ABSTRACT
Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the face has interesting affiliations with Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of the close-up. However, for Levinas, the face is a mode of transcending ordinary perception in which the Other should be seen as exceeding the subject’s tendency to include everything she meets within “the same”: the subject’s configurations of understanding and recognition. Deleuze’s philosophical analysis conceives of the face in close-up within one plane of immanence. Moreover, while, for Levinas, the face is a human modality, for Deleuze, the face should also be related to what is not human, thus allowing a space of posthuman ethics to emerge. Deleuze recognizes the cinematic screen as a plane where the human face loses its unique status and prestige. He andFélixGuattari’s posthumanist philosophical view challenges the very idea of subjectivity. Following them, film theorists look at the way the human subject can appear on the screen as part of extrahuman assemblages co-evolving with animals, and they find the face even in landscape. By referring to the notion of affect that Levinas, and Deleuze and Guattari associate with the unique appearance of the face, I show how what seem to be two unbridgeable philosophical views can be brought close.
