TOTALITY AND

INFINITY

AN ESSAY ON
EXTERIORITY

EMMANUEL LEVINAS
TRANSLATED BY
ALPHONSO LINGIS

DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

First published in French under the title Totalite et Infini.

Copyright 1961 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands.
English Translation Copyright 1969 Duquesne University Press.
All Rights Reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this translation may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without the written permission of the Publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations for use in critical articles and reviews.
Published by Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15282.
Library of Congress Catalog Number:
International Standard Book Number:
0-8207-0245-5

69-14431

ISBN-13: 978-0-8207-0245-2

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Twenty-third Printing, January 2011.

B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF EROS
Love aims at the Other; it aims at him in his frailty [faiblesse]. Frailty
does not here figure the inferior degree of any attribute, the relative
deficiency of a determination common to me and the other. Prior to the
manifestation of attributes, it qualifies alterity itself. To love is to fear for
another, to come to the assistance of his frailty. In this frailty as in the
dawn rises the Loved, who is the Beloved.* An epiphany of the Loved,
the feminine is not added to an object and a Thou antecedently given or
encountered in the neuter (the sole gender formal logic knows). The
epiphany of the Beloved is but one with her regime of tenderness. The
way of the tender consists in an extreme fragility, a vulnerability. It
manifests itself at the limit of being and non-being, as a soft warmth
where being dissipates into radiance, like the "pale blush" of the nymphs
in the Afternoon of a Faun, which "leaps in the air drowsy with thick
slumbers," dis-individualizing and relieving itself of its own weight of
being, already evanescence and swoon, flight into self in the very midst
of its manifestation. And in this flight the other is other, foreign to the
world too coarse and too offensive for him.
And yet this extreme fragility lies also at the limit of an existence
"without ceremonies," "without circumlocutions," a "non-signifying" and
raw density, an exorbitant ultramateriality. These superlatives, better
than metaphors, denote a sort of paroxysm of materiality.
Ultramateriality does not designate a simple absence of the human in the
piles of rocks and sands of a lunar landscape, nor the materiality that
outdoes itself, gaping under its rent forms, in ruins and wounds; it
designates the exhibitionist nudity of an exorbitant presence coming as
though from farther than the frankness of the face, already profaning and
wholly profaned, as if it had forced the interdiction of a secret. The
essentially hidden throws itself toward the light, without becoming signification. Not nothingnessbut what is not yet. This unreality at
the
". . . l'Aim6 qui est Aimee."

256

B. Phenomenology of Eros

257

threshold of the real does not offer itself as a possible to be grasped; the
clandestinity does not describe a gnoseological accident that occurs to a
being. "Being not yet" is not a this or a that; clandestinity exhausts the
essence of this non-essence. In the effrontery of its production this clandestinity avows a nocturnal life not equivalent to a diurnal life simply
deprived of light; it is not equivalent to the simple inwardness of a
solitary and inward life which would seek expression in order to overcome its repression. It refers to the modesty it has profaned without
overcoming. The secret appears without appearing, not because it would
appear half-way, or with reservations, or in confusion. The simultaneity
of the clandestine and the exposed precisely defines profanation. It
appears in equivocation. But it is profanation that permits equivocation
essentially eroticand not the reverse. Modesty, insurmountable in
love, constitutes its pathos. Immodesty, always dared in the presentation
of wanton nudity, is not something added to an antecedent neutral
perception, such as that of the doctor who examines the nudity of the
patient. The mode in which erotic nudity is produced (is presented and
is) delineates the original phenomena of immodesty and profanation.
The moral perspectives they open are situated already in the singular
dimension opened by this exorbitant exhibitionism, which is a production of being.
Let us in passing note that this depth in the subterranean dimension of
the tender prevents it from being identified with the graceful, which it
nevertheless resembles. The simultaneity or the equivocation of this
fragility and this weight of non-signifyingness [non-significance], heavier
than the weight of the formless real, we shall term femininity.
The movement of the lover before this frailty of femininity, neither
pure compassion nor impassiveness, indulges in compassion,* is absorbed
in the complacence of the caress.
The caress, like contact, is sensibility. But the caress transcends the
sensible. It is not that it would feel beyond the felt, further than the
senses, that it would seize upon a sublime food while maintaining, within
its relation with this ultimate felt, an intention of hunger that goes unto
the food promised, and given to, and deepening this hunger, as though the
caress would be fed by its own hunger. The caress consists in seizing
upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a
future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it
". . . Be complaft dans la compassion . . ."

