The following are my translations of parts of two essays, The Face, and The Responsibility for Others, in L Ethique et L Infini, collected interviews of Emmanuel Levinas. My translations of these excerpts are published in A 21 st Century Ethical Toolbox by Anthony Weston (Oxford University Press, second edition, 2008). From Levinas radio interview, The Face You talk about the face at length in [your earlier book] Totality and Infinity. It s one of your common themes. This phenomenology of the face that is, this analysis of what happens when I look into another person s face what does it consist of and what is it for? I don t know if we can talk about a phenomenology of the face, because phenomenology describes appearance. In the same way, I wonder if we can talk about looking into another person s face, because looking is knowing, is perceiving. I think it is rather access to another person s face that is an ethical question. When you see a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin, and you can describe them, you are turning toward the other person as toward an object. The best way to truly see others is not even to notice the color of their eyes! When we observe their eye color, we are not in a social relationship with them. Our relation to another person s face can indeed be dominated by perception, but what is specific to that face is what cannot be reduced to perception. First of all, there is the way the head is held up, its naked, defenseless exposure. Facial skin stays the nakedest, the most stripped the nakedest, although not indecent. The most stripped as well: in a face lies an essential poverty; we prove this by trying to hide its poverty by posing, with looks and attitudes. The face is exposed, threatened, as if inviting us to commit an act of violence. And yet at the same time, the face is what enjoins us from killing. It s true, war stories say that it is hard to kill someone looking you in the face. The face is meaningful and its meaning has no context. I m saying that the other person, in upholding her or his face, is not a character in a context. Ordinarily, we are characters: we are on the faculty of a prestigious university, hold a high-ranking government post, are the son or daughter of so-and-so--all the things it says on our resume; the way we dress or look. And every meaning, as we usually use the word, is relative to some context: something s meaning comes from its relationship to something else. Here, it s the opposite: a face has meaning all on its own. You means you. This is how we can say you can not see a face. It is what cannot become something your thoughts could contain; it is uncontainable, it takes you beyond. This is how the face s meaning goes beyond being, if we think of being as correlated with what s known. Quite the contrary: seeing is always a way of trying to grasp what is seen: it is what, more than anything else, absorbs being. But our relationship to a face is an ethical question. A face 1
is what we cannot kill, or at least, that is its very meaning: thou shalt not kill. Although it is true that murder is an ordinary occurrence: we can kill others--the ethical obligation is not an ontological necessity. The commandment not to kill does not make murder impossible, although the power of the commandment endures in the uneasy awareness of the evil which has taken place the malignancy of malice. This malignancy also apears in Scripture, where our humanity is exposed to the degree to which it engages with the world. But in truth, the appearance, within being, of these ethical oddities is a break of being. It is meaningful, even though being picks itself back up and goes on. The other person is a face, but we also speak to each other. Isn t human speech also a way of breaking what you call totality? Sure it is. Face and speech are connected. Faces speak. They speak, and this is what makes all speaking possible, begins it. Earlier, I rejected the idea of sight as a way of describing authentic relationships; it is speech, and more precisely, responding or responsibility, which is this authentic relationship. But because ethical relationship goes beyond knowing, and is taken on in an authentic way by speech, are you saying that speaking itself is not a kind of knowing? Within speech, I ve always drawn a distinction between speaking and what is said. Speaking must include something said this is a requirement of the sort society imposes on us, with its laws, its institutions, its social relationships. But speaking is the fact that in front of a face I do not simply sit there and contemplate it, I respond to it. Speaking is a way of greeting the other person, but to greet someone is already to respond on that person s behalf. It is difficult to keep quiet in someone else s presence; the difficulty is ultimately based in the meaning of speaking unto itself, no matter what is being said. We have to speak about something, about the weather or the price of tea in China, it doesn t matter but speak, respond to the other person, and respond on his behalf. In the other person s face there is, you say an uplifting, a highness. The other is higher than I am. What do you mean by that? Thou shalt not kill is the face s first Word. And it s an order. There is, in the face s appearance, a commandment, as if a master were speaking to me. Yet, at the same time, the other s face is stripped, it s the poverty-stricken person for whom I can do anything and to whom I owe everything. And I, whoever I am, but in the first person, am the one who finds the resources to respond to the call. I want to say to you, yes, in some cases but in others, no, my encounter with the other is violent, hateful, disdainful. Of course. But I think that whatever motivation can explain this reversal, analyzing a face as I ve just done, seeing the other s mastery and poverty, and my submissiveness and wealth, comes first. It is the primary assumption of all human relationships. If it 2
weren t there, we wouldn t even say, when we stood before an open door, After you! What I m trying to describe here is the very first, After you!... Yet in the face, as I ve described approaching it, we are also taken beyond action by what the action leads us to. Within access to the face, there is surely also access to an idea of G-d. In Descartes, the idea of the Infinite remains a theoretical idea, a contemplation, knowledge. However I think that our relation to the Infinite is not knowledge but Desire. I have tried to describe the difference between Desire and need by describing that Desire cannot be satisfied; that Desire in some way, is nourished by its own hungers and increases when it is satisfied; that Desire is like a thought that thinks more than it thinks, or more than its thoughts. This is no doubt a paradoxical way of putting it, but it is no more so than this presence of the Infinite in a completed action. From Levinas radio interview, Responsibility for Others [The excerpt using Cohen s translation joins the above essay, The Face, seamlessly in the Levinas transcript with a second Levinas essay from the same volume, Ethic and Infinity, The Responsibility for Others. ] what do you mean by responsibility? I am talking about responsibility as an essential structure, a primary, a fundamental structure of subjectivity. I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Here, ethics is no addon to some pre-existing existential base. The knot of subjectivity is tied right into ethics, understood as responsibility. I understand responsibility to mean responsibility for others, that is, responsibility for what is not my doing, or may not even be in my purview--or precisely what is in my view, is approached by me, like a face. How, having discovered another person s face, do we discover that person as someone for whom we are responsible? By describing the face as what it is, and not simply as what it is not. You ll remember what we were saying: approaching a face is not just simple perception, or the intention to try to grasp what is perceived. When we talk about what a face is, we can say that the moment the other looks at me, I am responsible for that person. I do not have to take responsibility, responsibility is incumbent on me. This is responsibility that goes beyond what I do. Usually, we are responsible for what we ourselves do. I say, in [my book] Other than Being, that responsibility is first of all a thing in and for others. It means that I am responsible for the other s very responsibility. How does this responsibility for the other define subjectivity s structure? 3
