When the Face Cannot Be Seen

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In my last few articles, I argued that political understanding begins with relation. This includes our relation to each other, to our own political communities, and to people living through the events we try to interpret. Honest disagreement and critique are part of that work. Without them, any claim to solidarity becomes fragile or even false. If we cannot create this space among ourselves, we will not be able to create it with people in other parts of the world whose realities don’t match our ideological expectations. Trying to force that fit produces distortion, misrecognition, or even the kind of inverted analysis that defends the oppressor. Relation begins when we listen before we apply our frameworks.

When I used the word abstraction in earlier writing, I did not mean complicated theory. I meant the moment when ideas replace living voices or push them aside. Abstraction is what happens when Syrians are described as proxies instead of people whose uprising carried its own meaning. They defined themselves, not “history” and not any teleological script imposed from outside.

Abstraction is what happens when Ukrainians are reduced to instruments of NATO instead of a society fighting for its own survival. It is what happens when Palestinians become political symbols, heroic or threatening, rather than human beings with their own words and history. Abstraction is any situation where a population is turned into a bargaining chip or a geopolitical lesson instead of a group of people with agency.

My last piece that emphasized putting relation before ideology felt like a way back to something human. Articles like The Anti-Imperialism of Idiots, books like Khiyana, and work by individuals such as Bassam Haddad show how easily politics drifts away from the people inside these events. In this atmosphere the answer seems almost obvious. Stay open. Acknowledge people. Stop forcing their experiences into someone else’s narrative. Care about people and do not let politics interrupt that.

This is where Levinas appears and why his work can feel like a way out. His entire ethical framework rests on the idea that responsibility comes before interpretation, including political interpretation. The face of another person interrupts our internal certainty. The encounter pulls us out of the abstract world we use to shield ourselves. In that moment when discourse about conflict dissolves into abstraction, Levinas feels like a correction. He offers the possibility of building political understanding on the recognition of another person rather than on a preselected worldview.

But there’s a catch.

Levinas was a Jewish French soldier taken prisoner by the Germans and held in a POW camp throughout the war. He built an entire ethical system around the demand not to put abstractions before people, but could not apply that insight in political practice. He refused to bring his ethics into political life because he believed they could not survive there. He saw politics as too compromised and too marked by force for ethical relation to remain intact. When he was asked whether Palestinians counted as the ethical Other with regard to Israel, he could not give a simple yes. Instead, he said:

“My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbour… But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character… we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong. There are people who are wrong.”

Maybe it was the way the question was asked, or maybe he redirected it to avoid committing himself. Either way, the question stopped being about Palestinians as people and became a moralized political framing instead.

The authors of The Faceless Palestinian offer context. They point out that Levinas was speaking in his usual philosophical mode rather than giving a political statement. They add that he entered the conversation wanting to discuss responsibility and guilt in general, which led him to lean toward those topics in his answers. This context matters, but the moment still reveals the problem that Judith Butler describes. Not all lives are able to appear as lives. Recognition is shaped by political and social power long before any ethical encounter can take place. Vulnerability is unevenly distributed. The capacity to be seen as a person who can suffer is shaped by the world, not by good intentions.

Frantz Fanon pushes the point further. Under colonial conditions, the colonized are not simply unseen but produced as objects. They occupy what Fanon calls the zone of nonbeing. The ethical relation is blocked at the level of the world itself. For Levinas, the ethical failure occurs when the self reduces the Other to its own categories. For Fanon, the failure happens long before that meeting, because the world has already reduced entire populations to something less than fully human.

Levinas remains compelling because he starts where most political frameworks refuse to start. Ethics before politics. The encounter before the framework. But when Palestinians entered the conversation, the ethics broke. The failure is not an argument against ethics but an example of how power shapes recognition before the ethical moment arrives.

It would be comforting if the lesson were simply to care about people and leave politics aside. Many people try. But none of us approaches these encounters untouched by the powers that formed us. This is what Levinas could not confront and why his answer feels so revealing. According to him, his ethics relied on a purity that political life cannot sustain. In that sense, ethics before politics becomes something a Marxist-Leninist would dismiss as bourgeois moralizing.

Leaving politics at the door is not only impossible but misleading. It gives the illusion of neutrality while reproducing the structures that decide who appears as human in the first place. Still, this is not despair. It does not mean geopolitical talk about capital or hegemony can excuse authoritarian violence. It means seeing why relation takes more than intention. Ethics matters. Relation matters. But they cannot float above the world. They have to pass through it.

If politics shapes who can appear as an Other, then the question is no longer just about ethics. It becomes a question about solidarity itself. What is solidarity? Is it an ethical demand, a political practice, or something that can only exist when both are operating together? And can ethics and politics ever be the same thing, or does the attempt to separate them create the very fractures we see today? Beneath all the noise are those the “camps” that compose campism?

This type of discussion can lose people who want activist or direct political engagement, but it remains essential. It is the background beneath arguments about Syria or Ukraine. The left appears divided because it doesn’t share a foundation on questions like what solidarity is or what imperialism means. For some, it begins with structural analysis, for others with lived experience, and for others with an ethical principle.

So the next step is not to build a new system or to announce a new moral framework. The next step is to take seriously the questions that emerge once we recognize the limits of “ethics before politics” and “politics before ethics.” This is the tension I described in the previous article through Levinas and Fanon, a tension that shows how each approach fills in what the other leaves out.

Other divides might feel more familiar to readers. The divide between Chomskian power analysis and any ethics of relation. The divide between Marxist-Leninist dialectical reasoning and the idea of solidarity grounded in listening rather than geopolitical alignment. These debates often seem to be about Syria or Ukraine, but they are really about which foundation we think politics should rest on. Some begin with structure, some with experience, some with ethical obligation.

Before we can reach those discussions, we have to work through these more basic questions. What does solidarity mean? What does recognition require? What do we owe to people whose struggles will never line up cleanly with our ideological expectations? Everything else flows from these definitions, and without them we keep returning to the same fractures. Before we work through those basic questions we first must allow internal dissent.

It might be frustrating, and it might feel like an internal discussion, “victims in other parts of the world do not care about any of this,” but the debate still needs to happen. If it does not, people will keep talking past each other, as they do in other political disagreements, whether it is Republicans and Democrats arguing in a Facebook comment section or different camps debating Musk’s latest rant on X. The point is that energy gets spent on that instead of on productive discussion, education, concerted messaging, or the work of actually trying to change something.

Image: Johannus van Eerden, Shot of person with blurred face (2023). Pexels.
https://www.pexels.com/photo/shot-of-person-with-blurred-face-15267055/