The face as primordial call

The face of the Other is not simply a configuration of physical features or a social mask: it is the irruption of a radical alterity that precedes any attempt at understanding or categorization. Before we can assign it meaning, even before we can defend ourselves from its presence, the face has already interpellated us. It is an opening that emerges from beyond form, a manifestation that exceeds the visible.

This manifestation constitutes the first discourse, not because it articulates words, but because it establishes the very possibility of all dialogue. The face speaks in a language older than words: it is both plea and command, vulnerability and authority intertwined. It confronts us with an ethical demand we cannot evade, a call that constitutes us as responsible subjects before any conscious decision.

What is revealed in the face is the impossibility of reducing the Other to our categories of understanding. It is an opening that appears in the opening itself, an enigma that asks not to be solved but responded to. The face speaks to us precisely from this irreducibility, from this fundamental resistance to being converted into an object of our knowledge or our power.