7—
The Invisible Face of Humanity:
Levinas on the Justice of the Gaze

They walked, and in their talk of the beauty of the earth do not notice the frail little beggar girl tripping after them.
Anton Chekhov, "A Day in the Country"^[1]

We tend to take the speech of a Chinese for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly, I often cannot discern the humanity in a man.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value^[2]

Something happened there [at Auschwitz] that no-one could previously have thought even possible. It touched a deep layer of solidarity among all who have a human face. Until then—in spite of all the quasi-natural brutalities of world history—we had simply taken the integrity of this deep layer for granted.
Jürgen Habermas, "Historical Consciousness and the Post-Traditional Identity"^[3]

The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—"after all, it's only an animal!"—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is "only an animal."
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia^[4]

It might astonish some that—faced with so many unleashed forces, so many violent and voracious acts that fill our history, our societies and our souls—I should turn to the I-Thou or the responsibility of one person for the other to find the categories of the Human. . . . The humanity of the human—is this not, in the contranatural appearance of the ethical relation to the other man, the very crisis of being qua being?
Emmanuel Levinas, "Apropos of Buber: Some Notes"^[5]

Is it certain that the ultimate and proper meaning of the human signifies in its exhibition, in the manifestation of the manifested for myself (which is the way this meaning is thought), in guise of

a thought revealing the truth of being? Is it so certain that man does not have his meaning beyond what he can be and what he can show himself? Does that meaning not show itself as meaning precisely as secret of the face?—open, that is, exposed, without defense? . . . A meaning, I say, beyond what man can be and show himself: the face is meaning of the beyond. Not sign or symbol of the beyond; the latter allows itself to be neither indicated nor symbolized without falling into the immanence of knowledge.
Emmanuel Levinas, "The Meaning of Meaning"^[6]

[In] repressive society, the concept of man is itself a parody of divine likeness. The mechanism of 'pathic projection' determines that those in power perceive as human only their own reflected image, instead of reflecting back the human as precisely what is different.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia^[7]

The reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one's own.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics^[8]

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden^[9]

All at once, / two millennia before that new creature / whom we enjoy when touching begins, / suddenly: faced with you, I am born, in the eye.
Rainer Maria Rilke, "Arrival"^[10]

In the innermost sanctum of the divine truth, where man might expect all the world and himself to dwindle into likeness of that which he is to catch sight of there, he catches sight of none other than a countenance like his own. The Star of Redemption is become countenance which glances at me and out of which I glance. Not God become my mirror, but God's truth.
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption^[11]

Then his soul looked through the gate where appearance becomes an enigma and seeing becomes a presentiment.
Hermann Hesse, "Iris"^[12]

Preface:
In the Destitution of Meaning

What needs to be said, here, at the very beginning, and by way of a preface, although we will in any case, whether we broach the matter here or not, continue to be bewildered throughout the course of these reflections, is that Levinas's use of certain philosophical words, and his intricate engagement with certain conceptual formations on the mediation of which his own discourse still to some extent draws and depends, are marked by the traces of an effort to contest and interrupt some of our words and concepts, and introduce for further thought some radically new ones, double-crossing familiar, long-standing meanings, and leaving nothing but a trace of their former configurations. Every one of his crucial words, and every crucial word that we shall be using to elaborate what he is saying and carry it forward, must be read as if double-crossed, or written within scare-quotes. But this should not be regarded as an excuse to deny that, in some broad sense, his discourse is a thinking and questioning of (what we might still be able to call) our experience.

Levinas's rhetorical mode seems to speak somehow in two voices: corresponding (i.e., co-responding) to the unrepresentable ambiguity of the trace, the claim of alterity, its anarchic nonidentity oscillating interminably between presence and absence, the real and the imaginary, the virtual and the actual, his language seems to oscillate, to equivocate undecidably between the constative and the performative, between description and prescription, between the literal and the metaphorical, between a discourse that could be situated within a certain familiar phenomenology and a discourse that reads and sounds like moral exhortation, or sometimes like the inspirational invocations and evocations of deeply religious experience.^[13] There is even a certain incantatory quality in his writing: frequent repetitions of words, phrases, even entire sentences. This quality, this doubled tonality, is neither due to inattention nor to an arbitrary, capricious, and self-indulgent will.^[14] Rather, it is meant to address us, his readers, in a powerfully affective-conative modality, immediately affecting the moral experience from out of which we draw our thinking. It is, for him, a question of addressing us in a way that might enable us to form, in response, what might be called a "deep, bodily felt sense" of the experience that he is trying to communicate. Such a "felt sense" could not be more different from the conceptual formations with which we are accustomed to working.^[15] And it seems that Levinas is indeed committed to the belief that a certain "return" to the body's deep, felt sense of the good, a "return" effected by phenomenology, responsive to the description of such a sense and thereby, in

so far as this be possible, actually enacting contact with it, could perhaps be strongly motivating, encouraging and guiding the realization of the good in one's life.

I think the impression of a certain rhetorical equivocation is true; but its truth makes understanding his thought extremely difficult, even treacherous. I think that his discourse does indeed make use, often simultaneously, of rhetorical modes that philosophical thought, at least in modern times, has kept separate. But I also think that there is a discernible logic in the way he works with the equivocations, the dialectical ambiguities and tensions set in motion by his rhetorical modes. It is as if, for a while, we must let ourselves be exiled with him in the destitution of meaning—there where all meaning is subjected to the most radical alteration, becoming virtually unrecognizable, certainly beyond the familiar forms of philosophical representation and appropriation. We are being asked, I think, to listen into the equivocations and reverberations of sound and sense, to hear something that is coming to voice: something being said in, by, and as the very event of saying.

The peculiarities of his rhetoric, however, are of such a nature that many philosophers have even felt compelled to question whether his work can, or should, be regarded as (still) phenomenological. If we equate phenomenology with Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, we cannot read Levinas's work as phenomenological. Not only does Levinas refuse Husserl's transcendental reductions and the transcendental egology; but he rejects Husserl's conception of intentionality. Moreover, he is not at all disturbed by the fact that his "descriptions" do not fit our moral experience as we normally live it, for the "inadequation" makes manifest the extent of our moral depravity and the work on ourselves that we need to do.

The phenomenology that Levinas practices is also quite unlike what we find in Heidegger, even though, in Heidegger's radical formulation for the "Introduction" to Being and Time , the phenomenological attitude is said to require the most extreme openness to the phenomenon, just as it shows itself. And even though, in "The Essence of Truth," written a few years after Being and Time ,^[16] we find Heidegger thinking of the phenomenological attitude in terms of a certain "exposure," Aus-setzung and ek-sistente Ausgesetztheit : "exposure to the disclosedness of beings," to "beings as a whole." Of course, for Heidegger, this exposure is first and foremost a question concerning our relation to ontology, and not our ethical comportment.

Although Levinas cautiously embraces a certain version of phenomenology, he resists any accommodation with hermeneutics as he understands it, because, whereas phenomenology can be rescued from its initial

idealism and essentialism, hermeneutics seems to offer no such promise. According to Levinas, its interpretation of all experience in terms of the "asstructure" constitutive of "knowledge" imposes a typification incapable of respecting the singularity of the individual's experience.^[17] In other words, it refers all attempts to understand the meaning of an experience to the conditions of a preceding structure (Vor-Struktur ) of understanding, thereby ruling out in advance any sense or meaning that cannot be correlated with a presently recognized possibility of understanding. This makes the method inherently arrogant, inherently complicitous in the violence of a logic that reduces the other to the same. However, when I have written of "hermeneutical phenomenology," I have not meant to bind phenomenology to the Gadamerian method, but rather to draw on the word's etymological and mythological history—most of all, its associations with Hermes the trickster, the god of wild meanings, surprising revelations, and bewildering concealments—in order to reinforce in our practice of phenomenology a radical exposure to alterity.

Briefly formulated, it is my contention that Levinas's discourse renounces the normally separate rhetorical modes (modes that Habermas and even Lyotard insist on keeping distinct), because what it states or describes is not ordinary, conventional experience, experience lived superficially, but rather the deeper structures of our moral experience—structures functioning in a dimension that is for the most part concealed from awareness, perhaps repressed or denied, and represented by schools of philosophical thinking that can only betray it. (Is it not threatening to our culture of egoism, this discourse that evokes our existential exposure, our moral subjection to the other?) As an approximation, we might say, in an older language, not ultimately fitting, that he is developing a method and vocabulary within phenomenology to call upon the normative transcendental structures that carry the deep potential neglected by our ordinary, conventional, and quite superficial moral experience—and indicate our further moral development, beyond the ordinary and conventional.^[18] In order, however, for this work of articulation actually to make a difference in our lives, it must not only describe these deep, deeply repressed structures in constative form; it must also speak of them and to them in such a way that we are sensibly moved to make contact with them and to entrust and submit our conventional moral experience, judgment, and action to the authority, the commandment, of their more primordial disposition.

Levinas often shared his reflections regarding language, intensely aware of the difficulties that his own use of the philosophical words inherited

from the tradition could not easily avoid. In "Language and Proximity," Levinas argues that what he terms "ethical language"

does not proceed from a special moral experience, independent of the description developed until then. It comes from the very meaning of approach, which contrasts with knowledge, [and] of the face which contrasts with phenomena.

Thus, he says,

Ethical language alone succeeds in being equal to the paradox in which phenomenology is abruptly thrown: starting from the neighbor, it reads this paradox in the midst of an absence which orders it as a face.^[19]

Two statements in Otherwise than Being are perhaps even more illuminating:

Ethical language, which phenomenology resorts to in order to make its own interruption, does not come from an ethical intervention laid out over descriptions. It is the very meaning of the approach which contrasts with knowing. . . . A description that at the beginning knows only being and beyond being turns [i.e., in order to serve, it is obliged to turn] into ethical language.^[20]

For, according to Levinas, only

The tropes of ethical language are found to be adequate for certain structures of the description: for the sense of the approach in its contrast with knowing, [for] the face in its contrast with a phenomenon. (OB 120, AE 155)

Only an evocative, invocative, exhortatory use of language, a metaphorical and poetizing use of language, a revelatory use of language, a rhetorical form that uses equivocation to speak on and to several different levels of experience at the same time, can function performatively, enacting what at the same time it describes, speaking with phenomenological fidelity of a deep truth that we have concealed from ourselves, speaking in a way that might radically interrupt and alter our conventional and superficial moral experience, our conventional moral sensibility and perception—perhaps even bringing about certain shifts without the mediation of deliberation and will.

What Levinas says is accordingly meant to be phenomenologically true: not, however, of conventional and superficial moral experience, but rather in regard to the deeper, more primordial (and thus pre-conventional) dispositions of our moral nature, the realization of which (in both senses of

this term) would constitute a "post-conventional" moral experience, a sense of responsibility and obligation not only beyond the conventional, but even beyond the Kantian "Sollen" of moral autonomy, since, in its extreme urgency and exigency, the sense of obligation and responsibility [1] takes hold of us at a primordial level of our embodiment, prior to reflective judgment and even prior to volition, and [2] demands that we realize it in taking on a supererogatory responsibility that is possible only to the extent that we undergo a radical "sacrifice" of our ego-logical identity, subjecting its very existence to the welfare of the other. The moral demands that Levinas deciphers are unquestionably extreme. But we are self-interpreting beings; so it is not impossible that his efforts to invoke and awaken in us such a new self-understanding could actually motivate a process of self-transformation. Thus, for one to accept as true the deep phenomenological descriptions that Levinas formulates is to let oneself be correspondingly (i.e., co-respondingly) transformed by them. What Levinas says about our moral experience of the other is indeed, then, phenomenological, bringing-forth a certain latency, a certain suppressed or concealed potential. But this potential—certain primordial, proto-moral dispositions—is not an inert, already-made, fully formed implicit reality to which the truth of the phenomenological discourse needs only to be an adequately explicit correlation or correspondence, merely rendering descriptively explicit what was already there implicitly, merely describing without in any way affecting and altering—or say performing—the implicit dispositions.^[21]

In order to avoid inertness, his discourse, his rhetoric, must be a saying the truth of which cannot be understood in terms of the correspondence theory of truth, because its truth exceeds the said. What the correspondence theory of truth misses, or rather conceals, is precisely the coresponding, the way certain descriptive language can engage with our experiencing, its evocative, affectively charged character setting in motion resonances and reverberations that can bring forth new configurations of meaning, of sense.

This is what Levinas means, I believe, when he insists that his thinking cannot be understood in terms of "disclosure." As saying, the truth that concerns him exceeds the said because it not only speaks descriptively about us to us, saying the present character of our experience, but it also speaks performatively, diachronically, diacritically, saying this present experience in a way that makes contact with—and brings out—its deeper, conventionally concealed moral disposition. Moreover—and this is a crucial moment in the excessiveness, the wildness, the diachronicity, of the saying, corresponding to the double tonality, the equivocal mode of the rhetoric—

saying continues to speak about them to us while they are undergoing the transformative process, working through the difference between the "always already" and the "not yet." For although our moral responsibility to and for the other has always already taken hold of us, subjecting us to its alterity, it has not yet been realized—in both senses of this term. Levinas addresses us, then, in such a way that the saying diachronically exceeds the said by virtue of its being able still to communicate with us, still to function with descriptive fidelity and revelatory power, in the articulation of the character of our moral experience even after our experience has undergone an alteration in response to the initial provocative invocation. Since the truth is in the saying and its enactments, its alterations of experience, the temporality of the saying must be diachronic: unlike the said, it can "have" something to say not only before the experiential shift that, with infinite respect and patience, it might provoke, but it can continue to speak, to resonate, even after the shift it has encouraged. Thus, Levinas refers to the work of his phenomenological discourse as "revelatory." I suggest that another word for this might perhaps be "performative." In any case, the crucial point for Levinas is that the way in which we think and say the sublimity of our moral experience must somehow avoid reifying and totalizing.

But this is possible for him only insofar as we understand his words—words referring, for example, to the face, the body, the flesh, and vision (i.e., sight, gaze, seeing, and looking)—as literal, rather than merely figurative, merely ornamental, "metaphorical" in that sense. Or if we want to read his words as metaphorical, then I think we should take them to be used in accordance with the Greek etymology of the word "metaphor," i.e., as used in a way that deeply moves us, carrying our experience forward into its transformation. But in this sense of the word "metaphor" his words are being used literally, but in such a way that they may alter that to which they are referring in the very process of referring. In this way, we can understand his words as quite "properly" phenomenological, albeit truthful only to that dimension of our experience that they bring out from its ordinary, conventional concealment. And therefore also as disturbing and disruptive—quite improper—in relation to the ordinary meanings we give to the words. Levinas's words effect a certain erasure, a certain Aufhebung , a sublation not strictly Hegelian, that always brings the old context of meanings with it, but only in a process that radically alters their sense. (And what we take to be "what was" implicit is not what was implicit, but rather what becomes what was implicit only now, in the present process of making explicit.) But ultimately, the dimensions of the moral experience that

Levinas describes and explicates are such that they must be understood to unfold within a temporality beyond being: the temporality, namely, of an immemorial "always already" that is also an infinitely deferred "not yet." Thus, in a passivity prior to consciousness, prior to volition, prior to freedom, we are always already claimed by and for a supererogatory responsibility to and for the other: an obligation to and for the other has always already taken hold of us—through our very flesh. However, this responsibility has not yet been consciously enacted. It is up to us to realize it in the exercise of our freedom.

In "The Other of Justice,"^[22] Axel Honneth expressed an uncertainty that many of Levinas's readers share regarding the face-to-face ethical relation: Is it primarily visual or is it primarily a matter of conversation? In his discussion of this study,^[23] Simon Critchley holds—and I think that he is right—that the ethical relation can, as it were, "fulfill" itself only in conversation; but I think that it would be a mistake to exclude the visual dimension altogether, because that would then ignore a crucial dimension of our sensibility: what I am calling the deeply elemental "bodily felt sense" that may (come to) be formed through the exposure constitutive of the immediacy of visual relation. But it is difficult to resolve all the perplexities surrounding this question. It seems to me that what is needed to carry Levinas's thinking forward is a "thicker," more narrative phenomenology, bringing out the phases and dimensions of moral development, concentrating through its double tonality on the articulation of the deeper dispositions of our bodily sensibility, making contact with the proto-moral nature of our primordial, pre-conventional embodiment.

Levinas speaks of the face, of the "I" looking and seeing the face of the other; yet he denies that it is a question of perception (EaI 85–87). How can this be? Should we take him to be withdrawing the face altogether from the realm of the visible? Then his words—"face," "looking," "seeing"—could only assume a metaphorical meaning, or rather, as I would prefer to say, a metaphorical use, where by "metaphorical use" we would be compelled to admit that we could make no connections with, and draw no implications for, our moral experience of the (face of the) other. In answer, for example, to the question, whether the face is something given in intuition, Levinas replies in the negative. But that is only because he holds that, in what the philosophical tradition represents with the concept of "intuition"—and also, for that matter, in what philosophical thought has always represented with the concept of "perception," there is a strong, virtually irresistible tendency to possess and appropriate, to reify and totalize, reducing the other

to the same, whereas the deep experience of the face that he wants to solicit and elicit, or invoke and evoke, must constitute an absolute relation to the face, letting the other's way of presenting herself to me exceed the idea of the other in me. Furthermore, by the same logic, a logic that "respects" the immeasurable and incomparable dimensionality, the withdrawal and absence of the face, the face is not to be described as a "phenomenon," because this word cannot easily be separated from the ontological discourse of disclosure, of correlations in the realm of knowledge, in which it has figured since Kant, and Levinas is attempting to articulate a radically different experience with the face of the other. (In the preceding sentence, I have placed the word "respect" between scare-quotes in order to indicate that it must be understood differently, because as used in that sentence it no longer belongs to the discourse of moral symmetry and equivalence.) Nor is it a question of the "physical" face, the face as (i.e., reduced to or totally identified with) its merely physical being.^[24] For the face can no more be reduced to the physical than can the meaning of our humanity. But this must not be taken to mean a total withdrawal of the face from the physical—as if the face could manifest without physical incarnation. Nor should we draw the conclusion that, if Levinas is not referring to the face in its physicality, is not referring to "the physical face," he must be using words in a "merely metaphorical" sense.

To conclude that, whatever Levinas may mean by the "face," there can be no connection with the face in its physicality, the face as a physical manifestation, the face of our incarnate experience, would be a tragic error. It would subtract from the introduction of the face-to-face relation the promise of a new way of thinking about our moral experience. Levinas's attempt to think the ethical relation in terms of the face-to-face seems to promise new possibilities for thought and experience; but this promise is annulled when the face is not thought literally, as bearing on our experience. Likewise, when he denies that our relation to the face is "perception," it would be quite perverse to conclude that the relation is instead to be conceived, or represented, as purely "spiritual," "mental," "cognitive," "intellectual," or "linguistic." I read Levinas's denial as a forceful way of saying that we need radically to rethink what "perception" is in the light of our experience of the other in the face-to-face relation. His way of saying this is exaggerated, paradoxical, in order to break through prevailing habits of thought. The deep, culturally concealed experience of the face-to-face ethical relation that Levinas is pointing towards both is and is not faithfully rendered, both is and is not appropriately contacted, by the philosophical

concept of "perception." But it is necessary for us to insist that, through this concept, we can at least glimpse a trace of the dimensionality of the moral experience that Levinas wants to evoke.

Similar comments must be made with regard to Levinas's invocations of the body, the flesh, and vision. They are all to be understood as pointing to an elemental experience which is beyond essence, beyond the ontology of our philosophical representations, "merely" the traces—tracings—of the physical, of what is understood in conventional morality. But they are not mere metaphors: he means to be referring to our embodiment, our flesh, our ways of touching others, our ways of looking at people and seeing their humanity. But since his hope is to communicate in a way that might enable us to undergo profound alterations in our experience, his mode of discourse is compelled to assume a certain doubleness, addressing "what is" in a way that solicits what could be otherwise.^[25] And yet, out of the deepest solicitude for our moral singularity and alterity, he lets us respond to the possibilities that his discourse evokes according to our own rhythm, our own inner necessity. (The communicative problem that we are attempting to understand, here, is not, I think, altogether different from the problem about which Kierkegaard wrote in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript .^[26] There, too, it was a question of an experience-altering communication that truly respects the moral singularity and otherness of the other.) He means at one and the same time both our seeing as we understand it and our seeing otherwise. With the same words, he addresses us simultaneously in terms of our present (presently recognized) conventional experience and also in terms of a (perhaps presently unrecognized) pre-conventional dimension of our experience, with which we could be moved to make some meaningful bodily felt contact, and in contactful relation to which our present conventional experience could (perhaps) undergo a radical alteration. Only a diachronic rhetorical mode would be able to work this way, exceeding the spellbinding logic of the same.^[27]

Because of our nature as reflective, self-interpreting beings, the phenomenological description that emerges from our self-reflection can set in motion, can motivate, can enact a process of deep self-transformation. Thus, when one wholeheartedly accepts as true a deep phenomenological description, one is already to some extent undergoing a co-responding process of self-transformation. Levinas uses the constative, descriptive mode of language in ways that enable it to touch and move us, enacting, bringing into being, that of which it speaks. What I think that his descriptions attempt to articulate are the primordial inscriptions of moral responsibility, the traces of our primordial subjection to moral obligation, that are registered in the

depths of our flesh; and it is in the struggle to make the impossible connection between description and inscription and bring it into our felt awareness that his descriptions assume their prescriptive force. But in suggesting the word "prescriptive" here, I of course do not mean to imply that Levinas is trying to dictate or impose how we should live our lives, but rather—if I may anticipate here what is to come—that his phenomenological descriptions refer, in a paradoxical, diachronic temporality, to an inscription of responsibility that takes hold of us bodily long before its moral assignment can be consciously realized and taken up by our freedom. The prefix in my use of the word "prescription" is accordingly meant to carry the sense of "before," referring to the "always already" of an "event" of inscription that (must have) preceded consciousness, preceded ego, and comes to heightened consciousness through the struggle for its recuperation in phenomenological description.

I—
Light and Power:
An Ancient Clandestine Friendship

In "Diachrony and Representation" (1985), we find Levinas still engaging the question of vision, giving thought to the ocularcentrism of our civilization:

The sphere of intelligibility—the reasonable [du sensé ]—in which everyday life as well as the tradition of our philosophic and scientific thought maintains itself, is characterized by vision. The structure of a seeing having the seen for its object and theme—the so-called intentional structure—is found in all the modes of sensibility having access to things. . . . But it is apparent that it is also found in the company human beings keep among themselves, between beings who speak to one another, and of whom it is said that they 'see one another' ['qu'ils se voient ']. Thus the priority of knowledge [connaître ] is announced.^[28]

For Levinas, as we shall see, it will always be the sociality or ethics of the gaze, and in particular, the relation between my gaze and the presence of the other (autrui ), that constitutes the problematic which thought must engage. "We must," as he says in Totality and Infinity , a much earlier work, "analyze more closely the privilege of vision" (TaI 189, TeI 163). Thinking of Heidegger's account, according to which (on Levinas's reading) the gift of the light is the opening or clearing of an openness for vision to take place, Levinas argues, as if registering what must be an objection to such an account, that "a being comes as though from nothingness" (ibid.). And he

concludes his remarks on vision by saying that "we find this scheme of vision from Aristotle to Heidegger" (ibid.). The problem, for Levinas, is thus clear: "in the light of a generality which does not exist is established the relation with the individual" (ibid.).

