Totality and Infinity was first published in 1961. Totality is the chief function of Western metaphysics, grouping everything together in a unity that recognises nothing beyond it and that loses sight of the singularity of that which is so grouped. Expanding upon this in an interview with Phillipe Nemo, Levinas explains that totalising is the attempt of human thought to contain the world, allowing for nothing other than what can be thought – thus reducing the world to human cognizance. Infinity is that which is exterior to thought, that which cannot be encompassed by a totality and so has been ignored in the history of Western metaphysics; it is revealed in the relationship of ‘the same’ with ‘otherness’, that is, an identity, an ‘I’, with something outside of itself, which is not itself. Levinas’ aim throughout this text is to argue for the primacy of infinity over totality and to cast intersubjectivity, the relationship of the ‘I’ with another person, as a form of welcoming or hospitality in which ‘the idea of infinity is consummated’ – or, rather, as morality. If we consider all that is exterior to be reducible to its intelligibility then, when confronted with other people, we reduce them to objects of our intellect and fail to treat them as thought-ful subjects in their own right, an asymmetry pregnant with the risk of irresponsibility.
The first thing to note is that in formulating the relationship of the ‘I’ to the other person as one between ‘same’ and ‘other’ Levinas does not intend to suggest that the ‘I’ is somehow unchanging, constant, which would run against conceptions of the self from Heraclitus to Sartre, Nietzsche to Lacan. Rather, the ‘I’ is a becoming, it is changing, but when confronted with the other it becomes ‘same’ by virtue of the sense of its own identity. Levinas writes: ‘The I is not a being that always remains the same, but is the being whose existing consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity throughout all that happens to it’. In other words, the sameness of the ‘I’ is a function of self-identity that cannot be extended to the other. Further, this relationship of the ‘I’ to the other should not be understood as a totality, as a ‘we’; the ‘I’ and the other are ‘absolutely separated because the other ‘is not wholly in my site’. The other eludes me and the relationship is without relation, in that there is an encounter with someone who can only ever be experienced as other (who bears no relation to me). Levinas writes: ‘The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possession, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics’. With this passage Levinas offers the reader two equivalences: first, the strangeness of the other person and our inability to understand the other person; and, second, the limitation of one’s freedom (spontaneity) and ethics. Before we can better understand these couplings it is best to approach the nature of the encounter itself.
For Levinas, the relationship with another person is established through ‘presence before a face’. As he describes it: ‘The way in which the other person presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face’. So, the relationship is enacted in a face-to-face encounter and the face is the locus point of the encounter. On the one hand we have a simple idea, of people meeting people in the flesh with the face as the obviously important focal point (for identification, for communication both verbal and nonverbal); on the other hand, the face is at the same time a marker for the very otherness of the other person, a signifier that they are more than we can think, elusively strange. The face is an expression of exteriority: ‘A presentation which consists in saying “It’s me” – and nothing else to which one might be tempted to assimilate me’; that is, it is a marker that the other escapes totality, resists the attempt to reduce the external to thought – an opening on to the idea of infinity. It is this latter role of the face that draws us towards ethics. If before the face we are in confrontation with something we cannot understand then we must act with responsibility lest we do harm. This is what Levinas calls ‘a calling into question of my spontaneity’:
It is the very revelation of a resistance to my powers that does not counter them as a greater force, but calls in question the naïve right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being. Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent.
The inaccessibility of the other person – their irreducibility to thought; transcendence – means that we can never know them. We can never know the thoughts, motivations, desires, intentions, etc., of the other person. This means that our freedom is dangerous since our ability to act without such knowledge could result in suffering. The very fact that we possess freedom demands that we use it with responsibility for the outcome of it, for how it might affect other people. ‘To welcome the Other is to put in question my freedom’; this is both an internal questioning and an external questioning. On the first count, we become aware that the unfettered exercise of our freedom is ‘murderous’, that it is harmful to the other, such that we become ashamed of our own freedom and reign it in. On the second count, this calling into question comes from outwith but in a subtle way; the other does not counter my freedom by a display of force, that is, I am not coerced or threatened into limiting my free actions by a show of power. Rather, the other is encountered as vulnerable – and this is expressed by the face. For Levinas, the face is naked; we do not cover the face, it is exposed: ‘The nakedness of [the] face extends into the nakedness of the body that is cold and that is ashamed of its nakedness’. The face of the other, then, is a display of their vulnerability, the last nakedness that decency allows, that exposes to us the fragile nature of the human being. So, whilst the encounter with the other calls into question my powers, it does so from the vulnerable position of exposure rather than from a position of superior force. At the most fundamental level, the encounter with the other is a familiar commandment: ‘Thou shall not kill’. Through the exposure of the face there is a silent injunction not to do harm to this vulnerable other. The encounter with the other ‘is fundamentally pacific’, as the violent exertion of my power is shown to be unacceptable.
