Levinas on the Face, Manderson on its ethics

To view the face merely as a plastic vision is to imprison the Other as my theme. This Levinas describes as “the divergence that inevitably opens between the Other as my theme and the Other as my interlocutor”[1]. However, expression undermines this divergence and “speech cuts across vision”[2]. The words spoken by the other “contests the meaning I ascribe to my interlocutor”[3] – my initial understanding of the Other is challenged and through this I glimpse the very fact that the Other is ungraspable, a mystery. Thus instead of possesing an understanding of the Other, I now grapple with a relationship with alterity.

The epiphany of realising my relationship with alterity changes the nature of light. Initially, the clearing of my being (in the solipsist sense) was like a spotlight shining from my mind’s eye, illuminating the small sphere of my reality. The epiphany of alterity is not the futile attempt to superimpose one circle of light over another. The relationship itself, and the charity and kindness involved in it, “is the sunlight without which we could not see anything at all”[4]. In this way, expression and discourse presses responsibility upon me. I recognise in the face this predicament of infinite responsibility that illuminates everything else. In this way, ethics precedes ontology, and responsibility precedes (and allows for) freedom.

Levinas’ notion of infinite responsibility is demonstrated by the reactions to an act to kill. If I draw my sword and strike to kill, the Other has two paths of resistance. Firstly, ‘real’ resistance is something sensibly perceivable by me[5]. The Other could perform a physical hindrance that stops me from killing him. In this scenario, he has imposed a ‘negative’ impossibility upon my intention to kill, but remained a plastic object on the horizon of my being.

However, there is a second choice: ethical resistance, or ‘the resistance of what has no resistance’[6]. Manderson’s image of Polynices in his death is precisely that. Because this resistance cannot be sensibly grasped, it therefore must take place in a relationship with overflowing alterity. This is a ‘positive’, infinite impossibility, where “infinity presents itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyses my powers and from the depths of defenseless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution”[7].

Manderson applies Levinas’ philosophy to the matter of asylum-seeker policy. If ethics precedes ontology, then hospitality is our predicament. The question to be asked, then,  is not ‘which policies best serves the priorities of my being?’, but ‘which policies allow for an ethical relationship between Australians and asylum-seekers?’. There are necessary requisites in order for Australians to privilege the latter question, however. First, we must view the ‘faces’ of the asylum seekers, each as individuals with infinite vulnerability. Second, if “speech cuts across vision”, then the asylum-seekers currently held in detention need to be given voices. Expression and discourse will thus challenge our understanding of their being, allowing us to grasp them as ungraspable, and human.