The Face of a Naked Lady by Michael Rips is a memoir about discovering and reflecting on the life of the author's late father, who ran a lens grinding firm in Omaha. He realizes that his father, and the meaning of his own life, are defined by how they interact with other people.

Following in the path of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas was committed to uncovering the constituents of consciousness. Believing, as did Husserl and Heidegger, that consciousness was thoroughly embedded in the world, he stripped aside all presumptions, including those concerning the real as well as metaphysical worlds, including the presumption that there was a division between the subjective mind of man and the objective world beyond that mind, to discover--the discovery set forth in Totality and Infinity--that the essence of man's mind was his awareness of the Other.

The Other, according to Levinas, cannot be known by man--a transcendence that provides no guidance or salvation. Levinas users the term "Other" interchangeably with "Infinity" or "God" or "Mystery of God," understanding that no term is adequate given the incomprehensibility of the subject.

Critical to Levinas's philosophy is the idea that man's awareness that he is radically apart from the Other (man is not an extension of the Other, nor is the Other an extension of man) confers existence on man by way of contrast and hence places man in the debt of the Other.

In the face of other people, man becomes aware of the Other and, consequently, the debt owed to the Other. The term "face," as used by Levinas, means both the material face of other people but also the unapproachable Infinity or Mystery that is reflected in the face.

"The face," Levinas observes, "expresses itself in the sensible,...[but] the face tears apart the sensible." Here Levinas repeats a story told by Vassily Grossman on how in Moscow, before a gate where people were allowed to drop off letters for friends and relatives arrested for political crimes, "people formed a line, each reading on the nape of the person in front of him the feelings and hopes of his misery."

Engagement with the Other that is never completely revealed, that is always the subject of contemplation, changes us, Levinas believed--it allows us to develop, freeing us from the illusion of a "true self." To reflect on it was to "explode" consciousness, not save it. In this, Levinas distinguished himself from Heidegger, who held that the forces exterior to man's mind were entrapping and that man could only find freedom by pushing aside those forces, and in doing so, allow an authentic self to emerge.

P. 56-58

There's much to recommend this book. The story of how Michael "translated" Ionesco's Rhinocéros into French for a high school class, and the play was then entered in a Nebraska academic competition is priceless.  ¶ 8:25 AM