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Totality and Infinity

were not yet. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of

disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible. In a certain
sense it expresses love, but suffers from an inability to tell it. It is hungry
for this very expression, in an unremitting increase of hunger. It thus
goes further than to its term, it aims beyond an existent however future,
which, precisely as an existent, knocks already at the gates of being. The
desire that animates it is reborn in its satisfaction, fed somehow by what
is not yet, bringing us back to the virginity, forever inviolate, of the
feminine. It is not that the caress would seek to dominate a hostile
freedom, to make of it its object or extort from it a consent. Beyond the
consent or the resistance of a freedom the caress seeks what is not yet, a
"less than nothing," closed and dormant beyond the future, consequently
dormant quite otherwise than the possible, which would be open to
anticipation. The profanation which insinuates itself in caressing
responds adequately to the originality of this dimension of absencean
absence other than the void of an abstract nothingness, an absence
referring to being, but referring to it in its own way, as though the
"absences" of the future were not all future on the same level and
uniformedly. Anticipation grasps possibles; what the caress seeks is not
situated in a perspective and in the light of the graspable. The carnal, the
tender par excellence correlative of the caress, the beloved, is to be
identified neither with the body-thing of the physiologist, nor with the
lived body [corps propre] of the "I can," nor with the body-expression,
attendance at its own manifestation, or face. In the caress, a relation yet,
in one aspect, sensible, the body already denudes itself of its very form,
offering itself as erotic nudity. In the carnal given to tenderness, the body
quits the status of an existent.
The Beloved, at once graspable but intact in her nudity, beyond object
and face and thus beyond the existent, abides in virginity. The feminine
essentially violable and inviolable, the "Eternal Feminine," is the virgin
or an incessant recommencement of virginity, the untouchable in the very
contact of voluptuosity, future in the present. Not as a freedom struggling with its conqueror, refusing its reification and its objectification,
but a fragility at the limit of non-being wherein is lodged not only what
is extinguished and is no longer, but what is not yet. The virgin remains
ungraspable, dying without murder, swooning, withdrawing into her
future, beyond every possible promised to anticipation. Alongside of the
night as anonymous rustling of the there is extends the night of the
erotic, behind the night of insomnia the night of the hidden, the

