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Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas
❖1930
➢Publishes his thesis in
French, The Theory of
Intuition in Husserl's
Phenomenoloagy.
❖1931
➢French translation, by
Levinas, of Husserl's
Sorbonne lectures, Cartesian
Meditations, in collaboration
with Gabrielle Peiffer.
❖1932
➢He marries Raïssa Levi,
whom he had known since
childhood.
❖1961
➢Publishes his doctorate (ès
Lettres), Totality and Infinity:
An Essay on Exteriority.
Position at the Université de
Poitiers.
❖1994
➢Raïssa Levinas dies in September.
Levinas publishes a collection of
essays, Liberté et commandement (no
English translation) and Unforeseen
History, edited by Pierre Hayat.
❖1995
➢Emmanuel Levinas dies in Paris,
December 25.
Totality
And
Infinity
Levinas one of the most
important work is totality and
infinity: an essay on exteriority.
In the later, Levinas, according
to a phenomenological method,
describes how subjectivity
arises from the idea of infinity,
and how infinite is a product of
the relationship of self to
another.
Levinas argues that ontology
enacts a relationship with
another being that reduces to
the same. Instead, Levinas
adopts an approach that does
not reduce to other to the
same, but considers the
separation between himself
and the other as inherent in a
relationship with being.
According to Levinas, the
externality is how individual
transcends finite into the infinite.
The externality is a relationship in
which the self is separate from the
other. The externality is a
relationship where the being of self
and other cannot be aggregated of
fused to infinity, because they are
completely separated.
In home, in order to have the idea of
infinity relationship, the home members
must be separated from each other. The
idea of infinity is in itself a form of
transcendence in a relation to the other.