ABSTRACT
For Emmanuel Levinas, books, and, in particular, the Book, that is, the Bible, are not tools or manuals; they are a “modality of our being”. It is through respect for the Book and books as such that his philosophical approach takes shape. Thinking philosophically is to address oneself “to all men”. In this sense, philosophy and biblical wisdom are not in contradiction with each other. As all philosophical thought is based on “pre-philosophical experiences”, for Levinas, reading the Bible was one of the founding experiences of his thought. Totality and Infinity was published in 1961. The very title of this essential work contains a critique of “the attempt at universal synthesis, a reduction of all experience, of all that is reasonable, to a totality wherein consciousness embraces the world. Levinas insists on the asymmetry of ethical intersubjectivity. In the very last part of Totality and Infinity, this asymmetry seems to emanate from a disequilibrium that might appear to be permutational.