According to Jacques Derrida, Levinas was the first philosopher to give thought to "the ancient clandestine friendship between light and power, the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and technico-political possession."^[29] On Derrida's reading, Levinas was already formulating an argument against the hegemony of vision in his Théorie de l'Intuition dans la Phénoménologie de Husserl . In that very early work, Levinas argues against the imperialism of theoria , the primacy of theoretical consciousness and its theoretical glance. For Levinas, even transcendental phenomenology, Husserl's method for rescuing the phenomenon, experience, from the violence of a philosophical thought that would betray it by requiring it to satisfy the ideal of objectivity, intelligibility, transparency, and lucidity, is ultimately guilty of intrigues with violence, reducing the radically other (autrui ) to the same. For Levinas, the entire history of philosophy—its humanism and its Enlightenment—can only be a history of its commitment to light: the "violence of light." (In fact, even the word "history" derives from a root which refers to sight. History consists of the stories that are told by those who were eyewitnesses to the events in question. But does this necessarily mean, as Giorgio Agamben implies,^[30] that in overcoming the metaphysics of presence, this original experience of history, seemingly bound to the authority of the gaze, must be also be overcome?) However, as we shall see, Derrida is surely right in maintaining that Levinas did not, and perhaps could not, overcome the authority of the gaze and liberate his ethics from the vision-generated, vision-centered rhetoric out of which philosophical thought has always been constructed. "How," Derrida asks, "will the metaphysics of the face as the epiphany of the other free itself of light?"^[31] "What language will ever escape it?"^[32] On my reading, however, Levinas already understood this point of difficulty. In any case, it must, I think, be acknowledged that Levinas, without twisting free altogether of the ocular language—as he says in Totality and Infinity ,^[33] "Ethics is the spiritual optics"—succeeded nevertheless in suggesting, albeit, perhaps, with too much equivocation or discretion, a significant challenge to the dominant way of understanding (re-presenting) vision, questioning the historical inevitability of the subject-object structure and stressing the primacy of being sensibly affected over against the sovereignty claimed by cognition and theoretical contemplation.^[34]

In an essay on Samuel Beckett's Endgame , Adorno observes that "Ontology comes into its own as the pathogenesis of the false life."^[35] Throughout his work, Levinas associates the historically dominant concepts of ontology—truth, knowledge, reason, reflection, objectivity, and certainty—with a philosophical discourse saturated by the power of light and the violence of a logic of the same.^[36] This association constitutes the grounds for his relentless and unsparing critique of the "ontological imperialism" (TaI 44, TeI 15) inherent in all these concepts peculiar to our philosophical tradition:

The light that permits encountering something other than the self makes it encountered as if this thing came from the ego. The light, brightness, is intelligibility itself; making everything come from me, it reduces every experience to an element of reminiscence. Reason is solitary. And in this sense, knowledge never encounters anything truly other in the world.^[37]

Knowledge, the bringing of light, is always only an instrument of ego-logical power, ego-logical mastery:

To know amounts to grasping being out of nothing or reducing it to nothing, removing from it its alterity. This result is obtained from the moment of the first ray of light. To illuminate is to remove from being its resistance, because light opens a horizon and empties space—delivers being out of nothingness. . . . The ideal of Socratic truth rests on the essential self-sufficiency of the same, its identification in ipseity, its egoism. Philosophy is an egology. (TaI 44, TeI 14)

The hermeneutical glance, seeing the other person as something, inevitably subjects the other to the violence of classificaiton, a system of categories. Hermeneutics too must therefore be repudiated, insofar as it consists in a showing, a making-present, a bringing-to-light, that assume the possibility of a complete convergence, a total correlation, between the subject and the object of knowledge, or that assume "revelation" to bring a totally determinate "essence" to light, in both cases reducing the other to the same. Reason, which is the demand for universality of knowledge, favors "the unlimitedness of light and the impossibility for anything to be on the outside" (TO 65, TA 48). Light, servant of a totalizing Reason that encompasses everything within its universality, reduces transcendence to the immediate presence of "evidence," its most lucid immanence. Light and Reason are allies because Reason demands total lucidity, total transparency, total visibility. Charging Heidegger—but, I think, inaccurately, unfairly—with an

"ontological imperialism" driven by the metaphorics of light, Levinas contends that, for Heidegger,

what commands the non-coinciding of thought with the existent . . . is a phosphorescence, a luminosity, a generous effulgence. The existing of the existent is converted into intelligibility; its independence is a surrender in radiation. . . . Reason seizes upon the existent through the void and nothingness of existing—wholly light and phosphorescence. Approached from being, from the luminous horizon where it has its silhouette, but has lost its face, the existent is the very appeal that is addressed to comprehension. (TaI 45, TeI 15)

Taking truth out of this metaphorics, Levinas accordingly asserts that, "If truth arises in the absolute experience in which being gleams with its own light, then truth is produced only in veritable conversation or in justice" (TaI 71, TeI 43). This, it could be said, is the point where one must locate Levinas's "linguistic turn": until we are situated in language, we cannot "know" what we are seeing—we may not really see until conversation with others makes us (able to) see.^[38] But justice may still depend on seeing—although it must, according to liberal constitutions, be blind to some consequential differences.

There are instructive affinities in this regard with Walter Benjamin, who was likewise compelled to begin his thinking with the recognition that, as he worded it, "The gaze [Blick ] is the natural propensity [Neige ] of the human being."^[39] Derrida might say that this propensity is precisely our phototropism. It is also our cognitive and volitional directedness, our intentionality. Thus, another affinity between Levinas and Benjamin: they both challenge intentionality because of its inherent willfulness, its egoity, its reduction of radical transcendence, its refusal of exposure. For example, in the Preface to Totality and Infinity , unfortunately ignoring Husserl's late manuscripts, where the Stimmung of a primordial, corporeal intentionality, a fungierende Intentionalität , is brought to articulation, Levinas writes: "intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, does not define consciousness at its fundamental level. All knowing, as intentionality, already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is preëminently non-adequation ." (TaI 27, TeI xv. Also see OB 23–59, AE 29–76. But also note TaI 23, TeI xii, where he broaches the intriguing thought of a radically different vision, a wholly different way of looking and seeing, and where, correspondingly, instead of rejecting intentionality altogether, he suggests the possibility of a different intentionality, "bereft of the synoptic and totalizing virtues of [normal, modern] vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type." It is toward the elaboration of such a

vision, a vision of radically different character, that my reflections on Levinas, here, may indicate the way.) As for Benjamin, it is in his "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to The Origin of German Tragic Drama , that we find his strongest argument against intentionality:

Truth does not enter into relationships, particularly intentional ones. The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it [Das ihr gemäße Verhalten] is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption [Eingehen und Verschwinden ] in it. Truth is the death of intention [Die Wahrheit ist der Tod der Intention ].^[40]

If the gaze is the ultimate manifestation of willful directedness, of phototropic intentionality, it is also, as Benjamin's carefully chosen word, Neige , suggests, not only our natural propensity, but also our decline, our fall into the dregs.

"We contest vision its primacy in being." For Levinas, it seems, vision—and its accomplice, the light that makes vision possible—inevitably effectuate a "suppression of the other" (TaI 302, TeI 279). "Transcendence," he insists, cannot be understood in terms of a vision of the Other, but only in terms of a primordial "donation." A "sacrifice" (TaI 174, TeI 149). "Vision," he says, "is not a transcendence. . . . It opens nothing that, beyond the same, would be absolutely other, that is, in itself. Light conditions the relations between data; it makes possible the signification of objects that border one another. It does not enable one to approach them face to face" (TaI 191, TeI 165–66). One might suppose that, with the concession that vision takes place within a field, and that this field is bounded by a horizon that opens out into the invisible—an account of vision that we find in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Levinas would admit the transcendence in vision. Instead, he argues, against Heidegger, that

to see is always to see on the horizon. The vision that apprehends on the horizon does not encounter a being out of what is beyond all being. Vision is a forgetting of the there is [il y a ] because of the essential satisfaction, the agreeableness [agrément ] of sensibility, enjoyment, contentment with the finite without concern for the infinite. (TaI 191, TeI 166)

Levinas articulates well, here, Heidegger's critique of a "fallen" vision. But Heidegger draws a crucial distinction between the "forgetful" vision of everyday life and a vision that is grounded in ontological recollection. Levinas does not seem to recognize this distinction—at least not in this text.

Here, his sweeping indictment sees no alternative potential: the fault in vision is hopelessly essentialized. In a later writing, however, while still arguing against vision, he suggests a very different experience with vision, one in which its "passivity," its "subjectivity," "subjectivity" in the sense of "subjection," and not is outwardly directed intentionality, its assertive willfulness, comes to light:

Sight is, to be sure, an openness, a consciousness, and all sensibility, opening as a consciousness, is called vision; but [even] in its subordination to cognition, sight [still] maintains contact and proximity. The visible caresses the eye. One sees and hears like one touches.^[41]

This experience of the "caress" is a significant concession, because it follows Merleau-Ponty in suggesting that there is, or could be, a gaze that is not bent on domination, not driven by the need to reduce the other to the same: a gaze, therefore, "beyond being," beyond ontology. And, as we shall see, it also has implications for the extension of the ethical relation into the political context of justice.

Levinas's attitude toward vision is actually quite complicated, because, even in Totality and Infinity , where there are passages in which he condemns vision in a seemingly sweeping indictment, there are also passages where (in an unfair misreading) he attacks what he takes to be Heidegger's fatalism and hints at the possibility of an interruption in the history of a totalizing and reifying vision:

[the] interpretation of experience on the basis of vision and touch is not due to chance and can accordingly expand into a civilization. It is incontestable that objectification operates in the gaze in a privileged way; [but] it is not certain that its tendency to inform every experience is inscribed, and unequivocably so, in being. (TaI 188, TeI 163)

Indeed, in the Preface to this work, in addition to the remark (already cited) about a radically different "type" of vision, he even seems to recognize for vision an emancipatory and redemptive service:

We oppose to the objectivism of war a subjectivity born from the eschatological vision. (TaI 25, TeI xiv)

This radically different way of seeing—but is it really a question of seeing with the eyes, or should this reference to "vision" be read as "merely" metaphorical?—is even recognized to be crucial for the emergence of a radically different form of subjectivity—a subjectivity "founded in the idea of the infinite," a subjectivity, therefore, in which the ethical vocation would be taken to heart. (A major concern of Levinas's work consists in articulating and bringing forth an experience and conception of the subjectivity of

the subject that would be radically different from, and indeed an uncompromising repudiation of, its entire historical formation as represented and produced by the culture of modernity. Briefly stated, the difference is between the subject as an ego-logical center of power, an origin of activity for the sake of its self-preservation and self-interest, and the subject as subjected by way of flesh and sensibility to the categorical moral imperative embodied in the other person.)

There is a passage in Totality and Infinity (TaI 89, TeI 61) where Levinas speaks of "seeing in justice and injustice." So it might seem that he is ready at least in principle to trust our eyes, to entrust the difference between justice and injustice to the capacity of our eyes for seeing the difference. But there are persistent equivocations in his discussions of seeing, of vision—equivocations, for example, that make many of his readers think it uncertain whether he is actually referring to our experience with vision or whether, instead, he is speaking "merely" metaphorically, and whether he is recognizing the possibility of a different way of seeing, or instead merely calling for the end of an ocularcentric ethics, morality, and politics.

I will argue that Levinas's references to vision are not "merely" metaphorical, but that their strangeness and peculiarity are due to the fact that he wants to "withdraw" from vision as it is commonly realized in our culture and correspondingly represented by reflection in philosophical thought, and that he wants, moreover, not only to disturb, to question, to interrupt such vision, but to evoke in us a radically different vision. I think it also true, however, that to some extent, the perplexing ambiguities surrounding vision in Totality and Infinity are due to the fact that his thinking was undergoing a transition in that work from an account of the ethical relation in terms of the gaze to an account in which what he calls "saying" becomes the crucial medium for evoking the deep experience of the ethical relation toward which he is directing us.

For the most part, however, both in his early and in his late writings, Levinas regards vision—and the hegemony of vision as paradigm of knowledge, truth and reality in the thinking of philosophy—with unqualified suspicion. Examining "the formal logic of the gaze" (TaI 289, TeI 265), he concludes that it is a "panoramic look" (TaI 220, TeI 195; also see TaI 294, TeI 270–71) inherently blind to manifestations of infinity and allied with the forces of totality: the gaze, he says, "totalizes the multiple" (TaI 292, TeI 268; also see TaI 305, TeI 282). And it imposes a reified presence on all the beings that it encounters.^[42] Formulating his disagreement with Husserl, and thus, a fortiori, with all versions of transcendental idealism, Levinas argues that vision "is essentially an adequation of exteriority [otherness]

with interiority [i.e., the conditions of sameness imposed by ego-logical subjectivity]: in it exteriority is reabsorbed in the contemplative soul and, as an adequate idea , revealed to be a priori, the result of a Sinngebung . The exteriority of discourse cannot be converted into interiority [as idealism always tries to do]" (TaI 295, TeI 271. See also Ethics and Infinity 87). An equally offensive adequation can be found, mutatis mutandis , in the gaze that operates in the discourse of empiricism, for its objectivism is a requirement, a condition, that the "subject" imposes on the field of its gaze. But in this indictment of vision, is he not essentializing it? Is he not assuming the impossibility of altering it?^[43]

In Totality and Infinity , Levinas attempts to counter the domination of vision and its supposedly insurmountable epistemo-ontological norm of adequatio by reminding us of the invisible, the limits of our vision and comprehension, and the desire of the spirit for a recognition of that which exceeds the presence of the given:

Invisibility does not denote an absence of relation; it implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea. Vision is an adequation of the idea with the thing, a comprehension that encompasses. Non-adequation does not denote a simple negation or an obscurity of the idea, but—beyond the light and the night, beyond the knowledge measuring beings—the inordinateness of Desire. Desire is desire for the absolutely other. (TaI 34, TeI 4)

It is a question of a "metaphysics" that, in opposition to the totalizing and reifying effects of "ontology," "desires the other beyond satisfactions," which therefore" understands the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the other. For Desire, this alterity, non-adequate to the idea, has a meaning. It is understood as the alterity of the Other and of the Most-High" (ibid.). In a strikingly similar spirit, Max Horkheimer, in a 1970 conversation with Helmut Gumnior, evoked what he called our "Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen" (longing for the wholly other).^[44] But for Horkheimer, traumatized by the Holocaust, resorting to this evocation is an admission that philosophical thought is powerless and hopeless in the face of a future he sees continuing the totalitarian exclusion of the radically other. Levinas is perhaps able to sustain a deeper faith in the promise of redemption; but his faith is constantly exposed to suffering. The promise, the eschatological vision—nothing more, now, than the trace of a passing trace—is endlessly deferred.

Longing for the wholly other. But how is the wholly other to be seen? How is the gaze to relate to the invisible? How can one put the wholly other

into images? Levinas partially answers these questions by defining a difference between "disclosure" (dévoilement ) and "revelation" (révélation ), correlating disclosure with vision and revelation with speech:

To put speech at the origin of truth is to abandon the thesis that disclosure, which implies the solitude of vision, is the first work of truth. (TaI 99, TeI 72)

"To disclose a thing is," he says, "to clarify it by forms: to find for it a place in the totality" (TaI 74, TeI 47). Benjamin is helpful here, because he, like Levinas, wants to distinguish between a "revelation" of truth and its totalizing, reifying "exposure." Thus, in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to the Trauerspiel essay, he states that "truth is not a process of exposure [Enthüllung ] which destroys the secret, but a revelation [Offenbarung ] which does justice to it."^[45] To do justice to the truth is to protect and preserve its dimensionality of concealment, its reach into the invisible. Only in this way is the truth saved from dogmatism, pretensions to absolutism, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of power. Only in this way are the limits of human reason, shattered and left in ruins when it attempts to exceed its horizons, its conditions of possibility, recognized and granted their measure. But why does Levinas think that placing the origin of truth in speech gives it more protection from reification than vision? Or is it a matter of protection? If speech is the origin of truth, that is because it is communication. But speech can deceive—and a wink, a glance, a look can speak, sometimes, more plainly, more revealingly, more consolingly, than words.

Unfortunately, there are times when Levinas connects disclosure in an essentializing way not only with vision, but also with phenomenology, the method for thinking about the dimensions of our experience as lived that he inherited from Husserl, often associating the method—as if in an essential way—with vision, light, knowledge, and disclosure; but sometimes he also recognizes that phenomenology can bring us to the limits of disclosure, where an experience of transcendence could breach the ego's cognitive defenses and leave us exposed and vulnerable. I would argue that, radically conceived, phenomenology can no longer be contained within disclosure and the correspondence theory of truth. Nor must vision be limited to disclosure, to a truth by correspondence and adequation. Against disclosure—and phenomenology as disclosure, Levinas writes:

The welcoming of the face and the work of justice—which condition the birth of truth itself—are not interpretable in terms of disclosure. (TaI 28, TeI, xvi)

Phenomenology, here understood as "the comprehension effected through a bringing to light," is accordingly identified with and limited to disclosure, correlation, equivalence:

[it] does not constitute the ultimate event of being itself. The relation between the same and the other is not always reducible to knowledge of the other by the same, nor even to the revelation of the other to the same, which is fundamentally different from disclosure. (Ibid.)

It may be possible to articulate knowledge of things in terms of a phenomenology of disclosure; but what concerns Levinas is our experience of other people, and this, he believes, since it involves a relation to the transcendent, the infinite, the invisible, cannot be comprehended within such a phenomenology. The other is not a "phenomenon," not an "appearance"—or at least not, I want to add, in the Husserlian sense:

contrary to all the conditions for the visibility of objects, the being is not placed in the light of another, but presents itself in the manifestation that should announce it; it is present as directing this very manifestation—present before the manifestation, which only manifests it. The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation: a coinciding of the expressed with him who expresses, which is the privileged manifestation of the Other, the manifestation of a face over and above form. (TaI 65–66, TeI 37)

But could there be a different phenomenology, a phenomenology that would be obedient to revelation, a phenomenology that would, by virtue of its openness, its exposure to the other, assist the other in living beyond essence, beyond typologies, "otherwise than being"? Why couldn't Heidegger's radical conception of phenomenology, as formulated at the beginning of Being and Time (letting what is, what is presencing, show itself from out of itself), in which he profoundly alters Husserl's conception, manifest the morally imperative recognition, respect, and care for the other? Why does Levinas equate phenomenology with Husserl's transcendental version? This is, I think, just what he does when he argues that

consciousness does not consist in equaling being with representation, in tending to the full light in which this adequation is to be sought, but rather in overflowing this play of light—this phenomenology—and in accomplishing events whose ultimate signification . . . does not lie in disclosing. (TaI 27–28, TeI xvi)

Disclosing requires of the other, or imposes on the other, a fixed identity; revelation welcomes, is receptive to, the other's deepest identity-transcending, essence-transcending needs. Levinas accordingly believes that, in the pres-

ence of an other human being, vision is confronted with a dimensionality, an invisibility, that it cannot possibly comprehend. Faced with this alterity, the composure of the gaze, its indifferent serenity, is irrevocably shattered:

Behold vision turning back into non-vision, into the refutation of vision within the sight's center, into that of which vision is but a forgetfulness and re-presentation.^[46]

Non-vision, the invisible, the impossibly visible, subverts the discourse of ontology and the pretensions of a rationality, a knowledge, that depends on totalizability and possession.

"Western philosophy," according to Levinas, "has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same . . . that ensures the comprehension of being" (TaI 43, TeI 13). Thus, Levinas will argue that our ontology has been, and still is, "a philosophy of injustice":

Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues in the State and in the non-violence of the totality, without securing itself against the violence from which this non-violence lives, and which appears in the tyranny of the State. Truth, which should reconcile persons, here exists anonymously. Universality presents itself as impersonal; and this is another inhumanity. (TaI 46, TeI 16)

Consistent with this analysis, Levinas tends to regard the world-disclosure constitutive of "knowledge," of "com-prehension," as the principal objective of a systematic, instrumental rationality: "we disclose," he says, "only with respect to a project" (TaI 64, TeI 36).

But, although he certainly does not condemn knowledge as such, does not even condemn instrumental rationality as such, he often seems not to allow or recognize any other form of rationality. In "L'Ontologie Est-elle Fondamentale?," for example, he seems to be suggesting that "the rational reduces to power over the object."^[47] (In this regard, his critique of reason is quite similar to the critique that Horkheimer and Adorno make in Dialectic of Enlightenment . And this suggests that it may be charged with similar objections. Thus, it might be argued, against all three, that the violence is not in reason as such but rather in its abuse, or in its inadequate and onesided development.) Nor is there recognition of a knowledge appropriate to the ethical relation, because all knowledge, for him, reduces the other to the same, the equal:

Knowledge is always an adequation between thought and what it thinks. . . . Knowledge has always been interpreted as assimilation. Even the most surprising discoveries end by being absorbed,

comprehended with all that there is of "prehending" in "comprehending." The most audacious and remote knowledge does not put us in communion with the truly other; it does not take the place of sociality; it is still always a solitude.^[48]

The inherent tendency of knowledge is always, it seems, "the suppression of alterity" and "a thought of the equal" (EaI 66, 91; EeI 71, 96).

Maintaining, moreover, that the "original ethical impulse" is always already violated once it is understood in the neutral impersonal light of reason, Levinas often appears to leave no room for a "public use of reason" on the side of justice—a justice of reason that would side with the different, the other, the stranger, the poor, the widow, the orphan. This is a question that still needs to be worked out within the compass of Levinas's thought.

Justice for the other, justice to the other: Levinas shows us that there are many more dimensions to justice—but also that justice is more aporetic—than philosophical thinking has recognized. Thus he shows that even the conception of consciousness that defines it in terms of intentionality bears on the possibility of a moral and political order in which the other can receive justice. Near the beginning of Totality and Infinity , Levinas distances his thinking from that of Husserl. He writes that

this book will present subjectivity as welcoming the Other [l'Autrui ], as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consummated. Hence, intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, does not define consciousness at its most fundamental level. (TaI 27, TeI xv)

This is his principal argument against intentionality.^[49] But he does not want to abandon phenomenology. What he therefore attempts to work out is the phenomenology of a relation to the other that precedes the emergence of intentionality as he understands it—in other words, without intentionality—a phenomenology that does not begin from consciousness. We are not compelled to read this as a denial that there is a legitimate application for the concept of intentionality; it may be read as saying only that, before the symmetry and velleity of the subject-object (noesisnoema) correlation, the subject is always already passively engaged by a more primordial relation with the other: a relation that takes place, as we shall see, in a radically different way.

This means, however, that there is, for Levinas, a radically different subject, a subject whose existence and life the philosophical discourse of modernity has not been willing to acknowledge. In the bourgeois philosophies of modernity, the subject is understood as a self-made ego-logical individual, a solitary monad, confidently defined by its self-containedness,

its self-sufficiency, its self-groundedness, and its resourcefulness in self-preservation. The glorious essence of this subject is freedom: a life measured by its enjoyment of independence and autonomy.^[50] According to the prevailing ideological narrative, this subject desires to be in absolute possession and control of whatever it encounters: its freedom, its autonomy, consists in the pursuit of private interests and pleasures. But, paradoxically, its will to power requires, at the same time, a strong system of ego-logical defenses, ensuring its impenetrability, marking its closure: in order to avoid losing control, this subject must receive nothing. Nor can it give without conditions that would inscribe the gesture in an exchange economy ruled by the logic of equivalence. Thus, the ultimate project of the modern subject's freedom can only lie in a contradiction:

in [guaranteeing] this permanence of the same, which is reason. Cognition is the deployment of this identity; it is freedom. That reason in the last analysis would be the manifestation of a freedom, neutralizing the other and encompassing him, can come as no surprise once it was laid down that sovereign reason knows only itself, that nothing limits it. The neutralization of the other which becomes theme or object—appearing, that is, taking its place in the light—is precisely its reduction to the same. (TaI 43, TeI 14)

For Levinas, this critique of philosophical vision—of its ontology, its cognition, its intentionality, its reason, and the modern bourgeois subject—must somehow be translated into an effective interruption of history, of historical construction:

The breach in totality . . . can be maintained against an inevitably totalizing and synoptic thought only if thought finds itself faced with an other refractory to categories. Rather than constituting a totality with this other as with an object, thought consists in speaking . (TaI 40, TeI 10)

Already announced near the beginning of Totality and Infinity , Levinas's hope for a breach in the continuity of history draws its inspiration, not from vision, but from speech, the binding of the divine breath that is given to all mortals:

The claim to know and to reach the other [l'autre ] is realized in the relationship with the Other [l'Autrui ] that is cast in the relation of language, where the essential is the interpellation, the vocative. The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one calls upon him, be it only to say to him that one cannot speak to him. . . . The invoked is not what I comprehend: he is not under a category . He is the one to whom I speak. . . . The interpellated one is called upon to speak; his speech consists in "coming to the assistance" of his word—in being present . (TaI 69, TeI 41)

This passage demonstrates, I believe, that Levinas is attempting to think the breaching of totality and the possibility of an historical opening for transcendence in terms of a fundamental paradigm shift in our prevailing culture, especially with regard to the way we experience others. What is at stake emerges from the difference between seeing and speaking, gaze and voice, knowledge and acknowledgment. In the relationship borne of speaking, borne of language, visibility is not determinative, not essential. In fact, for Levinas, authentic speech is possible only on condition that the one who speaks recognizes in the other a dimensionality that is inherently invisible.

For Levinas, as for Rilke, the invisible is of the utmost significance. So much weight is given to the invisible that even a utopian imagination, with its images of a more perfect justice, is accused of a certain complicity in violence. For any images that we might produce could only reproduce the same system of repressions; they could never be sufficiently different, sufficiently otherwise. There can be no image or representation of the just and equal society, the "kingdom of ends" where it is the face of the Other that commands unconditionally (TaI 215–17, TeI 190–92). (In this regard, there is a point of convergence between Levinas and Adorno: seeing the danger, a repetition of the same, they both give heed to the ancient prohibition of images of God in Judaic law.) "There is," Levinas concedes, "a utopian moment in what I say; [but] it is the recognition of something that cannot be realized, but which, ultimately, guides all moral action."^[51] "What counts," he says, "is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives" (TaI 28, TeI xvii). Images, however, can function only on behalf of objectifying thought: they belong to a system of controls; they obey what Adorno would call "the logic of identity."^[52] And their origin in spontaneity, in freedom, means that, regardless of contrary appearances, they will always be in the service of the ego and its interests. "I have just refused the notion of vision to describe the authentic relation with the Other [l'Autrui ]; it is discourse, and more exactly, response or responsibility, which is this authentic relationship" (EaI 87–88). This "refusal" of vision is also, for Levinas, a refusal of the image, of representation—and of the sovereignty of the visible, which cannot possibly, even when seen as bounded by a two-faced horizon, give way to the transcendence of objectifying thought. "The metaphysical relation," by which Levinas means our relation to the transcendent, the invisible infinite, "cannot be properly speaking a representation, for the other would therein dissolve into the same: every representation is essentially interpretable as a transcendental constitution [i.e., an effect of the intentionality or will of the ego-logical subject]" (TaI 38, TeI 8). Thus he argues that, "The shimmer

of infinity, the face, can no longer be stated in terms of consciousness, in metaphors referring to light and the sensible" (TaI 207, TeI 182). What matters is not visible.

Not visible. Not an appearance, not something that can "come to light"—not a phenomenon to which any of the methods of phenomenology could possibly do justice. And yet, he speaks of the "shimmer" of infinity. Is this "mere" metaphor? If so, what significance can it carry for our experience? What does it actually mean? Why continue to use a metaphor drawn from vision, referring to something normally visible? Why not concede the visibility of the shimmer, the visibility of the infinite in, or through, or as the shimmer? Why could it not be argued, instead, that the shimmer of the infinite is sensible, is visible—only not for ordinary vision, the way of looking and seeing, namely, that typically issues from the modern (bourgeois) ego-subject? What could his words possibly mean, if the shimmer really could not be seen—not ever, or not at least, say, by the one who wrote those words? If no shimmer of infinity was seen, from where do his words draw their authority? Does Levinas risk more than paradox, more than he supposes, when he withdraws infinity absolutely from the visible—when, for the sake of the ethical relation, he takes the "metaphysical" experience of the other entirely out of the visible, out of sight, rather than extending it from the visible into the invisible?

