The Non-Anthropocentric Other in Film: Towards a Spectral Ethics of Film

Abstract

This article aims to add a further perspective to the discussion of the relationship between film and ethics. This perspective is important in today’s context, as the omnipresence of digital and mobile audiovisual images in everyday life increasingly determines our thinking and behaviour. However, there is a lack of appropriate critical reflection and ethical understanding of these images and their ontology. This article proposes a machine ethics of film from a film-philosophical perspective. Such an ethics draws on critical posthumanism, namely on Karen Barad’s “ethics of mattering”, which explicitly relates to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the Other and their death. Thereby, special attention is given to the ontological nexus of film and death, as well as to the idea of film’s spectrality (drawing on, e.g., Derrida, Barthes, and Leutrat), a context that is discussed along with Barad’s diffractive view on quantum entanglement. Following from the author’s earlier approaches to Barad’s agential realism in the context of film-philosophy and certain Heidegger-based arguments set out in earlier writings about film and death, this article introduces the figure of what is called the “machinic spectre of film”. From here, the outline of a possible spectral ethics of film is considered by giving reasons for the exploration of further questions.

1. Sequence One: Introduction

The endeavour to develop a speculative and spectral ethics of film goes back to an understanding of film as part of an entangled world in which the interdependence of human and nonhuman agents takes centre stage. Their entanglement is present in film in a spectral way, as it is a technology-based and mechanical medium. The contemporary existence of a multitude of machine-produced audiovisual files circulating among digital data clouds raises the question of their spectral agency and responsibility. This can be analysed from an expanded Levinasian prospect, as this article argues from a film-philosophical perspective. The proposition of a speculative machine ethics of film matters to our contemporary media society, in general, as much as it does to filmmakers, spectators, philosophers, and media scholars, due to the persisting and increasing omnipresence of digital and mobile audiovisual content in our daily life. The ethics concerns the way we engage with film characters and with other digital spectres.

The theoretical background here mainly concerns critical posthumanism, namely Karen Barad’s “ethics of mattering” [1] (p. 3), which she explicitly relates to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the Other and their death. For Levinas, the Other is human centred, yet Barad critically questions “the humanist foundations that have been an integral part of Levinas’ philosophy” [2] (p. 268). It is my endeavour to transport this perspective into the context of film-philosophy. Although film-philosophy stretches back to the very beginning of cinema and early film theorists, the field has its main precursors in the philosophers Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. Film-philosophy has been, since the twenty-first century, a heterogeneous, growing strand of thought that argues for a form of philosophizing in, with, and through film. Film-philosophy expands the very methodology of philosophy: “film is not only capable of presenting extended thought experiments or illustrating philosophical concepts, but is philosophy itself” [3] (p. 3). This means that film-philosophy explicitly attributes to film the ability to produce epistemic knowledge of philosophical significance.

The term “film” will be used here in the sense of an all-encompassing concept of the various existing forms of audiovisual media, whether digital, synthetic or analogue, such as cinema, television, video, experimental film, social media, etc., and differs from the designation of a single film or movie. As I understand it, cinema is the first manifestation of film, at least chronologically speaking, and has expanded into contemporary post-cinematic forms.

To support the reader’s engagement with this article, I will give an overview of this article’s main arguments. The line of reasoning starts with considering film’s inherent nexus with two divergent meanings of death: firstly, death as the endpoint of life; secondly, death as the infinite state of non-life, and this significance of death is carried throughout this article. Death as the cessation of life means, for film, a narrative principle, and this is analysed by exploring the neologism “being-in-film” [4] (p. 75). Death as the state of non-life manifests in film through the ontological presence of something that is physically absent, and is based on the infinite mechanical reproducibility of film. This presence of absence characterises film’s spectrality and manifests on different levels; following authors like Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida, film conveys both a spectral site and sight, is populated by spectral entities, and is itself a spectre—and these features can be summarized as falling under the figure of film’s machinic spectre. As a figure in a critical posthumanist sense, the spectre is understood as a relational, constituting principle. Its spectrality increases in the age of the digital and synthetic mobile image, and becomes an existential part of human being. These images float around freely in data clouds as they unfold their spectrality, and invite us to enquire into firstly their agency and secondly their responsibility.

