a higher unity that precedes them, and it is the task of metaphysics to make visible this hidden source and origin. Yet as we have seen in the first part of this section, ‘Metaphysics and Transcendence’, this is not the only way to interpret metaphysics. It not only expresses a need to discover a unity we now lack, like the lovers in Aristophanes’ story in the Symposium, but the desire for that which transcends being when we lack nothing. Rather than interpreting human finitude negatively, as falling away or descent from an original unity, it is openness to infinity greater than being, as though the prefix ‘in’ of ‘infinity’ were not the mark of a negation but the superlative. It is true that in Plato and Plotinus, the infinite, the Good beyond being,



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is still pictured in terms of thought, but nonetheless, it remains as a trace of alternative tradition in Western philosophy, a road that could have been taken but was not. The Good beyond being for Levinas is not the contemplation of the Good, however that might be conceived, but the concrete experience of the other in speech. It is the very opposite of the mystical and the irrational, as for Levinas is the religious. ‘Separation’, Levinas writes, ‘is not simply a negation. Accomplished as psychism, it precisely opens upon the idea of infinity’ (p. 105).

Interiority and Economy For the self to have a relation to the other, it already has to have broken with any totality. A totality is where the self and the other are treated as though they are the same. Yet what does it mean to exist outside of a totality? It cannot be at the level of thought, since thought always represents the individual as though it belonged to genus. However I might categorize the self or the other, it could always be something that would be common to them. Separation has to be directly experienced. I must, then, already relate to myself as a solitary existence before I reflect upon myself self-consciously. This direct relation of the self to the self Levinas calls ‘enjoyment’. He has two targets in mind here: one is Husserl, who argues that the primary relation to things is cognitive; and the second, which is the more substantial object of Levinas’ critique, is Heidegger. In terms of the latter (and in some sense you already have to know this analysis before you have read Totality and Infinity), Levinas is arguing against Heidegger’s description of existence in Being and Time. It is true that Heidegger rejects Husserl’s intellectualist approach, and in this way they are both similar, but he does so through an understanding of existence as a project made up of a series of goals (Levinas says that Heidegger interprets existence as a finality).17 I enjoy the meal in order to feed myself, in order to go to work, in order to pay for my house, where all these ‘in order tos’ relate to my understanding of my existence. For Levinas, on the contrary, there is the simple enjoying of the meal, which is neither a thought about the meal, nor part of a larger project.

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Why does Levinas spend so many pages of Totality and Infinity describing the separated existence of the self? The reader might think the book is meant to be about the other (indeed they might have only heard that Levinas is the philosopher of the mysterious concept of the other), yet the majority of the main argument of the text is about the self. Ethics for Levinas is neither cognitive nor practical, but he can only show this by demonstrating that the existence of the self is not first of all either intellectual or practical. The other does not make a demand upon me because I think it, nor does it appeal to me because I have principles upon which I act. Rather, the other directly invades my bodily existence through which I enjoy the world. It is only subsequent to this assault on my most intimate self that I might subsequently derive principles upon which I could build a just world. Without this first incursion, a truly ethical justice would not be possible and, indeed, as we have seen from the preface, discriminating between justice and tyranny would be impossible. Ethics, then, has to do with the body, not the mind, and not the body as a tool or instrument, but one that enjoys and takes pleasure in its possession of the world. It is this body, selfish and egotistical, that is brought up short by the suffering of others. Should I take the bread from my own mouth to feed others? This is ethical demand par excellence, for Levinas. Yet, as we have already seen from the introduction, it is not just the relation of the self to the other that concerns Levinas, but how this ethical relation is the very condition of knowledge that ends up forgetting and repressing it. Without the demand of the other, then, knowledge, objectivity and representation would not happen. This is not because, as we have also seen, these orientations to the world are essentially linguistic for Levinas (the famous ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy), but language itself has, at its core, the ethical relation. The way that Levinas describes what we have called the third moment of the argument of Totality and Infinity in this section is through the dwelling. To possess the world it is not sufficient just to enjoy it, because the future can wipe away everything I have gained. I need a security that allows me to store up the future against a rainy day. This is the purpose or function of the dwelling. Yet it does not just exhaust itself in this function, for the dwelling is not just a shelter (as Heidegger describes it in Being and Time, for example), but also a home.18 In this way it already requires a relation to the other to be so, for it is ‘homely’ in the sense that



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it already echoes with a human presence. This other Levinas calls the feminine. There is no doubt that these pages have produced the most heated commentary. What is the status of the feminine other? Is it the same as the female sex, and does Levinas then just repeat a rather patriarchal and less-than-attractive portrayal of women (that her place is in the home, for example)? Yet also, and not without connection to these questions, how are we to relate this other to the other of language? How can there be two ‘others’ in Totality and Infinity without it compromising the unity and coherence of its own argument?

Separation as Life Without the separation of the self there can be no ethical relation for it would be entirely one-sided. But what does it mean to live a separated life? Previously Levinas had described the separate life of the self as ‘psychism’ (p. 54), but what is the content of such a psychism? It is not psychological or biological. Psychism is life lived as an activity and this activity is enjoyment. By describing life lived as enjoyment, Levinas has Heidegger in his sights. Heidegger too argued that existence is to be understood as a concrete life rather than as a formal category, but life for him was not enjoyment but work. Having a life is a project or business, something I have to achieve or do. For Levinas, labour or work comes after the ethical relation and is not the first meaning of existence. Enjoyment is not thought of in terms of finality as Heidegger’s projects are. I might use a hammer to build the hut, but this is not the same as enjoying the heat of the sun against my skin, or the cool taste of lager against my lips. I do not enjoy them first of all in terms of something, but for the sheer enjoyment of consuming them. Enjoyment is essentially nourishment and it is an activity that enjoys itself as itself without looking beyond itself. This encircling of enjoyment around itself that consumes itself in consumption is the egoism of the self. Pure egoism is the sheer love of life. Existence is not first of all to be understood as suffering but as happiness. Suffering is a falling away from happiness that is primary. Life is not a lack but feeds from what it lacks. It enjoys its needs, as we enjoy the food we eat. My dependency on my needs is the very expression of my independence. It is what it means to live

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a life. The expression ‘a life’ is important. Life as enjoyment is not biological or psychological, because in these discourses life is an abstract concept. They do not describe a life lived, but anonymous life lived by everyone. This is why the separated life of the egotistical self immersed in the enjoyment of enjoyment already breaks with any totality. I am an individual as a body that enjoys life and not as a concept that could be said of anyone. The atheism of the self is this enjoyment of life. It is this life that is brought up short by the demand of the other, but if I did not enjoy the world what would I give to the other? The ethical relation requires that both the self and the other absolve themselves from the relation at the same time as being part of it, otherwise there would be no difference between ethics and totality, or society and the state. Ethics, then, is not a movement from enjoyment to a higher state that supposedly leaves it behind. Without a life lived there would be nothing for others to appeal to, even though in this appeal they might make me question the very egoism that sustains it. We first live from things before we think about them. Nor are these things a means to an end. We use a pen to write a letter, to use Levinas’ example, and we write a letter to communicate to a friend, but this is not how we live from things, ‘from “good soup”, air, light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep, etc. …’ (p. 110). Something we consume is not the same as a tool we use. The latter already implies a relation to the other, which is not part of the direct enjoyment of the world, where I am only concerned with my happiness and contentment. The very essence of enjoyment is nourishment. I gorge myself on my existence. ‘All enjoyment’, Levinas writes, ‘is in this sense alimentation’ (p. 111). Living is a transitive verb whose object is itself and the object it consumes. To live life is both to live from something, but at the same time to enjoy the very living of it. I might have to earn my bread to survive, but there is enjoyment in the bread itself, the taste of it in my mouth and how it fills my stomach when I am hungry. I might have to work in order to exist, but there is also the pleasure of working itself. All these activities, which we might sum up as ‘living’, make up the very egoism of the I, the happiness of being alive. ‘Life’, Levinas writes, ‘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’ (p. 112). Existence is not, as some have argued,



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mere existence, a life of drudgery, pain and suffering. Life is first of all the sheer exuberance of being alive. If there is suffering, then it is a falling away from this vitality, rather than something one begins with. To hate life means that there must be a life to begin with. The joy of existence is not finality. There is a joy of thinking before there is something one must think, a joy of sleeping beyond the need to rest, reading before a book, working before a job to be done, the sun against one’s skin before a place one needs to go. Action does not determine enjoyment; rather, enjoyment is that from which activity springs. If we did not first of all enjoy life (and for that reason also suffer when we cannot do so), then we would not have ends or a project we would need to realize to preserve it. This emphasis of enjoyment against finality is set against Heidegger’s analysis of the everyday existence of Dasein in Being and Time.19 For Heidegger, to be is to act. I understand my existence in terms of my goals. I am hammering on the roof in order to build a hut, I am building a hut in order to shelter from the weather, I am sheltering from the weather in order to write Being and Time. I am writing Being and Time because this is what it means to be authentically me. Levinas is not disputing that this could be so, but he is disagreeing that this is a fundamental expression of what it means to be. There is a joy in being outside hammering in the sun that has nothing at all to do with any of these reasons. These reasons require social existence, and social existence relations to others. It is true that Heidegger recognizes the importance of others in Being and Time, but they are only part of my project (like the person to whom I address the letter).20 They are not the other who judges me, who asks me whether my existence is sufficient beyond authenticity. Nor is enjoyment merely a psychological state that we might contrast with its opposite like sadness, as though they were equivalent contrasts on the same continuum. Emotions presuppose that the self already exists, but enjoyment is not one state added to others that the self could have. Enjoyment is the very meaning of being a self. It is the very ‘accomplishment’ of being alive. Life itself is the pleasure of living. Such a pleasure is more than substance. I do not just live as things do. My life is something I pursue and bring about. It is, Levinas writes, ‘an independence higher than substantiality’ (p. 113). I do not act in order to enjoy, rather I act from enjoyment. Enjoyment means action is my action and an

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expression of my potency and exuberance. Even Plato, remarks Levinas, compared knowledge with feasting (p. 114). The soul does not just look with its eyes but feasts, and without this feast it would soon wither away and die. Even the lofty speculations of the soul are still part of the enjoyment of life, as the Epicureans realized. What is beyond life is not another life, which is often just this life without its misery, but the accusation of the other. This is because life is never just life as abstraction, but a life, and a life is always a life with others, even when it forgets this inevitable fact. ‘Throughout this book’, Levinas writes, ‘we are opposing the full analogy between truth and nourishment, because metaphysical Desire is above life, and with regard to it one cannot speak of satiety’ (p. 114). My life is not enough unto itself. This is the truth of ethics. Yet without a life there would be nothing to give. My life is independent not dependent. Life is not a lack, but thrives from what it needs. I am not unhappy because I have needs, because fulfilling them is what brings me happiness. If I lacked nothing, then I would be inert. To lack nothing is to be dead. We suffer because we were happy; we are not happy because we do not suffer. Happiness is not the absence of suffering; it is more than suffering. We do not suffer because we were originally unhappy. Happiness is a surplus above privation. My life, its style and élan, its personality and swagger, is the accomplishment of this happiness. To be happy is the concrete achievement of being a self. Sadness is a falling away from this original feat. Enjoyment and atheism are one and the same. Atheism describes the formal abstract separation of the self from the other, who can only be in relation because they are not one and the same. Enjoyment, however, makes clear what it actually means to be an atheist. ‘Enjoyment’, Levinas writes, ‘accomplishes the atheist separation; it deformalises the notion of separation which is not a cleavage made in the abstract, but the existence at home with itself of the autochthonous I’ (p. 115). Neither enjoyment nor atheism is pejorative. They are what it means to be a self. Such a joyful atheism extends as far as ‘the exploitation of the other’ (p. 115). Levinas does not mean here the other of ethics. It is precisely the opposite.21 To live from one’s needs is not to hear the voice of the other. From this hard-heartedness it does not follow that the satisfaction of needs is negative. Levinas rejects the Platonic notion that the satisfaction of a need is like scratching



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an itch. This would be to see human needs as the same as those of animals. The animal is wholly dependent on its environment, but we change ours through labour in order to suit our needs. My dependency, ontologically speaking, becomes the very expression of my independence. The satisfaction of my needs demonstrates that I am not at the mercy of the world, and its alterity is a spur to my endeavour rather than a threat to recoil from. Labour is the extension of enjoyment. It is the translation of the exteriority of the world into my interiority. This is the difference between my body and that of an animal. The human body is already labour. In order to consume the world, I have to distance myself from it to satisfy my needs. Need proves not the poverty of the human, but its ingenuity. Against the threat of starvation, I can work the land so that in the future I will have more to eat. I am not at the mercy of elements, but use them to satisfy my needs. I do not have to follow the weather, but use it in order to increase my productivity. I manipulate and bend nature to my will. The body does not demonstrate my weakness, but precisely the opposite. Through labour I overcome any disadvantage I might have in relation to the animal. Such an opening up of distance between me and the world, so that I can work on it for my needs, however, is ambiguous. For without the relation to the ethical other, the interiority from out of which I can resist my dependency on nature, the difference between me and the animal, would itself collapse. Agriculture is dependent on habitation, not habitation agriculture, and habitation is an ethical category. The individuality and uniqueness of the I lies not in the fact that it is one thing amongst many, like the Eiffel Tower, to use Levinas’ example, but because a life is not subsumable to life in general (p. 117). The self already escapes any genus or concept. To exist is to be a unique being. This means that the self has already escaped any totality, which treats an individual as a part of a whole, before it is has encountered the other. The fact that the self is not reducible to any concept that is said of it, but a unique life, Levinas calls ‘ipseity’. Without ipseity, the separation of the self, ethics would not be possible. For it is not the I as a concept that is called into question by the other, but a concrete individual that faces them. This concrete individual is a living body that enjoys its own existence. Enjoyment is not added onto this existence as an additional property, but is its existence. If my bodily existence

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is satisfaction and nourishment, then ethics is the opposite. To experience the demand of the other is to apologize for this existence and to feel shame for one’s self-satisfaction. Such an apology does not negate the self. It does not disappear in the demand of the other, otherwise there would be no difference between ethics and totality; rather, it is to understand that the existence of the self as enjoyment is dependent on a goodness (the relation to the other) it has forgotten or repressed. Existence is originally apologetic. I am dependent on others to be the selfish existence I, and this ethical dependency is to be sharply distinguished from an ontological one that can always be defeated by my own efforts. ‘The solitude of the subject’, Levinas writes, ‘will be recognised also in the goodness in which the apology issues’ (p. 119). A philosophy, like Spinoza’s, that interprets existence as intelligibility, and reverses the relation between ethics and ontology, so that the former is dependent on the latter and not the latter on the former, forgets that reason is subordinate to a society made of individual lives that it would abolish. It is not the state that makes society possible, but the other way around. Without society, the individual would only be an individual as the expression of higher concept. What prevents society from succumbing to the tyranny of the state is the difference between the members that make it up, where the I and the other are not one and the same, as though the other ‘would amount to a second copy of the I’ (p. 121). Such a relation already announces itself in sexuality and ethics, where the differences between the sexes, and the demand the other makes on me, are not experienced as the reverse of a common identity, as though being a woman were just ‘not being a man’, or the other ‘not me’. We will, however, have to ask ourselves, when we come to these parts of Totality and Infinity, whether they do so equally, and also whether Levinas, to some extent, subordinates sexuality to ethics.

Enjoyment and Representation In enjoyment do I not represent the thing I enjoy? How can I enjoy the apple I am eating, if I do not have an idea of that apple? Surely Husserl is right to prioritize thought over all other acts, since every act, whether it is loving, hating or desiring, requires the idea of



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the thing it loves, hates or desires? So although I might agree that enjoyment describes one way in which the self relates to the world, why should I accept that is the most important and describes what it is to be a self? This commitment to the priority of representation in Western philosophy, of which Husserl perhaps is merely the culmination, rests for Levinas on forgetting that without the body there would be no thought. Thought forgets its dependency so that it can proclaim its own elevation, like Baron Munchhausen’s inhabitants of the moon, whose heads separate from their bodies and go about their own business while leaving their bodies at home. Yet it is this home that makes thought possible. For without the security of the home, created because of the vulnerability of the body against a future that threatens it, the self would not exist. Everything we think of as the highest achievement of humanity, and what distinguishes us from mere animal existence, has its source in the home. Habitation is not just one more tool added to all the others I use to augment my existence, as though my home were just like the hammer I used to make it. My home expresses my place on this earth and that I have a place at all. It is the very boundaries of my subjectivity and without it I am hardly a self at all. Homelessness is not one calamity out of many. It is the self reduced to almost nothing, threatened by the elements and anonymous being. Yet if to have a home is to be a self, it already introduces the relation to the other at the very heart of subjectivity. For a home without the other is hardly a home at all. It would be only a storage facility for my furniture and a place, however necessary, where I would rest my head after a hard day’s work. It would be lodgings and not a home. If the dwelling already requires a relation to the other, what is the status of this other? Here we do have a difficulty. For Levinas labels this other the feminine. Are we to take this as derogatory? Are we to think of this other as less than the other of language and ethics? Or is there another way of interpreting this other, perhaps even against Levinas’ own intentions, that would reveal it to have a greater importance than the other who speaks to me? Is there a difference between the life that lives and that from which I live? I live from bread, music and ideas, but is my life just the same as these? Is living different from what is lived? In intentionality, we are used to thinking this difference. Husserl would say there is a difference between the act of thinking, loving, eating and so on, and the content of that act, what is thought in the act

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of thinking, loved in the act of loving, eaten in the act of eating. Can we say the same thing of enjoyment, so that there is an act of enjoying, on the one side, and the content of enjoying on the other? Where we might hesitate in following Husserl in this regard is that for him representation is the dominant activity. Thus the act of thinking is not the same as the act of loving, or the act of eating. Why is this? This is because every act must contain the act of representing, whereas representing does not have to contain the act of eating. To love something, I must have the idea of that thing I love and so too with eating. Is that the same with enjoyment, then? To enjoy something, must I have the idea of the thing I enjoy? The primacy of representation in Husserl leads to the conclusion that the object of consciousness, what it is that I am thinking about, whether that thing is something I love or wish to eat, must be internal to consciousness itself, since this object is not the real object, but an idea or a meaning. Thought is the mastery of the external object. This is what it means to give a meaning to the object. The object is reduced to the idea I have of it. I possess it completely. We are no longer talking about the person I love, but the idea of the person I love, not the apple on the table I wish to eat, but the idea of the apple. Husserl is arguing that I only get to the one through the other. I get to the person through the idea of the person, the apple through the idea of the apple. If you like, there would not be a person or apple for me without the idea I have of them. What could have appeared strange and unfamiliar becomes part of my world, which is nothing less than an interlocking network of meanings. ‘Clarity’, Levinas writes, ‘is the very disappearance of what could shock’ (p. 124). If this were the only relation of myself to the world, then we would say that the general definition of intentionality is the reduction of what is other, what could shock and disturb me, to the same. Thought is the domestication of the world. Intentionality, then, appears to be the very opposite of the ethical relation. In the latter, the same is shocked by what is other than it, whereas in the former, this shock is erased by eliminating the difference between the two. In intentionality ‘the same is in relation with the other,’ Levinas writes, ‘but in such a way that the other does not determine the same; it is always the same that determines the other’ (p. 124). This power over things that representation imagines is based on forgetfulness. It forgets that to get to a stage where it does



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have mastery over things it once lived in a world unfamiliar to it. Thinking lives in an eternal present. The past it thinks of is only a past thought that it makes present to itself and not the past to thought. There is a past that is more past than the past of thought. It remembers that yesterday it had a thought of an apple, and the weight of the world disappears in the lightness of thought, but it forgets the accomplishment of having that thought required a thinker who was more than just thought itself. The freedom of the self, whose highest achievement is reflection, where the world is reflected back to it as though in a mirror, and whose original dependence on things becomes an illusion, is not as autonomous as it believes. Representation, as we have seen, has its condition in the social relation to the other, which cannot be an object of thought. This is not to argue that the intentionality of thought is an error, as though, as Levinas remarks, to be accused of intellectualism is a fault (p. 123). It would be a serious misunderstanding to think Levinas is arguing for ignorance and stupidity. It is to ask whether intentionality is the first relation to the world, and whether it is dependent on a different relation it forgets or represses. The social relation to the other is not a cognitive one. This goes both ways. The self that reacts to the other does not do so by representing the other to itself, nor is the other who demands such a response a representation. Of course, I can think all kinds of things about the other, good or bad, but this is not the social relation to the other. For this to be possible there must be another kind of intentionality, which is not the same as representation, where the alterity of the other disappears. This other kind of intentionality cannot be a different kind of intentionality of thought but is the intentionality of the body. For Husserl, desire requires the thought of the object to be desired, eating the thought of the object to be eaten, but for Levinas there is a relation to food that the hungry body has that is not at all dependent on the thought of the food, and so too with desire. I live in my body before I have a thought of my body and my body already relates to the world, and it is the body that sustains my thought and not the other way around. The existence of my body also demonstrates that I am dependent on the exteriority of the world that does not just vanish in the interiority of my thought. I live from the world and this ‘living from’ is a very different intentionality than Husserl’s ‘consciousness of’, where the object of thought is internal to thought that thinks it. My body

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does not swallow up the earth it stands on. It touches it. This is its place beneath the sun. In thought it is as though the world was created by me, but this relation is reversed in my bodily existence. Thought does not first of all nourish life; life nourishes thought. Without life, I would not be able to think, but life is a dependency of ‘living from’. It is not at all the illusion of independence that thought dreams of. That I am dependent on the world for my nourishment is not the thought of this dependence, but the very fact of being a ‘naked and hungry body’ (p. 129). ‘The body’, Levinas writes, ‘is a permanent contestation of the prerogative attributed to consciousness of “giving meaning” to each being; it lives as this contestation’ (p. 129). Life, then, is not the product of thought. Rather, it is the condition of thought. Enjoyment constitutes subjectivity not because the content of its intentionality is somehow mysterious or unthought, since what is unthought is not other to thought but merely its opposite (as even Husserl would admit, surrounding every thought there is that which cannot be thought), but the reversal of the direction of intentionality itself. In the intentionality of consciousness, what is exterior is made interior. In the intentionality of enjoyment, of the body, the interior is suspended in the exterior. ‘The world I constitute nourishes me and bathes me’ (p. 129). It is this reversal that places a limit on thematization. It is the ‘absolute past’ that cannot be retrieved by the present of thought. This past is ‘older’ than the past of representation, where all experience is reduced to the presence of thought to itself in selfreflection. ‘The represented, the present, is a fact, already belonging to the past’ (p. 130). If ethics is not a matter of thought for Levinas, then this is not because I have to stop thinking to be ethical and only feel the suffering of others, but because my existence is already bodily before it is cognitive. Representation is always catching up with a life that has already passed. If life is enjoyment, then the first way we encounter things is not as tools and our immediate environment is not the ‘work world’. Things are not part of an interlocking network of finality but part of a ‘milieu’, which Levinas calls the ‘elemental’. Clearly Levinas has in mind Heidegger’s analysis of existence in Being and Time. Like Levinas, Heidegger too is attacking Husserl’s cognitive bias. Our relation to the world, he argues, is not immediately one of knowledge, but practice. I use things before I know them



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in a theoretical way. The chair is for sitting, the table for resting things on, the computer for typing my book. These objects are not immediately three-dimensional objects in Cartesian space. To see them this way is to abstract them from my ‘work world’, but it is this world that I actually live in, not the world of abstract physics. This does not mean Heidegger, like Levinas, thinks that science is somehow wrong, but he does not think that it can describe our own existence, an existence that science as an activity too must come from. Levinas’ argument with Heidegger is not to say that this work world is false, but such a world already requires the social relation to the other. (As we have said previously, there are others in Heidegger’s world, but these others are part of my world, part of my authenticity or failure to be authentic. They do not call this world or this project into question.) The work world is already built on the world of enjoyment, which requires that I have already built up my world by overcoming the elemental. In his previous work, Levinas would have called the elemental the il y a (the ‘there is’).22 He does not write explicitly about the il y a in Totality and Infinity, but it is there in the background. For Heidegger, at least at the time of writing Being and Time, being is personal. He writes in Being and Time that being ‘is in each case mine’. 23 This is because only for Dasein is its being an issue for it and precisely what is at issue is its own existence and not existence in general. For Levinas, on the contrary, my personal existence comes after my relation to the other and not before it. Prior to my relation to the other, being is not personal, but impersonal. Being is something I seek to escape, rather than embrace. It is from out of this impersonal milieu that I must take hold of the elements and make them mine, but first of all they are just there. To possess things requires that I form an ‘extraterritoriality’ within this impersonal space. This extraterritoriality is the home. The home is not one tool amongst many other tools, as though its purpose was just simply to shelter me from the weather (though, of course, that is one of its functions). Before the functionality and purposiveness of my existence, where things are given directions by my needs and projects, there is the brute fact of being that needs to be tamed. In order to have a purpose I must have a place on this earth and this is supplied by my home. For Heidegger, things are tools above all and their system of finality is what constitutes my

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world. For Levinas, tools are for the sake of enjoyment. I enjoy my home, I live from it. I consume things. This is true even of labour. I can enjoy my work and even suffer from it beyond the aims it is directed at. ‘The lighter to the cigarette one smokes,’ Levinas writes, ‘the fork to the food, the cup to the lips. Things refer to my enjoyment’ (p. 133). This means that existence is not first of all care and concern, as Heidegger describes it, but ‘play’ (p. 134). I sink my teeth into life and enjoy the wealth it gives me. It is this carefree existence that is totally oblivious to the suffering of others. Why should they matter to me? It is not the work world that brings this innocence to the end, but the demand of the other who says that I should take their suffering into account above my own world. The work world, and the world of representation and thought that springs from it, is subsequent to this demand. Without the other, I would still be wallowing in the elemental. Enjoyment is sensibility. I do not think of the bread I eat, but eat it. Eating is the sensation of the food on my lips. Sensibility should not be interpreted first of all as a thought of something sensed, as though the feeling were a mutilated form of thought. In thought there is a gap between the act of thinking and what is thought. Sensibility is the feeling of the body directly immersed in things. Not the thought of the water flowing against my skin, but the flowing of the water directly against my skin. I first of all live at this level of affects and sensibility and not thought. I live through sensibilities; I do not know them. This is the genius of Cartesian philosophy, Levinas says, that it accepts the irrationality of sensibility without reducing it to thought. My sensations are not mutilated thoughts. They are sensations in themselves. Enjoyment is not the idea of a sensation, but just the feeling of the sensation itself. This feeling is my body, and through my body I make my stand upon the earth. Enjoyment is not a thought, not an intention in the Husserlian sense, not a ‘consciousness of’. It is this standing, which Levinas describes with the neologism of ‘finition’ that is opposed to the infinity of ethics (p. 136). ‘I am myself,’ he writes, ‘at home with myself, inhabitation, immanence in the world. My sensibility is here’ (p. 138). That things have an identity, however, requires that there is more than sensation. This ‘more’ is language. Perception is already language. I see the same thing because I have fixed it with a word. But language for Levinas is already social. I would not speak if I



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were not already spoken to. The perceptual world has its origin in ethics. Without this ethical basis of speech, reality would never be stable. It would rest on the uneasy sands of enjoyments. ‘A thing’, Levinas writes, ‘exists in the midst of its wastes’ (p. 139). That things have a surface I can recognized is because I have already been faced by the other. I impose a stability on things through the names I give them, although they can always slip and slide back into the elemental (in the darkness of the night I no longer recognize the tree I once knew), whereas the other has a face of their own. Of course I can impose a face on them, but unlike the surfaces of things they do not just dissolve into facelessness, but the ethical face can shine through when I respond to the voice. The face of the other interrupts both the elemental and identity. The horror of mass death is not just the aspect of violence and waste, but it is seeing the human as just a thing, and not just as thing, but a thing that has slid into senselessness, the elemental. The mound of hair, of teeth, and shoes. In understanding this waste, I attempt to put a form on the formless. The face of the other, however, is not a form. It speaks for itself. Language first of all is a relation to the other before it is a form imposed on chaos. This is the difference between aesthetics and ethics. For in aesthetics I attempt to put a form on things (it is, as Levinas says, a kind of higher enjoyment, as though all art were in essence decorative), whereas the face has neither form nor matter. It breaks with the horror of matter by speaking and not by any form I might place upon it, either to make sense of, or to enjoy it. Insecurity haunts enjoyment from within. What the world gives it can also take away. This is the future of enjoyment where I am uncertain whether what I rely on today will be there tomorrow. Today the sun is shining on me, but tomorrow will there be a storm? It is this unreliability of the future that is overcome by the home and labour. I store up my resources against a future doubtful and changeable. The opposite of the elemental, which is always on the edge of withdrawing into the very anonymity from which it has sprung, is the straightforwardness of the human face. The face assists its presence in speech. This is the very difference between the personal and the impersonal. If for Levinas this ethical relation has its analogy in monotheism, then the impersonality of the elemental has its expression in myth. The angry gods, whose intentions are a mystery to me and whom I have to placate with sacrifices, are

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the very embodiment of a future I feel I have no control over. Enjoyment is paganism. It is the death of these gods that leads to the atheism, which is the condition of ‘true transcendence’ (p. 142). The insecurity and ambivalence of enjoyment, that what I enjoy today can be taken away tomorrow, that the self, as Levinas writes, ‘runs up against the very strangeness of the earth’ (p. 142), does not contradict enjoyment itself. It is because first of all I enjoy the world and its pleasures that I can feel menaced by their removal. I am not from the start sad and unhappy, as though existence were nothing but suffering and hardship where I can only expect a modicum of joy. On the contrary, existence is in itself joyous, and it is only through its decrease by external causes that I feel sadness. The aim, then, of habitation and labour, what we might call the economy in the broadest sense of the term, is to overcome, as far as possible, this dependency.

I and Dependence If uncertainty is at the heart of enjoyment it does not overcome or overwhelm it. Sadness and sorrow is set against the love of life and presupposes it. I do not begin with needs and then wonder how I might fulfil them, rather I am happy because I have needs. Life is not a burden or a concern. Here Levinas has in mind Heidegger’s analysis of thrownness in Being and Time, where existence is first of all conceived of as a project or task and whose ultimate end is death. Against this, Levinas contrasts the vitality and exuberance of living. It is as though Heidegger, in describing life, is in fact portraying work – as though from the very moment of our birth, all we had were worries and concerns. For Levinas, on the contrary, labour is subsequent to enjoyment and presupposes it. I work in order to enjoy my life; I do not enjoy life to work. I work so as to shore up enjoyment against the uncertain future that threatens it from within. My work and my possessions are, so to speak, a stored up future against a rainy day. Yet labour, Levinas will argue, requires a home. A home is not just a collection of bricks and mortar but is already a relation to the other. This other is not the other of speech and language, but a ‘feminine presence’. One difficulty of interpreting Totality and Infinity, as we have already mentioned, is the ambiguity of such a



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presence. Is she more or less than the other of ethics, and is this other, in turn, gender neutral (especially considering the negative connotations of neutrality for Levinas)? Whatever the difficulties of this interpretation are, it is clear that the description of the home and the feminine offers a very different logic of the relation to the other than that of speech. Here the other is not an exteriority that comes from outside, that speaks to me, to use Levinas’ expression, from a height, but from within. In the home, the other inhabits the self. Is there a tension between these two different ways of describing the relation to the other? Are they the same way of describing the other or different? I live in the present and from the elements but my very enjoyment of them and self-sufficiency conceal the fact that this independence is also a dependence. For what I enjoy today can be taken away tomorrow. The I needs the world from which it lives, but this world can also be removed by disaster and calamity it could not foretell, because it comes from a future unforeseen. The swollen river sweeps away the road, the crops are eaten by a plague of locusts, and the forest fires continue burning unabated. However much I lose myself in the present moment of enjoyment, these future threats are there ready to happen. ‘Joy’, Levinas writes, ‘remains a chance and a stroke of luck’ (p. 144). This does not mean that my joy disappears, or that the menace of the future makes my existence one of suffering and despair. To exist is to be joyful in the face of the menace of the future, despite the threat of external causes. The self does not exist first of all and then have to find reasons to be joyful. To exist is to be happy. To live is to love life. Such a love of life is not a judgement about life, but the living of life itself. It is expression of the power of existence and its intensity. Sadness is set against this joy. It is a diminution of it and not its opposite equivalent. What philosophy imagines as the sadness of existence is a disquietude at the heart of enjoyment, rather than something that abolishes and destroys enjoyment absolutely. We are happy because we have needs and wants and not in their absences. It is in their satisfaction that we feel joy and happiness. ‘A being’, Levinas writes, ‘without needs would not be happier than a needy being, but outside of happiness and unhappiness’ (p. 146). What overcomes the uncertainty of the future that threatens my enjoyment from inside must come from within my life, but it requires me to take possession and control of the world I am dependent on. Enjoyment must become labour. I must build the

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bridge over the river that threatens to sweep away my existence, a fence against the locusts, a ditch against the forest fire. Labour, however, presupposes a relation to the other that makes it possible. This relation to the other, Levinas calls ‘habitation’ or ‘dwelling’. The home is not just the materials from which it is made up. It is not just a shelter against the elements, but a ‘welcoming of the Other’ (p. 146). It is not a just a bulwark against the threat of the future, since my house too can be swept away or burnt down, but the offering of a new future that transcends my own. This other future, which is the future of the other, culminates for Levinas, at least, in the birth of the child. We will have to wait for these pages on fecundity to explain this in more detail. The separation of the self is not an abstract description, as though it were a mere property or quality, like red is a property of a red thing. Separation is produced concretely. This is why, for Levinas, separation is more fundamental than freedom. For the self to be free, or even to imagine it has rights and privileges, it already has to have a place in the world. On the one hand, this means that I am dependent on the elements, but, on the other, I dominate, control and possess them. Without this concrete real interiority of the self, the ethical relation to the other would not be possible, since both terms in the relation must absolve themselves from this relation whilst as the same time being in it. The difference between the self and the other is not an abstract negation. The self is not different from the other because it is not the other, and likewise the other is not different from the self because it is not the self. Such a relation would require that there were a common measure between the terms such that one could be lacking what the other has and vice versa. The difference between the other and the self is absolute rather than relative. There is no common measure between the self and the other. This absolute difference between the self and the other is not thought. It is not because we cannot think of a common measure between the self and the other that they are different, rather they are different concretely. This is why Levinas spends so many pages of Totality and Infinity describing the separated existence of the self, for it is this existence that is called into question by the demand of the other in speech. Yet there is a real problem here. If the same and the other are absolutely different from one another, how do they relate to one another concretely without at the same time one or the other being



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reduced to the other? If the relation between the self and the other is not dialectically produced (that is to say, one does not get to the other simply by negation), then the separation must be, Levinas writes, ‘absolutely closed over upon itself, not deriving its isolation dialectically from its opposition to the Other’ (p. 148). If this were the case, how then would the self ever come into contact with the other, how would it ever hear the demand of the other? It must, Levinas says paradoxically, be both ‘open and closed’ (p. 148). Of course at the level of thought this is absurd, but concretely it is possible. For the self to be both open and closed, its interiority (in the fullest sense of the term) must already be occupied by an exteriority from within. Levinas describes a movement of descending into the interiority of the self until one actually reaches an exteriority. This ‘other-in-the-same’ is what distinguishes human from animal existence. ‘Within the very interiority hollowed out by enjoyment,’ Levinas writes, ‘there must be produced a heteronomy that incites to another destiny than this animal complacency in oneself’ (p. 149). What can answer to this heteronomy? It cannot be the disquiet at the heart of enjoyment, for this belongs to my interiority as part of my enjoyment. One flees from life towards life, not away from it. To kill oneself is to assume that life is not worth living, but this presupposes that one already has a relation to something that is ‘more than life’. What is truly external to my life is only the relation to the other. Suicide assumes an ethical world. Only this relation to the other is heteronomous. There is no common measure between my life and ethics. To be open to ethics is already to imagine that my world is not sufficient reason to let suffering exist. Yet this openness to the other, if we are to follow Levinas’ description above, must happen within the closed world of the self. This ‘extraterritoriality’ within the territory of the self is the intimacy of the other within the home. The home has an ambiguous position. At one and the same time it permits the self to overcome the insecurity of enjoyment (and in that sense it deepens the foundations of interiority and sets it on a more secure basis), while, since this is the very condition of the home being a home rather than just a collection of building materials, it is a relation to the other. ‘The other’, Levinas writes, ‘precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness’ (p. 150). Nonetheless there is something very strange and unsettling in these pages that is hidden in the middle of Levinas’ description of

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the separated existence of the self, and so might be missed by many readers. Even the last quotation is peculiar, because the translator has decided to translate the sentence in the masculine rather than the feminine, even though in the very next paragraph Levinas says that the intimate other is feminine.24 Part of this has to do with ambiguous role of the feminine in Totality and Infinity, which we discuss in the next part, ‘The Dwelling’. This obscurity, however, goes back to a more fundamental methodological one. There are in fact two descriptions of the relation to the other in Totality and Infinity. One is the relation between the other in speech, which Levinas describes in terms of transcendence and height, and then there is this other relation to the other, which is one of ‘gentleness’ and intimacy, where the other does not speak to the self but somehow inhabits it from within. There is no doubt that Levinas sometimes speaks of the first in terms of the masculine and the second the feminine (although the previous quotation does show that he slides between them), but even this is not the fundamental problem. The real issue is what is the relation between these two relations? Occasionally Levinas writes as though they are the same, especially when he describes the second relation through the idea of the infinite (the other inhabits the same in the same way as the idea of God inhabits the cogito in Descartes’ description). Other times, the relation to the intimate other is a stepping stone towards the ethical other (this is the case with the description of the home in the section on separation). Levinas will even, to further complicate the difference between these relations, describe them as opposed to one another. This is notably the case when he describes the relation to the intimate other as absent of speech. We shall come across this when we look at Levinas’ description of the erotic relation to the feminine other. Then we might wonder how it is possible to have a relation to the other that is not ethical at all. Totality and Infinity never overcomes the puzzle of the relation between these two relations, even when Levinas attempts to integrate them to the overall argument of the book.

The Dwelling We have already been introduced to many of the themes of this part already, but only here does Levinas underline the crucial



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importance of the dwelling to his argument. First of all, we have to keep in mind that this is an analysis that always has in the background – as we have seen throughout this section ‘Interiority and Economy’ – Heidegger’s description of tools in Being and Time. It is Levinas’ position that the home is not a tool like any other but fundamental to the existence of the self. This means that the relation to the other is not revealed within the ‘work world’, as it is for Heidegger, where my relation to others is merely part of my own self-realization (I can either choose or not choose to be authentically with others, but it clearly my choice for Heidegger, and not something demanded of me by the other). It is not that I have a world for Levinas and then subsequently have a home. Rather, having a home is conditional on having a place in this world. Dwelling is the very ‘concretization’ of the existence of the self. He means by this neologism that my world is something I have to produce economically. It is not the creation of thought, or merely the self’s relation to itself where its being is an issue for it. Levinas understands economics as labour and possession, which he explains in greater detail in the following part, ‘The World of Phenomena’. It is the home that makes possible labour and possession through what Levinas calls ‘recollection’. We think of recollection in terms of memory, but Levinas wants to return to the literal meaning of the word as ‘re-collection’, as the taking possession of things. We recall from the previous part, ‘I and Dependence’, that even though the I enjoys the world through its consumption of things, this happiness is always threatened from within by the uncertainty of future, where what I enjoy now can be taken away from me without warning. Though the world is something I enjoy, this enjoyment is fragile. I need to secure my world against this menace, and I do so through my dwelling, which is the place I secure my possessions. In so doing I acquire my world as such and make it mine (again we can contrast this with Heidegger’s description of ‘mineness’ that is presupposed from the beginning to have or to lose, but is not itself economic). This economic possession of things that transforms them from the elemental to property already includes a relation to the other. This is the exteriority at the heart of interiority that we described in the previous part, and Levinas calls it the feminine. He makes it clear here that what he means by the feminine is not tied to the female sex (in other words, it would be perfectly possible for any other to

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occupy this role, whether they were male or female), but the ethical (though this ethical status is ambiguous) priority of hospitality over property. In living, we use tools – from the hammer I used to knock the nails into the wood, to the computer I am now using to write these words. To use tools there must be a context in which their use makes sense. I use a tool in order to accomplish a task. This task is set within a higher goal. I am using the computer to write these words in order to finish this book. Why am I writing this book? To explain Totality and Infinity to you because I think it is a significant and important work. Ultimately, however, this is how I choose to make sense of my life. I am a teacher and these issues are important to me, and I think they should matter to you as well. Briefly this is the argument Heidegger puts forward in Being and Time. My first relation to the world is not a perceptual cognitive one, as philosophy since Plato onwards tends to give priority to, but a practical affective one. If you like, I only think about things because they already matter to me. The ultimate context of my activities is my only relation to my existence, which is something that concerns me, even if I refuse to take responsibility for it. One of things that matters to me, and perhaps matters to me more than any other, are others. Even in my relation to things as tools, others are already there. The path, to use Heidegger’s example, I walk along next to the field announces the other who made it and used it before me.25 Yet these others, though they are part of my world, are given their significance by my attitude to them. Most others, Heidegger says, I am indifferent to, like the faceless crowd in the railway station. If another does matter to me (like a friend, a lover or a family member), then I can either seek to dominate them or free them for their own authentic journey through life (think of the relation between a parent and child, which Levinas turns to at the end of Totality and Infinity, but will describe in a very different way). As we can see, for all Heidegger’s insistence on the priority of ‘being-with’, it is nonetheless my attitude towards others that matters rather than the exteriority of the other as such. The difference of Levinas’ approach is to show that my being, which he calls separation and interiority, is made possible by my relation to others, which is not subsequent to my relation to myself. There is not first of all a self-relation (I am authentic or inauthentic) from which I then go out to others (I treat others authentically or



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inauthentically), but there would be no self-relation without the prior relation to the other that makes it possible. In Totality and Infinity, he argues this by claiming that habitation is prior to the work world and it is the home that makes the work possible and not the other way around. This means that my home is not just one tool amongst many, but the very condition for my world in which something like using tools is given a context and direction. ‘The privileged role of the home’, Levinas writes, ‘does not consist in being the end of human activity but in being its condition, and in this sense its commencement’ (p. 152). To be at home in the world, to have a sense of place and security, is literally to have a home. This is why homelessness is not just one calamity amongst many, but the very destruction of my humanity. What the home makes possible is labour and possession, and built on top of that layer, representation and objectivity. The home as the condition of the full interiority of the self, which does not just include the life of the mind but the whole of economic existence, Levinas calls ‘recollection’. The home is where I ‘re-collect’ myself against the insecurity of the elemental. It is my fortress against the world. This fortress is also my inner citadel. Recollection also means memory. The home hollows out the deep subjectivity of the self, like the photographs in their frames littered around the house on bookshelves and mantelpieces. My home is my past. It is what makes my past. If my home is destroyed, or I lose my home, it is not just a thing that is demolished, but a life devastated. Before memory is something abstract and ideal, it has to be laid down concretely, otherwise it is lost and dissolves. This withdrawal into oneself against the threat of the elements is not a solitary affair. Of course if one views one’s home simply as a tool, then one can build one’s home by and for oneself. The bricks and the mortar are not what Levinas means by one’s home. A home is more than just the material it is constructed from. It is a place one lives from. It has a deeper ontological significance. Yet, at the same time, at the heart of this ontological depth, is an ethical moment. For a home to be truly a home it requires another’s presence. ‘The intimacy which familiarity already presupposes’, Levinas writes, ‘is an intimacy with someone’ (p. 155). This other is not just another self. It introduces a different order into being that Levinas calls ‘gentleness’. My home feels like a home, rather than just a collection of things, because it is ‘welcoming’ and it is only

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so because there is someone who welcomes me. Such an intimate other, who welcomes me, is the woman. Any reader might hesitate here. Why is this other a woman? Should the other have a sex at all? If this other is a woman, is not Levinas just repeating the stock images of what it is to be a woman that belongs to a patriarchal view of society (the woman’s place is in the home, whereas it is man who goes out to work and so on). As we have already said, the feminine is deeply problematic in Levinas’ text, but in ways that might not be immediately obvious. First of all, from Time and the Other onwards, sexual difference has an ontological and ethical meaning for Levinas.26 The difference between the sexes is not merely empirical, whether we interpret this biologically or psychologically. The feminine is a different way of being for Levinas, which calls into question the dominant masculine ideal (I would not hesitate, for example, to say that beneath the so-called neutrality of Heidegger’s description of Dasein, it is essentially masculine). Despite this, I would also agree with other feminist commentators who argue that Levinas is patriarchal, and even more so when we come to his description of the erotic and fecundity. This does not mean, however, that we cannot take Levinas’ text further than he himself does. There is no doubt that Levinas himself subordinates the relation to the feminine other to the more straightforward relation to the ethical other, and he does so through the emphasis and priority he gives to speech. The ethical other speaks, the feminine other does not. This is what he means when he says here that the intimate ethical other of the home is a presence that is also an absence. Contrast this with the presence of the other in the words they speak in the ethical relation. This is the methodological ordering of the text. It distinguishes two relations of the other and then subordinates one to the other. It is this subordination that is marked by sexual difference. Even though Levinas never quite says so, one has the suspicion (perhaps confirmed by the relation between the father and the son in fecundity that ends this book) that the ethical relation is a relation between men. What, however, is to prevent us from taking the ‘extraterritoriality’ of the feminine, to use Levinas’ own expression, as the real ethical moment rather than speech, as though it were hospitality and the welcome in which the first ethical relation occurs, and not the voice?27 This might be one way of understanding Levinas’ enigmatic phrase that the



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empirical absence of the female in ‘nowise affects the dimension of femininity’ (p. 158). Could there be an ethical ‘becomingwoman’ that cuts across the empirical difference between the sexes and that comes from the side of the woman, but that is not reducible to how she has been defined in the past by the masculine ideal? Again, it must be underlined that this is not what Levinas says. We would have to push the text in a direction other than its own subordination of the intimate, feminine other, to the other of language and speech, ‘that reveals itself in a dimension of height’ (p. 155). Yet would this interpretation not be ethical response above all, since it would be returning the text to its own ‘other’, rather than just repeating the author’s intentions?28 The home sets the subject back from the anonymity of the elements. My immediate enjoyment of the world is therefore suspended or delayed. This does not mean that I cease to have any relation to the elements, but I do so now through labour, and it already presupposes the home. It is the suspension of the immediate enjoyment of the world that allows me to take possession of it. The interruption of the enjoyment is not produced through thought or reason, but through the concrete event of the home. This is why the first stage of labour is transportation. Through labour, elements are transformed into ‘movable things’ (the French word Levinas uses is meubles, which also means ‘furnishings’) (p. 157). I take possession of the world by grasping it, but such a grasp already assumes a place to where I can take them back and hold on to them. To grasp the world is not first of all to think and represent it to oneself, since that requires that one has already taken possession of it through the activity of labour, and the propriety on which it depends. Interiority is concretely the interior, in the sense of ‘interiors’, when one speaks of the furniture and decor of one’s home, and the propriety of the self is identical to its property. To be a self is to have property. This does not mean that property is the first and fundamental condition of the self. Property and the home are not synonymous (though we might think they are). The home is the condition for property and not the other way around. It is the welcoming of the other that makes a home a home, not its furnishings. A house could be filled to the rooftop with the latest and most fashionable furniture and fixtures ordered online, but could still be utterly unwelcoming.

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Taking possession of the world is how Levinas interprets labour. It transforms the elemental world into the identifiable and is thereby the condition of representation. Like Marx, it is not thought that determines life for Levinas, but life thought, and it does so through the medium of work. If labour is the condition of knowledge, it is not knowledge itself. It is the seizure of the world. The hand gropes in darkness. It does not know the beginning of itself, or the beginning of the world. Both merge together. It seizes things to directly consume them. The hand that labours, on the contrary, seizes the world by manipulating matter directly and transforming it. It transforms the future of uncertainty of the elemental into the certainty of the future of movable things. What first gives form to the elemental is labour, and it is from this solidity that the permanence of substance is built, and on which representation rests. Without labour and philosophy, representation would not be possible. Substance, which philosophy takes as primary, is not the first given of experience, but is experience already moulded by the hand. Enjoyment is the quality of the elemental before it has been transformed into something permanent. The evanescent pleasure of things is that they evaporate in their consumption. But who is to know whether this will return? So labour is the maintenance of enjoyment. The attempt to preserve what is always vanishing in the moment for another day. But to preserve the thing is to dominate and possess it. Labour is, therefore, always a kind of violence against the thing. It is violence, however, that is conditional on the home, even when it forgets this condition. If labour is essentially the storing up of things for another day, then there first of all has to be a place in which to store them. Such is the home. And as we have seen, the home itself is inseparable from the presence of the other, even if this other is only the feminine. ‘The extraterritoriality of a home’, Levinas writes, ‘conditions the very possession of my body’ (p. 162). To have a body is to be dependent and independent, as though the distinction between passive and active were not definite. At one and the same time I am dependent on the elements, because I live from them, but this very dependency expresses the joy of living, ‘breathing, seeing and feeling’ (p. 164). It is labour, through the dwelling, that breaks this equivocation of having a body, for through work I attempt to banish my dependency on the fickleness of the elements that appear to give with one hand while taking away



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with the other. The sun warms my face, but it is also the threat of drought in the future. The dwelling allows me to withdraw from the immediacy of the elemental so as to marshal my forces. It is the postponement of the inevitable. I know eventually I will be defeated, for my life ends in death, but I can push this fate as far into the future as possible through my labour. Today we will not starve. In this way dwelling is related to time. It is the suspension of the future in the withdrawal from the immediate present through recollection. Labour does not dissolve the physical body (though this fantasy is always imagined where one day technology will replace the softness of flesh), it merely delays what is inescapable. This is why, at the end of Totality and Infinity, Levinas will distinguish the future of the other from the future of the self. It is only the existence of the child, as other to me, that truly defeats the ineluctable fact of death. Freedom is not presupposed by my existence, whether we think of that freedom as a right or something more fundamental, as existentialism does. Rather it is something I have to work for. ‘To be free’, Levinas writes, ‘is to build a world in which one could be free’ (p. 165). Freedom is set against the dependency on the elemental, but it is not something that is given. It comes from the distance from things that dwelling allows, and out of which labour emerges. It is not as though my will defeats everything that is in front of it, as though freedom allowed me to detach myself from the concreteness of my existence, but it does allow me to put an interval between me and the obstacle. ‘To conceive the future’, Levinas writes, is ‘to fore-stall’ (p. 166). That representation has a condition is an anathema for philosophy. It imagines that activity is a result of thought and not the other way around, as though propositions determine use and not use propositions; belief activity, and not activity belief. Representation’s pretence to priority is contradicted by the fact that life has to be lived for thought to be possible. It is produced after the event of separation and not before. This is why representation rests upon memory and memory recollection. If there were not already a distance from the immediate present that happens because of the dwelling, then I would not have time to think. Thought forgets this (its memory, then, is a kind of forgetting of its ultimate condition), and fantasizes that the world emerges from its head like Athena from Zeus’ forehead. To claim that representation and thought are

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conditioned by the dwelling and what labour makes possible is not to say that they are the same. ‘It evinces’, Levinas writes, a ‘new energy’ (p. 169). What this ‘new energy’ is, is the relation to the other. Not the intimate other of the home, the feminine other, but the other as ‘absolutely other’ (p. 171). Without language there is no thought. Thinking needs speaking, but speech, as we have already seen for Levinas, is primarily ethical, because speaking about something already assumes you are speaking to someone. Language is not first of all propositional but already an orientation towards the other. This inversion of propositional truth into declaration Levinas calls ‘teaching’. I speak about the world because I am spoken to. Representation is a response to teaching. To think, then, to represent, as an activity, requires that my world is called into question by another’s presence. Thought, rather than the condition, of ethics would be an acknowledgement of it. This means that we need to think about ethics in a completely different way. The ethics of which Levinas speaks is not the ethics of action, an ethics that deliberates about the right or wrong course, that calculates and weighs up intentions or consequences, but an original receptivity to the presence of the other in speech that cannot be reached by any epistemic route. Of course I do not have to have the ears to listen. I can shut myself away in my home, close my door and shutter my windows, but to do so is to rob myself of thought. Labour and possession that coils around itself, which we witness today in the frenzy of acquisition and consumption, becomes a kind of universal stupidity.

The World of Phenomena and Expression This is the smallest part of the section ‘Interiority and Economy’, and the reader, for that reason, might pass it by for being insignificant. Its brevity, however, belies its importance. For, at its heart, it manifests one of the most important problems that arises out of the reading of Totality and Infinity. It is a problem both Blanchot and Derrida point out, even though both of them are very generous readers of Levinas and are clearly inspired by his work. Levinas’ emphasis on the experience of the other as the basis of ethics prioritizes speech over writing. Now on initial reading we might think this does not matter at all, but there are two problems



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with the precedence Levinas gives to speech. One is methodological, and the second logical. Taking the methodological problem first, if ethics is direct speech, and any indirect discourse would mean the reduction of the other to the same, then what is the status of Levinas’ own work? Is it not absurd to write about the other, if in so doing one betrays the very transcendence one is attempting to describe? Is not the pure experience of speech Levinas describes impossible? Second, the logical problem has to do with the internal logic (a paradoxical logic no doubt) of the argument itself. Levinas tells us that the relation of the terms in ethics is asymmetrical. The difference between the I and the other is not the same as the difference between the other and the I. The relation is irreversible. Yet the very quality that distinguishes the ethical relation from any other relation, speech, is reversible. I am just as much present in my speech in responding to the other, as the other is present in their speech in speaking to me. What then would be the difference between the speakers? Am I not other to the other when I speak, as the other is other to me when they speak? Levinas defines the alterity of the other, borrowing Plato’s indictment of writing, as the first person presence of the speaker in speech, but one would think that this would better define the position of the ‘I’ in speech and not the other, and if it does define the other, then it does not seem possible to distinguish between the position of the speakers, as the asymmetry of the ethical relation implies. If we return to Levinas’ own explanation, the difference between direct and indirect discourse is first of all explained through labour, because what is similar to both labour and indirect discourse is anonymity. Labour, for Levinas, following Marx, is always alienation and this is because the worker is never present in the work they produce, unlike language. The alienation of labour is expressed in the anonymity of money, where each individual is reduced to a part within a whole. Even in the economic relation itself, the other is reduced to the status of their work. Rather than revealing their face, their role reduces them to anonymity. They are the railway guard, the policeman, or the shop assistant. In this sense, they are not present at all. If you asked me about them, I would not be able to remember. How different this is from the ethical relation, where the person who I speak to is present in what they say. ‘He to whom the question is put’, Levinas writes, ‘has already presented himself, without being a content. He has presented himself as a face’ (p. 177).

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The difference between the two is a difference within language. In the first case, there is only the relation of the sign. I ask the other for the ticket, for directions, or a jacket I want to try on. Of course it is possible to have an ethical relation to any one of these people, but this would be more than just communicating to someone. In the ethical relation, I respond to the presence of the speaker in what they say, the ‘who’ behind the ‘what’, where the face breaks through the mask of the character or role assigned to them. This would mean that the ethical relation would have to be more than just speech, since I speak to others all the time whom I do not respond to as other. What makes speech specifically ethical, as we have already noted, is what Levinas calls in French significance (‘significance’ or signifyingness’). It is the presence of the speaker in the words they speak. What is ethical about speech, then, for Levinas, is not the words themselves, and not even in the act of speaking as such, but the silent presence of the face behind the words spoken. It is this I respond to when I relate to someone ethically, and not just as an additional item in my world. When Levinas says the worker is absent in the work they produce (whether their work is producing actual items, or merely services), it is this silent presence that is lacking. If I approach someone through signs, rather than being present they are absent in them. I know these things were produced by others, but I do not know who they were. There are a faceless totality and I feel no responsibility to them, as the financial speculator feels no obligation to those he has robbed of a living. Just as much as the other is not present in the words they speak if they are merely a sign or a role, then I am not present in the words I speak when I respond to them. This seems to indicate that the presence of the speaker in speech is symmetrical. Only in ethics are both the I and the other present in the words they speak. This presents a great difficulty for the logic of Totality and Infinity, which, as the title suggests, distinguishes between two relations: one, where the elements in the relation are reduced to the same (the relation of totality); and the other, where the elements in the relation, while remaining in the relation, are different. Nonetheless, the very quality that defines the ethical relation in distinction from any other relation, which is the presence of the speaker in the words they speak, is the same for both speakers. Both the I and the other are present in the words they speak in the same way. What, then, defines the difference



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of the other in relation to the I if it is speech? I am present in the words I speak because I ‘expose’ myself to the other in response to their presence. Just as they are present in the words they speak to me, so too am I present in the words I speak to them. This full presence of the I in speech, Levinas writes, is my ‘final reality’ (p. 178). It would appear, then, that the asymmetry of the ethical relation is based upon a more fundamental symmetry of speech. The emphasis on speech, and the presence of the speaker in speech, is further reinforced by the dismissal of writing (following Plato’s attack on writing in the Seventh Letter [324a–52a] and the Phaedrus [274a–78b]). Just as the worker is not present in what he produces, then the writer is not present in the words she writes. This means that writing can never be ethical. What then of the status of Totality and Infinity? Does this mean that a work on ethics cannot itself be ethical because Levinas is not present in the words he has written? The ethical moment has been narrowed down to a very precise experience. It is not the words spoken, but only the presence of the speakers in speech. It is a ‘pure speech’ without words. Even this presence itself is not visible. It does not belong to the world of ‘phenomena’. Expression is not the sight of someone before me. The other is not a visible object. The ethical presence of the other is only their ‘presence’ in speech, which strictly speaking is not a presence at all if one thinks of presence as visibility. Speech, Levinas writes, is ‘an incomparable manifestation’, and does not belong to the order of the visible (p. 182). The eye speaks rather than sees. It is the gaze of the other, which Levinas calls the ‘straightforwardness of the face’, that disturbs my interiority, not anything that they say or utter. Nor is it necessary that I say anything to them. It is sufficient that I respond. ‘To be oneself’, Levinas writes, ‘is to express oneself, that is, already, to serve the other’ (p. 183). We shall need to return to this problem of presentation, of how Levinas can write about that which he himself claims is beyond writing, in Chapter 3, ‘Reception and influence’.29

Ethics and the Face If the section ‘Interiority and Economy’ concerns the self, then ‘Ethics and the Face’ is about the other. What is surprising,

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considering that Levinas is characterized as the philosopher of the other, is that it is a much smaller section than the previous one. This is because many of the themes, descriptions and arguments contained therein have already been rehearsed previously. Totality and Infinity is written as though it were a narrative. As though, first of all there is a self enjoying its world and then along comes the other who interrupts this naive egoism by demanding justice. Of course this is not how the experience is. For Levinas, I am already questioned by the other by existing, and I have forgotten this obligation by my selfishness. I am only a self because of my relation to the other (we have already seen this presence of the feminine in the dwelling), otherwise the relation between the self and the other would be a negation. Both terms are in the relation, while at the same time absolving themselves from it. The separation of the self cannot be understood without the demand of the other. In this section, Levinas describes how we experience this demand. At its heart is the face. He is careful to distinguish this ethical experience of the human face from vision, which he argues is the dominate relation to things in Western philosophy. The human face is not a visible thing. To speak of the human face ethically is not to describe an attribute or quality that the face must have in order to be ethical (as opposed, for example, to the face of an object, or the face of an animal). The human face is ethical because it is expressive. It speaks. It is only because I relate to the face through speech that I relate to the other as a singularity: this other in front of me now who speaks to me, and not the ‘other’ as a category that could be said of many things. In vision, Levinas argues, we always relate to visible things through a prior visibility that makes their sight possible. It is this anterior illumination that reduces everything to the same. Only in speech can there be an individual other who faces me. If the demand of the other who faces me interrupts my possession of the world, then it does not do so through violence. It is not that the other forces me to be ethical. On the contrary, it is the weakness of the other that demands my justice, not their strength. The face of the other is a supplication, the commandment, ‘thou shall not kill’. To sense the vulnerability of the other is to experience the impossibility of murder. Of course, others are killed every day, and history is witness to the cruelty of humanity, but to



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kill another is precisely not to experience their face, to see them as a thing, labelled as the enemy or worse. In the language of hate, the other loses their individuality. They are lost in the group I despise or fear. The self that hates is lost in a system of values and slogans that diminish its own existence. There is another way of conceiving freedom. Freedom not as rights, those I perceive ought to be mine or which have been stolen from me, but as obligation. The highest expression of the self is apology and election, to be for the other, rather than just for oneself. Obligation does not deprive me of my freedom, but is what gives back to me my uniqueness, as though the true grammatical form of subjectivity were not the nominative but the accusative. It is not my own death that is the true mark of my singularity, but the death of the other. My own death, Levinas argues against Heidegger, in terms of the judgement of history is meaningless. Rather than seeking its end, I hold on to my life, desperate for one moment longer. I suffer death. It does not give meaning to my life, as it has not to those countless millions who have endured persecution and imprisonment. My death is not the ultimate focal point of my life, but my relation to others. It is this responsibility that makes me ‘me’ and not just one item amongst many. It is not ‘being-towards-death’ that creates the individual. On the contrary, death is an anonymous power that strips me of my individuality (this is what Levinas and Blanchot mean when they say against Heidegger that death is not the possibility of impossibility, but the impossibility of possibility). Death is the very meaning of the impersonality of the elemental, the il y a, which enjoyment and the dwelling seek to conquer. My defeat by death, however, is inevitable, but there is more to life than death. Such an excess of life over death requires that we think about time in a different way. What if my future were not my own? If I only think of the future in my terms, then it is right to say death is its ultimate significance, but what if the true meaning of the future were not mine but the other’s, a life that continues after mine, one to whom I would willingly sacrifice my own? Such a new a conception of time is the topic of the final parts of this section, and the next, ‘Beyond the Face’. It is the full exposition of what Levinas called ‘messianic eschatology’ in the preface, which is the alternative to the ontology of war that has dominated our philosophical tradition since its inception.

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Sensibility and the Face Because Levinas speaks of the face as a concrete experience, we might think of it in terms of perception. I see the face of the other in the same way I see any other object in the world. We then might also think there must be some kind of property or quality that distinguishes the human face from any other object in the world (like the property ‘red’ defines something red), and I could then define in advance what it is that makes the face a face. I might be able, therefore, to say what the difference is between experiencing the face ethically, and merely indifferently as just one more person in a crowd. It is because Levinas cannot give us such a definition that we might doubt whether such an experience exists at all, and all this talk of the face of the other is empty and meaningless. To demand that the face must be a property of something, and that one could define such a property in advance and utter meaningful sentences about them, is to accept that there is only one way of speaking about the world. Levinas is not disputing that we do speak about the world in that way, but he denies that this is the only way to speak about the world, and that it is sufficient to explain the way we experience the face ethically. It is important to note what Levinas is saying and what he is not. He is not claiming that the face has a mystical or hidden property that one cannot describe, because this would still be to remain within the language of description. What he is insisting is that descriptive sentences are not the only way we experience the world. To assert this is very difficult, because it is this way of talking about experience that is the dominant model in Western philosophy since Plato. All experience is reducible to descriptive sentences (what Levinas calls ‘objectification’), and if we cannot do that then we cannot say we are having an experience at all. The universality of description has its basis in the dominance of vision as the primary model of access to experience. To have an experience is to see something, since without vision how could I list the properties of that thing, and you too could not see the same thing and agree that my description is correct. To know something is to see it. To question this dominance would mean there must be another way we relate to the world that is not the visible. Levinas argues that this is language. Language is not visibility by other means. The primacy of descriptive sentences reduces language to a secondary



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activity to seeing. We only say what we see. What is the difference between speaking and seeing? How can we differentiate them? To explain this difference, Levinas goes back to Plato’s account of vision in the Republic (507c–508b). It is not just the seer and the seen that explain vision, but the visible as such. Without the illumination of the visible (in Plato’s story the sun occupies this position), I would not be able to see what it is I am describing and whether what I said about it were true or not. The visible is not the thing seen or the seer, but the illuminated space in which both are present to one another. This means that the visible is not a thing. It is neither the object nor the subject, but the visible that makes the relation between them possible. Levinas argues that the whole of philosophy since Plato has been nothing more than the description of this manifestation. Heidegger’s distinction between being and beings (what he calls ‘ontological difference’), for example, is just the culmination of this story. Being is the prior openness or manifestation that allows beings to come to presence to human beings, but which is not to be confused with either of them. When Levinas argues that the face of the other is not a visible thing, he means that it does not come out of this space. The visible space of representation and objectivity occurs after the ethical relation has taken place, and rather than representation determining ethics, it is determined by it. It is not vision that makes language possible, but the other way around, as language is the condition for vision. Speaking about someone, then, is not the same as speaking to someone. To say that speaking and seeing are not the same does not mean that they have no relation to one another. Seeing always attempts to reduce speaking to itself so that representation and objectivity become the only way to speak about the world. The aim of Totality and Infinity, through a kind of genealogy, is to show that representation and objectivity are in fact dependent on the social relation to the other that is not a visibility but an ethical one, where the face speaks to me (‘its revelation is speech’ [p. 193]), and I respond, without first of all knowing or comprehending them.

