This Week’s Events
Zahi Zalloua, Fanon contra Levinas: On Palestine and the Politics of the Faceless
Friday, February 7, 2025 - 04 pm - 06 pm
► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Fanon contra Levinas: On Palestine and the Politics of the Faceless
Facelessness marks the racialized other in all its exposure and vulnerability; to be faceless already gestures to an ontological and symbolic violation, evoking a naked alterity thrust into the Fanonian zone of nonbeing. In my talk, I would like to take up the challenges in thinking facelessness ethically and politically, attending to the frictions between the two registers. My reflections are structured in two parts. First, I explore the ethics and politics of the faceless through a critical rereading of Emmanuel Levinas’s notorious interview after the 1982 massacres of hundreds in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Levinas’s dismissal of his interlocutor’s question—Isn’t the Palestinian the other of the Israeli?—functions unwittingly as a meta-commentary on the precarity of the naked human face and the limits of a Levinasian ethics: What can an ethics infatuated with the “irreducible other” tell us about the Palestinian other, the other other? Second, I consider the ontological and political ramifications of thinking Palestinians, and the human itself, without a face. My wager is that we must pursue a politics of the faceless, where facelessness is not so much a condition to be overcome, but a relation to reorient away from the mystifying lure of dyadic ethics toward an emancipatory universal politics, of humans and beyond, a void opened up by the paradoxical figure of the “real” neighbor, understood in its Lacanian sense. What might emerge from this encounter with the faceless is potentially a questioning of my being as such, and the ends to which my affective dispositions and hopes have been turned. How does the affect of the faceless other impact my being? Can my social coordinates be altered in any way (the ontological question)? If so, what forms can/should this transformation take (the political question)?
► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.
Zahi Zalloua
Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature
Director of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies
Whitman College