Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (French: Totalité et Infini: essai sur l'extériorité) is a 1961 book about ethics by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

He argues that only a face-to-face encounter allows true connection with Infinity, because of the incessance of this type of interaction.

The work can be read as a response to Levinas's teachers, the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Britannica both identify Totality and Infinity, along with Otherwise than Being (1974), as one of Levinas's most important works.

[2][3] The philosopher Jacques Derrida criticized Totality and Infinity in his essay "Violence and Metaphysics".