2 - The Image and the Body

Summary

In Levinasian iconoclasm, the image fixes and masks, and is therefore the paradigmatic illustration of what is suspicious and condemnable about vision. The ethical revelation of the face, as Emmanuel Levinas conceives it, is evidently different from the always already mediated experience that an image offers. However, as Lisa Downing suggests, it may also be possible to consider ‘certain cinematic images which foil our desire to interpret, name and understand’ as analogous to a movement ‘from the meaningfulness of intentionality to the ethical of epiphany’. Downing points out the potentialities inherent in a resistance towards interpreting the image according to discourses that are established and familiar. She contends that, through such a resistance, there may emerge the possibility of being ‘affected beyond the level of meaning and intellect’; of being ‘interpellated at the level of ethics without social positions of subjectivity and objectivity being pre-defined for us’. Identifying innovative framings of the body in the works of Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat where ‘the human body is subjected to a radical making-unfamiliar’, Downing demonstrates the aesthetic possibilities where bodies ‘may appear in the realm of the visible qua face, precisely in so far as their appearance confounds the Looking–Knowing relation’, therefore disrupting the violence of the gaze. Opposing ethical epiphany to ‘content’, Downing proposes a Levinasian ‘gaze-as-caress’ where the camera moves away from the ‘acquisitive familiarity of possession’. In this proposition, Downing reworks the ethical investigation of the image by stating that this critique interrogates not so much ‘looking per se’ but rather ‘processes of meaning-making that accompany it’.

Similar to the responses to Levinasian iconoclasm reviewed in the previous chapter, Downing's approach demonstrates reverence for Levinasian concerns yet does not shy away from the aesthetic possibilities that can help us read Levinas against himself. The face resists the gaze; however, it ‘may appear in the realm of the visible’, but only insofar as its appearance undermines the gaze. How is the body significant in engaging with Levinasian anti-ocular concerns and in thinking the image otherwise? Why is the body pivotal in resisting the ‘Looking–Knowing’ relation and in the disruption of meaning-making processes in the image? Is the Levinasian face a body? And how is it possible to think film–ethics encounters in affirmative ways through an understanding of the face as a revelation of alterity that can be traced on the body?