What we get from Levinas, then, is a conception of morality that works within an encounter between two people: the face-to-face. What makes Levinas’ account of ethics peculiar is that it is asymmetrical; there is no Golden Rule, no reassurance that if you behave responsibly towards others that in return they will do likewise for you. Since Levinas is concerned with how the ‘I’ encounters the other he stops at an ethics that works purely in the first-person: it always falls on the ‘I’ to be responsible and not on the other. Of course, if we broke out of the first-person perspective of this account it would be obvious that everyone is responsible for everyone else, but since as human beings we can never have this ‘from the outside’ experience, it is sufficient for Levinas to have described a responsibility that falls on the ‘I’ alone (i.e. from my perspective me; from your perspective you). Levinas writes: ‘To utter “I,” to affirm the irreducible singularity in which the apology is pursued, means to possess a privileged place with regard to responsibilities for which no one can replace me and from which no one can release me. To be unable to shirk: this is the I’. That is, responsibility is mine alone and no one can take my place, no one can perform my duty for me. Further, because responsibility is mine alone and is always responsibility for a singular other, the ethical relationship enacted in the encounter is a ‘closed society’: it exists between the ‘I’ and the other, one-to-one and face-to-face.
Here is the core argument of Totality and Infinity: ‘The fact that in existing for another I exist otherwise than in existing for me is morality itself’. I think it’s useful to take all of this out of Levinas’ register and into more familiar language and context. The face is crucial to our interactions with other people. It has been observed by psychologists that there is an asymmetry inherent to face-to-face encounters. Basically, we possess a lot more information about ourselves than we do about other people. When we are conversant with another person we are fully aware of our own thought processes, our intentions and our motivations, and we can understand the way we act upon these. That is, we are able to perceive of ourselves introspectively. However, we have no access to the thoughts, intentions, motivations, of the other person. As such, we have to perceive of the other in terms of extrospection, which is to say, in our attempts to understand their actions we make judgements based only on their outwards behaviour (and not – because it is not possible – on their thoughts, etc.); or by projection, inferring things about the other that are closed to our perception by reference to our own thoughts and feelings. With extrospection, the face of the other takes on an importance; our own face is neither-here-nor-there since we rarely see it, whilst the other’s face becomes a vital focus in our attempts to understand where the other person is coming from. This asymmetry becomes problematic because we assume that others can be judged by their external displays whilst we judge ourselves based on our interior thoughts. We can understand Levinas in these terms. The other person is closed off to us; the face is both the interactive locus and a sort of barrier, a limit to what we can experience of the other. If we behave as if our ignorance of the inner-life of the other person is anything more than an inadequacy of perspective then we will do harm to the other; that is, if we act as if this ignorance is sufficient to act without regard for what we are ignorant of then we are violent in our use of freedom. We cannot infer from the experience of introspection/extrospection that we can put ourselves before others. If we project an image of ourselves onto the other person, assume that they must think and feel as we do, then we are in a relationship with ourselves and have lost sight of the other, again exercising our own desires at the cost of the other person’s. Levinas would call this sort of projection ‘the imperialism of the same’. What is moral is to treat this fundamental ignorance – the way that the other exceeds my thoughts – as the beginning of moral behaviour, as a demand to limit one’s spontaneousness, one’s freedom. That is, when we behave with a sense of responsibility for our actions, we acknowledge that our ignorance of others should manifest itself as humility rather arrogance, as morality rather than egoism. The lesson of the experience of introspection/extrospection is that we should put the other person before ourselves.
At this point it is important to note that Levinas’ conception of the face is not all that straightforward. He asks whether the ‘epiphany’ of the face – the experience of realising that the other person goes before me – is a sensible experience. It is not. For Levinas, vision relates to grasp, so to suggest that the epiphany of the face is sensible is to suggest that that which escapes the ‘I’ – the other – can be taken hold of, which is to say, is not other. He writes: ‘The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched – for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content’. The face is a resistance to my powers, it escapes my ability to see it, or at least, it transcends my ability to see it. The face is sensible and it is earthly, and it is important that it is such since it plays a practical role in responsibility. But the face is more than this, it transcends the fleshy world and takes us beyond it: ‘The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us, whose virtualities are inscribed in our nature and developed by our existence’. So, the face is a sort of terrestrial opening to a moral realm, beyond the self-concern of our own existence and the sorts of moral philosophies we derived from this and proclaimed to be natural. The face is encountered both as a visceral indicator of the other person and as an insensible demand to put the other person before me – and all this in a way that bypasses moral prescription, codes or rules.
It is here that I take perhaps my most important influence from Levinas. Morality has to be about exceeding social norms. It has to be more than following the sorts of ethical theories that Richard Rorty dismissed as mere ‘algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas’. Being for the other, a being directed towards the other, always goes beyond. It is about giving without reciprocation, hospitality without limitation, welcoming without hesitation. We can talk of justice, of course, which is to talk of socialism. But morality is different. Morality is a closed a society. Morality is a socialism of the I and the Other. That there is suffering in the world puts me in a position of privilege; it is my responsibility to do something about that, to redistribute what I have to the other who goes without. I would say that all of my work is motivated by this idea.
Screened Out 