Film-Philosophy 16.

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Losing Face: Francis Bacons 25th Hour Arne De Boever1

Spike Lees film 25th Hour begins with an act of violence that it does not show. Before any image has been shown, one hears the sounds of a dog who is being beaten. The dogs menacing growl is then transformed into the growling image of Montgomery Monty Brogans car speeding through New York. Monty spots the dog, and stops. It is only then that the viewer witnesses the results of the films invisible, but audible, foundational act of violence: the bloody body of a dog who has been badly beaten. When Monty approaches the dog, it turns out the animal has got a lot of bite left in him (Lee 2002). Perhaps because the dog is a fighter, Monty decides to save him. Although the dog resists, he ultimately manages to get the dog in the trunk of his car. As his sidekick Kostya observes, Monty does not emerge from the rescue operation unscathed: blood is trickling from a cut in his neck. This scene can be read as a pre-figuration of a stomach-turning scene towards the end of the film, in which Montys friend Francis Frank Slaughtery will beat up Montys face beyond recognition so that Monty will not be raped during his first night in jail. Montys beaten face recalls the body of the dog at the beginning of the film. It is through the bloody mess of their bodies that Monty and the dog begin to communicate, to enter into communion. This essay explores how this communion, this communication between Monty and the dog, comes about. I am interested, specifically, in what the significance of such an exploration might be for contemporary conceptions of community. For reasons that will become evident in a moment, I will initially approach this topic against the background of Emmanuel Levinass work on ethics, in which the notion of the face has played a crucial role. But my aim is really to situate the film in a more contemporary, post-Levinasian debate on an ethics of defacement. I am particularly interested in exploring the significance of such an ethics in the post-September 11 era, which is explicitly evoked at the beginning of Lees film. I argue that Monty and the dog begin to communicate, to enter into a communion, and thus to form a community, through a process of defacement that simultaneously strips them from their ways of life and propels them into a shared ethical and political becoming. Although this essay will approach these issues first and foremost through a discussion of Lees work, it will also address the questions of the face and defacement in literaturein the work of J.M. Coetzee, whose writings have been central to the so-called ethical turn in the humanitiesand painting. In the latter
1

California Institute of the Arts, adeboever@calarts.edu

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) case, it is the work of Francis Baconwho is alluded to several times in Lees filmthat interests me here. This means that this essay will, to some extent, be moving beyond an emphatic (and entirely justified) concern with race, gender, and class in Lees films. An early review of 25th Hour in Sight & Sound focused on male gender performance in the film; more recently, Bright Lights published a text on race and class in 25th Hour. These categories also circulate in the reception of Lees earlier work. However, Lees engagement with race, and perhaps with identitarian categories in general, might be more complicated than critics have been able to acknowledge. If Lees relation to identitarian categories such as race was always marked by violencethe violence of racismit also appears (and almost impossibly so) that Lee in his recent films is drawing something from that violence in order to establish a position that would be critical of identitarian categories as such. In this essay, I outline this position through a discussion of what I call Lees aesthetics of defacement. My question is, specifically, what might be the politics of such an aesthetics in the post-September 11 time of terror to which Lee explicitly alludes in 25th Hour. Ethics: From Levinas to September 11 In the ninth, largely improvised, session of his seminar La bte et le souverain I (2001-2002), Jacques Derrida recalls an exchange (which he had already evoked on several other occasions) involving Emmanuel Levinas, who was asked once whether what he says about the human beings ethical dimension also goes for the animal. The question pertains, specifically, to Levinass notion of the face, le visage, and the fact that for Levinas, the other in her/his ethical dimension is what he calls a face. As Derrida explains, this face is not simply that which is seen or that which sees, but also that which speaks, which hears someone else speak (Derrida 2008, 316-317: my trans.). For Levinas: our ethical responsibility is thus addressed to a face, and it is from a face that I receive from the other the imperative You shall not kill, which [as Derrida notes] is for Levinas the first commandment. (Derrida 2008, 317) The question about the animal apparently took Levinas off guard, and he responded: I dont know (Derrida 317). He then asked another question: Would you say that the snake has a face? (Derrida 2008, 317). Derrida takes this as the starting point for his discussion of D.H. Lawrences poem Snake. The scene that Derrida reconstructs here is famous and has proved extraordinarily productive not only in post-Levinasian philosophy (most Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 86

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) notably, perhaps, in Derridas work on animals), but also in literature. One of its most serious and consistent explorers has been the South African, now Australian, novelist J.M. Coetzee, whose interest in ethics and animals became widely known with the publication of the novel Disgrace and the lectures titled The Philosophers and the Animals and The Poets and the Animals in the late 1990s. But Coetzees interest in ethics goes back much further than this. There is a remarkable scene in Coetzees oeuvre that, even though it does not involve animals, powerfully illustrates his interest in Levinasian ethics. It comes at the very end of Coetzees 1986 novel Foe, which retells the Robinson Crusoe story from the perspective of a woman named Susan Barton who is cast away on Crusos (Coetzees spelling) island. As readers of the novel will perhaps remember, the novel has a double ending. In both endings, there is an Ipossibly Susan Barton in the first ending, most likely an anonymous narrator in the secondthat confronts an other, in this case Crusos enigmatic manservant Friday, who in the novel has traveled back to England in the company of Susan Barton after the death of his master. In the first ending, the confrontation is explicitly linguistic, with the I pressing her/his ear to Fridays mouth, and waiting for something to emerge. At first, there is nothing. Then, if I can ignore the beating of my own heart, I begin to hear the faintest faraway roar What emerges, from Fridays mouth, are the sounds of [Crusos] island (Coetzee 1986, 154). If these sounds already subvert the scenes linguistic set-up, Foes second ending pushes matters even further. This time, the I descends into an underwater shipwreck, where it comes across a number of dead bodies, Susan Bartons amongst others. Ultimately, the I finds Friday and asks him (under water): What is this ship? But this is no place of words, the novel goes on. Each syllable, as it comes out, is filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday (Coetzee 1986, 157). Thus, the set-up is emphatically no longer linguistic, but otherwise: He [Friday] turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my face. His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. (Coetzee 1986, 157) From ear-to-mouth, we have moved to face-to-face; from the sounds of the island, we have moved to a stream that beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. There is a relation here, but it is not a linguistic one. Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 87

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) This second set-up appears to be that of the Levinasian ethical relation, of the face-to-face that exists at the limits of language and of representation in general. This is not to say, however, that the face is opposed to language. As Derrida notes, rather, the face marks precisely an address, it is where the I is addressed by the other, where the commandment You shall not kill speaks in the other. As such, the face is (as Levinas himself indicates) the situation of discourse. In the words of Judith Butler in the titular chapter of her book Precarious Life, it is: that vocalization of agony that is not yet language or no longer language, the one by which we are wakened to the precariousness of the Others life, the one that rouses at once the temptation to murder and the interdiction against it. (Butler 2004, 139) In addition to the faces complicated relation to language, Butler captures one of its other ambiguities: that it is not simply the commandment to not kill, but also the temptation to kill. This is why Butler includes a chapter on Levinas in her book: because the notion of the face thus awakens one to the extreme precariousness of the other. The face is simultaneously the call for the others destruction and for the others preservation; it both saves and destroys. Any attempts to say what the face is are thus bound to ultimately lead to nothing because the face cannot be represented in the language of being. As Butler perceptively remarks, Levinas himself in at least one of his texts leaves out the verb be when he sums up what the face is: The face as extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precarious of the other (quoted Butler 2004, 134). For Levinas: the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in impossible representation. For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. (Butler 2004, 144) The human is affirmed by the limits that the face poses to representation. To represent it would mean to deface it; or rather: it is only through defacement that the face can be represented. The face can only be, in other words, in the form of defacement; Levinass very use of the word face, visage, to represent it is in this sense also a targeting, a viser, that defaces the face by calling it such.2
2

For Levinass most extended discussion of the face, see his Totality and Infinity, in particular the books Preface and the section entitled Ethics and the Face.