Far from directing us toward easily settled answers, these questions, provoked by the assumption that the language of vision and light is only metaphorical—but also, even as mere metaphor, entirely in the service of a totalizing immanence, only give rise to more questions, including questions about his turn to the mediations of language, and the way he understands his own work.

In the Preface to Totality and Infinity , Levinas writes:

Peace is produced as the aptitude for speech. The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak. It does not envisage the end of history within being understood as a totality, but institutes a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds the totality. . . . The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision—it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics. But it is a "vision" without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing, objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type—which this work seeks to describe. (TaI 23, TeI xii. Also see TaI 29, TeI xvii, where he repeats his claim that ethics is an optics.)

The equivocations in this passage are intriguing. Ethics is, he says, an optics. This suggests that it is the consummation of a certain vision, though,

to be sure, it is a "wholly different type" of vision: an extra-ordinary vision, perhaps an eschatological vision, but without (utopian) images. And yet, however different, it maintains the ethical within the realm of vision. So a way of seeing—our ordinary way of seeing—is at stake, subjected to the most radical questioning. Furthermore, this ordinary way of seeing, described as a way that imposes silence, is indicted in the name of, and for the sake of, a way of seeing that welcomes speech, welcomes conversation and debate. Here there is not even a hint of hostility to vision as such. Rather, there is a carefully drawn difference between a way of looking and seeing that is allied with the forces of war and violence and a radically different way of looking and seeing. And although the radically other way gives way to speaking, it is not a minor matter that it is in and as an "eschatological vision" that the difference is drawn—and the experience of morality is "consummated." Thus, one might seem justified in complaining that Levinas does not spell out the new "optics," does not elaborate the "phenomenology" of this extra-ordinary vision, does not tell us very much—almost nothing—about the ethical character of this other vision, other way of looking and seeing.

In a later chapter, he writes—possibly falling into the same metaphysics of presence he elsewhere so vehemently rejects—that "Speech refuses vision, because the speaker does not deliver images of himself only, but is personally present in his speech, absolutely exterior to every image he would leave" (TaI 296, TeI 273). But is this not a rather peculiar, or at the very least, a peculiarly limited conception of how vision figures in the speech situation? Is the gaze always driven by narcissism? Is narcissism absolutely unavoidable? When I am in conversation with others, is my looking at them, my seeing them, necessarily or primarily a matter of producing and communicating images? Speech might well refuse such an interaction; but the gaze cannot be reduced to this function. Between mother and infant, between two people in love, between two close friends, a glance, a wink, a look may suffice to console, to assuage some suffering—may be worth a thousand words. Levinas here idealizes speech; but speech, as he knows, can be deceitful, mean-spirited, malicious, cruel. The briefest of looks could enable the hunchback one passes on the street to experience the true height of his dignity.

In "Diachrony and Representation," Levinas asks a question that introduces yet other dimensions of ambiguity in his relation to vision and language:

Does not the "seeing one another" [le "se voir entre humains" ]—that is to say, clearly, language—revert, in its turn, to a seeing, and thus to the egological significance of intentionality, . . . the gathering of all alterity into presence, and the synchrony of representation?^[53]

Here, in this passage, "seeing one another" is not really seeing, but only a metaphor for language, and real seeing, seeing properly so called, is not allowed to be otherwise than ego-logical, turned and directed by a seemingly unalterable obsession with reducing the alterity of the other to the same.

And yet, taking advantage of a double meaning that the French language makes possible, namely the fact that the phrase "il me regarde" means both "he looks at me" (or "he sees me") and "he concerns me" (or "he is of concern to me"), Levinas comments that

qu'il me regarde ou non, "il me regarde."^[54]

The text continues, explaining his understanding of the visible and invisible dimensions of the face of the other which confronts my looking:

I call face [visage ] what, thereby, in the other [en autrui ], looks at me [regarde le moi ]—concerns me [me regarde ]—in recalling . . . his abandon, his defenselessness [son sans-défense ] and his mortality, and his summons [appel ] to my ancient responsibility.

In another text, "The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other," Levinas works with the double meaning to say that

the other "looks at me" ["me regarde "], not in order to "perceive" me, but in [the sense of] "concerning me," in "mattering to me as someone for whom I am answerable."^[55]

Here, however, he sets the double reading in motion only, it would seem, to deny one of the interpretations: the interpretation that remains would, quite paradoxically, entirely withdraw the matter—and the mattering—from the realm of perception, the realm where two gazes would meet. But this withdrawal, if understood straightforwardly, would not be without consequence. The other is supposed to matter to me, to be of concern to me: But how? In what way? Since I and the other are both made of flesh, do we not encounter one another with meaningful eyes, ears, gestures? And do I not therefore need to know from Levinas how my responsibility for the other is embodied, revealed, communicated? Can the need for a phenomenological narrative be ignored? How do my eyes look at the other when I fail to realize this answerability and remain indifferent to my responsibility? How would my eyes look at the other once they are bound by my primordial responsibility? How would the ethical relation be embodied in and as looking and seeing? These questions suggest that perhaps Levinas's objection is not to the ethical involvement of the gaze as such, but only to the way it is conceptualized in philosophical discourse, namely, as ordinary "perception." What he would be arguing, then, is that, as ordinary

"perception," the gaze of the "I" can only be a violation of the other's alterity, and that it needs to be experienced otherwise. Which means that the "I," the subject of the gaze, must itself become otherwise.

In Otherwise Than Being , Levinas touches on this problematic, but leaves it without providing any phenomenological narrative that would be instructive for the vision of the eyes. "Who is looking?" he inquires. And he replies:

the question asks that "the looker" be identified with one of the beings already known, even if the answer to the question "Who is looking?" should be stated in the monosyllabic "Me."^[56]

The question for Levinas is whether or not the looking and seeing of the gaze can be withdrawn from being: whether or not it can escape ontologizing, reifying, totalizing, the violence of ego-logical drives and self-interest. Perhaps Levinas introduces the idea of a "listening eye" to provoke philosophical thinking beyond the ordinary answers (OB 30, 37; AE 38, 48). But, in Difficult Freedom , he evokes a moment that it would certainly be wrong to read as "merely" metaphorical, i.e., "merely" figurative, rather than as an attempt to think about our looking and seeing in "straightforwardly" phenomenological terms:

when I really gaze, with a straightforwardness devoid of trickery or evasion, into unguarded, absolutely unprotected eyes . . .^[57]

Well, what will I see? And does the character of my gaze, here, live up to the eyes' "ethical" responsibility? In "On Jewish Philosophy," an interview in In the Time of Nations , Levinas declares that the face "appeals to responsibility before appearing to the eye," drawing a contrast between the appeal and the appearing that would seem to suggest that the appeal initially takes hold of us at a "preconscious" and therefore "bodily felt" level.^[58]

In Totality and Infinity , Levinas, describing the everyday situation, observes that, "The Other measures me with a gaze incomparable to the gaze by which I discover him" (TaI 86, TeI 59). In other words, it is inherent in the exposure of my visibility that I experience myself in judgment before the gaze of the other, that I see this judgment reflected in the other's eyes; but I cannot, or rather, ought not, return the judgment, for this would commit the offense of treating the other according to a principle of symmetry and equivalence. But is Levinas's sentence to be read as "merely" metaphorical or is it to be taken to heart as an attempt to articulate an eth-

ical experience with vision in the face of strong ego-logical defenses and strategies of resistance?

Reading Levinas, we often cannot decide with any confidence what the reference of his words is supposed to be. If his words are not to be taken literally, to what, then, do they refer? Isn't Levinas attempting to articulate in phenomenological terms—and that means in terms of our experience—the ethical character of a vision, a way of looking and seeing, that would be radically different from the character of vision that today is prevailing? If so, his discourse is a phenomenology describing with normative and performative force.

In Totality and Infinity , Levinas speaks of "seeing in justice and injustice a primordial access to the Other [l'Autrui ] beyond all ontology" (TaI 89, TeI 61). If his use of the word "seeing," here, is not "merely" metaphorical, not a "merely rhetorical" phototropism, then it would constitute an attempt to articulate a normative ideal for our sight, our capacity to see—and also an attempt to instruct, to teach, to speak appealingly to our capacity for vision, our capacity to bring forth a different way of looking and seeing.

Levinas's writing holds us in an unsettling suspension: always suspended between "seeing" literally understood as experience and "seeing" understood as a figure of speech; between a phenomenology describing the present historical actuality and a normatively inspired phenomenology describing a radically different future; between, as we shall see, the visible face (the face-to-face) as an actual or possible ethical experience and the invisible face as trope for a certain conception of justice. When these crucial terms cross one another, they may seem to cross each other out. What is gained, what lost, in these undecidable rhetorical ambiguities, these double-crossings?

II—
The Face Beneath the Surface

In Levinas's work, it is the human face that is perhaps given the greatest gift of thought. "The true essence of man," he explains, "is presented in his face" (TaI 290, TeI 266). But what is a face? Faced with the horrors of regional wars and the breakdown of institutions to maintain law and order, Montaigne sometimes resisted a cultivated disposition to skepticism and ignored his affirmation of tolerance and open-mindedness, writing, in his Essays , that "Truth must have one face, the same and universal."^[59] For him, though, it was a question of affirming a morality and justice grounded, not

in nature, not in customs, not in the fortunes of power, and not even in the positivism of law, but rather in what he took to be the rule of reason:

What then will philosophy tell us in this our need? To follow the laws of our country—that is to say, the undulating sea of the opinions of a people or a prince, which will paint me justice in as many colors, and refashion it into as many faces as there are changes of passion in those men? I cannot have my judgment so flexible.^[60]

But truth and justice must also be responsible to and for the singularity of the concrete individual: in their universality, they must also, somehow, recognize the incomparable existence, the exigent face, the absolute claims, of the singular. On this, Levinas has something—but not enough—to say.

To begin our consideration of Levinas's thought concerning the face, we should note that he tells us, in a late essay, that "It is necessary to say that, considering the way I am using the word face , it should not be understood in a narrow way [d'une manière étroite ]."^[61] That this is an accurate observation will, I believe, be confirmed by our reading of his works. That this introduces certain difficulties—or at the very least provokes some questions not easily settled—is one of the important matters to which we will be attending in this section of the chapter. As we shall see, it compels us to situate our thinking about the face in the equivocations and tensions of a semantic field where there can be no certitude with regard to a literal or figurative reading, and where, therefore, the connection between the "I" and the other in the face-to-face ethical relation and the connection between the "I" and all others in the moral-political relation, where it is a question of coming in judgment before the face of justice, become extremely problematic. For the moment, perhaps it will be sufficient to read what he says in the interview titled Ethics and Infinity: speaking there of the face of the other, he describes it as "the expressive in the other," and adds, in parentheses, that "the whole human body is in this sense more or less face" (EaI 97). This is an intriguing and promising thought, but nowhere can I find any further elaboration.

Now, "proximity" is a key word in Levinas's thinking about the ethical dimension of interpersonal relationships. This "proximity" would seem to be, for him, a phenomenological concept referring to experienced closeness. Thus it would not be a question of objectively measurable distance. Indeed, it must be noted that, if authentically felt, this closeness not only would not preclude a certain experience of distance (Benjamin's "aura," which he defines as surrounding anything that returns my gaze); but on the contrary, one who experiences such "proximity" would actually be compelled to

undergo an experience of distance—the distance, namely, of awe and enchantment, the overwhelming distance of moral respect—as if in the presence of a revelation.^[62] For Levinas, the infinite distance of the other in his very proximity shows itself above all in the face: "The way in which the other presents himself, [even] exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face" (TaI 50, TeI 21).

Levinas's phenomenology of the face introduces into ethical discourse a surprising new theme, one that immediately seems to promise a radically different way of thinking about the ethical relation. But this new theme is not without its perplexities. Whilst with one hand, he writes of the face in a vocabulary that assumes, or even seems to require, its visibility and points in a promising way to an ethical moment in our experience with sight, with the other hand he erases the assumption of visibility and double-crosses this relation to sight, seemingly withdrawing it entirely from the realm of our experience with vision. But doesn't this withdrawal of the face from visibility and sight also risk withdrawing from ethics all that might have been gained for it by introducing the face and the face-to-face relation into the discussion? Does the denial of the face's "phenomenality" necessarily mean that the face must be denied to phenomenological articulation? I suggest that one possible answer might be that the sense of this denial could constitute the very substance of the phenomenological treatment.

When, in "The Pact," Levinas meditates on the ceremony of the Covenant and shifts from a discussion of the face-to-face visibility, the visible co-presence of the other that is possible in a small community where everyone is literally visible to everyone else, to a discussion of the abstract universality of justice, he still invokes the face of the other, formulating the universal obligations of justice with regard to people who are strangers, literally invisible, literally beyond the range of any possible face-to-face relation.^[63] But this shift is not immediately comprehensible, since it radically destabilizes the way we should understand the face in the phenomenology of the singular ethical relation: in reading this phenomenology, we are initially disposed to understand his references to the face to be literal; but when the face also figures in his discourse on justice, it seems that, because of the invisibility of the face when it is a question of universal justice, we must regard these references to the face as "merely" metaphorical. And this compels us to rethink the sense of all his references to the face in the discourse concerning the ethical relation. Indeed, it can seem that we are left with an undecidable dilemma threatening the philosophical weight of his thought.

Thus I have been strongly tempted to think that his extension of the question of the face beyond the ethical relation of the face-to-face, i.e., beyond a situation where, in an important, if only preliminary sense, the face of the other is literally visible, to the question of justice, where, in an equally important, if no less preliminary sense, the face of the other does not belong to the visible (either because the other inhabits a distant life-world or because, as it is said, the judgment of justice, assuming the theoretical perspective of universality, must be blind), could only purport (if I may be excused for relying, here, on a vocabulary frequently complicitous in the violence of the logic of commodity exchange) the "loss" of that deepening of our understanding and our experience of the singular ethical relation which the phenomenological concreteness of the face and the face-to-face seemed initially to promise.^[64]

But further thought brings out a significant connection between the face of the face-to-face ethical relation and the face of justice: in the (normatively ideal) experience of the ethical relation, there is (is to be) a deep, deeply felt sense of the other's withdrawal into unfathomable invisibility. If (even) the face of the other in the face-to-face relation is, in a sense that bears imperative moral force, invisible, might we not see the invisibility essential to the institutions of justice as already prefigured in the invisibility of the singular ethical relation? The tensions in our dilemma can be resolved, I think, only dialectically: starting out with a phenomenology that describes the visibility of the face, Levinas can register the spiritual infinity, the transcendence of the other in the realm of the visible only indirectly, through (à travers ) a certain negation of the visible.

Thus, arguing against Heidegger, Levinas asks whether "the sight of a face" takes place "in the light of being" (OB 18, AE 22). He asks this question because, for him, sight is allied with light as a force that is primarily oppressive and violent: "Is not sight here immediately a taking charge?" (ibid.). Conscious of the paradox, Levinas introduces invisibility even into the face-to-face relation of neighbors, insisting that, in truth, the human face is "not seen," is actually, in a morally crucial sense, never seen: "meeting the face is not of the order of pure and simple perception, of the intentionality which goes toward adequation" (EaI 86, 96). We must carefully consider this argument about the face never really being seen, never really being visible, because it certainly disturbs our settled convictions and assumptions about what is taking place in our face-to-face relations with others—and, more generally, what it means for something to be visible or invisible. But undoubtedly, the whole point of the argument, leading us into the labyrinth of a paradox, is, as much as possible, to unsettle our experi-

ence of faces, casting them into an abyssal phenomenality, an abyssal "presence" where they can only haunt us, resistant to the point of anarchy in relation to our conventionally sedimented experience.

In our experience of the face, a crucial feature, for Levinas, is its exposedness, its vulnerability to the natural aggression of our gaze:

The nakedness of the face is not what is presented to me because I disclose it, what would therefore be presented to me, to my powers, to my eyes, to my perceptions, in a light exterior to it. The face has turned to me—and this is its very nudity. It is by itself, and not by reference to a system. (TaI 74–75, TeI 47)

In an interpretation that we will be connecting with an experience narrated by Rilke, he argues that, through the face,

the human being is exposed to the point of losing the skin which protects him, a skin which has completely become a face, as if a being, centered about his core, experienced a removal of this core, and losing it, was "for the other" before any dialogue.^[65]

"The face," he says, "rends the visible" (TaI 198, TeI 172). It "is not a form offered to serene perception."^[66] (We may agree. But why must perception be understood as serene, or contemplative? There is no textual support for thinking that this is how perception is understood in the phenomenologies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.) Working with certain assumptions about perception that it would be terribly unfair to attribute to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and that in any case are quite debatable, he maintains, without attempting to diminish the appearance of paradox, that the face "is neither seen nor touched—for in visual or tactile sensation, the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object" (TaI 194, TeI 168). But perhaps the appearance of paradox would vanish, were it to be explained that Levinas is not withdrawing the ethical relationship from the world of flesh and blood, the visible and tangible world, but is instead denying the ways being seen and being touched have been interpreted in the philosophical discourses of idealism, empiricism, and naturalism, as well as the ways they are understood and experienced in a culture—ours—that degrades human relations and violates the moral dignity, the moral presence, of the other, reducing moral presence to a merely physical, objective matter and subjecting it to all kinds of exploitation. Explaining how our perception of the face needs to be understood instead, he writes: "Immediately it summons me, claims me, recalls me to a responsibility I incurred."^[67]

Levinas's repudiation of perception is so strong, so unequivocal, that it might easily suggest that it is not at all a question of "experience," of what

we see or fail to see—or that it would be inappropriate, or even worse, a betrayal, a moral offense, to speak of the face in terms of such experience. But Levinas does not in fact press his argument that far: my relation with the other is , he says, a question of "experience"—only not "objective" experience (TaI 25, TeI xiii). And in fact he does not at all hesitate to depend on that word throughout his lifetime of writings. (I suggest that the seemingly paradoxical way that words work in Levinas's assertion that the face does not figure in perception is similar to the seemingly paradoxical way they work in Foucault's assertion in The Order of Things that before humanism and the Enlightenment, "Man" did not exist, and the way they work in Derrida's argument against Husserl in Speech and Phenomena ,^[68] asserting that perception, if thought as "full and simple presence," does not exist.)

Is it possible, then, to call Levinas's writings on the face—writings that seem to offer descriptions of a possible way of experiencing the face—contributions to the discourse of phenomenology? The answer must be in the negative, if [1] phenomenology must be, as he says in the interview of Ethics and Infinity , a method that "describes what appears"—a "look turned toward the face," and if [2] "the look is knowledge, perception," i.e., an adequation between the looking and the face of the other (EaI 85). But Levinas himself frequently refers to his work by calling it phenomenology. And there really is no compelling reason to deny that phenomenology can be the description of the face as revelation. For Levinas, our experience of the face of the other is not (should not be?) an experience of disclosure. Here is how he defines "disclosure":

To recognize truth to be disclosure is to refer it to the horizon of him who discloses. . . . The disclosed being is relative to us and not kath'auto . . . . According to the modern terminology, we disclose only with respect to a project. (TaI 64, TeI 36)

Here, now, is how he describes the face's "revelation," or "manifestation kath' auto ":

Here, contrary to all the conditions for the visibility of objects [i.e., contrary to conditions for disclosure], the being is not placed in the light of another but presents itself in the manifestation that should only announce; it is present as directing this manifestation—present before the manifestation, which only manifests it. (TaI 65, TeI 37)

It could be useful at this point briefly to consider Heidegger's approach to this problematic. Although Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology is sometimes characterized in terms of disclosure, it is really a question of what Levinas calls "revelation." For Heidegger argues that truth as

adequation, as correspondence, as correctness—that which Levinas calls "dévoilement"—is founded upon and derived from the experience of a more primordial event: aletheia . The recognition of aletheia is crucial: to situate truth as correctness within the openness of aletheia is the only way to care for the truth, for truth as correctness, because situating truth-claims in the interplay of concealment and unconcealment constitutive of this field of openness denies them any dogmatic authority, any right to claim completeness, absoluteness, finality, certitude. And this turns out to be, in spite of Levinas's disavowals, very much in keeping with the Levinasian conception of revelation. Heidegger refrains from using that word, however, because he fears that it would reinscribe his radical phenomenology within the metaphysics of ontotheological discourse. But he is very clear in arguing that to care for the truth requires preserving and protecting the dimension of its concealment. Otherwise, we surrender truth to positivism. As he says in "The Origin of the Work of Art," implicitly deconstructing the conception of the acting subject and the character of its action that has prevailed in modern culture at the same time that he challenges all our cultural assumptions, and all our complacent self-assurance, regarding "what is": "The resoluteness intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of a subject but the opening up of human being, out of its captivity in that which is , to the openness of Being."^[69] Could this openness to being imply a possibility that is otherwise than being?

In a 1986 interview, Levinas reiterates that the face is otherwise than being: "the face does not give itself to be seen. It is not a vision. The face is not that which is seen . . . is not an object of knowledge."^[70] (Not an object of knowledge, of course, in Levinas's quite narrow and one-sided conception of "knowledge.") And when pressed on the question of phenomenology, he replies: "it is very difficult to give it [the face] an exact phenomenological description. The phenomenology of the face is very often negative."^[71] But this reply is certainly not a repudiation of phenomenology. Quite the contrary. That it is difficult for him is clear. Nevertheless, his use of the phenomenological method, broadly conceived, makes a significant approach. The difficulty, as he puts it, is that he is "not at all sure that the face is a phenomenon. A phenomenon is what appears. Appearance is not the mode of being of the face."^[72] The face withdraws from the reach of the Husserlian "reduction," and it is with this in mind that Levinas denies that the face is an appearance, a phenomenon. For the "reduction" subjects the other person to the primacy of a method for establishing self-evidence. As an ethical relation, this of course can only be an offense. Perhaps the matter also hinges on whether or not the appearing of the appearance must be

construed in terms of the traditional subject-object structure. In any case, the face, for Levinas, is not (but I would prefer to say "not only") an "object of knowledge," but a "commandment," a "demand" that "has authority, but not force."^[73]

Moreover, the face is not an image or representation: "Because it is the presence of exteriority [i.e., radical alterity or transcendence], the face never becomes an image or an intuition" (TaI 297, TeI 273). Nor is the face a symbol, because a symbol always in the end imposes a logic of sameness on the other with which it makes a connection: its recognition of alterity is always conditional, for it "still brings the symbolized back to the world in which it appears."^[74] Nor is the face a mask, for a mask hides, but always also indicates—and betrays—what it hides.^[75] We will be returning to the question of the face and the mask later in this section.

For the moment, the point to be considered is the transcendence that constitutes the face, a transcendence that, in spite of all the indictments of vision and light, and in spite of the availability of alternative vocabularies, Levinas nevertheless describes by choosing the vision-related word "gleam":

without philosophically "demonstrating" eschatological "truths," we can proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks up, a situation that conditions the totality itself. Such a situation is the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other [le visage d' autrui ]. (TaI 24–25, TeI xiii)

And he informs his readers that

the rigorously developed concept of this transcendence is expressed by the term infinity.

From the face's presence as a transcendence into infinity, it follows that

the face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp. This . . . can occur only by the opening of a new dimension. (TaI 197, TeI 172)

So the face is in the sensible, is —in some sense—to be seen. But is the gaze necessarily, essentially grasping and possessive? Is it condemned, like the gaze of the Medusa, to turn whatever it sees into a petrified phenomenon, an object for a subject obsessed by possession? Levinas seems to assume here, first of all, what he elsewhere would be committed to challenging as a perpetuation of the "imperialism of the same," viz., that there is such a "thing" as an essential nature; second, that, in the case of looking and seeing, its character is totally determined by an essential nature; and third, that, in the case of looking and seeing, this essential nature is to be grasp-

ing and possessive. "This new dimension," he tells us, "opens in the sensible appearance of the face" (TaI 198, TeI 172). But if vision is inherently grasping and possessive, how would Levinas be able to say, to tell us, how the face reveals itself in the sensible? How could he attest to the truth of the face's epiphany, to its resistance to the grasp, to its opening up of a new dimension? Must he not have seen it with his own two eyes? If not, from where would his authority, his right to speak, be coming?

In Ethics and Infinity , conversations with Philippe Nemo, Levinas continues the familiar refrain:

the face is meaning all by itself. You are you. In this sense, one can say that the face is not "seen." It is what cannot become a content which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond. It is in this that the signification of the face makes its escape from being, as a correlate of knowing. Vision, to the contrary, is a search for adequation; it is what par excellence absorbs being. But the relation to the face is straightaway ethical. (86–87)

For Levinas, "the infinite comes in the signifyingness of the face. The face signifies the infinite" (EaI 105). But is signification possible only through language? Can it not also take place through the visibility of the face? Levinas tells Nemo that, "When in the presence of the other, I say 'Here I am!' this 'Here I am!' is the place through which the infinite enters into language, but without giving itself to be seen" (EaI 106). But if the infinite cannot be seen, if it is in no way sensible, would it not also, on the same grounds, be inaudible, not giving itself to be heard?

