Lévinas’s débâcle: Looking for the face(s) of the human in the twenty-first century

Abstract

We are living in an age when ‘everything is coming apart at the seams’, as the poet and painter Erna Rosenstein put it. Given this, I analyse the concept of the débâcle formulated and used by the French phenomenologist François-David Sebbah to explore the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. The débâcle connotes catastrophe, fracture, failure, collapse and disintegration, but its semantic range also encompasses the breaking up of ice, escape and ruin. As Sebbah dissects this concept in the context of the philosophy of Lévinas, it comes to tie in with ‘the anonymous rustling of the there is (il y a)’, the abyss of being. Besides discussing the débâcle in the context of Lévinas’s philosophy, I will explore how this concept is relevant to the description of the present, in particular to artistic practices interpretable as revealing the unsteady rhythm of phenomena from which a fragile and unstable structure of meaning emerges. I will also ponder whether thus-conceived the débâcle is perhaps a paradigmatic figure of the present day.