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Defacement is thus masterfully appropriated here within a theory of the face in which the other has a quasi-theological (given Levinass interest in theology, some would no doubt say: theological) hold over the I. As Butler points outand this is an important contribution to the debatesthis defacement (not her term) affects the very notion of the face itself, in the sense that what Levinas calls a face does not necessarily have to be a face. It can also be a human back, for example; other parts of the human body can be so expressive that they take on the significance of the face. Although Butler is also highly critical of Levinas, here she adjusts received readings of his work in order to mobilize his theory of the face, and of the awareness to the precariousness of the other that it awakens, within the context of her argument. She ultimately even uses the Levinasian notion of precariousness as her title, suggesting her debt to the philosopher is greater than the reader might, at first sight, have expected. The others quasi-theological hold over the I has been a point of contention between Butler and a philosopher with whom she has worked together on a number of occasions, namely Slavoj iek. Whereas one of Butlers most recent books in the version in which it was first published bears the title Kritik der Ethischen Gewalt (Critique of Ethical Violence, cf. Butler 2005), iek published an article in response entitled Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence that explicitly attacks Butlers Levinasian theory of ethics. iek enters upon the scene wielding Nietzsches hammer. Butlers ethics is: an ethics of finitude, of making a virtue out of our very weakness, in other words, of elevating into the highest ethical value the respect for our very inability to act with full responsibility. (iek 2005, 137) iek opposes to this the violence of a trauma, specifically of the traumatic origin of the law, in which one is joined to the other. Ethics is not about a critique of violence in the name of our precariousness; it needs to acknowledge insteadand even claimthe ethical violence of this traumatic origin. Such a claim comes about, in ieks theory, by Smashing the Neighbors Face (iek 2005, 142), as one of the section titles of his article puts it. It comes about, in other words, through a type of defacementa defacement that is different from the one appropriated by the Levinasian ethics of the face in the sense that it destroys, precisely, the theological theory of the face in whose service it is mobilized (its even more iconoclastic, in this sense, than Levinass own theory of the face). There is a way in which iek is not so much leaving Levinas behind here, but pushing him into a more extreme position of defacement thatas I have already indicated abovemight ultimately lie occluded within his thought, Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 89

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) as a messianic element that has the capacity to overturn the thoughts ethical theology. For iek, the relation to the other is emphatically not about a happy, face-to-face relation. Such a theory of ethics risks to lead to a gentrification (iek 2005, 144) of the other. Instead, it is about a relation to the other as a traumatic, monstrous thing: one to whom I cannot relate. That, for iek, is the real ethical relationanything that says otherwise creates a rosy-colored fiction that does not do justice to the traumatizing violence of everyday life, of our every day life relations to the other. Ethics, for iek, thus has to do with losing ones face (iek 2005, 147): it is not the realm of the face but of defacement, a defacement that is theorized here not in the service of a theory of the face but along Nietzschean lines, as what destroys the theological theory of the face that can be found in the work of Levinas. iek associates this ethics of defacement with the notion of the inhuman, and the figures of the Muselmann (as theorized by Giorgio Agamben), and Franz Kafkas creature Odradek (cf. iek 2005, 158ff). It is these figures of inhuman excess that can provide the foundation for a new ethics today. Francis Bacons 25th Hour I summarize these ethical debates after Levinas as a prelude to my discussion of Spike Lees film 25th Hour, which is, I argue, a meditation on ethics after September 11 that mobilizes precisely the notions of the face and of defacement that are central to contemporary ethical debates. The films opening credits are a memorial to the terror attacks of September 11: they situate the viewer within the two powerful beams projected into the New York night sky from the site where the Twin Towers used to stand. Lee plays with the viewers emotions by overlaying them with dramatic music: violins at first, and then also a voice singing an oriental sounding melody, possibly a Middle Eastern song of mourning. Given that September 11 only returns once later on in the film and is never talked about directly, Lees choice to emphasize it at the beginning of the film raises many questions. The images and the music cast a dark, vaguely threatening light over what is to follow, evoking the precarious situation of Montgomery Monty Brogan on his last day before he goes to jail. Monty is a young, white, Irish man who used to deal drugs in the city but got touched (Lee 2002), as he puts it. Someone betrayed him to the police, who arrived at his apartment one day and went straight for the drugs hidden in the seating cushions of his couch. Monty does not know who betrayed him; Kostya, his sidekick, suggests that it might have been his girlfriend, but Monty doubts this. The film follows Monty on his last day before he goes to jail, from very early in the morning until the morning of the next day, when his father will be driving him off to prison. 25th Hour is a Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 90

