In Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes the ethical relation as asymmetrical: I am responsible for the Other in a way that does not depend on reciprocity. The Other's need calls me before I have chosen to be called. But this responsibility, while absolute, still has a residual structure in which the I and the Other face each other as distinct subjects across a gap.
Levinas's second major work, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974), pushes further, and into territory that many readers find vertiginous. Here Levinas does not merely describe responsibility as asymmetrical; he describes it as total, pre-original, and prior to any free choice. Responsibility for the Other does not begin when I choose to engage; it is the very structure of subjectivity. I am not first a subject who then incurs obligations, I am constituted as a subject through being called upon.
Responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in which a commitment to another would have been made. I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation, persecuted. The ipseity in the passivity without arche characteristic of identity, is a hostage. The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone.
— Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974), trans. Alphonso Lingis, p. 114
The concept of substitution is central here. To be substituted for the Other, to stand in their place, to bear their burden, is not the same as empathy (putting yourself imaginatively in their shoes while remaining yourself). It is something more radical: a passivity in which the boundary between self and Other is not erased but becomes porous. Levinas speaks of being a hostage to the Other, held responsible, without having signed any contract, for the suffering and needs of the Other simply because I am here and they are there.
This is philosophically extreme, and Levinas knows it. His response to the obvious objection, doesn't infinite responsibility for every Other produce paralysis?, involves the concept of the third (le tiers). I am not only face-to-face with one Other; the moment I look up, there are others, other others, all making claims. The entry of the third is what introduces justice: the need to compare, weigh, and distribute responsibility. Justice, for Levinas, is not the foundation of ethics but a necessary complication that arises when ethics encounters the plurality of the social world. The face-to-face is the ethical absolute; the social is the space where that absolute must be negotiated without ever being abandoned.
Levinas's framework has been enormously productive in applied ethics, especially in care ethics, medical ethics, and postcolonial philosophy. Iris Marion Young drew on Levinasian ideas to argue that justice requires not merely treating individuals fairly but responding to the vulnerability of social groups whose faces have been systematically denied. In medical contexts, the Levinasian insistence on the patient's face, their irreducibility to a diagnosis or a case, has influenced debates about depersonalization in institutional medicine.
The critical pushbacks are substantial. Derrida, a close reader and admirer of Levinas, asks whether the asymmetry of responsibility is sustainable: doesn't the ethical relation require some reciprocity to avoid reducing the I to a doormat? Feminist critics have noted that the figure of the infinitely responsible subject maps uncomfortably onto roles historically assigned to women, the caregiver who is always for others, never for herself. Levinas himself was criticized for limiting his face-to-face ethics to human persons while failing to extend it to animals and non-human life. Simon Critchley and others have worked to extend and correct these limits while preserving the core insight: ethics is not a system you apply from outside, it is the ongoing call of the Other's face.