Even when writing on Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology unquestionably articulates a way of seeing radically different from the vision that Levinas accuses, Levinas maintains his animadversions, implicitly against all forms of vision:

Behold vision turning back into non-vision, into insinuation of a face, into the refutation of vision within sight's center, into that of which vision . . . is but a forgetfulness and re-presentation.^[76]

What, for Levinas, obstructs our vision, turning it back into non-vision, is the invisibility of the other's face:

It is [a question of] a relationship with the In-visible, where invisibility results not from some incapacity of human knowledge, but from the inaptitude of knowledge as such—from its inadequation—to the infinity of the absolutely other. . . . This impossibility of coinciding and this inadequation are not simply negative notions, but have a meaning in the phenomenon of non-coincidence given in the diachrony of time. (TO, 32, TA 10)

But why must vision be bound, as if by fate, to adequation and coincidence? Why could it not be an encounter with the invisible that lets it be the invisible beyond being? Why non-vision, rather than a different kind of vision? (Consider the way of looking and seeing suggested by Heidegger in his Conversations on a Country Path .) Perhaps, at times, Levinas is tempted to think a different vision, a "metaphysical" vision no longer the captive of an ontological need to dominate. Here, for example, he describes the gaze of the other:

[In the] gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, . . . and which one recognizes in giving . . . is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face. The nakedness of the face is destituteness. . . . To recognize the Other [l'Autrui ] is to give. But it is to give to . . . him whom one approaches as "You" [Vous ] in a dimension of height. (TaI 75. TeI 48)

One reason why this passage is important is that the gaze described here defies the essentializing that Levinas elsewhere imposes on it.

Levinas tells us that, "The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face" (TaI 78, TeI 50). How does he experience this? (I deliberately avoid asking, here, "How does he know this?") Is this not something that many in our civilization have claimed to see? According to the Scriptures, when Moses descended from Mount Sinai after his communion with God, his face was shining with such an awesome radiance that, when the Israelites saw it, they fled in mortal dread. Why should we deny that this radiance was a real experience—something that the Israelites actually saw? "Absolute experience," says Levinas,

is not disclosure [dévoilement ]; to disclose, on the basis of a subjective horizon, is already to miss the noumenon. (TaI 67, TeI 39)

Agreed. But despite his criticisms and suspicions of vision, we find Levinas frequently characterizing the face in terms of the gaze and what it sees: in addition to describing the face as an "epiphany," he writes, for example of the other's "defenceless eyes," "the absolute frankness of his gaze," "this gaze which forbids me my conquest"; and he observes that "his gaze must come to me from a dimension of the ideal," that I must learn to "catch sight of the dimension of height and the ideal in the gaze of him to whom justice is due."^[77] But then, separated by no more than the time of a blink, he writes: "The epiphany of a face is wholly language." Thus, rather than abandoning vision altogether, Levinas makes a surprising move: he turns

vision into speech. If we may attribute any virtue to the eyes, it is that they can speak:

The face is a living presence. . . . The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. (TaI 66, TeI 37)

When the other one speaks to me, her face "undoes" whatever form I may have imposed on her—whatever form would have made her "adequate to the same" (ibid.). "This presence," he then declares,

affirmed in the presence of the image as the focus of the gaze that is fixed on you, is said. (Ibid.)

The presence of the face that speaks, that expresses itself in meaningful language ("signification") cannot be reduced to my "evidence," to my way of seeing. Nevertheless, this presence, an irreducible otherness, can also come by way of vision. For he says, in no uncertain terms, that

the eyes [of the other] break through the mask—the language of the eyes, impossible to dissemble. The eye does not shine; it speaks . (TaI 66, TeI 38. Italics added.)

Finally, vision vanishes, mysteriously sublated, inscribed by some sleight of hand into the phrase "listening and word":

The vision of the face is no more vision, but listening and word.^[78]

For Levinas, the encounter with the face is not only an experience with language; what makes this experience fundamentally significant is that it is also an ethical experience: "the encounter with the face—that is to say, moral conscience."^[79] More specifically, though without any argument or any phenomenological "demonstration":

since the Other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard; his responsibility is incumbent on me . . . . I say in Otherwise Than Being , that responsibility is initially a for the Other . This means that I am responsible for his very responsibility. (EaI 96)

A face, therefore, "obsesses us" (OB 158, AE 201) with its strange duality, hovering between the visible and the invisible, "as if the face of this other, though invisible, continued my own face and kept me awake by its very invisibility."^[80] And because the face of the other can have this hold on me, awakening my conscience, Levinas asserts that "formal reason" is necessary only for a being "who does not have the strength to suppose that, under the visible that is history, there is the invisible that is judgement"

(TaI 246, TeI 225). But we human beings are not angels; few of us have this strength. For us, then, the deontology of "formal reason," incorporated in the institutions of the state, becomes a necessary moral compass.

We will return to the question of reason. For the moment, however, I want to persist in the questioning of Levinas's engagement with the phenomenology of vision. It is important to note, at this point, that Levinas has explicitly stated that he regards his writings on the experience of the face of the other as contributions to phenomenology:

I have attempted a "phenomenology" of sociality starting from the face of the other person—from proximity—by understanding in its rectitude a voice that commands.^[81]

Levinas can alter the phenomenology he inherited in many ways, can question some of its principal assumptions, even radically change its "approach" to the subject and introduce new normative concepts to guide this approach; but he cannot renounce it entirely. Because phenomenology is the only method for approaching the human—approaching the face of the other—that is uncompromisingly committed to respecting the articulation of experience just as it is actually lived—in contrast to methods which involve approaches to a subject's experience from an objective point of view that is external to, or independent of, this experience, and that therefore can never entirely avoid being impositional, oppressive. Thus he emphasizes that "This 'beyond' the totality . . . is reflected within the totality and history, within experience" (TaI 23, TeI xi–xii). In other words, the "beyond" that happens in one's encounter with another face-to-face is not at all beyond experience, not therefore beyond the approach of a certain ethically responsive, ethically responsible phenomenology. (Must we not therefore be able to see this beyond that is within?) But the beyond is, to be sure, explicitly introduced as an "eschatological" or messianic concept, which, "as the 'beyond' of history, draws beings out of the jurisdiction of history and the future; it arouses them and calls them forth to their full [timeless] responsibility" (ibid.). Within worldly time, within history, yet also rooted beyond the totality of these orders because of its absolute deontological force, the face can be the site, the medium, of divine judgment. The visible face of the other binds me in (and to) its concrete singularity: I am beholden to you. But it also binds me in (and to) its abstract universality: beholding your humanity, our kinship, I am beholden to everyone and committed thereby to the calling, the work of justice. This binding takes place below the level of consciousness, below "intentionality" as Levinas understands it. Some people may therefore deny its truth as a description of their expe-

rience. The task of his phenomenology would accordingly be a transformative one: through the responsibility of self-critical reflection, to put us in touch (once again) with this dimension of our experience and raise it into moral consciousness. Levinas's phenomenology is obliged to be both descriptive and normative, both constative and performative, both statement and evocative exhortation. It must speak with moral force, by a saying that exceeds what is said.^[82]

In some respects like the face of the angel of history that Benjamin reads into Klee's drawing,^[83] the face that Levinas wants us to see is a face,

Submitting history as a whole to judgement, . . . it restores to each instant its full signification in that very instant: all the causes are ready to be heard. (TaI 23, TeI xi–xii)

This face whose character Levinas is here describing: Must he not have seen it? What would such a "seeing" involve? In "Meaning and Sense," he explains this uncanny "presence" of the face by observing that, in the experience of the

extra-ordinary visitation and epiphany of the face, there is an ethics prior to and independent of culture and history [and] it is on this basis that one is able to judge civilizations.^[84]

Before recognition in full consciousness, I have always already responded to the presence, the face, of the other—responded in a way that implicitly acknowledges my responsibility for her and to her. The face is like an over-whelming force that erupts into the order of private lives and social history, breaching its defensive causal continuity to command our responsibility and pass the judgment of "divine" justice on each of us.

In many respects, Levinas's thinking does not undergo great changes between his early and late writings—as he himself remarks. However, there is a significant shift in the way he describes the "presence" of the face: whereas, in Totality and Infinity , it is said to be "beyond" in the sense that it is an excessive presence , in Otherwise Than Being , it is "beyond" as an irretrievable absence . But even in the earlier work, there are passages where he is already emphasizing a certain dimension of absence rather than a "full" or "excessive" (and therefore conceptually ungraspable) presence:

The relation with the face is not an object-cognition [i.e., not disclosure]. The transcendence of the face is at the same time its absence from this world into which it enters, the exiling [dépaysement ] of a being, his condition of being stranger, destitute, or proletarian. (TaI 74–75, TeI 47)

But in order, in the later work, to put additional stress on the "beyond" as absence, he begins to speak about the face of the other as "lit up" by the passing trace, more past than past, of an invisible infinity (OB 12, 91; AE 14, 116). The ethical "presence" of the other is not an ontological presence; nor does it belong to the order of passing "appearances," in accordance with which the trace of transcendence would have to show itself in terms of an objective chain of causality. Coming from the immemorial beyond— beyond the world of time and memory, the face in its brief passage through the world "expresses" its moral presence in an absolute, absolutely irretrievable absence. (This phenomenology of the "immemorial" is prefigured by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception , where he speaks of finding "at work in my organs of perception a thought older than myself of which those organs are merely the trace."^[85] It is a question, for him, of a prepersonal existence belonging to "a past which has never been a present."^[86] "I am borne into personal existence," he writes there,^[87] "by a time which I do not constitute.") The "presence" of this face is not that of an ontological presence, not the presence of a being, "because it transcends the present in which it commands me" (OB 12, AE 15). It is not even a residue of presence—only the advent of an "unrepresentable trace" (OB 116, AE 149), "the trace of the utterly bygone, the utterly past absent."^[88] But it is also, he soon remarks,^[89] a trace of hope. For every face, invisible even when facing me, bespeaks its kinship with all other human beings, however distant from me, however invisible to me, and thereby invokes a future justice, a justice to-come: à-venir .

Elaborating his description of the face, Levinas introduces an element that, as we shall see, draws a connection between his ethics of the face-to-face, an ethics between singular persons, and his theory of justice, a morality and politics of the social universal:

The beyond from which a face comes is in the third person.^[90]

That is to say that the face of the other brings before me the justice of the witness, and not only the claims of an absolute singularity. We will return to this question of the third person (le tiers ). For the present, I want to continue thinking about the face, considering some of the phenomenological constellations introduced in his late work, Otherwise Than Being:

A face is not an appearance or sign of some reality. . . . A face does not function in proximity as a sign of a hidden God who would impose the neighbor on me. It is a trace of itself, a trace in the trace of an abandon. . . . [Thus, it is] an invitation to the fine risk of approach qua

approach, to the exposure of one to the other, . . . the expression of exposure, saying. (OB 93, AE 118)

Two further traits figure in the phenomenological description here: the exposure of the face, i.e., vulnerability and injurability, and the saying that comes from the depths of immeasurable suffering. This saying, taking place in the silence that always comes before speech, is my command: yet, because of its singular temporality, it is not the same as the Kantian "Sollen" (ibid.). But when Levinas speaks of this commanding "presence" of the face, he states in no uncertain terms that

the mode in which a face indicates its own absence in my responsibility requires a description that can be formed only in ethical language. (Ibid.)

The problem, for him, thus becomes the formulation of a philosophical task, viz., to learn, somehow, patiently, how to speak of all this, how to say it in new, absolutely different words, words that would not end up reinscribing the experience in the vocabulary and context of an ethical discourse that, however well intentioned, could only abuse it, violate it, injure it, imposing on it the injustice of an identitarian, totalitarian logic.

Finding a way to speak about the face of the other poses, for Levinas, the most intractable and interminable difficulties. These difficulties are due in large measure to what Levinas calls the "trace," a trope that refers to the non-identity of the other's face—a non-identity that makes it impossible for me to grasp it in an act of perception and knowledge; a non-identity, moreover, that also invades my own experience, withdrawing it from my self-possession and even shattering my own identity as a "subject." (We are, of course, taking this term in its paradigmatically modern, i.e., essentially Cartesian or Kantian sense.) How can phenomenology as a "descriptive" enterprise overcome or escape its identity-logic? This is the question with which Levinas struggles.^[91] The trace is at the very heart of this struggle, since in a most uncanny way it resists articulation within the architecture of phenomenology—and yet it seems that only a certain phenomenology could possibly recognize it.

It is only in Otherwise Than Being , a late work, that the face is figured, above all, as nothing but a trace—cipher of the claim of alterity. In Totality and Infinity , a much earlier work, the face is described as an absolute singularity, infinitely transcendent, beyond essence, beyond being, beyond the positivity of presence: absence from the world. But in the later work, this absence, this radical alterity, mark of nonidentity, is brought into language

in the figure of the trace, emphasizing its withdrawal from being, its absolute, uncompromising irretrievability (OB 166, AE 211). And yet, the "reading" of the trace, the trace of the other that subjects me to its claim, must continue to be the principal concern of his phenomenology. Thus, in effect, his phenomenology becomes what I have elsewhere^[92] called a "tracework": an approach to the unapproachable, which withdraws itself from every approach; an attempt to describe the indescribable, the unrepresentable—an attempt to decipher the tracework of alterity in the very topography of the flesh. But how can there be a phenomenology of the indescribable, the inapparent? How can we see a spectral visibility? How can we say anything about an alterity that haunts me, a trace that can be located, properly speaking, neither "in" me nor "in" the other—a trace that manifests my subjection to the other but operates somehow in the between-us that is otherwise than being? How can we say anything at all about a trace that is supposed to be a nonidentity, "less than nothing," when anything we might say cannot avoid describing it and attributing an identity? Is the trace nothing but a "dialectical illusion"? We cannot avoid reflecting on the trace here. But it will also be necessary to consider the provocations of the trace, its paradoxical, aporetic relation to visibility and legibility, in the next section.

My experience of the other's face is not that of a presence reducible to the present; the encounter is said to happen in a paradoxical spatiality and an equally paradoxical temporality: for in my face-to-face encounter with the other, my experience is subject to the moral law, which has left a trace of its primordial inscription in my flesh. The trace belongs to a time "before the present, older than the time of consciousness [ego] that is accessible to [ego-logical] memory (OB 93, 106; AE 118, 134–35). Even before the time of my first "actual" encounter with another—in an immemorial time before any order of time we can conventionally calculate, I have already been deeply touched and marked by, and prepared for, the encounter: inhabiting my flesh, there is, thus, before any actual encounter, the "trace of a passage" (OB 91, AE 116) that is also the passage of a trace. In other words, I have been touched and marked by the moral law.

I would like to suggest that we might think of the trace that is in question here as virtually nothing—unless we make something of it . The significance of this formulation, however, will perhaps be intelligible only when it is thought—despite Levinas's resistance—in terms of a reflexive process of moral development. For Levinas, a mere trace of a trace is all that remains to carry the assignment of a moral responsibility, a responsibility already inherent in my capacity to be responsive to the "presence" of the

other and already importuning me even before I am able to recognize its claim on my existence. It is as if I were being touched and moved from afar by the categorical force of a moral imperative: a claim coming from "an immemorial past, a past that was never present" (OB 88, AE 112). But this past is not entirely lost, for it haunts the moral sense, which imagines it as preserved in the intricate tracework of the flesh, in the intrigue of an archi-writing.

This is not mysticism; not "dialectical illusion." Nor is it in the conventional sense mere metaphor. What I think he means is that obligation first takes hold of us bodily—in the flesh—in a time that is, at each and every moment, i.e., both synchronically and diachronically, prior to thematizing consciousness, prior to reflective cognition, and therefore prior to the ego's construction of a worldly temporal order. Morality, for him, is not—or not first of all—an obligation mediated, as for Kant, by the formal and procedural universalization of maxims; nor is it grounded in appeals to "good conscience" constructed through processes of socialization. Instead, morality is first of all a bodily carried sense of obligation, an imperative sense of responsibility immediately, but not consciously felt in the flesh: a bodily responsiveness that, unless severely damaged by the brutality of early life experiences, the "I" cannot avoid undergoing—at least to some extent—when face-to-face with the other. Even before beholding the other, the "I," as a "being" of flesh, is already rendered beholden; thus, at least in the normal case, when the "I" actually beholds another face-to-face, the "I"'s felt sense of beholdenness will be to some extent immediately awakened. But not necessarily awakened enough to motivate moral comportment. And it is through this sense of beholdenness that the "humanity" of the other, and eventually the universal claims of justice, are in the first instance recognized.

Thus, in spite of the impossibility of thematizing, representing, or narrating the "pre-history" of the traces of the other's claims on me, on my responsibility and obligation, Levinas nevertheless undertakes to describe the register of these traces. But can we tell whether these "traces" are discoveries or fabulations? Is it possible that they are nothing but the wishful projections of certain norms, values, and ideals, cast onto "human nature" in order to give them the force of nature? What kind of "reality" is to be ascribed to them? If neither discoveries nor inventions, could they be, ambiguously, paradoxically, both and neither? Are they figures of the moral imagination schematizing an ideal of moral relationships in terms of a deep topography of the intersubjective body? Could it be said that the traces of the other's claims on me have no reality other than the role they play in

my tracework itself—the tropological staging of my self-development as a moral subject, provocatively figured as a reflexive turn, or rather return, to retrieve, or attempt to retrieve, traces of motivation and guidance from the gift of a primordial incarnation, a body imagined as already graced with a moral predisposition? In this case, it is not that traces of the moral inscription are (in some straightforward way, synchronically) already there, present in the flesh, simply awaiting the time of a reading, but rather that they are a tropological production, markings on a fabulous topography of the body, legible, if at all, only in and as the very movement that would make the flesh reveal its moral assignment—legible, as it were, only by the heart that seeks them as signposts of encouragement along the stages of its moral journey. (This points beyond the bounds of the present chapter, but we will be returning to the question of moral development in the next section.) References to originary traces of alterity, traces of the other's absolute claims on my ability to be responsive, would thus represent, in effect, a way of turning the goal of moral maturity into an origin and positing the origin as the goal. Or perhaps we can say only that, in the philosopher's obsession with tracework, there is a response to the suffering of the other that would remind us, for the sake of this other, of the need to keep a terrible vigilance—that, namely, as Levinas testifies, of a certain inconsolable, irremediable insomnia. Perhaps the trace, alterity taking hold of the flesh, can only be thought in terms of a "hauntology."

There is, in his phenomenological attempts to say the ethical and theologico-political signification of the face, an intriguing remark, intricately reconfiguring its presence:

A trace lost in a trace, less than nothing in the trace of an excessive, but always ambiguous trace of itself (possibly a mask, in a void, possibly nothingness or "pure form of the sensibility"), the face of the neighbor obsesses me with his destitution. (OB 93, AE 118)

Possibly a mask. . . . In our world, says Levinas at another time and in another place, "faces are masks."^[93] But this, for Levinas, is a condition of disgrace: the face disfigured by ego-logical investments. The face of one who has fallen away from the fully human. A later passage in the same text is instructive in this regard:

The face as the desensibilization, the dematerialization of the sense datum, completes the movement, still caught up in the figures of mythological monsters, by which the animal body or half-body let an evanescent expression break through on the face of the human head they bore.^[94]

We are never very far away from the possibility of reverting to cruelties and monstrosities that deny our experience of the face of the other. The mask that represents a human face, attached to the body of a mythological monster, is a reminder of the persistent entanglement of myth and Enlightenment and a warning against the illusions of total disenchantment. We may "have" faces; but we are still, in a certain sense, bound to the condition of the animals.

The mask is a significant trope in Otherwise Than Being , sharpening Levinas's phenomenology of the face as a critical hauntology and transformative appeal. The "I," he says there, is at first a "no-one, clothed with purely borrowed being, which masks its nameless singularity by conferring on it a role" (OB 106, AE 135). Under the "borrowed mask of being" (OB 106, AE 134–35), there is the dimension of our humanity—not only our nakedness, our destitution, our exposedness and vulnerability, but also our felt responsiveness to others:

Prior to the play of being, before the present, older than the time of consciousness that is accessible in memory, in its "deep yore, never remote enough," the oneself is exposed as a hypostasis, of which the being it is as an entity is but a mask. (AE 134–35, OB 106)

The socialized gloss is a "comic mask" (OB 107, AE 136), concealing from ourselves and from others the painfulness of existence. Attempting to formulate the emergence of the moral self as a process whereby one "returns" to the felt sense haunting that hypostasis and retrieves it for moral life, he again speaks of the mask, carefully distinguishing the process with which he is concerned from prevailing conceptions of the self's formation:

The recurrence in the subject is thus neither freedom of possession of self by self in reflection, nor the freedom of play where I take myself for this or that, traversing avatars under the carnival masks of history. (OB 125, AE 161)

If the first of these conceptions of freedom may be identified as "modern," the second may perhaps be identified as "postmodern." (But in terms of Marx's analysis of the historical evolution of capitalism, both conceptions would represent mere masks of freedom: "A definite social relation between people which has assumed the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.")^[95] In any case, the process toward which Levinas's phenomenology is pointing is radically different. For him, the formation of the moral self involves tearing off the masks, returning to one's exposedness, making felt contact with that existential condition and living from out of that, without the mediation of the masks. From an ego-logical point of view, this

exposure of the face to the face of the other would be the unspeakable terror of self-effacement, the most extreme deconstruction of the identity of the "self" as the culture of modernity has conceived it. There is no telling what identity-shattering effect this exposure of the face behind the mask could have on the eyewitness, the one who sees it—as Rilke's narrative, which we will soon be reading, certainly suggests.

In a major series of lectures gathered under the title What Is Called Thinking ?, Heidegger reflects on the mode of perception that Levinas excludes from the ethical relation, observing that

man is the beast endowed with reason. Reason is the perception of what is, which always means also what can be and ought to be. To perceive implies, in ascending order: to welcome and take in; to accept and take in the encounter; to take up face to face; to undertake and see through—and this means to talk through. . . . [A ]nimal rationale is the animal which lives by perceiving what is. . . . The perception that prevails within reason produces and adduces purposes, establishes rules, provides means and ways, and attunes reason to the modes of action. Reason's perception unfolds as this manifold providing, which is first of all and always a confrontation, a face-to-face presentation. Thus one might also say . . . [that] man is the animal that confronts face to face. A mere animal, such as a dog, never confronts anything, it can never confront anything to its face; to do so, the animal would have to perceive itself . It cannot say "I", it cannot talk at all.^[96]

Continuing this thought, he reminds us that "Persona means the actor's mask through which his dramatic tale is sounded." And he therefore contends that, "Since man is the percipient who perceives what is, we can think of him as the persona , the mask, of being."^[97] Called to a thinking that recalls the Holocaust, but perhaps is too shattered to see beyond it, Max Horkheimer sees a different truth behind the mask: "The narrow-minded and cunning creatures that call themselves men will someday be seen as caricatures, evil masks behind which a better possibility decays. In order to penetrate those masks, the imagination would need powers of which fascism has already divested it. The force of imagination is absorbed in the struggle every individual must wage in order to live."^[98]

In one of his lectures, a Talmudic commentary published in Nine Talmudic Readings , Levinas writes to remind us of the

essential manner in which the human being is exposed to the point of losing the skin which protects him, a skin which has completely become a face, as if a being, centered about his core, experienced a removal of this core and, losing it, was "for the other" before any dialogue!^[99]

This passage comes so close to describing an experience about which Rilke writes that one should not be surprised to discover some day that Levinas actually had it in mind when he wrote that passage. There are, near the beginning of Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge , two frightening sets of notes, all the more frightening because of the peculiar detachment and lightness of their tone: notes about learning to see—or rather, more specifically, learning to see faces. This is indeed a question of imagination, a question with which it must struggle—and not without questioning itself. For what occupies the imagination—the production of images—is not without its risks, its dangers. As the Jewish prohibition against making images of the divine face would remind us.

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish. I have an inner self of which I was ignorant. Everything goes thither now. What happens there I do not know. . . .

. . . I am learning to see. . . . To think, for instance, that I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, it gets dirty, it splits at the folds, it stretches, like gloves one has worn on a journey. These are thrifty, simple people; they do not change their face; they never even have it cleaned. It is good enough, they say, and who can prove to them the contrary? The question of course arises, since they have several faces, what do they do with the others? They store them up. Their children wear them. But sometimes, too, it happens that their dogs go out with them on. And why not? A face is a face. . . .

Other people put their faces on, one after the other, with uncanny rapidity and wear them out. At first it seems to them they are provided for always; but they scarcely reach forty—and they have come to the last. This naturally has something tragic. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces, their last is worn through in a week, has holes, and in many places is thin as paper; and then little by little the under layer, the no-face, comes through, and they go about with that.

But the woman, the woman; she had completely collapsed into herself, forward into her hands. It was at the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk softly as soon as I saw her. . . .

. . . The woman startled and pulled away too quickly out of herself, too violently, so that her face remained in her two hands. I could see it lying in them, its hollow form. It cost me indescribable effort to stay with those hands and not to look at what had torn itself out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but still I was much more afraid of the naked flayed head without a face.^[100]

This text gives many things to be thought. Here, however, I will limit myself to some brief comments. The notes are initially about faces, and not the face: they are about surfaces, about the faces we present to the world outside ourselves, the masks that we adopt, at once concealing and revealing ourselves in the multiplicity of roles we play, and play out, on the stages of life's way. But with the appearance of "the woman," these notes take a frightening turn, as we are confronted with "a face from the inside," and compelled to imagine a human being without one of these faces. What, then, would we be facing? A woman, of course, without her repertoire of social faces. (What is the significance of the fact that "the other," here, is a woman?) And yet, I want to say, this woman would still have a face: the face, namely, of a human being. However deformed, however disfigured, she would still have the face of her humanity. This, I take it, is the face of ethical experience towards which Levinas wants to draw us—the invisible face, the face of our humanity, the one that is, in a certain sense, hidden from view, beneath, or behind, the faces we present, the masks we play, to the world. This, the naked and exposed face, the face that is other than these faces, is the one that we need to learn how to see.

