Intentionality and Metaphysics

The book concludes with a Levinasian critique of Derrida’s understanding of the conflict between Husserl and Levinas regarding intentionality.

Messianic Eschatology, or The Production of Ultimate Events of Being

The first chapter argues that totalization cannot saturate the crucial, ultimate events of being and that the full deployment of being implies a suspension of the historical order of war.

Being toward Infinity

This chapter is devoted to the question of the Infinite with regard to fecundity and generation.

The Metaphysical Context of Intentionality

Chapter 6 explores Levinas’s critique of Husserl’s notion of intentionality, through the description of teaching as the very foundational ground of all intentionality.

The Sensible Depth of Being

Chapter 3 is devoted to an exhaustive description of the modalities of separation, understood as sensible enjoyment and happiness, and argues that the sensible precedes representation.

To Receive the Idea of the Infinite

This chapter explicates the notion of separation as constitutive of the deployment of the Idea of the Infinite and the way in which relation to the Face of the Other concretizes the formal Ideal of Infinite.

The Utopia of the Dwelling

This chapter is devoted to the paradoxical situation of the home in Levinas’s view—as both utopian and as a way to lift the burden of the threat of the anonymous element from the ego.

The Terrestrial Condition

Chapter 4 explores Levinas’s critique of Heidegger and Sartre’s conceptions of the Being-thrown.