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) moving representation of Montys precarious life: it is saturated with regret about the past, and nostalgia for a life that is now irrevocably over. The vague sense of threat projected at the beginning of the film appears to relate mostly to Montys anxiety about what is going to happen to him when he enters into jail. He fears that, as an attractive young man, he will be subject to sexual violence. It is in order to prevent this that he will ask his friend Francis Frank Slaughtery to beat up his face beyond recognition, in the hope that the ugliness will save him from being raped. The reference to September 11 in the films opening credits begins to operate here in strange ways. It appears to create a connection between what is happening to Monty and the terror attacks. The light beams of the memorial that were shown at the beginning of the film are turned into searchlights that will find Monty wherever he goes; the terror attacks committed against the Twin Towers thus become associated with the governmental violence of the police and the prison system. September 11 is transformed from a symbol of precariousness into a symbol of power, it is turned from a symbol of Americas being hit by a terrorist attack into a symbol of America as the agent of governmental violence. I am suggesting that the state or situation represented in 25th Hour mirrors the state or situation in which human beings have landed after September 11. Today, anyonecitizen or non-citizen, criminal or non-criminalrisks to be treated by (US) power as a potential terrorist. To provide some more evidence for such a reading, consider Lees more recent film Inside Man, which revolves around a similar state or situation. A criminal mastermind robs a bank with a team of accomplices. They enter the bank dressed in overalls and wearing masks. Once they have dismantled the banks security cameras, they ask all their hostages to strip to their underwear, and force them to put on overalls and masks, making them look indistinguishable from the robbers. The hostages are then divided into small groups, into which, slowly but surely, each of the bank robbers is integrated. Since everyone is masked and dressed the same, the hostages have no idea how to distinguish the hostages from the bank robbers. Towards the end of the film, once the police are ready to spring the bank, the robbers release the hostages from the bank, and run out of the bank with them. The police are incapable of telling the robbers from the hostages. One bank robber, the leader of the team, stays behind in the bank with the loot (a stack of diamonds and an envelope containing material that is incriminating for the banks founder, a World War II collaborator): after a week, he liberates himself from his hideout, and walks out of the bank with the diamonds and the envelope. The genius of Lees representation is that, once the hostages are released from the bank, the police have no way of distinguishing the robbers from the hostages; therefore, the police treat everyone like a potential robber, thus turning Inside Man into an allegory of the post-9/11 era. Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 91

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Of course, the reversal that is performed in 25th HourMonty is turned from perpetrator into victimremains problematic, because Monty is a drug dealer; he is not an innocent victim like the victims of September 11. If anything, his role comes closest to that of the terrorists who died in the attack. And yet, as Dan Flory amongst others has noted, Lees film invites one to sympathize with Monty. It introduces the viewer to Montys life, his girlfriend, his friends, his father, and his regrets. He might be a drug dealer, but that clearly does not mean that he is a bad guy. Even the haunting appearance at two moments in the film of one of his customersa man called Simon whose life was evidently ruined by Montys drugsdoes not really challenge that sympathy. The film in fact begins with a scene (briefly discussed in this essays introduction) that is entirely aimed at inspiring sympathy in the viewer as described earlier: Monty takes it up for a dog who has been badly beaten and left to die. In the first scene after the opening credits, the film shows Monty taking the dog out on a walk. That is how easy it is to awaken sympathy: from the beginning, everyone loves Monty, who saved an abused animal from dying. The opening scene does a lot more than this though. Although one does not see the images of the dog being beaten, the images that Lee offers of the dogs beaten body speak for themselves: the dog is a bloody mess whose appearance will only find its like towards the very end of the film, in Montys face after it has been beaten up by Francis. This likeness between Montys face and the beat up body of the dog establishes a connection between Monty and the dog. This essay argues that the connection between the dog and Monty might also be a commentary on Levinas, and his ethical theory of the face. It is when Montys face is smashed up at the end of the film that the ethical connection between him and the dogan animalis revealed. It is through Montys smashed up face, through his defacement, that Monty and the beat up dog, the human and the animal, find themselves in an ethical relation. One could read this connection in at least two ways. In response to the question leveled against Levinasdo animals have a face?25th Hour seems to reply that yes, they do. The film provides this answer by establishing a connection between Montys face and the face of the dog. However, the film also goes further than thisand my point has been that such a transgression lies occluded within Levinass thoughtbecause this connection is not merely that of the face, but of a defacement. It is only through the destructive element of the Levinasian face, by smashing up the others face, that the animal is given a face, that the connection between Monty and the dog is revealed. A more accurate description of the theoretical movement of the film would therefore be to say that the film sketches Montys becoming animal: it is not so much that the animal is Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 92