The notes suggest a certain phenomenology; they abandon a customary discretion to touch, to reach into an experience that could turn our thoughts in the direction of the coming-into-visibility, the "epiphany," of this invisible face, the face that Levinas describes as "naked," the face that he says speaks in its silence of the other's utter "destitution." The first note begins with an acknowledgment of learning: "I am learning to see." The author then says: "I don't know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish." This experience of being "penetrated" is crucial for learning to see the face of the other. (This "penetration" is what Levinas is referring to when he writes about our subjection to the other, our exposure to the moral imperative embodied in the presence of the other.) Anyone and everyone can see the superficial masks, the social faces that people wear; but it sometimes takes a certain moral education, a certain learning, to see the deeper, more invisible face of humanity in the other. Even though, in a sense that Levinas wants us to see, everyone has always already witnessed, beheld, and been held in beholdenness by, this invisible face. Even though, in an important sense, one that we need to think through very carefully, this face of ethical communion is pre-eminently visible, is "in plain view," right in front of us, right there to be seen. Always already—and yet, not yet. Or perhaps even, in another sense, never.

This "true" face of the other comes to the surface in interaction with my responsiveness, but comes as the immeasurably deep. It is my responsiveness to the other that solicits this face, that welcomes it and brings it to the surface, making it to some extent visible. The face is not a face, not a mask on the surface: it is the immeasurable, impenetrable depth of the other; it is the most intimate distance of the other. It is the "presence" of the other for a "me" which is responsive in a dimension of my being itself so deep that, until I have been tutored and have given it some thought, I am not even conscious of its happening. Thus the author says: "I have an inner self of which I was ignorant. Everything goes thither now. What happens there I do not know."

The face is a paradoxical presence, an imperative at once absolutely singular and absolutely universal. For every face is absolutely unique, expressing and manifesting the individual; and yet, the face is also that through which, most of all, our "common" humanity is most undeniably in evidence, most visibly demonstrated. But the face of the individual, the face as singular, can betray its universal humanity—just as, conversely, the presence of the universal can betray the singularity of the face. And if both dimensions of the face are vulnerable to imposed invisibility, they are equally vulnerable to imposed visibility.

The face that the poet writes of seeing in the woman's hands is in a certain sense not her face: her face is rather what remains behind, naked, flayed, without describable traits, withdrawn therefore from all description, all narrative, all representation, all thematization and knowledge (OB 96–97, AE 122–24). What the poet sees left behind is the absolute withdrawal of the woman's humanity—her real face—from all rationally constituted systems of meaning: "the anarchy," as Levinas puts it," of what has never been present" (OB 97, AE 124). What the poet imagines he sees fills him with horror: for it is (again in Levinas's words) "as if the face of this other, although invisible, continued my own face and kept me awake by its very invisibility, by the unpredictability that it threatens."^[101]

Reflecting on Fewkoombey in Berthold Brecht's Threepenny Novel , Walter Benjamin speaks of "a new face, or rather, scarcely a face but 'transparent and faceless', like the millions who fill barracks and basement apartments."^[102] According to one way of reading the Notebooks , the woman whom Rilke observes loses her face; she thus becomes faceless. She loses not only her individuality, but perhaps also, if only for the common eye, her humanity. For it would be precisely the lost social face that manifested, that insisted, on her singular representation of humanity. Without such a face, she would become less than human: something terrible, an inhuman monster.

Is the face, then, merely a mask, merely a surface? Is our humanity merely mask and surface, only skin deep? Is it in the skin that covers the face?

In "Ethics as First Philosophy," Levinas articulates with a powerful phenomenological lucidity the experience of the moment of unmasking that is crucial to the formation of the moral self. What he wants us to see is that the unmasking of my face occurs in the face-to-face, precisely when I find myself deeply affected by what I see as the vulnerability, the mortality of the other:

From the very beginning, there is a face to face steadfast in its exposure to invisible death, to a mysterious forsakenness. Beyond the visibility of whatever is unveiled, and prior to any knowledge of death, mortality lies in the Other. . . . But in its expression, in its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness, separated, in some way, from any whole, were my business. It is as if that invisible death, ignored by the Other, whom already it concerns by the nakedness of its face, were already "regarding me" prior to confronting me, and becoming the death that stares me in the face.^[103]

It is through the face of the other that I am able to unmask myself, for it is the face of the other, showing me death, that compels me, that enables me, to touch my own death—and thereby to tear off the mask that seals me into an egotism even more terrible.

As if understanding Levinas's thought that "the face summons me to my obligations and judges me" (TaI 215, TeI 190), Nathaniel Hawthorne was tormented by such matters. In his "Preface" to Mosses from an Old Manse , he says: "So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face."^[104] Precisely this is in question in "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836), in which Hawthorne tells the story of a minister who covers his face with a black veil that he never allows himself to remove, not even when at home by himself, not even as he lies dying. Although the minister's services, and the man himself, are welcomed by all, the cause and motive behind this strange comportment soon become the topic, of course, of endless speculation within the community. The black veil is a monstrous defacement, a monstrous disfigurement; and it becomes an uncanny presence, a haunting obsession, among the faithful parishioners, in whom it creates terrible anxieties and crises of conscience.^[105] In some respects, its effects of meaning are like those suggested by Gyges's ring,^[106] about which Levinas writes with obsessive frequency:

Gyges's ring symbolizes separation. Gyges plays a double game, a presence to the others and an absence, speaking to "others" and evading

speech; Gyges is the very condition of man, the possibility of injustice and radical egoism, the possibility of accepting the rules of the game, but cheating. (TaI 173, TeI 148)

What egoism, what injustice, what dark sin, what evil, could the minister be hiding? Is the veil intended to make all those he encounters finally come face-to-face with their own egoism, their own injustice, their own sin and evil? Is the minister, stubbornly resisting the community's pressures to remove his disquieting veil, refusing to play by the rules of the game—by rules that permit people to live in comfortable self-deception, without conscience, without guilt, without exposure? Is the veil a confession of "the shame that freedom feels for itself" (TaI 86, TeI 58–59) and a reminder of conscience to others? (See also TaI 82–85, 100; TeI 54–55, TeI 74.)

There is a provocative remark by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil that would seem to bear on these questions, perhaps penetrating the mystery of the minister's veil:

A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and difficult decisions on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends. And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there. . . . Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow interpretations of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.^[107]

Might not this description interpret the deep shame, the trauma, the wound, that the minister nurses deep in the flesh of his psyche?

Never removed, the minister's veil becomes , in effect, his surrogate face. But if the face is itself only a veil, a front, what lies behind it? Confronted with this uncanny phenomenon, can we continue to assume that behind every face there is a soul, a spiritual presence, a transcendental ego? Can we assume that there is an essential truth behind the incomprehensible appearance? Or is the veil precisely an epiphany of the face, the face showing itself in its nudity, its destitution, its confession of the flesh, of moral weakness and spiritual sin? In Elective Affinities , Goethe observed that

any peculiarly unhappy person, even if he is blameless, is marked in a terrible way. His presence excites a sort of horror whenever he is seen

and noticed. Everyone searches his appearance for traces of the monstrous fate which has been laid upon him; everyone is curious and at the same time fearful.^[108]

This could easily be imagined as an observation reflecting on the minister's black veil. Is the veil the visible manifestation of a deep and inescapable unhappiness: the shame of human sinfulness? the compassionate suffering of one who has taken upon himself an impossible responsibility for others? the unhappiness of one who feels the sufferings of all God's sentient creatures? the pain of one who cannot turn away from or shut his eyes to the injustices that divide and destroy?

Levinas struggles with difficult moral questions, drawing us through the face into the realm of death. The face, he says, is a living "that is still not arrested in the absolute immobility of a death mask" (OB 90, AE 115). But, in its living, it nevertheless always "signifies mortality"^[109] and calls the ego, "hostage of the other person," to answer for this death, or death in life, "to which the face of the other person is exposed."^[110] In Totality and Infinity , an earlier work, he wrote:

We have attempted to expose the epiphany of the face as the origin of exteriority [i.e., my moral subjection to the other]. The primary phenomenon of signification coincides with exteriority; exteriority is signifyingness itself. And only the face in its morality is exterior. In this epiphany the face is not resplendent as a form clothing a content, as an image , but as the nudity of the principle, behind which there is nothing further. The dead face becomes a form, a mortuary mask; it is shown instead of letting see—but precisely thus no longer appears as a face. (TaI 261–62, TeI 239)

Not even in death can the face be known; because, in death, what is there before me is no longer a face. That other whom I would like to possess with my gaze and know in Levinas's sense of "know," integrating it into a worldly totality, is other than the infinitely other (TaI 55, TeI 26). Thus I remain claimed by the other, "hostage" to the other, responsible to and for the other, even beyond the other's death.

The "hermeneutic" speculation into which the sight of the minister's veil draws us ends in failure, in a resigned acceptance of the withholding or withdrawing of all meaning. Levinas would certainly understand this:

The notion of the face . . . brings us to a notion of meaning prior to my Sinngebung and thus independent of my initiative and my power. (TaI 51, TeI 22)

The veil, the face's "supplement," intensifies the experience of a failure in the fulfillment of meaning-giving intentionality. We cannot see what we

want to see, cannot know what we want to know: our seeing and knowing are frustrated, denied fulfillment. Unlike things, which give themselves to me,

the face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense, it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched—for in visual and tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content. (TaI 194, TeI 168)

If the face is a bar to the ego's bestowing of meaning and to the ego's enjoyment of meaning-fulfillment, so too is the minister's black veil. Precisely as such a bar, however, the veil compels us to question ourselves: it exposes us in our nakedness; it subjects us to its questioning.

Perhaps the minister shrouds his face in order to symbolize a commitment to God that spells his death to the world. Perhaps he sacrifices his own face in order to let the invisible face of God be seen, or at least felt: the veil would then be like the face of a mirror, an instrument of divine judgment, compelling all those who look at it to look deeply into themselves and examine their sins with the presence of divine judgment in their hearts. The black veil, assuming the exteriority of the face hidden behind it, arrests the gaze, denying it any representation of the face, returning the gaze to its source; it throws people into abysses of shame and guilt; it confronts people with reminders of death. The minister's veil is perhaps the face's way of appealing to responsibility "before appearing to the eye."^[111]

Hooper's last words perhaps suggest that the face itself is only a veil, and that what it conceals is the mystery of life and death. In any event, Hooper's veil causes fear and trembling, for to look at it is to be drawn into its abyssal blackness, its annihilation of face, and turned, through its mirror-like inversions, into a corpse or a ghost. The veil is, in effect, a mask of death, a death's head, an exemplary display of divine justice. A revelation that conceals what it reveals, a concealment that reveals concealment.

The veil is not only a bar to contact and open dialogue, not only a bar to sympathy and consolation; it is also a bar to meaning, to the fulfillment of presence.^[112] It announces the time of Apocalypse, but continually defers the promise of ultimate meaning, the promise of redemption. Not even in death is the minister's veil withdrawn and the promise of revelation kept.

If, as Benjamin argues, "Truth is not an unveiling that destroys the mystery, but rather a revelation that does it justice,"^[113] then the minister's black veil is indeed an instrument of truth, compelling those who encounter it to face the most demanding truth. For this most demanding truth, what is

required is not an unveiling of the face, but, on the contrary, a veiling that serves revelation: "The absolute experience," as Levinas says, "is not disclosure but revelation."^[114]

What is revealed? The suffering, the destitution of the other. And to the extent that this suffering, this destitution, is a consequence of the face that we have, whether wittingly or unwittingly, immediately or mediately, imposed on the other, it commands us to "unmake" it. "The face," says Levinas, "is unmade": "Le visage est défait."^[115] In "Facies Hippocratica," Rebecca Comay comments, with regard to this sentence, that "The 'unmaking' of the face is the only way to 'save' a face already defaced by its inscription in the world of exchange and measure—the world as such."^[116] Perhaps the minister's veil, unmaking his face and signifying his spiritual death to the world, may also be read as a protest against the disfigurements of a world in which the moral dimension of face-to-face relationships is reduced to the measures of an equivalence economy. Perhaps the veil withdraws the face from this disfigurement, withdraws it from the totalizing system of calculative rationality and calculative justice, withdraws it into the invisible realm where a divine justice may judge it.

"When we look at someone," says Benjamin, "there is the expectation that the recipient of the gaze will return our look. When this expectation is met, there is the experience of aura in its fullness. . . . To experience the aura of a phenomenon means to invest it [belehnen ] with the ability to look at us in return."^[117] The minister's black veil is a refusal to return the gaze, a refusal, therefore, of the auratic. But precisely because it denies the gaze of the other, it holds the other in its spell. According to Benjamin,

the deeper the remoteness that a glance has to overcome, the stronger will be the spell that is apt to emanate from the gaze. In eyes that mirror, the absence of the looker remains complete. It is precisely for this reason that such eyes know nothing of distance.^[118]

For Benjamin, the question of distance is crucial to the logic of symbol and allegory—and nowhere, perhaps, more compelling than with regard to the allegorical significance of the baroque image of the death's head (Totenkopf ).^[119] Examining the different effects of symbol and allegory, he takes us into the "abyss of allegory" (Abgrund der Allegorie ),^[120] arguing that,

whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature [das transfigurierte Antlitz der Natur ] is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption [im Lichte der Erlösung ], in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the

very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death's head. And although such a thing lacks all "symbolic" freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity—nevertheless, this is the form in which man's subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world [Leidensgeschichte ]; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline. The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance. But if nature has always been subject to the power of death, it is also true that it has always been allegorical. Nature and death both come to fruition in historical development, just as they are closely linked as seeds in the creature's graceless state of sin.^[121]

Quoting a passage from Daniel Casper von Lohenstein's Hyacinthen ("Yea, when the Highest comes to bring in the harvest from the graveyard, so will I, a death's-head, become an angel's countenance"),^[122] Benjamin provokes the thought that if the black-veiled face should be seen as a death's-head, it could also evoke the countenance of an angel, the angel, perhaps, of divine justice. But not far from these allegorical images the logic of elective affinities turns the death's-head into the monstrous, many-eyed head of a Medusa, the monster whose sight petrifies all those who are unfortunate enough to have received the looks it casts.^[123] (For Merleau-Ponty, the gaze becomes "inhuman" when it withdraws from, and does not experience itself as, "communication" and "communion.")^[124] Like the face of Medusa, with so many eyes that one can never hide from its terrible judgment, the black-veiled face, the death's-head, will frighten all those who see it, compelling them to face the imperative truth of divine justice. Until the time of redemption, the truth that we must face is the legible truth of suffering, a Leidensgeschichte etched into the flesh of faces: in particular, a history of the injustices that indifference and hatred in regard to those who are seen as our other, our enemy, have traced in a writing still invisible to many.

In his Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty began a lifetime of reflection on the phenomenology of our perception of others, correctly recognizing that questions of morality and political justice are already at stake in the very earliest moments of perception. He shows that

our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgement. It is as false to

place ourselves in society as an object among other objects as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, and in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification.^[125]

There is, he points out, an "anonymous," "pre-personal" subject, a subject radically different from the Cartesian and Kantian subjects, that precedes the cogito , the ego-logical subject of perception and knowledge.^[126] This subject is indeed a subject—but not, or not first and foremost, in the egological sense traditionally understood by empiricism and intellectualism. Rather, we must recognize the presence of a subject because of our original exposure to the solicitations of the other.^[127] Even before we are actively engaged with others at the level of perception, we have already, according to Merleau-Ponty, been "passively" responsive to their presence: it is, in fact, a question, as Levinas has so beautifully described it, of "a passivity more passive than passive." (With his elaboration of this moment, it is clear that Levinas is pursuing, both beyond and against Husserl, Husserl's own phenomenology of a corporeal intentionality he described as "passive synthesis.") I would argue, and have done so elsewhere, that it is the experience of exposure peculiar to this original subject, always already responsively subject to the other, and not only the reflexively critical experience of the subsequently achieved ego-logical subject, which we must retrieve and the development of which we must nurture if there is to be any real hope for the sociocultural construction of a truly universal subject—a subject, namely, that would hold itself responsible for the extension of justice, beyond visibility, beyond the possibility of discursive, face-to-face relations, to all sentient beings.

In "Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality," a chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment that seems to have been written by Max Horkheimer, we are reminded, however, of the limitations on the "exposure" and "compassion" of the original subject, reminded that the "universal subject" necessary for the rule of justice will not emerge from the course of nature without social mediation. Indeed, according to the argument of this chapter:

there is an aspect of compassion which conflicts with justice, to which of course Nietzsche allies it. It confirms the rule of inhumanity by the exception which it practises. By reserving the cancellation of injustice to fortuitous love of one's neighbour, compassion accepts that the law of universal alienation—which it would mitigate—is unalterable. Certainly, as an individual, the compassionate man represents the claim of the individual—that is, to live—against the generality, against nature and society, which deny it. But that unity with the universal, as with

the heart, which the individual displays, is shown to be deceptive in his own weakness. It is not the softness but the restrictive element in pity, which makes it questionable; for compassion is always inadequate.^[128]

I think this is correct. To end injustice, social policy cannot, and must not, depend on the velleities and vicissitudes of compassion, or on the contingencies of philanthropic gestures. But Horkheimer and Adorno do not recognize, here, that the potential for compassion can come from a much deeper dimension of individual experience and that our social practices—including practices that construct the ways of our perception—can draw on this potential, work with it, and develop it, making it a much stronger, more reliable source for the moral energies that are needed to build a more just social order.

By calling attention to the primordiality of exposure, passivity, and vulnerability in our being with others, and articulating it phenomenologically as a dimension of our embodied experience, our experience as beings of a spiritual flesh, Levinas is able to connect responsibility for social justice to the facticity of a responsiveness to the other that precedes the voluntarism of the ego-logical subject, taking hold of us, binding us, through the compassion of the deeper, more primordial dimension of our incarnation. Through the very nature of our embodiment, our flesh, which is far deeper, infinitely deeper, than our conventional experience of the body would ever concede, we are always already being moved, whether we realize it or not, by a deep compassion for the other. (And this is presumably true even of the man who takes pleasure in torture or commits murder. Investigating the childhood of such men, one always uncovers stories of abuse that severely damaged or virtually destroyed this dimension of their embodiment. Behind the evil deeds of Auschwitz, one may also find a "thoughtlessness" that disconnects the agent from the bodily felt sense of his acts. Evil is possible only as a radical alienation and uprootedness in our embodiment.)

Read in conjunction with the phenomenological narrative of moral formation elaborated by Merleau-Ponty, Levinas's account makes a contribution of incalculable significance. Modern theories of justice forgot the wisdom in ancient Greek culture that Plato and Aristotle attempted, albeit not unproblematically, to pass on in their discussions of moral education, and in particular, the best way to approach and draw on the inherently proto-moral order already implicit in the earliest natural experiences of infancy and childhood, so as to give them, in their maturity, the desired moral form. However, Levinas does not provide an adequate account of the developmental stages through which the experience of exposure and

responsiveness, of subjection to the other, must pass in order to become the responsibility for justice that is morally required of the adult as citizen of a democratic state and member of a planetary community. Nor does he sufficiently register the importance of socialization and the importance of social-political institutions in making possible the step, the transition, from the ethical, where it is a question of seeing in the other person an absolute singularity, to the moral-political, where it is a question of recognizing all others according to the justice of an abstract universality. Thus he does not sufficiently explain the essential and decisive connection between the "ethical" experience to which he calls our attention—the face-to-face responsibility for the concrete, singular other—and the problematic of justice, in which it is a question of responsibility for all others, abstract others—including those who are invisible and unknown, those who are deceased and those not yet born.

But this is not merely a limitation charged against Levinas, nor is it merely a problematic for philosophers to work on. Rather, it is first and foremost a question and a challenge confronting everyone who is endowed by nature with a capacity to feel, to see and hear, to engage in discourse, to be responsive. It is a question of our responsibility for the universal extension of justice to all sentient beings: how we are to respond to the absolutely irrecusable, singular claims on our humanity asserted by the very existence of all the other sentient beings—beings whose faces we cannot see, cannot ourselves face—passing for a time through the world.

In Otherwise Than Being , Levinas denounces the "freedom" that a certain modern bourgeois liberalism, now a politics of egoism and ruthless capitalism, has always prized: not even the "carnival masks of history" (OB 125, AE 161) can succeed in masking the suffering wrought by such freedom, always enjoyed at the expense of the other. This, I think, is what Benjamin was pointing to when he wrote, in his Trauerspiel book:

Everything about history that from the beginning has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—no, in a skull.^[129]

History until now is a story of oppression and violence, a story also, therefore, of untold suffering. For the gaze rooted in compassion, rooted in a sense of justice defying the tales of the victors, who would make this suffering, for which they are the cause, totally invisible, history therefore can present itself only as the death or mortification of the face—as a death's-head or skull. The face of history is a skull that faces the living with the face of death, the face of injustice: a face of death due to injustice. But if the face of history is even today, in a time of destitution amidst abundance, nothing but a grin-

ning skull, or rather, as in the killing fields of Cambodia, a pyramid of skulls, why must we tolerate it remaining in this state until the time of redemption, until the end of time and history as we have known them, when the radiance, the Schein , of the face of God—another god?—might burn through the chains of the historical continuum? Must it be that only the angel of history, an angel sent in a time beyond time by the god of the time of redemption, will give to the suffering human face its longed-for justice?

In the maturity of the moral self posited by Habermas, the face becomes a mask of discursive reason. Is it possible that there is, paradoxically, and contrary to his unquestionably admirable intentions, a monstrous inhumanity in the face this mask both conceals and reveals? Whether it conceals or reveals, the mask always betrays!

In our time, the persistence of injustice, of institutionalized forms of violence against the oppressed, has created a new kind of mask: the mask of the terrorist who resorts to violence as the only remaining weapon in the struggle against the greater violence of injustice. In Die Maßnahme , Berthold Brecht wrote of revolutionaries whose faces, visible for all to see, were reduced to "empty pages on which the revolution may write its orders."^[130] This reading of their faces may itself be an injustice; but in any case, today's most extreme revolutionaries wear masks to conceal the reading of their faces. In a series of interviews, Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the native peoples of Chiapas, Mexico, reflected on the significance of the ski masks he and his army are forced to wear. The masks are not only necessary for their survival; they are also emblematic, hermeneutical, and allegorical, hiding faces behind multiple layers of meaning. Whereas the duplicitous enemies of the people have "double faces," faces that conceal their indifference to the suffering of the poor behind faces that are really faceless masks of bureaucratic design, the oppressed cover their faces with masks of facelessness to fight against a regime of injustice in which they are treated and seen as "faceless." The masks of the guerrillas demonstrate this reality, expressing the condition that makes it necessary for them to engage in a struggle to give back to the native people their true faces. The struggle of the Zapatista National Liberation Army is very much a struggle for the truth, a struggle over the truth. The masks thus speak the monstrous truth: the truth, namely, that the truth is concealed as long as injustice prevails. Masks must conceal their faces, then—until that moment when the struggle for truth is ended in a lasting victory for the oppressed and the faces of the people, shining with the beauty of a recognized dignity, the invisible face of their humanity, can be seen and heard wherever justice is at stake.^[131] It is very much a question, as Rilke's story says, of "taking care of faces." But in a time, as

Adorno points out in writing about Beckett's Endgame , when it can sometimes seem that "the only face left is the one whose tears have dried up."^[132]

III—
The Humanity of the Other:
A Question for Vision

In Totality and Infinity (TeI 188, TaI 213), Levinas observes that, "in the eyes that look at me," there shines "the whole of humanity." At the same time that Levinas wants to insist on "our" uniqueness and singularity (each of us must be seen and made visible as "the only one of his kind"), he also wants to say that each of us "belongs to humanity" (au genre humain ). It is easy for us to say something like this, for, in a sense, the experience in question is very familiar. So familiar, in fact, that we may not at once realize how perplexing, how uncanny it actually is. How is it possible for the universal—humanity—to shine forth in and from the singular? How can the singularity of the other reflect the universal? Why is it absolutely imperative that I see the other in his or her singularity if I am ever to see the other's humanity, the other's universality? And how can we escape from the hermeneutical "seeing as," a form of language which seems to impose itself on us at the very moment when we are trying to say something that withdraws the singular from typification?

Reflection on our experience with vision in the constitution of the ethical relation can compel our exposure, beyond the possibility of metaphysical resolution, to the inalterably aporetic logic of the relation between the universal and the singular in the revelation of humanity that takes place through the "presence" of the other. Seeing the humanity of the singular other, seeing humanity in the singular other: seeing the other as human. The hermeneutical grammar of the "as," hidden in the first two locutions, is more paradoxical than it may seem. For the experience in question radically exceeds the possibility of representation within the logic, the categories, of universal and singular, in terms of which metaphysics has always attempted to represent it. This is, ultimately, what I want to show in the course of our hopeless struggle, here, to understand, to make sense, of this experience with sight within the framework of our metaphysical heritage.

In Difficult Freedom , Levinas makes two assertions which, if thought together, could almost be read as suggesting completion in the form of a practical syllogism:

[1] "The face of man is the medium through which the invisible in him becomes visible and enters into commerce with us."

[2] "It is in economic justice that man glimpses the face of man."^[133]

The first proposition is important because, as I will show, it suggests that it is the visibility of an invisible dimension to the face that mediates the transition from the ethical relation to the relation required by justice. The second proposition is also important, because it could be thought to challenge the distinction Levinas makes between the ethical and the political and the priority he asserts for the ethical. It certainly seems to recognize that conditions of economic justice are as crucial for an ethical experience of the other person's humanity as the ethical experience is necessary for realizing the need to work for economic justice. Seeing humanity in and as the face of the other is not an experience that phenomenology can easily articulate; not even Levinas's greatly altered method is sufficiently responsive to the intricacies and mediations of this experience.

