 Jacques Derrida once called Totality and Infinity a “treatise on hospitality” (1997 [1999: 21]). As we have seen, Levinas’ 1961 work approached being as war or a conflict of wills that persist in their existence like the philosophical tradition’s concept of conatus essendi (the will to persist in being). Neutral existence or the there-is (il y a) denoted indeterminate nocturnal being, which gives way to the diurnal being called “the elemental” (sunlight, winds, rain). As noted, being in Levinas thus entails both dynamic forces and a conception of natural processes and causality. However, hospitality, also called “metaphysical desire” (TI: 33), cannot be grounded on such forces, much less on a conception of the will as based on drives of self-preservation or self-expansion. And, because hospitality is elicited by the other—and is non-reciprocal—it does not presuppose an original social exchange, much less moral sentiments or innate emotive capacities for empathy or compassion. If it did, there would be no question of escaping a so-called natural order of existence. That is why Levinas—aware that the concept of nature has a debated history—characterizes both our response to the other and, in 1974, proximity, as “pre-natural signification” (OBBE: 68). He explains, 