Non-fenomenalitatea chipului și illeitatea animalului – chestionarea diferenței antropologice din perspectiva fenomenologiei lui Emmanuel Levinas
The non-phenomenality of the face and the illeity of the animal: Questioning the anthropological difference from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology

Summary/Abstract: This article revisits Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the face by reading it alongside Rainer Maria Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo. Against the anatomical reduction of the face, I argue that, in Levinas’s own terms, the face is an event of transcendence - an appeal that precedes cognition and ruptures the subject’s spontaneity - and that this event can appear beyond the human. Rilke’s fragmentary torso, which “sees” with all its parts and issues the imperative Du musst dein Leben ändern, functions as a phenomenological analogue of the Levinasian face: a visibility that withdraws at the very moment it addresses us, turning mere stone (or flesh) into command. On this basis, I propose a hermeneutic shift: if we abandon the metaphysical language of totality and the anthropological partition that reserves “face” to the human, we are compelled to admit that non-human animals can “have” a face—i.e., can present an irreducible exteriority that obligates us ethically.

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