The infinite is not definable, for the very reason that once something is defined it has been bestowed edges and separated out from infinity.

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One way to indicate infinity is to create a set that includes every possible discrete — defined — entity. This indication, however, misleads, because it falsely implies that zero precedes infinity and that infinity is somehow built upon it. But zero implies the absence of something. A something must be defined in order to exist as something other than a stretch of infinity — and in order for there to be a quantity of something, that something must understood as an instance of a category of which there can be instances. Only after Zero is a third-order entity derived from abstractions and subdivisions of infinity, not a metaphysical starting-point.

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To relate to that which is finite as if it is infinite, or to relate to that which is infinite as if it is finite may very well be the root of evil. Two points to consider: 1) The human mind can only possess and master that which is finite. 2) Every human being contains something of one’s own, possessed by no other human being, and therefore, in respect to another, contains a speck of infinity.

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Other human beings are unacceptable to us to the degree they are alien to us. The infinite contains everything that is us and everything that is alien and it holds them together in an inescapable but deniable unity.

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Levinas: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum — the adequate idea.”