Ethics and the Face We argue as though first of all there is the perception of things and then subsequently their understanding through categories and

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concepts. Anything that appears different from this must then be defended in relation to this arrangement. Either we have to subtly change what we mean by a category or concept, so that this new experience can fit, or, at the opposite extreme, we claim that this experience is beyond knowledge altogether and there is no category or concept that can describe it. The two alternatives seem to be either the expansion of reason, or mysticism. When Levinas argues that speaking is not the same as seeing, he is rejecting both these alternatives, for even the negation of reason is reason’s other and not the other to reason, since it is reason itself that sets the limits as to what is rational and what is not. Speech is not another kind of visibility, but is absolutely different. The fact of speaking allows Levinas to say that the transcendence is not merely an interesting conceptual innovation, a mere playing with words, where I say that the difference between A and B is more than merely the negation of A, but a concrete event. ‘Speech’, Levinas writes, ‘proceeds from absolute difference’ (p. 194). It does so because in vision the terms in the relation, the seer and the seen, belong to the same world, the space of disclosure or manifestation, whereas in speech the interlocutors do not share the same world. The other does not have their place in my world as other objects do, but calls that world into question. Of course it is perfectly possible for me to relate to others as part of the furniture that makes up my world, how I make sense of it and myself, but this is precisely not to have an ethical relation to them. Without language, as the concrete accomplishment of difference and transcendence, there would only be the relation of identity and immanence. The difference between them, which is the difference between totality and infinity, is not therefore itself a conceptual difference. Even though Levinas borrows the idea of the infinite from Descartes, this is the great dissimilarity between them. For Descartes, the idea of the infinite belongs to his reformulation of the ontological argument as the definition of God. The idea of the infinite, on the contrary, does not describe the other for Levinas. It is not a property or attribute of the other that would distinguish it from some other type of thing. Rather, it names what takes place in language when the other calls into question my self-possession of the world and demands justice from me. This is why Levinas associates it with a ‘radical empiricism’, as opposed to history of the idea of the infinite in Western philosophy, which is precisely its opposite, and where the infinite is merely



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an idea and is conceptualized negatively in relation to the finite (p. 196). If the infinite is to have a positive meaning then it is only as the experience of the other who comes from ‘elsewhere’ and interrogates me. This ‘elsewhere’ is not something mysterious or otherworldly realm, but is the very ordinary affair of speech. The face does not confront me by negating my power, as though the only counter to violence is a violence more powerful. On the contrary, it is the very weakness of the face that marks its resistance. Violence against the other is aimed at the other as a thing and not as a face. To wish to destroy the other is to want to destroy them as a face. The presence of the other’s face is the permanent commandment against murder. To experience the other as a face is to experience the impossibility of killing. This impediment is not a real one, as though the face has a quality that would prevent murder. In fact one might say that the opposite is the case. Violence against the other is precisely spurred on by the face. It is not enough to destroy the other. One has to destroy the very fact they are human, or could ever have been experienced as human. They have to be obliterated twice over, as though death were not sufficient. Such is the horror of mass killing. First we dehumanize, then we kill, and even after their death we desecrate their corpses. The counter-movement is the presence of the other in speech – what Levinas calls the ‘non-allergic presence of the Other’ (p. 199). It is not more war that defeats the endless cycle of violence, but the peace of the defenceless and destitute who have no power, yet in their very powerlessness call for the onrush of violence to stop. The presence of the face is not found in the words spoken but behind them. We have to distinguish between two orders of presence or sensibility, the presence of vision and the presence of language. If we say that the face is given in language this does not mean that it is a signifier or a signified. The face is not a symbol. It does not belong to the intelligibility of the world but breaks through it. Speaking is not first of all a representation or an act for Levinas, but a summons or solicitation. When he says that the face speaks, Levinas is not referring simply to the fact of speaking, but that behind this speaking there is a face that makes a demand on me, which inspires me to acts of kindness and love. Or better, the face is nothing but this appeal. It is neither what is said, nor the visible world that is made sense of through the said, but this mute plea to rectitude.

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If language is first of all responsibility, then this means that rather than thought determining the relation to the other it is the relation to the other than determines thought. Without the ethical relation, there would be no representation or objectivity, even though they forget the very ethical foundation of thought. ‘Preexisting the plane of ontology’, Levinas writes, ‘is the ethical plane’ (p. 201). ‘Expression’, which is what Levinas calls the presence of the face in speech, does not add one more item to a totality in order to complete it. Despite the fact that without speech there would be no objectivity or representation, it does not belong to the same order. Thought, reason and objectivity are parasitic on sincerity. It is sincere speech that is the source of a meaningful and shared world and not the other way around, but what is sincere about speech cannot itself be reduced to one cultural item amongst others. Sincerity is an attitude or orientation in speech. The response to the presence of the other in speech does not disclose something additional about the world. It does not contain any information whatsoever, and in this sense it does not have a meaning, if we understand by meaning either a proposition or statement, or an ontological depth that makes such a meaning possible. I can say nothing about the other that would be true of the other. To be for the other is an orientation in speech. It is not a statement about the other. Nonetheless there are only true statements about the world; the world is only present as such, there for us, because first of all there is sincerity. The possibility of truth comes from this relation. It is not determined by it. In Levinas’ theory of language, there are only signs, because first of all there is a giving of signs to someone, but this ‘gift’ is not itself a sign. To reject the priority of signs is to understand that the significance of the presence of the other in speech is not an empty appeal to mysticism. To argue that the ethical relation is simply beyond comprehension would already be to accept that the only meaningful relation is that between the signifier and signified, or a proposition and a state of affairs in the world, and that anything else does not have a meaning. On the contrary, for Levinas, the presence of the other in speech is an everyday concrete event. This is why Levinas describes the ethical relation as prosaic, rather than poetic. ‘Discourse is rupture and commencement,’ he writes, ‘breaking the rhythm which enraptures and transports the interlocutors – prose’ (p. 203). The difference between the mythical and



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the ethical, poetry and prose, is that at the heart of the mythical is fusion. What cannot be gained through knowledge is sought through a religious feeling and abandonment. In ethics, I do not lose myself in the other, nor does the other negate me. The terms in the relation remain separated while still being in a relation. Only speech can accomplish this paradoxical logic. This is why ethical speech is the basis of the non-violent relation to the other, because to speak is both to listen to and respond to the other and this is only possible if both interlocutors retain their difference. It is this separation that is the basis of a shared world, which in turn is the support of knowledge and learning. Levinas contrasts this ethical notion of teaching with Socratic ‘maieutics’, where what we know is something we know already because we already hold it in common (p. 204). When we read Plato’s re-enactments of Socrates’ dialogues, we might have a feeling after a while that they are not true dialogues at all, but only Socrates listening to himself through the other. True teaching is to learn from the other. To learn from the other is to be inspired and possessed by the other. This inspiration is first of all ethical and not demonic. The other side to reason is not irrationality, which is only reason’s negation, but the superlative presence of the other in speech that is the very possibility of reason itself. When Levinas says that language is the condition of thought, he does not mean this in the way it is normally meant after the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy. This only requires that one acknowledges that without words one could not express what it is that you wanted to say. What matters in speech, for Levinas, is not the ‘physical materiality’ of language, but the ‘attitude of the same with regard to the Other’ (p. 204). Thus, although a philosopher like Merleau-Ponty might question the priority of thought over language (that we still find in Husserl), he nonetheless still situates speech within the cultural horizon of meaning that is given through embodiment.30 What is lost at the level of intentional consciousness is returned through the concrete intentionality of the body that lives through the system of signs that surprise thought. The relation to the other in speech is neither an intellectual nor a concrete intentionality. It is the very reverse of intentionality. Not the self transcending itself, either through consciousness, or through its body (which Levinas himself had early described through the grasping of the hand), but by being shocked by what

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it confronts without context or horizon. I do not comprehend the other, either intellectually or culturally, and then act upon this ‘intuition’. To respond to the other as absolutely other is to react before comprehension or understanding. The presence of the other, which is the signifying of signs, rather than the sign itself, overflows any intention I might have of them. To have an intention of the other is already to situate them, whether I do so in a system of thought, or a cultural context of gesture and style, and thus reduce the impact of the encounter. Levinas’ notion of the other, then, is quite different from the popularity of the other that one finds in cultural discourse. Here the ‘other’, whether purposively or not, is the exotic difference of another race or people. Its difference is merely the projection of our own fantasies and illusions, rather than the real experience of alterity. It is because society, as the relation to the other, is the origin of reason, and not reason society, that we should not confuse the latter with the state. The identification of society with the state follows from the precedence given to reason. The loss of the individuality in the state follows the disappearance of the individual in reason. Reason is always the one and never the many or the multiple. ‘In such a rationalism,’ Levinas writes, ‘there is no longer any society’ (p. 208). But if reason begins in ethical speech rather than reason, then the pluralism of society would not disappear in reason, but would be its condition. The relation between reason and ethics would be reversed, but this would not mean we would descend into the irrational and absurd. How would we think of the origin of reason differently as arising from the ethical relation rather than founding it? It would mean thinking of knowledge as a gift given to the other. We speak of designation. The word names a thing. But designation is also a relation to the other. I designate a thing not in isolation, but in speaking to another. To speak about the world is always a speaking to someone, and Levinas insists that in fact the second is prior to the first: there is a speaking about the world only because there is a speaking to someone. ‘In designating a thing,’ he writes, ‘I designate it to the Other’ (p. 209). To simply possess things and consume them does not require a language. To speak is already to share the world with others. Without language, there is no objectivity, because there is no naming, but the act of naming already implies the existence of an interlocutor.



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To objectify the world requires I am already at a distance from myself. We might think of this distance as the distance of objectification and reflection. The distance of thought (the self that becomes an object to itself) is the effect of the separation between the self and the other. We can think of this dislocation of thought temporally. The distance of thought from the immediacy of enjoyment, and possession of the self’s concrete existence and immersion in the elemental, is the temporal distance between the present and the past. All thought has its source in memory, and if it were not possible for us to pull ourselves out of the fleeting moment of the present, then no higher act of comprehension would be possible. Yet we have already seen for Levinas that the memory that makes thought possible is itself dependent on the ‘recollection’ of the home. Only because the self is already in a relation to the other can it withdraw itself from the immediacy of enjoyment and ‘recollect’ itself in the security of the home. There are, then, two futures. There is the future of insecurity, where the elemental, the ‘there is’, continually threatens the selfsatisfaction of enjoyment. This is the motivation for habitation and possession, where I secure my existence against the threat of a future disaster. Such a security, Levinas argues, is the condition for there being knowledge at all. The search for truth is not possible if we are all destitute and starving. Yet this is not the only future, and as Totality and Infinity now progresses we get a bigger and bigger sense of this other future. This other future is the ‘messianic eschatology’ he speaks of in the preface (p. 22). Unlike the future of insecurity, it is not a lack within the present, the ‘uncertainty of the morrow’, but a surplus. It points to a future other than mine. At this moment in the text, Levinas refers it to the idea of the infinity, but when we get to the section ‘Beyond the Face’, it will be the future of the child, who is both mine and not mine. At the core of both, in the idea of the infinite, and the birth of the child, is a world maintained (it has a future) not through the egoism of the self, but through the other. In the idea of infinity, as it is presented by Descartes (but not in terms of the content of the ontological argument), we discover that the cogito is not in fact first, though it is at the beginning of the narrative, but was all along sustained by the ‘presence of the infinity in this finite thought’ (p. 210). In the existence of the child, I discover too that it is not I who sustain the generations, but generations that sustained me. It is this promise of

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the future that makes the present more than it is. What is ‘yet to come’ sustains the present and redeems it. The presence of the other in speech that calls into question my egoism makes possible a world shared in common. The world is not first of all a common world in which we must then find a place for our subjectivity or individuality. The world comes after the fact of separation and the demand the other makes on us in language. Yet, if it is the other in front of me that makes this demand upon me, who are the others? Do I have a responsibility to others I am not immediately affected by, those faceless others I do not know? Here is where the political question reawakens. For Levinas, as we have seen, politics is associated with ontology and war, with the reduction of the other to the same, and the abolition of society in the state. Is there another way of thinking about politics, one that does not go from politics to ethics, but the other way around, from ethics to politics? Could politics be inspired by ethics, by the ethical relation to the other? This is one of the most pressing questions that come out of reading Totality and Infinity, and one, as we shall see when we look at the reception of this work at the end of this book, that has troubled many readers. One of the difficulties of answering this question (or even formulating it in the correct way) is that Levinas himself does not address it straightforwardly. We only get a hint of what an ethical politics might be in this small part ‘The Other and the Others’. The relation to the other is not a relation à deux. In calling my closed world into question, the other does not simply add themselves to it. On the contrary, through ethics, the world is transformed. It is no longer the private world of my enjoyment, but the public world of others. Language itself, which is the very reality of the ethical relation, already speaks against such a private world. If the world were truly private, then we would not speak. All we would need to communicate would be private signals and gestures. It is for this very reason that Levinas was hesitant to grant to the feminine presence of the other in the home the full status of the other, and it is the same reason why he equivocates when it comes to the other in the erotic relation later in Totality and Infinity. Are not these others too close to me to be truly other? Are they not, in some sense, part of my world? The ethical other, on the contrary, is not intimate. Its demand for justice comes to me from afar. Language is not the complicit and secret relation of the ‘I–Thou’,



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the language of friends and lovers, but the alien and the stranger. Through this other, those whom I do not know, and perhaps can never know, also make a demand on me. ‘The third party’, Levinas writes, ‘looks at me in the eyes of the Other – language is justice’ (p. 213). There are then, for Levinas, two ideas of the community. There is the community in which the individual is fused with others to produce a unity or totality. This is the community of the state. But there is another ‘we’, which is not the ‘we’ of the state, where one individual is exchangeable for another without loss or remainder. It is the ‘we’ of society or the social relation. Here I come to others not through a common property that distinguishes them as the enemy, but through the face of the other whom I am responsible for, and in that responsibility responsible for all the others as well. This is a peculiar cosmopolitanism that is not based upon identity (underneath our races and cultures we are all the same), and expressed through a universal statement of rights, but obligation. I do not first of all relate to others in the world through a declaration or proclamation (one that can quite soon be jettisoned because of events), but through the other standing in front of me. It is responding to the presence of this other that I feel the whole of humanity looking at me – humanity now not as an abstract idea, whether biologically or politically, but a concrete experience in the face of the other. This experience of humanity Levinas calls ‘fraternity’ (p. 214). My obligation towards others does not have its origin in the sometimes empty statement of universality, but in the face of the other in which I see the whole of humanity judging me, and to whom I am ultimately responsible. It is an equality that comes not from the self, who determines in advance to whom they are responsible (who fits within the genus ‘human’ and who does not), but from the other, to whom I am infinitely responsible. ‘Equality’, Levinas writes, ‘cannot be detached from the welcoming of the face, of which it is a moment’ (p. 214). The basis of fraternity is not identity but difference. Yet the difference between me and the other is not threatening or sinister. If I cannot assimilate the other it is not because they violently reject me. We think of peace in terms of harmony and coherence because we label the other as the ‘enemy’. Peace, then, would be the expulsion from our community of anything different, and violence the only cure for a violence real or imaginary. The difference of

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the other to me is not a difference of genus or species. I define the other as an enemy because I already think of the other in terms of concepts or categories (the other has a different culture from me, or a different colour skin). The ethical relation to the other is not a relation that is subsequent to working out whether we are the same or not. The ethical relation does not stem from the effort, an effort that human history tells us is always likely to fail, of the self to transcend differences (the other is just like me, under the skin we are all the same), but the concrete event of speech itself that is the recognition of an absolute difference that can never be accounted for by the definition of a genus or species. Equality comes after this experience and not before. To respond to the other is not to respond to a threat, but the very opposite: the destituteness of the other. It is the other’s weakness and vulnerability that calls out to my sense of justice. The ethics of which Levinas speaks, then, does not begin with a definition of the terms (the self is this or that, the other something else), but the relation in which the terms are transformed, what Levinas calls the ‘the I–Other conjuncture’ (p. 215). If I do not already experience the presence of the other as a demand made upon me, then no amount of descriptions or labels is going to make me responsible. ‘The priority of this orientation’, Levinas writes, ‘over the terms that are placed in it (and which cannot arise without this orientation) summarises the theses of the present work’ (p. 215). Speech is not the correlation between two terms that would face each other with different definitions, but is the fact of speaking itself, which cannot be narrated from the outside without at the same time destroying its ethical meaning. The difference between us is not an objective definition, but simply the event of me responding to you. To begin with the definition of terms first of all, and to attempt to get to an ethics that way, is to take the primacy of reason for granted that Totality and Infinity questions. As we have already seen, it is not reason that is the condition for ethics, for Levinas, but ethics reason. Without the ethical relation to the other there would be no reason or objectivity, but philosophy reverses this relation and seeks to make thought the condition of speech and not speech the condition of thought. This precedence of thought over speech, which is repeated throughout the history of philosophy, is the basis of politics. Politics is the sacrifice of the individual to the state through the necessity of the law, where speech becomes the



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impersonal language of universality, and the will the general will of the all. Universality, reason, the state: these are all synonyms for Levinas. The philosophical drive towards universality is inseparable from the tyranny of a state that has no interlocutors. This identification of universality and language, Levinas argues, reaches its highest accomplishment in the works of Spinoza and Hegel where the individual is totally subsumed into a higher totality (p. 217). Only the pathos of the individual acts against this incorporation, and it is not the I alone that punctures the system, but its relation to the other. The singular life is not the arbitrariness of the will (that my existence precedes my essence, to use the famous slogan of the existentialists), but the other whom I experience in speech. Other philosophers, Levinas points out, like Bergson and Heidegger, have recognized the surplus of life over and above any system that thinks it, but they have always situated this superfluity in the individuality of the self and never the other (the other is only one part, however important, of my experience of myself). The self does not escape the anonymity of existence through negation, which Levinas implies would be futile (by refusing the system I simply confirm my right not to exist), but in the positive experience of responding to a face that speaks to me.

The Ethical Relation and Time This part is one the most difficult in Totality and Infinity because Levinas is reaching beyond the limits of his own argument. We appear to be travelling on uncertain territory not only because Levinas is introducing us to new ideas, but because it is difficult to see how they fit with what has gone before. Indeed the title of the next section, ‘Beyond the Face’, to which this part acts as a bridge, already tells us we are leaving the main argument of the book behind. What is at the heart of this transformation is time. We might say so far that Levinas’ argument has been situated in space rather than time. The ethical relation of the self to the other is a spatial relation, a ‘curvature of space’, as he describes it in one of the conclusions to this book (p. 291). But as much as this relation is spatial, it is also temporal. At the heart of this temporal interpretation of it, as elsewhere in Totality and Infinity, is an engagement with Heidegger. Just as much as Heidegger describes the being of

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Dasein in terms of space, he does so in relation to time. Indeed the whole second part of Being and Time is a reformulation of the previous existential analysis through temporality. At the centre of Heidegger’s work is Dasein’s anticipation of its own death. The future of Dasein’s temporality is ‘being-towards-death’, and through this foresight of one’s own mortality Heidegger reinterprets the significance of the past and the present. The thesis of Being and Time is that this existential time is the basis of clock time and not the other way around, and this temporality is the meaning of Dasein’s being and thus, ultimately, the meaning of being itself. Levinas’ response is not to invent a different ontology to compete with Heidegger’s, but to ask whether such a relation to death is final and terminal. Is what is fundamental to my existence only my anticipation of death as a possibility, and is all that matters to me my death and not the death of the other?31 One way of thinking about death is asking yourself what is it that makes your life significant and meaningful? I am born, I live and then I die. Is there not something miserable about these facts? I am hardly here and I am gone, and even my disappearance barely registers. Perhaps I am remembered for a few years after my death and then that too is extinguished. It should not surprise us, then, that poets and philosophers have tried to find significance in death. Perhaps the very place where I experience nothingness and insignificance is where I will find the most meaning. I will transform my ultimate weakness into strength. Through accepting my own death, I will discover the true significance of life. The authentic philosopher, Spinoza says, following in the long line of philosophers since Socrates, does not fear death but embraces it. Such a courageous view of the acceptance of death is perhaps something only philosophers and poets could dream up, as they imagine themselves sacrificing themselves for truth or love, but for most of us death is sordid and vile. We die in sickness or violence. Death is not something we welcome with open arms, but what we would, if we could, postpone forever. There are two ways, Levinas seems to be suggesting, of thinking about the relation of death and time. One is the way Heidegger portrays ‘being-towards-death’ in Being and Time as anticipating one’s own death in life and in this assumption choosing one’s own authentic existence, because in facing the possibility of my own impossibility I will have the courage to do something with my life



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(I imagine myself on my death bed surveying my life and saying ‘I blew it’, and in that instant I would die). Yet such a death is exactly only imagined and not real. Death does not come, not yet anyway. I still have the time to do something with my life (‘I will be a writer’, I say to myself). It is the death that does not come that is concealed by the death I imagine. This death is the real death and rather than the possibility of my own impossibility, it is impossibility of every possibility.32 Rather than being-towards-death, Levinas calls it ‘dying’. It is this event I want to postpone, even in and through the death I imagine and which assists me in becoming authentic. The first death, if you like, is an interior death, both in the sense it is something I only envisage, but also because it helps create my own interior life (for now in facing it I am authentic). The other is external and comes from the outside. This is why Levinas thinks of it in terms of violence and war. It is easy to imagine oneself become authentic through an imagined death, but it is harder to believe that one might be authentic in a ditch full of mud and the dying, or even less in a gulag or concentration camp. Totality and Infinity begins with war, but it is only in these pages that Levinas addresses directly why ethics is the opposite of war. It cannot be because it is more violent or stronger than war, as though you might end war by threatening a more violent peace. Ethics is more than war because in fact war is secondary. War is always a failure of ethics and not ethics a respite between wars. Levinas can say this because the argument of Totality and Infinity is not only that there is a specific ethical relation to other, but that this relation is the basis of all that follows. The ethical relation is foundational. This, so to speak, is the transcendental argument of Totality and Infinity. The face-to-face relation precedes war and commerce. It is not synonymous with them. This is why war and violence aims at the human face. War is not first but peace. War is waged against peace, not peace against war. This is why it is not true to say that war and violence presupposes totality, as one might think if one only read the preface of Totality and Infinity. The opposite is the case. It is only because we are separated beings that war is possible. ‘War and commerce’, Levinas writes, ‘presuppose the face and the transcendence of the being appearing in the face’ (p. 222). The impossibility of murder is not a negativity, as though there is some objective property of the human face that would prevent it, since this is clearly not the case at all. We see murder, death and

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violence all around us. The impossibility of murder is the fact that in aiming to destroy the face it always misses it. To kill the other is to turn them into a thing, into a faceless corpse. Thus the possibility of murder is always justified through objectification and alienation. They are not ‘us’, they are the enemy, they are over there. If we were isolated beings, just abstract parts of a whole, then these others would not matter to us. Violence is the allergic reaction to the face of other, which at the very moment it tries to destroy the human as human, only comes against the inhuman. This perhaps explains the mindless rage of violence and war that destroys everything in its path, as though it cannot bear its own destruction of humanity. The ethical resistance of the face to violence is not subsequent to the act of violence, as the grimace of pain or arching of the shoulders, it invites violence, this exterior death it seeks to postpone. It is because I already experience the ethical demand of the face that I want to destroy it. The asymmetrical relation to the other can always be changed into a symmetrical one, but what is important here is that such a transformation requires work. It needs history and politics that provide me with the resources such that I can stifle my initial reaction to the vulnerability of the other and destroy them. It is not totality that is given, but the experience of the human face. A totality has to be constructed so that I do not ‘see’ the face that stares back at me. The effacement of the ethical relation is the result of commerce and history. Here the relation to the other is totally different from a relation to the other as an individual that calls me into question. The other of commerce and history, which strictly speaking is not ‘other’ at all, since from another perspective I am the same other for an I who looks at me, and so we are each other’s ‘other’, robs me of my interiority. We have already seen this in the discussion of work in the previous section, ‘Interiority and Economy’, where work is the process by which the self is alienated from its own production. The anonymity of money and commerce negates the self who produces it. Through labour, the self relates to others, but these others are not the other of speech. In speech, both the addresser and addressee are present in the words they speak, but it is this presence that is absent in commerce. The work is issued into the unknown. I do not know what happens to what I have produced. My dispossession of it is marked by its delivery over others, but even these others are not present to me. The work circulates



