This is probably a bad time to be talking about Levinas, given the blot left on his reputation by his response to the Sabrat and Chatila massacre in 1982 For present purposes however I’m less directly interested in the themes of hospitality, openness to the other and so on (which might be regarded as having been put to the test and found wanting on that occasion) than in the metaphysical decision through which Levinas circumscribes ontological “totality” and opposes to it an “infinity” characterised as “trans-ascendant”.

This decision bears a superficial similarity to Laruelle’s circumscription of philosophy, and even to Badiou’s ontology of consistent multiples drawn from the “pure inconsistent multiplicity” of Being at large. For Laruelle (going by Ray Brassier’s account in Nihil Unbound), philosophy is a repertoire of decisions which separate in various ways the empirical from the transcendental within immanence, establishing in each case a dyad which guarantees philosophical access to the transcendent. It can be seen as a series of attempts to totalize the field of experience, to “transcendentalise” it so that empirical givens maintain an assured connection to their transcendent conditions. Levinas’s “trans-ascendence” names an exteriority that is not the transcendence proper to immanence, sutured to it by the transcendental assigned within immanence by philosophical decision, but a transcendence which submits to no immanent-transcendental regime. The trans-ascendant does not afford the immanent (with the transcendental forming the schema of its affordances), but exposes it.

It isn’t difficult to argue that Levinas rapidly falls back into philosophical “decision” in his development of the thematics of the face and the ethical encounter, which seem to equip empirical experience with precisely the transcendental aspect Laruelle predicts it will acquire in any philosophical discourse. To declare that ethics is “first philosophy” is to enlist ethics as the operator of philosophical decision: the couple other-Other, mobilized in Levinas’s discussion of the face-to-face as the immanent excess of manifestation, or of the Saying as the immanent excess of signification, is precisely the kind of suturing that philosophical decision sets out to accomplish. Levinas opens the path to a non-philosophy of sorts in his assault on totality as the violently-pacified empire of the Same, but closes it again in his philosophy of the encounter and the ethical relation to the other. What he calls “metaphysics”, the “idea of the infinite”, would according to this argument be another philosophical transcendental suturing the empirical to the Beyond.

Badiou’s criticisms of Levinas are quite well-known (especially those made in Ethics, one of his best known and most readily-accessible books); essentially, Levinas’s choice of “infinity” as a figure for trans-ascendance is an unhappy one, since every real immanent situation is already “infinite” in density. Levinas’s assault on totality is figured by Badiou as yet another rendition of the theme of the poverty of finitude, a theme with which Badiou encourages us all to feel thoroughly bored and fed up. But this is a bit off the mark: “totality” in Levinas is not primarily finitude, but the relational consistency effected by both philosophical and egological totalisation. He might almost have said “the counted-as-one”. “Totality” for Levinas is that which localises every manifestation, reducing the face to an apparition amongst apparitions and the Saying to an instance of discourse; “infinity” is accordingly the dislocation of being, the “without a context” of “signification without a context”. As Levinas says, not without a certain terrible historical irony, “the Stranger is not wholly in my site”.

In fact, Levinas has recourse to several figures of totalisation. One is the totalisation effected by an ego’s powers of relation, its ability to bring objects into relation to itself, composing a field of object-relations as an extension of its own egoity; to this is opposed a kind of intentional failure or constitutive incompletion of relation, which Levinas credits Husserl with discovering. Another is the economic capture of the contents of the world in circuits of investment and return, to which is opposed pure expenditure and the exorbitant gratuitousness of hospitality. Yet another is the power of enumeration, of counting this face as a face amongst faces, to which Levinas opposes the singularity of the Face, the Saying, the Encounter which is never one amongst others. Of all of these figures, only that of “relational” totalisation really refers to “infinity” as something beyond the reach of the finite, off the scale or over the horizon. The infinite density of the Same does not protect it from the “infinity” of relational unbinding, aneconomic singularity, the displacement of every place.

The question which interests me at the moment is whether it is possible to detach from Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy” the non-philosophy to which his thematics of the unbound, aneconomic, singular and unplaceable seems to lend itself. If his ethics is ultimately a kind of theodicy, with dodgy political ramifications, then perhaps it is better to jettison it (there are other good ways to live than as a “hostage” to the other). But his attack on ontology remains powerful and inventive, able as Derrida said to “make us tremble”, and should perhaps be renewed as a counterbalance to the brittle assurance of speculative axiomatics.