The Face of the Other

As a commonly used term, the term ‘face’ (le visage), as Levinas employs it, may easily generate some misunderstanding as to its precise meaning. In fact, this could be said of many aspects of Levinas’s philosophy. One can easily overlook the subtlety of his thoughts and make some hasty comparison between his and others’s philosophy. Just as one tends to think of ethics as consisting in living out universal moral principles, one might as well conceive of moral consciousness in Levinas as an experience of values, for instance, justice, goodness, impartiality, etc. This tendency is quite strong because it is around such moral values that Western moral philosophies are generally centered. For Levinas, however, moral consciousness is not primarily about an experience of values, but rather “an access to exterior being” (DF, 409). This exterior being is what Levinas calls the ‘face’ (le visage), which is “the way in which the Other [l’Autre] presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me” (TeI, 21/TaI, 50). That is to say, the face is the way in which the Other manifests herself before me that goes beyond my ability to evaluate, comprehend, and thematize her. This general account of the face of the Other later allows Levinas to conceive of the face as signifying transcendence. But how exactly are we to understand what Levinas means by the face?

I find Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front very helpful in showing how the face both manifests and reveals transcendence.106

As a soldier on the

106_{For this inspiration I am deeply indebted to Merold Westphal who has shown how well-suited this story}

is for understanding Levinas’s account of the ethical encounter with the Other. See Merold Westphal,

Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 3

battlefront, the leading character in the story first thinks mainly about killing the enemy. When he finds himself separated from his comrades and hiding in a crater full of water and mud, he starts thinking about how to defend himself: “If anyone jumps in here I will go for him. It hammers in my forehead; at once, stab him clean through the throat, so that he cannot call out; that’s the only way; he will be just as frightened as I am; when in terror we fall upon one another, then I must be first.”107 _{Here the soldier is utterly}

thematizing the human Other for his own interest. He has not encountered the face yet, and therefore, the Other remains impersonal to him. But when a body of an enemy soldier does fall over him, he begins to feel the shock: “The man gurgles. It sounds to me as though he bellows, every gasping breath is like a cry, a thunder – but it is only my heart pounding. I want to stop his mouth, stuff it with earth, stab him again, he must be quiet, he is betraying me” (155). He spends the next hours watching the wounded soldier closely. He even tries to comfort him, certainly not without fear. But finally the three stabs into the already dying body end everything. The whole event that leads to the violent death begins to torture this character: “This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts” (158). What is most touching, and indeed relevant to our study here, is the speech he gives to the dead man:

“Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that

lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand- grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us

that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we

107

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, the illustrated edition, trans. A.W. Wheen (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1958), 154. The page numbers following each quote from this story are taken from this edition.

have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform

you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert” (159-60, italics mine).

This speech contains some important aspects of Levinas’s notion of the face. First, we often see and treat the other person with our own idea or abstraction about him or her. The intersubjective relation occurs with mediation, that is, through our thinking about the person. But in truth it cannot even be properly called a relation because we have not met the person yet. A proper relation, in Levinas’s view, can only begin with the encounter with the face of the other person. Second, the face of the Other opens up a new kind of relation. It helps us see the other person as real, as another human being like us. Fellowship and kinship begin to form. A dimension of transcendence starts to open up. Third, we always come too late to this realization because we dwell too long, and comfortably, in our own idea about the Other. Only through the encounter with the naked face can we experience the meaning of ethical transcendence.

It is very important to note here that what Levinas means by the ‘face’ is beyond the physical form of it. One immediate misunderstanding of the meaning of the face occurs when one simply identifies it with the physical face of the people we encounter in daily life. In this regard one assigns a narrow and common meaning to the face, pointing to the frontal area of the body where the eyes and the mouth are located and the place people will look at in order to identify a person.108_{Such a mistake occurs quite naturally}

because that is how human beings encounter one another. With Levinas’s background in phenomenology, one may even think that what the philosopher is doing is a

108

See Bernhard Waldenfels, “Levinas and the Face of the Other, “The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, eds. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 64.

