REVIEW ESSAY

Redeeming Levinas

Sam B. Girgus, Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

J. Douglas Macready
University of Dallas, USA

In Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine, Sam B Girgus develops an ethical analytic for cinema by recovering the ethical theory of Emmanuel Levinas, which he argues is dramatized in a multinational canon of films that he terms ‘the cinema of redemption’. These films enact and promulgate a Levinasian ethic through their approach to time, ethics and the feminine. Girgus recovers an aesthetics of film from Levinas’s thought by rethinking the tension between transcendence and immanence in the context of the sexual difference and the feminine body and demonstrates that  films are capable of representing the core truth of Levinas’s ethical theory at twenty-four frames a second. 

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