Totality And Infinity

Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity is a monumental work of phenomenological enquiry that goes on to assert the centrality of ethics to philosophical thought. This Reader's Guide provides a detailed explanation of the work, breaking down the occasionally intimidating but always inspirational content of Totality and Infinity for non-specialist readers, unpacking the complexities of Levinas' thought with clarity and rigour. Ideal for students coming to Levinas for the first time, the book offers essential guidance, outlining key themes, approaches to reading the text, the reception, and influence of the work, and recommends secondary reading materials.

Ever since the beginning of the modern phenomenological movement disciplined attention has been paid to various patterns of human experi ence as they are actually lived through in the concrete. This has brought forth many attempts to tind a general philosophical position which can do justice to these experiences without reduction or distQrtion. In France, the best known of these recent attempts have been made by Sartre in his Being and Nothingness and by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenol ogy of Perception and certain later fragments. Sartre has a keen sense for life as it is lived, and his work is marked by many penetrating descrip tions. But his dualistic ontology of the en-soi versus the pour-soi has seemed over-simple and inadequate to many critics, and has been seriously qualitied by the author himself in his latest Marxist work, The Critique of Dialetical Reason. Merleau-Ponty's major work is a lasting contri but ion to the phenomenology of the pre-objective world of perception. But asi de from a few brief hints and sketches, he was unable, before his unfortunate death in 1961, to work out carefully his ultimate philosophi cal point of view. This leaves us then with the German philosopher, Heidegger, as the only contemporary thinker who has formulated a total ontology which claims to do justice to the stable results of phenomenology and to the liv ing existential thought of our time.

By virtue of the originality and depth of its thought, Emmanuel Levinas’s masterpiece, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, is destined to endure as one of the great works of philosophy. It is an essential text for understanding Levinas’s discussion of “the Other,” yet it is known as a “difficult” book. Modeled after Norman Kemp Smith’s commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Levinas’s Existential Analytic guides both new and experienced readers through Levinas’s text. James R. Mensch explicates Levinas’s arguments and shows their historical referents, particularly with regard to Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida. Students using this book alongside Totality and Infinity will be able to follow its arguments and grasp the subtle phenomenological analyses that fill it.

"Essays by 14 Levinas scholars provide a fresh acount of the argument and purpose of Emmanuel Levinas's major work, Totality and Infinity, drawing parallels between Levinas and other thinkers; considering Levinas's relationship to other disciplines such as nursing, psychotherapy, and law; and bringing this seminal text to bear on specific, concrete issues of present-day concern"--Provided by publisher.

First published in English by Duquesne in 1969, this has become one of the classics of modern philosophy.

Levinas's idea of ethics as a relation of responsibility to others has become highly influential. Simon Critchley proposes a dramatic new way of reading Levinas's work, and provides a less familiar, more troubling, account of it. He argues that Levinas's fundamental problem was the attempt to escape the tragic fatality of Heidegger's philosophy.