The agency of the film spectre is introduced as “the thinking performance of a technical apparatus” [5] (p. 159), an idea developed from the writings of Jean Epstein in dialogue with Barad’s posthumanist approach. Her proposal of an “ethico-onto-epistemology” [1] involves an ethical stance. She follows Levinas’ ethics of alterity, in which the ethical relation of responsibility with the Other is always present. Film-philosophy has, in recent studies, refocused on Levinas. The Levinasian fear of the death of the Other imposes a relation of responsibility that is present in the diegesis of many cinema films, much like an intrinsic connection between death and ethics. Moreover, I relate the concept of the Other to the proposed figure of the machinic spectre of film. This concept applies to the idea that every movie film character is, from a philosophical perspective, both a dramatis persona and a conceptual persona—the latter of which can be a tool to grasp the inherent philosophical concepts of a movie in a self-referential way [4] (p. 7). Therefore, those machinic spectres that are film characters stand for film’s spectral self-referentiality, such as the main figure of Murnau’s Nosferatu or Jacques Derrida in Ghost Dance.

The enquiry into spectral responsibility begins, then, with Barad’s extension of the Levinasian concept of responsibility to the “other than human” [1] (p. 393). In a Baradian perspective, the film spectre can be regarded as a reconfiguring principle, a state where matter and mind intra-actively condition each other. The puppet master in the animation film Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995) is, in that sense, a further spectral conceptual persona to be named. Barad’s quantum ontology argues that spectrality is the very condition for entities to come into existence or not [2] (p. 252). In a Levinasian sense, the spectral dimension (as defined in this article) lies in the very Other, and means the extreme vulnerability of being. Film records this spectrality and thus creates the film spectre. Following this, the question I propose for future analysis is as follows: If the Other is extended to the other than human, how, then, can the Levinasian term of responsibility be detached from an anthropocentric perspective? How can the other than human, the film spectre that is circulating in digital data clouds, be designated as responsible?

Dividing this article into sections called “sequences” alludes to the possibilities of creating entanglements between theory and practice in film-philosophy. I consider such a structure to be fruitful, as it recalls the meaning of film sequences, but does not understand them as self-contained narrative units as in classic cinema. Rather, the sequences here follow a specific conceptual order that leads to a certain open dramaturgy: the framing of a question to be further explored.

2. Sequence Two: The Spectral Dance of Film and Death

Let me begin by describing two of film’s conceptual nexuses with death, which build upon two entangled, although opposing, meanings of death: firstly, death as the cessation or endpoint of life; secondly, death as the infinite state of non-life that is spectral in nature.

In discussing film’s first nexus with death, namely, the meaning of death as the act of the cessation of life, I go back to my book Being and Film [4], which outlines a Heideggerian and object-oriented approach to film-philosophy. Death as the cessation of life is here understood from an anthropocentric point of view as a concept of closure, as an event that leads to the completeness of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. In the context of film, the idea of closure means a narrative principle. For example, filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini argues for comparing death to film montage:

I compare death to film-montage. Once life is finished, it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. … For me, death is the maximum of epicness and myth.

[6] (pp. 55–56)

According to Pasolini, death attributes a sense to life and is, therefore, comparable to a film montage. I propose reading Pasolini in the following way: through its deathly ending, life is no longer opened and therefore forms a whole. This wholeness creates a sense and even an epicness, like in a narration shaped by a film montage. Each film shot comes to an end through a cut on the editing table. And because the shot ends, it becomes a whole unity closed upon itself. It can be read and interpreted; it creates a narrative sense just as a story suddenly makes sense when it is complete. An important reference here is Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle defined a story through its completeness, which is threefold: “A story that is complete must have a beginning, middle, and ending“ [7] (p. 51). In this context, death can be compared to the end of a story, because it “has nothing that comes after it” [7] (p. 51). Life is that which comes before death and after birth; it is the middle, since “a middle follows from some other event and also has things that occur after it“ [7] (p. 51). In a Heideggerian sense, life only forms a complete whole through death: “Dasein reaches its wholeness in death” [8] (p. 281). By saying so, Heidegger points out that this being-a-whole can never be ontically experienced by Dasein. He thus describes death as something always still outstanding in our existence and sets it as the ending: “death must be conceived as the ending of Dasein” [8] (p. 289). Here, the completeness of being takes on the sense of a closure that insinuates a narrative conclusion.

Following the same line of thought, I argue that each film implies its own act of death, simply when it ends, and thereby receives its full meaning and its temporality. In this sense, filmhood, through the act of death/the cut in the editing process, can be emphasised as a closed and finite temporal system, while worldhood, in contrast, appears as infinite and opened. Both rely on different modes of temporality. Temporality, narration, and sense thus seem to be entangled.

