What strikes me about Levinas is his constant intrusion into life itself, the daily life, to build an ethic enabling interpersonal communication where the visual is a major player in most םf the “play” but paradoxically leaving out a large part of what appears before our eyes into some dark invisible matter…
So ”you try to see myself” and I as a picture maker, try to see you but we both disappear in that fog of “dark matter”.
Pseudo illustrations:
From another point of view, the view of a psychotherapist I quote:
“I was scared to death to see that first client. Who wouldn’t be? According to
Emmanuel Levinas, seeing one’s first client is not only a frightening idea, but an
impossible one. How do we see a client? How do we see anyone, for that matter? You
cannot see a client like you can see a movie, and you cannot have a client like you can
have a can of coke. The client—the Other—is not an object to be seen or had. The
Other, as Levinas argues, is much more than what can ever be seen, contained, or
grasped.”see here .
And finally I quote Assaf Romano {From the text “Portraits” see here )
“In his book The Ethics of Visuality, Prof. Hagi Kenaan argues that “the face is testimony to the Other’s absolute alterity.”[4] Elsewhere, discussing Emmanuel Levinas’s thematization of the other’s humanism, he writes: “Why is it the face, for Levinas, that which reveals the radical alterity of the Other? […] Isn’t the human face precisely that which necessarily appears to the consciousness of a specific viewer […]? […] To begin with, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’; the face of the Other always appears within a social-cultural-political context, within certain conventions and taxonomic systems that are often tied to domination, the abuse of power, discrimination and injustice. […] This […] is precisely where Levinas’s critique begins. […] According to Levinas, the possibility of encountering the […] otherness of the Other […] demands a radical transformation of central aspects of the self […], in particular, a transformation in our characteristic ways of looking and seeing, of listening and hearing. […] Levinas writes that ‘This presence consists of in coming towards us, in making an entrance.'”[5]
Prof. Kenaan proposes to think about Levinas’s “face” as a sort of an event or occurrence deriving from the words face and facing: “The face’s unique presence does not derive, therefore, from its visual characteristic, but rather from its act of facing. The essence of the face lies, according to Levinas, in the very event of facing or addressing. Addressing whom? An ‘I’, an ego, a self.”[6] ” “
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And as a footnote:
As a picture maker I am a chaotic visual artist… not thinking about Levinas… without planning… not rationalizing…. but aiming at something into the fog :
korzacsol 