B. Phenomenology of Eros

259

clandestine, the mysterious, land of the virgin, simultaneously uncovered

by Eros and refusing Erosanother way of saying: profanation.
The caress aims at neither a person nor a thing. It loses itself in a being
that dissipates as though into an impersonal dream without will and even
without resistance, a passivity, an already animal or infantile anonymity,
already entirely at death. The will of the tender is produced in its
evanescence as though rooted in an animality ignorant of its death,
immersed in the false security of the elemental, in the infantile not
knowing what is happening to it. But also vertiginous depth of what is
not yet, which is not, but with a nonexistence not even having with being
the kinship that an idea or a project maintains, with a nonexistence that
does not claim, in any of these ways, to be an avatar of what is. The
caress aims at the tender which has no longer the status of an "existent,"
which having taken leave of "numbers and beings" is not even a quality
of an existent. The tender designates a way, the way of remaining in the
no man's land between being and not-yet-being. A way that does not even
signal itself as a signification, that in no way shines forth, that is
extinguished and swoons, essential frailty of the Beloved produced as
vulnerable and as mortal.
But precisely in the evanescence and swoon of the tender the subject
does not project itself toward the future of the possible. The not-yet-being
is not to be ranked in the same future in which everything I can realize
already crowds, scintillating in the light, offering itself to my
anticipations and soliciting my powers. The not-yet-being is precisely not
a possible that would only be more remote than other possibles. The
caress does not act, does not grasp possibles. The secret it forces does not
inform it as an experience; it overwhelms the relation of the I with itself
and with the non-I. An amorphous non-I sweeps away the I into an
absolute future where it escapes itself and loses its position as a subject.
Its "intention" no longer goes forth unto the light, unto the meaningful.
Wholly passion, it is compassion for the passivity,* the suffering, the
evanescence of the tender. It dies with this death and suffers with this
suffering. Being moved [Attendrissement] suffering without suffering, it
is consoled already, complacent in its suffering. Being moved is a pity that
is complacent, a pleasure, a suffering transformed into happiness
voluptuosity. And in this sense voluptuosity begins already in erotic
desire and remains desire at each instant.
Voluptuosity does not come
* "Toute passion, elle compatit a la passivite . . ."

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to gratify desire; it is this desire itself. This is why voluptuosity is not

only impatient, but is impatience itself, breathes impatience and chokes
with impatience, surprised by its end, for it goes without going to an end.
Voluptuosity, as profanation, discovers the hidden as hidden. An exceptional relation is thus accomplished in a conjuncture which, for formal
logic, would arise from contradiction: the discovered* does not lose its
mystery in the discovery, the hidden is not disclosed, the night is not
dispersed. The profanation-discovery abides in modesty, be it under the
guise of immodesty: the clandestine uncovered does not acquire the status
of the disclosed. To discover here means to violate, rather than to disclose
a secret. A violation that does not recover from its own audacity the
shame of the profanation lowers the eyes that should have scrutinized the
uncovered. The erotic nudity says the inexpressible, but the inexpressible
is not separable from this saying in the way a mysterious object foreign to
expression is separated from a clear speech that seeks to circumscribe it.
The mode of "saying" or of "manifesting" itself hides while uncovering,
says and silences the inexpressible, harasses and provokes. The "saying,"
and not only the said, is equivocal. The equivocal does not play between
two meanings of speech, but between speech and the renouncement of
speech, between the signifyingness [significance] of language and the
non-signifyingness of the lustful which silence yet dissimulates.
Voluptuosity profanes; it does not see. An intentionality without vision,
discovery does not shed light: what it discovers does not present itself as
signification and illuminates no horizon. The feminine presents a face
that goes beyond the face. The face of the beloved does not express the
secret that Eros profanes; it ceases to express, or, if one prefers, it
expresses only this refusal to express, this end of discourse and of
decency, this abrupt interruption of the order of presences. In the
feminine face the purity of expression is already troubled by the equivocation of the voluptuous. Expression is inverted into indecency, already
close on to the equivocal which says less than nothing, already laughter
and raillery.
In this sense voluptuosity is a pure experience, an experience which
does not pass into any concept, which remains blindly experience.
Profanation, the revelation of the hidden as hidden, constitutes a model
of being irreducible to intentionality, which is objectifying even in praxis,
* Throughout this section dicouvrir and its cognates suggest that we understand "discovering" as an "uncovering."Trans.

