Precondition for the Home

For the intimacy of recollection to be able to be produced . . . the presence of the Other must not only be revealed in the face which breaks through its own plastic image, but must be revealed, simulatneously with this presence, in its withdrawal and in its absence. . . . And the other whose presence is discreetly an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome which describes the field of intimacy, is the Woman. The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home and inhabitation.

- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

Companion

The familiarity of the world does not only result from habits acquired in this world, which take from it its roughnesses and measure the adaptation of the living being to a world it enjoys and from which it nourishes itself; familiarity and intimacy are produced as a gentleness that spreads over the face of things.

This gentleness is not only a conformity of nature with the needs of the separated being, which from the first enjoys them and constitutes itself as separate, as I, in that enjoyment, but is a gentleness coming from affection for that I.

The intimacy which familiarity already presupposes is an intimacy with someone. The interiority of recollection is a solitude in a world already human. Recollection refers to a welcome.

- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

Home

The home would serve for habitation as the hammer for the driving in of a nail or the pen for writing. For it does indeed belong to the gear consisting of things necessary for the life of man. It serves to shelter him from the inclemencies of the weather, to hide him from enemies or the importunate.

And yet, within the system of finalities in which human life maintains itself, the home occupies a privileged place. . . . The privileged role of the home does not consist in being the end of human activity but in being its condition, and in this sense its commencement.

- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity