The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze PDF
Preview The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze
Hagi Kenaan is Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He works in the areas of continental philosophy, phenomenology, aesthetics and the philosophy of art. He is the author of The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (Columbia University Press, 2005) and co-editor of Philosophy’s Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking (Springer, 2011). ‘Kenaan’s brilliant study reveals what Levinas’ “ethical turn” has to teach us about the ethical potential of the visual. His study offers nothing less than a guide for restoring to us an ethics of vision in our postmodern world. It is an urgent, compelling and, ultimately, hopeful work.’ Martin Berger, Professor and Chair, History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California at Santa Cruz ‘Hagi Kenaan questions the manner in which the Other’s face shows itself to us. Reading Levinas in light of the philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, he analyses with finesse how the face subverts the primacy of consciousness. The face is a reminder of an alterity irreducible to the flow of images that tyrannically occupy our field of vision ... To see a face is not to see a phenomenon, but to hear a call addressing me. It is in this difficult, paradoxical and eminently singular optics that ethics upholds itself. Ethics becomes an optics when the vulnerability of the face is perceived as a call for a conversion of the gaze.’ Catherine Chalier, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris X – Nanterre ‘The Ethics of Visuality is an extraordinary achievement. The author offers a brilliant meditation not only on Levinas’ thought but also through it, engaging and going beyond it, culminating in profound insights … Kenaan here builds on his own thought-provoking work – namely, on the presence of the singular in language and the challenges it raises. Levinas, as is well known, Levinas.indb 1 18/04/2013 19:02 raises similar questions in his conception of alterity and the primacy of the ethical. Kenaan’s achievement in this book is both an elaboration of Levinas’ thought through an exploration of his claim that ‘ethics is an optics’ and a critical evaluation of Levinas’ work through bringing the tension between optics and alterity to the fore. Kenaan is critical of the presuppositions of the visual in Levinas’ (and much of Western philosophical) thought, which is two-dimensional or, in a word, ‘flat’. Harkening back to the dimensionality of culture, he brings to the fore the active dimensions of seeing, what, if we could use Kierkegaard’s reflection from Works of Love, raises the question of seeing what one sees. This active understanding of seeing brings problems of agency to the fore and, consequently, the question of ethics at the heart of seeing. But since seeing transcends the two-dimensional, then the incompleteness and selection at work in acts of visualization raise the penumbral, the erasing, the determining, the distinguishing, the judging, and the many instances of actions beyond models premised upon identification and objectification, of intentional practices of adumbrating notions of ‘there’ and ‘that’. This is groundbreaking stuff, reminiscent of the debate Edith Stein had with Husserl, where she identified an ethical dimension of phenomenological movements of reduction. It is a must-read for anyone seriously interested not only in visuality but also in the very condition of what it means to speak with responsibility about appearance.’ Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy, African American Studies and Judaic Studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and author of Disciplinary Decadence Levinas.indb 2 18/04/2013 19:02 The Ethics of Visuality Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze Hagi Kenaan Translated by Batya Stein The book was translated with the support of the Israel Science Foundation. Published in 2013 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2013 Hagi Kenaan The right of Hagi Kenaan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of Contemporary Philosophy 3 ISBN: 978 1 78076 515 0 (HB) 978 1 78076 516 7 (PB) A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. International, Padstow, Cornwall Levinas.indb 4 18/04/2013 19:02 Beyond the last image and before the first word – facetalk Levinas.indb 5 18/04/2013 19:02 Levinas.indb 6 18/04/2013 19:02 Contents Acknowledgements viii Preface: The Rule of the Frontal ix Ethics is an Optics: Preliminary Remarks 1 Face Face 1 The Gleam of Infinity 23 Face 2 How a Face Looks 29 Face 3 Face and Object 43 Face 4 Why a Face, All of a Sudden? 