B. Phenomenology of Eros

261

for not taking leave of "numbers and beings." Love is not reducible to a
knowledge mixed with affective elements which would open to it an
unforeseen plane of being. It grasps nothing, issues in no concept, does
not issue, has neither the subject-object structure nor the I-thou structure.
Eros is not accomplished as a subject that fixes an object, nor as a
pro-jection, toward a possible. Its movement consists in going beyond
the possible.
The non-signifyingness of erotic nudity does not precede the
signify-ingness of the face as the obscurity of formless matter precedes the
artist's forms. It already has forms behind it; it comes from the future,
from a future situated beyond the future wherein possibles scintillate, for
the chaste nudity of the face does not vanish in the exhibitionism of the
erotic. The indiscretion in which it remains mysterious and ineffable
precisely is attested by the exorbitant inordinateness of this indiscretion.
Only the being that has the frankness of the face can be "discovered" in
the non-signifyingness of the wanton [lascif].
Let us recall what is involved in signification. The first instance of
signification is produced in the face. Not that the face would receive a
signification by relation to something. The face signifies by itself; its
signification precedes Sinngebung. A meaningful behavior arises already
in its light; it spreads the light in which light is seen. One does not have to
explain it, for every explanation begins with it. In other words, society
with the Other, which marks the end of the absurd rumbling of the there
is, is not constituted as the work of an I giving meaning. It is necessary to
already be for the Otherto exist and not to work only for the
phenomenon of meaning, correlative of the intention of a thought, to arise.
Being-for-the-Other must not suggest any finality and not imply the
antecedent positing or valorization of any value. To be for the Other is to
be good. The concept of the Other has, to be sure, no new content with
respect to the concept of the I: but being-for-the Other is not a relation
between concepts whose comprehension would coincide, or the
conception of a concept by an I, but my goodness. The fact that in
existing for another I exist otherwise than in existing for me is morality
itself. On all sides it envelops my knowledge of the Other, and is not
disengaged from the knowledge of the Other by a valorization of the
Other over and above this primary knowledge. Transcendence as such is
"conscience." Conscience accomplishes metaphysics, if metaphysics
consists in transcending. In all that precedes we have sought to expose the
epiphany of the face as the origin of exteriority.
The

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primary phenomenon of signification coincides with exteriority; exteriority is signifyingness itself. And only the face in its morality is exterior.
In this epiphany the face is not resplendent as a form clothing a content,
as an image, but as the nudity of the principle, behind which there is
nothing further. The dead face becomes a form, a mortuary mask; it is
shown instead of letting seebut precisely thus no longer appears as a
face.
We can say it yet otherwise: exteriority defines the existent as existent,
and the signification of the face is due to an essential coinciding of the
existent and the signifier. Signification is not added to the existent. To
signify is not equivalent to presenting oneself as a sign, but to expressing
oneself, that is, presenting oneself in person. The symbolism of the sign
already presupposes the signification of expression, the face. In the face
the existent par excellence presents itself. And the whole bodya hand
or a curve of the shouldercan express as the face. The primordial
signifyingness of the existent, its presentation in person or its expression,
its way of incessantly upsurging outside of its plastic image, is produced
concretely as a temptation to total negation, and as the infinite resistance
to murder, in the other qua other, in the hard resistance of these eyes
without protectionwhat is softest and most uncovered. The existent
qua existent is produced only in morality. Language, source of all signification, is born in the vertigo of infinity, which takes hold before the
straightforwardness of the face, making murder possible and impossible.
The principle "you shall not commit murder," the very signifyingness
of the face, seems contrary to the mystery which Eros profanes, and which
is announced in the femininity of the tender. In the face the Other
expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which
he descends. In his gentleness dawns his strength and his right. The
frailty of femininity invites pity for what, in a sense, is not yet, disrespect
for what exhibits itself in immodesty and is not discovered despite the
exhibition, that is, is profaned.
But disrespect presupposes the face. Elements and things remain
outside of respect and disrespect. It is necessary that the face have been
apperceived for nudity to be able to acquire the non-signifyingness of the
lustful. The feminine face joins this clarity and this shadow. The
feminine is the face in which trouble surrounds and already invades
clarity. The in appearance asocial relation of eros will have a reference
be it negativeto the social. In this inversion of the face in femininity,
in this disfigurement that refers to the face, non-signifyingness abides

