When Politics Forgets the Face
What happens when political conviction replaces human connection
Listen to a discussion of this article.
In my last piece, In Defense of Leftist Self-Critique, I argued that honest reflection requires questioning both ourselves and the ideas and people we choose to support. This not only brings the benefits that such reflection offers but also protects freedom of thought and expression within our ideas and communities. It is also a form of relational exchange.
A divide within today’s left is between those who approach politics as relation and those who practice it as abstraction. This divide has become sharper in an age of constant communication. Technology brings us closer than ever, yet our proximity often lacks presence. We can see and hear people from across the world, but do we allow their realities to alter our understanding?
Among intellectuals and commentators, that kind of humility has become rare. It is understandable that few people want to listen to a political discussion where someone simply says, “I don’t know.” Audiences expect insight and explanation, not uncertainty. Yet when the topic concerns real people and lived events, the urge to offer confident opinions can spread wrong or misleading information. The harm is not only that such claims may be inaccurate but that they exclude the voices of those directly affected.
Equally important, it misses the chance to say, “Neither I nor any outside expert may be the best person to answer that question.” By assuming expertise over the lived experiences of those directly involved, the analysis becomes non-relational.
Non-relation is tempting because it feels safe. Abstractions can be used to justify what might not be justifiable if met face to face. Putting it another way, non-relational abstractions remove the face altogether. In that way, it offers comfort and coherence while protecting us from the vulnerability of being changed. It replaces encounter with explanation and empathy with conclusion, and above all, it provides certainty.
Ethics, maybe, starts when we stop being sure. Judith Butler wrote that we never approach another person from a place of total understanding. We become ethical beings not by asserting our will or knowledge, but by being called into relation by someone else’s existence. That person can be someone whose very existence places a claim on us, a demand we neither choose nor control.
In a world shaped by empire and inequality, that demand is filtered through systems that distort how we see and hear one another, regardless of intent. At some point, we need to ask ourselves what our goal is: to act upon the world or with it, to speak for people or with them, to be right, or to be able to say, I don’t know. That is where relational dialogue and politics can begin again. The call of another person is part of what it means to be human. Their presence reminds us that being ethical begins in response, not representation, allowing their existence to unsettle our certainty and draw us into relation.
When we speak for others instead of with them, we turn relation into representation. This is done without consent in many cases and can cause great harm to those involved when a self-appointed representative speaks with bias or misinformation. The injustice deepens when such misrepresentation serves the interests of the very powers, groups, or individuals responsible for the suffering of those being spoken for.
When we accept uncertainty, when we allow others to remain distinct from our ideas, we make room for real dialogue. We begin to act with the world or in relation to it rather than upon it.
For all his problems and limitations, Emmanuel Levinas captured something important, which Butler built from. Relation is the foundation of ethics. It comes before knowledge, judgment, and theory. Before politics itself, there is the encounter with another person.
True relation begins when we are confronted by what Levinas called the face of the Other. The face is not simply a physical feature but the appearance of vulnerability itself and recognition that another person can suffer and die. The mere presence of the Other makes an ethical demand upon us. It calls us to responsibility before we have time to interpret or decide anything. Levinas describes this as the moment when the self is interrupted by the existence of another. In Totality and Infinity, he writes that the face of the Other speaks an unspoken command: “Do not harm me.”
Butler takes this idea and gives it a wider frame. She agrees with Levinas that ethics begins with this exposure, but she also reminds us that not all lives are recognized in the same way. Social and political structures decide whose vulnerability will be visible and whose will remain unseen. Butler asks a difficult question that Levinas himself did not fully answer. Who is allowed to appear as a face? Whose grief, pain, or death is allowed to register as human? Sometimes those questions are more difficult to answer than we might initially think.
Non-relation begins when the demand for recognition is denied. It occurs when we refuse to see the Other as someone who calls us to responsibility and instead turn them into an object of knowledge or use. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes this as the passage from infinity to totality, the shift from openness toward the Other to the attempt to contain them within our own concepts or systems. Even when motivated by good intentions, this act silences the Other for the sake of thought itself, forcing them to fit into what we already believe.
This is not a rare or theoretical problem. It shapes how people talk about politics today. When political thinking becomes the defense of an idea rather than an encounter with living people, the Other disappears or is vilified. The most obvious examples come from the latter, when the Other is turned into a caricature to justify dehumanization. Yet there is also a quieter kind of dehumanization that hides inside good intentions themselves. It happens not only in the institutions we have learned to question, but also within the movements and voices doing the questioning.
This sounds good, and some, like Butler, have universalized the concept beyond the encounter between two people into social and political life. She expanded the vulnerability and interdependence that Levinas describes as the basis for ethics on a global scale.
In Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, his primary foil is Heidegger, though one could also imagine Marx and Engels representing the same struggle between abstraction and relation. That is a different discussion, too large for this article, but there is a material situation here that matters. Ethics does not exist apart from history. It is shaped by material conditions and by who is allowed to appear as a subject in the first place.