In his Critique of Instrumental Reason , Max Horkheimer wrote with concern of his impression that "the capacity for experience that transcends the immediate situation is being atrophied."^[134] There is support for this observation in a passage in Otherwise Than Being , where Levinas condemns the withdrawal from social concern that he discerns among the intellectuals who are his contemporaries. He remarks that

one can call it utopian, yet it is the exact situation of men, at least in our time, when intellectuals feel themselves to be hostages for destitute masses unconscious of their wretchedness. Intellectuals are today mistrustful of a philosophy of the one keeper of his brother, the one-for-the-other . . . : they would scornfully call it humanist or even hagiographical. (OB 166, AE 211)

Levinas is not afraid of appearing to be uncompromisingly utopian; he will not abandon the cause of justice for those who are needy and destitute. To this end, he gives a radically different interpretation to the ethics of responsibility for the other—and ultimately articulates, albeit differently from Habermas, a discursive conception of justice that he believes can alone protect and preserve the infinite otherness of the other. His conception is grounded in our experience of ourselves as hostage to the other. It is, however, as we shall see, a conception that rejects humanism for its failure to do justice to the other.

What is involved in the shift from the perspective of the ethical relation, in which the "I" sees the absolute singularity, the absolute uniqueness of the other, to the perspective of the moral-political relation, where it is a question of the normative universality of justice, requiring a symmetrical relation involving comparisons, equivalences, and calculations of reciprocity? Has the discourse of humanism failed to see and make visible what matters here? And if it has, what would account for its failure? What

alteration in the gaze would correspond to, or even perhaps make possible, the shift from the ethical to the moral-political relation? Would the shift ultimately depend, not merely on a fundamental alteration in the gaze, but even more on a shift from a relation happening in the light of perception to a relation happening in speech? Then does Levinas in fact attempt to withdraw both relations from vision, light, and the ontological commitments of vision and light, in order to "return" them to the speaking and listening? Does Levinas ultimately need, therefore, to withdraw the face of the other, and the relations through which the humanity of the singular other is to be revealed, not only from the discourse of humanism, but also from the discourse of the Enlightenment?

"Je est un autre."^[135] Levinas admired and often repeated these words. All his philosophical works could be read as an elaboration of the experience condensed into these words. When René Char wrote that the poet is a "guardian of the infinite faces of the living,"^[136] he understood that the vision of the poet, unlike that of the paradigmatic Western philosopher, is a vision rooted in feeling—and that it is first of all through feeling that one sees humanity in the faces of others. All of us (but I, as Levinas would say, most of all) need to learn the seeing that is rooted in feeling, in sensibility. This is the seeing that can "recognize the gaze of the stranger, the widow, the orphan" (Tal 7).

We live, says Levinas, in a world "where no being looks at the face of the other" (TaI 302, TeI 278). Robert Coles tells a story that exemplifies this moral blindness. In "Children as Moral Observers," he reports what a black child of eleven, a child living in Soweto, South Africa, told him in the summer of 1979, fourteen years before the final, official end to apartheid:

One day, I'm ready to go die for my people. It's that bad. We are treated like dogs. . . . When I go to Joburg [Johannesburg], I look at the white people, and there is fear in their faces. They can't see us, but we see them. They don't want to see us, but we have to see them! I hope, some day, God helps us settle this; He will have to come down here again, and open a lot of eyes!^[137]

For this child, in whose face, as Levinas would say,^[138] traces of God's presence are to be seen, the intrigues between vision and domination, vision and violence, seeing as friendliness, welcoming the neighbor, and seeing as discrimination, denying the humanity of the other, could not be more visible—nor more intelligible.^[139] It is crucial that the child attempts to return the gaze that looks at him without seeing him: he understands that the day must come when there is, between blacks and whites, a symmetry, a reciprocity of gazes.^[140]

In Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea , the narrator, Roquentin, reports and comments on a thought-provoking conversation with someone whom he calls the Self-Taught Man. As we enter this conversation, the Self-Taught Man is speaking:

"But Monsieur, . . . how can you judge a man by his face? A face, Monsieur, tells nothing when it is at rest."

[Roquentin replies] "Blind humanists! This face is so outspoken, so frank—but their tender, abstract soul will never let itself be touched by the sense of a face."

"How can you," the Self-Taught Man says, misunderstanding, but making a cruicial point, "stop a man, say he is this or that? Who can empty a man? Who can know the resources of a man?"^[141]

Instead of the abstractions of humanism, Sartre, taking the side of Roquentin, wants an existential morality drawing on the truth of concrete experience—the experience, for example, of being touched and moved by the presence of an other's face. The Self-Taught Man, however, can think this concreteness only in terms of an oppressive positivism, imposing on the other the logic of a reified identity. He can think the gaze in its concreteness only as the gaze of a Medusa, turning the other to stone. That we should see the other's humanity, see humanity in the other, seeing in touch with feeling, is to him incomprehensible. (For different reasons, this would also be problematic for Roquentin, who in this respect cannot be identified with Sartre.) There is a certain blindness in the vision of humanism. Is it then merely a question of "further enlightenment"?

Perhaps, as Levinas says, there is, in the experience of a human face, "a reasonable significance which Reason does not know."^[142] I have suggested that it is precisely this significance that Levinas's phenomenological ethics elicits and articulates: a moral experience of the other, face-to-face, that takes hold of me in a dimension of my incarnation that precedes the formation of the ego-logical structure and continues to function , whether or not I am conscious of it, even after the ego-logical identity is formed; a moral experience that continues to function , in each and every moment, always the prior—an acknowledgment of the other's humanity that, in relation to any and every moment of thematized, reflectively explicit cognition, has (will have) always already taken hold of me. Diachronically preceding the formation of the ego, and remaining to some extent synchronically operative, "beneath" the level of consciousness, this acknowledgment of the other's humanity precedes the ego's construction of a worldly temporal order, precedes the order, the measure, the reckoning of the ego's timing. It is in this sense that Levinas will say that it is a question of the

"immemorial," an experience "more ancient," to use Merleau-Ponty's felicitous phrase, "than thought" (Merleau-Ponty, PhP 242). But how can this "immediate" experience of the humanity of the other serve as the grounding for the moral-political concern for justice?

In an interview near the end of his life, Michel Foucault hinted at a conception of the political that would, in effect, move him much closer to the conception of rights and justice in the ideal speech situation of Jürgen Habermas's theory of deliberative democracy; but he expressed this conception with words that move him closer to Levinas as well, declaring that forms of rationality "rest upon a foundation of human practices and human faces."^[143] But how strong is the foundation laid down by the experience of face-to-face encounter? How can there be what Levinas calls the "maieutic awakening of a common reason" in the face-to-face relationship?^[144] How can the face-to-face encounter be incorporated into a moral and political rationality, a moral and political justice?^[145] What is it about the face that makes it capable of bearing this rationality, this justice? What do we see in the face? What can we, what will we see? What do we refuse to see? To what do we shut our eyes? How much truth, how much humanity, can we face?

To see humanity in the face of the other. To see the other's humanity. To see the other as human. What does this mean? What does it involve? How is it to be taught? How is it to be learned? Is it, after all, something teachable, learnable? Is it an experience that involves social mediations? What social practices could alter our cultural habits of perception? Levinas devoted a life-time of thought to this problematic. In Totality and Infinity , he broached the problem in a challenge to those who would depend solely on the institutions of an abstract, formal universality of Reason to establish a society in which this recognition of the other's humanity would be assured:

If . . . the first rationality gleams forth in the opposition of the face to face; if the first intelligible, the first signification, is the infinity of the intelligence that presents itself (that is, speaks to me) in the face; if reason is defined by signification rather than signification being defined by the impersonal structures of reason; if sociality precedes the apparition of these impersonal structures; if universality reigns as the presence of humanity in the eyes that look at me; if, finally, we recall that this look appeals to my responsibility and consecrates my freedom as responsibility and gift of self—then the pluralism of society could not disappear in the elevation of reason, but would be its condition. It is not the impersonal in me that Reason would establish, but an I myself capable of society. (TaI 208, TeI 183–84. Italics added.)

In this passage, Levinas articulates the problem that his phenomenology must face, if it is to succeed in arguing for such a "first rationality." This is a problem that the words in italics call to our attention. But we also will need to consider very carefully what is said about the "gift of self" and about the role of "Reason" in establishing an "I" that would be truly "capable of society." (Before we think about the problem, however, we must consider how difficult it would be to read his reference to the eyes, here, as "merely" metaphorical.) If, as Levinas has argued, to look at the face of the other is to see an irreducibly singular, absolutely unique being, how can I also see in this face the other's humanity—if seeing this humanity means seeing something universal, something common to both of us? Would this not be reducing the alterity of the other to the same, the incomparable to the comparable?

According to Levinas, each of us lives out a life "visible" to others:" 'He is looking at me'—everything in him looks at me; nothing is indifferent to me" (OB 93, AE 118). But is this "visibility" literal or metaphoric? In this remark, the sense in which I am "visible" to the other, "seen" by the other, is that I am "seen" by the other, whether or not another person is actually present, because I experience myself always called before the tribunal of conscience, always taken hold of by obligation, responsibility, and a concern for justice. Thus, it would seem that a literal sense of visibility and being seen is not intended. And yet, the literal sense cannot be denied without jeopardizing the "metaphorical" extension. Levinas does not in fact ignore the literal. When I am face-to-face with another person, I can, according to Levinas, actually see the humanity of this person in the very shining of the face, in the very gaze of the eyes.^[146] And, when he says this, it seems clear that he means "see" in the literal sense. But what is it that I see in this shining? Nothing could be easier than to understand how I may be said to see you . But it is not so clear what it could mean to say that I see your humanity . And yet, the momentous transition from the concrete singularity of a face-to-face ethical relation to the abstract, normative universality of the moral-political perspective, where it becomes a question of justice (a justice that necessarily concerns everyone, and that therefore is not limited to the concrete immediacy of face-to-face presence), would seem to depend on our ability to see humanity in the concretely present other—or say, see the other's humanity. (Is this the same thing as seeing that you are a human being?)

The face, he says, is both the concrete other who is or could be facing me here and now, and also the abstract other, witness for humanity: "both the neighbor and the face of faces, visage and visible" (OB 160, AE 204). "The

neighbor that obsesses me is already a face, both comparable and incomparable, a unique face and [yet also] in relationship with [all other] faces, which are visible in the concern for justice" (OB 158, AE 201). In other words, the face is both the concrete, visible presencing of this absolutely unique, absolutely singular, incomparable person, infinitely other, and also the uncanny, visibly invisible presencing of a certain undeniable abstract (mediated) universality. The paradox, here, if that is what it should be called, is that the face-to-face relation which the "I" shares with the other somehow connects me to the whole of humanity: somehow, the personal relation that engages the "I" is at some heightened level a manifestation of a shared humanity. This is how we might imagine it. Thus it is in this experience that the deontological sense of justice, the concern for justice, is first aroused. In order to clarify how the connection between the "I" and the concrete other becomes a concern for justice, a universal justice for "the whole of humanity," Levinas points to the presence of "the third party":

[1] The presence of the face, the infinity of the other, is a destituteness, a presence of the third party (that is, the whole of humanity which looks at us), and a command. (Tal 213, Tel 188)

[2] [The] third party, the whole of humanity, [is present] in the eyes that look at me. (Ibid.)

The witness in the third party (le tiers ) figures not only in Totality and Infinity , his most important early work, but also in Otherwise Than Being , his most important late work.^[147] And in both works, it is the perspective in terms of which Levinas attempts to think the question of justice. Here is a passage from Totality and Infinity that lays out the significance of the third party, who is also the witness:

The third party [implicitly, therefore, the whole of humanity] looks at me in the eyes of the Other—language is justice. It is not that there first would be the face, and then the being it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity. The face in its nakedness as a face presents to me the destitution of the poor one and the stranger. . . . The poor one, the stranger, presents himself as an equal. His equality within this essential poverty consists in referring to the third party, thus present at the encounter, whom in the midst of his destitution the Other already serves. (Tal 213, Tel 187–88)

Although the figure of the third party is certainly useful in elaborating the connection between the concrete face-to-face ethical relationship and the impersonal, abstract, institutionally mediated relationships at stake in matters of justice, as well as the transition from the concreteness and sin-

gularity of the ethical to the abstractness and universality of the moral-political, I want to argue, in agreement with Derrida, that the transition from the asymmetry of the face-to-face relation to the symmetry and equality of the relation defined by justice is not as straightforward as he supposes.^[148] More specifically, I want to argue that Levinas makes the concept of the third party carry more of a burden than it can bear and that its entrance on the scene cannot entirely resolve the perplexing, seemingly paradoxical contradiction involved in the double signification of the face. In a late interview, Levinas tells us that "the moment of objectivity motivated by justice" requires that we "efface" the singular, concrete face in order to let the "universality" claimed for justice shine forth:

[We] must, out of respect for the categorical imperative or the other's right as expressed in his face, un-face [dé-visager ] human beings, sternly reducing each one's uniqueness to his individuality in the unity of the genre, and let universality rule.^[149]

What is involved in the transition from the "facing" of the other in the face-to-face ethical relation to the "un-facing" that is required by the moral-political perspective? The transition to the perspective of justice requires that we turn away from feelings and actions in relation to a visible, concrete singularity (a singularity, however, whose "own" moral dimensionality extends into the invisible), and assume the abstract, universal perspective of a different invisibility—this time the blindness of impartiality and universalizability that is required by the principles of justice, as well as the extension of moral responsibility beyond the possibility of face-to-face relations. But what is involved in this transition from the ethical relation to the perspective of justice? How is it "motivated" by the claims made against our vision in the realm of the visible—in the context of what the visible calls upon us to see?

In part, our problem lies, I think, in Levinas's insufficiently elaborated introduction of the third party—above all, in the fact that it has to represent more than one function in soliciting and bringing about this crucial transition. It is crucial to understand how the presence of the "third party," a "presence" even when actually absent, is supposed to account for the way that my experience of the other's humanity is "corrected" or "adjusted," to become a moral-political recognition of universal claims for justice—a bond, an obligation, a responsibility, and commitment that is connected at once with the visible and with the invisible, the present and the absent. One thing we may say, I think, is that it stands for the gaze returned in accusation. For the gaze of the third party affirms equality and reciprocity: as

Merleau-Ponty says, the "I" not only sees; the "I" is also visible, seen, and in being seen, or being visible—the price it must pay in order to see—it finds that its gaze is necessarily returned. This gaze returned, almost impossible to escape, subjects the "I" to the reflective judgment of an ever-present humanity, a gaze looking at us and calling us to account from every material, sensuous surface. The third party is a witness who judges.

But I would argue that the presence of what Levinas calls "the third party," representing—even when not actually present—the absolute demand for the symmetry and reciprocity promised by the principle of universal justice, must be understood as more than, and other than, simply a necessary "correction" or "adjustment" to the asymmetry—the privileging of the concrete other—in the face-to-face ethical relation. Levinas himself says that "the pluralism of society could not disappear in the elevation of Reason, but would be its condition" and that it is Reason—by which I take him to mean the social and cultural institutions incorporating Reason—that will establish an "I" "capable of society" (see TaI 208, TeI 183–84, quoted at length a few pages earlier). The third party, whose "objective gaze" introduces the normative perspective of moral-political universality, must be understood, for example, as representing, or standing in for, all the social mediations—the larger processes of socialization and moral education, including the sociocultural practices involved in the formation of perception and sensibility. It must therefore be understood as representing the social-political institutions of civil society and state that serve to interpret, maintain, and protect the work of justice by ensuring the necessary social conditions for the singularity of the face-to-face ethical relation—the relation that Levinas holds to be primary and foundational for the moral and political order of justice. And yet, the third party also serves to remind us of the inescapable aporia, the inescapable injustice, and even violence, involved in seeing the other as other in order to do justice to this other.

We need a story about the "movements" that are required of the gaze in the transition from the ethical relation to the perspective of justice. In "The Other of Justice," Axel Honneth defends Levinas, observing that "The moral point of view of equal treatment . . . requires continuous correction and supplementation by a viewpoint indebted to our concrete obligation to individual subjects in need of help."^[150] I wholeheartedly agree. With admirable clarity, Levinas sees that, and also how, the ethical relation is necessary for the perspective of justice; he also sees that the perspective of justice is necessary for social life. And what he sees he shows with ad-

mirable rhetorical force. But I question his assertion that the face-to-face relation is primary, is the foundation for the perspective of justice. We thus need to see that, and also how, the incorporation of the impartial perspective of justice in the institutions of civil society and state must be regarded as not merely necessary for social life, but more particularly, as itself a necessary condition for the ethical relation. To spell out the argument for this point here would take us beyond the horizons of our present topic; but perhaps it will suffice to say that we need to see that, and how, the institutions of civil society and state interpret, maintain, and protect the perspective of justice indirectly as well as directly—for example, by establishing favorable conditions for socialization, so that the ethical relation can be taught, maintained, protected, realized. By "favorable conditions," I mean to envision conditions of social justice that would, for example, forever end the reproduction of poverty and cruelty in family life. The function of the perspective of justice represented by the third party is not, as Levinas suggests, merely to "correct" the priority and privilege accorded to the singular other—the other one—in the ethical relation. We cannot simply look to altering face-to-face relations through "raising consciousness" in the individual. We cannot ignore the task of altering the social conditions, political institutions, and the cultural life-world within which the face-to-face relation takes place. The ethical and the moral-political are interdependent, equally dependent on the other.

Levinas has a phenomenological story to tell in regard to our acknowledgment of the other's humanity; but I submit that a compelling story would hinge on a more differentiated conception of the presence of the third party in order to explain how I am bound to experience the humanity of the other as a universal normative claim and am thereby elevated to a vision of justice. In any case, however, Levinas sees that the first chapter of this story requires an understanding of the nature of the moral claim: its taking hold through the visibility of the ethical relation, against the elemental sensibility of the flesh, and registering its first meaning as a sense of responsibility, obligation, and justice carried by the body, carried by the flesh. He sees that we need a phenomenology of embodied moral experience, an account that avoids both rationalism and empiricism, both idealism and realism, revealing how this experience goes beyond Kantian deontologism in the rigorousness of its claim.

But how can the ethical be understood as incarnate, without reducing it to the objectivity of the merely physical or the subjectivity of ego-logical immanence? How can the flesh that embodies the ethical be at once

material and spiritual—or rather, beyond such metaphysical duality? And how can Levinas's "return" to the embodiment of moral experience reveal an obligation, a responsibility that exceeds that required of us by the categorical imperative? 'In his review of Honneth's paper on "The Other of Justice," Thomas McCarthy rightly argues that Honneth fails to make sufficiently clear—and I would argue that Levinas does not either— "just how and in which respects it [what McCarthy calls "the care perspective" of justice] goes beyond the bounds of a Kantian doctrine of virtue in which benevolence and beneficence figure centrally."^[151] And he argues that,

if loving concern for concrete individuals is meant as a general but indeterminate (Kant would say "imperfect") obligation, it might be accommodated by discourse ethics along the lines that Habermas sketched in his earlier discussion of Carol Gilligan's ethics of care. If not, he will need some justification for such determinate moral obligations. How, when, and why do "asymmetrical", "unilateral" and "nonreciprocal" moral obligations arise?

A completely satisfying account in answer to all these questions is more than I can hope to provide here. But in the context of our concerns, I will say, as part of the answer, that the obligation constitutive of the ethical in Levinas's thought exceeds the Kantian not only because the asymmetry of its demand on us makes the demand supererogatory, infinitely more exacting, more exigent, but also because its binding precedes critical reflection, precedes judgment, being a binding and urging, first of all, of the flesh. In the phenomenology of moral experience that Levinas sketches, it is—and must be—a question of the role of embodiment, the "first nature" of flesh, of sense and sensibility, always already attuned in a rudimentary way to the moral dimension of sociality, the role of this "first nature" in the formation of the moral perspective demanded of our "second nature." On my reading, Levinas was attempting to articulate his conception of an embodied ethics, in which practical reason would finally be recognized in its embodiment—in our gestures, our listening, our looking and seeing. What Levinas's phenomenology shows us is that moral obligation cannot be understood without understanding how, in a time before memory, it takes hold of our flesh, our embodiment, and how, unless first damaged by the brutal conditions of early life, it emerges in response to the presence of the other.

Looking at other persons and seeing their humanity—thus also the whole of humanity somehow present in the singular—must therefore be, for Levinas, a distinctive mode of looking and seeing. It is not a question of an intellectual or cognitive act—not a deduction or inference, not a judgment of analogy. Seeing the other's humanity cannot be a matter of seeing

that the other is like me, nor can it be seeing that I am like the other. For seeing resemblances (analogical reasoning) can only be a reduction to the (symmetry of the) same—and consequently an act of violence (ibid.). Thus, it also cannot be a question—though Levinas sometimes seems to suggest otherwise—of seeing the other as human. What must be insisted on is that I simply see the other's humanity! At all costs, Levinas wants to resist both an idealism that would entirely withdraw the humanity of the other from the visible and an empiricism that would reduce the visible reality of the other to an ontology that denies the dimension of transcendence. He will therefore insist that the face-to-face relation cannot be abstractly represented, and even that it cannot be adequately comprehended by one of the subjects involved in the relation. Nor, a fortiori, considering the way representation works, can the humanity of the other be represented by any external agent—not even the "third party."

To move beyond the conceptual dilemmas, the aporia, which the humanity visibly manifest in the face of the other constitutes, philosophical thought is obliged to find a new way to recognize and articulate the face-to-face experience. And this is just what Levinas attempts. In struggling to think this experience otherwise than in terms of being, i.e., otherwise than in terms that would inevitably force it to obey the logic of identity, reducing the other to the same, he attempts to effect a fundamental alteration in our approach to the other. The "appearance in being of these 'ethical peculiarities'—the humanity of man," requires, he says, "a rupture of being" (EaI 87). Therefore, it is useless to turn for inspiration to the discourse of humanism, because this discourse is entirely woven out of the violence of an essentialism belonging to the age-old framework of Western ontology. With words that are reminiscent of one of Nietzsche's notes, published in book 1 of The Will to Power ,^[152] and some of Heidegger's thoughts in his 1947 "Letter on Humanism,"^[153] Levinas writes: "Humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human" (OB 127–28; AE 164).

In place of the discourse of humanism, Levinas offers a discourse that attempts to articulate, to bring out, or say solicit, a certain normative experience. Using, as always, a mode of discourse that appears to reverberate between the descriptive and the prescriptive (since, as phenomenological description, not everyone would or could accept it as true), he says:

It is my responsibility before a face looking at me . . . that constitutes the original fact of fraternity. (TaI 214, TeI 189)

(I will not undertake, here, a critique of Levinas's reduction of the other to the gender of "fraternity," since Derrida has already initiated such a

critique, examining the textual repercussions of this surprising blind spot. Suffice it to say that Levinas's support for traditional gender identities and roles represents a terrible disfigurement.) It is in and through the responsibility that has taken hold of my flesh, the flesh of my vision, that I find myself compelled to see the other person "as" another human being. According to Levinas,

fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others. All human relations as human proceed from disinterestedness. The one-for-the-other of proximity is not a deforming abstraction. In it, justice is shown from the first . (OB 159, AE 202. Italics added.)

Elaborating on this point, Levinas draws our attention to how we are sensibly affected by the presence of others (OB 101, AE 127) and he observes that, in the ethical relation of proximity, others "do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature, individuations of the human race, or chips off the same block, like stones metamorphosed into men" (OB 159, AE 202). This also means that

humanity, to which proximity properly so called refers, must then not be first understood as consciousness, that is, as the identity of an ego endowed with knowledge or . . . with powers. Proximity does not resolve into the consciousness a being would have of another being that it would judge to be near inasmuch as the other would be under one's eyes or within one's reach, and inasmuch as it would be possible for one to take hold of that being, hold on to it or converse with it, in the reciprocity of handshakes, caresses, struggles, collaboration, commerce, conversation. (OB 83, AE 104)

If it be true, as is often said, that I will tend to see a reflection of myself mirrored in the eyes of the other, it must also be said, I think, that this mirroring, instead of encouraging narcissism, most often double-crosses it, enabling me to contact what Kant in The Doctrine of Virtue referred to—but without appreciating the aporia—as "the humanity in my own person"; and that, when our gaze is rooted in this contact and comes from this contact, we may accordingly see—may be able to behold—the humanity of the other.^[154] In other words, the humanity of the other is something that becomes most visible—is given in luminous visibility—only to those most in touch with their own humanity. For Levinas, "The [idea and ideal of the] unity of the human race is in fact posterior to fraternity. Proximity is a dif-

ference, a non-coinciding, an arrhythmia in time, a diachrony refractory to thematization" (OB 166, AE 21l). The other can be thematized only as beyond thematization, represented only as beyond representation: "he loses his face as a neighbor [when inscribed] in narration. The relationship with him is indescribable in the literal sense of the term, unconvertible into a history, irreducible to the simultaneousness of writing, the eternal present of a writing that records or presents results" (ibid.).

Compelling us to make a momentous alteration in our thinking, he shows, in what he calls a "prehistory of the ego" (OB 117, AE 150), that the experience of the humanity of the other which is visible in the face is first of all a question of our exposure to the other, an immediate, bodily felt response, taking place in a passive bodily disposition before all ego-logical consciousness, before all intentionality, knowledge, and volition: a bodily disposition that registers in a very deep level as obligation and responsibility in view of the command, at once singular and universal, that visibly issues from the face of the other.^[155] But because of what is left unsaid, there is a certain uncertainty or equivocation in what Levinas says regarding the way in which this responsibility, this ethical disposition is related to the visibility of the face of the other. As I understand him, he wants to say that this responsibility takes hold of me prior to any and every actual face-to-face encounter with another person—a thesis that only makes sense to me if it means that this responsibility takes hold of my flesh, becoming a bodily carried disposition—but that actual face-to-face encounters can be occasions for the awakening and realization of this originary responsibility. A "direct optics."^[156]

We still need a phenomenological account of the "moments" involved in the transition from the perspective of the concrete singular other to the perspective of the abstract universal other. This task, however, requires that we first of all clearly distinguish the ethical from the moral-political, the "good"—that which constitutes the individual's conception of happiness in a good life—from the "right" and the "just"—that which would be equally good for everyone. For many years, Levinas made this task more difficult than it otherwise would have been because he used "the ethical" to refer to both dimensions of our life with others: both the ethical, which cocerns the good (conceptions of the good life, conceptions of happiness), and the moral-political, which concerns what is right and just, equally good for all. He eventually attempted to "correct" the semantic dimension of this confusion in his thinking.^[157] But he left unchanged his association of "the Good" with moral-political obligation, denying himself any way to

recognize that there can be different, equally moral conceptions of the good life and making it seem as if the categorical imperative of moral obligation imposes on all people the same conception of happiness, the same conception of the good life.