B. Phenomenology of Eros

263

in the signifyingness of the face. This presence of non-signifyingness in

the signifyingness of the face, or this reference of the non-signifyingness
to signifyingnesswhere the chastity and decency of the face abides at
the limit of the obscene yet repelled but already close at hand and
promisingis the primordial event of feminine beauty, of that eminent
sense that beauty assumes in the feminine. The artist will have to convert
this beauty into "weightless grace" by carving in the cold matter of color
or stone, where beauty will become calm presence, sovereignty in flight,
existence unfounded for without foundations.* The beautiful of art
inverts the beauty of the feminine face. It substitutes an image for the
troubling depth of the future, of the "less than nothing" (and not the depth
of a world) announced and concealed by the feminine beauty. It presents
a beautiful form reduced to itself in flight, deprived of its depth. Every
work of art is painting and statuary, immobilized in the instant or in its
periodic return. Poetry substitutes a rhythm for the feminine life. Beauty
becomes a form covering over indifferent matter, and not harboring
mystery.
Thus erotic nudity is as it were an inverted signification, a signification
that signifies falsely, a clarity converted into ardor and night, an expression that ceases to express itself, that expresses its renunciation of
expression and speech, that sinks into the equivocation of silence, a word
that bespeaks not a meaning but exhibition. Here lies the very
lasci-viousness of erotic nuditythe laughter that deflagrates in
Shakespearean witches' sessions full of innuendos, beyond the decency of
words, as the absence of all seriousness, of all possibility for speech, the
laughter of "ambiguous tales" where the mechanism of laughter is not
only ascriba-ble to the formal conditions of the comic such as Bergson,
for example, has defined them in his book Laughterthere is in addition
a content which brings us to an order where seriousness is totally lacking.
The beloved is opposed to me not as a will struggling with my own or
subject to my own, but on the contrary as an irresponsible animality
which does not speak true words. The beloved, returned to the stage of
infancy without responsibilitythis coquettish head, this youth, this pure
life "a bit silly"has quit her status as a person. The face fades, and in its
impersonal and inexpressive neutrality is prolonged, in ambiguity, into
animality. The relations with the Other are enacted in play; one plays
with the Other as with a young animal.
* ". . . existence sans fondements car sans fondations."

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Totality and Infinity

The non-signifyingness of the wanton is therefore not equivalent to the

stupid indifference of matter. As the reverse of expression of what has
lost expression, it thereby refers to the face. The being that presents
itself as identical in its face loses its signification by reference to the secret
profaned, and plays in equivocation. Equivocation constitutes the epiphany of the feminineat the same time interlocutor, collaborator and
master superiorly intelligent, so often dominating men in the masculine
civilization it has entered, and woman having to be treated as a woman,
in accordance with rules imprescriptible by civil society. The face, all
straightforwardness and frankness, in its feminine epiphany dissimulates
allusions, innuendos. It laughs under the cloak of its own expression,
without leading to any specific meaning, hinting in the empty air,
signaling the less than nothing.
The violence of this revelation marks precisely the force of this
absence, this not yet, this less than nothing, audaciously torn up from its
modesty, from its essence of being hidden. A not yet more remote than a
future, a temporal not yet, evincing degrees in nothingness. Hence Eros
is a ravishing beyond every project, beyond every dynamism, radical
indiscretion, profanation and not disclosure of what already exists as
radiance and signification. Eros hence goes beyond the face. Not that
the face would cover over something more by its decency, like a mask of
another face. The immodest apparition of erotic nudity weighs down
the face, weighing a monstrous weight in the shadow of non-sense that is
projected upon it, not because another face arises behind it, but because
the hidden is torn up from its modesty. The hidden, and not a hidden
existent or a possibility for an existent; the hidden, what is not yet and
what consequently lacks quiddity totally. Love does not simply lead, by
a more detoured or more direct way, toward the Thou. It is bent in
another direction than that wherein one encounters the Thou. The
hiddennever hidden enoughis beyond the personal and as its reverse,
refractory to the light, a category exterior to the play of being and
nothingness, beyond the possible, for absolutely ungraspable. Its way
beyond the possible is manifested in the non-sodality of the society of
lovers, their refusal to give themselves over in the midst of their abandon,
this refusal to surrender themselves that constitutes voluptuosity, fed by
its own hungers, approaching, in vertigo, the hidden or the feminine, a
non-personal, but into which the personal will not be engulfed.
The relationship established between lovers in voluptuosity, fundamentally refractory to universalization, is the very contrary of the social