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) given a face, but that Montys face is defaced and that in that defacement his becoming animal takes place. I would argue that the same goes for the dog, who only becomes animal in the sense that I am using the expression here because he has been beaten up. The dog as domesticated animal has not become animal yet. It is only when he is reduced to meat that the dog also becomes animal. In other words, the dog needs to be defaced as well in order for the ethical relation between Monty and the dog to be revealed. In what follows, I would like to give some more theoretical depth to this reading in order to grasp its full aesthetic and political significance. The expression becoming animal recalls the famous tenth plateau of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus, which is entitled 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, BecomingImperceptible (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 232-309). But I am actually taking the expression from another of Deleuzes works, namely his book on the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon, which is subtitled The Logic of Sensation. The particular chapter I have in mind is Body, Meat, and Spirit: Becoming Animal. As the title of my essay indicates, I think Spike Lees 25th Hour is an extremely Baconian film, something like a narrative spun around the practice of Bacons painting. There is at least one explicit reference to Bacon in the film. It comes in the second half of the film, when Monty meets up with his girlfriend Naturelle and his two friends, Jacob Elinski and Francis, at a club where some of his criminal friends are having a goodbye party in his honor. When the champagne is brought out, Monty raises his glass, and speaks one of the most memorable lines of the film: Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends. It is a memorable line, because it summarizes very well a particular aspect of Montys precarious situation, namely that he no longer really knows who his friends are. Did his girlfriend turn him over to the police? Will his friends come see him in jail? Will they still be there for him once he has done his time? The interesting thing though is that it is not Montys line, but Francis Bacons. Montys toast is a quotation of Francis Bacons famous toast. I probably would not have made much of this were it not for the stomach-turning scene towards the end of the film. At the end of a night of drinking, the tired friends Monty, Jacob, and Francis end up in one of New York Citys parks in the company of Montys dog, and the time has come for Monty to ask Francis for the favor that has been alluded to earlier on in the film. This favor turns out to be that he wants Francis to beat up his face beyond recognition, to such an extent that his ugliness will save him from being raped during his first days in the can. Although Francis plays the tough Wall Street banker throughout the film, he does not take to the task easily, and Monty has to provoke him to ultimately get him to execute the job. The result is terrifying, but I am trying to consider it as a work of art: as Franciss work of art, which resembles that of Francis Bacon. Indeed, after Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 93

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) Francis is done with Montys face, it looks distinctively like a Francis Bacon: defaced, unrecognizable, red, pink, purple, swollen, and cut. Some of Montys teeth have become undone. It is through this facethis defacementthat the connection between Monty and the dog is established. It is in this defaced face that Monty becomes animal, and that a new ethics of defacement is broached.3 Commenting on Bacons work as a portraitist, Deleuze writes that Bacon is a painter of heads, not faces, and there is a great difference between the two: For the face is a structured, spatial organization that conceals the head, whereas the head is dependent on the body, even if it is the point of the body, its culmination. It is not the head that lacks spirit; but it is a spirit in bodily form, a corporeal and vital breath, an animal spirit. It is the animal spirit of man: a pig-spirit, a buffalospirit, a dog-spirit, a bat-spirit Bacon thus pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face. (Deleuze 2002, 19) This is also, I argue, what Spike Lee is doing in 25th Hour. Montys face is defaced to such an extent that what emerges from Lees portrait of Monty is Montys head, which the film invites us to read as a dog-spirit in bodily form. It is indeed in Lees portrait of Montys headnot his facethat a zone of indiscernability or undecidability between man an animal (Deleuze 2002, 20) is opened up. Deleuze considers Bacons painting to constitute such a zone. The objective zone of indiscernability is the entire body, Deleuze notes, but the body insofar as it is flesh or meat (Deleuze 2002, 20). Painting must achieve a pictorial tension between bone and flesh, and: what achieves this tension in [Bacons] painting is, precisely, meat, through the splendor of its colors. Meat is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each other locally rather than being composed structurally. (Deleuze 2002, 20-21) And again, a bit later on: Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernability; it is a fact, a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The painter is certainly a butcher, but he goes to the butcher shop as if it were a church, with the meat as the crucified victim. (Deleuze 2002, 21-22)
3

