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Few problems are as challenging to Levinas' ethics as the tension or even chasm that opens between ethics in relation to the face and the claims of the "third". Because of Levinas' focus on the face, and in his later work on nearness, we often regard the appearance of the third as some sort of interruption in my responsibility in face of the other. After many years of discussion, Levinasian texts have become almost rote: particularly those discussions in which infinite responsibilities are said to be betrayed by negotiated and finite ones. Of course, the relation to the face is itself an interruption, an interruption of some first-person stability captured in the notion of self-consciousness and even autonomy. We can tell a story, from one to two (the face) to three.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230234734_6

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