Paternal election and the time of the Other in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Le Fils : Levinasian ethics and the question of traumatic encounter

This essay offers a new reading of the relationship between the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the cinema of the Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, focusing on the overlooked question of the traumatic impact of the Other in Levinas’s ethics. Through a close reading of Levinas’s outlining of the paternal relationship in Totality and Infinity as incarnating the goodness of discontinuous time, the author highlights his emphasis on the generosity of responsibility as it opens up time for the Other, and provides a redemptive pardon for the past time of the self. He argues next that this ethical transaction is complicated by Le Fils/The Son’s (2002) treatment of the traumatic violence enacted by the son upon the father, and how the time of the Other does not necessarily call forth a straightforward ethical answer in the way that Levinas describes it. His reading of the film thereby uses Levinas to go beyond Levinas, arguing for a complex negotiation of the alterity of the Other as it manifests in the film’s presentation of moments of crisis wherein the possibility of the negation of ethical response paradoxically opens up time and the question of responsibility for the unethical Other.