Personambiguity in Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another and the Abyssal Surface of Responsibility

Abstract

Numerous studies across disciplines discuss the complex relationship between human facial features and personal identity in psychosocial dynamics. Most of these researches follow the common definition of the face as the forepart of the head. Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) is a Japanese novel that explores the face’s complexity in great depth and contests this common notion of the face. First, this novel shows that the search for meaning behind the face’s physical properties is lacerated by discords of individuality/abstraction and identity/pretense. These straining pairs (which I call personambiguity) exemplify Lévinas’s point that the face’s meaning outweighs its phenomenality. Second, this novel presents that the constraint and primacy of responsibility transcend the face’s sensible qualities. My reading holds that the face is an abyssal surface, in which the other manifests itself against our appropriative idea of otherness and summons us to irrecusable responsibility.

Keywords

• abe
• ethics
• face
• levinas
• phenomenology