phenomenology of the face. Levinas himself rejects the description of his project as a phenomenology of the face because phenomenology always deals with what appears through perception, whereas what he attempts to point to is precisely beyond the physical appearance of the face. One cannot see and touch the face, he says, precisely because it is “present in its refusal to be contained”(TeI, 211/TaI, 194). That is why he argues that the real encounter with the Other can only take place beyond the physical appearance of the face that we come across every day: “The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes! When one observes the color of the eyes, one is not in social relationship with the Other. The relation with the face can surely be dominated by perception, but what is specifically the face is what cannot be reduced to that” (EeI, 79- 80/EaI, 85-6). This is not to say that the alterity of the Other lies simply beneath the face that one encounters. Nor does it consist in the condensation of some invisible aspects of the Other. One could say that the face, in Levinas’s view, expresses the very otherness of the Other, irreducible to anything visible or invisible beneath it.109 _{When the main}

protagonist in Remarque’s story realizes that the dead man is another human being like himself, such a realization occurs not because he sees that the enemy has a physical face just like he does. There is rather something else that shines through the face of the dead soldier that brings the main character to the realization about the fellowship. The protagonist begins to experience transcendence through the face of the soldier.

109

See Jacob Meskin “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in the Early Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas,”

Levinas Studies: An Annual Review, vol. 2, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press,

Here we may sense that Levinas wants to take us to the realm beyond phenomenology because he clearly does not think that the phenomenological method is adequate to express the proper meaning of the face. In Otherwise than Being he describes the face as “the very collapse of phenomenality” [la défection même de la phénoménalité] (AE, 141/OB, 88). The signification of the face, for Levinas, cannot be gleaned through vision, which is basically “a search for adequation,” because vision is “what par excellence absorbs being” (EeI, 81/EaI, 87). The absorption of being, Levinas would argue, will lead to totalization, which cannot be ethical. That is why the encounter with the face cannot take place at the level of pure perception: “Meeting the face is not of the order of pure and simple perception, of the intentionality which goes toward adequation” (EeI, 92/EaI, 96).

In an important way Levinas holds that the face is “signification without context” or that it is “meaning all by itself” (EeI, 80/EaI, 86). What he means is that we often encounter a person through a particular context in such a way that the designation of the person is intelligible only when seen within such a context. The ‘character’ (personnage) of a person as a professor of philosophy makes sense only within the context of the academic world. Other designations or characters such as the son or daughter of this person, or the president of such organization, are always relative to particular contexts. The face, on the contrary, is never within a particular context, or relative to it; it is meaningful in and of itself. The face destroys and surpasses any plastic image one has of it; it “expresses itself,” καθ’ αὐτό (TeI, 43/TaI, 51). Consequently, toi, c’est toi, Levinas

would say, or a face is “the very identity of a being.”110 For this very reason one can say that the face is beyond the description of phenomenology because it is not ‘seen.’ The face always resists the absorption of thought to become its content; it is “the desensibilization, the dematerialization of the sense datum.”111_{Uncontainable, it takes us}

beyond being. That is why for Levinas the relation to the face is immediately ethical. One clearly cannot kill such a face. As the main character in Remarque’s story puts it, what one can kill is the abstraction or the idea about the other person, but not the face as such, or more precisely, not transcendence that shines through it.

It may sometimes seem, however, that Levinas is doing a phenomenology of the face, which he has denied. In one of his interviews, for example, Levinas speaks of three moments of the epiphany of the face, namely, its rectitude of exposure and defenselessness, its facing, and its demand on me.112 _{But I would argue that the}

phenomenological investigation of the face serves only as a springboard for a further and deeper analysis and discussion about the alterity and transcendence of the Other. Through such an analysis Levinas attempts to take us to the deeper meaning of the face and to speak of the ethical demand of the Other expressed in the face. This method will eventually take us beyond phenomenology.

The first moment of the epiphany of the face, according to Levinas, is its uprightness and rectitude, which signifies its exposure and defenselessness. One cannot see one’s own face and has no control over it, as it is always exposed to the gaze of the

110_{Levinas, “The I and the Totality,” ENP, 43/ENT, 33.} 111

Levinas, “The I and the Totality,” ENP, 43/ENT, 33.

112

Levinas, “The Philosopher and Death,” IRB, 127. See also “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” EDE, 240/CPP, 55.

various others. The human face thus occupies such a position that it is always exposed to threat and danger, and even death: “A being face forward precisely as if it were exposed to some threat at point-blank range, as if it presented itself wholly delivered up to death. I sometimes ask myself whether the idea of the straight line – the shortest distance between two points – is not originally the line according to which the face that I encounter is exposed to death. It is probably the manner in which my death regards and intends me, but I do not see my own face” (IRB, 127). That is why Levinas often speaks of the nakedness or the nudity of the face, which suggests its defenselessness before any threat, for instance, “This nudity which is a call to me – an appeal but also an imperative – I name face.”113

Faced with death, the rectitude of the face shows its mortality, namely, the possibility of its murder. It is on the defenselessness and mortality of the face that Levinas’s ethics is based. Thus, the ethical meaning of the face, as Edith Wyschogrod observes, lies in the human face “not as a form apprehended in perception but as an ethical datum exuded, as it were, from the exposure and defenselessness of the Other.”114

It is in this context that the injunction “Thou shall not kill” is to be understood.

