Totality and Infinity

Emmanuel Levinas's first major work, presented as his state doctoral thesis and published in 1961 with the subtitle An Essay on Exteriority. Its preface links Western philosophy's urge to grasp everything in one whole, or totality, with the logic of war. Against this, Levinas argues that the encounter with another person breaks every totality. The other person faces me in a way I cannot reduce to my own categories; this is the face, which addresses me before I know anything about it and calls my freedom into question, above all through the command not to kill. Ethics, so understood, comes before ontology. The book moves through the relation of the same and the other, using Descartes's idea of the infinite as a model; the life of the separated self, with its enjoyment, dwelling and labour; the face and its ethical demand; and, beyond the face, eros, fecundity and the relation between generations. Critics, notably Derrida, questioned whether Levinas could escape the philosophical language he criticised.

It is the central text for the idea that ethics is first philosophy, and it changed how philosophers think about responsibility, the other person and the limits of theory.