In the context of this kind of consideration, I developed the “hypothesis of film-as-death” [4] (p. 75), which reassesses Heidegger’s interrelated concepts of being, time, and death. I introduced a reflection on what happens to being in regard to film as an experience for Dasein, arguing for the neologism “being-in-film” [4] (p. 75). In this Heideggerian sense, being-in-film offers a way to experience a being in death. This is because being is involved twice here, as Dasein doubles through film: firstly, it becomes being-in-film; secondly, it simultaneously persists as spectator-being. Therefore, by being-in-film, Dasein comes to an end and experiences the event of death and closure. Yet, it continues afterwards.

The concept of death, as I have introduced it thus far, means the end of life and leads to an anthropocentric temporal point of view determined by time-limited units; through death, the time of Dasein’s being ends. However, it is possible to view this cessation of life from the perspective of its temporal opposite, namely infinity, and to develop a different insight into the same concept. Death is then no longer to be regarded as an act that ends with life, but as the permanent and infinite state of non-life. Being-in-film hereby acquires the meaning of persisting non-life, a state that lies beyond the human perception of time and is emphasised through the presence of something that is absent, a thought that Cavell famously introduced in The World Viewed [9] (pp. xv–xvi), and that corresponds to the Heideggerian philosophy of presence and absence [2] (p. 81). From a temporal viewpoint, infinity coins the second meaning of death regarding film, which I consider much more fruitful for the current analysis. The previously analysed concept of death as closure seems an imprecise term, since death designates the passage from life to non-life, rather than an actual endpoint. Yet, when someone dies, he or she transits to the realm of death. Therefore, I propose regarding the act of film recording itself as such a transition to non-life.

This non-life as an infinite state is given in film by the endless mechanical reproducibility of what is recorded. As Walter Benjamin famously noted in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [10], film is designed to be reproducible [10] (p. 24); it relies ontologically on its mechanical reproducibility. There is no original and, therefore, there is the infinite possibility of endless copies, distribution, and reproduction. From this perspective, and in contrast to what I have said before, filmhood is also an infinite system. Its temporal dimension relies on its techno-ontological condition. In other words, past times can be brought back in film—again and again—and therefore it is no longer clear what life and death are here. “A spectre is neither living nor dead”, said Jacques Derrida, who then immediately emphasised the “thoroughly spectral structure of the cinematic image” [11] (p. 26). What exactly does film reproduce? From a philosophical point of view, the answers provided by film theory are unsatisfactory, but spectrality could be an ontological feature that parallels the aforementioned presence of absence.

Derrida refers, in this context, to the “different temporalities of spectres”, meaning the different layers of spectrality in film. He argues that—beyond narrative phantasmagorical film characters like ghosts or vampires [11] (p. 26)—the “cinema… inscribes traces of ghosts on a general framework, the projected film, which is itself a ghost” [11] (p. 27). What does that mean? From the spectator’s point of view, and like in Plato’s cave, Dasein doubles and glides into an immaterial, spectral world. Film conveys a spectral site and sight, in eidetic and kinetic form, evoking the infinitely returning dead, mechanical spectral entities, which the spectator meets by being-in-film, which means being in a spectral world.

Since the second nexus of film and death stresses film’s spectrality, which is machinic and “not possible before the movie camera” [11] (p. 27), I will shortly refer to the origin of the cinematographic image in the analogue photographic image. Already, a single photograph unfolds a spectral core of its own. It grasps and holds that which does not unfold in time: the now, a point of passage from the future to the past. In a photograph, the continuous presence of the moment of the now is visually disclosed through its detachment from anthropocentric time. The now has been frozen by a technical apparatus and called into a presence that lies beyond time, the present as reproduction. A photograph holds a moment in its eternal resurrection; it depicts an infinite and, thus, spectral state.

This idea was coined and carried to completion by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. Barthes assumes the photographed moment to be the depicted objects’ anticipation of the instant of death [12] (p. 14). The film negative is assembled from 24 static photographic pictures per second—applying Barthes’ theory, that would be 24 instances of death. The immediate succession of the next frame creates an apparent, false continuity, and this constitutes an imitation of life. The disclosure of death in film, from this perspective, is obscured by a false motion; nonetheless, it is there. From this viewpoint, the spectator would then experience death indirectly. Yet, according to Barthes, the photographed object (or person) is the referent, but by emanating a kind of spectre, the person acquires the nature of a simulacrum. For Barthes, the expression “spectrum of the photograph” adds the return of the dead to photography [12] (p. 9).

