ABSTRACT
In a recent interview, Emmanuel Levinas suggests that ‘there is a dominance in the look, a technical dominance’ (1991:16). In so far as the organization of visuality in the modern era is subordinated to a project of mastery, as defined by the intentional, knowing subject, vision is inherently destructive of ‘otherness’. As such, it must be replaced by a relation of obligation and responsibility, one that is rooted in the spoken word and touch rather than sight. Levinas’s stance here can be said to typify an increasingly influential position in twentieth-century thought that has argued for a strong correlation between vision and the reifying and domineering aspects of modernity, which is felt to denigrate the bodily, affective, and intersubjective qualities of human life. Many leading feminists have taken this line of inquiry one step further, asserting that ‘the logic of the visual is a male logic’ (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983:207). The hierarchization of the senses in Western culture since the early modern period and the increasing reliance on sight as the foundation of objectivity and certitude has facilitated a detached ‘will to knowledge’—in essence, vision is the most ‘phallic’ of the human senses.
