- Length
- 320 pagesLingis, Totality and Infinity, Duquesne University Press, 1969
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Totality and Infinity
The book that made ethics first philosophy, written against the teacher its author had brought to France and never stopped admiring. Its claim is that another person's face makes a demand on me before I have decided anything, and that no system can absorb this without destroying it.
- Date
- 1961
- Author
- Emmanuel Levinas
- Region
- Paris
- Language
- French
- 1969 English, Alphonso Lingis The standard English version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 34 years
Written by a man who spent the war in a prisoner-of-war camp while his parents and brothers were murdered in Lithuania, and who never mentions this in the book.
What the book says
An argument that ethics comes before ontology and that Western philosophy has had the order backwards since the Greeks. Levinas' term for the philosophical impulse he opposes is totality: the drive to comprehend everything within a single system, in which whatever is encountered gets its meaning from the place it occupies in my understanding. What such a system cannot accommodate is another person. The face of another human being, on his account, is not an appearance among appearances that I interpret; it presents itself, resists being reduced to my idea of it, and makes a demand before I have decided anything - a claim that is prior to any choice about how to respond. This is infinity: something that overflows the concept I have of it. The relation is deliberately asymmetrical. I am responsible for the other before any contract, any reciprocity, any question of what they owe me, and this responsibility is not chosen and cannot be discharged. The earlier sections build up to this through separation, enjoyment and dwelling - a self that is genuinely at home and self-sufficient, because only such a self can be interrupted.
What it argues
That the other person cannot be thematised, and that this impossibility is the beginning of ethics rather than a limit on knowledge. Philosophy has proceeded by bringing what it meets under concepts, which works for things and falsifies persons: whatever I understand about someone is my understanding, and the person exceeds it. The face is Levinas' term for this excess - not literally the features but the way another presents themselves as irreducible, and as vulnerable. From this comes the asymmetry that distinguishes his position from every account built on reciprocity or mutual recognition: my responsibility does not depend on the other's responsibility toward me, is not earned, and increases the more I meet it. Language, for Levinas, begins here - not as a system of signs but as address, someone speaking to me, which is why the ethical relation is prior to the descriptive one.
What it answered
Heidegger, and the whole tradition he calls a philosophy of the same. Hegel's mutual recognition and Buber's I-Thou are both criticised for symmetry: on Levinas' account a relation of equals is already a totality with two members, and the demand another person makes is not conditional on their making room for mine. He is also answering, silently, the century - the book was written by a survivor whose family was destroyed, and the dedication of his next book names the six million among others.
How it argues
By phenomenological description pushed against its own limits, in prose that is difficult in an unusual way - not technical so much as insistent, circling the same claim from different directions because the claim is that the thing described cannot be captured. Levinas argues that a philosophy of the other cannot be conducted in the language of comprehension without betraying itself, so the writing works by disruption, and the later book goes further in the same direction. Readers find this either necessary or evasive.
The moment
Levinas was born in Lithuania, studied at Freiburg with Husserl and Heidegger in 1928-29, and wrote the thesis that introduced Husserl's phenomenology to France - the book Sartre read. He took French citizenship, served as an interpreter, and spent the war in a camp for French officers, which as a prisoner of war protected him; his wife and daughter were hidden in a monastery, and his parents and brothers were killed in Lithuania. Afterwards he ran a Jewish teacher-training school in Paris for two decades and did not hold a university post until he was fifty-five.
How it travelled
Slowly and then across several disciplines. Derrida's essay of 1964 was the first major engagement and shaped everything after it; Levinas' own reputation in France grew through the 1970s and 80s, and the anglophone reception came later still, largely through theology, literary theory and ethics. His work is now used in medical ethics, in disability studies, in animal ethics and in the literature on hospitality and on refugees, often by readers who take the account of the face without the metaphysics.
The strongest objection
Derrida's, and it is that the book cannot say what it wants to say in the language it uses. Levinas argues that the other is wholly other and cannot be brought under any concept - and then writes three hundred pages of concepts about it, using the vocabulary of Greek ontology to describe what is supposed to precede that vocabulary. Either the claim is self-undermining, or the writing is doing something other than asserting, and Levinas took the criticism seriously enough to change his method in the next book. There is a second objection from a different direction: an asymmetrical responsibility with no limit and no reciprocity gives no guidance when two other people make competing claims, and Levinas' answer - that the third party introduces justice and hence politics - is where his account gets thinnest.
Why read it
Not as a first book in the tradition. The section on the face is what everyone means by Levinas and can be read on its own with a guide. Read Heidegger first, since the argument is a reply, and expect prose that will not let you move quickly. The applied literature that uses him is often clearer than he is.
- First printed
- 1961
- First in English
- 1969
- Digitised
- No
Otherwise Than Being (1974) revises the position substantially, partly in response to Derrida's long 1964 essay on this book, and uses a more disruptive vocabulary to avoid the ontological language Levinas had been criticised for retaining.
Alphonso Lingis' 1969 English is the standard and is in copyright, as is the French.
Where it stands
Live and widely used, particularly in applied fields. Within philosophy he remains a divisive figure: enormously important to one tradition and treated as barely arguable by another, largely because the central claims are offered as descriptions that one either recognises or does not.
On quoting this book
In copyright in French and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the position can be stated without self-contradiction is the standing philosophical question and Derrida put it first. Whether Levinas' account of the other extends to all others, given remarks he made about non-European peoples and about animals that sit badly with the theory, is a real and uncomfortable line in current scholarship. How far Otherwise Than Being supersedes this book is argued. And whether ethics can be first philosophy in the strong sense - whether anything can be prior to ontology - is the question the whole project turns on.