My description of Montys defaced face also recalls Edward Nortons performance in David Finchers Fight Club, which I consider to be the manifesto of the ethics of defacement that I am uncovering here. Finchers film was based, of course, on Chuck Palahniuks novel by the same title.

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One certainly gets something of the messianic status of meat that Deleuze evokes here in Lees film, which can also be read as a commentary on the crucifixion of Monty. Like Bacons painting, Lees film creates a: deep identity, a zone of indiscernability more profound than any sentimental identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is man. This is the reality of becoming. What revolutionary person in art, politics, religion, or elsewhere, has not felt that extreme moment when he or she was nothing but a beast, and became responsible not for the calves who died, but before the calves who died? (Deleuze 2002, 22) It is this reality of becoming, I argue, that Lee captures in his 25th Hour. The reality of the suffering beast, the reality of suffering man, the reality of suffering in which man and beast, Monty and the dog find each other. Importantly, and let us not forget that Deleuze insists on this, this reality comes about in the realm of meat, whichlest one would oppose it to the spiritDeleuze actually characterizes as spirit in bodily form. When Monty is defaced, when Francis (Slaughtery/Bacon) turns his face into head, his head captures the dog-spirit that one encountered at the very beginning of the film, when Lee presented the viewer with the images of the dying dog that Monty saved. The dialogue that one gets in this scene is telling, and appears to almost literally evoke Deleuze. After Monty has thrown the dog in the trunk of his car, Kostya repeats that he does not understand why Monty wants to save the dog: He tries to bit your face off, he says; why does Monty care about the dog? The dog is meat, he tells Monty. 'Let the dog be'. But Monty is somehow addressed by this meathe is addressed by the reality of becoming that is exposed in this dogs being beaten, in this defaced piece of meat. In both the dog and in Monty, one thus finds examples of others whose face has been smashed up, who have been turned into meat, and whose traumatic reduction to meat actually establishes an ethical relation. As I have tried to show, such a relationwhich contains elements from both Butlers and ieks discussion of ethicspushes the Levinasian theory of the face to acknowledge its occluded core of defacement: of the defacement of the face as the site where the ethical shines throughin the destruction of the gentrified other, precisely then when one is losing ones face.4

This is why works such as Michael Taussigs Defacement, a work of anthropology, or Valentin Groebners Defaced, a book about violence in the late Middle Ages, accrue an increased ethical significance today.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement This essay argues that with a novelist such as J. M. Coetzee, a painter such as Francis Bacon, and a filmmaker such as Spike Lee, one is dealing with artists who practice an aesthetic that is not idolatrousas Levinas often appears to think of the aesthetic in general5but iconoclastic, and to such an extent that it actually pushes Levinass own iconoclastic theory of the face to acknowledge its occluded core of defacement. Thus, these artists practice an aesthetic of defacement that opens up new possibilities of communication and communionand thus, ultimately, of communityin the post-September 11 era. It is in Montys Bacon face that Monty and the dog become animal, and enter into an ethical relationship. It is precisely in their reduction to a bloody messa life that appears to be no more than meat, a bare kind of life that is no longer any particular identity but that just isthat new possibilities for communion open up. In the concluding section of this essay, I argue that it is here that the political possibilities of this aesthetics of defacement become most obvious. As I indicated earlier on, Slavoj iek associates the ethics of defacement with the figure of the Muselmann in Giorgio Agambens work. The Muselmann is perhaps Agambens most powerful example of the kind of life he calls (adapting this term from Walter Benjamin) bare life, a life that is produced when someone is stripped of their individual and collective way of life or form of living, and turned into a life reduced to survival. As Agamben explains, Muselmann was the name that concentration camp prisoners reserved for those prisoners who, although they were still living, already appeared to have entered into the realm of the dead. They had turned, according to Jean Amrys testimony cited in Agambens Remnants of Auschwitz, into a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions (Amry qtd. Agamben 1999, 41). This is what happens, I argue, to the dog in the opening scene of 25th Hour, as well as to Monty towards the end of the film: they are turned into bare life. However, it is precisely from this precarious position, from this zone of indistinction between human and animal life and the realm of the living and the dead, that a communication or communion between Monty and the dog becomes possible. It is from this precarious position that new ethical possibilities emerge. I argue that something similar takes place in Agambens work, in which lifes reduction to bare life also opens up the possibility of its salvation from the violence that produced it. In Agambens work, the counterpart for bare life might thus be what he calls whatever being: a type of life that, like bare life, is mediated not by any condition of
5

