Totality and Infinity An Essay on Exteriority

The history of (western) philosophy has been the history of Being, or; Ontology.Ultimately it has been the attempt to draw all Otherness into the orbit of the Same.That is to say:to gain a panoramic vision of the whole and thus control it. It has been the history of the will-to-power.It has thus been the denial or repression of Otherness and a prioritising of the Same which finds its expression as Totality. In a critique of Heidegger, Husserl and the western tradition, which these thinkers in many ways exemplify (Heidegger would staunchly deny this!), Levinas tries to show us the Infinity beyond Totality manifest (but not really manifest) in the face of the Other. He draws upon an alternative tradition which includes Phenomenology but also Plato and certain gestures of Descartes,to reach beyond Phenomenology.To break the magic spell of sameness, which threatens to repress our recognition of the ethical importance of the Other. Beyond the face he also articulates important intersubjective relations such as Eros and the Fecundity that issues from it(and not merely from it). This is a staggering and complex book, rich in philosophical thought. Already a classic it should be studied alongside his other works.