Both historical and recent developments of quantitative research in linguistics brought out a great amount of data without a unifying method. The older data have been computed mainly by hand from limited samples of shorter texts, with limited possibilities of data combinations. Newer data based on large corpora offer a great number of quantitative characteristics even in the most different combinations, but they have been mainly extracted from heterogeneous text materials. Statistically, the older data can be considered as less exact. New data, with respect to enormous extent of corpora, can be considered as most exact. Therefore, problems arise not only because of the above mentioned methodological disparities of old and new approaches of computation, but also because of different details studied or because of limited possibilities of direct comparison. Deeper statistical and probabilistic questions arise too, and their discussion should not be ignored.
It is clear that Levinas’s critique of the dominance within Western philosophy of the concept of totality in Totality and Infinity was intended as a response to totalitarian-ism, but the extent to which this determines the organization of the book and the way in which this takes place has been largely misconceived. This is because of the failure to take seriously the opening question of whether or not we are duped by morality. The ethical resistance of the face of the Other does not adequately address that question until morality is secured against the challenge issued by a philosophy that equates being with war and that takes place only through the account of the infinite time of fecundity. Fecundity concretized in the family is the site of resistance to the totalitarian tendencies of any state that seeks for the sake of its preservation to legislate procreation. Hence fecundity and Eros are “beyond the face.” This reading draws on the important role given to fecundity in Time and the Other as well as the texts newly available in the first three volumes of Levinas’s Oeuvres.