Introduction
Levinas is a philosopher of startling sincerity. But despite his earnestness and appeal among continental philosophers, the theological dimension of his thinking and rhetoric causes many would-be sympathizers to shy away from him. The notion that “the face of the Other” gains its ultimate significance by revealing the presence of divinity is seen as needless hyperbole. I think Levinas need not be so radical in his account of the face, that his ethics could retain its force even if it abandoned its theological foundation for a secular one. Such a feat impels the work of Alphonso Lingis, and the following chapter shows at length how this is done.
The present chapter offers a critical analysis of Levinas’s conception of the face as revelation and suggests a reappraisal of the face-to-face encounter that is informed by Levinas’s analysis of sensibility. One could see it as providing a phenomenological, or perhaps realist, reading of the face that substitutes for Levinas’s “metaphysical” reading. Focusing on the materiality of the ethical relation, it adduces some of the dangers of his construal of the face and explores an alternative interpretation of faciality; this interpretation is not a departure from Levinas, but rather a defense of what Robert Bernasconi has called the “empiricist” reading.1 By refocusing his project on the sensuous aspects of faciality, Levinas is better prepared to confront criticism from potential detractors in feminist and critical race theory, or other fields that emphasize the corporeality of relations. For this, it must be shown that the material complexity of the Other is what places him/her beyond comprehension, without putting them beyond contact. A mundane ethical contact which forgets about divine commandments can be assembled from Levinas’s own tools, thus displacing from his obsession with transcendence. This requires thinking the face as immanent infinity, or as a sensuously textured presence that gestures toward countless faces in their stark mortality.
Totalities
Totality and Infinity is a work driven by its critique of systematic ontology, Hegel and Heidegger in particular, both of whom stand as representatives of what Levinas terms “totality.” Totality is shorthand for any closed system which leaves no room for radical alterity. Idealist philosophies, with their reductive conceptual schemata and all-inclusive representations, are a favorite target for Levinas. The Hegelian totality, for instance, considers the world as the manifestation of an organic human spirit incapable of seeing the world as irrational or beyond cognition, that is, as other. What Levinas finds objectionable about Hegel, as well as Heidegger, is that they build ontological systems that reduce or exclude otherness and difference in the name of universal sameness. Levinas opposes totalizing systems with the concept of infinity, which is emblematic of that which cannot be enclosed within a system because its very being is constituted by its excess. Think Descartes’s idea of God in the Third Meditation. Infinity is what overflows the finitude of any system; infinity is that which resists inclusion. The most prominent instantiation of infinity, at least in Totality and Infinity and several other important essays, appears in the revelation of “the face” (le visage). Levinas does not mean the fleshy, tangible face that we encounter when we look at another person. Nor is the face a simple metaphor, although it is a metaphor. The face for Levinas is much more: the face is (and is not) the face of God, a divine and disincarnate presence which speaks, but does not appear, through the eyes of another person.2 The elevation of the face to such a height can be difficult to accept, but it is constitutive of the very force of Levinasian philosophy. To understand the ethical function of the face, it is necessary to see how it inter-rupts—as infinity and transcendence—and precedes an ontology like Heidegger’s.
The exigency of infinity in Levinas’s ethics is fuelled by the tendency of Western philosophy to place ontology before ethics. Ethics is always made to conform itself to the guidelines of ontology, which inevitably seeks to comprehend individual beings within a general system of being. By forcing every being to conform to a single system, ontology necessarily does violence to whatever resists enclosure, whether by referring its singularity to a general form or by excluding it as nonsensical. Ontological closure needs to be overcome, according to Levinas, by installing ethics as first philosophy, thus guaranteeing a minimization of violence in our philosophical systems and political institutions.3
Putting ethics before ontology means ensuring that difference is not effaced by the normative standards of life in common or the world of the same. Ontology must conform to ethics, not the other way around.
The philosophy of intersubjectivity, when guided by ontology instead of ethics, runs the risk of building a world that is intolerant of alterity, which allows no place for the Other as other. Even, and especially, Heideggerian ontology enacts a violent exclusion of this kind. Heidegger’s philosophy, and by implication his politics, institutes a “pagan climate” that Levinas considers intolerable and genuinely dangerous.4 Being is the oppressive specter of Heidegger’s system—its oppression is precisely its neutral universal gaze, which remains blind to the infinite distance which separates my subjectivity from others. In his interrogation of being, according to Levinas, Heidegger fails to comprehend the elevation of the Other at the same time that he succeeds in assimilating the transcendence of the Other into the immanent structure of being-in-the-world.5 Levinas cites the basic structure of Dasein (as care, Sorge) and the exposition of Mitsein (being-with) in Being and Time to illustrate the ethical neutrality of Heideggerian ontology: both of these structures refer intersubjectivity to the immanent structures of ontology, and therefore remain silent about what lies beyond being. “In Heidegger coexistence is, to be sure, taken as a relationship with the Other irreducible to objective cognition; but in the final analysis it also rests on the relationship with being in general, on comprehension, on ontology.”6 Before Sorge and Mitsein, the ethical relation structures the world-in-common and makes it inhabitable; it is the Good, beyond being, which nourishes our concernful being-with. This is Levinas’s claim.
Levinas calls the face-to-face the ethical relation because it is the site where the Other calls the autonomous ego to account for itself, to be accountable for its freedom and its personal projections. The Other does not properly appear as an object for the ego, but nevertheless contests the field of visibility which the ego projects by claiming that field of visibility as its own. A struggle ensues. But the contestation brought upon the ego by the Other is itself incontestable because the ego contested remains ignorant of who is contesting it. Or, as Marion says,
I do not accede to the other by seeing more, better, or otherwise, but by renouncing mastery over the visible so as to see objects within it, and thus by letting myself be glimpsed by a gaze which sees me without my seeing it—a gaze which, invisibly and beyond my aims, silently swallows me up and submerges me, whether I know it or not, whether or not I want it to do so.7
The ethicality of the face-to-face encounter derives from its asymmetrical structure, or the fact that an ego is unable to comprehend the Other beyond the objective presence which appears to it as that which remains concealed. As in Descartes, it bears the structure of a finite intellect coming into contact with the idea of God: an infinite depth is found in the face of the Other.8 The encounter with the infinite renders the finite ego passive. Passivity is the only mode possible for a finite intellect prompted to accommodate an infinite power, and the condition of possibility for responsibility.9 Because they lack this asymmetrical dimension, Heidegger’s neutral ontology of being-with and Buber’s symmetrical I-Thou dialogue, for example, do not qualify the intersubjective relation as immediately ethical.10
In Heidegger, being-with is always comprehended against the horizon of equipmentality, of the Zuhandenheit he sees as primary to Dasein’s understanding of its being-in-the-world.11 Since the Other always appears within a system of pre-understood referentiality, the Other is able to communicate and interact with me. The equipmental horizon is basic to the ontological structure of Dasein: all of Dasein’s relations must pass through this tool-system, and thus through being. For Levinas, the obligatory passage through being which Heidegger forces every existent to undergo is the neutralization of otherness, the necessary reduction of the truth of the Other to a system of established references. Hannah Arendt describes Heidegger’s system of equipment in the following terms:
[T]here exists a web of human relationships which is, as it were, woven by deeds and words of innumerable persons, by the living as well as by the dead. Every deed and every new beginning falls into an already existing web where it nevertheless somehow starts a new process that will affect many others even beyond those with whom the agent comes into direct contact.12
That every deed triggers a new series of effects is what makes Levinas eager to formulate an adequate theory of justice. The unforeseeable effects which issue from Dasein’s freedom and the analysis of intersubjectivity are never called before an ethical tribunal, precisely because Heidegger’s conception of Mitsein remains at the level of a universal law. For Levinas, its anonymity is precisely its inadequacy: “Universality presents itself as impersonal; and this is another inhumanity.”13 This means that the freedom of Dasein is never really held responsible for its actions, because its actions never run up against a vulnerable and affected Other, which is the vehicle of justice in Levinas’s metaphysics.14
To counteract Heidegger’s inhumanity without completely dismissing his ontology, Levinas puts the face of existents before being, thus reversing the Heideggerian model. Levinas needs the face to condition, or “signify beyond,” the meaning of any hermeneutic or phenomenological horizon.15 Not included in this horizon, however—and this is representative of everything that is insufficient in Heidegger’s account of being-in-the-world and being-with-others—are the concrete needs of human beings, which Heidegger brackets from his ontological considerations as merely “ontic” concerns. As Levinas says in Totality and Infinity, “Dasein is never hungry.” With this pithy remark, Levinas means to charge Heidegger with a decisive unconcern for everyday human needs. This is Heidegger’s fatal flaw. But is it not also Levinas’s? Does he not, somewhat tragically, commit the same error in his metaphysics of the face despite the extensive attention he gives to needfulness in his first magnum opus? That is to say, is it not the case that the face of the Other which summons my responsibility is superseded by the more-than-human face of God, thereby destroying the singular humanity of the Other’s imperative?
Elevation and Recognition
Levinas believes he can grant ethical significance to the face only by elevating it to a level beyond any representational system of knowledge. This means that the face cannot be allowed to appear; it may only signify. Or, as Edith Wyschogrod puts it, “the face breaks with the sensible form which appears to contain it by addressing us, by soliciting a relationship with it which cannot be expressed in terms of enjoyment or knowledge.”16 Levinas must therefore give the face a metaphysical, as opposed to ontological, meaning. Ontology, in Levinas’s terms, confines us to immanence, whereas metaphysics refers our gaze beyond the face of the Other, to the realm of transcendence, which is precisely where the singularity of the Other resides. The singularity of the Other is shut away behind the eyes, at an infinite remove from any representation the ego could construct. The metaphysical elevation of the face allows Levinas to avoid the inevitably agonistic forms of intersubjectivity that arise in symmetrical models, such as those found in rationalistic discourse ethics, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, or even Buber’s dialogism. By rendering the ethical relation asymmetrical, Levinas can argue that all war or agonism presupposes peaceful solicitations, and therefore every encounter is derivative of a peace that I am obligated to maintain.17 I must always assume, or rather admit, that the Other approaches me peacefully. Ethics becomes for Levinas an ideal metaphysical communion, a nonviolent relation where two transcendences meet without touching. Ethics bridges the chasm across which the Other obligates me to respond and constitutes the otherwise neutral realm of intersubjectivity.
I reject the distinction which Levinas draws between ontology and metaphysics, but I only want to say in defense that by making the face a transcendental condition of subjectivity, Levinas gives an ontological meaning to it, if by “ontology” we mean the question of what is, as it is. Calling his ethical project “metaphysics” seems to put certain questions out of play and to distance Levinas from the history of metaphysics traditionally conceived, thereby weakening the power of his argument, which seems to demand an uncritical reception. In short, if Levinas wants to redefine “metaphysics,” he may, but this seems to involve a private language that fails to communicate with other metaphysicians. This failure of communication is not a foregone conclusion, however. I think he has much to teach metaphysics as it is usually understood.
Levinas’s account of the face strips the face of its phenomenality, and therefore renders the face unrecognizable in its singularity. This is problematic. It compromises the ability of the face to appear to us within immanence, and therefore divests the face of its phenomenologically evident imperative. Just as Heidegger’s Dasein is never hungry, Levinas’s face never laughs or cries; its eyes do not shimmer before our own. As he emphatically puts it in Ethics and Infinity, “The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes!”18 Or, in Totality and Infinity: “The eye does not shine; it speaks.”19 Marion is reading Levinas correctly when he writes that to face the Other is to concentrate one’s gaze on the pupil of the eye, the precise vanishing point of the Other: “here, for the first time, in the very midst of the visible, there is nothing to see, except an invisible and untargetable void.”20
The eyes modestly conceal the Other who faces, but they at the same time reveal an abstract system of subjection which contains both enabling and disabling components.21 The eyes are essential to the functioning of this system, acting as both window (onto the unknown) and mirror (of a discriminatory social order). It is dangerous to assume that these eyes necessarily conceal a peaceful interlocutor.
Metaphysics does for Levinas’s face what ontology does for anxiety, boredom, and wonder in Heidegger: it transforms a mundane event into a powerful philosophical concept. But it does so at the price of entering it into a conceptual system which abstracts from the everyday functioning of discriminatory practices. Levinas, no less than Plato, Heidegger, or Hegel is a systematic thinker. The nodes of his conceptual web can be enumerated by anyone who reads him critically. This means that Levinas is guilty of the same charge he levels at Heidegger: ontology-building. But Levinas supplements his ontology with a theological ground, so as not to diminish its ethical import. This means, in my view, that we must be wary of what the eyes of the Other command. The face is not necessarily an unequivocal phenomenon, but it can be constituted as such, and arguably always is—our faces often give us away, operating as they do as the differential that faithfully interpellates us (“ambushes” us, as George Yancy would say)22 in the racial order. This is the danger of Levinas’s ontology.
The face betrays its real significance, both its equivocal and unequivocal contours, if and only if we notice the “color” (race, gender, class, etc.) of its eyes, its skin, and its command. Ethics is always bound on one side by an imperative to do justice to the particularity of the Other and on the other side by the motivation to see in him or her the common goodness in everyone. This is the double-bind imposed on us by the actuality of real ethical problems, which are always refracted through a complex socio-historical lens and which resist reduction to any ahistorical formula. Specifically, as Patricia Williams has put it, “This tension between material conditions and what one is cultured to see or not see…is a tension faced by any society driven by bitter histories of imposed hierarchy.”23 Forsaking either of these elements, the particular/historical or the universal, releases us from the basic tension and inevitable complexity that makes ethical matters so difficult to resolve.
