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In the other scene, a Russian woman encounters a captured German officer in the ruins of Stalingrad. The siege has been broken, and the officer is being forced to retrieve corpses from the rubble. A crowd gathers to watch him, among them a woman who has endured some great harm over the course of the war. The sight of the officer fills her with rage. She picks up a brick, moves to strike him down, but at the last moment throws down her stone. “Not understanding what was happening to her, governed by a power she had just now seemed to control,” Grossman writes, “she felt in the pocket of her jacket for a piece of bread that had been given to her the evening before by a soldier. She held it out to the German officer and said: ‘There, have something to eat.’ ”5
Elsewhere, particularly in later writings, Levinas’s examples of face-to-face encounters are, arguably, less sanguine and more confrontational, involving elements of violence.6 He associates the encounter with the other, what he comes to term “proximity,” with situations involving what he variously calls “accusation,” “persecution,” “subjection,” “obsession,” “passivity,” and being “held hostage” by the other. The other is not simply the colleague for whom I politely hold open a door, or the defenseless stranger to whom I beneficently offer help. The other is the “oppressed who is other than myself ” who accuses me for my complacency and affluence.7 The other is, for example, like the colonial subjects in John Coetzee’s stories, the oppressed person who confronts her oppressor and accuses her for profiting from long-accepted injustices. Even more strikingly, the other can be the person who oppresses me, the victimizer who harms me yet for whom, Levinas claims, I am still “infinitely responsible.”8
What do these examples tell us about the idea of face-to-face encounters? Levinas uses them, first, to link humanity with vulnerability. One of the terms he uses to talk about the other is autrui. Autrui corresponds to our use of the word others to refer to other persons. Some of Levinas’s peers used it in discussing the “problem of other minds.” For example, Sartre writes about solipsism and le probleme de l’existence de l’autrui in Being and Nothingness. Levinas distinguishes his use of this term, however, from its use in these debates.