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Perhaps even I now, at this moment, writing these words, trying to understand what he experienced, trying, at the same time, to say something to you about the point of this book and why this moment lurches out of my memory when I think about what Levinas means by face-to-face encounters. This too is a face-to-face encounter.
3. What Is a Face-to-Face Encounter?
Levinas gives, of course, several examples of his own. Often, he asks the reader to imagine looking into the faces of persons who are helpless. We are asked to imagine passing by “the stranger, the widow, or the orphan” who is begging for help and feeling our hearts go out to them, feeling obligated to “tear the bread from our mouth to nourish the other.” Other examples are not so dramatic. Levinas gives the example of holding a door open for a stranger as a mundane example of a face-to-face encounter. It is a simple act of civility, but Levinas is struck by the poetry of this gesture, the message it conveys about ceding one’s place in the world to make room for others, about how easily such selflessness filters through our daily lives.
Two of my favorite examples come from interviews he gave in the eighties. At the time, Levinas was fascinated by Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a novel about the siege of Stalingrad and life in Stalinist Russia.3 He cites two scenes from Life and Fate as illustrating face-to-face encounters. In one, Grossman describes a line of people standing outside of the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow. The line forms each morning, with hundreds of families waiting to make inquiries and to pass along packages and notes. A detail obsesses Levinas: Grossman describes how each person cranes their necks as they approach the prison’s windows, hoping to glimpse their loved ones inside. Levinas dwells on this image, imagining each person among the hundreds staring at the neck of the person in front of him, each “reading on the nape of the person in front of him the feelings and hopes of his misery.” This image of “the nape” can be understood, he says, as the “welcome of the face.”4