Altering the very first sentence of this extraordinary and highly original book, I quote: "Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by freedom." I have, of course, replaced the word "freedom" for "morality." In altering the sentence, however, as I hope to show, I have not altered the central theme of the book (first published in French in 1961). This is so, not because morality and freedom are interchangeable, as many maintain, but, quite

This work of philosophy shows how ethics is based on one’s relationship with an other, which is accomplished in the form of a welcome, including gift-giving and respect, rather than with violence, that is, any attempt to dominate or make use of an other.What is most striking about the book is how poetic it is, how it makes use of poetic devices such as wordplay and repetition, and how it depends on the experience of reading the book rather than on proving what is asserted. The book, therefore, a...

Levinas applies Phenomenology to Buber to argue that Ethics begins with the intrusion of the face of another human into the confines of consciousness.

Every time I read this, I realize how my understanding of Levinas is partial.

It's rather unquestionable how much impact Levinas had on French philosophy. And his argument is, at times, fascinating. It's just that I disagree with the initial premise so much that I disagree with so many ideas that Levinas extracts from that premise. Was it a worthy intellectual exercise to read? Yes, absolutely. It's just that to really get it, you have to put yourself in the shoes of a Talmudic scholar who survived the Holocaust, and deeply wanted to wash phenomenology clean of the dirt H...

Levinas has put love into philosophical terms. I don't mean romantic love. I mean love as in the giving of oneself for the well-being of all others.

Another college book. I read this my senior year. Obviously most of it has been lost to memory. What has not been lost is the conversation I had eating warm johnnie bread, drinking stolen wine and talking about the Other with my roommate and another friend well into the night. Levinas' project is fascinating because he is trying to take the existiential phenomenology that Heidegger develops and argue that Alethia is structured by the ethics of the other. Much of this ultimately tends to be too m...

so challenging, so lovely. levinas really came for the necks of everyone in the western tradition from aristotle to hegel and heidegger, but he was sure to do so in a nice way lol

Put down the book at 40%. Tiresome, boring, very, very redundant - it is simply a slog to get through. And the content isn't all that original nor that complex. It's just put in a very dense, complicated and inaccessible manner (as with most other continental philosophers of the twentieth century). Bottom line: The post-World War II world needed an emphasis on humanity and humanism and a primacy of ethics over the obsession with and rigidity of objective/positive science. For Levinas, the face o...

Levinas has rekindled my faith that it is possible to act ethically and be a generally "good" person without subscribing to any particular codification of religion. Amazing book, if you can get through it. It made my head hurt!

Totality and Infinity is the most difficult text I have ever read. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian-born French thinker who was one of the most influential postmodernists for much of the twentieth century, is quite intentionally unlike any other philosophy any other philosopher has produced. For many of his readers, Levinas provides the “ethics” postmodernism so desperately needs, whereas for others, Levinas is incomprehensible, unphilosophically mystical, and in fact fails to pr...

After several years I finally decided to get into Levinas since everyone on my friendlist seemed to have read him. My previous exposure with Levinas was through Badiou's critical assessment of his "privileging" of the ethical (difference/multiplicity) over the political (sameness/unity) in Ethics. I'm not a fan of drawing sharp distinctions between ethics and politics (and the equivocation of any collective political project with a sort of totalising program) and when I picked up this text I was...

Levinas restores the phenomenological inseparability of the philosophical and the theological in the face of the Other in this deeply ethical work. This work is hard to read. It takes vigor and commitment to get through it. I would recommend, first, just pushing through the entirety of the work before stopping and sorting it all out. This work is not linear. There is a lot of back-and-forth, and it really must be read as such. Otherwise, an amazing work whose heaviness ought not be ignored.

Certainly, an incredibly difficult book--but definitely one well worth the effort. Levinas presents so much to contemplate in a way I find other (alter, perhaps) than in most other forms of expression. The ideas presented here must be continually remembered and reflected on, in my view--very highly recommended.

4 stars for getting through this challenging and insane book for school, but also feeling like I've learned something?

Another one in desperate need of a reread, but eventually I just have to move on from the first read.

Simultaneously beautifully and ostentatiously written yet philosophically disastrous. 4/5 stars for aesthetics and bold ingenuity, 1/5 stars for ethics.For someone who speaks plainly enough about the ruses of rhetoric and the sneaky violence of pedagogues, the appeal to moral platitudes from the beginning is quite off-putting and condescending. For my part however, calling out "hypocrisy!" doesn't prove anything. Sure, war = bad, but will Levinas demonstrate this somehow or just rub it in my fac...

