THE OTHER’S FACE AND ABSOLUTE DETERRITORIALISATION: AN EXPERIMENT IN REINTERPRETING DELEUZE’S CRITIQUE

This article attempts to rethink the critical potential of G. Deleuze’s philosophy through an experimental confrontation with E. Levinas’ ethical concept. The central subject of the study is the concept of ‘absolute deterritorialisation,’ which, for Deleuze and Guattari, is associated with the destruction of stable identifications and movement along lines of flight. The author refers to Deleuze’s concept of the abstract machine of faciality, considering it as an implicit critique of Levinas’s privileged position of the ethics of the Other. The work analyses the fundamental divergence of philosophical strategies rooted in the question of the nature of the first principle: immanence in Deleuze versus absolute transcendence in Levinas. Despite the opposition of approaches, it is possible to identify points of intersection: a common desire for decentralisation of the subject, criticism of language and politics. Particular attention is paid to the status of the face, which for Levinas is the trace of the Other and the source of ethical responsibility, and for Deleuze is the product of an abstract machine of faciality that determines political regimes of signification. The study concludes that genuine absolute deterritorialisation, opened up by transcendence, is possible not as an accelerated slippage of signs, but as a timeless suspension of the regime of signification and the free birth of the ethical subject in the act of responding to the call of the Other. At the same time, no real political regime can serve as a genuine basis for ethics or act as a consequence of ethics as the first philosophy, but a complete departure from the political dimension is also believed to be impossible.