Be this as it may, in Levinas's account, the ethical relation constitutes the very structure of subjective experience: it is the subject's exposure to the other which makes the subject a subject: "The exposure precedes the initiative a voluntary subject would take to expose itself" (OB 180, AE 227). What defines the ethical subject, for Levinas, is not, therefore, freedom and autonomy, but rather its "pre-logical subjection,"^[158] its "involuntary election" by "the Good" (OB 15, AE 19): "the Good is not presented to freedom; it has chosen me before I have chosen it. No one is good voluntarily" (OB 11, AE 13. Also see OB 18, AE 22). But Levinas would not deny that I am always free to refuse this "election." Moral character is thus a question of what I make of this initial disposition—what I make of the fact that I have already been taken hold of by "the Good," or what I would prefer to call the right and the just. In words addressed to "The Youth of Israel," he says:

Attachment to the Good precedes the choosing of this Good. How indeed to choose the Good? The Good is good precisely because it chooses you and grips you before you have had the time to raise your eyes to it.^[159]

The "Good" is thus, in Levinas's special sense, "anarchical," that is to say, more ancient than any thematized moral principle, and more ancient than, radically other than, and irreducible to, any conventional, socially constructed normative order—even older than any transcendental "origin" posited by "morality." Indeed, the force of the Good as a reflective principle depends on the prior hold it has on our embodiment. Unfortunately, Levinas does not sufficiently flesh out in a phenomenology of moral experience how this "involuntary election" by "the Good" takes place and how it connects with our freedom—not only our capacity and desire to make existential choices in regard to happiness and the good life, but also our moral obligation to make the choices that justice requires of us. But I take it that it is first and foremost a question of the elemental flesh, a question of our embodiment. If it is felt at all, the moral universality is felt first of all in and as a certain bodily sense of obligation. (But I think we must recognize that often only the embodiment of a saint or a bodhisattva would be sufficiently developed for this felt sense to take form. And indeed it often seems that the moral experience of obligation and responsibility which Levinas is "de-

scribing" could only be that of the saint or bodhisattva. But then he would be describing a comportment that he is also attempting performatively to bring forth.)

This embodied dimension explains how there can be an obligation that Levinas describes as coming before cognition and volition. It is "an order which, beyond representation, affects me unbeknownst to myself, 'slipping into me like a thief'. . . . It is the coming of an order to which I am subjected before hearing it, or which I hear in my own saying. It is an august command, but one that does not constrain or dominate" (OB 150, AE 191. Italics added). (Would it be possible to connect this account to Habermas's claim that there are normative presuppositions implicit in speech as a social practice?)

Returning moral experience to its sources, Levinas calls attention to the "passive" quality of this bodily felt sense. But he contends that it is a question of "a passivity more passive than passivity," because the conventional sense of "passivity" understands it in terms of an ontological dualism, as the opposite of activity, hence as a willed passivity. Whereas the passivity to which Levinas is calling our attention is not a passivity that originates in the ego. It is rather an existential condition into which, as it were, we are thrown. Or it is as if our ability to see the Good were in the very nature of things.

Crucial, then, to Levinas's way out of the dilemma, the paradox, in the "I"'s experience of the other's simultaneous singularity and universality is the exposition of a radically different conception of the "I," the subject who looks and sees. Everything hinges on this reconfiguration of the beholding subject, bringing out, I believe, what Merleau-Ponty calls the "prepersonal" dimension of its experience of the other, showing that this experience is not self-assertion, but rather subjection [l'assujettissement ], the experience of being held, through the gaze, in beholdenness to the other: before the face I cannot simply remain there contemplating it, I have always already responded to it. "I can recognize [see] the gaze of the stranger, the widow and the orphan," he says, but "only in giving or refusing" (TaI 77, TeI 49). And yet, justice requires that we always also concede that the response has not yet taken place, that the responsibility has not yet been realized—and that the justice that the other's moral existence commands is in a time to come.

According to classical liberalism, the bourgeois subject should enjoy a will free of all influences, "une volonté soustraite à toute influence."^[160] But Levinas wants to point to a condition of subjectivity that precedes this voluntarism: he thinks that, prior to becoming an autonomous ego, I am a

subject of flesh and bones already subjected to the wisdom of the moral imperative, the normativity of the good and the right deeply inscribed in my flesh and bones (OB 164; AE 208, 209). Inscribed not by torture, as in Kafka's story "The Penal Colony," but, as it were, by the grace of nature. We need to give thought to this nature.

In "Substitution," one of the most important chapters in Otherwise Than Being , his last major work, Levinas comments that,

for the philosophical tradition of the West, all spirituality lies in consciousness, thematic exposition of being, knowing. In starting with sensibility interpreted not as a knowing but as proximity, in seeking, through language, contact and sensibility, . . . we have endeavored to describe subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness and thematization. (OB 99–100, AE 126)

This attention to sensibility is a major innovation in moral theory, promising even more than Levinas might have suspected. The fact of "incarnation," he says, elaborating his phenomenology of moral experience,

far from thickening and tumefying the soul, . . . exposes it naked to the other, to the point of making the subject expose its very exposedness. . . . The concept of the incarnate subject is not a biological concept. The schema that corporeality outlines submits the biological itself to a higher structure. (OB 109, AE 139)

Somewhat later, he explicitly introduces the question of the categorical imperative into our thought of embodiment:

The fact that immortality and theology could not determine the categorical imperative signifies the novelty of the Copernican revolution: a sense that is not measured by being or not being; but on the contrary, being is determined on the basis of sense. (OB 129, AE 166)

Levinas is calling our attention, here, to "a pre-original reason that does not proceed from any initiative of the subject, an an-archic reason" (OB 166, AE 211–12). It is, he says, "a reason before the beginning, before any present, because my responsibility for the other commands me before any decision, before any deliberation" (ibid.). "This recurrence" to an incarnate reason, he argues,

would be the ultimate secret of the incarnation of the subject; prior to all reflection, prior to every positing, an indebtedness before any loan, not assumed, anarchical, subjectivity of a bottomless passivity, made out of assignation, like the echo of a sound that would precede the resounding of this sound. (OB 112, AE 142)

The peculiar "presence" of this Levinasian categorical imperative, taking hold of us "beneath the level of prime matter" (OB 110, AE 140), transforms the very substance of our bodies from "matter" into "flesh":

The incarnation of the [moral] self [must be understood as] a passivity prior to all passivity at the bottom of matter becoming flesh [la matière se faisant chair ]. (OB 196, AE 150)

(This suggests an interpretation that would connect it with Merleau-Ponty's thought, in The Visible and the Invisible , of "a glorified body," "un corps glorieux,"^[161] and of "an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions."^[162] For me, this "ideality" includes the moral "inscription" of the flesh. In one of his working notes,^[163] the philosopher writes, intriguingly, that "my flesh itself is one of the sensibles in which an inscription [inscription ] of all the others is made. . . . "I find Merleau-Ponty's use of this word "inscription" charged with significance, since that same word plays a major role in Levinas's tracework phenomenology of moral experience.) As "passivity incarnate" (OB 112, AE 142), the flesh of our bodies receives an assignation, "an extremely urgent assignation" (OB 101, AE 127), an "exigency" (OB 112–13, AE 143–44) that takes hold of our vision, our beholding, and makes us correspondingly beholden, facing the other in a condition of subjection, "hostage" to the other, responsible to and for the other. If from the hands of family and neighbors, the child has not suffered traumatic cruelties in the early years of its passage through the world, but on the contrary has been recognized and appropriately nurtured, this categorical imperative, our incarnate moral assignment, can give crucial support and guidance to moral deliberation, moving and disposing us according to its commandment:

The logos that informs prime matter in calling it to order is an accusation, or a category. But [the] obsession [that takes hold of us in the form of a moral predisposition] is anarchical; it accuses me beneath the level of prime matter. . . . Western philosophy, which perhaps is reification itself, remains faithful to the order of things and does not know the absolute passivity, beneath the level [that traditional thought describes in terms of the dualism] of activity and passivity. (OB 110, AE 140. We should again consider the use of the structural and topographic words "level" and "beneath," which suggest a diachronic sublation, somehow preserving what is nevertheless surpassed.)

But the embodiment of the categorical imperative cannot be understood, therefore, until our way of thinking about the body undergoes a radical revision. Thus he says:

The body is neither an obstacle opposed to the soul, nor a tomb that imprisons it, but that by which the self is susceptibility itself. Incarnation is an extreme passivity, . . . exposed to compassion, and, as a self, to the gift that costs. (OB 195, AE 139)

Crucial for our understanding of embodiment is, then, the "proximity" of the face-to-face ethical relation that takes place between the "I" and an other:

The relationship of proximity cannot be reduced to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity, nor to the simple "representation" of a neighbor; it is already an assignation, an extremely urgent assignation—an obligation, anachronously prior to any commitment. This anteriority is "older" than the a priori. This formula expresses a way of being affected [affecté ] without the source of the affection becoming a theme of representation. We have called this relationship irreducible to consciousness [by the word] "obsession." (OB 100–1, AE 127)

I want to call attention to Levinas's word, "assignation," here, because it already assigns to the body, in the form of a certain "sign," the inscription of a moral obligation, the urgent claims of the moral law. Thus it is not surprising to find a passage where this inscription in the flesh, this moral logos (OB 121, AE 156) is actually made explicit. In the ethical relation set in motion by the "approach" or "proximity" of the other,

there is inscribed or written [s'inscrit ou s' écrit ] the trace of infinity, the trace of a departure, but trace of what is inordinate, does not enter into the present, and inverts the arkhé into an-archy, that there may be . . . responsibility and a [morally disposed] self. (OB 117, AE 149)

This turn in Levinas's phenomenology may seem queer, but it is only in fact an elaboration of Numbers 15:31, which reads—in so far as it gives itself to a reading—as follows: "One who has broken God's commandment is one who profanes the covenant inscribed in the flesh. "In his essay "On the Mimetic Faculty," Benjamin writes about the attempt "To read what was never written."^[164] This is the paradox into which Levinas's phenomenology draws us. The marking of the inscription, impossible as a metaphysical presence, nevertheless leaves a trace in withdrawing from presence and effacing itself. And it will only be through the deconstruction of our

ego-logical identity that, in a process of moral transformation, what was never written, a double erasure, a double effacement, may indeed be retraced, read—and be thereby, finally, written. This is what Levinas refers to as the "posteriority of the anterior" (Tal 54, Tel 25). A question, therefore, of performative remembering.

Levinas speaks of the inscription, an inscription that underwrites the claims of the other, prescribing our responsibility, as nothing more than a "trace," or rather a mere trace of a trace, virtually illegible, because we cannot possibly return to the original moment of the inscription, and in any case, even if, per impossibile , we could, we still would not get at it, since it belongs to a past that never was fully present to itself. A phantom, a spectral remnant, the trace requires that we learn from its spectral visibility a different way of looking and seeing—a way that would be infinitely responsible for the other, whose visible presence before us is otherwise than being. But the moral imperative, having first of all taken hold of us through the very nature of the flesh, is nevertheless always already predisposing us in certain ways prior to the time when we are able to become conscious of its functioning—though it does not at all constitute a determinism of moral comportment, which always remains a question of the exercise of our freedom and depends on our willingness to engage in a process of recuperation, retrieving some sense of direction and motivation from the originary moral disposition. But if the attempt to retrieve or decipher the trace is impossible, why expend so much effort in tracework? For Levinas, what ultimately matters—what constitutes, let us say, the very possibility of virtue—is not the retrieval or deciphering of the trace—a metaphysically impossible task—but the character of the effort, the exertion, one's devotion to the task. It is by the character of this effort, this devotion that we are ultimately measured. For the mere facticity of this moral inscription determines absolutely nothing: everything depends on whether and how the "gift" of responsibility carried by our flesh is received for the second time. In other words, everything depends on whether and how the recuperation of this tracework disposition is made the highest concern of my moral life:

Responsibility for my neighbor dates from before my freedom in an immemorial past, an unrepresentable past that was never present and is more ancient than consciousness. . . . [T]his anarchic responsibility, which summons me from nowhere into a present time, is perhaps the measure . . . of an immemorial freedom that is even older than being, or decisions, or deeds.^[165]

Thus, as Alphonso Lingis notes, the dimension in which the sensuous material is laid out is "already extended by the sense of alterity."^[166] (And yet,

it is never extended enough, for the sense of alterity will always continue calling to be recognized, retrieved, and realized in our lives.) As Levinas expresses the point: "Sensibility is exposedness to the other" (OB 75, AE 94). Accordingly, it is also, as he will later demonstrate, using a description which recognizes that what is involved is an event that precedes one's social initiation into a thematic recognition of the moral order, exposure to the "anarchy of the Good," an ordering of our embodiment that precedes the cultural order of moral education. This means that

the subjectivity of sensibility, taken as incarnation, is an abandon without return, [in fact], . . . a body suffering for another, the body as passivity and renouncement, a pure undergoing. (OB 79, AE 100)

Emphasizing his difference from Kant, Levinas describes this moral experience as "heteronomy" (OB 124, AE 160). But of course, this heteronomy is the most extreme antithesis of the heteronomy which, in Kant's moral system, precedes the stages of moral enlightenment or maturity (Mündigkeit ) that are called "autonomy": as Levinas uses the term, it is a way of expressing the fact that, prior even to the heteronomy that Kant ascribes to a life determined solely by custom and convention, shame or fear of punishment—hence anarchically prior to the normative arkhé of the discursive social order, I am always already bodily claimed and bound, or say appropriated, by the moral law, a law subjecting me to the welfare of the other. But of course, as Adriaan Peperzak correctly points out, Kant "knew very well that, before I become aware of it, I am not able to establish the moral law by which I discover myself to be [already] ruled."^[167]

In describing the "heteronomy" by which the moral law takes hold of me, Levinas deepens the "pathos" of Kant's moral philosophy, because the moral predisposition inscribed in the flesh is in conflict with desires of the flesh that are also inscribed from time immemorial and that are not (yet) bound to the moral law: its assignment is thus not assured an easy or automatic victory in this conflict. This is, I suggest, why Levinas emphatically uses words such as "persecution," "accusation," "wound," "trauma," "sacrifice," "hostage," "obsession," and even "violence" to describe the experience of responsibility and obligation that one feels—or should be able to feel—in seeing another human being. These terms may seem at first quite perplexing.^[168] But I think that they can be explained once we take into account Levinas's distinction between the ego and the moral self , and understand the terms to be, first of all, accurate phenomenological descriptions of the ego's point of view with regard to the moral experience of the other. For whom would the embodied experience of the moral relation be ap-

propriately described as "persecution," "wound," "accusation," "violence"? Would this not be the experience of the ego? The ego would "naturally" experience the assignation of the moral law in these terms because the moral law, inscribed in the flesh but ruling nevertheless "against nature," or rather, against a certain propensity of nature, would constrain its ego-serving desires. But in fact the moral self could also use these terms to describe its experience of the moral relation. However, the grounds for its use of these terms, and therefore what it would mean by these terms, would be the very opposite of the ego's. Let us see why.

In Difficult Freedom , the persecution involved in responsibility is described as "an invisible universality."^[169] What does this mean? I suggest that the invisibility of the persecution, the wound, the trauma is a function of the fact that, after having taken hold of the universality of the flesh in a time before ego-logical memory, the event's significance nevertheless requires recognition and recuperation—an elective realization. Precisely this realization would be the difficult work of freedom that overcomes the ego and constitutes the moral self. Something that Freud remarked in Civilization and Its Discontents may clarify this question. He comments that

the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and distrustful is his conscience, so that ultimately it is precisely those people who carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the deepest sinfulness.^[170]

So the extreme terms that Levinas uses could also be used to describe the experience of the moral self, troubled to the point of anguish and trauma by a heightened moral conscience, aware that its response to the other is always too late and always too little.

In Difficult Freedom , Levinas says that the more just we are, the more harshly we are judged. Judged not only by others, but by ourselves, by the sense of our own conscience.^[171] According to Levinas,

Persecution is the precise moment in which the subject is reached or touched without the mediation of the logos. (OB 121, AE 154–55)

The ego is therefore, first of all, in the accusative (accusé ), called upon to be responsive to the other—"me voici!"—before there is an "I" existing in the nominative:

in the form of an ego unable to conceive what is 'touching' it, the ascendency of the other is exercised upon the same to the point of interrupting it, leaving it speechless. . . . [Persecution] designates the form in which the ego is affected. (OB 101, AE 127–28)

For Levinas, I am bound in responsibility to and for the other, put radically into question by the irreducible alterity of the other, even "before the appearing of the other in sensibility" (OB 75, AE 95). The rigor of Levinas's ethics is extreme, not easily, not comfortably to be understood, especially when the face-to-face relation is thought to take place within the hell, the non-place, that was Auschwitz. But, according to Levinas, I am responsible even "for the persecution with which, before any intention, he [the other] persecutes me" (OB 166, AE 212). "Only the persecuted one must answer," he says, "for everyone, even for his persecutor."^[172] (In Part IV, we will question the victim's responsibility for the persecution. It is certainly a controversial point.)

Calling attention to the tracework of a rudimentary and preliminary moral predisposition, illegible as such, but which nevertheless gives some initial moral direction and motivation, Levinas asserts that

in the "prehistory" of the ego posited for itself there speaks a responsibility. The self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles. (OB 117, AE 150)

What Levinas calls the "self" is thus both earlier than and later than the ego—although the earlier and the later are also, by virtue of the sociocultural mediations and the thematic consciousness that separate them, irreducibly different. As I read this passage, it suggests that the moral "self" appears in two distinct phases or faces: a pre-egological phase or face which is immemorially earlier than the (personal) ego, and in which the flesh, a phantom tracework of moral inscriptions recorded like lacerations, is already touched, already "wounded" by the claims of the other, already responsive to the alterity of the other; and second, much later, a post-egological stage or phase, which, however, is only an existential or "elective" possibility, and which always depends on the commitment of the (personal) ego for its realization—depends, that is, on the ego's personal assumption of responsibility for the developing transformation of our initial or originary capacity to be responsive to the other. It would thus be a question of the emergence of a moral self from the traces of a prepersonal responsiveness to the registers of alterity, a moral self rooted in, and remaining in good contact with, a vital sense of this responsiveness.

If this reading be admissible, it would suggest that Levinas was engaged in a certain tracework, in a return to the primordial body of experience, for the sake of a calling to attempt, in the tropological language of phenomenology, the retrieval for present living of the original assignment of "motivations." Such tracework would begin to make visible, beyond the ego-logical stage or

face, the very height of our moral development. But we need, at this point, something that Levinas does not give us: a phenomenological narrative that would articulate his moral vision in terms of a process of moral transformation, translating his provocative, but extremely abstract concepts into a much more concrete and intricately experiential language, a tracework truly capable of directing our attention to the transformative potential—and the logic of transformative phases—constitutive of our moral experience as beings wrought of a deeply spiritual flesh. Within the limits of this chapter, we shall attempt to adumbrate the main features of this narrative, emphasizing the paradoxical diachronicity of the recuperative effort.

It should, however, be noted here that, if we are inclined to think of the tracework as (re)marking a potential for the developing transformation of a deeply inscribed moral disposition, we must be prepared to concede that it can register its "accusation" of the flesh only by way of a certain radical dis-positioning or dis-placing of the presumed topography, for the dispositional tracework could never become legible except obscurely, marginally, and with the greatest of difficulty within the purview of the subject-object, subject-subject, and ego-alter structures recognized by the discourse of ontologies. Indeed, if the trace eludes the objection that it is a "dialetical illusion," that is because such an objection can be sustained only within a metaphysics determined by "presence."

In Otherwise Than Being , the struggle to think the face of the other—the ethical relation—within the architecture of phenomenology centers on the trace. We cannot linger, here, over this problematic, which I have discussed at some length elsewhere.^[173] Perhaps it will suffice for the time being to say that we must at least attempt to think the trace—the presence of an absence, the absence of a presence—as a site of provocation outside of all ontologies. Since the passive reception of the moral commandment holding us responsible for the other takes place, for Levinas, in a past that never was, and never could be, (fully) present, in a time before the ego's conventionally constructed order of time, and consequently before ego-logical memory; and since the phenomenological attempt to recuperate that originary event, by which our responsibility for the other took hold of our flesh and founded our identity on a radical alterity, can never hope to return to that event as it was, the most that phenomenology can retrieve is, as Levinas says, just a trace of a trace. This means, of course, that hermeneutics, as traditionally conceived, must be avoided. Even so, however, the attempt to use our freedom to retrieve this trace from its spectral visibility is of the utmost importance for our developing transformation as moral selves: it can make all the difference in the world.

The peculiar tracework of the categorical imperative, legislating responsibility by way of a certain preliminary moral predisposition, a certain immediacy of responsiveness that is borne in and as our embodiment, functions "without the mediation of any principle, any ideality" (OB 100, AE 127). Hence the "anarchy" of this "assignation," recurrently antinomian— hence also, since it has never been present as such, the impossibility of representing it in standard concepts (OB 97, AE 123–24). Nevertheless, in Levinas's phenomenology, provocative traces of this assignation, virtually indecipherable, can be indicated, hinted at, by a certain evocative use of language. The relation between language and experience, especially with regard to the retrieval of the trace, constitutes what is unquestionably the most intractable and interminable problematic in Levinas's moral phenomenology. It is thus a matter we cannot avoid, even though our principal concern with regard to his moral phenomenology is the character of the gaze in the face-to-face of the ethical relation—the question, therefore, of the visible and the invisible. But if traces of the primordial moral law are at least to some extent retrievable, decipherable, legible, in spite of their nonidentity, their paradoxical ontological status, that will be possible only, as he says, by the most extreme abuse of language, double-crossing whatever descriptions may be ventured, casting doubt on every claim to retrieve, to see and read:

If the anarchical were not signalled in consciousness, it would reign in its own way. The anarchical is possible only when contested by language, which betrays, but also conveys, its anarchy, without abolishing it, by an abuse of language. (OB 194, AE 127)

According to Levinas, the Good has always already given me an assignment by the time I become aware of its hold on my embodiment, my senses, my sensibility, my perception. I am beholden to the Good even before I behold its presence in the world. The assignment of the Good is, in fact, what first enables me to "catch sight of and conceive of value" (OB 122–23, AE 157–59). It is what gives what we might call the "naturally formed" ego, whose nature is to some extent otherwise disposed, the initial challenge and the initial opportunity to become a moral self. For Levinas, however, the fact that the moral law is already inscribed in the "nature" of the flesh should not be interpreted as an argument for moral naturalism—or at least not in the sense of "moral naturalism" for which philosophies of moral naturalism have always argued. He is not pointing to or arguing for "a natural benevolence, as in the moral philosophies of feeling." On the contrary, the moral disposition is "against nature," or rather, against the natural inclina-

tions that the formation of the ego tends to favor. Levinas says, simply: "It is against nature, non-voluntary, inseparable from the possible persecution to which no consent is thinkable, anarchic" (OB 197, AE 157). Responsibility for others, he says, "could never mean altruistic will, instinct of 'natural benevolence', or love" (OB 111–12, AE 142).

And yet, if the moral law is an inscription that primordially informs the flesh, there must be a sense in which compassion, benevolence, responsibility for the other, and a vision of the Good are also natural. Why does Levinas want to emphasize that they are "contrary to nature"? I suggest that what he means is that there is a veritable abyss—an abyss, say, of legibility—between the assignation inscribed in the flesh by the categorical imperative and our comportment in the world. But I would argue that this is an abyss that could be bridged only by appropriate sociocultural mediations, processes of moral transformation, Bildungsprozesse which would undertake the decipherment of some of the traces of the secret, encrypted message inscribed in the nature of the body. It would be, then, the urgent function of such interactional social processes to encourage and enable us to construct our moral lives on the basis of the "secret gift" that is hidden in the body. (I would refer the reader again to TaI 208, TeI 183–84, quoted earlier at length, where Levinas writes of the "gift of self," but makes it clear that, in a crucial sense, the gift is received without realization.) Of course, Levinas's claim that I am "chosen" by the Good in this way should not be understood to deny that I can perversely chose to ignore this "election," that I can, for one reason or another, one cause or another, "misquote" the moral law to myself, and that I can also, due to the impoverished or brutal conditions in which I have grown up and in which I am living, entirely fail to experience, or say read, any sense of the moral law.

That Levinas's critique of moral naturalism is designed to open up the possibility of another way of experiencing "human nature" and the "nature" of embodiment, and that it thereby suggests a radically different way to conceive the kernel of truth distortedly represented in historical versions of moral naturalism, may be gleaned from a passage in which he argues that responsibility for the other comes to us from a time that is, as he expresses it,

prior to all memory and all recollection. It was made in an irrecuperable time which the present, represented in recollection, does not equal, in a time of birth or creation of which nature or creation retains a trace, unconvertible into a memory. (OB 104–5, AE 133)

As I have already suggested, we might think of the moral assignment that is registered in the flesh as a "gift of nature." But it can only be a question,

here, of a gift that is not, that cannot possibly be, fully or totally received, fully or totally retrieved—a gift, moreover, that does not in any way diminish the fact that the assignment is "against nature" (OB 197, AE 157): against nature in the sense that, whilst the obligation comes over us, is given to us, and takes hold of us only by grace of the very nature of the flesh, it nevertheless makes the most rigorous, most impossible demands on us, calling on us from a time before consciousness, before memory, before time itself, and before volition, to resist the temptations of desire that easily possess us in the time of our egoism.

