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The introduction begins by exploring how Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy has been taken up by film theorists to date. Much of this scholarship centres on Levinas’s theories of the Other as found in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), particularly the ‘face’ of the Other, which theorists have discussed in relation to visualre presentation. Levinas developed his ethics, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), into a performative account of what it feels like to be responsible for the Other. Accordingly, Performing Ethics through Film Style takes a similar approach with film, linking the performativity of Levinas’s writing style with the capacity of films to perform a Levinasian ethics of responsibility for the Other through their styles. The introduction brings in performativity theory – including J. L. Austin’s speech acts, Jacques Derrida’s originary performativity and Judith Butler’s theories of language in the socio-political sphere – to enhance this study of performativity in Levinas and film. And it sets up the subjects of the chapters to follow: the films of the Dardenne brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader. Studying these directors in relation to Levinas shows how films can perform ethics through a wide variety of styles.

This chapter looks at two early Dardenne films, Je Pense à Vous (1992) and La Promesse (1996). The gap between these two films proved momentous in the Dardennes’ career, as they were able, after the critical, commercial and, in their eyes, personal failure of Je Pense à Vous, to rethink their approach to film style, which led to La Promesse, the true ‘beginning’ of their career as it is commonly known and their first explicit engagement with Levinas’s ethical philosophy. The chapter considers this radical change in film style to be akin to the distinction that J. L. Austin, in his lectures on performativity, makes between constative and performative uses of language, the first being description and the second being performance. The chapter begins by positing a parallel between the shifts in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy from the descriptions of Totality and Infinity to the literary performance of Otherwise than Being and the Dardennes’ reconfiguration of their style between Je Pense à Vous and La Promesse. This will show how, just as Levinas sought to clarify his ethics by deploying a more overtly performative style, so the Dardennes achieve a similar, Levinasian style in their filmmaking in La Promesse.

The Conclusion sums up how studying Emmanuel Levinas and film in terms of style and performativity can expand our appreciation both of Levinas’s ethics and of the work of these significant filmmakers. This study of a range of films directed by the Dardenne brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader helps open up the different ways in which film style can perform ethics. This opening-up shows that there is no such thing as a singular ‘ethical style’ or ‘Levinasian style’ and no such thing as a singular ‘Levinasian topic’. Rather, the power and importance of Levinas’s ethics can be detected and explored in a range of subject matter and performed through a range of film styles. This realisation paves the way for other studies into ethics, performativity and film.

As a way of conclusion, the afterword comes back to Roland Barthes. His writings on photography and grief (Camera Lucida, 1993), and particularly his conception of the punctum as the element in the photograph that “pricks” you, illustrates how emotions do and undo the subject. Bringing together the main findings of the book, the afterword argues that the subject and its identity are, therefore, the result of the performative work of emotions. But this identity will be necessarily ephemeral, as it is only a particular configuration of a particular doing of emotions, which will be made and remade in each iteration.

Big Brother was the first of the high-profile ‘Reality Television’ shows. Pioneered in Holland, it was imported to Britain by the production company Endemol. From the first, the programme was presented as a sociological experiment, in the vein of Stanley Milgram’s socio-psychological 1960s research to measure the willingness of participants to obey instructions conflicting with personal conscience if directed by an authority figure. However, as the show’s popularity increased the pretext of studying how people behave and interact in a house under ‘laboratory conditions’ diminished while criticisms of the programme’s repetitiveness encouraged changes in the show that raised its level of artificiality. Like the televised input of experimental psychologists such as Oxford University’s Dr Peter Collett, interest in people’s social psychology had all but disappeared after a couple of series and been entirely replaced by a fascination with game-show elements allied to the promise of sex and conflict. Big Brother has thus been considered part of a growing phenomenon known as the ‘television of cruelty’, with some contestants diagnosed as suffering from post traumatic stress disorder after appearing.

Initially a ruthless and hypersexualized operative for the Hellfire Club, Emma Frost has transformed into a core member and leader of the X-Men. Frost engages with the world on her own terms, bypassing many of the stereotypes attached to superheroines. Her challenging personality functions as a dark mirror for other characters in the saga, inscribing emotions and attitudes that implicitly question the values of the X-Men and of the genre to which they belong. Focusing chiefly on her membership of the X-Men and her part in key developments of the Marvel Universe in the 21st Century, this chapter examines Emma Frost as exemplifying Butler’s concept of gender performativity as an explicit aspect of her superpowers. It explores whether the limitations of hegemonic masculinity can offer a way out and asks whether it is possible to consciously exploit hegemonic narratives in order to affect change.