49 Face 5 Vision, Gaze, Other 53 Face 6 Face and Resistance 69 Face 7 Outside 81 Talk Talk 1 The Face of Language 85 Talk 2 Expression 91 Talk 3 The First Word 95 Talk 4 Saying and Betraying 99 Talk 5 Word, Window, Screen 115 Talk 6 Listening to a Big Bird 125 Talk 7 The Open 131 Notes 137 Index 148 Levinas.indb 7 18/04/2013 19:02 Acknowledgements The Ethics of Visuality is a philosophical response to the gradual disappearance of the human face from the life-world of contemporary culture. The book was originally published in Israel, in Hebrew, within a society and a politics whose overall indifference to the address of the face has become unbearable. The book is dedicated to friends who refuse to live in a faceless world. I thank Batya Stein for her careful translation and Liza Thompson for her unique way of welcoming the book. viii Levinas.indb 8 18/04/2013 19:02 Preface The Rule of the Frontal A: Where are you? B: I’m in a traffic jam on the A4. A cellular answer to a cellular question. This is state-of-the-art technology, and a new generation of phones is already available. Between the poles, however, another event has also taken place, one that the digital media cannot encode: you addressed me. A question was asked, and the question, though no more than yet another horizontal move in the boundless field of digital information, continued to resonate like a voice within a well. This resonance stems from the fact this digital question has a latent, albeit forgotten depth structure. In the current ‘where are you?’ question, an ancient one vibrates; ‘new meat is eaten with old forks,’ as Brecht writes. This ancient question is the one that opens, for example, the dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus when there too, as on the highway, the question does not appear at the centre but indeed on the city’s limit: ‘Phaedrus, whence come you, and whither are you going?’1 What are the coordinates between which you move? Where in between them are you located? What is your place? Originally, though, the question is even older – a divine question, the first question – the one addressed to Adam in the wake of the first sin: ‘And the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, where are you?’ (Genesis 3:9). The ‘where are you’ question calls forth a kind of gaze that was new to humans. To situate himself, Man (Adam) was required to dislodge his gaze from its immersion in things seen ‘there’ and gather it back onto himself and onto the context in which his life unfolds. In order to answer the ‘where’ question, Adam is required ix Levinas.indb 9 18/04/2013 19:02 x The Ethics of Visuality to find a new viewpoint, external to the immediate flow of his experience; a viewpoint that only becomes accessible after having eaten from the tree of knowledge: ‘And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.’ Eating from the tree of knowledge signals a threshold. Crossing this threshold makes them human. By eating from the tree, Adam and Eve sin and are harshly punished even though they have not yet been initiated into the moral domain (the only domain wherein such punishment would be justified). They are punished whilst still lacking the ability to discern between good and evil. This ability will be granted to them only ex post factum and, in this sense, the first sin could not yet be ascribed to a moral subject. Indeed, not committed by a moral agent, the first sin is precisely what turned humans into ethical subjects. The ethical subject was born in sin, and not by chance: the only possibility of establishing the domain of human life as an ethical domain was contingent upon eating from the tree of knowledge, upon doing what retrospectively emerges as evil. Hence, by eating from the tree of knowledge, humans find themselves for the first time between poles in whose regard the question of orientation opens up, the question of how to locate oneself – the ‘where are you?’ question. This radical transformation plays a constitutive role in the creation of the visual realm. Adam and Eve had been part of the visual from the start, but after eating from the tree of knowledge, a revolutionary change takes place: their eyes are opened. This change is indeed related to a reflective dimension that is added to the gaze and that had not been there before. But even before this reflexivity, there is something without which the gaze could not have returned to the one doing the looking. Underlying reflection is a visual vector that is created with the eating of the fruit and now becomes central. The essence of the gaze prior to the sin lies in an outward flow toward what is visually ‘there,’ presenting itself to the gaze, beyond the gazing, and embodied in a hand stretched out to grasp the fruit. By contrast, with the eating of the forbidden fruit, the Levinas.indb 10 18/04/2013 19:02
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