Facing the Veil in Education: Todd and the “Veiling” Question

Abstract

So when one expresses concern about seeing, or not seeing, the face of the student or the teacher, when one demands “that the face — not just the eyes — be visible so that one can better ‘read’ it and thereby form ‘proper’ communicative relations,” what is one referring to in the context of Levinas? When reading Levinas, Biblical connotations to “the face” must be kept in mind, as well as references to Franz Rosenzweig’s writings. Very familiar with Rosenzweig’s work, Levinas wrote a “Foreword” for Stephane Moses’s System and Revelation, in which Moses discusses Rosenzweig’s use of “the human face” as “the way the transcendence of the other is revealed to me,” harking back to “the face of God” and “Truth.” Sean Hand recalls that, in Totality and Infinity already, “[t]he term ‘face’...denotes the way in which the presentation of the other to me exceeds all idea of the other in me,” and Michael Smith writes: “The face of the other is the locus of transcendence in that it calls into question the I in its existence as a being for itself.”