Responsibility is no simple attribute of subjectivity, as if subjectivity existed beforehand unto itself, before ethical relating. Subjectivity is not a thing in itself, it is, once again, first of all a thing in and for others. The other s nearness is presented in the book as the fact that the other is not simply near me in space, or close to me like a relative, but comes close to me atan essential level insofar as I feel as I am responsible for that other person. This is a structure that doesn t look anything like the intentional relationship connecting us, through knowing, to an object whatever object you are talking about, even a human object. Nearness doesn t have to do with this intentional quality; it especially doesn t have to do with whether or not the other is someone I know. I can know the other person perfectly, but this knowing would never by itself become nearness? No. My link to the other is tied only using responsibility, and this is so whether the responsibility be accepted or refused, whether we know or don t know how to take it on, whether we are able to do something concrete for the other person or not. It is to say, I m here. To do something for the other person. To give. To be a human spirit, that s what it is. What guarantees the spirituality of human subjectivity is its embodiedness. I can t see what angels would be able to give each other, or how they could help each other. Serving before speaking; this is how I analyze human interrelating. It is as if what lies in the other s nearness beyond the image I have of the other person the face, whatever is expressive in the other person (and the whole human body is, in this sense, a face, more or less)--were what ordered me to serve that person. I use an extreme word. The face asks me, and orders me. Its meaning means an order. When I say that the face means an order I ve been given, it does not do so in the same way anything means what it means; this order is the face s very meaning. You are saying at one and the same time, it asks me and it orders me. Isn t this contradictory? It asks me as someone who orders you asks you, as when someone says, you are requested. But isn t the other also responsible for me? Maybe, but that is not your concern. One of the fundamental themes we haven t yet talked about in Totalite et Infini is that relations between people are not symmetrical. This is how I can be responsible for someone else without waiting for the other person to reciprocate, even if it costs me my life. Reciprocating is the other person s concern. It s precisely insofar as the relationship between the other person and myself is not reciprocal that I am subject to the other, and I am essentially subject in this sense. It is I on whom it all rests. You know Dostoyevsky s line, We are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others. [See the translation by Cohen for reference for this quotation in English from Constance Garnett s translation of Dostoyevsky.] This is not because of some actual guilt of my own, or because of bad things I might have done, but because I am responsible with a responsibility that is total, which responds to all others 4
and to everything within others, even to their responsibility. One s self always has one responsibility more than all the others. Do you mean that if others don t do what they must do, it s because of me? I have even said somewhere this is something I don t like to quote very much, because it has to have other considerations added that I am responsible for the persecutions I endure. But that s only true of me! Those close to me, or my people, are also others, and I call for justice for them. You d go that far! Because I am responsible even for the other s responsibility. These are extreme ways of putting it, which we should not take out of context. In actuality, many other considerations come into play and demand justice even for me. Practically speaking, laws ecartent make certain consequences unlikely. But justice has no meaning unless it is inspirited by the kind of dis-interest that animates the idea of responsibility for the other. In principle, the self can t lose its first person -hood, the self holds up the world. Subjectivity, which is formed in the very moment where it becomes incumbent on it to be responsible for others, extends to substituting oneself for others. It takes on the conditions, or lack of conditions, of becoming hostage. This kind of subjectivity is initially being hostage; it responds to the point of atoning for others. We can try to feel shocked by this utopian, and for a self, inhuman, concept. But human beings humanity true living is absent. In historical and objective human beings, humanity, the percee of subjectivity, of the human psyche [psychisme], in its original vigilance or degrisement is accomplished by beings who have undone the conditions of their being: they ve become dis-inter-esting. That s what the title of the book means, other than being. The ontological condition comes undone in, or is undone by the human condition, or lack of condition. To be human means to live as though you were not a being among beings. As though, through human spirituality, the categories of being were overturned into an other than being. Not only being another way. Being another way is still being. Other than being in truth has no verb which would point to the event that makes it so unquiet, of its dis-inter-estingness, of the questioning of being or of est-ing, of is-ing. The self holds up the other, is responsible for the other. We can thus see, in the human subject, at the same time as total subjection, the primacy of the first-born. My responsibility is unceasing, no one could replace me. In fact, we are speaking the very identity of the human self as beginning with responsibility, that is, as beginning with this positioning, or this de-positioning, of the sovereign self within the self s consciousness, a depositioning that is precisely the self s responsibility for the other. Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively, and which, humanly, I cannot refuse. This is uniqueness supreme dignity. My self is not interchangeable, I am myself only insofar as I am responsible. I can substitute myself for anyone, but no one can substitute themselves for me. This is my inalienable identity as a subject. This is precisely the 5
meaning of Dostoyevsky s, We are all guilty for all and for all men before all, and I more than the others. 6