B. Phenomenology of Eros

265

relation. It excludes the third party, it remains intimacy, dual solitude,

closed society, the supremely non-public. The feminine is the other
refractory to society, member of a dual society, an intimate society, a
society without language. Its intimacy is to be described. For the
unparalleled relation voluptuosity maintains with the non-signifying constitutes a complex that is not reducible to the repetition of this non, but to
positive traits by which the future and what is not yet (and is not simply
an existent that remains at the status of the possible) is, so to speak,
determined.
The impossibility of reducing voluptuosity to the social, the
non-signi-fyingness upon which it opens, and which is manifested in the
indecency of the language that would state voluptuosity, isolates the
lovers, as though they were alone in the world. This solitude does not
only deny, does not only forget the world; the common action of the
sentient and the sensed which voluptuosity accomplishes closes, encloses,
seals the society of the couple. The non-sociality of voluptuosity is,
positively, the community of sentient and sensed: the other is not only a
sensed, but in the sensed is affirmed as sentient, as though one same
sentiment were substantially common to me and to the other and not in
the way two observers have a common landscape or two thinkers a
common idea. An identical objective content does not here mediate the
community, nor is the community due to the analogy of feeling; it is due
to the identity of the feeling. Reference of love "given" to love
"received," love of love, voluptuosity is not a sentiment to the second
power like a reflection, but direct like a spontaneous consciousness. It is
inward and yet intersubjectively structured, not simplifying itself into
consciousness that is one. In voluptuosity the other is me and separated
from me. The separation of the Other in the midst of this community of
feeling constitutes the acuity of voluptuosity. The voluptuous in
voluptuosity is not the freedom of the other tamed, objectified, reified, but
his freedom untamed, which I nowise desire objectified. But it is freedom
desired and voluptuous not in the clarity of his face, but in the obscurity
and as though in the vice of the clandestine, or in the future that remains
clandestine within discovery, and which, precisely for this reason, is
unfailingly profanation. Nothing is further from Eros than possession. In
the possession of the Other I possess the Other inasmuch as he possesses
me; I am both slave and master. Voluptuosity would be extinguished in
possession. But on the other hand, the impersonality of voluptuosity
prevents us from taking the relation between lovers to

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be a complementarity. Voluptuosity hence aims not at the Other but at

his voluptuosity; it is voluptuosity of voluptuosity, love of the love of the
other. Love accordingly does not represent a particular case of friendship.
Love and friendship are not only felt differently; their correlative differs:
friendship goes unto the Other; love seeks what does not have the
structure of an existent, the infinitely future, what is to be engendered. I
love fully only if the Other loves me, not because I need the recognition
of the Other, but because my voluptuosity delights in his voluptuosity,
and because in this unparalleled conjuncture of identification, in this
trans-substantiation, the same and the other are not united but
preciselybeyond every possible project, beyond every meaningful and
intelligent powerengender the child.
If to love is to love the love the Beloved bears me, to love is also to love
oneself in love, and thus to return to oneself. Love does not transcend
unequivocablyit is complacent, it is pleasure and dual egoism. But in
this complacence it equally moves away from itself; it abides in a vertigo
above a depth of alterity that no signification clarifies any longera
depth exhibited and profaned. Already the relation with the childthe
coveting of the child, both other and myselftakes form in voluptuosity,
to be accomplished in the child himself (as can be accomplished a Desire
that is not extinguished in its end nor appeased in its satisfaction). We are
here before a new category: before what is behind the gates of being,
before the less than nothing that eros tears from its negativity and
profanes. It is a question of a nothingness distinct from the nothingness
of anxiety: the nothingness of the future buried in the secrecy of the less
than nothing.