When the Face of the Other Disappears

 

René Magritte, Réproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced), 1937. 

Introduction

Kerk & Leven (“Church & Life”) is the leading weekly Catholic magazine in the Flemish region of Belgium. Since October 2025, on the invitation of the chief editor of the local edition of the parish of Olen, Cis Marinus, I have been writing a reflective article every two weeks from a philosophical and theological perspective, exploring Christianity in a scientific age.

3 Deccember 2025

When the Face of the Other Disappears

In this darkest period of the year, Advent, when the days grow ever shorter, I cannot help but think back to a bizarre experiment from 1974 by the Serbian artist Marina Abramović. An experiment that unexpectedly revealed such a “dark” side of humanity that people seem to prefer to forget it altogether. It never fails to amaze me how little attention has been given to it over the past 50 years.

Marina Abramović is a performance artist, meaning that the artwork consists of live actions by the artist, usually in the presence of an audience. In 1974, she was still very young, 22 years old, when she performed the work Rhythm 0. She herself could not have foreseen what this experiment would lead to. She placed herself in an art gallery and announced beforehand that she would remain standing completely still for six hours. On a table next to her lay 72 objects that the audience could use as they saw fit. These objects ranged from harmless (such as flowers, a feather, honey, a shoe, a glass of water) to dangerous (such as a knife, a razor blade, scissors, even a loaded pistol with one bullet). Next to her, she placed a sign that read: “I am the object. During this time I take full responsibility. Everything is allowed.”

At first, the visitors were cautious and even kind. They gave her flowers, kissed her on the cheek, or gently touched her hair. But that did not last. Over time, the audience spontaneously became more aggressive and violent. Someone took the razor blade and cut into her neck, causing it to bleed, and drank the blood from her neck. Someone else took scissors and began cutting her clothes, leaving her half-naked. Someone pressed the thorns of a rose into her (now bare) abdomen. Someone held the loaded pistol to her head. This could have ended fatally, but another person intervened and took the gun away, leading to arguments and fighting.

With the knives, razor blades, and scissors, she received more and more scratches and cuts, and was even stabbed several times: she was bleeding from all sides. She was deeply humiliated, both physically and emotionally. Her breasts and buttocks were groped, she was carried around like a lifeless doll and even placed on a table. It stopped just short of rape, perhaps because the men’s partners were present and their presence somehow acted as a restrainment.

The strangest part of all was the conclusion. When the six hours had passed and Marina Abramović suddenly began to move again, the audience fled the room in panic. They could no longer see her as an “object.” Suddenly it dawned on them that she was not a lifeless object but a human being, and they could not bear the confrontation with themselves. The realization of the horrific acts they had just committed on what now appeared to be a human being was unbearable.

The most disturbing aspect was not the horrific acts of torture and humiliation themselves, but the fact that it happened so spontaneously and escalated so quickly. The audience was not incited, there was no reward, no incentive, no coercion, no situation of “Befehl ist Befehl” (orders are orders), with which Nazi criminals tried to justify themselves after World War II. It happened almost automatically, as if there is a hidden “demon program” within each of us that can be downloaded and activated with the right combination of keystrokes.

What happens when a person completely surrenders herself and gives another person total power? Marina Abramović showed how quickly people dehumanize someone when they believe there are no rules or consequences. She literally became an “object,” and the audience lost its moral compass. The performance Rhythm 0 shows that freedom without moral boundaries can spontaneously lead to moral decay. It raises the urgent question: is freedom still freedom if it entails no responsibility?

Is there only darkness, then? Just as the dark days of Advent remain bearable because they contain within them the seed of hope, the expectation of the light of Christmas, so too this horrific story of Marina Abramović contains the seed of a “counterweight,” a counter-narrative. The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was himself a prisoner of war of the Nazis during the Holocaust. There he discovered that avoiding the gaze of another human being is the beginning of all violence. When the face of the Other disappears, we lose our humanity. In this, Levinas found the key: it is the face of the Other that makes me human. Levinas deliberately writes “Other” with a capital letter to emphasize the irreducible otherness of the other person and the ethical responsibility that follows from it. By “the face,” Levinas does not mean merely a physical face with eyes and a mouth, but the presence of another human being. It represents the fact that the other has her own life, vulnerability, and dignity. According to Levinas, the face of the other speaks—even without words. It says, as it were: “I am vulnerable. I can suffer. You can hurt me, and therefore I appeal to you.”

This is the ethical appeal: the other reminds us that we are responsible, that we must ensure we do no harm to them. The link with Marina Abramović’s experiment lies in the moment she began to move again and the audience fled the room in panic. It is the face of the other that makes us human. We become human because we are addressed by the other. Even before we think, judge, or choose, there is that appeal: the other needs you. The face of the other breaks open our ego-centeredness and shows us that we are connected to others, that we must take into account their vulnerability and their value.

This perspective can also be recognized in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. In the Gospel stories, Jesus appears as someone who calls people to a radical responsibility. He addresses human beings to love, to forgive, to serve, to be the least. Jesus is par excellence the one whose presence breaks open the ego. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25). This means that Jesus is not only “the Other” himself, but also hides within every vulnerable other. A perspective that closely aligns with Levinas’s idea that the Other carries a sacred, inviolable value.

For Levinas, God reveals Himself only in the face of the Other. God cannot be grasped: He is the Unfathomable who has passed by and has left me with the Other. Only when I respond to the appeal of the Other can I “see” God in that Other’s face. God does not stand “above” humanity, but can only be found in the face of the defenseless Other.

 

 

Originally published as: van Biezen, A. (2025). Wanneer het gelaat van de Ander verdwijnt. In Kerk & Leven, edition 0485, 3 December 2025, p. 4.