Absolutely outstanding. Just incredible. I found myself sailing through this text and just could not put it down. His critique of Hegel and Heidegger was really quite wonderful. Levinas completely revolutionizes our conception of the Other as something that cannot be contained, reduced, or captured. This is such a powerful notion because that is exactly what we do - we subsume the Other under our categories of the understanding, under Reason. Levinas opens our eyes to what was always, already th...

This book is full of rich and provocative insights. Levinas developed his philosophical insights--a blend of themes of phenomenology with ideas from Bergson and German Idealism--during the same period that Heidegger and Sartre were developing their philosophies, and there is strong resonance between all three. What is frustrating about this book, though, is that, (1) unlike the works by Sartre and Heidegger, it is often characterized by an approach to language that seems contrived and (2) it is

Problematic not for its ideas and fundamental points, though those are flawed, but for the presentation, which is not very persuasive or sensible. Grounding ethics in the distance between self and other is a fairly fascinating idea in itself, but Levinas doesn't flesh it out well.

If there is true, its elsewhere

Reading Totality and Infinity is like receiving a philosophical hug. Despite being a metaphysical system, it embraces the moods of humanity rather than impersonal structures of distance. One feels at home within the embrace of the Other while Levinas outlines a dialectic of pathos that affirms isolation as not a deviation from truth but a step shy of discovering it – like a shadowed crag before the summit. Levinas’ response to atheism runs throughout this work, but rather than attacking it as a

Indeed one of the hardest thinkers to sync up with, Levinas carries the reader from the interiority of the self, which sets out from the enjoyment that is itself an end for all conscious creatures, to the encounter with the Other that calls the self into question—exteriority, which is defined by the living dialog between humans who exceed one another. This encounter turns out to be the condition of possibility for genuine human freedom and responsibility—the moral, which is prior to the politica...

This is a must read after working through Being and Time by Heidegger. Levinas makes his mark among the great philosophers of history. A work comparable in creative ingenuity and phenomenological prowess to BT, the notion of the face and the separation from the “there is” into solitude...mind blown. I can see why Derrida was so excited about him. If you have read Rosenzweig you will see his influence shining through in a glorious light.

God always calls us to Himself too soonThe relationship with a being infinitely distant, that is, overflowing its idea, is such that its authority as an existent is already invoked in every question we could raise concerning the meaning of its being. One does not question oneself concerning him, one questions him. Always he faces.One lives outside of God, at home with oneself; one is an I, an egoism. The soul, the dimension of the psychic, being an accomplishment of separation, is naturally athe...

Idea: people live in a comfortable bubble of manageability, a flow of enjoyment, until they meet real other people (who break into that bubble), who hold them to the standard of responding to another person, which is an ethical obligation to the other person's needs, as though the Other is your master and you are its slave, but not in a bad way. That's the main thing I got out of the book. I think the reason the book is very much longer than that paragraph is that it's trying to show phenomenolo...

This is a hard book to read and to understand, but it is absolutely worth the effort. One piece of advice: concentrate, and try hard to understand what Levinas is saying, but keep going even when you don’t understand—just keep reading. One of the techniques Levinas uses is to repeat ideas over and over and over, but always in slightly new ways. Derrida describes the technique as “proceed[ing] with the infinite insistence of waves on a beach.” That’s a good analogy: as you move through the book,

I found this book has shone in my memory for such a long time as a book everyone should read because it explored the ideas of 'self' and 'other' with such ease. This is a kind of ease one develops when one has seen first hand the horrors that ensue from the fragmentation of morality. Levinas was a survivor of the Shoa (better term than holocaust) and he saw whjat it was in the Nazi philosophy that allowed men and women to act immorally to the Jew, the Homosexual (evebn though many of the Nazis w...

Levinas's first major treatment of his conception of ethics as first philosophy. At its center is a view of the ethical relation as fundamentally asymmetrical, due to the dual height and destitution of the Other. An ethics founded on the face-to-face, Levinas runs into trouble when he attempts to move "beyond the face" and offer a phenomenology of Eros that has been very pointedly critiqued by Irigaray.

Levinas has emerged as one of the four or five most influential European philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, and Totality and Infinity should be considered his first major philosophical treatise. If you only read one book by Levinas, this ought to be the one.