What Other Can Disturb Me? The Temporality of Alterity in Levinas’s Totality & Infinity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the temporal meaning of the alterity of the Other in Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality & Infinity and its implications for the recent debate concerning the possibility of a non- anthropocentric extension of Levinas’s ethical philosophy. Through a close reading of sections from Totality & Infinity, I articulate, first, Levinas’s argument that because pre-reflective experience is characterized as an interiorizing jouissance, discourse is the condition of possibility for objectivity, and, second, that this discourse is afforded only by the asymmetrical ethical relationship that Levinas develops as his main thesis. On my argumentation, this asymmetrical ethical relationship is afforded by the diachronic and discontinuous temporality Levinas exposes in his analysis of fecundity. As such, I argue that the alterity of the Other, which, on Levinas’s \naccount, shatters egoist jouissance, is inherently and radically futural. \nIt is my contention that because it is this futural alterity of the Other that calls me into question and inaugurates ethical life, one cannot articulate categorical restrictions on what sort of Other could disturb me in advance or once and for all. As such, and on my argumentation, one need not “extend” Levinas’s account of ethics to include non-human Others, because Totality & Infinity already offers intrinsic provisions for a more-than-human ethics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".