A spectre is a ghost, per definition an “apparition of a dead person that is believed to appear or to become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image” [13]. The return of the dead in photography, when applied to film, thus forms a serial and moving phantasmagoria; the spectator does not question the origin of the movement, s/he believes in the phenomena in front of their eyes. Therefore, and similarly to Derrida, Jean-Louis Leutrat describes this achievement as the revival of that which has already died.

Return is a great cinematic theme, the eternal return. Bring back to life, give a second chance to live, to reinfuse usable, dead material with life, and to set in motion the living-dead, the zombies, the mummies.

[14] (p. 41)1

3. Sequence Three: The Film Spectre Is Still Growing

As I have shown, the idea of film’s spectrality is quite old and goes back to film’s origin in analogue photography. Yet, how do the features of spectrality manifest in the digital realm? As is well known, Vilém Flusser coined the term “technical image” [15], which encompasses photographic pictures and digital images equally. He emphasised a fundamental shift from observation to the computation and conceptualization of images; thus, in the future, the technical image will change human thinking through its omnipresence. In addition, certain dualist opponents should no longer be thought of as contradicting. Flusser claimed that “the whole problem of truth and falsehood, of fiction and reality, must now be reformulated in the light of the mass media” [16] (p. 103).

This is especially true if we regard the recent turn of what Flusser called “the mass media” [16] (p. 103) towards digital mobile images, and the actual rise in synthetic and AI-generated images. With these, photography has changed its nature. By this I do not mean the digital possibilities of the manipulation or the faking of the photographic moment, which have been discussed intensely during the last two decades and have blurred the frontiers of photography and painting, or the obsolete distinction between true and false, reality and fiction [15] (p. 38), as mentioned by Flusser. Instead, I argue for a new aspect of the spectrality of the digital, and even the synthetic, photographic image. I quote the artist Victoria Fu, to emphasise her observation that the “spirit” has left its machinic producer and has become tied to human existence in a different and omnipresent way:

I’m not sure what photography is. It’s everything and everywhere, like a spirit that’s left its body. Photography is not tied to the camera—or any apparatus—anymore… We and the world around us are reconstituted in parallel image universes.

[17] (p. 77)

Let me apply Fu’s observation to film. Fu has described the mobile digital world as a spirit that has left its body; by this she has identified an important contemporary feature of the machinic spectre that concerns its reproducibility and liberates it from human agency; it is not only an eternal return, but a self-determined one based on machinic agency. Moreover, it is no longer the human being alone who provides the impetus for the creation of an image. Synthetically self-generated images and depictions circulate, and they all move around, triggered by machinic agency.

Again, and in the evolving digital realm as well, what is true for the photographic image is true for the moving film image. Joanna Zylinska, from whom I took Victoria Fu’s challenging quote, even argues that in the contemporary context the historical distinction between the moving image and the still image has become obsolete, when she characterizes “photography as an (always) moving image” [18] (p. 119). She explains that the use of everyday media not only mixes videos and photographs in “a more diverse array of image forms and formats”, but they are constantly “available to us as part of mobile image flows and data clouds” [18] (p. 119)2. Photographs are, from this perspective, not only mobile but moving images; they move around the world(s) like freed spectres in a parallel universe—yet, so do film images, whose movements then evoke a double spectral performance. These two novel meanings attributed to the digital/synthetic image, one of an unbound spectrality and one of literally (self-)moving image flows and agency, deserve further analysis: they trigger queries about the kind of agency they unfold, and, from a critical posthumanist perspective, such agency may imply ethical considerations. In any case, the kind of spectrality they exhibit builds on film’s previous invocation of non-life.

Therefore, I will briefly reiterate the various aspects of the spectrality of film that have been discussed so far. By spectrality, I mean the quality of being spectral or ghostly, or a past that echoes in the living present and that questions the very nature of the same. There is Barthian spectrality, which is given by “the spectrum of the photograph” [12] (p. 9). It is set in motion by film, which consists of moving photographic stills. This motion goes hand in hand with the idea of the return of the dead through film, and points to Derrida’s intrinsic spectrality of film. Thirdly, there is a mechanically reproducible state of non-life that is triggered by the foundation of film on technology: an infinite state for referential objects or beings that manifest themselves through the transcendent presence of their own absence, and are brought back in an immaterial way. Spectral entities are called on and grasped by a technical apparatus. There is no longer a clear distinction between life and death. Film conveys a spectral site and sight, is populated by spectral entities, and is itself a spectre. And this spectral sphere increases in the contemporary context: self-moving and self-generated images are present in ghostly data clouds.

