The Face, by Emmanuel Levinas

This short essay engages in a close reading of a passage of Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘The Face’ drawing on the concepts of identity and relational logics. Questions concerning the assumptions employed by Levinas about time, space and form of being will be asked of the text in order to create a dialogue with its meaning. The potential implications of these assumptions will also be explored through the consideration of hinge words and pivotal phrases. Tangible conclusions will not be drawn; however arguments will unfold which demonstrate the possibilities of this passage in regards to the creation of knowledge and the understanding of everyday ways of being.

Levinas asserts that the relation to the face is one that is dominated by perception and thus demonstrates the conception of what a person is rather than who a person is, this fundamental ideology stems from an identity logic to the social world. The question of etymologically with regard to the specific hinge word of perception, from the Latin word perceptionem, is the receiving or collection of; and hence in the sense of an identity logic and the associated assumption of chronological time, perception is the expectation of receiving or collecting the individual as what they are aesthetically and physically for example, the nature of a binary logic between male and female. There is a sense of impatience and a desire to identify an individual through categories of traditional attributes that distance and detach each individual from each other, such as what their eye colour is, who else has this eye colour, and whether we can then say that he or she looks like him or her. This expectation of association creates a defined being, one which focuses upon the individual identity a...

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...ked with the face prevents us from killing. The relational logic tied to this state of being, the trust and participation in this relation, creates an awareness and respect for the unique being. Hence the assumption of humanity in humans is one of a relational logic approach to the social world.

The dialogic engagement with Levinas’s ‘The Face’ has unearthed a constant shift between an identity and relational logics. Levinas discusses the face creatively and hence constructs an alternative approach to understanding everyday ways of being, particularly by illuminating the deviation between questions of what an individual is and who an individual is. Interpretively, identity logics restrict humanity and potential for social interaction, thus the assumption of vulnerability and humanity in humans can only occur when applying a relational logic to the social world.