It might be useful, at this point, to consider another contemporary formulation of the idea of a bodily felt categorical imperative. The formulation appears in Adorno's Negative Dialectics:

A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily felt sense of the moral supplement—bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection.^[174]

And he goes on to explain his thinking:

The course of history forces materialism upon metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism. What the mind once boasted of defining or construing as its like moves in the direction of what is unlike the mind, in the direction of that which eludes the rules of the mind and yet manifests that rule as absolute evil. The somatic, unmeaningful stratum of life is the stage of suffering, of the suffering which, in the [Nazi extermination] camps, without any consolation, burned every soothing feature out of the mind, and out of culture, the mind's objectification.

I would certainly welcome the thought of a categorical imperative inscribed from time immemorial in the very flesh of our bodies. But Adorno damages it beyond mending when he attributes its origin to Hitler's imposition, when he reduces it to the physical, a materiality inimical to the spirit, and when he denies it discursivity and meaningfulness. To be sure, the hell realm of the extermination camps was designed to reduce human beings to animal bodies—and often almost succeeded. But even in the smallest measure of the "almost," there is a world of difference. And the difference is to

be measured by the judgment of the moral law, peering out from eyes sunk into their sockets. The voices of this categorical imperative, the expressions of the body's felt sense of righteousness and justice, must be recognized. Unfortunately, Adorno could think this bodily carried imperative only as imposed, only in terms of the objective, physical body, and only, therefore, as mute, unable to speak, to articulate its sense of the moral. Perpetuating the old metaphysical dualisms that suppress recognition of the body-as-lived, the body of experience, he could not think the obligation phenomenologically in terms of the embodied subject's own experience of embodiment. What inmates and survivors of Auschwitz would have conceded that for the voice of the categorical imperative within them, they were indebted to Hitler?

But here we must acknowledge a disturbing, haunting question. In thinking such a categorical imperative in terms of embodiment, we must not avoid meditating on a point made by Habermas in "Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity." (The reader is referred to the third quotation that appears at the very beginning of this chapter.) But Habermas does not suggest, in this passage, that the Holocaust compels us to question the existence as such of a "deep layer of solidarity." Rather, he is suggesting that we need to reflect on the possibility that it can suffer irreparable trauma and destruction. And he implies that we must not ever take it for granted. If, however, there be no such "deep layer," or if the Holocaust could make us lose faith in this "deep layer," lose our trust in the very possibility of forming a bodily felt sense of its moral "presence," then Levinas's phenomenology of moral experience—and mine also—would suffer a truly irremediable catastrophe. Such a conclusion is difficult to avoid if we take this phenomenology to be deciphering a primordial inscription of the moral law encoded into the very nature of our flesh—and if, as I think ultimately we must, we take the logic of Habermas's reference to a "deep layer of solidarity" to be pointing toward some primordial endowment of proto-moral dispositions.

To give a truly satisfying answer to the problematic that Habermas broaches in this regard is not something that could be accomplished in the context of this already lengthy chapter. However, his remark is much too important to remain without at least some preliminary and provisional comment. But I think that what took place in Auschwitz, in the Holocaust, certainly shows that it is possible for evil to overwhelm the integrity of this "deep layer" and cause our bodily felt sense of the moral law to disintegrate; and thus I think that we must strive never to take its moral guidance for granted. In other words, since the moral development of this "gift of

nature" can never be more than a contingent possibility, the "inscription" of a "prescription" that is in no sense preordained, in no sense predetermined, it must be recognized that the cruelty and brutality of social conditions—conditions produced in large measure by enduring injustices—can penetrate the flesh so deeply and alienate individuals from this first nature to such an extent that the moral development of their humanity may be permanently stunted and the gaze which, once upon a time, was directed by its contact with this potential may become horribly distorted, monstrously bent toward an evil it desperately embraces. But this means that we are obliged to question the validity of the Levinasian thesis that the ethical relation is the absolute foundation for justice.

In his Trauerspiel essay, Benjamin makes a point that I think bears on the problematic we are considering here:

The sanctity of what is written is inextricably bound up with the idea of its strict codification. . . . So it is that . . . the script of sacred complexes . . . take the form of hieroglyphics. The desire to guarantee the sacred character of any script—there will always be a conflict between sacred standing and profane comprehensibility—leads to complexes, to hieroglyphics.^[175]

We must assume that the primordial inscription of the moral law is hermeneutically encrypted in and as our incarnation: written, so to speak, in the form of hieroglyphics that require decoding, a reading that is possible only, I would say, through the collaboration of freedom, Bildungsprozesse , and the right sociocultural conditions.

There is, in Derrida's Of Grammatology , an explanation of arche-writing, this primordial inscription, that usefully brings out its ethical significance:

The arche-writing is the origin of morality as of immorality. The nonethical opening of ethics. A violent opening.^[176]

The tracework inscription is nothing but an opening, a beginning, preceding ethical consciousness, an inscription of the moral law that attempts to restrain uncivilized desire, but does not at all preclude evil. Evil is always possible. For this arche-writing is not the imposition of fate, but only the uncertain destiny, always at risk, of a promise kept in reserve.

And much can go wrong. Fully to understand how evil is possible, in spite of the gift of this primordial inscription, we would need to examine the origin of evil. This is an extremely difficult task that we cannot undertake here. I will simply assert, for now, that evil can exist, despite the primordial inscription, because the destiny that is encoded into the flesh is not a teleology, not a determinism: it is only a "reserved" promise, an entrust-

ment, a message of hope, an invocation that must respect the subject's freedom. This will have to suffice, for the time being, as the beginning of a possible answer to the problematic which the quotations from Habermas, Benjamin, and Adorno force us to think through.

Let us now return to Levinas's radical revision of the categorical imperative. We note that it involves a radical rethinking of the conception of the subject, especially with regard to the way free individuals are represented in classical bourgeois liberalism. In contrast to the conception realized in liberalism, the other in Levinas's conception "does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness" (TaI 200, TeI 175). For Levinas, we are not—or should not be—autonomous monads exercising our freedom in the pursuit of self-interests that inevitably set us in motion against one another. We must recognize that, as subjects, we are not only needfully dependent on one another, but moreover elevated to goodness only by grace of the other, the one who brings us to a consciousness of our primordial subjection to the Good. The subject is not first of all, as classical liberalism insists, a free agent, but is a subject by grace of subjection to the Good: what Levinas calls "the condition of being hostage" (OB 117, AE 150). And it is through this condition, this experience of subjection that there can be eyes moved to tears by the distant suffering of others—"that there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity—even the little there is, even the simple 'After you, sir'" (ibid.).

But it is extremely difficult for Levinas to make his phenomenological narrative of the face-to-face relation convincing, because it immediately encounters the strongest imaginable resistance from our culturally hegemonic self-understanding, compelled as it is to make use of a philosophical vocabulary that inevitably betrays it, and challenging as it does all our late-modern convictions—about freedom, autonomy, the identity of the subject, what it means to be human, the role of reason in ethical life, the origin of obligation and responsibility, the being of values, the ground of ethical relations, and even what it is that we see when we look at another person. Levinas understands the resistance well enough to analyze it and diagnose its pathology. Thus, he argues that the ego-logical subject of modern bourgeois culture knows of nothing prior to its freedom or outside of the necessity which runs up against this freedom. This is a crucial point, because the "obligation" and "responsibility" to which Levinas is calling our attention do not come from freedom, but from an immediate bodily responsiveness, an exposure and beholdenness which are constitutive of human nature as an elemental, chiasmic flesh, a flesh intricately and inextricably intertwined with the flesh of the other (OB 122, AE 157).

We are now ready to return to the problem with which we began this section, viz., seeing the other's humanity, or seeing humanity in and through the other: a problem that takes us to the very heart of the transition from the concrete singularity of the ethical relation to the abstract universality of justice. What is the relation between the experience of seeing the concrete and singular other and the experience constituted by the abstract, impartial, "blind" perspective of universal justice—justice for the invisible other of humanity? How does the asymmetrical ethical relation, in which I am face-to-face with a concrete and singular other, become the symmetrical moral-political relation—a relation to the invisible, abstract other whose call for justice concerns me, a relation in which I take on a certain responsibility for the whole of humanity? I would like to suggest that it would be useful to think about these questions in terms of what we will call, following Levinas, a process of individuation. Levinas mentions individuation, but never tells us about the process in which it takes place. He offers no narrative of developmental transformation, no story about the formation ego and self, and no account of how processes of individuation and processes of socialization, Bildungsprozesse , are diachronically intertwined. But what else could possibly be at stake when he says, in the long passage quoted earlier, that Reason establishes an "I" that is "capable of society" (TaI 208, TeI 183–84), if it is not a question of socialization and self-developing transformation? I will accordingly attempt to show something of the logic of these processes, explicating the transformations in terms of its phenomenological moments. The analysis that I am proposing is, I believe, implicit in Levinas's work, although it is never formulated in his work as I shall formulate it here. Here, then, with brief commentary, is a selection of three textual passages in relation to which I think the logic of the process can be clearly articulated:

[1] The unlimited initial responsibility, which justifies this concern for justice, . . . can be forgotten. In this forgetting, consciousness is a pure egoism. But egoism is neither first nor last. (OB 128, AE 165)

I would argue that this articulates the three phases or moments of the process: first, a primordial responsibility always already borne by the flesh, but not yet retrieved, thematized and freely developed; second, the pure egoism of consciousness, in which this primordial responsibility tends to be suppressed and "forgotten"; and third, the moment of return, in which there is a certain recovery of this responsibility, transforming it into a moral life of supererogatory responsibility for the other. This analytic explains why egoism is neither first not last, but precisely in the middle, be-

tween the proto-moral self we receive and the self-developed moral self we are called upon to become. (See TaI 208, TeI 183–84 on "the gift of self": a gift suspended between the "always already" and the "not yet.")

[2] . . . it is in the course of the individuation of the ego in me that is realized the elevation in which the ego is for the neighbor, summoned to answer for him. (OB 126, AE 162)

It is in the process of individuation that the self, the "elevated" dimension of the ego (the "moi" of the "me voici!") is realized. The articulation of the three phases or moments is implicit in this formulation of the ego's "individuation."

[3] Without [experiencing a deep sense of] persecution, the ego raises its head and covers over the self. Everything is from the start in the accusative. . . . The more I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution, of my freedom as a constituted, willful, imperialist subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible. (OB 112, AE 143)

According to the schema offered here, the moral self is both first and third; but, in its first phase or moment, it functions in a certain passive receptivity, not fully conscious of itself, whereas, in its third moment, it would voluntarily begin a process transcending the ways of the ego and its culture, retrieving in "recollection" at least the tracework of alterity in the flesh's primordial inscription, in order to become a self motivated by the "knowledge" of justice, a knowledge specifically mediated by the impersonal and "objective" perspective, or gaze, of the "third party" (le tiers ). Thus we must look to the institutions of "Reason," representing the third party, to establish an "I," a self truly "capable," as Levinas phrases it, "of society" (again the reference is to TaI 208, TeI 183–84). What Levinas calls my "return to myself" and my "discovery" of my being already responsible is what we are here interpreting as a process of breaking through the ego's defensive constructs and retrieving the tracework of a supererogatory moral assignment, calling me to a radical responsibility for the other.

Drawing on the interpretation introduced into the chapter on Merleau-Ponty, we might think of Levinas's phenomenology as offering a narrative of developing moral transformation with regard to our capacity for vision; and we might conceptualize this narrative in terms of a temporal schema which articulates the body of moral experience in two different but interdependent readings, one of them diachronic, the other synchronic: [a] a diachronic representation concerned with the phases and faces of our embodiment in a diachronic process of moral development, and [b] a synchronic

representation, topographic or structural (e.g., OB 110, AE 140), articulating the synchronic dimensions of this embodiment that are surpassed but nevertheless preserved in a certain tracework of memory and imagination, whenever a new phase of development emerges to carry forward and leave beneath it, as a latency that at any moment can involuntarily manifest or be to some extent reflectively retrieved, the remnants of the preceding phase. It seems to me that Levinas's moral phenomenology is very much in need of such a narrative.

Here, then, but only in its briefest and most schematic form, hovering undecidably between what can be remembered and what is imagined, is the narrative I want to suggest:

[1] The proto-moral self of infancy: that prepersonal, anonymous phase and dimension of our embodiment in which is registered, in a passivity of the flesh prior to consciousness, memory, and volition, a responsiveness to the other that is also the taking-hold of an absolute responsibility for the other, exposing me in the most radical way to the judgment of the other. To this extent, but only to this extent, I am always already a moral self. And yet, of course, it must also be recognized that, in this phase, I am not yet a moral self. But the assignment will have been registered.

[2] The ego-logical subject: As the infant grows up, the proto-moral experience is surpassed, yet traces of its alterity seem in some way to be preserved in a bodily memory beneath the formation of the ego-logical subject, who is strongly self-centered, lives in the self-absorbed pursuit of its own well-being, and believes itself to be self-contained, self-possessed, and self-grounded. The morality of this subject is at best conventional and, in Kant's sense, heteronomous.

[3] The moral self: This phase and dimension is merely a possibility, dependent on the ego's willingness to undergo a certain deconstruction and reconstruction of its identity by returning to retrieve the responsiveness and responsibility that it imagines originally took hold of the flesh in the time of its infancy. It is a question of returning to retrieve, in so far as possible, a dimension of our experience that—as we imagine it—continues to function "beneath" the ego-logical structure of the adult and continues, therefore, to obsess and haunt it. The moral self, a never-ending, never-completed project of exposure to the other, receives its gift of freedom only in submission to the responsibility that has already bound it to the other. In the radically altered intersubjectivity of the moral self, the involuntary mimetic reversibility of the first phase, in which the alterity of substitution—Levinas will also speak of the "I" as "hostage" to the other—makes one infant take over the suffering of another, and also the interest-

driven interchangeability of the second, ego-logical phase, would be transformed, to become, whatever the sacrifice, a truly selfless commitment to the welfare and justice of others. Thus, in this third phase, the moral self receives what is, in effect, a new face—and the anonymity that is possible only if one has a proper name to sacrifice. No longer anonymous, as in the first phase, no longer assuming the name that corresponds to the destiny of egotism, the moral self would act, as we say, with selflessness, in the name of a higher anonymity, a higher namelessness, a higher heteronomy, giving to others while remaining in self-concealment, self-effacement.

The transition that can take place in the third phase or moment of vision—the transition, that is, from the experience of the concrete other (whom I see facing me in the asymmetry of the face-to-face ethical relation) to the abstract, impartial, "blind" perspective of universal justice (where the other is an abstract other always invisible, and a figure for the whole of humanity), involves a process that may itself be articulated for analytic purposes in terms of three phenomenological moments. [3a] The first moment takes place when, by way of the deeply felt, bodily felt sense of beholdenness, of being touched and moved in spontaneous responsiveness to the visible presence of the singular and concrete other, we are made to feel very deeply our kindredness, our solidarity with the other in the very event of seeing. [3b] The second moment would be a moment of recognition, soliciting a deeply felt sense of responsibility for this other. Now the face of this other would visibly manifest an invisible dimension: this is "the face of the other's humanity." But this revelation is still in a sense limited: the "face of humanity" is seen only in and as the face of the singular and concrete other. But seeing the invisibility of the other would make possible a reflectively thematized transition to the next moment, when vision would properly become a question of justice. (This transitional moment is suggested, I think, by Levinas's assertion that "the face of man is the medium through which the invisible in him becomes visible and enters into commerce with us.")^[177] [3c] This is the socioculturally mediated moment that Levinas (TaI 208, TeI 183–84) would call "knowledge," "reason," and "justice," in which the experience with vision would now be extended, generalized, reaching out even beyond the invisibility of the concrete other to behold the abstract and universal other, the whole of humanity: reaching out beyond all those visibly present, our eyes would now behold in the justice of the invisible all those who cannot be made concretely visible—all the living, all the dead, and all those of the future, generations who are not yet born. In the moment of reason and justice, the face of the other becomes an abstraction from vision, doubly invisible, not only because it is the face of

others who are, or must be regarded as, beyond the horizons of my eyesight, but because the dimensionality of the face is a revelation that is always, for Levinas, infinite and immeasurable.

It is crucial to see that, although we are endowed with a pre-originary predisposition to be affected by others, the capacity to respond depends for its actualization on our actually being affected by the other in face-to-face encounters which solicit, provoke, and awaken a certain "remembrance" of the inscription carried by the very flesh of our eyes—a moral imperative secretly commanding us to assume responsibility for the other that took hold of us in an immemorial past preceding the emergence of intentionality, ego-logical consciousness, and volition. The face of the other is an epiphany, an illumination that provokes this corporeal recollection, this mémoire involontaire , by communicating immediately with our primordial sensibility at a level entirely beneath intentionality, beneath consciousness. This is what happens in the third phase, in the moral transformation of the ego.

The narrative that we are schematizing thus gives us a way of thinking about the questions that introduced this section. The transition from the concrete, face-to-face ethical relation, in which the "I" can see humanity in the face of the concrete, singular other, to the moral-political relation, the abstract relation demanded by justice, in which the "I" recognizes the humanity of all others, is made possible by a certain mediating experience: the experience, namely, of seeing in the face of the concrete, singular other an invisible and unfathomable dimension, a dimension already withdrawing itself from visibility. For if even the face of the one who actually faces me is already seen to be invisible, already seen to be infinite, then my seeing this invisibility and being drawn into its withdrawal, drawn into its absolute alterity, would prepare me for the blindness that must be borne by a vision of the invisible humanity which looks back at us from the abstract face of justice, the invisible faces of the abstract other.

But everything hinges, here, if only at a certain point, and for a brief moment, on the redeeming character of our vision. Just as Levinas distinguishes, in Totality and Infinity , between touch, or contact, which denies transcendence for the sake of truth-as-disclosure, and the caress which brings out and reveals transcendence, so his critique of vision should have distinguished between the vision that is rooted in a primordial, deeply felt, bodily felt sense of exposure and enthrallment, responsiveness and responsibility, and the superficial, unfeeling vision that is promoted by an alienated, indifferent world. The deeper vision, a vision rooted in the primordial disposition of the flesh, would be the accomplishment of a post-

conventional, revelatory vision, a vision no longer obedient to the merely conventional, still (in the Kantian sense) heteronomous determination of the moral. A vision obedient to the invisible, to that which can never appear, the imperative of a moral law more rigorous than the Kantian. A vision disenchanted, released from ontological idolatry, from the phantasmagoria of today's capitalism, from the production of images that destroy memory and imagination alike. However, it must be conceded that, in spite of the experience of the invisible even in the ethical relation, the face-to-face relation with a concrete other, there remains an unbridgeable gap between the recognition of the other in the ethical relation and the recognition of the other in the matter of justice: a transition from the ethical to the moral-political that only the urgent appeal for justice spoken by those who have suffered its absence can possibly overcome.

I also want to emphasize, here, in disagreement with Levinas, that the ethical relation cannot be the foundation for relations of justice, because every dimension of the experience depends on the intactness of the flesh, bearer of the primordial inscription of the moral sense; and every one of the moments depends upon certain favorable sociocultural conditions—a factor which cannot be adequately conceptualized and addressed simply by introducing the "third party." But if everything depends on favorable sociocultural conditions, then the ethical relation that Levinas regards as primary already depends on a certain minimum of social justice. Levinas himself seems, in fact, to realize this when he says, in Difficult Freedom , that "it is in economic justice that man glimpses the face of man."^[178] The violence in the urban ghettos and Native American reservations, endlessly reproducing the effects of the hopeless poverty that persistent racism, inequality, and social injustice continue to produce, should by now be sufficient to demonstrate this point. The face-to-face experience of the ethical relation cannot be taken for granted. It is all too easily destroyed by degradation, brutal passion, senseless cruelty. But can we—a "we" the constitution of which Levinas's concept of the "third party" can at most only begin to theorize—then ignore the extent to which the conditions of living caused by systemic injustice are complicitous in such destructiveness? Is the connection not plainly visible?

IV—
What If the Other Is the Oppressor?

In Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological narrative, the beginning of moral consciousness in the child is an experience of intercorporeality that he brings to articulation by saying that "I live in the facial expressions of the

other, as I feel him living in mine."^[179] In another text, he explains his project as follows:

We are interrogating our experience precisely in order to know how it opens us to what is not ourselves. This does not even exclude the possibility that we find in our experience a movement toward what could not in any event be present to us in the original and whose irremediable absence would thus count among our originating experiences.^[180]

In thinking about the self's relationship with others as an interaction that first engages the self as a being of flesh, we must consider whether Levinas somehow forgets the dialectic of lord and bondsman in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit . We know that Merleau-Ponty follows the Lacanian account of the ego's specular formation and describes the interaction as an "encroachment," "transgression," and "alienation," while Levinas will use terms such as "wound," "persecution," "possession," "obsession," and "hostage" to characterize the ego's bodily felt experience of a primordial responsibility for the other, and will even refer to this primordial experience of obligation as "subjection." For Levinas, it is necessary to see that the formation of the self, the moral subject, is a process of subjection—subjection not in the sense of being under domination, of course, but in the sense of bearing responsibility for the other.

But what if the other is motivated by prejudice, intolerance of difference? What if the other is always, at least to some extent, as Foucault has argued very compellingly, a force that imposes normalization? What if the other is always, to some extent, the self's oppressor, the enemy of the self, unable or unwilling to recognize and accept the identity that would most deeply fulfill the self's social existence? Foucault's argument, drawing heavily, of course, on Freud, is that the subject's very identity and existence are dependent on processes of subjection, configurations of social power that are not merely effects imposed from outside, but, as internalized norms and ideals working within the economy of the psyche, become formative and constitutive of the subject's very being.^[181] This implies a different sense of alienation, transgression, encroachment; a different sense of wounding, trauma, persecution, and hostage: a sense that is rendered even more disturbing when one considers to what torments, nightmares, and horrors these words must bear witness when taken to refer to the victims of racism, gender discrimination, homophobia, and other forms of normalizing oppression. In a society where such oppression is pervasive, the subject's experience of living in the facial expressions of the other and feeling the other living in "its own" can be irremediably devastating, identity-shattering,

even, sometimes, annihilating—the very antithesis of a good beginning for the moral relation and the possibility of justice.

In this regard, the possibility of justice requires us, if only briefly, to reflect on one of Levinas's most difficult arguments. According to Levinas, the moral self is responsible even for its persecutors, responsible even for their responsibility. This is, of course, an exceedingly difficult moral demand; but the demand is rendered even more difficult to accept because of his moral discretion. Respecting our freedom, he will not state exactly what this might mean, what it might require of us. How, then, might the oppressed—the homeless and the hungry, the victims of racism, ethnic hatreds, and nationalism—be responsible for their persecutors and oppressors? Surely they cannot be held responsible for actions and circumstances over which they could have no control. But perhaps they may at the least be held to account in that they are responsible for keeping alive, as a lesson for future generations, the memory of their persecution. And perhaps they are responsible for finding within the unfathomable depths of their heart some way to grant, in time, the blessing of forgiveness. Indeed a difficult freedom.

Much hinges on what we can see—what we are open to seeing—in one another's faces. There can be no justice until we are all able to see how subjection causes pain and suffering in the differently treated other—and until each one who suffers the denial of recognition necessary for identity and social existence feels free at last to make such injustice visible in the realm of discursive reason. Thus the gaze must also become voice—a democracy of voices—in another Enlightenment, another history.^[182]

V—
Justice:
A Presentiment of Seeing

So that a justice that can never come may nevertheless come, come now, we are called to the greatest vigilance, held responsible for the other in the very act of beholding, held hostage by way of the gaze, the face of the Other, moral "subjects" only by virtue of our being subject to the other through a sense of responsibility that is always already taking hold of us by the time our vision becomes conscious of itself in the act of perception. But what, then, are the radical, transformative potentialities inherent in the nature of perception and, more generally, in our embodiment, with regard to the development of moral character? If the order of justice is our concern, we need to learn an altered, radically transfigured vision, a vision rooted in a deeply felt sense of our interconnectedness with other sentient beings, a vision rooted in the moral disposition, the "categorical imperative" that nature

gives us through our embodiment and that it is the duty of society to protect and realize in mature, post-conventional moral comportment. We need this vision. But because this "nature" has been terribly violated, corrupted; because the social conditions created by injustice do not care for, do not solicit and appropriately develop its originary disposition, we need a society radically different from ours: a society that can cultivate our capacity for vision and make it serve what Levinas calls "moral knowledge," the ideal of a reconciled society in which there is justice and equality for all, the ideal of a non-repressive society—a society no longer dominated by the counterfeit symmetries of the gaze blinded by the enchantments of self-interest and its calculative rationality.

In "The Authoritarian State," Horkheimer wrote: "The other is always in danger."^[183] But to understand and see this, we must see that we ourselves are always already an other. Only then, perhaps, can we truly hearken to Levinas's words: "C'est l'heure de la justice!"^[184] But that is a time which cannot be identified—it must not!—with any time present or foreseeable. Nor can the justice of the hour be anything more than forever provisional. Only those who understand why they cannot see the face of justice see it in the other.

Those are pearls that were his eyes.
The Tempest , Barnet, 1.2.394

What are eyes, if they can become precious stones? Once upon a time, the justice of nature transformed a mortal's eyes into pearls, revealing the great beauty that the eyes are capable of giving to the world. But the time of this sea change belongs to the realm of sacrifice and death.