Totality and Infinity

Introduction

Levinas submitted the book as his main doctoral thesis; it appeared in 1961 in a phenomenological series in The Hague, subtitled “An Essay on Exteriority”. Its four sections move from the relation between the Same and the Other through a phenomenology of enjoyment, dwelling and work to the face, and finally to the erotic relationship and fecundity. Against Heidegger, who places being before ethics, Levinas argues that the ethical relation to the other person comes first and cannot be absorbed into knowledge or comprehension. Derrida’s long essay “Violence and Metaphysics” (1964) questioned whether Levinas could escape the language of the philosophy he criticised; Levinas’ Otherwise than Being (1974) responds in part.

Connections

Builds on

• Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes

Criticizes

• Being and Time1927 · Martin Heidegger
• Cartesian Meditations1931 · Edmund Husserl

Taken up in

• Philosophy of Liberation1977 · Enrique Dussel
• Oneself as Another1990 · Paul Ricœur