Abjection and the Ethics of Otherness

Israeli and Palestinian Documentary Cinema about the Second Intifada

Abstract

The essay examines a certain shift in the politics of the body/corpse as an outcome of the “new” war. Perspectives on suicide-attack-induced trauma are compared via an analysis of the 2003 Israeli documentary No. 17 (representing here an entire corpus); video recordings taken of suicide bombers before their missions; and the Palestinian narrative film Paradise Now (2005). Among the interrelated issues discussed are the ethics of the gaze; the phenomenology of suicide attacks; our willingness to become contaminated by the corpse as indicating our willingness to accept the other; and the distinction between discourses oriented towards the other and those which preclude such orientation. By proposing the body/corpse relationship as the basis for a new “materialistic” discourse, the essay contests the predominance of “memory discourse” in trauma studies.