ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin as it pertains to the insectile or, in other words, to an entomological imagination. The insectile is structured according to apparent opposites, form and formlessness, and refers to particular manifestations of subjects. On the one hand, the insectile is instrumentalised as racialised technology centred on the face, rendering a fixity of form, and, on the other, it is coded as that which undoes precisely this logic of form. In a first instance, the chapter is paying attention to the faciality of the unnamed, alien woman (Scarlett Johansson), constructed as insectile; the second part lends an ear to the film’s sonic environment, the buzz of its extra-diegetic score. The essay, further seeking to respond to Sheryl Vint’s claim that the film cannot offer an ethics of difference, suggests a position from which an ‘improper’ ethics of difference might begin to be thought.
