The Destination

Summary

Heidegger’s definition of human existence as “being in the world” also designates destination: our existence is destined for the care of the world, and summoned by death which is the universal and ineluctable exteriority which outlines the totality of the possible. For Levinas the existent is summoned forth by an appeal which appears in the mortality caught sight of in the face of the other. The locus of this imperative is an alterity exterior to nothingness as well as to being. Yet Levinas writes a phenomenology of this absolute exteriority.

In an examination of the radical dichotomy between the face of the other and the rest of the phenomenal, the author argues that the imperative alterity of the other that faces concentrates and singularizes the imperatives that are already addressed to us in the elemental, the home, the things, and the world.