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Is there any more eloquent or definitive evidence of human individuality, of human dignity, than the face? My face shows that I am unlike you, that I am myself; and in this beautiful incommensurability we establish solidarity with each other, because your face also looks only like itself, only like you.The hiddenness of the face—the Divine face, too—is commonly regarded as a curse or a punishment, and its revelation as an epiphany. This is certainly the case in the mystagogic morality of Levinas, for whom the sight of the face is “a visitation,” “the first disclosure,” “a bareness without any cultural ornament”: “the face enters our world from an absolutely foreign sphere, that is, precisely from an absolute,” and so it...