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through hands that do not meet. The absence of the worker from the work is measured by its market value it has for others. The anonymity of the market is money. It is the very opposite of an interiority. This is why all history is first of all economic history. If there were not economics, where every individual is robbed of their singularity in the circulation of money, then there would be no history. History is always the history of ‘dead wills’ (p. 228). There is no history of interiority. Here is the ultimate paradox of the self for Levinas. Without labour and possession it cannot create a secure world for its own survival, but labour is the very basis of the independence of the world from the self. The more that I build up the world, the more insignificant I become, such that what I produce replaces me, and its value is given by others rather than myself. In the same way, history becomes the history of my dispossession. It is the account of survivors who enjoy my work in my place. ‘Historiography’, Levinas writes, ‘recounts enslavement, forgetting the life that struggles against slavery’ (p. 228). This ambiguity, where what supports my existence already dispossesses me of it, is lived intimately at the level of the body. For without my body, I cannot live, but at the same time my body is the very possibility of my death through illness and external violence, which can even shake the philosopher’s belief in his or her immortality. Can I not have the courage to face this death and thus save my interiority by bringing this death within my existence, as though I can live my death before it happens? Such an interior death is not an external death internalized but forgotten and repressed. I imagine my heroic death so as to conceal sickness and violence, where death enters against my will, like the virus or the bullet, and destroys every possibility, even the possibility of ‘being-towards-death’. However much I might refuse the murderous intent of the other, in dying I submit myself to a reality that is not my own. Death is not a refuge it seems because its very actuality is the abolition of the self that desires it. As Levinas adds, suicide is not just the wish to end one’s own life, but the very world in which one exists (p. 231). To truly refuse death is to ask oneself if there is another relation to the other that is not a conflict between symmetrical wills that resist and limit one another. The true limit to one’s will is not violence but justice. Violence’s limit is finite and numerical, whereas the limit of justice is infinite. Its transcendence is not numerical but

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superlative. The ethical other is ‘more than me’, rather than an additional degree of power identical to my own but greater. It is not I who seek justification even unto death but pardon through the demand the other makes of me. This means the true commitment to myself is not through an ideal I subsequently discover will lead to my betrayal, but in my openness and response to the other. I discover that at the deepest level my interiority is supported by an exteriority rather than destroyed by it, but only an ‘exteriority withdrawn from antagonism of wills, withdrawn from history’ (p. 231). Such an exteriority, as we have repeatedly seen, is the exteriority of speech, which is precisely the opposite of the violent opposition of wills, each seeking to defeat the other in a conflict one can imagine in bitter silence. Death appears to be caught between the opposition of nothingness or being. Either I am obliterated by death as an external event, or I internalize death as a possibility and make it, as in Heidegger’s ‘being-towards-death’, the touchstone of authenticity. Is there another alternative, Levinas asks? In both cases, whether we experience death as something external as an actuality, or internal as a possibility, we are speaking of death that belongs only to the self. If we think of the death of others then we think of them as natural facts, which we read in newspapers or hear on the radio, that belong to the world, and whose countless numbers soon fade into meaninglessness. But we can think of the relation to the other in death in another way. We can think of death in terms of murder. ‘In death,’ Levinas writes, ‘I am exposed to absolute violence, to murder in the night’ (p. 233). Here we come to one of the most paradoxical statements in Totality and Infinity in a book full of such paradoxes. Such a threat appears to come from the same region as the ethical other does. Is it the I, then, who murders the other, which seems to be its meaning when Levinas speaks – and indeed begins this part ‘The Will and Death’ with its restatement – of the impossibility of murder, or is it the other who murders me? How can we speak of a murdering other? The answer to this question, although it is not entirely clear in the whole of this section, and is what makes it so difficult to read and understand, is that Levinas is describing two relations to the other: one symmetrical, and the other asymmetrical. In the first case, I am other to the other as the other is other to me, like in Hegel’s famous description of recognition in The Phenomenology



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of Spirit, and we must not forget that the elaboration of this relation begins in the famous master–slave dialectic that ends in the battle to death where one side has, in the end, to submit to the other.33 The other relation is asymmetrical. Only the other is other to me and I am not the other’s other. Asymmetry is key to understanding Totality and Infinity, and explains why the ethical relation to the other breaks with the logic of the same. For if the relation between the other and the self were reciprocal, then the two terms in the relation would be identical as we changed the perspective of the relation from one to the other (as is clearly the case when one reads The Phenomenology of Spirit, where the dialectic follows first the master, then the slave). The asymmetry of the relation also explains the paradox that both terms are in a relation while at the same time absolving themselves from it. It maintains the difference between the terms, the other is not me, and I am not the other (where this ‘not’ is a superlative rather than a negation), because it refuses the mediation that symmetry or commensurability requires. The description of the death that comes from the hand of the other, therefore, is a description of a symmetrical violence, and not the asymmetry of the ethical relation. The murderous other, then, is similar to the other as ‘malign genius’, in Levinas’ reworking of Descartes’ Meditations. If the hour of death is hidden from us (ultima latet – ‘our last hour is hidden from us’ is a Latin phrase Levinas repeats often), this is because it comes from a will over which I have no control. It is not nothingness I face in death, but another hostile will. However much I might make plans for the future, they can be undone by the imminence of my death for which I can make no plans. Yet, since for Levinas death is interpersonal, the place from which it threatens also offers a different relation to the other. If I cannot escape my death, this does not mean I do not have time for the other, and ‘having time for the other’ can give a meaning to my life that transcends the fact of my death. I can have such a different time because I can relate to the other not as an antagonistic will that threatens me but as someone whom I desire. It is not my courage to face death that defeats its sting, but goodness, ‘whose meaning death cannot efface’ (p. 236). Goodness, as a response to the demand of the other, means that I have time against the time of death. To give life a meaning beyond death is to postpone it as far as I can. The ultimate meaning

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of life is not my death, but it is not my life either. It is to have patience for others. To put off one’s death is to have time. To have time against death. Yet this time is not my own. If there were not others to have time for, then death would crush me and render my life meaningless. To think of one’s death and to imagine one’s life as authentic in the face of it is not sufficient for Levinas, for even this heroic death is rendered senseless in the horrors of war and the concentration camp. When one imagines oneself facing death and looking back on one’s life as wasted or fulfilled, one does not picture to oneself this death. Such a death makes every death a waste and futile. Who would want to bring meaning into life through such a death? Would there not be something unspeakable about making such a death a measure for life? To have time against death is not to have time for oneself. What Levinas is asking is whether death can and could be the only measure of an authentic life. Why would not having time for others be equally as important and meaningful? The authentic life is a solitary one. It measures itself against one foe alone and that is death. If it does have significant relations to others, even family and friends, let alone the stranger, then it is subsequent to this struggle unto death. Only when I have defeated death can I return and have an authentic relation to others. Yet no one can defeat death. Death is a heap of corpses in an unmarked grave (this is what Levinas means when he says that murder might be the essence of death, every death [p. 234]). To have patience, to have time against death, is then also an apology. It is to be for others. What is at the heart of this interpretation of death and time, which is in fact an interpretation against death, and the fascination of death in Western philosophy, is whether subjectivity is only to be defined in relation to its own death. What if the measure of a life were not authenticity but being for others? Would my death then be the most significant event of my life, whether imagined or actual? Ethics is both this non-murderous relation to the other, but also the life-affirming description of the self, which even in the suffering of dying can maintain a distance from itself, because it knows that its life means more than its own death. This ‘more than my life’, Levinas will call ‘fecundity’. It is the birth of others that finally defeats death and not the heroic solitary will affirming itself resolutely in the face of death. It is through the demand of others that I have to justify myself, not death. Even my external works



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do not really defeat death. Are not my works just a fake substitute for myself? It is not Aristotle who is remembered but ‘Aristotle’, the writer of The Metaphysics. It is not Keats who is remembered, but the author of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. In our works we disappear, as the mighty vanish in the ruins in the jungles and the deserts. All time is death and decay. Only in the face of the other is my singular existence justified. This is why, for Levinas, my true existence is not courage in the face of death, but ‘apology’. Levinas is not the first philosopher to say that the freedom of the self can only be a freedom of others. How can I be free if everyone else is a slave? Freedom is not possible without the freedom of institutions. Yet this freedom, through time, can become worse than the slavery it promised to release us from. In the state, all individuals become abstractions, and can be sacrificed for a supposedly higher truth. The security that the state promised must be secured through an ethical injunction that each one of us matters. Not equally, since this would be a route back into the same abstraction and levelling down, but that the other matters more than me. That I have a duty towards others that exceeds my own self-interest is what Levinas calls ‘election’ (p. 245), and it is at the very basis of an ethical subjectivity. It is the ethical meaning of the self that for Levinas is prior to its ontological foundation in self-preservation (it is for this reason that Totality and Infinity is profoundly anti-Spinozist). It is not that election substitutes for political institutions, but without the necessary supplement of election, every political constitution falls into the danger of tyranny. The difference between the objective law and justice is that in the former I am only responsible for what I have done, and when I have paid my debt my responsibility ends. In justice, on the contrary, there is no end to what I owe. ‘The infinity of responsibility’, Levinas writes, ‘denotes not its actual immensity, but a responsibility increasing in the measure that it is assumed’ (p. 244). This is the difference between politics and religion. Again what Levinas means by religion is not a set of propositions one asserts, but an activity that asks of one more than the rights one demands. My obligation to the ‘stranger, widow and orphan’ is not something that can be exhausted. ‘The better I accomplish my duty’, Levinas adds, ‘the fewer rights that I have; the more I am just the more guilty I am’ (p. 244). Perhaps it is the infinite responsibility to others, rather than my heroic struggle with my own death,

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that better defines what it is to be a self. For only in this demand can I be truly unique since death comes to everyone equally and indifferently. Such an election to justice, however, is invisible to the scales of history. What history measures is the rise and fall of civilizations, and not the interiority of the self who is given over to others. Is there then another time than the time of history? Such a different time, which makes possible another destiny for the subject than death and its disappearance in the flow of eternity, is fecundity and paternity. It is the next section, ‘Beyond the Face’, where Levinas will describe their ultimate significance.

Beyond the Face Is there more to time than the span between my birth and death and the ages of nations? If the answer to this question is ‘no’, then Levinas suggests my own life and death would have little meaning. For in comparison to historical epochs, what significance could my own death have? It is, Levinas suggests, only in relation to the other that my life could mean more. However much I might cling on to my heroic existence, whether as a poet, a philosopher or a politician, it will sink beneath the waves of indifference like any other life, even those I judge to be insignificant and without worth in comparison. Yet who is this other who can give meaning to my life beyond death and defeat the impassiveness of eternity? It is not the other of speech. Or at least not directly so. It is for this reason that the last section of Totality and Infinity is called ‘Beyond the Face’. ‘Beyond the face’, here, means that this other is not the other of ethics, nor the other who calls me to justice through their presence in the words they speak. Because this other is not the ethical other, many readers of Totality and Infinity have simply left this section out of their explanation of Levinas’ ethics, but reading it changes the meaning of the book as a whole, and shifts completely how we understand the relation of the self to the other.34 It is only in these pages too that Levinas fully answers the question of the preface as to whether there is a reality other than war. We have already in our reading come across another that is not the ethical other, which is the feminine in the description of the



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dwelling. As we remember, a home for Levinas is not simply the bricks and mortar of which it is built, but its welcoming presence. Such a presence is not possible without the feminine other. Yet this other presence is ambiguous. Because my relation to this other is not one of speech and direct address, the feminine is not ethical. She is other, but not quite other enough. At most, we might say, she is on the way to being ethical, but only if she loses her femininity. The same ambiguity of the feminine is to be found in this section, but this time not in the home per se, but in sexuality. It is sexuality that renders the feminine silent. In sexuality she refuses speech, but also I am refused speech. It might strike you that I am now using the feminine pronoun to describe the feminine. This would appear to go against Levinas’ stipulation that the presence of the feminine in the home does not require the actual existence of the female sex, implying that it is perfectly possible that a man could play the feminine role. In Levinas’ account of the feminine and sexuality, however, there is no such separation between the social and biological, on the one hand, and the ethical meaning of the feminine, on the other, because when he speaks of the relation between the lover and the beloved, it is clear that the first is masculine and the second is feminine.35 Yet it is possible – and this is the way I will interpret this part, against Levinas’ intentions – to think of a man occupying the feminine, as much as the woman. There would be a double ambiguity. Not only the ambiguity of the ethical status of the feminine as such, but also its empirical identity as it passes between the sexes, just as Levinas himself says about the feminine in the dwelling that it is not dependent on the empirical presence of a woman. There is no doubt here we are stepping beyond a mere commentary and offering an interpretation (even if this distinction is a hazy one), but it is impossible for me to read these pages without communicating their difficulty. Whether or not Levinas does slip into a conservative description of the role of the sexes (and there are good reasons to think he does), this does not mean that the feminine is merely a property or possession of the self, as though she were some kind of secondclass citizen or human being. The experience of the feminine is on the side of the other and not the self. She always resists the appropriation of the self. This resistance, however, is never as far as the ethical refusal of the other. ‘We shall show how in love’, Levinas

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writes, ‘transcendence goes both further and less far than language’ (p. 254). What is ‘beyond the face’ in this sense, then, is that which does not go as far as the face, but does not fall back into the status of a thing. One way we might think of this ambiguity is that in sexuality I enjoy the other, but I do not enjoy them in the same way I might consume or enjoy a thing. Of course I can enjoy someone in this way, but then I would not be having a sexual or erotic relationship with them. I would be consuming them like anything else. This is the difference between pornography and sexuality. In the former case, it does not really matter who I enjoy. They are replaceable. Whereas in an erotic relation they are not, for what is at the heart of the erotic relation, which is what makes it different from pornography, is the resistance of the feminine other to my grasp, rather than their indifference to me. It is this defiance that is the measure of love. Yet love, and the familial life that grows out of this love, for Levinas, is not sufficient for ethics. My feeling of responsibility for my family can work against the demand of justice for the ‘stranger, widow and orphan’. Indeed, the family, in one sense, is merely the extension of my ego, as is the home that is not open to others and closes its doors and windows to the suffering of the world. This is why love can always fall back into need. In loving the other I am only loving myself and filling a lack I feel in myself. In the same way, one might think children are a continuation of myself. I live the life through them that I lack in myself. Or worse still, I think having children is like possessing anything else in this world, and merely completes what I believe a good life should be. One way of thinking about Levinas’ description of sexuality and the family, then, would be to imagine that through the family there could be an ethical relation to the outside. This is why fecundity and fraternity are so close for him. The ambiguity of love for Levinas is that this need is always a relation to another and not merely a thing, and thus to some extent, however small and slight, there is still transcendence. ‘Love’, he writes, ‘remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, and this need still presupposes the total, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved’ (p. 254). Yet, it always courts the danger that it might slide into perversion and alienation. At this point the erotic relation is less than the ethical relation, or if you prefer, ethics, the entry of ethics in the sexuality relation, however



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minimal, prevents it from becoming exploitative. Beyond even this ambiguity, however, there is even the further one that the erotic relation is capable of being more just a relation to the ambiguous presence of the other, and this is because one possible outcome of this relation is the birth of a child. It is even, to some extent, Levinas seems to imply, a relation beyond the face, the ethical face as such. ‘Through the face’, he writes, ‘filters the obscure light coming from beyond the face, from what is not yet, from a future never future enough, more remote than the possible’ (pp. 54–5). We shall have to wait to see what the meaning of such a ‘beyond the face’ could be, especially since the whole of Totality and Infinity appears to be about the face-to-face relation as the very basis of ethics. Before we do so, however, we must first look in greater depth at what Levinas calls the ‘phenomenology of Eros’. Love is always love of someone, but what is the status of this ‘someone’? We might think the aim of love is egotistical. Like Aristophanes’ strange original human beings in Plato’s Symposium (and there is no doubt that Levinas has this dialogue in mind when he is writing this section), who have been split in half through the punishment of the gods, we only seek the other to complete ourselves. Yet even in Aristophanes’ story, if we read it to the end, love is not simple, because when the lovers are asked to say what their love is, what it is that they want from one another, they cannot (192c–193). There remains a mystery and secrecy in love. Such a riddle at the heart of love, Levinas calls the ‘feminine’. Just as with his description of the home, we are faced with an interpretative difficulty here. Does Levinas mean that love can only be love of another women by a man? Despite the heterosexual bias of the text, I do not think we have to interpret feminine as being identical with the female sex. Femininity is not the name of a property of something in the way we distinguish biological differences in other species, but alterity itself. It is the tenderness, vulnerability and fragility of the other, whose very weakness prevents me from dominating and possessing them. The alterity of the feminine does not resist me by force, but through the opposite, powerlessness. In this way, it is the same as the ethics of the face. Violence is aimed against the face not because I fear it, but because it shames me. Because the feminine is an ethical category, rather than an empirical biological or psychological one, then it must be applicable to a man as to a woman, even though there is no doubt

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Levinas himself recoils from this inevitable conclusion in a way that he does not when he describes the feminine presence in the home. The greatest danger in reading Levinas’ description of the feminine is to ‘essentialize’ or ‘substantialize’ it. Alterity does not name a person, since people are a sum of attributes and properties, and are described ontologically. It evokes, on the contrary, what in a person escapes appropriation. The erotic relation to another, as opposed to a bare need, retains a mystery or distance at the very heart of the most intimate physical relation. The feminine resists appropriation because it cannot be placed within the network of significations that make up the world. The erotic is excessive. It belongs to the night and not the day. It is not meaningless, for then it would be defined by what is meaningful, but like Aristophanes’ lovers, I cannot quite say what it is. Its resistance to meaning lies in the materiality of the body. The erotic body is not the same as the body as a thing. The caress that lightly touches the body of my beloved is not the same as the hand that grasps the thing and possesses it. The caress, through its intimacy, seeks to find the essence of the body it touches, as though it were, Levinas says, a kind of profanation, but what it reveals is only the alterity of the feminine, ‘this weight of non-signifyingness, heavier than the weight of the formless real’ (p. 257). The meaninglessness of the feminine is not like coming across something in the world that I do not know or recognize, because in its passivity it actively recoils against my ‘meaning giving’ activity. Here is the very reversal of Husserl’s intentionality, where the sensation is immediately reduced to the thought that thinks it, even if that thought accepts the shadow that surrounds all phenomena. The passivity of the feminine is not to be confused with inertness. Its distance from me, Levinas says, lies in its equivocation that in the very fact of offering yourself in all your vulnerability, which your nudity implies, you escape the grasp that seeks to possess you. You do not escape this embrace because you are too powerful, but because what the hand seeks in the caress cannot be sought. It reaches as though for a thing, something possible or actual, but the erotic body is not a thing. It is neither a possibility nor an actuality, but points to a future yet to come. At this stage, we do not know what this future is, but we shall learn later that it refers to the promise of the child. If Levinas means only the promise of a child in a biological sense, then



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this would only reinforce our suspicion that this analysis has at its heart only a normative heterosexuality. Yet surely such a promise is ethical rather than biological? The promise of the child, whether a child is born or not, indicates that the sexual relation to the other is not only one of need and satisfaction but of placing one’s life in hostage to another. Why would a homosexual relationship in which the partners adopted a child be any less ethical than a heterosexual one in which a woman gave birth? Would we want to say that the former would be less committed to the child than the other? If we were to say ‘yes’, then we would collapse the difference between the ethical and the biological. There is no doubt that Levinas’ text recoils from such a possibility. I know of nowhere, either in his interviews or published work, where Levinas speaks positively of homosexuality, but this does not mean we cannot think where he dares not to. So the beloved could be a man or a woman, and the lover. My problem with Levinas’ text is that he collapses the gendered difference (which he thinks of in traditional way) onto the difference between the lover and the beloved in a way that he managed to avoid in his description of the dwelling. In so doing he actually destroys the ethical meaning of the feminine that crosses between the sexes. If the feminine is on the other side of being, neither possible nor actual, then it elides with the anonymity of the ‘there is’. ‘Alongside’, Levinas writes, ‘of the night as anonymous rustling of the there is extends the night of erotic’ (p. 258). Love is not a project I add to all my other projects that make up the world. Rather than making my world it shatters it. Nor is it part of the separation of the ego, which through enjoyment, habitation and economy, creates an empire unto itself. Unlike the feminine of habitation, it destroys worlds. It threatens me with the very chaos I thought I had surmounted through my activity. In my passion, I am swept away from the possible and the actual, so much so that the very activity of love becomes barely distinguishable from passivity. I swoon in the tenderness and voluptuosity of the other. Unlike, however, the relation to the ethical other, the feminine is not present in what she reveals. Or she reveals by not revealing. This is why the profanation of the other, her nudity, is accompanied by shame. She reveals too much by not revealing herself in speech. Though the body of the other is not a thing, and this is why the caress cannot possess her, her face does not speak. ‘The face of

