ARTICOLI / 14 / Lazare Benaroyo /
In this article I look at the significance of Emmanuel Levinas’ thought for an ethics of care. I argue that the meaning Levinas gives to the term « face » is a central aspect related to this issue. The face is in this French philosopher’s view an ambiguous phenomenon, an enigma, that bears high ethical significance : beyond its physical appearance, the face of the other escapes every affort at representation, it indicates the way in which the representation of the other exceeds any idea of the other in me, and it is precisely this irreducibility of alterity that lights up its ethical meaning. In Levinas’ view, to be oneself is to be for the other, and the otherness of the other manifests itself in the face-to-face encounter. Accordingly, responsibility is the response to the injunction, the interpellation, of the other’s face, preceding the claim of justice, and humaneness is conceived as entangled in the other’s face. Against this background, I suggest that Levinas’ philosophical insight constitutes a turning point from a traditional to a new conception of responsibility that may bear great significance to a renewed understanding of an hermeneutics and an ethics of care.
