面容與感性是列維納斯親近詩學的兩個關鍵概念。它們一方面顯示了法國現象學所發生的知覺轉向或者感性轉向，另一方面表達了列維納斯善良發生學的詩意化追問。善良如何可能？這個問題始終主導著列維納斯的倫理形而上學，形成了他那不像倫理學又像倫理學的親近詩學。可以說，列維納斯的親近詩學是將善良的發生置於感性之中，因而使他提出的面容現象學帶著其獨有的美學意味。他的親近詩學力求從無概念的無限經驗出發，從他者的面容和外在性出發，從言說和親近出發，最終超越胡塞爾的認知主義和海德格爾的存在論視域。在列維納斯的親近詩學中，他者的面容不是看到的而是聽到的。我與他者的言說關係並非一種相即性的認知關係，而是一種主體無條件地服從他者的倫理關係。從「知識論是第一哲學」走向「倫理學是第一哲學」，從認知化的正向意向性轉向親近化的反向意向性，從物件到面容，從表像到傾聽，從理解到感受，這就是列維納斯親近詩學展示出來的現象學轉向。

Visage and Sensuousness are the two concepts key to Lévinas’s poetics of intimacy. On the one hand, they show the perceptual or sensuous re-orientation of French phenomenology; on the other, they express the poetic questioning by Lévinas’s genesis of kindness. How kindness is possible is a question always dominant in Lévinas’s ethical metaphysics, forming his poetics of intimacy, which is ethical yet not so ethical. It is fair to say that the uniquely aesthetic implication of Lévinas’s phenomenology of visage is brought out by the attribution of the genesis of kindness to sensuousness in his poetics of intimacy. His poetics of intimacy is meant to set out from the infinite experience, from the visage and externality of the other and from discourse and intimacy, eventually transcending Husserl’s cognitivism and Heidegger’s existentialism. In Lévinas’s poetics of intimacy, the visage of the other is not seen but heard. The dialogical relation between me and the other is not a cognitive relation of Adäquation but an ethical relationship of the subject obeying the other unconditionally. The transition from “epistemology as the first philosophy” to “ethics as the first philosophy”, from the intentionality of cognition to the intentionality of intimacy, from things to visages, from seeing to listening, from understanding to feeling, is exactly the phenomenological re-orientation expressed in Lévinas’s poetics of intimacy.