ABSTRACT
Critical work in the arts and humanities influenced by those branches of thought known as poststructuralism, have been characterized in recent years by what has been termed a ‘turn to ethics’.2 This post-Second-World-War trend has been brought about by the incorporation into the critical canon of the work of ethical philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, the later work of Jacques Derrida (itself borrowing from Levinas’s theory), and the ethical dimensions of Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist thought, postcolonial studies and queer theory. As the citation from McGinn, which forms the epigraph above, shows,
ethics can be thought of as the encounter that occurs between a reader or viewer and a text or work of visual art, as much as a moral or political code in daily life. What McGinn perhaps underplays is the specificity of the role of visual media in contemporary culture (film seems to be an afterthought in his statement). In a society increasingly saturated with images, the visual, rather than the written word, becomes a privileged locus of exploration of the ethical. Ethical criticism has sought to foreground the dimensions of responsibility, self-reflexivity, desire and engagement with otherness, when considering our intellectual (and emotional) attachments to art and culture. However, ethical criticism differs vastly in its attitude towards these questions. Where a Levinasian reading would foreground the responsibility of the self towards the absolute vulnerability of the other, a postmodern Lacanian ethics, as propounded by Slavoj Žižek, would emphasize instead an ethics of the self, in which the ethical gesture would involve fidelity to the real of one’s desire, even if this resulted in betrayal or destruction of the other. In either – extreme – scenario, what is at stake is the encounter and the act of interrogating the self about its relationship to the other. As Colin Davis has pointed out, in the context of a Levinasian reading of modern French literature, the ethical
turn in criticism needs to take into account the preoccupation with ‘altericide’ (killing the other) visible in postwar cultural production.3 This is true too of the visual arts, and any ethical enquiry into film will need to engage with the destructive and anti-social, as well the creative and social, energies underpinning and represented in filmic production. If we also take on board ethical philosophical models that admit of negativity within their very framework, the project of ethical criticism becomes even more fraught. While the poststructuralist ethical turn has influenced literary theory and
cultural studies most particularly, film studies has been relatively slow on the uptake. At the same time, however, film scholarship has become increasingly preoccupied by ethical questions, even though this concern with ethics has generally remained implicit. This book aims to redress this reluctance to view the moving image in explicitly ethical terms, to stage the encounter that, as the title suggests, has been hinted at in existing criticism, but largely short-circuited, downplayed or foreclosed. Filmmakers have responded in a variety of ways to the challenge of adequately representing identity, difference and the relationship between self and other. Moreover, in tandem with developments in film practice, an ethics of looking is implicitly posited in most strands of theory, from feminist gaze theory, through postcolonial and queer perspectives, to Žižekian accounts of Hollywood cinema. While there is no established body of theory that might be described as ‘ethical gaze theory’, the idea that ethics is an optics through which we habitually view and conceptualize is a persuasive one.