The introduction situates this volume into different theoretical and historiographical traditions. It starts by examining the meanings of performativity through a reading of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977), as his analysis of the utterance “I love you” perfectly illustrates the bodily effects of emotions. The next section moves on to discuss the theoretical grounding of the concept “emotional bodies,” linking the work on emotional practices as developed by anthropologists, cultural historians and sociologists such as Monique Scheer, Jo Labanyi, and Sarah Ahmed with the feminist materialism of Judith Butler and Karen Barad. Finally, the last section makes connections between chapters in different sections, highlighting the common ideas underpinning this book.

This essay focuses on studies developed in the field of psychosomatic medicine that connected cancer with patients’ body image and fantasies (1950-1959). At this time, cancer began to acquire more medical and social visibility, and psychosomatic studies pointed to connections between cancer and emotional and personality factors. The chapter shows that scientists such as Seymour Fisher or Sidney E. Cleveland established that there are many aspects of the individual’s body that acquire psychological significance. The analysis also suggests that the body-image variations between individuals depended on the cancer localization, as well as differences in personality. By looking at these sources, this chapter argues that emotions and bodily fantasies became performative forces in the field of psychosomatic medicine.

By combining emotion and gender histories, this study analyzes the affective economy of fear ruling during the Paris Commune and its aftermath. This focus allows us to examine the creation of female collectives, such as the pétroleuses: the revolutionary women accused of having organized the fires that devastated the French capital during the bloody week. Although there was no evidence about their involvement in this episode, they became the evilest enemy in the eye of the public. Taking Louise Michel’s testimonies as starting point, this chapter analyses abjection as a practice that situated the female revolutionary body outside the borders of civilization. A comparison of past and present terrorist bodies allows us to think about the powers of fear for the creation of fictional enemies.

This paper analyzes gender performativity in the form of cross-dressing cuteness through cosplaying by a popular male-cosplaying-female fan group “Ailisi Weiniang Tuan (Alice Cos Group)” based in China. Drawing from cute studies, gender/queer studies, and fan studies, this paper examines the phenomenon of fake girls as a venue of redefining the boundaries of identity and gender using cosplaying and the notion of cuteness to achieve queerness to address the issue of gender performativity through queered cuteness in today’s China.

This chapter explores the theme of the becoming of the body through metamorphosis in Marie Darrieussecq’s writing, analysing the interweaving of Deleuzian traces with contemporary feminist thinkers Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti’s theories of performativity and parody. It then explores the interplay between simulation and dispersal in Darrieussecq’s work, relating this to a posthuman vision of the contemporary world within which consciousness is figured in terms of flux and folds. The chapter shows how Darrieussecq’s conceptually inventive writing illuminates Deleuzian notions of becoming and folding, not least in her reconsideration of relations between surface and depth in the torsion between mind, body and universe.

This chapter looks at an especially interesting articulation of the posthuman within the indigenista films of Emilio “El Indio” Fernández. It identifies an attempt to modernize indigenous peasants by exposing their bodies to modern medicine. The chapter views these films in the context of Roberto Esposito’s “immunization paradigm,” a biopolitical theory that compares the medical process of immunization to the state’s role of subject creation. When a people lacks a natural immunity to a vice (improper performativity of race and gender in the case of these films), a new actor, such as the state, must step in and provide an artificial immunity. Using this theoretical framework, the chapter analyzes the films Río Escondido (1947), María Candelaria (1944), Enamorada (1946), and The Torch (1950). The readings suggest that we approach these films as allegories for a postrevolutionary society where immunological discourses prescribe appropriate gender and racial performativity for the nation.

Systematic theologian and biologist Celia Deane-Drummond elaborates on the issue of whether the human person can claim a unique status in creation, defending the idea of retaining the distinctiveness of human beings in a nuanced way. From Thomas Aquinas she borrows his interpretation of the terms “image” and “likeness”: While using the language of divine “likeness” to describe other animals, thereby expressing a sense of shared creaturely being, the term “image” referred to the distinctive character of human beings. Deane-Drummond adopts this distinction but, informed by recent ethological studies on animals, bases the image dimension on the religious capacity rather than the capacity to freedom. Moreover, she interprets this distinctiveness in terms of the performative, as presenting the particular task of humanity to recognize its divine vocation to serve God and to exist in respectful communion with other beings. Rather than to argue that animals display the divine image, the author suggests that the close relationship between humans and other animals clarifies the distinctive features of what it means to be human.