To summarize and build on all these different features of film’s spectrality, I propose a neologism, namely the figure of film’s machinic spectre. This spectre of film—similar to Haraway’s figure of the cyborg (see [19])—is meant as a figure in a relational sense. Because, in the sense of Haraway,

[f]igurations can be used for relational forms of thinking that are not based on the categorial, representational separation between materiality, words, and worlds. Figuration as a thinking tool thus has a constituting function3

[20] (p. 47)

As a figure, the film spectre is, firstly, a social reality and constitutes our very own human techno-condition, “an elemental part of being” [17] (p. 77). The data clouds that host the film spectre are carriers of images and different forms of human self-digitisation4 that go beyond (yet include) cinema, film, and fictional set-ups. Dasein has, hereby, doubled permanently and persistently—spectator-being and spectral film-being are not only entangled, but their identities are blurred. Secondly, and this happens on a metalevel, the film spectre operates as a tool for thinking about the spectral self-reflexivity of the digital (film) image and its mechanical and techno-ontological condition. The film spectre’s constituting function entangles materiality, thoughts, and worlds by its immaterial yet worlding character, on which the very nature of film is based.

Let me deepen this aspect of self-reflexivity. “Je suis un spectre”/“I am a spectre”, explains Derrida when he was filmed by Ken McMullen in Ghost Dance (1983)5. In the moment of his recording, Derrida becomes a self-referential spectre, just as Cavell argues: “Objects projected on a screen… occur as self-referential… Their presence refers to their absence, their location in another place” [9] (pp. xv–xvi). Yet, in the case of Derrida, the object is conscious of its own self-referentiality. He pronounces his own spectrality simply because his physical original, the person Jacques Derrida, anticipates the filmic transition from physical life to spectrality. Derrida comments on the transition. He argues in Ghost Dance that his voice is taken over by his own ghost and that “the cinema is the art… of allowing ghosts to come back”5. He evokes a self-reflexive ghost in a spectral image: (im)materiality, thoughts, words, and worlds are not separated here. I will come back to this point of entanglement later, as it also unfolds in an ethical dimension. However, this self-reflexivity raises the question of the agency of the film spectre. I briefly recall my claim that the sphere of the film spectre is increased in today’s digital, synthetic, and mobile contexts. Novel kinds of spectral images populate moving data clouds and make questions about their agency and responsibility urgent ones. The spectrality of film images is, by nature, polysemous, and so is the enquiry into its agency. I therefore propose to look closely into the origins of any film image, namely cinema.

Jean Epstein, a pioneer filmmaker from the silent film era, reflected on the nature of film philosophically. In his writings, he designated an agency in regard to cinema in the 1940s as “the intelligence of a machine” [21], and I have elaborated on this in the article “Film as Artificial Intelligence” [5], as a nonorganic and non-anthropocentric form of “intelligence” inherent in the mechanical automatism of film: “To understand film in Epstein’s sense, as the thinking performance of a technical apparatus, inculcates a dissolution of human boundaries and abilities into the cinematograph” [5] (p. 159). This posthuman thinking performance can be read as a manifestation of the spectral agency of film; the spectre is not only bringing back what has been, but adds a spectral performance, an agency of thought of its own that escapes human attention. This spectral performative presence increases in the aforementioned digital and mobile contexts, blurring further the borders of established dualisms in epistemology like movement and stasis (as described by Zylinska), and created for Epstein the mere beginning of a new machinic principle of thought: “[V]ery old, perennial problems—antagonisms between matter and mind, continuity and discontinuity, movement and stasis, or the nature of space and time, and the existence and inexistence of any reality—come into view under a brand new light” [21] (p. xii).

It is not only fascinating that Epstein recognised and anticipated the deep core of the technical image, but, as I have argued before, his stance “makes Epstein a pioneer of the speculative-materialist turn in contemporary philosophy” [5] (p. 159). Among the speculative–materialist positions analysed in my essay “Film as Artificial Intelligence” [5], I believe that the quantum-ontologist position of Karen Barad will be especially fruitful to consider in the current context of the development of a spectral and speculative ethics of film.

