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]