Bernasconi contends that Levinas’s remark about the color of the Other’s eyes is not meant as a practical injunction and should not be taken as a dismissal of the ethical valence of the phenomenal characteristics that identify someone as a member of a particular (racial, ethnic, religious, etc.) group. Rather, it is meant to suggest that it is incumbent upon us not to allow the generalized social markings of the Other to efface the singular interruption that every Other introduces into the social order. As Bernasconi says, singularity should be understood “not as a phenomenon that can be unveiled, but as an enigma.”24 But it could be argued that enigmas are practically unsatisfactory and leave too much to presumption, a loyal ally of discrimination. To allow the Other to remain enigmatic and absolutely beyond recognition—as Levinas must, since this is what makes his philosophy innovative—is to claim that the imperative the Other commands issues from elsewhere, from some unmarked locale. That is, some place where my body cannot be and therefore cannot hear.25 How do I even begin to respond appropriately to such a call? When the alterity of the Other is deemed absolute, we overlook the fact that racism often thrives on such a disregard for the phenomenality of the face; it “bypasses the attachment to social identity that is often found on the part of the oppressed”26 and leaves us paralyzed, awaiting the revelation that will enable us to respond. It seems to me that Levinas ought to have made the color of the Other’s eyes—along with the rest of his/her phenomenal features—an essential feature of the Other’s singularity. Even if he does not completely dismiss such features, Levinas does not attribute enough significance to the phenomenal in his account of faciality. I will now try to make good on this criticism.
Hyperbole of the Face
The face breaks up the totality of being, bursts apart the order of appearance and phenomenality. This breakup is the institution of divine law, the ethical command. Levinas’s face has no gender or race; it is beyond human aspects; it does not contort with exasperation or fear, its speech is rendered voiceless—the Other disappears into a world without qualities or coordinates, beyond recognition and beyond immediate contact. With one exception: Levinas says that it is at the level of discourse or speech that we remain bound to the Other. Discourse—i.e., a “discourse before discourse”—is presupposed as the sine qua non of human relation. “Better than comprehension,” Levinas says, “discourse relates with what remains essentially transcendent.”27 Speech reaches through the phenomenality of the face and introduces the Other.28 Or, more precisely, the condition of speech accomplishes this. As Peperzak puts it, in speech “I address myself to another person who reveals that my monopoly has come to an end. [The Other] robs me of my sovereignty, but thereby frees me from solitude.”29 Speech presupposes my debt of freedom to the Other, which I am made to answer for when the Other approaches. This is the performative value proper to the face, and what makes its speech an inescapable—because transcendental—imperative.
Speech, the primordial ethical bond which comes before any ontology of intersubjectivity or Mitsein, is a language that no one can hear or listen to. Speech has no distinct graphical or phonetic marks; it lacks a certain timbre or pitch, a discrete dialect, diction, or slang. Reading Levinas, discourse and speech come off as either pure formalities or the mute pronouncements of a God who may or may not speak to us any longer. Moreover, “discourse” seems to contain a troubling paradox. If Levinas’s discourse (in text and concept) is of a monotheistic propriety (Judeo-Christianity), does it not belong to a discursive regime that remains deaf to pagan, polytheistic, and atheistic interventions, which is to say, to the other discourses which both enable and contest it as its other? If so, three questions arise: first, given this paradox, what might be the legitimating authority which nevertheless underwrites the performativity of the face? Might not the imperative power of speech be located elsewhere? Second, are we ready to concede that a transcendental speech, a language prior to the inarticulate stammering of a voice in distress, is what charges the face with its moral significance? Third, is the transcendental value of Levinas’s conception of discourse not undone by the religious discourse from which it issues?
What Levinas identifies as Saying, which opposes itself to the dead letter of the Said, is meant to breathe life into the formal structure30 of discourse and rational dialogue.31 This is why in Otherwise than Being, he writes that: “Signification, the one-for-the-other, has meaning only among beings of flesh and blood.”32
Saying, in its materiality, indicates the corporeal form of communication, the first-personal appeal that the Other makes upon us—I hasten to add, through the corporeal phenomenon of the voice33 —when it addresses us face-to-face. It must be suggested, however, that the privilege granted to Saying in Otherwise than Being is compromised by the superhuman status afforded the face in Totality and Infinity. This draws our attention back to the problematic elevation of the concept of the face, which Deleuze and Guattari can help us understand in their critique of faciality in A Thousand Plateaus. We will return to this in a moment.
Levinas needs to hyperbolize the face in order to buttress his thinking of the Other. Why is this? Because the face must express, above all else, the command not to kill. And this command, this moral law, as we know, does not resonate with us as an absolute unless it issues from God. Failing that, the moral law must be given some other transcendental significance. Otherwise than Being displays Levinas’s attempt to find this other ground. This is one of Levinas’s most substantial innovations, one which seems to have become necessary for ethics to resume in the wake of Nietzsche. The divine command certainly does not come out of the ontological horizon of Heidegger, which only admits what can be brought into the light and comprehended. God and His Word are exempt from this display, so ethical truth must be revealed otherwise. Levinas entrusts the face to present us with the ethical command that always already sustains us. Discourse carries the divine Word which gives the face its immediate ethical meaning and is presupposed by any horizon of understanding. It is what allows us to apprehend the truest meaning of the Other and to know the “temptation and impossibility” of killing the Other. All of this transpires precisely because my freedom and power to kill is made possible by the nourishment the Other has always already provided for me. The transcendental character of the Other, then, places it beyond any historicized act of violence which I might commit.34
Impotent Violence
We catch a glimpse of the sensuous form of the Other’s imperative, and Levinas’s supersession of its features, when he problematizes the murderous act. He needs the face of the Other to be the revelation of an exteriority beyond comprehension, beyond freedom, and beyond dialogue. The Other becomes the condition of possibility for knowledge, action, and communication. The face must become the expression of transcendence if it is going to systematically dismantle the power of a violence that would harm, or worse, destroy the Other. He thus makes the ontology of freedom dependent upon the ethics of alterity.
