Donneth asked:

1. Levinas distinguishes between "desire" and "need". what is the difference? Why should DESIRE
be a metaphysical moment?

2. The Face is the situs of ethical. Would you explain in your own terms Levinas' phenomenology of
the Face and reflect on why the Face-to-Face checks the 'egology' of the life of the Same?

3. WHat is the Same and what is its relation to enjoyment?

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The difference between need and desire, simply put is that needs can be fulfilled, desire cannot. For
Levinas there are two ways to talk about human life: one is as separate, individual, egocentric and
independent, the other is as transcending towards what is Other and the good. The first dimension is
what he calls the 'Same'.

This is the realm of the ego's grasp of the world, understood as consciousness' ability to incorporate
"actually or potentially, that which lies outside it." According to Levinas, this movement of the
suppression and possession of all otherness and difference into theory, knowing and being has been
the predominant feature/ characteristic of the western philosophic tradition and leaves no possibility
open for transcendence.

However consciousness does not exhaust the meaning of the Same for Levinas, there is also in the
movement of the same an enjoyment of the world, which does not take the form of representations,
but are lived as sensibility, at the level of the body. The realm of the Same is steeped in need. Needs
are characterised as a lack that must be satisfied. Hunger is a prime example, hunger is experienced
as a privation of sustenance, satisfying this lack however is not just a matter of finding nourishment.
Eating, consuming is a matter of enjoyment, it is a kind of folding back on oneself where the world is
absorbed by me such that ultimately only I exist. This world of the same is foremost an economy
where there is a balancing of intention and actions, a coinciding of lack and fulfilment.

Desire on the other hand is structurally very different. It indicates the movement out of this ego-based
economy, out of the world of the same, towards the transcendence of the Other. Whereas needs can
be fulfilled, desires are insatiable. Desire is what remains when all the needs and wants of the ego
are met, not in the sense of a 'there is more I can have' but more of a sense that what I have may not
be the most valuable. That what is most valuable is what escapes (essentially) any and all
encompassing, any and all economy. Desire is desire for what is different, outside, elsewhere. Desire
is the desire for transcendence. Rather than a folding back on oneself it is a movement of extreme
unfolding, so extreme in fact that there is no return to what is familiar and the Same. Ultimately it is
desire for the Other. An Other who when we encounter him/ her reveals a world to me a new world a
world that I am no longer justified in claiming as my own. A world in which the movements of the
Same no longer suffice in order to make sense of. Why? Because the Other is a very strange
experience as both imminence and transcendence, in other words as a Face.

The notion of the face is as you recognise very difficult and slippery. I think the latter feature is
deliberate on Levinas' part. He is trying to capture in a detailed way the basic thought that when we
are with someone, just by the simple fact that there are not ourselves there is something always out
of our reach, the other is both with us and not with us, it is this slippery duality that leads to the
difficulty in understanding Levinas' discourse. At one point, Levinas even says, "I do not know if one
can speak of a phenomenology of the face, since phenomenology describes what appears" (Ethics
and Infinityp83).

The face then is not the physical features of the eyes, nose, mouth. Levinas goes on to say that "The
best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the colour of her eyes!". The face is what
escapes any description of the other by the self; the face is what points to that which cannot be
brought into the confines of the ego's world. The face is transcendence. And yet the face is what is
most immediate, most imminent, most real, because the face presents itself as 'destitute' as 'naked'
and 'exposed' calling for help, my help to give up the coat on my back to cloth her, to give up my food
to feed her. Before this appeal, I had never had to consider the way I lived my life. I just did as I
pleased. The Other breaks intothis status quo disrupting the pleasant flow of self-containment.
When faced with the Other, however, there is a question that strikes to the very foundations: Do I
have a right to exist? Does the fact that my living my life mean that someone else is suffering, if so
what can I do? Of course I may not do anything I am under no compulsion to act, But then I have
ignored the Other's call for help. If in fact I do help the other thenethics and the Good opens up.

In other words metaphysics, transcendence is made most real, is possible only at the intersecting of
the imminent the physical, the everyday.

Levinas opens Totality and Infinitywith voices other (wise) than his own: "The true life is absent". "But
we are in the world ". The first sentence is a quote taken from Rimbaud and can be read as both an
admission of the lack of value or meaning and simultaneously a longing or yearning for what is
missing. The second sentence is an allusion to Heidegger, who characterises human life as
being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world means that we have needs and wants that we can fulfil and
enjoy, and yet there is something that does not fit into this world, it is beyond or rather to big to fit into
this world it overflows it. This 'it' is the good, the infinite, the other. This third sentence reads:
"Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi". Levinas understands 'metaphysics' in a literal
sense as meta-physics that which comes after physics, the world, what is outside the familiar and the
Same. Metaphysics is a transcendence again understood literally as a moving-over or across or
rather a trans-ascendance a moving up and beyond. Desire as that which cannot find fulfilment as
that which shows up after all needs have been fulfilled is metaphysical or rather metaphysics.

Brian Tee

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