Invented People

Emmanuel Levinas says that the face is a fundamental event. The face is not the mere difference of your hair color being different than mind, or your eyes being blue and mine being green. Rather the face is that which is non-submissive to categorization, that which is language, but beyond language, the part of you that overflows and will not submit to a description or category of thinking. Your face asks of me one thing "You shall not kill."

There is within myself a desire to make you the same as me. I want you to be like me. I want to thematize you so you fit into my categories of thinking. But alterity--your very transcendence--refuses my categories. It asks that I not kill you by trying to fit you into my way of thinking. It invites me to consider you as you are, mysterious, elusive, unexplainable, and allow you to be. Your face invites "love".

But I am not speaking of romantic or erotic love, but rather the response to your needs, your requests, your interests. I respond in love to you when I allow you to be yourself, and do not demand that you become "like me" so that in your sameness you are deserving of my attention.

No. Your face is before your being. Your face comes to me prior to any beginning. Your request for me to meet your needs is preexistent. Your face precedes my very existence and does not depend on any prior condition or set of rules. Your request for me to serve you does not depend on whether or not you will serve me back, or meet my needs, but rather stands on its own.

But it is hard to understand you, to figure out what it is you want, what it is you need. There are gaps, holes, asymmetries of thought between us. I can reckon perhaps with the difference in your appearance, even your culture, or your language. I can account for difference in background, education, and whatever other category there may be. But what I cannot assume, what I cannot hold, what I cannot grasp, is your alterity.

Do I know you? I know things about you, but do I truly know you? There are so many gaps. Yet through these gaps, your face appears. To make "sense of you" is to "kill you," but nonetheless, I struggle not to invent you so that you can fit into my world. I fill in the gaps, make adjustments, rationalize your behavior, even create excuses why your behavior is so very different, so very unpredictable and so alien to my own.

I don't understand why you do what you do. It fails to dawn on me why you don't respond the way I would respond. Yet your alterity stands. I go to great lengths to try to make you "fit" into my way of understanding. And in so doing, I violate you. I erase you. I disallow your alterity, the very transcendent part of you through whom God is speaking, and through which God desires that I come to understand how to love you and serve you.

It is hard. I am limited. I do not understand. I feel as though you don't understand me. There are others putting their claims on me as well. Others need my attention. Their faces call to me. And I must choose one, then the other. And how am I to function if my needs are not met? Does my providing for your needs mean that I must violate the needs others who require my service? Still, your alterity remains. We must work it out.

My desire is to serve you, to love you, to be what you need.