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the beloved’, Levinas writes, ‘does not express the secret that Eros profanes’ (p. 260). Here again we see the importance of speech in Levinas’ understanding of ethics. Though the feminine is an alterity, because she is neither a possibility nor an actuality (neither something ready-to-hand, nor present-to-hand, to use Heidegger’s vocabulary) and thus escapes the ontological projection of the I, who has set up their world against the anonymity of being, she does not reach the status of the ethical other either because she does not speak. The description of the feminine in these pages, then, runs the risk of being no different from the ‘evil genius’ in Levinas’ repetition of Descartes’ argument. For if we remember, the ‘evil genius’ also does not speak, and both exist in a world of laughter and deception. ‘The silent world’, Levinas writes, ‘is a world that comes to us from the other, be he an evil genius’ (p. 91). What, then, is the difference between the ambiguous presence of the feminine and the mockery of the evil genius? What the evil genius lacks is a relation to the future. For though we play with the feminine other as ‘with a young animal’ (p. 263), her absence in speech refers to a future that has not yet happened. This ‘not-yet’ is not a possibility added to my experience of the world, because the relation between lovers excludes it. Unlike my relation to the feminine in habitation, the feminine of eroticism is not concerned with my security. The erotic is a closed world, a world without society, a community of feeling, when the sensed and the sentient merge into one, but whose common identity is not the same as identity seen from the outside. It is a oneness of sense, not thought, for the other is me and separate from me. ‘The feminine’, Levinas writes, ‘is the other refractory to society, member of a dual society, an intimate society, a society without language’ (p. 265). Yet from this irresponsible world of two arises another future that belongs to neither, which is the child. Why does Levinas say that the child is neither a possibility nor an actuality? One might think that is actually what it is. The child is a possibility like any other. The hesitation of describing a child as an ‘it’ might explain why this is not so. Is a child the same as any other project I might accomplish? My life is full of possibilities, some of which I fulfil and others I do not. Is my child the same as these? The child is not an ‘it’. The child is a ‘he’ or ‘she’. The child is another. I can have an ethical relation to my child, even to a child who does not yet exist. This is a promise available in the erotic



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relation, even if it never arrives. This promise is not the same as a possibility. The child is a future other than my future, and makes good the assurance that my death is not the ultimate end. What is ‘beyond the face’ in the erotic relation is the birth of the child. Such a birth is not one more project added onto all the other projects I have that make up my life, getting a job, marriage, a mortgage and so on, but completely turns over my world. ‘He is me a stranger to myself’, Levinas writes (p. 267). This relation to a future, the child’s future, rather than my own, who becomes more important than my own future, such that I would substitute my own life for theirs, Levinas calls ‘fecundity’. Fecundity is not merely the biological fact of reproduction, but that the relation to the child is an ethical one. Again, this placing of birth at the heart of eroticism is an echo of Plato’s argument in the Symposium. For Diotima corrects Socrates’ view of love, and says that the true object of love is not the possession of the beautiful, but the birth of the child. The difference is that for Plato the birth of ideas in the mind of the philosopher is more important than the birth of children (206c–9e). Fecundity is the relation to infinite time. For the future of the child is not the continuation of my time. I do not survive through generations that come after me, as though the eternity promised by myths could be made good by biology. Rather time is continually restarted by the next generation. It is not the same time, but an other’s time. ‘Infinite time’, Levinas writes, ‘does not bring an eternal life to an ageing subject; it is better across the discontinuity of generations, punctuated by the inexhaustible youths of the child’ (p. 268). This commitment to future generations beyond my time is the ethical meaning of the child. I have already substituted myself for them. The relation to the son (and why, we might ask, does not Levinas speak of the daughter, or even the relation between the mother and the daughter?) is not a return to myself. Birth is not a repetition of the same as it appears to biology, where the self is merely a vehicle for the supposedly ‘selfish genes’, because this is to entirely leave absent the ethical relation to the child, where the child is other to me, even though they are mine. Birth proves to me that being is not the impersonal order where the singularity of the other (and thus the individuality of the I) is sacrificed to the anonymity of life or thought. The child is the interruption of being. ‘Being’, Levinas writes, ‘is produced as multiple and as split into

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the same and other’ (p. 269). At this very moment, Levinas adds, we leave ‘the philosophy of Parmenidean being’, and the condition of permanent war described in the preface. For it is the ethical succession of generations (‘the goodness of goodness’) that offers an alternative reality and the promise of peace, which is more than merely a hiatus between wars. For the relation to the child does not end with me. My children too will have children, each generation interrupting and renewing the previous one, an infinite time of birth contrasted to the finite time of death. The relation of the self to the other is one of separation. So if we now think of the other as the child, it will change how we think of the self. What is the self of Eros and fecundity? Is it the same as the self we have already encountered in enjoyment, habitation and thought? If Levinas argues that in the erotic I have a relation to the other ‘beyond the face’, he does not mean that there is some mysterious region beyond this world. What lies beyond the face is the ‘not yet’ of the future. At first, in the erotic relation itself, this ‘not yet’ means that however much I reach out to the other she escapes my grasp. She is not a possibility amongst my other possibilities. She resists my projects rather than accomplishing them. Yet the relation to the feminine is also the promise of the child. This is a future even deeper than the future of the erotic. For the child is not merely the resistance of the other who sinks into the night and is barely distinguishable from the laughter and horror of the ‘there is’, but a future more future than mine. The ambiguity of love is that at one and the same time it falls behind the ethical relation in the silence of the feminine face, which withdraws from her presence but is never reduced to the status of a thing, and at the same time goes further than ethics in the birth of the child. In fecundity we have a very different relation of the I to the other. It is neither the I that reduces the other to the same, nor is it the I called into question by the other from a distance and height. Rather, the other divides me from myself from within. ‘The child’, Levinas writes, is ‘mine in a certain sense or, more exactly, me but not myself’ (p. 271). Even in Heidegger, the future is thought of as my future. Ontological transcendence is merely the priority of the possible over the actual, but it is still my possibility. The ethical status of the child is that he or she (though Levinas only speaks of ‘he’ in the text, the son) is not one possibility amongst others. This does



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not mean I cannot treat my child as any other possibility and even think of them in terms of my life project (‘my child is my greatest accomplishment’, I might say), but this would mean that my relation to my child would no longer be ethical. Those who think of their children as theirs insert them with their own egoism. This is why they see their family as a shelter against the world, and imagine that their responsibility to them is greater than their responsibility to others. To begin with your family in this way is not to be ethical. It is the very opposite of ethical, and in fact closes down the welcome of a home, which is the very basis of any ethical civilization. Because Heidegger only sees the future in terms of my possibilities, then the ultimate possibility is my death, since it is this event that destroys any other possibilities I might have. Yet is there not another relation to the other that is not conceived by Heidegger, where the other is not part of how I understand myself and the significance of my existence? Already in the sexual relation, the other is not, as we have seen, one possibility amongst others. Rather than confirming my possibilities, sexuality, Levinas suggests, unseats and unsettles them. In the erotic, I experience the other as an absence I cannot insert within my world. This absence is a ‘not yet’ I cannot place within my other possibilities. Only, however, in the relation to the child is the monadic structure of the subject finally broken, because with the birth of the child my interiority is cleaved from within. I do not own or possess my child, it is not ‘mine’ in the way that Heidegger speaks about my being in Being and Time. ‘I do not have my child,’ Levinas writes, ‘I am my child’ (p. 277). I am a substitute or hostage for the child. In the ethical relation to child, their life is more important than mine (but also all the others who stand in for their life, what Levinas calls ‘fraternity’), and in this way birth defeats death. This is what the messianic means for Levinas. It is not the divine glory descending from the clouds. It is not the invasion or occupation of a country, which is meant to foretell a new epoch, but the ordinary event of the birth of a child to whom I have this extraordinary ethical relation beyond speech, to the very core of my being such that my being, in relation to them, no longer has any importance to me. Fecundity and paternity are not biological concepts for Levinas, the mere continuation of the species, where the species is always of more importance than the individual, but an ethical relation. Yet at this moment, where Totality and Infinity ends, such

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an ethical relation is no longer one of speech, but flesh, the flesh of my flesh that is no longer my own. Not only is there a shift away from language, but paternity also relates to fraternity. The relation to the other is also a relation to the ‘third’, those others who are in some way represented by the other who stands before me. There is no doubt that these others in the plural, for which the other is a stand-in, is one of the most enigmatic and important of Levinas’ ideas. It is crucial, for example, for thinking about the move from ethics to politics.36 Yet it remains one of the most underdeveloped ethical categories of Totality and Infinity. Why is that? The main reason is the emphasis of the presence of the other in speech as the ethical moment par excellence. Those others for whom the other stands in, therefore, fail to achieve this ethical standard, for they are, by definition, not present, since it is only this other, who is standing in for them, who is present in the words they speak. Since presence in speech is the ethical criterion for Levinas, it becomes very difficult to distinguish what would be the difference between an ethical or an ontological politics. In other words, what decides between the others who exist for me as ‘third party’ that stare through the eyes of the other who stands before me, and those others who are just elements within a totality? How can an ethics shape and determine a politics that does not descend into the permanent rhythm of war, which Levinas describes in the preface? It should not surprise us, therefore, that as Levinas moves away from speech as the defining characteristic of the ethical relation, through the relation to the child, truly ethical politics becomes feasible. It is a politics not of face and speech, but flesh. Yet there is also a negative reason that Levinas has to make this move. In some sense he is compelled to introduce the category of the third in paternity to prevent this relation becoming an egoism of two. It is because my relation to my child, paternity, is already a relation to others, fraternity, that my child is not just me, but through him or her, a relation to others. We are all equally responsible for others, but each one is uniquely so. Such a community, one of transcendence rather than immanence, is very different from the fusion of an ontological body politic that sees its unity in a race or culture, for this is solidarity that can only function through seeing others as the enemy, and which dissolves my individual responsibility in a common project or fate.



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Not only is there an ethical community different from an ontological one, whose discourse is only that of the victors, but this other community is sustained by another time. At the end of Being and Time, Heidegger links the destiny of the individual to the fate of the people who follow a ‘hero’.37 What Levinas has in mind, in the ethical community, is entirely opposite to this historical justification. In following the authentic hero or leader, the people are meant to seize their authentic possibilities from the past in order to project them into the future. It is not only the hindsight of history that might make us worry about such a Führerprinzip, but that in such a community the other would vanish. Each individual would be the same, because they would have the same possibilities projected onto the future through the ‘leader’. We could glimpse the origin of totalitarianism in such a community, because if each of us has the same destiny, then our individual existence does not matter in the great scheme of things, and so we might be sacrificed for the Party, the State or the Revolution. It is not, however, the self who acts against such a fusion of individual wills, through the aggressive assertion of its individuality, but the exorbitant demand of the other. The ethical community is not about what protects and guards you against ‘others’ whom you perceive as your enemy, but on the contrary the exposure of yourself to the other. This is the true and fullest meaning of fraternity (or sorority, of which Levinas does not speak). In such an ethical community, the future is not ours, but the others’, the others we do not know or have not met, or who have not even been born yet, to whom we already have an responsibility before any intention, because it would be the very basis of intentionality. Such a future has nothing at all to do with the future of my possibilities, however I might envisage them. Levinas calls it ‘the infinity of time’ (p. 281). The infinite is not a time without limits that just endlessly goes on, but the interruption of my time (finite time) by the time of others (infinite time). Such a time stretches beyond my time because it transcends my own death, but it is not the empty time of eternity, which is merely the fantasy that my time can continue forever. Infinite time is the discontinuity of time (there are times other than my own) and not the continuity of time. The future does not just come to be as the swarming of different possibilities from which I am meant to choose my fate (a fate, if we are to listen to Heidegger, that belongs to the authentic destiny of

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a people), but to the future of the other that demands that pardon for a past that has already betrayed the future yet to come. In the first case, the future is a projection of the self, in the second it is an ‘introjection’ of a time that is not my own. Time recommences through the forgiveness of the past and the beginning of a new future. This is why Levinas writes that ‘it is not the finitude of being that constitutes the essence of time, as Heidegger thinks, but its infinity’ (p. 284). In the last sentences of this book, before the conclusions, Levinas says that this infinite time, which is the time of recommencement and becoming, where no instant is the last one, but always begins again, also requires a ‘completed time’ (p. 284). This completed time is not the time of death, but the ultimate victory of good over evil, a ‘Messianic triumph’ (p. 285), and so we return to the first pages of the book, where Levinas spoke of a ‘messianic peace’ (p. 22), as the opposite of the ontology of war. Yet he writes that whatever this messianic peace or triumph might be, it ‘exceeds the bounds of this book’ (p. 285). We are given no reason why it does so. ‘Beyond the Face’ is the most difficult section of Totality and Infinity. This is not just for the same reason as the other sections, which are also difficult to understand as all original philosophy is, since it attacks our common-held assumptions. ‘Beyond the Face’ is difficult for its own reasons, and how it relates to the overall argument of the book itself. In the one sense, it does seem to be added onto the book as a supplement, which does not fit with the rest of what has been said. It reads, is some ways, more like the early material from Time and the Other, where Levinas does speak of the other in terms of the feminine.38 Yet, interestingly enough, by attempting to link this additional material to the main text, Levinas subverts and undermines it. No longer are we faced with the other of height, transcendence and speech, but intimacy, immanence and flesh. No doubt too, Levinas subordinates and subjugates this ‘other other’, so that we are meant to understand the other of the flesh, the feminine other, as secondary to the other of speech and ethics proper. Yet this ambiguity goes two ways (and is itself double). The last pages can be read as suggesting the other of the flesh goes further, rather than less far, than the other of speech in sustaining a new form of time and community, and it is this other, I would argue – though it goes further than this commentary to explain – which becomes the basis of Levinas’ description of the



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experience of the other in Otherwise than Being, whose other is not the other of speech, but the flesh, vulnerable and exposed, and maternity, rather than paternity, is the model of the ethical relation (I bear responsibility for the other as woman bears the child in her womb, one and not one).39 Finally, as we see from this transformation of the status of the other from paternity to maternity, there is the ambiguity of the feminine itself, which acts as a focal point in the text, where this tension between the other and the ‘other other’ is most pressing. The extraterritoriality of the feminine is domesticated in the phenomenology of Eros by being straightjacketed by traditional forms of gendered identity, and this is further re-enforced by the description of fecundity, where the relation is only between the father and the son. Yet Levinas himself forgets the deterritorialization of the feminine in the dwelling, which passes between the sexes. If the ethical category of the feminine is neither biological nor psychological, then it must be said of both the female and the male sex. There must be a ‘becoming woman’ of both sexes, which escapes the masculine ideal of destruction, war and death.

Conclusions In ‘Conclusions’, Levinas summarizes and repeats the argument of Totality and Infinity overall. As we remember, there are two key theses of this book: one, that ethics and ontology are not the same; and two, that ontology has its basis in ethics and not the other way around, as has been traditionally asserted. We might say, aware that we are pushing both terms to their limit, the first is empirical, since it is has its source in concrete experience, and the second is transcendental, since it is a deduction concerning the conditions of possibility of knowledge in general. The ‘Conclusions’ tends to muddy the waters around the first thesis. This is because Levinas does not hesitate to talk about the ethical relation in terms of being. If you were only to read these pages, then you might think that Levinas is merely offering a re-interpretation of being (perhaps, if you were to use an Heideggerian idiom, emphasizing ‘being-with’ over ‘mineness’), rather than an absolute break with ontology (that this rupture is

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more complex than Levinas first believed, is perhaps the reason for this confusion). This perplexity over the relation between ethical and ontological language is further confounded in the ‘Conclusions’ because Levinas speaks both of the ethical relation as a re-interpretation of being, and as being ‘beyond being’. Two other general remarks can be made of these ‘Conclusions’ before we summarize them. First of all, it is noticeable that the religious tone of these remarks is much more prominent than the rest of the work as a whole. Levinas will actually say the other resembles God, and we will have to think exactly what the word ‘resemble’ means here. Second, Levinas greatly emphasizes the importance of speech in the ethical relation, but the other relation to the other, habitation and the feminine and even fecundity, has much less of a role to play. One the greatest difficulties of reading Totality and Infinity is thinking of the other as a concept like any other, in the way, for example, that a sociologist or anthropologist might think of the other. There is no doubt that the concept of the other is very important in the study of culture, when we think of other customs or societies, within or outside of a dominant one, but this is not how Levinas thinks of the other. The word ‘other’ describes a concrete event in which the egotistical self at home in the world is called into question by the presence of the other facing them. This other is not a concept, but the individual standing there before me. I can of course think about this other, but this thinking is not ethical (at least not directly so). The ethical moment exists only in the face-to-face encounter and nowhere else. Individuation here is not the result of a process of distinguishing a species from a genus, but is ‘produced’, to use Levinas’ word, and thought follows this production, rather than determining it (in this way one might call Levinas’ ethics ‘empiricist’, if one is careful what one means by this expression). There is, therefore, a difference between the individuation of a concept, and the individuation of the other. It is the difference between the concept of the human and the actual human being. It seems for philosophy in general that the problem is as soon as we designate the individual we have to use a concept to do so. Yet, in this case, Levinas argues, we are describing individuals from the outside, as though we were looking and pointing at them and demanding an explanation. There is another way of thinking



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about interiority that is not through an external designation. Such interiority is lived rather than described and this interiority is the interiority of the self. The aim of Totality and Infinity is to show that what preserves this interiority is not that totality of a system of signs, where the individual eventually evaporates and disappears, but the relation to the other. I am only truly a subject through the demand the other places on me to respond, as though my subjectivity were nothing else than this response. There are then, for Levinas, two ways of understanding the exteriority of being: one, as the exteriority of the system represented by the state and the political philosophy that defends it; and the other, the exteriority of the other of the ethical relation, society that precedes the state, and even makes that state possible, though the state has repressed, and indeed forgotten this original repression. The difference between these two ‘exteriorities’, the exteriority of the system, totality, and the exteriority of ethics, infinity, is concretely distinguished in the fact that speaking is not the same as seeing. The mediation of the self and the other through a third term is the result of vision (this is why the history of philosophy is dominated by visual models). I look at something and I apply a concept to it and this concept is the same for both individuals. If I look at a human being, then the concept ‘human’ is going to be the same for every human I look at (except perhaps for that dangerous exception of those I believe do not belong to the set ‘human beings’, even if they look human from the outside). To speak to someone is to transform this situation completely. In speaking to someone, all that matters is the other who stands before me. I am not comparing them to anyone else; or, better, it is their demand in speech that prevents me from treating them like anyone else. To say that speech and vision are different does not mean they do not have a relation to one another. Vision attempts to capture speech. This is the seed of all violence in the world. But equally speech resists vision. We should not think of this resistance entirely negatively, for it is the difference between speech and vision that is the possibility of truth. ‘This curvature’, Levinas writes, ‘of intersubjective space inflects distance into elevation; it does not falsify being, but makes its truth first possible’ (p. 291). This is the second thesis of Totality and Infinity. Not only is ethics different from ontology, but without ethics there would be no ontology. It is not knowledge that founds society, but social relations knowledge. Without the

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ethical relation to the other, there would be no truth or disclosure, nor theory or objectivity. It is the same curvature of intersubjective space that Levinas equates with the ‘very presence of God’ (p. 291), or as a ‘discourse with God’ (p. 297). It is here that some critics of Levinas will argue that there is no difference between religion and ethics in this work, and that the one is not possible without the other. It is true to say that Levinas does use religious concepts in Totality and Infinity (such as ‘creation’ and ‘atheism’, for example), but we do need to be careful with how we interpret this ‘presence of God’. It is clearly not the ontological God. We are not speaking of God that is the heavens, or the philosophical God who is the original explanation and cause of the universe. If God has a meaning, and is something preserved in our religious traditions, then the only worthwhile meaning it does have is ethical. Yet, we might ask why do we need this additional religious significance brought to the ethical relation? Would not the ethical relation, as the presence of the other in speech, be sufficient? What more is added by the ‘the very presence of God’? In this instance, there are perhaps two types of reader of Totality and Infinity: those who think one can read this book and simply cut away the ‘God talk’ without changing its fundamental meaning; and those who think it is not possible to do so, because Levinas is distinguishing between an ethical and ontological meaning of God sustained by a religious community and culture, and in the end you cannot make sense of his ethics without it. However you might respond to this choice, there is no doubt that ‘God’ is problematic in Levinas’ work. It throws up more questions and complications than it does answers and solutions and we shall return to it in the reception of this work. There is a tension in these conclusions as to whether ethics is just another way of thinking being, or is beyond being altogether. This strain is visible in the titles of the conclusions themselves. One section is called ‘Being is Exteriority’, and the other, ‘Beyond Being’. We might wonder how the other can both be exteriority, and at the same time be beyond being (or even what ‘beyond being’ might be, or if anything can ‘be’ beyond being). These are the kind of questions, as we have already alluded to, that Derrida will ask of Levinas. What is the status of the discourse of Totality and Infinity? If writing itself is not ethical for Levinas, then what of the book itself? Is it not ethical? And if it is not ethical, what of the times



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in the book that Levinas addresses the reader themselves? What is at issue here is whether the ethical terms such as ‘transcendence’, ‘the infinite’ and ‘separation’ are ontological or not. If they are ontological, can there be a ‘supra-ontology’ that does not slide back into mere ontology (and if not, how can Levinas argue ethics and ontology are absolutely different from one another)? If they are not ontological, but ethical, then how is it possible even to describe or explain them? Surely as soon as I write, then I must do so in the language of ontology? It seems, at least at the time of writing Totality and Infinity, Levinas has not decided on this point, for the book wavers between these choices. At one time, it claims only that ethics is a re-interpretation of ontology (this is especially the case if one emphasizes the ‘transcendental’ argument of Totality and Infinity, where one merely reverses the relation between ethics and ontology, but preserves the latter). At others, it affirms the absolute difference of the other from any ontological description or explanation (this reading is more to the fore if you concentrate on the ‘empirical’ argument of the fundamental difference of the experience of the other that cannot be captured by any ontological justification or interpretation). This radical empiricism of Totality and Infinity is justified by Levinas through speech. It is not what is said that is significant, but the presence of the speakers in speech as they attend to the words they say. This is why Levinas differentiates speech from work. In work, on which every culture and civilization is built, the other is not present. The anonymity of work is represented in the ubiquity of money, where the value of a thing is not found in the person who made it, but the amount of money it represents. The problem here, as we have already pointed out, is that the presence of the speaker in the words they speak is a value equivalent to both speakers and thus would abolish the difference between them. Second, the self-presence of the speaker is the definition of speaking in the first person (it is the ‘I’ who speaks), and therefore it would seem contradictory to define the other in this way (is it not the other who is supposed to be absolutely different from the ‘I’?). Moreover, to define ethics through speech would deny that writing could have any ethical significance at all, and that all writing, even literature, is merely the work of thematization. It is also because Levinas makes this absolute split between speech and writing that the transition from ethics to politics is

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particularly difficult. If I think of ethics as only the ‘face-to-face’ relation, then it is almost impossible to see how there could be an ethical politics (‘Justice’, in Levinas’ terms), for as soon as I leave the immediacy of the ethical relation, then I would have betrayed it. It therefore remains extremely opaque what the status of the ‘third’ is in Levinas. Who are the others of the other, and how is it possible to move from the ethical relation to the political one? This is perhaps why, when he comes to think about others rather than the singular other, Levinas does not do so through speech, but through hospitality and fecundity. Yet even here in the last pages of the ‘Conclusions’, he writes as though one could speak of them in the same voice. ‘The essence of language’, Levinas writes, ‘is goodness, or again, that the essence of language is friendship and hospitality’ (p. 305). Yet is the relation to the other in hospitality and fecundity the same as in speech? Even in the body of Totality and Infinity there is an ambiguity as to whether the feminine is ethical or not. We remember neither in the home, nor in eroticism, does the woman speak. I remain unconvinced it is possible to think both of these ‘others’ together, and perhaps it should not be a surprise that by the time of Otherwise than Being, Levinas’ second major work, the insistence on speech as the ethical experience par excellence falls away. The ‘Conclusions’ of Totality and Infinity leave us with many questions, but is this a judgement against the work as a whole? In the next section, I will argue it is not, and indeed it is the measure of the importance of the work, and why many have continued to be inspired by it since its publication, that it leaves us with these questions.

