Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
Losing Face: Francis Bacon’s 25th Hour
Arne De Boever1
Spike Lee’s 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 dog’s menacing growl is then transformed into the
growling image of Montgomery ‘Monty’ Brogan’s car speeding through
New York. Monty spots the dog, and stops. It is only then that the viewer
witnesses the results of the film’s 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 Monty’s friend Francis ‘Frank’
Slaughtery will beat up Monty’s face beyond recognition so that Monty will
not be raped during his first night in jail. Monty’s 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 Levinas’s 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 Lee’s
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
Lee’s work, it will also address the questions of the face and defacement in
literature—in the work of J.M. Coetzee, whose writings have been central to
the so-called ‘ethical turn’ in the humanities—and painting. In the latter
1
California Institute of the Arts, [email protected]
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615
85
Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
case, it is the work of Francis Bacon—who is alluded to several times in
Lee’s film—that 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
Lee’s 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 Lee’s earlier work. However, Lee’s engagement with race, and
perhaps with identitarian categories in general, might be more complicated
than critics have been able to acknowledge. If Lee’s relation to identitarian
categories such as race was always marked by violence—the violence of
racism—it 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 Lee’s
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 bête 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 being’s ethical
dimension also goes for the animal. The question pertains, specifically, to
Levinas’s 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 don’t 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. Lawrence’s 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 Derrida’s 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 Coetzee’s interest in ethics goes back much
further than this. There is a remarkable scene in Coetzee’s oeuvre that, even
though it does not involve animals, powerfully illustrates his interest in
Levinasian ethics. It comes at the very end of Coetzee’s 1986 novel Foe,
which retells the Robinson Crusoe story from the perspective of a woman
named Susan Barton who is cast away on Cruso’s (Coetzee’s spelling)
island. As readers of the novel will perhaps remember, the novel has a
double ending. In both endings, there is an ‘I’—possibly Susan Barton in
the first ending, most likely an anonymous narrator in the second—that
confronts an ‘other’, in this case Cruso’s 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 Friday’s 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
Friday’s mouth, are ‘the sounds of [Cruso’s] island’ (Coetzee 1986, 154). If
these sounds already subvert the scene’s linguistic set-up, Foe’s 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 Barton’s 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 Other’s life, the one that rouses at once the temptation to murder
and the interdiction against it. (Butler 2004, 139)
In addition to the face’s 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 other’s destruction and for the other’s 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; Levinas’s 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 Levinas’s most extended discussion of the face, see his Totality and Infinity, in
particular the book’s ‘Preface’ and the section entitled ‘Ethics and the Face’.
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615
88
Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
Defacement is thus masterfully appropriated here within a theory of the face
in which the other has a quasi-theological (given Levinas’s interest in
theology, some would no doubt say: theological) hold over the I. As Butler
points out—and this is an important contribution to the debates—this
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 other’s 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 Žižek. Whereas one of
Butler’s 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), Žižek published an article in response entitled ‘Neighbors
and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence’ that explicitly attacks
Butler’s Levinasian theory of ethics. Žižek enters upon the scene wielding
Nietzsche’s hammer. Butler’s 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. (Žižek 2005,
137)
Žižek 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 instead—and even claim—the ethical violence of this
traumatic origin. Such a claim comes about, in Žižek’s theory, by
‘Smashing the Neighbor’s Face’ (Žižek 2005, 142), as one of the section
titles of his article puts it. It comes about, in other words, through a type of
defacement—a 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 (it’s even
more iconoclastic, in this sense, than Levinas’s own theory of the face).
There is a way in which Žižek is not so much leaving Levinas behind here,
but pushing him into a more extreme position of defacement that—as I have
already indicated above—might 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 thought’s ethical
theology.
For Žižek, 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’ (Žižek 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 Žižek, is the real ethical relation—anything 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 Žižek, thus has to do with ‘losing one’s face’ (Žižek 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. Žižek associates this ethics of defacement with the notion
of the inhuman, and the figures of the Muselmann (as theorized by Giorgio
Agamben), and Franz Kafka’s creature Odradek (cf. Žižek 2005, 158ff). It
is these figures of inhuman excess that can provide the foundation for a new
ethics today.
Francis Bacon’s 25th Hour
I summarize these ethical debates after Levinas as a prelude to my
discussion of Spike Lee’s 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
film’s 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 viewer’s 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,
Lee’s 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 Monty’s 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 Monty’s 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 film’s 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 America’s 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,
anyone—citizen or non-citizen, criminal or non-criminal—risks to be
treated by (US) power as a potential terrorist.
To provide some more evidence for such a reading, consider Lee’s
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 bank’s 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 bank’s 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 Lee’s 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
Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
Of course, the reversal that is performed in 25th Hour—Monty is turned
from perpetrator into victim—remains 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, Lee’s film invites
one to sympathize with Monty. It introduces the viewer to Monty’s 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 customers—a man
called Simon whose life was evidently ruined by Monty’s drugs—does not
really challenge that sympathy. The film in fact begins with a scene (briefly
discussed in this essay’s 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 dog’s 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
Monty’s face after it has been beaten up by Francis. This likeness between
Monty’s 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 Monty’s face is smashed up at the end of the film that the
ethical connection between him and the dog—an animal—is revealed. It is
through Monty’s 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 Levinas—do animals have a face?—25th Hour
seems to reply that ‘yes, they do’. The film provides this answer by
establishing a connection between Monty’s face and the face of the dog.
