A thwarted search, an ethical awakening: Levinasian subjectivity in the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami

This article brings Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? into dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy to critically examine the film’s pedagogical implications. At the surface, the film follows a young boy’s (Ahmad) apparently simple quest to return a classmate’s notebook. This quest turns into a journey that evolves into a quietly powerful confrontation with the structures of institutional authority. Drawing on Levinas’s notion of subjectivity as inherently grounded in responsibility for the Other, the film is interpreted as staging an ethical awakening that is not embraced freely, but placed upon the subject, disrupting the totalizing logic of obedience entrenched in familial and educational systems. We argue that Ahmad’s refusal to yield to these systems’ demands is not an act of childish obstinacy, but rather a subtle yet subversive challenge to the pedagogical machinery that not only denies individuality, but is essentially driven by homogeneity. By analyzing the dynamics between anxiety, responsibility and disobedience, this article argues that the film presents a poetic yet profound critique of education as a site of normalization, while simultaneously offering a model of ethical subjectivity constituted through substitution, and failure. The failure to “achieve” the aim – Ahmad never finds the friend’s house – is understood as the condition for a non-utilitarian ethics.