The human face we encounter first of all as the other's face strikes us as a highly ambiguous phenomenon. It arises here and now without finding its place within the world. Being neither something real inside, nor something ideal outside the world, the face announces the corporeal absence (leibhaftige Abwesenheit) of the other. In Merleau- Ponty's terms we may call it the corporeal emblem of the other's otherness. But we do not thereby resolve the enigma of the other's face. This enigma may be approached in different ways. In contrast to the later Merleau-Ponty, who tries to deepen our experience more and more, looking for the invisible within the visible, the untouchable within the touchable, Levinas prefers a kind of thinking and writing which may be called eruptive. Many sentences, especially in his last writings, look like blocks of lava spat out by a hidden vulcan. Words like 'evasion', 'rupture', 'interruption' or 'invasion' indicate a thinking which is obsessed by the provocative otherness of the other. They suggest a special sort of immediacy. In contrast to Hegel's immediacy, which is only the beginning of a long process of mediation, Levinas's immediacy breaks through all kinds of mediations, be it laws, rules, codes, rituals, social roles or any other kind of order. The otherness or strangeness of the other manifests itself as the extraordinary par excellence: not as something given or intended, but as a certain disquietude, as a dérangement which puts us out of our common tracks. The human face is just the foyer of such bewilderments, lurking at the borderlines which separate the normal from the anomalous. The bewildering effects lose their stimulating force if the face is taken either as something too real or as something too sublime.