Othering whose face? Levinas and Foucault

The face (visage) is an important concept in the work of early Levinas. He attributes to it a straightforwardness (droiture) and frankness (franchise) as opposed to a dissimulative, duplicitous language of rhetoric which others this face by approaching it from an oblique angle. Levinas is therefore at great pains to save the sincerity of ethical language of this face from the figurality of common language which translates the first one into arbitrary terms. Is there no other possibility but to identify in such a violent manner this face turned to us in its helpless nudity? There probably is, but only if we are ready to put into question our signifying intention, to let this exceeding Face other our identifying face. On the other hand, Foucault, who made himself famous for the injunction "do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same", regards as the final aim of the passion for knowledge to enable one to get free of oneself. We write, he says, to be other than what we are, to allow our thought to function otherwise. Foucault always sought to outmanoeuver the identification of his authorship by immersing himself into an anonymity of dispersive voices. In my paper I shall try to compare these two ethical strategies of defacing oneself for the benefit of a radical otherness.