The kind of causality and principle of thought to which Barad’s agential realism refers is based on diffraction as a reconfiguring and monist approach, to be distinguished from reflection as a mirroring and dualist kind of reasoning. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad describes diffraction as follows:

Diffraction is a material-discursive phenomenon that challenges the presumed inherent separability of subject and object, nature and culture, fact and value, human and non-human, organic and non-organic, epistemology and ontology, materiality and discursivity… Diffraction is a material practice for making a difference, for topologically reconfiguring connections.

[1] (p. 381)

It is obvious by now that her position fits with the observations of Epstein, who also questioned philosophical dualism, even if he did so in the context of film. In any case, it is exactly here that ethics comes in, and death and spectrality are reiterated. What does such a diffractive spectre of film look like, and how does this perspective help us draft a spectral ethics of film?

4. Sequence Four: Levinas Expanded

Let me stay with Barad, who introduces her approach as an “ethico-onto-epistemology” [1] (p. 381). She builds her position from a concept of quantum entanglement, consisting of the mutual relatedness and concomitant co-production of the nature of being (ontology), knowledge (epistemology), and their ethical effects; due to the “ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies” [1] (p. 206), ethics becomes involved. Barad coins this neologism as “intra-activity”, and claims that “there are no pre-existing individual objects with determinate boundaries and properties that precede some interaction”, rather, they “are enacted through specific intra-actions” [1] (p. 206). She further points out that these “entanglements are… irreducible relations of responsibility” [1] (p. 265). Barad thus argues that “the measurement intra-action plays a constitutive role in what is measured” [22] (p. 6). Therefore, she refers to ethics, in that “it matters how something is explored” [22] (p. 6). Barad points out that “there is no fixed dividing line between ‘self’ and ‘other’” [1] (p. 265). She argues for an “ethics of mattering” [1] (p. 353), which she relates to Levinas’ ethics of alterity. Barad emphasises that for Levinas, “responsibility is not a relation between two subjects; rather, the otherness of the Other is given in responsibility… one cannot escape responsibility” [1] (pp. 391–392). Therefore, our ethical relation of responsibility with the Other is always existing—a responsibility that for Levinas is the basis of thought itself.

Recent discussions of film as a “medium of ethical experience” [23] (p. 4), particularly of cinema, have partially drawn on Levinasian philosophy. For example, Orna Raviv focused on “how cinematic experience can open an ethical space that allows the Other to appear” [24] (p. 2). I support her question—“What is the ethical experience of seeing faces on the screen?” [24] (p. 2)—which manifests, for example, through the close-up and Levinas’ discussion of expression beyond the viewer’s gaze [24] (p. 4). According to Raviv, for Levinas, the ethical “encounter with the face of the Other is an encounter with the singularity of each person, with what makes one person different from the next and what cannot be recognized and understood” [24] (p. 3). In the context of the current analysis, the following question arises: What if we consider these expressions as a spectral performance? Death and transcendence while facing the Other played an important role for Levinas. In his own words, this “extends beyond the ontology of the Heideggerian Dasein” [25] (p. 83) because:

It is as if that invisible death, ignored by the Other, whom already it concerns by the nakedness of its face, were already ‘regarding’ me prior to confronting me, and becoming the death that stares me in the face. The other man’s death calls me into question…The Other becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question.

[25] (p. 83)

I think that Levinas’ fear of the death of the Other as an imposed relation of responsibility is present in the narrative construct of many films in quite a direct way. Let me point to very diverse cinematic films in which death plays a major role, for example, Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010), Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011), Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), The Matrix (Lara and Lana Wachowski, 1999), Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), and even The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer et al., 2012) and Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Friedrich W. Murnau, 1922). In all these movies, the question of death triggers an ethics of responsibility and care. They contribute to conceiving film as an ethical experience.

There is apparently an intrinsic connection between death, or the fear of death, and ethics, which confirms Levinas’ approach of an imposed relation of responsibility towards the Other. Regardless, death for Levinas corresponds to death as a violent cut of and cessation of life, whereas the state of non-life, of spectrality, means “horror… an anxiety about death” [26] (p. 33), and is therefore feared and rejected by Levinas: “The haunting spectre, the phantom, constitutes the very element of horror“ [26] (p. 33)6. It should be noted that only some of the films named above highlight death as a concept of closure (e.g., Melancholia, Imitation of Life), while others mainly focus on the state of non-life (Nosferatu), and others combine both (The Matrix, Biutiful, and Solaris), and still unfold an ethics triggered by death.