On this, see Levinas Totality and Infinity; several of the articles published in FilmPhilosophys special issue on Levinas address this (problematic) aspect of his thought. Most relevant in this particular context is probably Libby Saxtons Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann, in particular the articles opening section.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative community, such as that recently proposed in France by Maurice Blanchot), but by belonging itself (Agamben 1990, 85). In short, it is a kind of life that just is, in the same way that the bloody dog in the beginning of Lees film or the unrecognizable Monty at the end of the film just are. It is this just being that opens up the possibility of their ethical relation. In Agamben, the ethics of whatever being forms the basis of the political community that the title of the book I have been drawing from presents as coming: a community beyond identity, rooted in a singularity with respect to which particular differences still exist, but no longer matter. This is how I read the closing scene of Lees film, where the faces of the immigrants, homosexuals, et cetera that Monty is cursing in a memorable scene earlier on in the film are reunited in Montys Bacon face: a face beyond recognition, a whatever being in which all of these faces belong. When Monty is cursing these faces earlier on in the film, he is not actually insulting them, but doing them a favor. It is precisely their particular identities that need to be cursed in order for all these identities to be able to enter into communication and communion. That does not mean that these particular identities will be destroyed; but the difference that they pose will no longer present an obstacle to the community that is coming, a vision that Agamben and the closing scene of Lees film share. The scene is, in this respect, an important reiteration of a similar scene in Lees earlier Do the Right Thing, which represents a New York race riot while it celebrates the particular diversity of New Yorks population. When in Do the Right Thing a similar series of faces starts rolling across the screen, featuring faces of characters that the viewer both likes and dislikes, one understands that this multicultural vision is not simply a rosy-colored celebration of diversity but precisely the exposure of what iek calls the properly traumatic kernel of otherness: the fact that the neighbor is first and foremost not someone to love, as the New Testament urges one to, but a kind of fearful monster with which one must nevertheless live togetherbecause that is the human condition. New York city, where everyone is cursing everyone all the time for little or no reason, appears to be the perfect setting for such an ethical and political lesson. As Lee points out in an interview with Paula Massood: If you live here [in New York] long enough, weve all thought, and hopefully not said, some of those things that Monty says in the mirror (Massood 2003). One could also read the scene as a rewriting of another scene involving Edward Norton (who plays Montgomery Brogan) in Tony Kayes film American History X. Kayes film shows Nortons character (Derek Vinyard)a white supremacistinvolved in a conversation with his mothers boyfriend, challenging the boyfriends reference to slavery to explain the contemporary difficulties of African Americans. Vinyard Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 97