However, the film also goes further than this—and my point has been that
such a transgression lies occluded within Levinas’s thought—because 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
other’s 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 Monty’s ‘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 Monty’s 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 Guattari’s 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 Deleuze’s 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 Lee’s 25th Hour is an extremely Baconian film, something like a
narrative spun around the practice of Bacon’s 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
Monty’s 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 Monty’s line, but
Francis Bacon’s. Monty’s toast is a quotation of Francis Bacon’s 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 City’s parks in the company of Monty’s 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
Francis’s 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 Monty’s face, it looks distinctively like a Francis
Bacon: defaced, unrecognizable, red, pink, purple, swollen, and cut. Some
of Monty’s teeth have become undone. It is through this face—this
defacement—that 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 Bacon’s 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. Monty’s face is
defaced to such an extent that what emerges from Lee’s portrait of Monty is
Monty’s head, which the film invites us to read as a dog-spirit in bodily
form. It is indeed in Lee’s portrait of Monty’s head—not his face—that ‘a
zone of indiscernability or undecidability between man an animal’ (Deleuze
2002, 20) is opened up. Deleuze considers Bacon’s 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 [Bacon’s] 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 Monty’s defaced face also recalls Edward Norton’s performance in
David Fincher’s Fight Club, which I consider to be the manifesto of the ethics of
defacement that I am uncovering here. Fincher’s film was based, of course, on Chuck
Palahniuk’s novel by the same title.
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615
94
Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
One certainly gets something of the messianic status of meat that Deleuze
evokes here in Lee’s film, which can also be read as a commentary on the
crucifixion of Monty. Like Bacon’s painting, Lee’s 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, which—lest one would oppose it to the
spirit—Deleuze 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 meat—he is addressed by
the reality of becoming that is exposed in this dog’s 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 relation—which contains
elements from both Butler’s and Žižek’s discussion of ethics—pushes 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 through—in the destruction of the gentrified other, precisely then
when one is ‘losing one’s face’.4
4
This is why works such as Michael Taussig’s Defacement, a work of
anthropology, or Valentin Groebner’s Defaced, a book about violence in the late Middle
Ages, accrue an increased ethical significance today.
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615
95
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 idolatrous—as Levinas often
appears to think of the aesthetic in general5—but iconoclastic, and to such
an extent that it actually pushes Levinas’s 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 communion—and thus, ultimately, of community—in
the post-September 11 era. It is in Monty’s Bacon face that Monty and the
dog become animal, and enter into an ethical relationship. It is precisely in
their reduction to a bloody mess—a life that appears to be no more than
meat, a bare kind of life that is no longer any particular identity but that ‘just
is’—that 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 Žižek associates the ethics of
defacement with the figure of the Muselmann in Giorgio Agamben’s work.
The Muselmann is perhaps Agamben’s 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 Améry’s testimony cited in Agamben’s Remnants
of Auschwitz, into ‘a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its
last convulsions’ (Améry 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 Agamben’s work, in
which life’s reduction to bare life also opens up the possibility of its
salvation from the violence that produced it. In Agamben’s 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 FilmPhilosophy’s special issue on Levinas address this (problematic) aspect of his thought.
Most relevant in this particular context is probably Libby Saxton’s ‘Fragile Faces: Levinas
and Lanzmann’, in particular the article’s opening section.
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615
96
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 Lee’s 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 Lee’s 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 Monty’s 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 Lee’s film share.
The scene is, in this respect, an important reiteration of a similar
scene in Lee’s earlier Do the Right Thing, which represents a New York
race riot while it celebrates the particular diversity of New York’s
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 Žižek 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 together—because 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, we’ve 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 Kaye’s
film American History X. Kaye’s film shows Norton’s character (Derek
Vinyard)—a white supremacist—involved in a conversation with his
mother’s boyfriend, challenging the boyfriend’s 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 America’s 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 Hour’s aesthetic of defacement challenges the ways in
which identity is caught up in contemporary power games. Might this not be
the film’s truly political, and intensely American narrative, one of the
reasons why the American flag can still be featured prominently in Lee’s
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 film’s opening credits appear to suggest,
on the precarious political situation of all human beings—Americans, but
also non-Americans, given the international dimensions of the US’ response
to September 11—after 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 life—an 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 Monty’s
Bacon face: because everyone is at the risk of being treated by their
governments as a potential terrorist. It is in Monty’s Bacon face that the
truth of life’s relation to power is exposed. The ethical relation that the film
reveals is therefore also deeply political.
One might argue that the film—like Agamben—waxes utopian when
it suggests that it is in this Bacon face that one’s 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.
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615
98
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 law’s
limits—the defacement that may prevent him from being violently made
part of the community of the prison—that 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 one’s 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 freedom—precarious, but
freedom nevertheless—becomes possible. It is such a sense of freedom—
ethical and political—that emerges from Lee’s 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.
Cañadas, Ivan (2009) ‘Spike Lee’s 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) Séminaire La bête et le souverain Volume I (20012002). Paris: Galilée.
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.
Žižek, 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.
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615
100