The privileged role of the home does not consist in being the end of human activity but in being its condition, and in this sense its commencement. The recollection necessary for nature to be able to be represented and worked over, for it to first take form as a world, is accomplished as the home. Man abides in the world as having come to it from a private domain, from being at home with himself, to which at each moment he can retire. (pg.152)

To be separated is to dwell somewhere; separation is produced positively in localization. The body does not happen as an accident to the soul.  (pg. 159)

Emmanuel Levinas
from the chapter entitled The Dwelling
in Totality and Infinity, Duquesne University Press 1969

return to index