 Flowing out of the temporal interruptions that leave affective mnemonic traces in persons, the ground of social existence in Levinas does not resemble the solipsism for which Heidegger was sometimes criticized. Our life with others is never a flight from what should be the resolute assumption of our mortality (Heidegger’s “inauthenticity”), nor even moments disappearing in a teleology of expanding socio-political groups that culminate in the State (Hegel, sometimes Husserl). As individuals, we are always already in social relations, marked by a remainder of responsibility. We have always already been impacted by the expression (or face) of an other. Yet, because the immediacy of this impact resists conceptualization, we tend to overlook the force the other’s address has on us (as facial expression or words). We carry on, in our respective spheres, apparently motivated by desires and projects, some of which entail the kind of quests for mastery and recognition that Hegel described. Nevertheless, in Totality and Infinity, these quests are as if undercut by “metaphysical desire” (TI: 33–34, 114, 148ff.), which Levinas defines as “a desire [for the other] that cannot be satisfied”. As he explains, “we speak lightly of desires satisfied, or of sexual needs, or even of moral and religious needs” (TI: 34). However, metaphysical desire “desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness—the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it” (TI: 34). This under-layer of our everyday desires comes to light in the faltering of our will to mastery as experienced in the face-to-face encounter. The other’s facial expression or bodily posture affects me before I begin to reflect on it. As indicated, it is dual: a command and a summons. Naked and defenseless, the face signifies, with or without words, “Do not kill me”. It opposes a passive resistance to our desire for mastery wherein our freedom asserts its sovereignty (TI: 84). Levinas speaks of the face of the other who is “widow, orphan, or stranger”. While these are biblical figures, he argues that we encounter them concretely even before transcribing them into religious allegory (TI: 76–78). Indeed they invest our freedom as the possibility of giving.