(Conference Paper, PHAVISMINDA Conference, Camiguin, 2005)
Emmanuel Levinas elaborates in his magnum opus, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, the groundwork for an ethics of the human face, “choosing as basis, the ethical basis of society, the self’s responsibility for the other”1. For Levinas, the face, which is a metaphor for the other, refers “to the poor, the stranger, the abandoned, the orphan”[i], or put simply, the suffering man who is left in the margins, hungry, and dying. The face, the marginalized, reminds us of our responsibility. The “I’ only finds its meaning when it answers the call of the other. To be responsible means to proclaim that the “I” in the here and now is an “I” that says, “I am for you”.
