What is the connection between aesthetics and Levinas’ ethical phenomenology? Are they related? Separate? For Levinas, the ethical imperative precedes cognition, and the primary task of philosophy is explaining the difficulty regarding the non-violent relationship to the Other. The face of the human Other – the living second person capable
of suffering – signifies alterity for Levinas. Only the face can look back at us and thereby announce its status as something more than an object for our use. Ethical life begins not by analyzing the world with abstract moral concepts, but by listening carefully to the muffled but rich sources of meaning embedded just under the surface of instrumental life. For Levinas we do not directly experience the Other but rather only its vestige.

Where then is aesthetics situated? Where is art in all of this?

Mathew Sharpe in a paper entitled Aesthet(h)ics: On Levinas’ Shadow in Colloguy offers us an account. He says that there is as little place for art in Levinas’ ethical politeia as there was in Socrates’ for the pantomimic artist. What we are confronted with in art, for Levinas as for Plato, is nothing less than a false or ersatz transcendence, a dangerous simulacrum--or the danger of simulacra per se---that would “double” and so contest the “true transcendence.

Sharpe, quotes from 'Reality and its Shadow' to show that art for Levinas:

brings into the world the obscurity of fate, but it especially brings the irresponsibility that charms as lightness and as grace. It frees. To make or appreciate a novel and a picture is to no longer have to conceive, is to renounce the effort of science, philosophy, and action. Do not speak, do not reflect, admire in silence and in peace such are the counsels of wisdom satisfied before the beautiful. Magic recognised everywhere as the devil’s, enjoys as incomprehensible tolerance in poetry. There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague.