The Intrusion of the Infinite: Levinas versus the Power of Spinoza and Nietzsche

As part of the project The Art of Nietzsche, I presented my first Virtual Reality installation: an interactive sculpture in weightlessness. This work marked the beginning of a renewed confrontation with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. He proved to be an elusive figure; a thinker who throughout history has been harnessed to the most diverse causes — from fascism to the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s. For me, however, he remained a philosopher who provokes friction precisely through his radical resistance to fixed frameworks. In this essay, I explore the tension between ‘Totality’ — the urge of Western thought to fix, understand, and control everything — and ‘Infinity’. In the virtual weightlessness of my sculpture, I found a visual parallel for this conflict. While Nietzsche saw in Spinoza an ally and wanted to liberate the world from moral gravity, for Emmanuel Levinas he became the very embodiment of the ethical blindness of Western ontology. Nietzsche’s fascination with Spinoza, whom he famously called his “precursor” in a letter from 1881, forms the foundation of this exploration. Both broke with the illusion of free will and the notion that the world possesses a moral or purposeful order. In that rupture, a radical freedom emerged. Nietzsche experienced this as a “twin solitude” in his isolation on the Alpine peaks; a liberation from the suffocating morality he regarded as ballast for the human spirit. My choice of Virtual Reality as a medium is not incidental. It represents the technological realization of this Nietzschean ‘free spirit’. The user finds themselves in a weightless space where the laws of physics and tradition have been suspended. Yet, seen from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, this digital freedom raises fundamental ethical questions. For Levinas, Western philosophy is often an ‘egology’: a mode of thinking that reduces everything to the ‘I’. The VR headset is the ultimate physical manifestation of this; it shuts out the outside world and presents a reality that fully coincides with the subject. This is Totality: a closed system in which no reality exists that transcends the individual. Everything is calculated and controllable. The heart of Levinas’s ethics lies in the encounter with the Other, symbolized by the Face (le Visage). This face breaks into my world and places a moral demand upon me. In the weightless, virtual space of the interactive sculpture, this face is absent. The user floats in an aesthetic experience that may be liberating but is also potentially ethically blind. In VR, the Other is often reduced to an object or is entirely absent, causing ethical responsibility toward fellow human beings to risk evaporating. As an artist, I position myself at the intersection of these two apparent opposites. My work is a deliberate exploration of the Nietzschean intoxication; the interactive sculpture invites radical sovereignty, in which the user leaves behind the constraints of moral gravity. Yet this digital autonomy is not an end in itself, but a question. By seeking out the ‘Totality’ of technology, I make the absence of Levinasian ‘Infinity’ tangible. My stance is one of critical presence: I use technology to explore the limits of the subject while reminding the viewer of the vulnerability left behind outside the headset. For me, art is the place where we may float with Nietzsche, only to step back into reality with the ethical weight of Levinas — enriched by the awareness of what it truly means to be ‘present’.