ABSTRACT
Throughout his philosophy, Levinas discusses the “inner life”; in Totality and Infi nity, he calls this inner life “interiority.” In this fi rst chapter, the inner life will be examined in a preliminary fashion before turning to more specifi c aspects of interiority (namely, corporeality and sensibility) in the following two chapters. An exploration of the self in Levinas faces certain diffi culties. There are several questions about the status of the inner life and its relation to “exteriority,” which need to be taken up. Furthermore, complications emerge as Levinas’s account changes from Totality and Infi nity to Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. When Levinas discusses the inner life as a “psychism” in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, explaining that this term names an “otherness in the same,” we start wondering whether this is a response to possible misunderstandings which could emerge from the systematic account of interiority and exteriority in his early and middle work. However, Levinas maintained from the beginning that interiority does not precede exteriority in any straightforward fashion; nor has it ever been treated by Levinas as a sphere completely free from otherness.
