הפוליטיקה של המבט הקולנועי

The Politics of the Cinematic Gaze

“The Gaze” can be thought of as a political apparatus: a policing apparatus, following Bentham and Foucault; an apparatus of responsibility, following Levinas, Delbo, and van Alphen; and an apparatus of subject constitution, as, for example, is clearly visible in Renaissance texts. This politics of “looking,” “gazing,” and “seeing” as it appears in the cinematic medium will be the focus of this seminar. How can one describe the politics of the characters’, the spectators’, and the camera’s gaze? Is it a different political apparatus, does it give rise to a different responsibility? The “gaze” at the screen, usually understood in psychoanalytical terms, will be “looked at” through the “lens” of the juncture between subject-constitution, always as part of a subjection-apparatus, and psychoanalysis, following psychoanalytical theories of cinema together with Butler’s (using Althusser’s) theory. Can responsibility be constituted in the darkened, invisible conditions of the theater house, with no “Big Eye” watching? And are non-public sites of spectatorship also non-political? Are there differences between the politics of responsibility of the documentary gaze, the pornographic gaze, and the gaze as understood by the epistemology of visual culture? Can the cinematic gaze be changed, and with it the politics of the gaze at large?