Gothic and the Question of Ethics: Otherness, Alterity, Violence

Abstract

This chapter explores the affinities between the Gothic mode and Emmanuel Levinas's account of alterity, absolute otherness, responsibility and the ethics of the face-to-face encounter. Commencing with a theoretical discussion of Levinas's conceptualisation of the face of the Other, it proceeds to show how, in numerous Gothic fictions and films, the face serves as the site of absolute otherness. But if this implies a simple convergence between the Gothic and the ethics of Levinas's revisionist phenomenology, the chapter goes on to highlight how, in Gothic, the ethical encounter is seldom if ever unaccompanied by horror, terror, and unspeakable acts of violence that Levinas does not emphasize. It turns out, the argument concludes, that the Gothic already seems to have thought through the same problems, paradoxes and difficulties of Levinas's ethical encounter as those are theorised in Jacques Derrida's later work on the ethics of hospitality.