Let me return the focus to the question of spectrality in the context of film. How is the spectator ethically engaged with the film spectres who are literally “becoming the death that stares me in the face?” [25] (p. 83). Colin Davis [27] evokes the figure of the undead dead, the vampire, through his analysis of Murnau’s creation of the film Nosferatu (1922), a film that he puts in dialogue with Levinas’ 1948 essay “Reality and Its Shadow” [28]. As Davis points out, for Levinas, through art “[o]bjects are de-realised, becoming images and non-objects, dark and ungraspable, occupying a kind of ghost world…” [27] (p. 42). He further argues that, according to Levinas, “art places us in an ‘interval’ or ‘between-time [l’entre temps]’ in which shadows proliferate…” [27] (p. 42). This interval of the ghost world, which for Levinas characterizes art itself, seems especially apt for characterising film. As Davis argues in the context of a Levinasian reading of Nosferatu: “film de-realises the familiar, transforms the known world into a site of absence and phantoms, and occupies a disturbing place between life and death” [27] (p. 43).

This reading directly relates the film character Nosferatu to the drafted figure of the machinic spectre of film. To consolidate this relation, I will draw on the idea of “conceptual persona” as I introduced it for the philosophical analysis of film characters in my book Being and Film [4]. The wording is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as “they directly refer to ‘conceptual personae’, the English translation of ‘personnages conceptuels’, designating subjects in philosophy who convey movement of thought: ‘The conceptual persona is the becoming or the subject of a philosophy’” [4] (p. 7). Furthermore, in the context of a philosophical analysis of film characters, “the concept derives from the term ‘dramatis personae’ in film and theatre studies as well. Dramatis personae encompass all the characters involved in the dramatic conflict of a piece” [4] (p. 7). I developed the idea of the conceptual personae (CPs) for a philosophical analysis that was in dialogue with the movie Solaris by A. Tarkovsky. The CPs of Solaris are derived from the main characters of the film, and are thus the “becoming or object(s) of a philosophy”, namely the solaristic system. These solaristic CPs, therefore, “disclose themselves as nodes of a network of interrelated philosophical questions, tenets, and principles of thought” [4] (p. 7). The idea of CPs can thus be a tool for analysis to grasp the inherent philosophical concepts of a movie.

Based on this background and applying the idea of CPs to the context of this article, I argue that those film spectres that are film characters are self-referential CPs for film/cinema, and stand for the polysemous figure of the film spectre. This makes the vampire Nosferatu a spectre that is self-referential for film, although not as self-reflexive as Derrida’s spectre in Ghost Dance, who can also be grasped as a CP. Derrida is a film spectre that claims to be a spectre in a double sense, neither living nor dead—a dramatis as well as a conceptual persona. Nosferatu and Derrida, both CPs, conceptualise film as a de-realisation of the familiar, which “transforms the known world into a site of absence and phantoms and occupies a disturbing place between life and death” [27] (p. 43), as Davis points out quite well.

However, the Other and their death are human centred for Levinas and, as Davis recalls, he is suspicious of the arts for their spectral agency, even “claiming that vision and representation hinder the possibility of an ethical relation to the Other” [24] (p. 3). The CP Nosferatu would certainly confirm such a suspicion, but not the CP Derrida. In the following, I will argue against Levinas’ considerations and introduce a sketch of a critical posthumanist ethics of film spectres by delving deeper into Barad’s position, by relating it to spectrality. As I have underlined before, this sketch is to frame a query to be further explored, a philosophy in the making.

5. Sequence Five: Towards a Posthumanist Ethics of Film Spectres

Karen Barad clearly argues for an extension of Levinas’ concept of responsibility to the “other than human” [1] (p. 393), because of the ongoing intra-active entanglement with the “Other”; thus, she takes out “the humanist foundations that have been an integral part of Levinas’ philosophy” [2] (p. 268)7. Barad’s extension of the Other locates ethics in a wider relational system, an extension of human relating as well as nonhuman:

alterity… includes a spectrum of possibilities, including the ‘other than human’ as well as the ‘‘human.’’ And if ethical relations extend to the other than human… Responsibility—the ability to respond to the other—cannot be restricted to human-human encounters…

[1] (p. 393)

By transferring Barad’s ethical stance to the context of the film spectre, we have two different aspects to consider. On the one hand, the film spectre is to be regarded as “other than human” [1] (p. 393). But, on the other hand, from a diffractional perspective, the film spectre can be regarded as a reconfiguring principle, a state where matter and mind pass through and intra-actively condition each other. As I stated before, (im)materiality, words, and worlds are not separate for the film spectre Derrida (see p. 6 of this article).