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) replies: I mean, Lincoln freed the slaves, like, what? 130 years ago. How long does it take to get your act together? (Kaye 1998) Like Brogan, Vinyard is someone who curses Americas multiculturalism. But reading the two films next to each other powerfully reveals an entirely different politics of their curses: whereas in American History X, the cursing testifies to a racism that makes community impossible, I argue that in 25th Hour it is precisely through the defacement of the cursing that community comes about. As several of the philosophers I have discussed in this essay have argued, it is not because one is critical of identity politics that one is a racist; it is not because one insists on universality that one does not care about identity. Instead, 25th Hours aesthetic of defacement challenges the ways in which identity is caught up in contemporary power games. Might this not be the films truly political, and intensely American narrative, one of the reasons why the American flag can still be featured prominently in Lees film?6 There remains a problem that I addressed briefly above, but to which I want to return in closing, namely the fact that in this vision, the people of New York find communion in the beat up face of a convicted drug dealer. If what happens to Monty in the film is somehow a reflection, as the images of the September 11 memorial in the films opening credits appear to suggest, on the precarious political situation of all human beingsAmericans, but also non-Americans, given the international dimensions of the US response to September 11after September 11, surely there is a difference here that needs to be acknowledged: unlike Monty, most human beings are not drug dealers. This observation draws out even more the injustice with which human beings were treated by governments in the aftermath of September 11: no longer as citizens, or human beings who are protected by international treaties, but as beings whose lives are caught up in states of exception in which anything appears to be allowed in the name of a national security or emergency issue. It appears that in the wake of September 11, human beings are being turned into meat by their governments, into what Agamben calls a bare kind of lifean inhuman excess of life that opens up a zone of indistinction between the animal and the human being. It is for this reason that humanity becomes one in Montys Bacon face: because everyone is at the risk of being treated by their governments as a potential terrorist. It is in Montys Bacon face that the truth of lifes relation to power is exposed. The ethical relation that the film reveals is therefore also deeply political. One might argue that the filmlike Agambenwaxes utopian when it suggests that it is in this Bacon face that ones salvation after September
6

It would be worthwhile exploring the history of the aesthetics of defacement in the history of American cinema with reference to specific political conflicts such as the September 11 terror attacks so as to historicize further the particular politics of this aesthetic. I would like to thank Norman Klein for alerting me to this.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) 11 also lies. It is, after all, through his Bacon face that Monty hopes to escape sexual violence in prison. It is thus through his Bacon face that, in a certain sense, Monty hopes to stay out of jail and live within the limits of the law. It is, in other words, precisely through his claim of the laws limitsthe defacement that may prevent him from being violently made part of the community of the prisonthat he hopes to find a place in it. But might this not be a perfect description of how good law is supposed to work? It is supposed to protect subjects, but as subjects whose lives are ultimately separate from the law, whose lives ultimately exist in a disjunction from the law. Of course, such a disjunction is also dangerous, for it awakens a sense of the extreme precariousness of life. But this precariousness is not the end of the story: it is not simply in this position of weakness that the ethical relation is revealed; it is not simply this position of weakness to which ones political possibilities would be limited. Rather, 25th Hour shows that this precarious situation can also be claimed as a position of disjunction, of disidentification, where one establishes a gap between life and law from where a certain freedomprecarious, but freedom neverthelessbecomes possible. It is such a sense of freedom ethical and politicalthat emerges from Lees film, and that becomes particularly significant in the post-September 11 era.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London/New York: Verso. --- (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP. Caadas, Ivan (2009) Spike Lees Uniquely American Di(vision): Race and Class in 25th Hour. Bright Lights Film Journal, 63 (2003). Coetzee, J.M. (1986) Foe. London: Penguin. --- (2003) Disgrace. London: Secker and Warburg. --- (1999) The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton UP. --- (2003) Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker and Warburg. Deleuze, Gilles (2002) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Derrida, Jacques (2008) Sminaire La bte et le souverain Volume I (20012002). Paris: Galile. Flory, Dan (2006) Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist. The Journal of Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 99

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64, 1 (2006), 67-79. Gilbey, Ryan (2003) 25th Hour. Sight & Sound, 13, 3 (2003), 58. Groebner, Valentin (2004) Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages. Trans. Pamela Selwyn. New York: Zone Books. Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press. Massood, Paula J. (2003) The Quintessential New Yorker and Global Citizen: An Interview with Spike Lee. Cineaste, 28, 3 (2003). Mitchell, W.J.T. (1990) The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing. Critical Inquiry, 16, 4 (1990), 880-899. Palahniuk, Chuck (1996) Fight Club. New York: Norton. Saxton, Libby (2007) Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann. FilmPhilosophy, v. 11, n. 2 (2007), 1-14. [http://www.filmphilosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/84/69]. Accessed December 2nd, 2009. Taussig, Michael (1999) Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford UP. iek, Slavoj, Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhard (2005) The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Filmography Fincher, David (1999) Fight Club. USA. Kaye, Tony (1998) American History X. USA. Lee, Spike (1989) Do the Right Thing. USA. --- (2002) 25th Hour. USA. --- (2005) Inside Man. USA.

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