'Attuned to what Kristin Hole describes as Denis's cinema of "affective reorientation" and "shared vulnerability and responsibility", Towards a Feminist Cinematic Ethics offers fascinating reflections on connections between Denis, Nancy and Levinas, while drawing productively on contemporary feminist philosophies of ethics, co-existence and the body. An insightful, imaginative and lucid study.' Laura McMahon, University of Cambridge What role can cinema play in cultivating an ethical sensibility that would continue to have implications beyond the cinema doors? How do we theorise a cinematic ethics that is not centred on narrative morality, or on traditional notions of virtue and subjectivity? Towards a Feminist Cinematic Ethics examines how three important thinkers - Claire Denis, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy - can direct us towards a non-normative ethics of the encounter. Read together, they generate fresh interventions into the well-worn tension within feminist theorising and practice, between the political utility of identity categories and their inadequacy. This book makes methodological headway into examining the role that cinema itself plays in communicating ideas that resonate with and challenge philosophical concepts at their limits. Kristin Hole is assistant professor at the Portland State University School of Theatre and Film. Cover design: [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com ISBN 978-1-4744-0327-6 Barcode
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Encounters, Intrusions: Denis, Levinas, Nancy
Chapter 2 Film Interrupted: Denis, Nancy, and an Ethics of Sense
Chapter 3 Otherwise than Hollywood: Denis, Levinas, and An Aesthetic of Alterity
Chapter 4 Troubling the Body: Trouble Every Day, Dance, and the Non-Mythic Body
Coda
Bibliography
Kristin Hole is a Lecturer in the School of Theater and Film at Portland State University.