ABSTRACT: In this essay, I rewatch Matthieu Kassovitz's groundbreaking and explosive film La Haine through a Levinasian perspective. First, I extrapolate Levinas' account of the face as the unique, if ambivalent catalyst for genuine ethics. Then, I turn to the film, first considering the violence of totalization in the context of liberal democratic-republican political institutions, like those in France, as well as the sociopolitics which they erect; next, I turn to Vinz for a more phenomenological account of being totalized, itself a form of violence which would, in Levinas' economy of violence, seem to justify defensive violent counteraction. However, this is complicated by the arresting face, possessed even by the totalizing other, which we see in one of the film's most climactic scenes, where Vinz holds a neo-Nazi skinhead at gunpoint but cannot, with his existence standing before him, bring himself to pull the trigger. I conclude by noting and pondering this entangled tension between the necessity of an economy of violence, and the face-to-face encounter between the other and the same which risks rendering even that justifiable violence as impossible.