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, described how the colonial world erases the possibility of relation itself. Under colonialism, the Other is not encountered as a person but produced as an object. Fanon shows that what Levinas described in metaphysical terms takes on a concrete form in systems of domination and racial hierarchy.
To Fanon, the Other is denied as a subject and turned into an object within colonial society. He calls this condition the “zone of nonbeing.” Levinas describes how the absorption of the Other is an ethical failure. By absorption, he means the way the self tries to take hold of another person through knowledge or control, turning them into something familiar and manageable. Fanon shifts the problem from the moral to the structural.
What Levinas sees as an individual failure becomes, in Fanon’s view, the organizing logic of colonial society, where political and economic domination depend on denying the humanity of the colonized and turning relation itself into control. One is metaphysical and ethical, while the other is materialist and political. In The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon shows how the colonized subject is reduced to an object through economic exploitation, violence, and racial hierarchy. Butler later extends Levinas’s ideas outward and eventually comes closer to Fanon’s terrain, acknowledging how vulnerability and recognition are shaped by power and history. Yet beneath these convergences remains a deeper divide between ethics imagined as transcendence and justice fought for within the conditions of the world.
Although Levinas and Fanon speak from different worlds of thought, one ethical and metaphysical, the other historical and material, the distance between them is not necessarily contradictory. Levinas shows how responsibility comes before knowledge, but Fanon shows that under colonial domination, that very possibility of responsibility is destroyed. Their frameworks resist synthesis, yet taken together they reveal that ethics without material transformation becomes abstraction, while material transformation without ethical relation can become domination.
Fanon recognized this danger in the postcolonial world, where liberation movements sometimes hardened into new hierarchies, but the concern extends further. A similar pattern appears in modern geopolitics, where a materialist or even sympathetic analysis detached from ethics can end up defending domination rather than opposing it, as seen in attempts to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the Assad regime’s violence in Syria.
In this way, the two form a kind of yin and yang. While each would likely argue that their own framework already accomplishes what the other attempts, viewed from a different angle, they can be understood as complementing each other within specific historical and moral contexts.
While Levinas’s ethics is sometimes read as detached moral philosophy, but its roots were anything but abstract. As Howard Caygill has shown, Levinas’s reflections grew from a socialist humanist impulse. An impulse insisting that responsibility to the Other is an obligation grounded in shared material vulnerability. In his Prison Notebooks, written during his internment in a German labor camp, Levinas described labor, hunger, exposure, and the breakdown of class hierarchies among prisoners. In that sense, Levinas’s politics was born not from theory but from a world where relation was stripped to its barest material form.
Relational politics begins with the awareness that no idea, movement, or system exists apart from the people it claims to serve. It resists abstraction because abstraction too easily becomes hierarchy. A movement that cannot tolerate reflection replaces responsibility with loyalty. The fear of being wrong grows stronger than the desire to understand. In Levinas’s terms, the Other disappears behind the wall of totality; in Fanon’s, hierarchy remakes itself through ideology.
Relational politics, by contrast, moves through critique. Relational politics puts the person before politics while recognizing that politics is part of every interaction. Balancing the personal with the structural might open space for both perspectives to coexist. It also allows for the possibility of self-critique, not only of ourselves and those who shape ideas, but of the movements we are part of. This is the courage Levinas describes, the liberation Fanon calls for, and the discipline that keeps conviction alive rather than letting it crystallize into dogma.
Ethical relation without material change becomes abstraction; material struggle without ethical relation can create hierarchies. As in the yin-yang, neither half is pure, and each depends on the other. The work is to let those who live the struggle define the balance.
This isn’t relegated to any political group or institution. It impacts all and ties back to the previous article, In Defense of Left Self-Critique. In more comfortable societies, a subtler form of non-relation can appear. It hides behind the language of tolerance in phrases like “that’s your truth” or “we’ll just agree to disagree.” This posture seems open-minded but functions as a refusal to listen. It protects the self from critique while performing civility. Relational interaction is avoided, difference is neutralized, and the possibility of transformation is lost.
Relational dialogue asks something harder. It does not dissolve conviction but tests it. It treats disagreement not as a threat but as the space where understanding becomes possible. To listen is to risk being changed, possibly by the Other. The ethical act is not to defend one’s position but to remain present in the encounter and let open the possibility for another’s experience to revise one’s own sense of truth.
Today, that spirit is missing in global analysis. While it is now largely recognized as being absent in mainstream media and government narratives, there are other spaces still unexamined, including our own movements and even our own minds. At some point, we need to ask ourselves what our goal is: to act upon the world or with it, to speak for people or with them, to be right, or to be able to say, I don’t know. That is where relational dialogue, and politics, can begin again.
Image: The Rubin Vase, from Edgar Rubin’s Synsoplevede Figurer: Studier i psykologisk Analyse (1915).