 Levinas’ argument in Totality and Infinity unfolds up to the question of justice and then takes an unanticipated tack. Rather than pursuing justice as it is refined through civil society into the State, Levinas focuses on a smaller-scale institution, the family, arguably common to all humanity. It is presumably in the family rather than in the State that the responsibility described in the face-to-face encounter is most clearly enacted. If the family is consolidated by the birth of the child, then, as Levinas puts it, it is the father who elects and calls the child to responsibility, just as the child grows up serving his siblings in a way more personal than that prescribed by the impersonal justice of States. According to Levinas, this justice carries a specific temporal modalization: “The unique child, as elected one, is accordingly at the same time unique and non-unique. Paternity is produced as an innumerable future”, as open posterity (TI: 279). In this penultimate section entitled “Beyond the Face”, the phenomenology of the family thus inserts the responsibility experienced in the face-to-face into a micro-society, in which questions of justice may arise, but with a new emphasis on future time.