CHAPTER THREE

Reception and influence An original and significant book produces its own readers through the problems it leaves behind. Paradoxically, a work only works because it does not work, or at least not perfectly and seamlessly so. If a work did answer all the questions it set itself, and left nothing to the reader, then such a work, which is impossible anyway, would be of no interest to anyone, and probably would not survive. Or, what would live on would not be a philosophical work. You can easily imagine there are those works that carry on in that way (their fundamentalism lies not in them, perhaps, but in the way they are read). They too demand a certain kind of reader, but not a philosophical one. Not a reader who is more inspired by questions than by answers, which is what I imagine a philosophical reader to be. Levinas’ reception and influence, therefore, resides in the questions he continually asks to us, and thus we carry on reading him, rather than in any certainty or definite decision he might provide. This is why when I think of problems here, I do not mean it in a negative sense, as though somehow Totality and Infinity were a failure. If only Levinas had worked harder (and he was supposed to have worked very hard, if we can trust the testimony of others), or had been more intelligent and cleverer, or had not been so led astray by his religious beliefs, then he would have written a better book. He could have written a better book. Who has not written something and not thought they could have done better? Such a sentiment, I think, is the very basis of being a writer. There are different ways we can speak of failure: failure in an extrinsic sense,

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as when a work does not quite reach the mark, or intrinsic failure as the very condition of the work. ‘I will have already failed’ is a phrase that begins every project. I do not think this is entirely because we have in mind some objective factors we cannot obtain, such as clarity and rigour for example, which might very well be the case, but because the very problem or problems that sustain our thought overshoot our ability to express them, such that, under their obligation, we continually have to return to them. What then are the problems that Totality and Infinity leaves us with? I think that there are four, and they have all already come up in our explanation, and I would list them as follows: 1 The problem of presentation 2 The problem of politics 3 The problem of the feminine 4 The problem of religion.

I have not listed these in order of importance, nor should we think we can, because I have made a list; think of them as separate. Each of them is probably related to the other, but in terms of exposition we shall treat them separately.

The problem of presentation The method of Totality and Infinity is concrete phenomenology. Phenomenology is descriptive. It seeks to describe what is given in experience as it is given. If we think of a simple object like a cup on a table, then the aim of phenomenology is to describe that object as it gives itself without prejudice or preconception. This might appear, at first hand, to be a very simple task, but to analyse in detail what is given in this experience is in fact very difficult, precisely because in our ordinary attitude to the world, we do not really pay any attention to it. Phenomenology aims to describe the presentation of things. Not the things themselves, but their presentation, and how things present themselves in many different ways: for example, how a picture of a cup might present itself differently from the cup that is sitting on my table in ‘flesh and blood’, so to speak.



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Totality and Infinity can be read as an immanent critique of phenomenology. On the one hand, it stands within the tradition of phenomenology and, on the other, it is outside. In what way does Levinas see himself as standing outside of traditional phenomenology? From his original thesis, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, he had already judged it as being committed to the priority of representation and objectivity. Although there are many ways in which things present themselves to us in the world, in Husserl’s account, our intuition of them is more fundamental than any other. It is for this reason that Heidegger is so important to Levinas’ development. For he saw in Being and Time the possibility of understanding phenomenology as a method devoted to existence as much as to thought. In other words, that there was a distinction between a theoretical and concrete intentionality, which Heidegger described, in Being and Time, as the difference between the present-to-hand and the ready-to-hand. The more that Totality and Infinity distances itself from Being and Time, however, the more acute the problem of presentation becomes. Even in Being and Time, the problem of presentation is a difficulty, for the being of Dasein makes itself present only in withdrawing. Thus, in the analysis of anxiety, where Dasein flees from itself into the world of the ‘They’, so that it does not have to face itself, the phenomenologist has to follow what Dasein is in flight from.1 Indeed, we might add that the whole of Heidegger’s later philosophy addresses this problem about how we can bear witness to the presentation of being in its withdrawal. If this is a problem for being, how more so is it with the experience of the other? If the being of things has its source in the being of Dasein, which withdraws itself in its presentation, how more difficult is it to speak of the presentation of the other? Again and again, Levinas tells us that the other is not a thing or a person, neither something present-to-hand nor ready-to-hand. It is not part of my world, but that which calls into question my world totally. It is neither something visible nor invisible. Yet how can we have a phenomenology of that which does not appear? It is possible, one can imagine, to have a phenomenology of that which appears by withdrawing from its appearance. Even in Husserl’s more classical method, absence was a part of the experience of the presence of something, even if he gave priority to that presence. The non-appearance of the other, however, is not like this. It does not

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belong to the play of absence and presence, which is part of the visible as such. Levinas’ answer to this problem is sharply to distinguish between speech and vision. The other does not appear because it is ‘revealed’ rather than ‘disclosed’, and revelation belongs to speech. We have to distinguish between the presence of the other in vision, and the ‘presence’ of the other in speech. Yet even in this answer there are other problems. The first is how Levinas describes the revelation of the other in speech. He does so through Plato’s explanation of the difference between writing and speech, and the superiority of the latter over the former. What speech has that writing lacks is the full presence of the speaker in the words they speak. This, if you like, is Levinas’ principle of principles, which is analogous to Husserl’s of the presence of the object in perception. The problem, however, with this distinction, as Blanchot points out in Infinite Conversation, is that the full presence of the speaker in the words they speak would be true of both the I and the other.2 For in responding to the other, I would be as just present in the words I speak as the other is in theirs. Plato’s definition of the difference between writing and speech would collapse the asymmetry of the ethical relation through the symmetry of speech. Even if there were not this problem, there is the problem of the status of the writing of Totality and Infinity itself. This problem is at the heart of Derrida’s first essay on Levinas (which is probably still the most important reception of his work), ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. If ethics can only be experienced as the concrete event of the presence of the other in speech, what then is the veridical claim of the description of this event? How could Totality and Infinity be true except by betraying the very experience it is writing about, since every description of the other could only be violence against the other, and all indirect discourse a sell-out of direct discourse? For whatever you might say about Totality and Infinity, it is a written work of philosophy, yet is not all writing, by definition, unethical? By making this absolute distinction between writing and speech, Levinas has appeared to undermine the very possibility of his own work. Even in Totality and Infinity, Levinas will use the philosophical tradition as evidence of the unique experience of the other, but by his own definition of philosophy, this does not seem possible. How can philosophy speak of the other, when the whole tradition of philosophy, as it is described by Levinas, is shaped



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and determined by the priority of the visible, even Heidegger’s philosophy of Being? If Totality and Infinity is not a philosophical work, then how are we to read it? ‘“If one has to philosophize, one has to philosophize”’, Derrida quotes without attribution; ‘“if one does not have to philosophize, one still has to philosophize (to say and think it). One always has to philosophize”.’3

The problem of politics The problem of politics and presentation are related, for politics is a form of writing for Levinas. It is with the invention of writing that the state obtains power over the individual, for in the written word or description, I become like any other anonymous person. Bureaucracy and the state arise together. It no longer matters who I am, and my individual history is subsumed into a general one, where my fate is no more important than a fly dancing on a window pane. Writing, the state, totality are all synonymous for Levinas, but is politics merely the politics of the state? Is there an ethical politics that responds to the demand of other without reducing them to the same? How can one go from the experience of the ethical demand the other imposes upon me to a world or society where such a demand would be fulfilled, since, if one were to take this demand seriously, it would require the very institutions that Levinas describes as unethical. As Critchley writes, who more than any other contemporary writer has attempted to put Levinas’ ethics into action, ‘ethics without politics is empty, then politics without ethics is blind’.4 There is a danger, in the way that Levinas portrays the ethical relation in Totality and Infinity, of reducing it only to the other who faces me, of a ‘society of two’, which precisely worries Levinas about the erotic. Can it be ethical if it is only you who matters to me but not others? Is this not like someone who thinks they are being ethical because they care about their family members or those who are immediate to them, when really this is just an example of their egotism? How can there be a step from my concern for you and my concern for others? Can it really be the case that ethics would disappear as soon as I make political demands, if my politics placed others before myself?

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We could think of politics in another way (Critchley thinks of it as an ‘anarchic meta-politics’5). Not as the division between ideologies of Left and Right, but as a relation to others whose claim is higher than my appeal for freedom. There are those who start with themselves and work outwards. They begin with their family, their house, their street, their city, their nation and only then do they connect to the world. And there are those who start in the opposite direction: who begin with others, and then work backwards to end up with themselves. It is possible to imagine from such a view, if one claimed that the second direction was ethical, that one could have a basis for a politics. How might it change, for example, how one thought about immigration, if you placed the relation to others first rather than last? How would one think of the chains of responsibility that tie us, as consumers, to those who make the products we buy who live in a form of modern slavery? One way in which Levinas does think about an ethical politics, in Totality and Infinity, is through the third person (pp. 212–14). In the face of the other who stands before me, and to whom I am infinitely obligated, I can see the others who might have stood in their place. Yet the status of the ‘third’ remains opaque and uncertain. Since Levinas defines the ethical moment as the immediate presence of the other in speech, then it does not seem that my relation to these others can be ethical, for these others do not speak to me. As soon as we move from the individual to the plural then the ethical moment vanishes, unless we were no longer to think of this plurality as a universality. Again there is an allusion to such a possibility in Levinas’ fraternity. I am not just responsible for the other who stands before me, but the other of the other. This might be the basis of thinking of community in a different way, as Derrida suggests, despite its masculine bias.6 A community that is not founded on the fusion of individuals, where the individual other vanishes in the general will of all, but one of plurality, separation and transcendence, where each one is only one because they are open to the other and hostage to them. Such a community could not be the same as the state or sit alongside it. It would be the form of society that would remain outside the political situation, but would constantly return as its permanent contestation. In relation to the power of the state it would appear weak and absurd, but in its refusal to compromise and negotiate, it would bear witness to an absolute demand.7



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The problem of the feminine There are different ways one could think about the feminine in Totality and Infinity. One could make it a matter of judging the author. ‘Is Levinas a feminist?’ one might say, and one could answer this question either in the affirmative or negative. Yet what would be the point of that? Judgements like these are very boring and hardly make thought go any further. In fact, in the opposite way, they are smug and self-satisfied and tend to confirm just what one already thinks. Better than judging Levinas in this way would be to think how the feminine operates in his text, because despite Levinas’ intentions, it is a fissure or break in the argument. There are two ways the relation to the other is described in Totality and Infinity as a concrete event. One is the other who presents themselves in speech, the other as ‘wholly other’ or ‘most high’. Then there is the intimate other of the dwelling and eroticism, who does not speak, and who seems, at least within the erotic, barely distinguishable from the ‘there is’. The second other Levinas calls ‘the feminine’. These two relations to the other have two very different forms. In the first relation, the other comes to the self from without. In the second, the other already inhabits the self. The self, if you like, is ‘othered’ from within, as though the very meaning of subjectivity were ‘the-other-in-the-self’. The narrative of the relation is also very different. In the first relation, the separated self forms itself and only then subsequently encounters the other, whereas in the second relation, the self is already inhabited by the other from within. However, because Levinas defines the ethical moment as the presence of the other in speech, this second relation cannot strictly be ethical. In both cases, as Irigaray quite rightly points out, the feminine as dwelling and as erotic, Levinas describes the other as not quite reaching the elevated dignity of the ethical other (who we might then presumably think is masculine).8 This diminution of the feminine is further compounded by the fact that Totality and Infinity ends with the description of fecundity and fraternity, as the relation between fathers and sons, and brothers, where the feminine completely vanishes. There is failure of nerve here, or at least there is another possibility or path that Levinas could have taken, which he chose not

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to. The subordination of the feminine in Totality and Infinity is due to the fact that Levinas prioritizes one relation to the other over the other: the relation of speech over the relation of intimacy, ‘the-other-in-the-same’. As Levinas says in the description of the dwelling, the empirical absence of a woman in the home in no way does away with the ‘extraterritoriality’ of the other within the same (pp. 157–8). The feminine is not a biological or psychological category for Levinas. It does not name a species difference, but is an ethical experience passing between the sexes, which always comes from the side of the women. The feminine names the dispossession of the same from within at the very heart of its interiority. What if this dispossession was more fundamental than the ethics of speech? What if, in fact, it is because of this dispossession I can speak ethically? In this way the concrete event of ethics would only have been possible first through the literal dislodgement of the masculine by the feminine.

The problem of religion There are some, like Badiou in his sustained critique of Levinas’ ethics, for whom talk of God in philosophy is anathema.9 Since Nietzsche, it no longer seems respectable to do so. Though there are those who still speak of God, there is something slightly mad or embarrassing about them, like a scientist who wants to bring their beliefs into their cosmology. If the early modern philosophers were obsessed by God, then it seems exactly the opposite today. Like the crowd in Nietzsche’s famous parable about the ‘death of God’, we only snigger when anyone has the lack of manners to bring God into the conversation. At its most extreme, philosophy is militantly atheist, and at its least, it is lukewarmly non-committal. How much then is Totality and Infinity committed to the idea of God? Is Levinas trying to smuggle the biblical God under our noses, and thus, as Dominique Janicaud argues, compromising the purity of the phenomenological method?10 It depends what you mean by God. If you mean by that word a being on whom the existence of the world depends, then the answer is ‘no’. All the proofs of the existence of God are ontological for Levinas, and since his philosophy is committed to the idea of the



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priority of the ethical over the ontological, it would make no sense whatsoever that his thought was dependent on such a being. Thus, when we come across the idea of creation in Totality and Infinity, we should understand it in an ethical sense, as the dependency of the self on the other, rather than in an ontological one, as a cosmological or teleological argument, as though Levinas were arguing that the existence of world were dependent on the will of God to be (pp. 293–4). Existence is not a category applicable to the meaning of God. In this sense one could say that Levinas does not believe in God, if one means by this a belief in God as a being, even if one thinks of this being negatively, as ultimately beyond designation and description. Indeed Levinas will go further than this. Not only is the ontological God unbelievable, it is the very opposite of monotheism. It is the God of superstition and irrationality, the denial of this world rather than its affirmation. In this way, we might say that Levinas is on the side of those philosophers who would argue that there is no place for God in philosophy. If religion does have a meaning, it is not because it guides and directs our ethics but the other way around. Religion only has a meaning because of ethics as the obligation to the other who exceeds my understanding and comprehension. Levinas’ commitment to religion, rather than a belief in God, does seem like Kant’s defence of religion. One only believes in God because it gives an ultimate meaning to one’s ethics. It is our ethical commitments which are first, and not religion. Religion is only a necessary supplement to our ethical will. It is, to use Kant’s language, the visible manifestation of the invisible church, which is the community of ethical wills.11 There are occasions, when one reads the passages in Totality and Infinity that refer to religion, that one can hear this Kantian echo, but the big difference, of course, is how they conceive of ethics. For Kant, ethics has its source in the rational will. He replaces God as a being with the idea of God. Christianity is the one true religion, because it is the only religion that has managed to bring about this transformation. God is a moral idea and nothing more. For Levinas, however, ethics is not an idea. It is a concrete event produced in the shock of the encounter with the other that calls into question the very foundations of my existence. Rationality, as an activity, is subsequent to this event and does not determine it. Thus, when Levinas says at

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the end of Totality and Infinity that there is an analogy between God and the other, we should not take this to be ontological or conceptual (p. 293). Is there another way in which to think God, neither as a being nor as an idea? I think there is. It is as a word. Levinas reminds us in an essay, ‘The Name of God according to a few Talmudic Texts’, that the word God in Hebrew is not a noun that names something that has certain properties or attributes, but a proper name, which one is not permitted to pronounce.12 What matters is not so much what the name names (as though it names an essence), but the ritual of not pronouncing it. The ritual must have a positive significance; otherwise the prohibition is purely arbitrary. For Levinas at least, the Talmudic interpretation of this prohibition is that in not pronouncing the name of God I am reminded of my ethical obligation to others. The word ‘God’, then, neither names a being, nor an idea, but is just what it is, a word, and as this word only has a meaning within the context of a ritual or practice. As Levinas has been reported to have said on many occasions, religious beliefs did not matter to him at all. What was important were only the actions of a community whose survival he dedicated his life to preserving, but only as a reminder of our responsibility for others above all else.13

CHAPTER 4

Further Reading As with any important and original philosopher, there is a huge body of work published on Levinas. There is an online bibliography, which is up to date until 2012 (‘Levinas online bibliography’, http://www.duyndam.demon.nl/Levinas/Online_Bibliography.html [accessed 14 August 2014]), and an excellent overview of Levinas’ work written by Bettina Bergo in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (‘Levinas’, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/ [accessed 14 August 2014]), which also has an useful bibliography. The texts recommended here represent a very small selection and are aimed at a reader who has come to Totality and Infinity for the first time and, perhaps for that very reason, is interested in reading more.

Works by Levinas Although Levinas had published much before Totality and Infinity, it might be worth reading his two original works before its publication, which contain many of the themes that were developed in that book. Existence and Existents, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001). Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987).

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Levinas’ second major work responds to some of the problems of Totality and Infinity. The reader should be warned, however, that it is as difficult, if not more so. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999).

Levinas’ many essays have been collected into different editions. Two of the most important are: Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1997). Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, A. Peperzek et al. (eds) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996).

The reader of Totality and Infinity might find the essays ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’ and ‘Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity’ useful. The first is Levinas’ early critique of Heidegger’s philosophy, and the second is the kernel of the argument of Totality and Infinity. Finally, there are collections of interviews with Levinas, which can be very illuminating: Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985). Is it Righteous to be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Introductions to Levinas’ thought There are three useful introductions to Levinas’ thought, which have substantial chapters on Totality and Infinity: Davis, Colin, Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996) Hand, Seán, Emmanuel Levinas (London: Routledge, 2008). Morgan, Michael, The Cambridge Introduction to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).



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Biographies of Levinas There is an excellent biography of Levinas written by one his students at the École Normale Israélite Orientale: Malka, Salomon, Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and His Legacy, trans. M. Kiegel and S. Embree (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006).

Texts on and related to Levinas’ Totality and Infinity Ainley, Alison, ‘The Feminine, Otherness, Dwelling: Feminist Perspectives on Levinas’, in Hand, S. (ed.), Facing the Other: The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 7–20. Atterton, Peter, ‘Levinas and the Language of Peace: A Response to Derrida’, in Philosophy Today, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1992), 59–70. Benso, Silva and Schroeder, Brian (eds), Levinas and the Ancients (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008). Bernasconi, Robert, ‘The Silent, Anarchic World of the Evil Genius’, in Moneta, G., Sallis, J. and Taminiaux, Jacques (eds), The Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988), pp. 257–72. Bernasconi, Robert, ‘Rereading Totality and Infinity’, in A. Dallery and C. Scott (eds), The Question of the Other: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 23–34. Bernasconi, R. and Critchley, S. (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Chanter, Tina, ‘Conditions: The Politics of Ontology and the Temporality of the Feminine’, in Nelson, E., Kapust, A. and Still, K. (eds), Addressing Levinas (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005) pp. 310–37. Cohen, Richard, ‘Levinas: Thinking Least about Death – Contra Heidegger’, in Long, E. (ed.), Self and Other: Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 21–39. Critchley, Simon, ‘Il y a – A Dying Stronger than Death (Blanchot with Levinas)’, in Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1993), 81–132. Critchley, Simon, ‘Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution of Them’, Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2004), 172–85.

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Dastur, Françoise, ‘The Question of the Other in French Phenomenology’, Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2011), 163–78. Davidson, Scott and Perpich, Diane (eds), Totality and Infinity at 50 (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2012). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 1976), pp. 97–192. Derrida, Jacques, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P. Brault and M. Naas (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Derrida, Jacques, ‘At This Very Moment In This Work Here I Am’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, trans. P. Kamuf and E. Rottenberg (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 143–90. Drabinski, John, ‘The Subject in Question: Relation and Sense in Totality and Infinity’, in Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 83–128. Fagenblat, Michael, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Guenther, Lisa, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006). Irigaray, Luce, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love’, in Bernasconi, R. and Critchley, S. (eds), Rereading Levinas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 109–18. Irigaray, Luce, ‘The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, “Phenomenology of Eros”’, in T. Chanter (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Levinas (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), pp. 119–44. Iyer, Lars, ‘Irony Mastered and Unmastered’, in Blanchot’s Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 89–116. Katz, Claire, Levinas, Judaism and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003). Large, William, ‘On the Two Meanings of the Other in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity’, Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2011), 243–54. Moyaert, Paul, ‘The Phenomenology of Eros’: A Reading of Totality and Infinity, IV.B’, in Bloechl, J. (ed.), The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 30–42. Peperzak, Adriaan, ‘Levinas’ Method’, Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 28, No. 1 (1998), 110–25. Sparrow, Tom, Levinas Unhinged (London: Zero Books, 2013).



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Stanford, Stella, The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (London: Athlone Press, 2000). Taminiaux, Jacques, ‘The Presence of Being and Time in Totality and Infinity’, in Hansel, J. (ed.), Levinas in Jerusalem: Phenomenology, Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), pp. 3–22. Wall, Thomas, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (New York: New York State University Press, 1999).

