There is already a confrontation with Heidegger (and his epigones) here and a rhetorical tension of language, oxymoronic, in an effort to twist it to say what can not properly be said: the modal "saying" itself, which is "equi-primodial" with Being.

The "vision" refers back to the Kierkegaardian/Heideggerian "Augenblick", the gathering moment of authentic vision, in which one takes possession of oneself as one's futural projective commitment. But the latter conception is precisely a relation to Being, rooted in its "repetition" or retreival, isn't it?

Levinas means to implicate rather the modal relation to the other as "beyond" being, that is, as not derivable from any order of Being, beings, or objectivity. He locates ethics beyond any consideration of physical causality, cognitive objectification, or functional pressures of social structure, and, in that sense, he calls his ethics "metaphysical".

Hence "optics" here would mean "refraction", perspective, as which does not come from the appearences, radiance, reflection of "things". (Imageless, because not derived from the idolatry of Being; consider that when "Genesis" states that man was made in the image of God, the point is that God does not have an image, which would be precisely idolatry.) "Vision" here would mean moral preception/disclosure without derivation or deduction from "principles".

There is "signification with context", i.e. without intrication in Being, because what the relation of the other "gives" is the signification of signification or sense,- ("sens" in French also literally meaning "direction", as well as "sense" and "sense"),- that is, orientation within the burgeoning ambiguity of Being. (There is a structural homology in this conceptual trope to Lacan's notion of the phallus as the "signifier of the signifier", though otherwise the tenor and implications of the "surplus" in signification are quite different.)

Thus there is a placelessness to the relation to the other, for all that it is spoken of as "proximity", a u-topia, which is not a utopia to be "located" at the end of history.

John,
you write that Levinas:

...locates ethics beyond any consideration of physical causality, cognitive objectification, or functional pressures of social structure, and, in that sense, he calls his ethics "metaphysical".

This is the problem I have---it's too dam transcendental and abstract. I view the other from with the taken for granted concepts of ethical everyday life--eg., Muslims as the other in the minimal sense that they dress different, have differnt customs, are Islamic etc; or the maximal sense of the threat posed by a fundamentalist Islam.

I understood phenomenology to be a return to the things themselves--to the concrete existence of everyday life. I struggle with Levinas and his bare world of a naked self and the bare other --too bloody Cartesian for my taste.

I 'm suprised considering the word ethos is "custom," from which we derive "ethics." Levinas is a long way from ethics as ethos or customary ethical life.

Gary:

Actually, "ta ethica" meant "on matters of character", with "ethos" as a kind of "ground" of the agent implying a way of life.

But as to the "transcendental" aspect, remember that Levinas' basic claim is for a "fundamental" ethics as "first philosophy": that is, it is a matter of tracing out the source of ethical normativity, the bindingness of norms, unexpungible and all too easily expunged. The "other" would break through and exceed any ontic system of prescriptive rules. I think Levinas relentless meditation is directed at ethical transformation, an ethics of tranformation perhaps. But "face of the other" is no more abstract than Heideggerian Being: both cases remain elusive because they "name" something unobjectifiable.

Okay, I'm beginning to see that along with overturning Heidegger's association of death with power, Levinas also subverts its link to vision. He sees Being towards death, in Heidegger?s authentic existence, as a supreme lucidity and a supreme virility.

From what I understand Levinas argues that by looking deeply into the nothingness of death, Dasein illuminates its need to master its ownership of Being. When Dasein elucidates the fact that this nothingness represents the uttermost possibility of its impossibility, it achieves the possibility of seizing authentic possibilities.

In contrast, Levinas insists upon the absolute obscurity of mortality. Because it would eradicate the subject who relates to the world through light, death is manifested as completely unknowable, a mystery that inspires terror in the suffering ego.

I reckon I'm with Levinas on this.