Touch Me Not: the ethics of intimacy

Abstract

The article explores the relationship between intimacy and ethics on the basis of the thematic preoccupations and aesthetic processes of the film, Touch Me Not, to re-visit the meanings of the body, beauty and sexuality in this context. Based on a discussion of how the skin-body (as an 'area before words') distinction maps onto the ethics-ontology relationship in Levinas, the article discusses the film's take on the skin as a semi-permeable border between the self and the 'other', treating touch both as a means of communication and as a metaphor for ethics. For Levinas' anti-ocular ethics opens up the possibility for a discussion of the visual image that can move beyond the classical ontology of the cinematic image. In this context, the article discusses the significance of the film's form in relation to the ethics of the visual in the cinematic space. Blurring the boundaries between the filmic and the non-filmic, reality and fiction, the film maker and the subject, the film disrupts the conventional spectators' gaze, which has come to be devoid of a moral stance in contemporary society.