Levinas’s ethics dissolves the power of the murderer by making the act of murder illogical, literally without sense, and therefore powerless.35 The murderer does not realize that he has been rendered passive before the Other. Every attempt to murder becomes, in Levinas’s eyes, a senseless and impotent act, one that completely misunderstands the metaphysics of intersubjectivity.36 This is because what the murderer intends to destroy is beyond the scope of intentionality and cannot be represented, much less seized; the hatred or contempt which is felt by the murderer is always mistaken, directed at an Other whose reality resides beyond the reach of violence. The command not to kill comes from beyond the totality of intentional acts and references.37 This account of the Other should give us pause. It requires us to admit that the one we love or despise is not the one we see, embrace, or curse. That person is just a façade, our contact with them a dissimulation. Can we trust this person? It seems that for Levinas we must. But does this mean that the killing of another person is an illusion? If so, what is the meaning of murder, beyond a failure to accomplish a violent contact? The metaphysics of murder evinces the importance of hospitality. The exigency of the unconditional hospitality advocated by Levinas cannot be dismissed, but it also cannot be uncritically accepted or delved into here. It must suffice for us to consider a conditional form of hospitality toward the phenomenon of the face.38
The problem of the authenticity and authority of the command, as well as the ontotheological account of the Other, can be circumvented if we prioritize the face in its material expression. Would not the difficulty of killing another who looks straight into your eyes be enough to call you, the would-be murderer, into question? Levinas says as much in “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity”: the Other “can also…oppose himself to me beyond all measure, with the total uncoveredness and nakedness of his defenseless eyes, the straightforwardness, the absolute frankness of his gaze.”39 At this moment Levinas finds the Other not in the face, but in the vulnerable mortality of the eyes. But despite his acknowledgement of the affective recoil induced in an executioner when he or she witnesses the facial expressions of the condemned, Levinas finds it necessary to once again go beyond the expressive surface of the eyes. He dislocates expressivity from its immanence and, in the case of murder, dissociates it from the imminence of bodily death. This gesture of transcendence is unnecessary: Levinas acknowledges that the employment of execution-style killing testifies to the adequacy of the face in its singularity and specificity. In the execution, the executioner is hooded or the condemned is turned away—in both scenarios, no facial expressions are exchanged between murderer and murdered. The contours of the face speak a language all their own, a language more textured than the “epiphany” of discourse. This language is not lacking in practical effects.
Facial Deviance and Racial Deviants
The divine command of the face provokes a host of questions regarding the authenticity of the divine voice, and the authority of the one summoned, that Kierkegaard famously depicts (and Derrida scrutinizes in The Gift of Death) in his portrayal of Abraham’s dilemma in Fear and Trembling. Augustine already captures the problematic in his Soliloquies, when he writes: “Of a sudden, someone spoke to me—perhaps it was myself, perhaps some other, outside me or within, I do not know.”40 The problem of authenticity notwithstanding, when raised to the level of the Absolute, which inevitably means absolute standard, the face presents us with a whole series of problems which we will call problems of facial deviance. Levinas’s contention that the face is a revelation shows its weakness when confronted by race and feminist philosophies. This is where we see his ethical metaphysics contested by an infinity of complexions which Levinas has to subsume, for “economic” reasons, under a single ethical principle: the face. Deleuze and Guattari begin to unpack facial deviance in a chapter from A Thousand Plateaus entitled “Year Zero: Faciality.” We should digest their criticism before reappraising faciality.
The face, for Deleuze and Guattari, operates as a transcendental signifier that opens a semiotic system tyrannized by the face of Christ. The face of Christ acts as a normative horizon in the racial and moral registers. “The face is not a universal,” they say. “It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad cheeks and the black holes of his eyes. The face is Christ.”41 The face, for Deleuze and Guattari, acts as a violent and oppressive sign that calls to order, with a univocal pronouncement, the command of the white man, authorized as he is by his resemblance to the Christian Savior. What they intend to adduce through this metonymy is the historical presence of a racial order supported by sociopolitical, religious, economic, and metaphysical components which always lead us back into the colonialism of the West and its normative horizon.42
In one capacity, the face institutes a hegemonic order that measures otherness according to a centralized standard: the white, male, European face. The “light” and the “dark” are indexed to this norm. “If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances…are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category.”43 Critical race theorist George Yancy amplifies this point in his reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Under Yancy’s reading, the “blue eyes” of the white man—a signifier which functions as metonymically in the racial register as “Christ” does for Deleuze and Guattari—enact on the black body “the normalizing disciplinary techniques of whiteness,” rendering it “ugly” in its very blackness when measured against the universal beauty of whiteness.44 As Yancy might put it, the body of the black man is reflected back upon him by the blue-eyed gaze of the white man or woman, thus returning his black body to him with a “deviant” valuation. The references to Foucault are explicit here,45 and they alert us to the danger which lurks in the eyes of the Other, especially when the complexion of those eyes reflect an oppressive or violent power/knowledge regime. This is why in order to combat racism it is necessary to notice the color of the Other’s eyes, and above all not to pretend as though there is no color to be seen! There is a whole ethics of facial recognition/profiling here. Moreover, as Yancy shows, it is necessary to uncover (genealogically, he would say) the field of possibilities that lay beneath the “façade of whiteness” and the subtle ways it influences the construction of non-white, non-male, and non-Western identities, and reinforces whiteness as a value code.46
The face cannot appear differently in a globalized community animated by the sociopolitical and racial vicissitudes of the West. It is made to function as a reinforcement of the dominant order, not as a sign of this order’s instability or equivocity. For Deleuze and Guattari, the face, in as much as it is complicit in the racial privilege of white men, “operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face…which never abides alterity.”47 This is the “inhumanity” and the “horror” of the face—its tendency to signify, without equivocation, the infinity that is the God of Western white man and His commandments. The point is to escape the univocity of the face, to dismantle or resignify the system of facial deviance, and to “detect the particles of the other”48 without entering them into the racist’s order of expression. In short, when we fail to see the “color” which is written49 all over the face, we blind ourselves to the racially charged matrices of power/knowledge that are reinforced, but also potentially undone, in our face-to-face interactions. Color-blindness of this type renders us unequipped to read and resist those powers.
Sensitivity of/to the Face
A different face is needed. If we allow Levinas’s face to interrupt the phenomenal order,50 to install an ethical order which derives its authority from the “noumenal glory”51 of the Other, then we sacrifice the phenomenality of the ethical imperative and reduce its possible manifestations to one—the revelation of God—when in reality the number of possible imperatives is effectively infinite. This reduction is, at the phenomenal level, impossible and should be rejected as irrational and unnecessary, despite its resemblance to Kantianism. The fact that there are an indefinite number of actual faces that make a claim on my ethical sensibility is enough to render the infinity of God redundant, redundancy being one of the primary tactics of domination.52 When the face of God supervenes on the visage of the other (now de-capitalized), it neglects the indelible force exerted by other bodies on our own. We forget that it is not just reason and revelation that disrupts our totality, but sensation and the sensuousness/sensuality of the face.
“Sensation is the break-up of every system,” says Levinas.53
Sensation, like speech, he gives a transcendental function, which seems to me a more compelling basis for his ethics.54 This means that ethics is, and must be, a corporeal matter; the imperative is received not only by our rational faculties, but by our carnal sensibility, which is fundamentally an affective capacity and an irreducible component of intercorporeal survival. Our responsiveness to other bodies, which at once conditions our sensitive responsibility to them, is anterior to our competent manipulation of tools within a system of equipment, instruments, and projects.55 To sense the other and be sensitive to them is a condition for stabilizing our own bodies within the world and figuring out how to work with others toward a pluralistic future.
