Levinas never settled whether non-human animals possess a face

Evidence

69 Face: Levinas, Existence and Existents, 97–9. Also see his first main discussion of the face, in the 1946–7 lectures ‘Time and the Other’, in Levinas, Time and the Other, and Additional Essays, tr. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 39–94. It was never clear whether Levinas believed the face must be human, despite the dog story. When interviewers quizzed him about this, he sounded cross: ‘I don’t know if the snake has a face. I can’t answer that question.’ Peter Atterton & Matthew Calarco (eds), Animal Philosophy (London & New York: Continuum, 2004), 49, citing ‘The Paradox of Morality: an interview with Emmanuel Levinas’ (by T. Wright, P. Hughes, A. Ainley), in Robert Bernasconi & David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas (London: Routledge, 1988), 168–80, this 171. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1588

Categorization

• QUESTION: The dog story in Lévinas’ Difficult Freedom suggests animal faces elicit ethical response, yet his evasiveness here leaves the boundary genuinely unresolved — worth chasing what scholars have concluded.
• XREF: connects to: Levinas’s face-to-face ethics rejected Heidegger’s collective Being-with — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 627

Broader Connections

• Levinas’s face-to-face ethics rejected Heidegger’s collective Being-with #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 627