Another CP to refer to is the “other than human” [1] (p. 393) film figure, namely a technological spectre, an AI program named “puppet master” in the animation film Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995). The puppet master is the contemporary conceptual persona of film’s spectrality, which inspired the later character of the architect in The Matrix Trilogy (Lara and Lilly Wachowsky, 1999–2003)8, who is also a CP in this context: a node of interconnected philosophical questions and principles of thought specific to the world of the computer programme called the Matrix, approaching, among other topics, that of the agency of contemporary, self-generated, and moving digital spectres, and their relation with humans. Similar to the CP Derrida, the puppet master in Ghost in the Shell is conscient of its own existence as a ghost, its high machine intelligence, and claims to be an immaterial entity, neither dead nor alive, yet self-consciously present in a huge AI network. In contrast to Derrida, its self-reflexivity as a spectre happens within the narrative of the film, although it is not conscious of being a film’s CP, like Derrida is when he directly tells the spectator he is a polysemous film spectre. However, the puppet master’s existence is agential and performative, raising ethical questions for humans and nonhumans: Can the puppet master be trusted? Is it vulnerable and capable of responsibility? Does it impose responsibility?

Interestingly enough, Barad relates her agential realism directly to spectrality when she describes “the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements” [2] (p. 245), an idea she takes precisely from Jacques Derrida’s hauntology [31]. She describes quantum entanglements as a state “[b]etween life and death” [2] (p. 252), and gives examples, like Schrödinger’s cat or the “dis/continuity” of quantum leaps, a notion “that troubles the very dichotomy between discontinuity and continuity. Indeed, quantum dis/continuity troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy—the cutting into two—itself (including the notion of ‘itself’!)” [2] (p. 246). This means that spectrality is the very condition for entities to come into existence (or not), and makes spectres exit the mere fictional, metaphoric, and artistic dimension; it shifts the spectral dimension into science. From a philosophical perspective, the spectral dimension is then part of the ontological condition of being. Film is able to record this spectrality and creates the film spectre.

Why designate this area as spectral instead of virtual, like Deleuze would name it [32] (p. 244), or even transcendent, as Levinas would call it in relation to the Other’s face?9 It is the very question of the Other “becoming the death that stares me in the face” [25] (p. 83)—the spectrality of anticipated death that is recorded by the film image and is also valid for the nonhuman other. The spectral dimension lies in the very question of the Other and means the extreme vulnerability of being. Schrödinger’s cat could be dead, being both dead and alive. Such an existential vulnerability of being calls for an ethics of responsibility. And Barad conceives ethics beyond the human dimension: “Ethics is… not a superimposing of human values onto the ontology of the world” [2] (p. 267). Instead, she argues, by quoting Derrida, for an extension of ethics to include ghosts: “No justice… seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead” [31] (p. xix quoted in [2] (p. 261)).

In the context of the machinic film spectre, the ghosts who are not yet born designate the technical, synthetic, and self-generated digital images to come, and are virtual in a Deleuzian sense. Deleuze claims in Difference and Repetition that the virtual “possesses a full reality by itself”, because it is “opposed to the actual and not the real” [32] (p. 244). The ethics of being “not yet born” [31] (p. xix) “is an integral part of the diffraction (ongoing differentiating) patterns of worlding” [2] (p. 267), and part of a continuously ongoing reconfiguration. Therefore, in a machinic spectral ethics of film, it matters not only how something is recorded, filmed, imagined to be filmed, or stored in data clouds, but also to consider which kinds of other spectres are freely circulating in the data clouds, unbound from human agency. In any case, the question I propose to be further explored is the following: If the Other is to be extended to the other than human, how, then, can the Levinasian term of responsibility be detached from an anthropocentric perspective? How can the other than human be designated as responsible, or is this an already too human concept? Barad claims that responsibility “is a relation always already integral to the world’s ongoing intra-active becoming and not-becoming. It is an iterative (re)opening up to, an enabling of responsiveness” [2] (p. 266). How is this responsiveness different for the human Other and the other than human? And what does this difference mean for the figure of the machinic spectre of film?