STE ́PHANE MOSE`Swhich he appears to be an undifferentiated element in a measurable manifold, as a barely
perceivable unit in a mass that obeys its own laws; the other qualitative, in which he
emerges,without context, as a unique and irreplaceable person. The second point of view
is the only one that permits the founding of an ethics, in that it focuses attention on the
uniqueness and singularity of each man as a being endowed with freedom and
responsibility.
The question, for Levinas as for Rosenzweig, is then the following: How can we exit
the totality? Is there a place beyond being, a place thought can identify and speech de-
scribe, a place of pure transcendence, in which man can signify outside all context? For
Rosenzweig, as we have seen, this place of extra-territoriality is the ego, the subject an-
chored in the affirmation of its irreducible singularity. It is precisely this attempt to re-
commence philosophy setting out from the pure experience of the ego that Levinas rejects.
His inaugural ‘‘speculative gesture’’ does not, however, consist in refuting Rosenzweig’s
procedure, but rather in radicalizing it, which he does by thinking the idea of totality
through to the end. Totality, in the very logic of Hegel’s logic, cannot leave outside itself
the existence of a supposedly autonomous ego. Despite all its vehemence, the existential
protest of the ego, the desperate affirmation of its desire to live, bears witness, ultimately,
to a naı ̈ve egotism, an unawareness of the necessary laws governing the real. As opposed
to Rosenzweig, Levinas seems to agree with Hegel in thinking that the universality of
reason transcends the point of view of the individual ego.Totality and Infinity,Levinas
writes, ‘‘does present itself as a defense of subjectivity, but it will apprehend subjectivity
not at the level of its purely egoist protestation against totality, nor in its anguish before
death.’’^18 Hence the completely radical reversal of perspective Levinas carries out in rela-
tion to Rosenzweig. There is, exterior to the system of totality, no place for any substance
whatsoever,except for exteriority itself. There is, in fact, something that infinitely exceeds
the idea of an all-encompassing totality in which all differences, all particularities (what-
ever their place in the hierarchy of the system), are ultimately absorbed into the identity
of the same: namely, the notion of a pure exteriority itself. It is this exteriority that Levi-
nas, inspired by a famous passage by Descartes in theMeditations, calls the idea of the
infinite. In the context of theMeditations, what Descartes has in mind is that if I, a finite
creature, am capable of thinking the idea of the infinite, that is because it was placed
within me by a truly infinite being. What Levinas retains of this reasoning is the idea
according to which thought is capable of thinking ‘‘beyond what is capable of being
contained in the finitude of thecogito.’’^19
But for Levinas, the idea of the infinite is not graspable as such; it is not a theme
given to thought. Precisely because by its very definition it surpasses all thought, it gives
itself only indirectly, in a roundabout way or a displacement, in which it shows itself, as
if by metonymy, through a lived experience: that of the revelation of the exteriority of
others. The other man, in his radical exteriority, is imposed upon me as the unintegrable
itself, as the one who cannot be reduced to one element among others in the totality of
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