On this Side of the Face. Reflecting on the Affective Resonance Between Ethics and Aesthetics

This paper means to interpret Ettinger’s artistic practice and theoretical thinking in the light of Levinas’s category of the face, as a transcendent, asymmetrical and exceeding alterity, unamenable to the categories of the Same. The work of art becomes trace, event-encounter in which the spectator affectively resounds with the artist and becomes a witness of Someone Else’s trauma, responsible for a primeval corporeal vulnerability to be accepted with compassionate hospitality. Aesth-etics is so configured as a trans-subjective relationality, a matrixial network of affective connections in which an original co-belonging is experienced, from which a met(r) amorphic process of reciprocal co-poietic transformation departs, capable of giving events a different development.