Haunted by the Other
Levinas, Derrida and the Persecutory Phantom
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21720445 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Burke (0000-0003-1486-5972, St. Joseph's College, NY), Michael Joseph Burke (0000-0001-9275-6494, St. Joseph's University New York, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 362-385 |
| Publication date | 2021-10-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Film-Philosophy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1466-4615 • E-ISSN: 1466-4615 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/film.2021.0180 |
| OpenAlex | W3208926965 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 17 |
In this article, I explore what I call the persecutory trope – which underscores the alterity of the phantom and its relentless haunting and spectral oppression of the protagonists – in recent American ghost films, connecting it to the ethical thought of the continental philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Films like The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2004), It Follows (Robert Mitchell, 2014), and Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012) depict terrifying spectral antagonists whose relentless persecution of the protagonists often defies comprehension and narrative closure. I suggest that these films comprise a specific supernatural subgenre due to the particular way in which their specters haunt the victims. The relentlessness of the spectral assailant, and the foreclosure of actions by which the specter is either expelled from or reintegrated into symbolic understanding of its victim, can be construed in terms of the ethical relationship between the other and the self in the work of Levinas and Derrida. Their focus on the moral agent's responsibility to an other, an obligation that the agent does not undertake voluntarily, entails the spectralization of ethical responsibility insofar as it does not rest on solid, evidential grounds. This article shows how the spectralization of the ethical resonates in recent American ghost films through the disruptive effects of the specter's haunting and responsive mourning enacted by protagonists
Aesthetics · Alterity · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Oppression · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology
Critical Excess
Apparitions—Of Derrida's Other
What Is Hauntology?
Ghostly Matters
In place of the Other
The ‘face’ of the il y a
Haunted Subjects
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence
The Shell and the Kernel
Nightmare Japan
Terror of the Ethical
The Architecture of Deconstruction
Learning to Live Finally
Dying Alive
| Highly cited | No |
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