ABSTRACT
In recent discussions of the ethical dimensions of film, the name Emmanuel Levinas has cropped up more frequently than that of any other philosopher. Yet on the surface Levinas’s writings may not seem the most promising starting point for research in this field. References to cinema are extremely rare in his work and serve a purely illustrative function. Moreover, while he does not explicitly criticize film, his philosophy manifests an abiding suspicion of the aesthetic and the visual, which he associates with forms of domination and violence. In the preface to Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Levinas describes ethics as an ‘optics’, a formulation which appears conducive to reflection on a medium which has historically appealed first and foremost to our sense of sight. But he immediately qualifies this description by dissociating the ethical relation
from the field of the visible: ‘it is a “vision” without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or intentionality of a wholly different type – which this work seeks to describe’.1
