Totality and Infinity

Context and Aims

Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961) is widely regarded as his first major systematic work and a landmark in postwar continental philosophy. Written against the backdrop of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Levinas’s critical engagement with Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian ontology, the book proposes a fundamental reorientation of philosophy: ethics, rather than ontology or epistemology, is said to be “first philosophy.”

The title names a central opposition. “Totality” designates comprehensive systems—metaphysical, political, or conceptual—that absorb individuals into overarching structures of meaning or power. “Infinity” names the irreducible alterity of the Other that resists such inclusion. The work’s declared aim is to describe how the encounter with the Other breaks the closure of totality and reveals an ethical relation that cannot be captured by theoretical or political systems.

Central Concepts and Arguments

Levinas develops his position through a phenomenological vocabulary, drawing on but also revising Husserl, Heidegger, and religious traditions.

1. Exteriority and the Face

A key notion is exteriority: the Other is not simply another object in the world but stands “outside” the horizon of my projects and categories. This exteriority comes to expression in what Levinas calls the face (visage). The face is not primarily a physical appearance; rather, it is the manifestation of the Other’s absolute vulnerability and command. In the face‑to‑face encounter, the Other addresses me with an implicit ethical injunction, often summarized in Levinas’s formula: “Thou shalt not kill.”

For Levinas, this relation is asymmetrical. I am called to responsibility for the Other in a way that is not balanced by a symmetrical claim on the Other’s responsibility for me. The face interrupts my freedom, limiting my power and exposing me to a demand I did not choose.

2. Critique of Totality

“Totality” includes closed philosophical systems, political totalitarianism, and any project that reduces persons to functions, concepts, or roles. Levinas argues that much of Western philosophy has operated under a totalizing impulse: the drive to render all that is other intelligible within a unified framework of knowledge or Being.

By contrast, the ethical relation to the Other introduces infinity—not in the mathematical sense, but as that which always exceeds my comprehension. The Other cannot be “totalized”; there is always more than I can grasp, know, or control. This excess marks a break with the ideal of complete conceptual mastery.

3. Desire and Transcendence

Levinas distinguishes metaphysical desire from needs or appetites. Needs can be satisfied and closed; metaphysical desire is a desire for the infinite, for what cannot be assimilated. The Other arouses this desire, orienting the subject toward transcendence—a movement beyond the self and beyond the world understood as a totality of objects.

Unlike Heidegger’s emphasis on Being, Levinas claims that transcendence occurs in the ethical encounter, where the subject is drawn beyond itself toward an irreducible Other. This shift relocates transcendence from a primarily ontological register to an ethical one.

4. Enjoyment, Dwelling, and the Ethical Subject

Part of the book offers a phenomenology of the same, describing how the subject enjoys the world, dwells in a home, and establishes possession and identity. Levinas discusses enjoyment (jouissance) of things, the formation of a home as a site of intimacy and security, and labor as the transformation of the world for one’s own projects. These analyses show how the subject becomes established as a self-sufficient center of meaning and freedom.

However, the arrival of the Other—often framed in terms of hospitality—disturbs this self-enclosed enjoyment. The Other appears at the door of the home and demands welcome. In this way, the ethical relation arises not as an abstract duty but as a concrete interruption of private possession and self‑interest.

5. Ethics Before Ontology and the Role of the Third

Levinas asserts that ethics precedes ontology: before I can thematize beings or grasp Being, I am already in relation to another person who commands my responsibility. Knowledge, theory, and politics are said to be secondary to this primary ethical exposure.

Yet Totality and Infinity also introduces the figure of the Third—an additional Other who appears alongside the first interlocutor. With the Third, questions of justice, comparison, and institutions emerge: How should I distribute concern and resources? How to judge between multiple others? Levinas suggests that law, politics, and the State arise from the need to reckon with the Third, translating the asymmetrical ethical relation into more symmetrical structures of justice. This introduces tension between the primordial ethical responsibility and the necessity of political order.

6. Divine Trace and Humanism of the Other

Though not a theological treatise, the work invokes the Divine as the source of the infinite that shines through the face of the Other. Levinas speaks of a “trace” of God rather than a direct presence, emphasizing that transcendence is encountered ethically rather than conceptually.

On this basis, he proposes a “humanism of the Other” in contrast to humanisms centered on autonomy, power, or rational mastery. Personhood, on this view, is constituted in and through responsibility for others, rather than in self‑possession or sovereignty.

Critiques and Reception

Totality and Infinity has had a wide impact in philosophy, theology, literary theory, and political thought.

Supporters regard the work as a decisive challenge to totalitarian forms of thought and politics, highlighting vulnerability, hospitality, and responsibility as central ethical categories. It has influenced debates on ethics after Auschwitz, post‑Heideggerian phenomenology, feminist ethics of care, and discussions of alterity in postcolonial and critical theory.

Major criticisms take several forms:

• Conceptual and stylistic concerns: Some commentators find Levinas’s language obscure, his phenomenological descriptions difficult to verify, and his distinctions (e.g., between totality and infinity) too sweeping.
• Gender and embodiment: Feminist philosophers have criticized certain passages on eros and the feminine as relying on problematic stereotypes, while also adapting Levinasian themes to more inclusive accounts of care and relationality.
• Politics and justice: Critics argue that Levinas’s strong emphasis on asymmetrical responsibility risks undermining concrete political agency or reciprocal rights. Others question how the passage from ethics to politics via the Third can adequately guide institutions and collective life.
• Religious and metaphysical presuppositions: Some see the appeal to the infinite and the divine trace as smuggling in theological assumptions, while defenders interpret these elements as phenomenological characterizations rather than doctrinal claims.

Despite, and partly because of, these debates, Totality and Infinity remains a central reference point for contemporary discussions of ethics, otherness, and responsibility, marking a decisive shift from the primacy of ontology toward a conception of philosophy grounded in interpersonal obligation.