Translating the other’s face: Cultural encounters between Judith Butler and Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

Judith Butler draws on Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics in order to question processes of humanization and dehumanization taking place through various practices of representation of the face of the other. This is a singular reading leading Levinas’ work to the field of media representations conceived as an agonistic social landscape where the demand of the face is offered or, on the contrary, hidden from us. In that sense, Butler’s cultural transposition of Levinasian ethics entails a politicization of ethics which is indistinguishable, at the end, from an ethic assault to the politics of representation. In this cultural bond among ethics and politics arise fundamental questions on responsibility linking it to the practice of cultural translation while offering alternatives to some common universalist shortcuts of contemporary ethical reflection.