Poetry and the Face

The role of poetics in Proper Names by Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

Levinassian perspective, influenced by Jewish tradition and French phenomenology, sees art as an idolatrous practice devoid of ethical value. In Noms Propres, however, poetry is the most proper expression of the face, as a language capable of reaching beyond being. The perspective offered in this work therefore seems to break with the previous criticism of art.