Abstract

In this article the "phenomenology of voluptuousness" is analyzed mainly in the first great book of Levinas, Totality and Infinity. Here, the Jewish philosopher reflects onthe selfishness celebrated on the night of lovers, but also on the possibility that the night of lovers is already traversed by the future. Thus, the alleged immediacy of caress, and Levinas’ resistance to any kind of digestive thinking about being, brings an ethical irradiation of eroticism: the Good arises of those nights and transcendence is fulfilled in the form of a trace, and only as a trace.