In sharp contrast with Heidegger's insistence that the metaphysics of presence, in particular the objectivation of beings in terms of their being “ready at hand” culminating in the techno‐scientific world‐view, be destructed and overcome in light of a more fundamental thinking of “presencing” or “coming into presence” (Anwesen), the philosophy of the infinitely Other introduced (or should we say: rearticulated) by Emmanuel Levinas marks a radical rupture with all ontology. Indeed, it breaks away from every thought of Being, from the (...) notion of the event or eventhood (Ereignis) of Being, but also from the notion of the gift implied in Heidegger's formula that Being “is” what “there is,” that Being “is” what essentially “gives,” or, finally, that Being “is” (what is) fundamentally given (Es gibt das Sein). From the publication of his earliest phenomenological studies in the 1930s and late 1940s onwards, but especially since the appearance, in 1961, of his first major book Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l'extériorité (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority), Levinas has left no doubt that the central concern of his philosophical thinking was to leave the parameters – indeed, the very “climate” – of Heideggerian thought behind. This flight, as it were, not merely from ontology but also from Heidegger's later thinking‐of (Andenken) of Being consists, in its first phase, in the reorientation rather than destruction or deconstruction of traditional Western philosophy – a tradition which, according to Levinas, has been by and large a philosophy of the Same (le Même) – in the direction of the Other (l'Autre) or, more precisely, other human beings (autrui). At first glance, therefore, Levinas's first major work is characterized by the attempt to establish ethics as the genuine first philosophy. The ethical relation here is at once the primum intelligibele that puts an end to the essential arbitrariness and the anarchy of the world of opinions and truths, of appearances and idealized constructs. For all its apparent abstraction, it signals itself in the concrete event of obligation, more specifically in the introduction of a responsibility that precedes and exceeds contracts and rules, reciprocity and recognition, norms and conventions. In Totality and Infinity this relation of the self to the other is described in terms of the asymmetrical structure of discourse, of dialogue, and, most importantly, of the face‐to‐face with the other's visage. For, so the argument goes, it is solely in the face‐to‐face that the Desire (désire) for the other arouses, provokes, or evokes. It is in this singular relation without relation alone that the self is accused and made responsible. (shrink)