The real wall is not geographical

Borders exist precisely where we most insist on denying them: not between nations, but in our perception of the other. The migrant does not destabilize economies, but certainties; they do not threaten resources, but the illusory homogeneity with which we upholster our inner selves. Their true crime is not crossing geographic lines, but transgressing the boundaries of our self-understanding.

The “irrevocable freedom” that Levinas (2002) attributes to the foreigner functions like an inverted mirror: while we reinforce physical walls, it is our mental constructs that collapse. Paradoxically, the more we try to protect our collective identity from the “invader,” the more we reveal its fictional and fragile nature. The migrant exposes the contingency of the values we believed to be universal and eternal.

Today, we desperately try to reduce the migrant to a statistic, a media tragedy, or an abstract threat. Anything but recognize them as the bearer of a face that, in Levinasian terms, imposes an ethical responsibility prior to any political construct. Physical fences are mere symbols of deeper boundaries we refuse to examine.

References

Levinas, E. (2002). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Leyte, Trans.). Sígueme. (Original work published in 1961).

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The face as resistance

The faces we encounter are not blank canvases but territories already in rebellion against our conceptual colonization. Every wrinkle, scar, and expression constitutes a silent insurrection against the interpretative molds we wear like invisible glasses. What is truly unsettling about the face of another is not its difference, but its resistance to becoming a confirmation of our everyday taxonomies.

Levinas (2002) understood that the face is precisely that which exceeds any totalization. The fundamental paradox lies in the fact that the more we try to capture the other in our categories, the more it reveals itself as infinite, as an irreducible surplus. Each gaze is an ambush laid against our explanatory systems, a permanent escape from our classificatory archives that challenges the pretense of turning the human into interpretable data.

The contemporary subject, trained in the rapid consumption of images, confuses seeing with understanding. We reduce faces to selfies, expressions to emojis, singularities to profiles. Our technological hypervisuality paradoxically blinds us to what Levinas called “the epiphany of the face”: that moment in which the other ceases to be an object and becomes an ethical mandate, an inescapable call that no algorithm can process.

References

Levinas, E. (2002). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.(A. Leyte, Trans.). Sígueme. (Original work published in 1961)

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The shared void

True love is that beggar who gives away his hunger. Like two voids learning to dance together. The shared lack is the only honest gift.

Love places us in an impossible position: we offer precisely what we lack to someone who does not request such an offering. We extend our empty hands with the promise of fullness, while the other, also inhabiting their own emptiness, does not recognize what we attempt to give. This fundamental contradiction constitutes the very essence of the amorous encounter, where two absences try to complement each other without ever completely succeeding.

Paradoxically, it is this exchange of lacks that sustains the bond. Like two blind people describing a color neither has seen, we build together a necessary fiction. Love persists not despite this impossibility, but because of it; its power resides precisely in the unresolvable tension between what we seek and what we can actually obtain, between the fantasy of completeness and the reality of misencounter.

The analytic experience reveals that this economy of shared emptiness is perhaps the only possible space for genuine love. It is not in complete satisfaction where love finds its dwelling, but in the mutual recognition of our lacks. By embracing this condition, we discover that loving is not possessing or completing, but accompanying the other in the perpetual dance between desire and absence, between hunger and giving.

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