NOTES

Chapter 1   1 Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy, trans. M. Kiegel and S. Embree (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006), p. 153.   2 Two excellent introductions to phenomenology are: Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2008), and Michael Lewis and Tanja Staehler, Phenomenology: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2010).   3 For Husserl’s famous statement of the ‘principle of all principles’ and the primacy of intuition, see Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Gibson (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 43–4.   4 See the fifth meditation in Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 89–157.   5 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1962), pp. 153–63.   6 See Dominique Janicaud, ‘The Theological Turn of French Philosophy’, trans. B. Prusk, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 15–103.   7 See Emmanuel Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 61–2.   8 For a convincing account of the Jewish sources in Totality and Infinity, see Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).   9 Heidegger, Being and Time (op. cit.), pp. 21–4. 10 Ibid., pp. 41–9.

136 Notes

Chapter 2   1 See Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 133–4.   2 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1962), pp. 319–25.   3 The Greek phrase is epekeina tas ousias (509b). Levinas refers to this phrase many times in his work and interviews.   4 See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999), p. 162.   5 See Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), p. 43.   6 For an explanation of the superlative in Levinas, see William Large, ‘The Impossible Community: Privative Judgements in Blanchot, Lévinas and Nancy’, in A. Bielik-Robson and A. Lipszyc (eds), Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influences (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 108–15.   7 For an exploration of Levinas’ relation to Kant, see Peter Atterton, ‘The Proximity between Levinas and Kant: The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason’, The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 40, No. 3 (1999), 244–60.   8 See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Is Ontology Fundamental’, in R. Bernasconi et al. (eds), Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 1–10.   9 See Heidegger, Being and Time (op. cit.), pp. 256–73. 10 ‘Speaking is not Seeing’ is the phrase Blanchot uses to describe Totality and Infinity. See Maurice Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 11 Levinas also wrote several essays on Buber. For an excellent account of these, see Robert Bernasconi, ‘“Failure of Communication” as a Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue between Buber and Levinas’, in R. Bernasconi and D. Woods (eds), Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 100–35. 12 Levinas will describe this resistance of the naked body in the section ‘Phenomenology of Eros’ (pp. 256–66). 13 See Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics

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of Reproduction (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 57–73. 14 See Heidegger, Being and Time (op. cit.), pp. 86–90. 15 See René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. J. Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 15–18. 16 In Totality and Infinity, signifiance tends to be translated as ‘signifyingness’, which perhaps gives it too ontological a flavour. 17 Levinas had already argued against Husserl’s intellectualism, inspired by Heidegger, in his thesis. See Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 133–4. 18 See Heidegger, Being and Time (op. cit.), p. 116. 19 Ibid., pp. 95–102. 20 Ibid., pp. 153–63. 21 Perhaps to underline this difference, Levinas uses the French autre, rather than autrui. 22 For Levinas’ account of the il y a, see Levinas, Existence and Existents (op. cit.), pp. 33–7. 23 See Heidegger, Being and Time (op. cit.), p. 68. 24 The original French is as follows: ‘Autrui qui se révèle précisément – et de par son altérité – non point dans un choc négateur du moi, mais comme le phénomène originel de la douceur’. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), p. 124. 25 See Heidegger, Being and Time (op. cit.), p. 240. 26 See Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. R. A. Cohen, (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), pp. 84–90. 27 See Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P. Brault and M. Naas (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 21–45. 28 Derrida’s second important essay on Levinas’ work has this other reading of Totality and Infinity as its central argument. See Jacques Derrida, ‘At This Very Moment In This Work Here I Am’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, trans. P. Kamuf and E. Rottenberg (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 143–90. 29 Levinas responds to both of these problems in Otherwise in Being. First, by focusing on the grammatical position of the speakers in ethical speech (the self that responds is always in the accusative and

138 Notes

never the nominative), and second, by analysing how writing can bear witness to the ethical moment in its very betrayal in the reduction of the said to the saying. For the accusative, see Otherwise than Being (op. cit.) pp. 109–33, and for the reduction, ibid., pp. 43–5. 30 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 31 Levinas analyses in depth Heidegger’s being-towards-death in lectures he gave in 1975–6. See Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. B. Bergo (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 32 See Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), pp. 87–108. 33 See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 111–19. 34 In his influential and important essay on Totality and Infinity, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Derrida, for example, will leave this section completely out of his analysis. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (London, Routledge, 1976), pp. 97–192. 35 In French, Levinas speaks of the ‘beloved’ in the feminine, l’aimée, and the ‘lover’ in the masculine, l’amant. See Luce Irigaray, ‘The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, “Phenomenology of Eros”’, in T. Chanter (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Levinas (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), pp. 119–44. 36 See Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002). 37 Heidegger, Being and Time (op. cit.), p. 437. 38 See Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (op. cit.), pp. 84–94. 39 See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being (op. cit.), pp. 75–81.

Chapter 3   1 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1962), pp. 228–35.   2 Maurice Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 56–7.   3 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (London, Routledge, 1976), p. 191.

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Levinas also refers to the same quote (and this essay could be seen as a reply to Derrida) in ‘God and Philosophy’, in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. B. Bergo (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 55–78. The probable origin of the phrase is a lost work of Aristotle’s, Protrepticus, which has come down through the tradition in numerous sources.   4 See Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2012), p. 120. See also his essay, ‘Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution of Them’, Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 2 (April 2004), 172–85.   5 Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (op. cit.), p. 119.   6 See Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P. Brault and M. Naas (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 67–70.   7 See Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. P. Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988). For my own explanation of this community, see William Large, ‘The Impossible Community: Privative Judgements in Blanchot, Lévinas and Nancy’, in A. BielikRobson and A. Lipsyc (eds), Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influences (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 108–15.   8 Irigaray’s two key essays on Levinas are ‘The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, “Phenomenology of Eros”’, in T. Chanter (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Levinas (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), pp. 119–44, and ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love’, in R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (eds), Rereading Levinas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 109–18.   9 See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. P. Hallward, (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 18–28. 10 See Dominique Janicaud, ‘The Theological Turn of French Philosophy’, trans. B. Prusk, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 15–103. 11 See Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, G. Di Giovanni and A. Wood (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 151–91. 12 See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Name of God According to a Few Talmudic Texts’, in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. G. Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994), pp. 116–28. For my own explanation of this essay, see William Large, ‘The Name of God: Kripke, Levinas, and Rosenzweig on Proper Names’, Journal

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of the British Society of Phenomenology, Vol. 44, No. 3 (October 2013), 321–34. 13 See Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and His Legacy, trans. M. Kiegel and S. Embree (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006), p. 241.

INDEX

aesthetics 61 alienation 75, 94, 102 alterity 27, 29, 53, 57, 65, 75, 86, 103–4, 106 anterior posteriority 30–1 apology 54, 79, 98–9 Aristophanes 33, 46, 103–4 Aristotle 24, 29, 99 asymmetry 35, 45, 75, 77, 97, 122 atheism 32, 38, 50, 52, 62, 116 Badiou, Alain 11, 126 Being and Time 12, 34, 40, 92, 109, 111 and the analysis of existence 58–9, 62, 68 ‘being-with’ in 35, 51, 68, 113 and the description of the home 48, 51 ‘destruction’ in 12–13 and the everyday 51 method of 6–7 phenomenology in 20, 121 time in 31 92 being-towards-death 31, 92–3, 95–6 Bergson, Henri 91 birth 31, 62, 64, 87, 98, 100, 103, 105, 107–9 Blanchot, Maurice 74, 79, 122 body 30, 48, 50, 53, 55 Buber, Martin 35

caress 104–5 child 64, 68, 73, 87, 102–10, 113 children see child cogito 30, 42–3, 66, 87 cognition 33, 40 commerce 93–4 community 2, 26, 44, 89, 106, 110, 124, 127–28 ethical 111 the state and 89, 110 time and 111–12 concepts 37, 50, 53, 82 annuling difference 24, 37 individuals as distinct to 23, 54, 114–15 the other as different from 19–20, 46, 90, 114 sensation vs. 33 singularity vs. 24, 28 truth and 33 consciousness 8, 41, 56, 58, 85 consumption 38, 49, 67, 72, 74 creation 10, 40, 42, 116, 127 Critchley, Simon 123–4 critique 28, 39–42 Dasein 6–7, 11, 42, 51, 59, 70, 92, 121 death 62, 73, 95–100, 113 authenticity and 98 in Being and Time 31, 92 being towards 79, 92 Dasein and 21, 92

142 Index

dying vs. 31, 93 the elemental and 79 fecundity as beyond 31, 73, 98, 100, 107–8 murder as 83, 96, 98 the other and 79, 92, 96–97 possibility as 79, 92–3, 95–6, 109 time and 79, 92, 97–100, 111 war and 98 dependence 57–8, 62–3 Derrida, Jacques 74, 116, 122–4 Descartes 7, 9, 16–17, 19, 30 cogito 30 description of the evil genius 43, 106 God in 9–10, 19–21, 38, 42–4, 66 the infinite in 19, 42–3, 82, 87 Meditations 30, 40, 42–3, 97 the transcendence of the other and 13–14 desire 25–6, 29, 33–4, 46, 57, 97 dialogue 26, 28, 41, 43, 85, 103 difference 6, 20, 27, 31, 35, 42, 45, 56, 75–6, 85, 89–90, 97 abolishing 24 absolute 64, 82, 90, 117 disclosure 34, 82, 116 discourse, indirect 75, 122 Durkheim, Emile 35 dwelling 48, 55, 64, 66–7, 72–4, 78–9, 101, 105, 113, 125–6 economy 37, 47, 62, 67, 95, 105 egoism 32–3, 49–50, 87–8, 109–10 election 79, 99–100 elemental 58–61, 67, 69, 72–3, 79, 87 empiricism 5, 82, 113–14, 117

enjoyment 29–31, 33, 37, 39, 47, 49–50 heart of 62–3, 65 immediate 71 of life 50, 52 erotic 70, 88, 102–9, 113, 118, 123, 125 eternity 100, 107, 111 ethical relation 22–3, 43–4, 90, 93 the child and the 106–7, 109–10 erotic and the 102, 123 fecundity and the 102, 109 the feminine and the, 10, 70, 108, 113–14 knowledge vs., 34, 48, 56, 81, 84, 86, 94, 116 ontology vs., 113–14 politics and the, 38, 88, 115, 118, 123 religion and the, 10, 38, 61 separation and the, 23, 49–50, 64, 97 speech and the, 35–36, 45, 70, 75–7, 82, 84, 88, 110, 113, 116, 122 time and the 91 writing and the 39, 84, 122 everyday 13–14, 36, 84 evil genius 17, 43–4, 106 existence 8, 22, 24–6, 68, 79, 91, 100, 127 apology and 54 bodily 48, 53, 57–8, 95 death and 31, 95 economic 10, 69 enjoyment and 31, 33, 49–54, 62–3 the everyday and 40, 51 the feminine and 10 freedom and 41–2, 73 God and 127

Index habitation and 55, 64, 67, 87 Heidegger’s analysis of 7–8, 21, 31, 40, 47, 49, 51, 58–60, 62, 92, 109, 121 the self and 23, 29–30, 40, 48, 67 speech and 64 existentialism 41, 73, 91 experience concrete 1–2, 38, 41–2, 46–7, 80, 89, 113 ethical 2, 78, 118 expression 34, 74, 77, 84 exteriority 10, 53, 57, 63, 65, 67–8, 96, 115 extraterritoriality 59, 65, 70, 72, 113, 126 face 12, 19–21, 36–7, 41, 53, 61, 77–8, 80–1, 83–4, 89, 91, 94, 99, 108, 110, 114, 123–4 face-to-face relation 27, 93, 103, 118 family 98, 102, 109, 124 fecundity 22, 31, 64, 70, 98, 100, 102, 107–9, 113–14, 118, 125 feminine 9–10, 22, 49, 55, 63, 66–7, 70–2, 74, 78, 88, 100–6, 108, 112–14, 118, 120, 125–6 finality 8, 37, 47, 49, 51, 58–9 flesh 9, 73, 110, 112 food 49, 57, 60 fraternity 89, 102, 109–11, 124–5 freedom 2, 36, 39, 41–2, 57, 64, 73, 79, 99, 124 generations 31, 87, 107 gentleness 65–6, 69 gift 37, 84, 86

143

God 10, 21, 28, 42–3, 82, 114, 116, 126–8 existence of 9, 19, 30–2, 38, 126 habitation 9, 53, 55, 62, 64, 69, 87, 105–6, 108, 114 happiness 49–50, 52, 63, 67 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich 26, 46, 91, 96 Phenomenology of Spirit 96–7 Heidegger, Martin 6–7, 11, 34, 48, 59, 62, 109 Being and Time 31, 40 and the bias towards cognition 40, 58 description of Dasein 28, 42, 59 and the description of other 7–8, 21, 51, 67–8, 109 and the description of time 91, 108–9, 111–12 ‘destruction’ in Being and Time 12–14 existence 7, 47, 49, 51, 60, 91 hermeneutics 14 and the importance of death 31, 79, 92, 96 and the meaning of being 28–9, 81 and the meaning of the world 7, 37, 59 phenomenology and 121 height 9, 26, 63, 66, 71, 108, 112 Heraclitus 18 hermeneutics 13–14 history 18–19, 31–2, 79, 94–6, 100 home 27, 48–9, 55, 59–67, 69–72, 74, 87–8, 101–4, 109, 114, 118, 126 hospitality 68, 70, 118 humanity 23–4, 39, 55, 69, 78, 89, 94

144 Index

Husserl, Edmund 4–8, 20–1, 35, 40, 42, 46–7, 55–8, 85, 121–2 il y a 59, 79, 87, 105, 108, 125 independence 49, 51, 53, 58, 63 infinity 46–7, 60, 82, 87, 112, 115 idea of 21, 31, 38, 42–3, 87 insecurity 62, 65, 69, 87 intention 2, 37, 60, 86, 111 intentionality 5, 8, 37, 55–8, 111 concrete 85, 121 interiority 9–10, 27, 31–2, 47, 53, 57, 65, 67–9, 71, 77, 94–6, 100, 109, 115, 126 interlocutors 36, 39, 82, 85–6, 91 intimacy 65–6, 69, 104, 112, 126 intuition 5, 7–8, 86, 121, 134–5 Irigaray, Luce 125 Janicaud, Dominique 126 joy 51, 62–3, 72 Judaism 3, 11–12, 14 justice 2, 9, 17, 21–2, 24, 29, 36, 38–9, 41, 78, 88–90, 95, 99–100, 102, 118 ethical 48 Kant, Immanuel 13–14, 28, 36, 38, 40, 42, 127 knowledge 24, 28, 34, 39–43, 45, 52, 58, 82, 85–7, 113, 115 condition of 48, 72 labour 53, 60–4, 67, 69, 71–5, 94–5 language 16, 30, 36–8, 40, 44, 48, 60–2, 74–6, 79–86, 88–9, 91, 102, 106, 110, 117–18 neutral objective 32 the other of 49, 55, 71

life 31–2, 55, 68, 73, 91 as atheism 32 enjoyment of 49–52, 58, 60, 62–3, 65 as ipseity 53 as labour 72 as ‘living from’ 33, 58 opposed to death 73, 79, 92–3, 95, 97–8, 100 as psychism 49 in relation to the child 102, 105–7, 109 separate 22, 49 love 25, 33, 56, 83, 92, 102–3, 105, 107 manifestation 81–2 Marcel, Gabriel 35 Marx, Karl 72, 75 masculine 66, 70–1, 101, 113, 125–6 maternity 113 memory 67, 69, 73, 87 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 85 messianic 18, 109 eschatology 18, 79, 87 metaphysical 10, 26–7 metaphysics 23–6, 28–9, 46, 99 ethical 25 method, phenomenological 3, 16, 46, 126 money 37, 95, 117 murder 83, 93–4, 96 impossibility of 41, 78, 93–4, 96 mystical 25–6, 38, 47, 80 negation 10, 27–8, 46–7, 65, 78, 82, 91, 97 Nietzsche, Friedrich 126 not yet, the 103, 106, 108–9 nourishment 49–50, 52, 54, 58 nudity 104–5

Index objectivity 9, 29–30, 36–7, 40, 48, 69, 81, 84, 86, 90, 116, 121 obligation 22, 31, 40, 76, 78–9, 89, 99, 120, 127 ontological argument 10, 20, 31, 42–4, 82, 87 ontology 7, 9, 17–18, 23, 39–40, 54, 84, 88, 92, 113, 115, 117 priority of 28–9 Parmenides 46 passivity 104–5 paternity 100, 109–10, 113 peace 18–19, 83, 89, 93, 108 messianic 112 phenomena 4, 6, 46, 67, 74, 77, 104 phenomenology 3–5, 10, 12–14, 20, 28, 113, 120–1 philosophy 6, 11, 21, 26, 29, 34, 41, 43, 81, 122 as atheism 126–7 as critique 39–41 history of 5, 15–17, 23–4, 28, 42, 90, 115 the ‘linguistic turn’ in 48, 85 phenomenology and 4, 14, 16 in Plato 25, 43 priority of cognition in 68, 72–3 Plato 9, 13–14, 16–17, 19, 26, 28, 33, 41–3, 46, 52, 68, 80–1, 85 Phaedrus 9, 77 Republic 25, 81 Symposium 25, 103 Plotinus 46 plurality 32–3, 36–7, 42, 46 poetry 13–14, 85 politics 18, 21, 33, 90, 94, 99, 110, 117, 120

145

ethical 88, 110, 118, 123–4 possession 62, 67, 69, 71–2, 74, 78, 87, 95 power 17, 26, 29, 41, 56, 63, 83, 96, 123–4 presentation 5, 77, 120–1, 123 project 9, 35, 47, 49, 51, 59, 62, 105–8, 120 existential 7 property 67–8, 71 propositions 30, 33, 41, 73, 84, 99 psychism 29–30, 32, 47, 49 reason 2, 9, 11, 21, 24, 29–30, 36, 38, 40, 42, 54, 71, 82, 84–6, 90–1 recollection 67, 69, 73, 87 relation without relation 23–4 religion 18, 32–3, 38, 99, 116, 120, 126–7 representation 37, 48, 54, 56–8, 60, 69, 72–4, 81, 83–4 priority of 55, 121 responsibility 68, 76, 79, 84, 88–9, 99, 102, 109, 111, 113, 124, 128 revelation 34, 81, 122 rights 8, 22, 39–40, 64, 79, 89, 99 Rosenzweig, Franz 16 Sartre, Jean-Paul 41 science 4–5, 9, 59 sensibility 32–3, 60, 80, 83, 104 separation 24, 26, 30–2, 39, 47, 49, 52–3, 64–5, 68, 73, 78, 85, 87–8, 105, 108, 117, 124 sexual difference 54, 70–1, 101, 105, 113 sexuality 54, 101–2, 109 signification 44

146 Index

signs 44, 76, 83–4, 86 sincerity 36, 44–5, 84 singularity 19, 24, 28, 37–8, 78–9, 95, 107 society 21–2, 29, 32, 42, 50, 54, 70, 86, 88–9, 106, 114–15, 123–4 Socrates 28, 85, 92 son 70, 107–8, 113, 125 space 81–2, 91–2 speech 10, 19, 24, 30, 36, 38, 42, 45, 74, 78, 84, 86, 90, 96, 117 direct 24, 75 ethical 26, 61, 74, 76, 85–6, 114, 116, 126 experience of the other as 20, 24, 26–7, 40, 43, 47, 62–4, 66, 91, 94, 100, 112–13 fecundity beyond 109–10 feminine as opposed to 70–1, 101, 105–6, 112, 125–6 politics and 110, 118 as the presence of the speaker 37, 44–5, 61, 75–7, 83–5, 88, 110, 122, 124–5 truth and 30, 34, 41 vision as opposed to 8, 34, 81–3, 115, 122 writing and 9, 35, 117, 122 Spinoza, Baruch 46, 54, 91–2, 99 state 42, 50, 54, 86, 88–91, 99, 111, 115, 123–4 stranger 11, 38, 89, 98–9, 102 subjectivity 6, 21–2, 30, 45, 55, 58, 69, 71, 79, 88, 109, 115, 125 defined in relation to death 98, 100 ethical 8, 99 in phenomenology 4–7, 28, 37 superlative 27, 46, 85, 96–7, 134 system 28, 31, 91, 115

teaching 9, 45, 74, 85 temporality see time there is, the see il y a thought 5, 26, 28, 30, 32, 35, 38, 46–7, 56–7, 60, 64–5, 71, 84, 86, 90, 108, 114, 121 the body and 55, 58 experience of the other and 20, 24 language and 74, 85 life and 33, 58, 72–3 separation and 47, 87 time 6, 31–2, 73, 79, 91–3, 97–100, 116 infinite 107–8, 111–12 tools 48, 50, 55, 58–9, 67–9 totality 19–21, 23, 29–32, 34–5, 47, 50, 53–54, 76, 82, 84, 89, 91, 93–4, 110, 115, 123 transcendence 9, 13, 19, 23, 25, 27, 30–1, 46, 66, 75, 82, 93, 95, 102, 110, 112, 117, 124 transcendental method 7, 93, 113, 117 truth 24, 26, 29–30, 36, 39–41, 43, 52, 84, 87, 115–16 ethical 25 propositional 33–4, 74 violence 24, 36, 40–1, 61, 72, 78, 83, 89, 92–5, 103, 115, 122 visibility 8, 34–5, 77–8, 80–3, 115, 122 vision see visibility vulnerability 41, 55, 78, 90, 94, 103–4 Wahl, Jean 1 war 17–19, 83, 88, 93–4, 98, 100, 108, 110, 113 Western philosophy 12, 17, 23, 28, 34, 46–7, 55, 78, 80, 82, 98

Index woman 54, 70–1, 101, 103, 105, 113, 118, 126 work 49–50, 53, 60, 62, 70, 72–3, 75–6, 94–5, 117 world 5, 9, 19, 39, 58–60, 80, 87–8 as dwelling 27, 67, 69 enjoyment of the 48, 50, 55, 62–3, 71

147

the feminine and the 104–6 Heidegger’s description of the 7–8, 34, 40, 42, 68 in Husserl 4, 56–8 labour and the 53, 72, 95 objectification of the 81, 87, 121 visibility and the 34, 83 work 58–60, 67, 69