Our carnal sensibility, which meets with the face of the other in all its unfathomable complexity and its sensuous complexion, does not require the formalism of Kantian morality to find itself summoned to responsibility. This summons issues from the naked materiality that the other presents to us, a materiality that is elemental and, as such, ungraspable. This materiality is “what has consistency, weight, is absurd, is a brute but impassive presence; it is also what is humble, bare and ugly.” The face of the other signifies the sheer fact of existence which burdens each one of us; “matter is the very fact of the there is…,” Levinas says in Existence and Existents. 56 This fact is written on the body of the other, is discernible in the scars and laugh lines, crow’s feet and fatigued countenance of the other. This is a metaphysical point, not an empirical one. Whether we respond to these features or to the faceless ego behind the eyes determines how we apprehend the humanity of the other. And why not locate the singularity of the other in his or her material complexity, as Foucault suggests? The face of the other would then be apprehended as the site of an event, a “play of dominations” where power, memories, and rituals are engraved.57 In Michel Tournier’s words,
the face is the part of our flesh which is endlessly molded and remolded, warmed, animated by the presence of our fellows. After parting from someone with whom he has had an animated conversation, a man’s face retains a glow which only gradually fades and may be rekindled if he meets someone else.58
The contorted or radiant animation of the face eludes precise calculation. It is invested by a certain encounter, or confluence of encounters, that could never be untangled. Do not the histories of our bodies differentiate us to a sufficient degree, to the point of individuating us within the formless matter of the il y a and placing our “subjectivity” beyond the understanding of any possible interlocutor? Ethics would then entail a passive respect for this complex history, an unwillingness to impose a familiar form on the “humble, bare and ugly” materiality of the face or to compromise its integrity. An ethics of this sort would not require us to recognize the divine beauty which radiates from beyond the fleshy gaze of a stranger, but would proscribe violence toward the “absurd ugliness” of that stranger. Aesthetics would come to displace the priority of ethics. Levinas himself is not unaccustomed to conceiving ethics as reverential aesthetics.
Deviations of Faciality
Few have done more to draw out the importance of sensation and sensibility for Levinas’s ethics than Alphonso Lingis. As a reader of Levinas, Lingis has both adopted Levinas’s ethical injunction and modified it to lend due consideration to the aesthetic singularity of the face. On this score, Lingis’s texts bring to light the injustice involved in the effacement of another’s guise. The ethical imperative, for Lingis, is embedded in the phenomenality of beings, not in the noumenal or divine sphere. Turn to the opening page of any chapter in Lingis’s texts: there you will find a smiling, stoic, or, above all, sincere face looking back at you—an imperative staring you down in the dignified form of a Brazilian street kid or a Guatemalan mother with her child slung over her back. Lingis tries to convey the unique experiences undergone by some encounter with a foreigner in a strange land or unfamiliar locale. He has developed a knack for conveying the inexpressible character of these encounters, for giving voice to the faces that defy representation. This is not because these faces lack their own expressivity or are somehow beyond recognition. They do not present his camera with exotic and alien visages whose humanity is unidentifiable and must be explained. It is simply that Lingis’s camera will always fail to capture the complex of memories, fantasies, codes, incapacities, abilities, and obligations that that coalesce in the face of his subjects. Of necessity he must annotate his photographs.
Each of these complexes are gathered in the body of the other, the concrete site of the other’s humanity: it is what constitutes the tangible “you” with whom we make contact.59 The phenomenon of trust testifies to this contact, for when we trust we “attach to someone whose words or whose movements we do not understand, whose reasons or motives we do not see.”60
Despite our failures, we do not turn away or abandon our desire to engage the other. Our trust answers to a dare, not an obligation. It rides on the contingency of responsibility. We catch on to the other’s voice and allow its unmistakable appeal to solicit our effortless interlocution. Because the laughter or tears of another are contagious, the other becomes a magnet for us or reflects in their eyes our own mortality.61 This is the kind of non-allergic contact which Levinas desires, but it is not a contact which can be prescribed. We can always flee the scene and head home. Our sensibility is attracted to or is repulsed by the visage of the other; our trust or distrust follows on the heels of this corporeal proximity. “Our trust,” Lingis writes, “short-circuits across the space where we represent socially defined behaviors and makes contact with the real individual agent there—with you.” 62 If such contact were impossible, would it not also be impossible to recognize others’ gestures and respond to their solicitations as directed to us? Would it not be impossible even to consider placing our faith in this other individual? It is the experience of real, immanent contact with the other that, despite Levinas’s contestations, must be rehabilitated in our consideration of ethics in general and of the face-to-face relation particularly. The point is to conceive this contact not at the level of cognitive recognition or identification, but at the level of a precarious affectivity or carnal sensibility.63 Responsibility is much less a somber obligation than it is an exhilarating risk.
Lingis’s phenomenological travel writing exemplifies the type of non-cognitive ethical sensibility I am advocating.64 His ethical sensibility is nourished by and grounded in the face-to-face contact which constitutes the foundation of his travels. Travels which, incidentally, perform a kind of “autobiographical refutation” of Kantian morality: Lingis’s ethics is borne of his countless excursions across the globe, whereas the categorical imperative is the invention of a man who never left his hometown.65 An imperative turns up in Lingis’s writings which is prior to language, but not prior to the senses of travel. It occurs between beings who do not share the same language, but who somehow make sense of each other. To make sense of that other becomes our responsibility. A voice, not just a sound, enters my ear. “The words have penetrated right through the role, the social identity, the visible and interpretable form, to the very core that is me.”66 Someone has spoken to me; they have contacted me. I will attempt to respond: “A slum dweller in Brazil, after a mudslide or the polluting of his water supply, who reaches out to me reaches out for the skills and resources of my hands. […] The fatigue, the vertigo, the homelessness in his body appeal first for terrestrial support from my body which stands steady on the earth.”67 The voice makes sense to us, indicates to us a unique face who appeals to our material well-being. “Beneath the face as a surface for signs,” Lingis writes,
we see the skin in its carnality and vulnerability. We see in the spasms, the wrinkles, the wounds on her skin, the urgency of her hunger, her thirst, her cold, her fever, her fear, or her despair. We are immediately afflicted with these wounds, these wants, this suffering. In our hands extended to clasp her hands, touch turns to tact and tenderness.68
Our response to the other does not first pass through the existential structures of being, but neither does it pass through the authority of God. As Lingis insists, our responsibility is triggered immediately by the corporeality of the other: “We cannot view the sufferer’s contorted hands, his grimaces, hear his sighs and moans, without these inducing contortions, grimaces, sighs, and moans in us, and with them, inducing a sense of the pain.”69 Our response to the other is first and foremost the incontestable response of our bodies to the imperative that only our bodies can detect. The face of the other is the face of every other, an infinity of others whose sensuousness claims us. Lingis’s travel writing performs an ethics of the body by responding impossibly to the complexity and excess of faces, without effacing the determinate location in which those faces appear.70 In this way he enacts the Levinasian ethic and its impossible demand—an impossibility which is indigenous to the exigency of ethics.
