Mortal Ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas never wrote about cinema. To the uninitiated, this may appear surprising, given that his life spanned the twentieth century, in which film emerged as a major art form, and his work includes tantalising allusions to films and the cinematic medium. Far from surprising, however, the liminal place that cinema occupies in Levinas’s thought is entirely understandable. Although his philosophy features many cultured references to literature and the other arts, and he discusses the work of such writers as Marcel Proust and Michel Leiris in some detail, his early work is dismissive of the aesthetic dimension in ethical terms. More significantly still, his philosophy bears a challenging relation to questions of vision and the phenomenological world of appearance, tending towards the anti-ocular and revealing an iconoclastic approach to images. There is something provocative, then, in wanting to ask what Levinas’s philosophy has to say about cinema, if we understand this realm as the location par excellence of the moving image. Yet this is precisely the guiding question of this Special Issue, which is the first to bring together articles on the work of Levinas and the insights that his philosophy can offer to film studies. The collection features an international selection of contributors, and includes Levinas specialists as well as film scholars. There is no easy bond to be forged between this philosopher and film, and the possibility of making this connection remains open to interrogation throughout some of the articles. But by taking Levinas to the cinema, while tracking the cinematic aspects of his thinking, all of the contributors address this hitherto occluded relation in generative ways, and each creates a critical opening for future research in the field.