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)

Psychotherapy

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