Peniyya: The Image Beyond the Hegemony of the Gaze

This is an essay about a crucial dimension of pictures that typically does not call attention to itself within the current milieu of theoretical treatments of the image. The paper focuses on the facing, or the peniyya, of images which is not only a primary condition of the image’s visuality, but is furthermore what makes the image ethical. Peniyya explicates the significance of an image’s facing through a dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical understanding of the human face. The analogy between Levinas’s notion of the face and the facing (peniyya) of images runs against predominant readings of Levinas which emphasize the Levinasian ambivalence, not to say hostility, towards the visual, and the clear opposition he makes between the face’s infinity and the finite and objectifying essence of images. The aim of this essay, however, is to show that there is an interesting sense in which Levinas’s reflections on the human face offer, perhaps in spite of Levinas, a crucial prism for approaching pictures: It shows that the Levinasian face can be understood in a manner that illuminates a dimension of alterity in pictures, one that remains uncontainable and, as such, questions the responsibility of the interpreter and opens up the ethical depth of the image. As a central case study, This essay turns to a series of provocative graffiti images, chimeric animal-human faces, that were created by Klone, a Tel Aviv-based street artist.