Fictions of the Other

Abstract

This study identifies a dissonance within the humanities between an urge to overcome the centrality of the human and an inability to let go of the human, and frames this dissonance as an ethics and politics of creative media. The literature and visual media examined offer us a way to think about the current value of "human value" in how we fiction the figure of the other. Four contexts are given that exemplify this fictional ethics. First is the context of friendship and community in the philosophies of Blanchot, Levinas, Derrida, and Nancy. At the point where a sense of the common cannot be avowed vis-à-vis the absolute strangeness of the other, friendship is thought as a mode of fictioning the other in excess of the mechanisms of language. In the second context of the biopolitical and immaterial economy, I examine how the literature of François Bon and Leslie Kaplan fictions the surplus-word as an ethical figure that mediates a relation to the other at the disjuncture of the materiality of the other's human face and the biopolitical autonomy of the common devoid of the human. The third context deals with the case of migration in Europe and the question of hospitality, through a study of how the documentary films of Sylvain George allow us to see the figure of the other at the borders of surveillance apparatuses other than in terms of the stranger or foreigner. The fourth context addresses the phenomenon of a global digital face culture through a study of Jean-Paul Marcheschi's paintings, Gérard Rondeau's photographs, and various artists' digital facial projections. In the way that they formalize the visual dimension inherent in the rhetorical trope of prosopopeia and give face to the faceless, these works stretch what we mean by an art that humanizes. Through these case studies, I argue that we in the humanities have been too hasty in superseding the value of the human and that the basis of thinking a humanism of the other lies in the altering of how we fiction our perceptions of the other.