The danger, of course, is that the sense made of the foreigner’s face will reflect the white, male, Western, hegemonic complex of values that Lingis carries with him in his physiognomy and comportment. He has confessed a personal apprehensiveness about photographing others and the potential for deformation in such images.71 There is certainly an irresponsible form of travel, one that does violence to the other by scrutinizing their world in the light of our own and pretending that our perceptual competence is adequate to theirs. This is why it is necessary—and I do not believe that Lingis would see things otherwise—to actively practice what María Lugones calls “world-traveling,” in which, as Shannon Sullivan puts it, “one allows for a pluralistic world and a complex picture of how common meaning is forged out of, but does not necessarily eliminate, different perspectives and interests.”72 World-traveling denotes a form of identification that substitutes playful, loving perception for the “arrogant perception” that judges the other according to the categories of the same.
World-traveling can act as a short-circuit to what Sullivan calls “ontological expansiveness,” a concept that shares Levinas’s anxiety over the totalizing tendencies of formal thought, but which also goes beyond Levinas in significant ways. Ontological expansiveness, for Sullivan, refers to the way in which privileged races and cultures are capable of extending their territory by assimilating the territory of the other. It is the expansion of a world and a place where one will, in Lugones’s terms, “feel at ease,” thus bringing dis-ease to the territory one colonizes. In Sullivan’s words, “As ontologically expansive, white people consider all spaces as rightfully available for their inhabitation of them. A white person’s choice to change her environment in order to challenge her unconscious habits of white privilege can be just another instance of ontological expansiveness.”73
Ontological expansiveness obviously leads white folks into a catch-22: as racially privileged, they take for granted their comfort within and mobility through space. To undo this privilege it is necessary to move between worlds and travel into other territories with the hope of undoing their unconscious habits. Violence against the other appears inevitable. It seems to me that the notions of white privilege and habit which Sullivan describes could exemplify the kind of violence that Levinas believes to be inherent in sociality. Whether his generalization of violence eliminates its cultural and racial specificity is an open question. Sullivan suggests that there might be ways to consciously escape the (often unconscious) violence of white privilege. Basically, this means changing one’s environment, world-traveling, and hoping “that the changed environment will help produce an improved habit in its place.”74 Another paradox arises: in order to conduct world-traveling, it is necessary to have already overcome ontologically expansive behavior, thus preserving the plurality of worlds that could be traveled to. It appears that a certain degree of passivity or spontaneity is key to combating ontological expansiveness, its operation being so elusive, so microscopic.
The dangers involved in ontological expansiveness, arrogant perception, and irresponsible travel summon Levinas’s injunction to hospitality. But they also alert us to the virtues of chance. When we find ourselves in a world that is not our own, and our desire is not to commit violence, but to understand that world, then it is necessary to respond to that world passively, to minimize our determinations on the scene. The passivity of responsibility describes a welcoming of exposure (to the other), come what may. It is neither agonistic nor dialectical. Instead, it is playful: “Given the agonistic attitude,” Lugones says, “one cannot travel across ‘worlds’, though can kill other ‘worlds’ with it. So for people who are interested in crossing racial and ethnic boundaries, an arrogant western man’s construction of playfulness [as agonistic] is deadly.”75 Playfulness describes the renunciation of praktognosis, the practical and perceptual mastery that sometimes gets the best of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of alterity.76 The language of play connotes a floating signification, which contrasts the transcendental, religious “discourse” of Levinas. In play identities are free to try each other out or borrow from one another. Playfulness is a more mundane attitude toward the other than the “religion” prescribed by Levinas, but nevertheless it is consonant with his aversion to agonism. It offers a transactional encounter which is responsible but not completely passive, which improvises engagement with the other without sacrificing the worlds brought into the fold.
Alterity without Revelation
In sum, I think Levinas misreads the face-to-face encounter to the extent that he understands the façade of the face as superfluous to ethical relations. It is not for him the face “in the flesh” that presents the ethical relation, but something behind and above the face. Of course, it is much more efficient for him to defend this claim, instead of confronting the infinity of singular faces that constitute the plurality of the population. Levinas has to settle for efficiency (by which I mean a certain level of generality) if his ethics is going to get off the ground. And, indeed, even though the autobiographical style taken up by Lingis and many philosophers of race seems more suitable to the “thickness” of the face-to-face encounter, Levinas’s metaphysical mode does lend a certain “depth” to the hyper-historical testimonial. Even social constructionist or narrative theories of the self require an ontological depth, the kind of depth which ontological analyses of “facticity” or “worldhood” lend to notions like “location,” “situatedness,” and “embodiment.” Levinas provides some of this depth.
Levinas’s ontology commits him to a humanism which sees in social relations the meeting of souls, or self-identical persons. This is what divine otherness comes to. When I love another person or despise them, it is something inalienable and essential that I intend—this is the “glory of the noumenal.” But we need not spiritualize the other or presume some transcendent existent beyond the face to uphold a certain humanism of the other; indeed, as we have seen, it is dangerous to do so and such presumption forecloses certain possibilities for world-traveling. I have tried to suggest that another Levinas is legible in his texts, one that Lingis consistently reads. There is enough in the contours of the face, the hue of the skin, and the sparkle of the eyes to interrupt violence without having to appeal to divine command. The mundane is excessive enough to dislocate totality. Levinas knows as much; the defense of materiality that makes up his critique of transcendental egoism betrays this knowledge. His entire description of the ontogenesis of the self in Totality and Infinity, not to mention his description of the subject’s enigmatic harassment by the il y a in Existence and Existents, is grounded in a materialist ontology of the mundane. It is here that we would locate the element of chance latent in Levinas’s ethics.77
Under this reading the absence of sensation in Heidegger and Hegel would be what is truly objectionable about their ontologies. Sensation is an epistemological excess. It opens onto an infinity that relentlessly impresses upon us, calibrating our motility while at the same time threatening to transgress our cognitive and practical thresholds with sublimity and fatigue. Is it not the relegation of sensation to the status of an epistemological unknown in Kantian idealism, for instance, that Levinas ultimately sees as presumptuous? Heidegger ignores sensation; Hegel sublates it. In both cases the sensuous is tamed. This is what Lugones means to criticize with the notion of “arrogant perception.” But Heidegger at least recognizes the ontological significance of the affective dimension of being-in-the-world, which Levinas acknowledges as an essential component of ethical sensibility. The return of sensation and its affective dimension in Levinas’s ontology, it seems to me, is what allows his thinking of the other to escape closure, precisely because sensation is what allows us to make contact with exteriority without subjecting that exteriority to our representational devices. Sensation is unforeseeable and commands a response; it enables and disables, and thus has an unruliness built into it that the body must negotiate with.
Levinas transgresses the sensuousness of the face by making it speak the divine Word. In this way he forces a meaning on the other and reinforces a semiotics that might otherwise be contested by the singular voices of the face. This semiotics, as we have seen, is preprogrammed, and the face is readily enlisted in its circulation. This is why I want to end by suggesting that Levinas’s description of the nape offers a less violent object than the face in our exploration of the vulnerability of the other—for the nape presents us with an immanent and non-signifying sensuality that, paradoxically, signifies non-violence. The passivity of the nape requires no transcendental obligation to transform it into an imperative. In the nape, Levinas says, “all the weakness, all the mortality, all the naked and disarmed mortality of the other can be read from it.”78 In this way, the nape “functions” as the face, Levinas says. But by insisting that the nape functions as a face, Levinas forces the nape back into a system of reference that overrides the nape’s immanent prohibitions, when it should in fact be seen as contesting the semiotics of the face and its standards of beauty. This is the prime violence of Levinas’s metaphysical system. Against this, we might insist that the bare, defenseless texture of the back of another’s neck works autonomously to dismantle the hegemony of the face, and paralyzes violence in the web of passions triggered by the fragility reflected in that disarming surface.
1. In his paper “Rereading Totality and Infinity,” in The Question of the Other: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, eds. Arleen B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), Bernasconi contrasts the empiricist and transcendental readings of Levinas. The former emphasizes the concreteness of the face-to-face relation while the latter highlights the role of the transcendent Other (human) in the constitution of the Same, or ego-centered subjectivity. Here I am defending the empiricist reading, but I do not oppose the transcendental reading. In fact, I am interested in working out a position that combines these two readings, what would amount to a “transcendental empiricist” reading of Levinas that privileges what he calls the “transcendental function” of sensation. On my reading sensation becomes the term which links Same and Other, acting as both an enabling and disabling condition of possibility.
2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 66.
3. The link between totality and politics can be easily gleaned from chapter 6 of Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985).
4. Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 52.
5. This is what is implied in the analyses of the overtly Heideggerian themes of habitation, home, work, and dwelling in Section II of Totality and Infinity. Each of these themes can be shown to refer back to the immanence of the Da of Dasein, which for Levinas signifies the insulated world of the Same. The interruption of the world which the transcendence of the other enacts is absent from the Heideggerian system because the other is not a transcendence, but a participant in the immanent structures of Dasein’s existence.
6. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 67.
7. Jean-Luc Marion, “The Intentionality of Love,” in Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 82. The essay from which this citation comes is an “homage” to Levinas.
8. Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), 164
9. Note the emphasis placed on “receiving” the infinite in Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 204.
10. Anticipating a bit, it should be said that, although Levinas recognizes an asymmetry in the I-Thou relation, this asymmetry explicitly refers us to the divinity, or “Height,” of the face, but fails to attend to the asymmetry that derives from socioeconomic inequalities. Qualifying Buber, George Yancy reminds us: “This I-Thou interpersonal relationship… is always already structured by other social positions and locations such as class, race, and gender. The ‘I’ is always already located in its encounter with the ‘thou’, which is also always already located and shaped within a larger social matrix of other dynamic transversal locations.” See “Introduction: Philosophy and the Situated Narrative Self,” in The Philosophical I: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy, ed. George Yancy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), xx.
11. Others are encountered for Heidegger within a context of equipment. “They are encountered from out of the world, in which concernfully circumspective Dasein essentially dwells.” This means that others are encountered not as wholly other beings, but as beings who are pre-understood insofar as they participate in and share a world with me. This world is structured for the other and myself by our common concern for being-in-the-world. For Levinas all of this boils down to the fact that Dasein’s contact with others is always mediated by its ontological structure, the structure of care. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1962), §26.
12. Hannah Arendt, “Labor, Work, Action,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Eric Baehr (New York: Viking, 2000), 179-180.
13. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 46.
14. For Levinas’s theses against Heidegger, see Totality and Infinity, 45. “Justice” in this context is concerned with making us responsible for the unforeseeable effects of our actions, those which extend beyond our intimate relations and into the world of “the third.” It signifies the anteriority of heteronomy to autonomy, and is the first principle of ethics as first philosophy. As Edith Wyschogrod has put it in Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 99: “Our transgression against another is thrown out of kilter, falsified, as it were, by the other’s relation with a third, a relation which may well be unknown to us. Since we cannot calculate the other’s relation to the third, that third may be injured by our receiving pardon [from more intimate others].” Heidegger’s conceptions of freedom and being-with are incapable of comprehending this triadic relation and the form of responsibility which arises within it. This is because, for Levinas, he never stops to consider the conditions under which freedom is enabled by the alterity of the other.
15. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 10.
16. Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 85.
17. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199.
18. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 85.
19. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 66.
20. Marion, “The Intentionality of Love,” 81.
21. This is basically a Foucauldian point, taken from the Introduction to Volume I of the History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), which demonstrates that what we call “freedom,” no less than what we call “subjection,” is necessarily produced by the coercive powers and social forces which shape us. These forces, for Foucault, are material in their physiological and psychological functions, but they are not distinct from abstract or immaterial conceptual matrices. Subjectivity would be unthinkable were it not for this tandem of forces. The process of subjectification can spin out of control, however, and the “black holes” of the Other’s eyes can become the very maelström in which one’s subjectivity is obliterated. This notion, which cuts against the grain of Marion and Levinas, is drawn out nearly term for term by Deleuze and Guattari in their analysis of faciality, which is taken up summarily below.
22. See George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), chapter 7. Incidentally, “ambush” is the term Levinas employs to characterize the nature of war. War is a contest in which one party seeks to overcome the strength of its adversary by exploiting the adversary’s weakness. War is seeking out the Achilles’ heel of the other. See Emmanueal Levinas, “Freedom and Command,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 19.
23. Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (New York: Noonday Press, 1998), 5.
24. Robert Bernasconi, “The Invisibility of Racial Minorities in the Public Realm of Appearances,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 289.
25. The point here is Jean-Luc Nancy’s, when he writes: “The idea of the ineffable always serves the cause of a higher, more secret, more silent, and more sublime word: a treasury of sense to which only those united with God have access. But ‘God is dead’ means: God no longer has a body.” The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 190-191.
26. Bernasconi, “Invisibility,” 290.
27. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195.
28. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 193.
29. Adriaan Theodor Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 12.
30. There are moments in Totality and Infinity (e.g., 195), as when Levinas says the following, where the very structure of language is sufficient for ethics: “The formal structure of language thereby announces the ethical inviolability of the Other and, without any odor of the ‘numinous’, his ‘holiness’.” This formalism seems to be precisely what is contested in the Saying/Said distinction drawn in Otherwise than Being. His penchant for the formal structures of inter-subjective relations, and his tendency to “ontologize” concrete categories—like fatigue, obsession, enjoyment, etc.—is evidence of Levinas’s susceptibility to ontology, despite his protests against it. Levinas’s susceptibility is, I take it, testimony to the inescapable primacy of ontology over ethics.
31. Simon Critchley gives a well-articulated exposition of the Saying/Said distinction, but he focuses more effort on adducing the ethical implications of the “performative” language of Otherwise than Being, and Levinas’s increasingly deconstructive mode of operation, than he does on the material components of face-to-face expression and their ethical valence. I do not object to Critchley’s reading of Levinasian ethics here; in fact, it is extremely compelling. But it underplays an entire dimension of Levinas’s thinking in favor of now-familiar poststructuralist/deconstructive themes. Critchley’s “Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?”, in Ethics—Politics—Subjectivity (London: Verso, 1999) does a much better job of illumining the materiality of sensibility. Now that the linguistic turn has subsided, we can begin to excavate the more tangible or “realist” components of Levinas’s philosophy. See Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, second edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 4-9.
32. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 74.
33. I know of no more thoughtful treatment of the ethical and political significance of the voice than that carried out by Fred Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Evans is vigilant in his critique of the “oracular” voices, such as that of the white supremacist, which persistently seek to silence the voices of otherness and assert their exclusionary truth. In my view Evans’ attack on oracles is perfectly consonant with Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism of the face and Lingis’s treatment of the voice.
34. For this line of argument, see “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, especially 9-11.
35. Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” 55.
36. As Wyschogrod summarizes the metaphysics of murder: “The one who is killed is absolutely independent. […] What we encounter is the infinity of his transcendence; his face is the expression of that infinity. The power of the infinite is stronger than the power of murder.” Emmanuel Levinas, 86.
37. Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” 55.
38. I am inclined to agree with Derrida and admit that the question of unconditional or absolute hospitality will always be an impure and undecidable, yet imperative, consideration. To dismiss the problem would lead to a deficient consideration of the other, but to adhere to its strictures could result in political negligence. As he writes in Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 135, “We will always be threatened by this dilemma between, on the one hand, unconditional hospitality that dispenses with law, duty, or even politics, and, on the other, hospitality circumscribed by law and duty. One of them can always corrupt the other, and this capacity for perversion remains irreducible. It must remain so.”
39. Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” 55.
40. Quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 111.
41. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 176.
42. For a balanced discussion of this point, see John Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
43. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 178. Evidence of the historical presence of this scale of racial deviance, and its link to notions of universal beauty, is illustrated nicely in a remark by Goethe: “We venture, however,…to assert that the white man, that is, he whose surface varies from white to reddish, yellowish, brownish, in short, whose surface appears most neutral in hue and least inclines to any particular and positive colour, is the most beautiful.” Quoted in George Yancy, “A Foucauldian (Genealogical) Reading of Whiteness: The Production of the Black Body/Self and the Racial Deformation of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” in What White Looks Like, ed. George Yancy (London: Routledge, 2004), 119.
44. Yancy, “A Foucauldian (Genealogical) Reading of Whiteness,” 109, 122.
45. In Foucault’s terms: “The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances.” Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 87.
46. Yancy, “A Foucauldian (Genealogical) Reading of Whiteness,” 122, 137-138.
47. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 178.
48. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 178.
49. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 85.
50. Cf. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 88.
51. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Ego and the Totality,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 43.
52. Deleuze and Guattari go so far as to say: “The face itself is redundancy.” The face acts as a “loci of resonance,” or a surface that reflects signifiers with a particular frequency and charge, thereby making language “conform in advance to a dominant reality.” Faces are never wholly singular, but always define a particular degree of deviance from the dominant regime of signification, that is, the regime of the white man. Cf. A Thousand Plateaus, 168. Compare Yancy’s position on the reflective power of the white gaze and its capacity to objectify or “return” the black body as “codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through the processes of negotiation embedded within and serving various ideological interests, which are themselves grounded in deeper power-laden social processes. See “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 4 (2005): 215-241.
53. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 59.
54. Especially for the ethics of embodiment that we find in Levinas. On the transcendental role of sensation, see Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 188-189. See also Chapters 2 and 3 above.
55. This insight is gleaned from Lingis’s marvelous text, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), which contributes significantly to our comprehension of the material basis of Levinas’s ethics and offers a reformulated, corporeal version of the Kantian imperative.
56. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 57.
57. See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 85.
58. Michel Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 86-87.
59. We cannot forget, to quote Foucault one last time, that this “humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.” “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 85.
60. Alphonso Lingis, Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), ix.
61. Alphonso Lingis, “Contact,” Janus Head 8, no. 2 (2005): 439-454.
62. Lingis, Trust, ix.
63. The distinction between the cognitive/representational and the affective/non-intentional is elaborated in Totality and Infinity, particularly Section III, “Exteriority and the Face.”
64. Levinas calls this “nonintentional consciousness,” of which ethics is a privileged example. Nonintentional consciousness denotes the pre-thematic experiences of the lived body, the body whose contact with the concreteness of the lifeworld goes unnoticed and unreflected upon. Given his comments on sensation in Totality and Infinity, we could add sensing— specifically its affective or excessive dimension—to the forms of nonintentional consciousness. See his article, “Nonintentional Consciousness,” in Entre Nous.
65. Perhaps the strangest thing in the anecdote about Kant having never left Königsberg is that Kant actually wrote one of the first texts of anthropology. As George Yancy has pointed out to me, in that text Kant gives an anthropological account of Africans, not one of whom Kant ever met. This leads me to speculate that Yancy’s preference for the autobiographical mode of philosophical writing comes out of his antipathy toward Kant’s anthropology and the way it reflects on his philosophical style. This is what brings Yancy close to Lingis and makes their philosophical ethos so different from traditional moral theory.
66. Lingis, “Contact,” 441.
67. Lingis, The Imperative, 133.
68. Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 50.
69. Lingis, “Our Uncertain Compassion,” Janus Head 9, no. 1 (2006): 25-32.
70. This reconciles Lingis’s main criticism of Levinas’s treatment of the face, which Lingis sees as ultimately sacrificing the singularity of the face to the monotheistic God who, for Levinas, is “constitutive of the otherness of the one who faces us….” For Lingis, this means that Levinas’s face lacks determination, location, substance, and real difference. See Alphonso Lingis, “Objectivity and/of justice: A Critique of Emmanuel Levinas’ Explanation,” Continental Philosophy Review 32 (1999): 395-407.
71. See Mary Zourani, “Foreign Bodies: Interview with Alphonso Lingis,” in Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, eds. Alexander E. Hooke and Wolfgang W. Fuchs (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 87-88.
72. Shannon Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 79.
73. Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of White Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), chapter 6.
74. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, Introduction.
75. María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” in Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), 400.
76. Cf. Luce Irigaray’s comments on the privileging of vision in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 193), 174. Sullivan echoes some of Irigaray’s concerns in Living Across and Through Skins, chapter 3. The attitude of playfulness lets go of the rules that typically guide interpersonal interactions and keep us in control of the situation. In play, “we are not worried about competence,” says Lugones. This attitude is not incompatible with Levinas’s; it is consonant with Levinas’s metaphysics insofar as it is a metaphysics which expects the world to be “unruly” and beyond our finite capacity to gather the plurality of worlds into one “neat package” (Lugones, “Playfulness,” 400).
77. Out of the ambivalent quality of sensation comes an ethics of the body that makes no appeal to the divine, but rather locates its imperative in the immanence of intercorporeal relations. Describing the play of chance in such an immanentist ontology would require some comparison of Levinasian metaphysics with what Louis Althusser has called “aleatory materialism.” See Althusser’s Philosophy of the Encounter (London: Verso, 2006).
78. Levinas, “The Other, Utopia, and Justice,” in Entre Nous, 232.