The second moment of the epiphany of the face lies in the face-to-face encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the interpersonal relationship does not consist in thinking about the self and the Other together, which grounds many ethical theories, but rather to be facing. The true union or true togetherness is thus “not a togetherness of synthesis, but a togetherness of face to face” (EeI, 71/EaI, 77). This facing of the Other, or the fact that

113

“Being-for-the-Other,” IRB, 115.

114

Edith Wyschogrod, “Preface to the Second Edition.” Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical

he or she faces, provides the irreducible and ultimate experience of the ethical relation. The ethical relation is one in which I am related to the face of the Other (le visage d’autrui). The face-to-face encounter becomes for Levinas the source and origin of ethics, beyond any attempt to formulate the universal moral principles. In this sense ethics comes “not as a secondary layer, above an abstract reflection on the totality and its dangers”; it has “an independent and preliminary range. First philosophy is an ethics” (EeI, 71/EaI, 77). The way in which the person faces, that he or she is alone in doing so, at the same time becomes the measure for assessing the degree of violence that is penetrated in death (IRB, 127).

The third moment is that the face makes a demand on me. The face of the Other before me does not remain silent. It speaks, and when it does, my being is interrupted by the Other: “The face looks at me and calls to me. It lays claim to me. What does it ask? Not to leave it alone” (IRB, 127; TeI, 61/TaI, 66). The fact that the face speaks, according to Levinas, renders possible and begins all discourse (EeI, 82/EaI, 87). The proper response to the request not to be left alone would be to say, “Here I am” [Me Voici] (EeI, 93/EaI, 97). It suggests the availability and readiness of the self to be responsible for the Other. In his later work, Otherwise than Being, Levinas will speak of the disposition of the subject to be a hostage to the Other, ready to become a substitute for the Other. For Levinas, to give the response “here I am” is already to encounter the face of the Other (IRB, 127).

We see here that for Levinas the presence of the face is not one signification among others, but rather the “first” signification or expression of transcendence.115_Taking

us beyond intentionality, or beyond being, the face immediately breaks up a totality that has created an unethical situation (cf. TeI, 9-10/TaI, 24). This immediacy is for Levinas due to the “obsessive proximity” of the Other that skips the stage of consciousness. The approach of the Other through the face is so excessive that consciousness always comes to late for a relation with the Other: “The neighbor is not to the measure and rhythm of consciousness.” This is why Levinas calls the face “the auto-signifyingness par excellence.”116

It is the immediate and excessive proximity of the face that makes possible the disruption of any attempt for totalization. The totalitizing force, the anonymous, the impersonal, all these render the face of the Other faceless. All these belong to a “philosophy of the neuter,” which includes the Heideggerian Being and Hegel’s impersonal reason. It is precisely this kind of philosophy and its derivations that the face challenges:

Materialism does not lie in the discovery of the primordial function of the sensibility, but in the primacy of the Neuter… To begin with the face as a source from which all meaning appears, the face in its absolute nudity, in its destitution as a head that does not find a place to lay itself, is to affirm that being enacted in the relation between men, that Desire rather than need commands acts. Desire, an aspiration that does not proceed from a lack – metaphysics – is the desire of a person (TeI, 333/TaI,298).

The face of the Other, in other words, opens up the dimension of infinity, which puts an end to “the irresistible imperialism of the Same and the I” (EDE 240/CPP, 55). In this

115

TeI, 194/TaI, 218. See Anthony J. Steinbock, “Face and Revelation: Levinas on Teaching as Way-

Faring,” Addressing Levinas, 127.

way the face makes possible the transcendence of an I. Only an I, says Levinas, can respond to the injunction of a face (TeI, 341/TaI, 305). Such injunction is not based on some physical force, but rather ethical one, as it is marked by infinity: “This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in his face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder’” (TeI, 217/TaI, 199). The face, with all its resistance to violence, challenges me, puts me into question, and invites me to responsibility from which I cannot run away: “The epiphany of the absolutely Other is a face by which the Other challenges and commands me through his nakedness, through his destitution.”117_{It is thus through the face of the Other, according to Levinas,}

that ethics becomes meaningful.