This article examines the issues surrounding transcendence, the Other and base materialism in relation to Georges Bataille’s heterology and Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the face of the Other as infinity and transcendence. The article concludes that there is no facet of human existence – including work and the economy – which is not touched by transcendence, and that the idea that there are societies based in subsistence and in nothing but a ‘struggle for existence’ is a prejudice of modernity.