“The banal fact of conversation, in one sense, quits the order of violence. This banal fact is the marvel of marvels,” wrote E. Levinas. This is what takes place every day everywhere; the banal conversation. The face to face talking. The Other does not appear in the nominative, but in the vocative. I not only think of what he is for me, but also and simultaneously, and even before, I am for him. Even when one speaks to a slave, one speaks to an equal. “What one says, the content communicated, is possible only thanks to this face-to-face relationship in which the Other counts as an interlocutor prior even to being known.” One looks at a look. To look at a look is to look at something which cannot be abandoned or freed, but something which aims at you: it involves looking at the face. It is looking at the face that cancels violence. “This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear ‘You shall not kill’, and to hear ‘You shall not kill’ is to hear ‘Social justice.’ Ethical language as the very meaning of approach, which contrasts with knowing. “A face is a trace of itself, given over to my responsibility.”… “In the proximity of the other, all the others than the other obsess me, and already this obsession cries out for justice.”
What avoids evil is the very fact of getting out. To break open the ego of the power to get, to subjugate and possess. “Society is the miracle of moving out of oneself. The violent man does not move out of himself. He takes, he possesses. Possession denies independent existence. To have is to refuse to be.” The call of ethical concern is the invisible of the visible of things. The logos of language is grounded in the ‘nascent logos of the perceptual world’ such that if the unconscious is structured like a language, this is doubtlessly because language is structured like the world. The ’desire’ of the body to always see more, a desire stirred up by the world, and the ultimate locus of this desire and the source of its energy. Desire transubstantiated into the mystery of invisibility of the word, of moral command and criticism, of self-comprehension of spirit.
That ‘spirituality’ is rooted in a primordial generosity, in a multi-voiced plurality, a porosity and openness, a wonder, all of which mark the invisible depth of the visible. The relations with others, intelligence, and language cannot be set out in a lineal and causal series: they belong to those cross-currents where someone lives. Speech is our mother speaking. Thus, while speech puts the child in a more profound relation to she who names everything and puts being into words, it also translates this relation into a more general idea. Man is but a network of relationships, and these alone matter to him. Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside of myself and open to the world. We are true through and through, and have with us, by the mere fact of belonging to the world, and not merely by being in the world that things are, all that we need to transcend ourselves.
A moral view measures, in the face, the un-crossable infinite in which all murderous intent is immersed and submerged. This is precisely why it leads us away from any experience or view. The infinite is given only to the moral view: it is not known, but is in society with us. The commerce with beings which begins with ‘You shall not kill’ does not conform to the scheme of our normal relations with the words, in which the subject knows or absorbs its object like a nourishment, the satisfaction of a need. “The moral relation therefore reunites both self-consciousness and consciousness of God. Ethics is not the corollary of the vision of God, it is that very vision. Ethics is an optic, such that everything I know of God and everything I can hear of His word and reasonably say to Him must find an ethical expression. Language is the possibility for a being to appear from outside, for a reason to be a you, to present itself as face, temptation and impossibility of murder. Reason and language are external to violence. They are the spiritual order. If morality must truly exclude violence, a profound link must join reason, language and morality. If religion is to coincide with spiritual life, it must be essentially ethical.”… “The absolute thought is inseparable from the verb to hear.” The question of the one who listens is part of the expression of the one who speaks.