«Other than Being»: Face in the Metaphysics of Emmanuel Levinas. Part II: Face and the element of the aesthetic

The face (visage) is one of the principallysignificant figures of ethics or metaphysics of a French thinker Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), a designation of the way ofself-presentation of the Other in his/her radical otherness. Being mostly an ethical figure, the face resists its aesthetical categorization.Nonetheless, its essential features indicate its possible proximity to such aesthetical categories as the sublime and the formless.The face turns out to be the impossible sublime object of experience. Exceeding and preceding any intention with its καθ αὐτό, theface evades the form, which is imposed upon the things by the subject. The correlation of the face and the image (or the ethicsand the aesthetics) in the Levinassian metaphysics may be represented in whole as the interconnection of two formulas: the face hasno image; the image is a personification. The first one affirms the absolute alterity and transcendence of the face; the second, on thecontrary, states the essential inferiority of the image, its dependence on the face, to the absoluteness of which it tends, but does notreach, not holding itself at the height of its transcendence. However, in the very nakedness and abstractness of its appearance, the facereveals its ambiguous and catastrophic proximity to the image after all. In the face the expression and the one who expresses coincide.In the image the representation and the represented may also turn out to be the same - but only in that exclusive case when theimage represents itself. But this self-contained image is the very point of attraction of art in its movement of personification and resistanceto the face; this is the aesthetic image to the utmost. Furthermore, this emancipated image also proves to be a presentation of thething as it is (in persona, καθ αὐτό) - outside of the world as a system of mutual references or transcendental correlation - in its ineradicablealterity or in its being that makes itself known by way of the metaphysical reduction - as a trace of the total eradicationof the matter. So, this pure expressivity - necessary in case of the face and possible in case of the image - manifests that there is acertain analogy between them. And this similarity raises a question: is there not the same ontology in the Other? And the Other -does s/he not rest in his/her irreducible otherness, as the image does, upon some irremovable remainder of the being - upon theashes that are no more subject to decay - for they are themselves the downfall and decomposition of all? The residue of being seemsto be just the trace, the impersonality of the face itself. The analogy with the image touches the very logos of the face: You maynot kill me, - for the logos of the anonymous presence (il y a) also consists in its indestructibility, its spectres return constantly.How moral is the command that comes from the Other, if its basis is exactly his/her way of being? All these questions, as it seems,draw out what can be called the principal aporia of metaphysics of Levinas. This aporia consists in the fact that ethics makes use of thebeing while eradicating its elemental evil, it still roots in it.

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