Thee:Thou::The:Other

"Every effort to turn Ethics into a principle of thought and action is essentially religious... Ethics is a category of pious discourse.... We are left with a Pious discourse without piety. A spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and a cultural sociology preached in line with the new style sermons in lieu of the late class struggle.... become like me, and I will respect your difference!"

- Emmanuel Levinas

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Alain Badiou, "Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil"

Excerpts:

Ethics according to Levinas

Roughly speaking, Levinas maintains that metaphysics imprisoned by its Greek Origins has subordinated thought to the logic of the same, to the Primacy of substance and identity. But according to Levinas, it is impossible to arrive at an authentic thought of the other, and thus an ethics of the relation to the other from the despotism of the same, which is incapable of recognizing this other. The dialectic of the same and the other conceived ontologically, under the dominance of self identity, identitais, ensures the absence of the other in effective thought, suppresses all genuine experience of the other, and bars the way to an ethical opening to alterity.

So, we must push thought over to a different origin, a non-Greek origin. One that proposes a radical primary opening to the other, conceived as ontologically anterior to the construction of identity. It is in the Jewish tradition that Levinas finds the basis for this pushing over. What the law understood according to Jewish tradition as both immemorial and currently in effect names, is precisely the anteriority founded in being before the same, and with respect to theoretical thought of the ethics of the relation to the other, itself conceived merely as the objective identification of regularities and identities. This law, indeed, does not tell me what is, but what is imposed by the existence of others.  This "law of the other" might be opposed to the laws of the real. 

According to Greek thought, adequate action presumes an initial theoretical Mastery of experience which ensures that the action is in Conformity with the rationality of being. From this point of departure are deduced laws in the plural, of the city, and of action. According to Jewish ethics in Levinas' sense, everything is grounded in the immediacy of an opening to the other which disarms the reflexive subject. The thou, who prevails over the I. Such is the whole meaning of The Law.

Levinas proposes a whole series of phenomenological themes for testing and exploring the originality of the other, at the center of which lies the theme of The Face, of the singular, giving, denoncion, of the other in person, through his fleshly Epiphany, which does not test domestic recognition: the other as similar, identical to me, but on the contrary is that from which I experience myself, ethically, as pledged to the appearing of the other and subordinated in my being to this pledge. For Levinas, ethics is the new name of thought, thought which has thrown off its logical chains, the principle of identity, in favor of its' prophetic submission to the law of founding alterity.

The ethics of difference

Whether they know it or not, it is in the name of this configuration that the proponents of Ethics explain to us today that it amounts to recognition of the other, Against Racism which would deny this other, or to the ethics of differences against substantialist nationalism, which would exclude immigrants, or sexism which would deny feminine being, or to multiculturalism against the imposition of a unified model of behavior and intellectual approach, or quite simply to good old fashioned tolerance, which consists of not being offended by the fact that others think and act differently from you.

This common sensical discourse has neither Force nor truth. It is defeated in advance in the competition it declares between tolerance and fanaticism, between the ethics of difference and racism, between recognition of the other and identitarian fixity. For the honor of philosophy, it is first of all necessary to admit that this ideology of a right to difference, the Contemporary catechism of goodwill with regard to other cultures, are strikingly distant from Levinas his actual conception of things.

Excerpts from video:

What (in the Jewish tradition) is the meaning of the prohibition of making an image? Here, Levinas introduces a great innovation. The prohibition of the image is actually the prohibition of representation, it's prohibition on capturing a person as a meaning inside a specific box we call his body, appearance, profession, his trade... It's about going beyond, opening up beyond this. The transition, so typical of Jewish culture, from the image to the spoken word, it's a transition from what I can grasp to what's really there. And what is there - no definition, description or image can fully capture. It is to deal with infinity, dealing with man - dealing with infinity. It's the religious meaning of relations between one person and another. So the prohibition of the image is not minor, or one of the Torah's prohibitions, it gives special expression to the struggle between the visible and that which is beyond the visible. Ethics is always on this side. The visible encloses, it frames; ethics frees us from the visible, introducing into the visible the metaphysical, infinite dimension.
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Youssef Seddik:

The foundation in Judaism is an obligation for us Muslims. Philosophically, the most important issue is the prohibition of the image. And even Muslim sages ignored this throughout their whole life. The Quran repeats the ten commandments, and "though shalt not an image", which is essential in Judaism, is replaced by the Quran by: "If you construct an argument - be honest". The image is integrated in the discussion. The discussion must be honest, including the plasticity of the image. This should be considered as Levinasean. It's not only the perceptible aspect of the image, but any simulacra as such, including lying and injustice. Even concepts can become idolatry. There's a saying of the prophet which I'm not sure is true, because I don't believe in the Hadith, that sums up the words of the prophet, the prophet says: Any idol is prohibited, including the Quran itself. Even concepts must not be turned in to idols.

Do I Exist?  Do I Need to be Seen Being Seen (Facebook)?  Establish my "profile"?

Do I need to SEE my own face in order to real-ize a visual sense my OWN "infinitude"?  Remove all doubts?  As in some kind of hyper-real "Mirror Stage"