Tag: Levinas

You try to see Myself…

korzac

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:

You see Myself
You see Myself
The rupture
The rupture
Rupture and Union
Rupture and Union

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] ” “

___________________

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 :

The Fog...
The Fog…

The Gaze X Six

korzac

.I quote from a short review of Hagi Keenan’s book “The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze”:

..”Our world is saturated with images. Images multiply around us, having reached the status of essentially reproducible commodities. Overwhelmed by this proliferation of visual stimuli, our gaze becomes increasingly bored and distracted. Do we ever really read and engage with images? Can they ever provide the sense of meaningfulness we crave? French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas confronted and subverted these questions.” (see here)..( Not an advertising)

(Click on the images to enlarge)

LVNS GAZE
LVNS GAZE
LVNS GAZE 77
LVNS GAZE 77
LVNS GAZE 22
LVNS GAZE 22
LVNS GAZE 55
LVNS GAZE 55
LVNS GAZE 33
LVNS GAZE 33
LVNS GAZE44
LVNS GAZE44
The Gaze X Six
The Gaze X Six

 

 

 

 

Levinas is looking…

korzac
To begin with, I am not a philosopher and probably never will be. But relying on the writings of Levinas (see here and here) who speaks of the “face” as a door closed to what is beyond or in his terminology the transcendental, is surely a mysterious fact or thought sparking my imagination as a visual artist when drawing portraits and people , perhaps in the same way as medieval artists did when painting the religiousness of their time.
.
From another direction but in the same vein of the Levinassian “face” and the “gaze” there is the book by Hagi Kenaan (  “The Ethics of VIsuality,  Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze”, see here)….
.
 …I quote from Catherine Chalier , “‘Hagi Kenaan questions the manner in which the Other’s face shows itself to us […} he analyses with finesse how the face subverts the primacy of consciousness. The face is a reminder of an alterity irreducible to the flow of images that tyrannically occupy our field of vision … To see a face is not to see a phenomenon, but to hear a call addressing me. It is in this difficult, paradoxical and eminently singular optics that ethics upholds itself. Ethics becomes an optics when the vulnerability of the face is perceived as a call for a conversion of the gaze.’ (see here in Review}.
(Catherine Chalier, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris X – Nanterre)”.
.
Anyway, the convergence of many different aspects into a visual work is an intriguing affair, in particular the pixel as a crazy visualization of transcendence and absence.

,

Transcendance
Transcendance
Trancendence 2
Trancendence 2
TRANSCENDENCE33
TRANSCENDENCE33
Before Transcendence
Before Transcendence
Absence as Trancendence
Absence as Trancendence

 

Why Emmanuel Levinas… and why “Face a Face” in Painting

korzac

,

"Face a Face", Levinas.
“Face a Face”, Levinas.

I am a visual artist. A large part of the subject of my paintings and drawings, are people. They are not “copies” of the real people, (the global reality). I’m using the format of comics that  came to me directly and releases me from the need to be  close to this global reality. I prefer to create my own local “reality”.

I paint and draw people’s faces. Their face is an external surface. I’m guessing through this surface what they feel and express. In contrast, Rembrandt, when portraying  himself, knew what he felt when he painted them. The viewer is affected …but he only guesses what  Rembrandt really feels…Rembrandt is veiled.

The Veiled Look
The Veiled Look


And here comes Emmanuel Levinas  in…

I discovered him by chance. I saw the documentary film  “Absent god” (see here) where Levinas speaks, among other things, about his concept of “Face” ,. He says:

“…But this shock of the divine,
this rupture in the immanent order
the order that I can embrace, grasp,
the order I can make mine, possess,
it is the other person.
The way I phrase it,
it’s the face of the other person”…(Quoted from the subtitles accompanying a conversation  with Levinas in “Absent God”)

Trace
Trace

…and Derrida says on Levinas’s  “Face a Face”:

…”Ici Jacques Derrida [ …] en appelle à la tora pour contester Lévinas qui, lui, en appelle à la religion. Dans un premier temps, le texte indique “Or l’Eternel s’entretenait avec Moïse face à face, comme un homme s’entretient avec un autre” (Ex 33.11). Puis dans un second temps : “Tu ne pourras pas voir ma face, car nul homme ne peut me voir et vivre (…) Tu te tiendras sur le rocher. Qand ma gloire passera, je te mettrai dans un creux du rocher, et je te couvrirai de ma main jusqu’à ce que j’aie passé. Et lorsque je retournerai ma main, tu me verras par derrière, mais ma face ne pourra pas être vue” (Ex 33.20-23). Dieu parle à Moïse face à face, mais sa présence n’est jamais totale. Elle n’est que trace, effet de trace, effacement de la trace. Selon Lévinas, dans le face-à-face humain, il n’y a pas de symétrie. Autrui, qui ressemble à Dieu, nous parle depuis une hauteur. Tout dialogue est discours avec dieu. …” see here

J'ai vu Levinas
J’ai vu Levinas

.From another point of view here is an excerpt from ” Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other” by professor  Roger Burggraeve :

“”What Levinas really means by the “face of the other” is not his physicalcountenance or appearance, but precisely the noteworthy fact that the other—not only in fact, but in principle—does not coincide with his appearance,image, photograph, representation, or evocation. “The other is invisible” (TI6). According to Levinas, we therefore can not properly speak of a “phenomenology” of the face since phenomenology describes what appears. The face is nonetheless what in the countenance of the other escapes our gaze when turned toward us. The other is “otherwise,” irreducible to his appearing, and thus reveals himself precisely as face. Surely, the other is indeed visible. Obviously, he appears and so calls up all sorts of impressions, images, and ideas by which he can be described. And naturally, we can come to know a great deal about him or her on the basis of what he or she gives us “to see.” But the other is more than a photograph, or rather not only is he factually more—not only more in the sense where there is always more for me to discover—but he can never be adequately reproduced or summarized by one or another image. The other is essentially, and not merely factually or provisionally, a movement of retreat and overflowing. I can never bind or identify the other with his plastic form (EI90–91). Paradoxically, the other’s appearing is executed as a withdrawal, or literally, as retraite or anachorese.

My local singularity
My local singularity
 The epiphany of the other is always also a breaking through and a throwing into confusion of
that very epiphany, and as such the other always remains “enigmatic,”
intruding on me as the “irreducible,” “separate and distinct,” “strange,” in
short as “the other” (AS81). The other is insurmountably otherwise because
he escapes once for all every effort at representation and diagnosis. The
epiphany of the face makes all curiosity ridiculous (TI46).”” see here.
.
So to conclude this short note  metaphorically, the Levinasian “Face a Face” is a mystery, some sort of singularity where the picture breaks down. I as a picture maker am always positioned at the event horizon, a veiled horizon.
My Event Horizon
My Event Horizon

…And finally, it is worth reading the article by Professor Hagi Keenan  “Facing Images: after Levinas”, http://www.tau.ac.il/~kenaan/facing_images.pdf