COME ON, HUMANS, ONE MORE EFFORT!is why subjection to the other defines the subject as ethical: ‘‘the I always has one responsi-
bilitymorethan all the others.’’^6 Responsibility is asymmetrical and irreversible, nonrecip-
rocal and nonegalitarian. It is the most fearsome aspect of ethics, according to Levinas.
Whereas for a Christian the face of the other is the incarnation of his fellow man, for the
Jewish philosopher it is the epiphany of infinity and the presentification of the Law.^7
Whereas for a Christian the act of faith is an addressed declaration that abandons the
other to his freedom, for a Jew it is the reception of the address that declares to him that
he belongs to the chosen people. May my Jewish readers please forgive me, but, insofar
as I am following in Gauchet’s footsteps, I can only see in the invention of Christianity
an advance on the path to the exit from religion, articulated, needless to say, with the
religion from which it issues. It is noteworthy that this invention should be signed with
an act of faith that is altogether similar to the Jewish one—an act of faith that accommo-
dates an election: it is Mary’s acquiescence in Gabriel’s ‘‘Blessed art thou among women.’’
But it is no less noteworthy that this signature instantly entails a brand-new casting of
roles based on sexual difference. God the Son was born from the womb of a woman
fertilized by the divine Word—herein lies the foundation of the religion of incarnation.
But at what price, given that from that day on, women have been condemned to being
the medium and the vehicle of incarnation, receiving their own incarnation only as feed-
back from this Word made flesh through their agency? They are virginsandmothers,
bereft of their own flesh, or else they are fallen women. It is on the place of woman in the
economy of incarnation that the status of images—and hence of art—has depended in
Christianity, at least since the ‘‘economic’’ resolution of the ninth-century quarrel about
iconoclasm.^8 I shall not dwell on this matter here except to say that I am calling for an
incarnate image not born from the breath of a God and the womb of a Virgin, and that I
know some artists—women artists, mostly—who are working to deliver it.
At the starting point of incarnation, we thus find an address to a woman and a
‘‘Jewish’’ act of faith—or a feminine one, since we can ascribe it to receptivity and acqui-
escence. It is immediately followed by a second act of faith, which is little stressed in the
Scriptures but is really the first in which it can be seen that faith is the retroactive gift of
love. This is St. Joseph’s acquiescence in Mary’s pregnancy and the assumption of his role
as ‘‘foster father.’’ I have now and then quipped, as if it all resulted from a syllogism:
Joseph knows he didn’t sleep with Mary. Yet Mary is pregnant. So God exists. The effect
is comical, with Joseph being propelled into the role of a cuckold with his head in the
sand. The joke actually reveals more than conceals the profound beauty of Joseph’s act of
faith and its no less profound truth with respect to the paternal function. In the Gospels,
of course, Joseph is alerted by an angel who appears to him in a dream and tells him that
Mary is pregnant as a result of God’s work. This is a concession to belief in a vein that
often recurs in the Gospels, and is somewhat obvious to the eye of the modern reader.
Like all dreams, according to Freud, Joseph’s fulfilled a wish—the wish to find an un-
alarming answer to the uncertainty of paternity. But this concession to belief can be
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