Le visage de la haine: A Levinasian Perspective

Le visage de la haine: A Levinasian Perspective (2024)

Abstract: In this paper, I reconsider Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) with Levinasian eyes. I begin by tending to the groundwork of Levinas’s contributions to ethics which, for him, famously begin in the face-to-face encounter of an other, in their most genuine, radical, and absolute alterity by the self/the same. Then I discuss what is lost by the totalization which, in attempting to assimilate this alterity into the sameness of itself, attempts the impossible; such occurs not only at the level of individual actors but too in the sociopolitical institutions who effectively systematize the violence of totalization. From here, we return to La Haine, where Levinas first abets us in analyzing the French society which it reflects, and then the film itself, more specifically tracking the character Vinz and the question of violence as inflicted by and/or upon him, in Levinas’s view. Nearing the conclusion, I discuss the fact that Vinz is unable to realize his desire to kill once it finally looks him in the face; this seems to beg a question as to whether, amidst the shared actuality of an economy of violence and the face-to-face, the latter is more basic than the former. I conclude by unfurling only part of the long spiral of questions implicated by this quasi-tension between the economy of violence and the face which invites the possibility of murder yet begs us not to, wondering aloud about the eventual death of Vinz as a possible condemnation and/or paradoxical reassertion of the present reign of totality.

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selected excerpts

Le visage de la haine, pg. 2: Yet famously, for Levinas, ethics begins—and ends, according to Casey (“In my beginning is my end” (Casey, 76)—in this face-to-face encounter; it is here and here only, in the visage, that we “experience human others [autrui] in their true exteriority, their absolute alterity”; we find ourselves arrested by an other whose Kierkegaardian “thatness” (Casey 80) is and sheerly can not be overcame. Indeed, this Other is “unique” and thus unable, even in a faintly authentic sense, to “submit to the generalities and platitudes of collectivities; instead of consolidating itself into something conceptually or historically coherent,” the Other is “radically heterogeneous,” to me and other Others as well (Casey 81). Such metaphysical separation is absolute. And the face is not only visible, nor only its inscription with an exterior heterogeneity off of which all conventional senses of others’ interiority actually ricochet like a small projectile off a taut wall; no, furthermore, within that which is in fact visible, is the severe vulnerability of the Other: “inscribed on [their] face prior to language,” those first words from the other are “‘You shall not kill’” (Bernasconi 81). The face, in both cases, is not just a “communicative vehicle” but “the face that faces us in the ethical relation comes already speaking, speaking before speech as it were” (Casey, 87). And the engagement of the same with the Other is so intense here, in this face-to-face encounter, that a most resounding “unguarded openness” emerges, kicking and wailing, from its “abrupt actuality” (Casey 80). Thus in this encounter we find the place where genuine ethics reside, for Levinas; uniquely enabled by the face, true existence stands before us.

pg. 4: Circumventing the weeds of the French constitution in its legal nitty-gritty, the foremost principle of such, perhaps the same supposed aspiration of any liberal state, suffices for our purpose: such is the equality of all citizens before the law. In other words, every citizen becomes, in effect, the same as the next; such is the real content of the “universal citizen,” which does not see an other in their genuine alterity, but only as numerically discontinuous. Thus the problem of totalization is at once obvious and severe. The corresponding passage from Durfee is worth citing in its near-entirety:

Any society which might think of itself as a melting pot of various peoples and cultures has the problem of amalgamation... The dominating Western philosophical idealism approached interrelationships and community through totalization... The plural elements are subordinated to prior thought and system as “elements of an ideal calculus.” (552)

Granting that a given state is actually earnest in its pursuit of, say, liberté, égalité, fraternité, a dissonance beyond paradox begins to ring and refuses resolution. The universal citizen could only ever be an ideal, the rationalism of which “constantly subordinates the particular to the general,” not only subordinating each body to the imperialism of the same, of totalization, but also “subordinating will to thought” (Ibid). In other words, an entire political and legal structure is erected upon an ontological misconception which not only fails to see the radical alterity of a given Other but instead sees in their place the piercing antithesis of sameness. Here, language does not perform the “social role of communication” but instead abets this “subordination of all to thought”—that is, an abstracted notion of totality—“leading to the universal rather than genuine dialogue” (Ibid). Such universality may be theoretical, and political, but “is not the life of selves truly exterior to one another, nor is it moral” (Durfee 552 : Levinas, Totality 83), and in this way “morality grounded on politics turns inevitably to tyranny” (Durfee 555). The veil of ignorance never felt so disparately unaware of its own irony indeed.

pgs. 7-8: In simpler terms, it seems that Vinz is simultaneously chugging toward brute violence yet subject to violence in a more abstract sense. Where does this leave us? If we sought out Derrida for help, he would venture that Levinas offers limited clarity here, for Derrida, maybe gleefully, led the charge that Levinas’s conception of violence failed to see the necessity of its economy, that is, “violence against violence” (Bernasconi 87). But according to Bernasconi, Levinas did in fact acknowledge the necessity of an economy of violence. In a 1962 lecture, “Transcendence and Height,” which Bernasconi suggests Derrida overlooked, Levinas did proclaim that “in order to suppress violence, it is necessary to have recourse to violence” (Bernasconi 87). Levinas further explored “the question of the use of violence in the attempt to combat evil” (Ibid) in “Judaism and Revolution,” writing, “Unquestionably, violent action against Evil is necessary” (Ibid : Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings 109). Of course, the one combatting evil must adhere to certain conceptual requirements; and yet if they do, and a compelling case could be made for Vinz as a rebel with a cause, so to speak, they surpass the “absolute claim of politics and come to recognize the ethical” (Ibid). Indeed, Vinz’s fantasy of killing of a police officer as a sort of eye-for-an-eye principle—who, in a painstakingly literal sense, maintains the status quo—could be seen as “moved by a sense of the horrors and injustices of a world without a soul” (Ibid), with this world being Abdel’s precursory killer. In this reading, Vinz has heard the “tears that a functionary cannot see, the tears of the Other” (Ibid : Levinas, “Transcendence” 94).