Citation:
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.
Morag, Raya (2013) "Abjection, Ethics, and Otherness: Israeli Documentary Cinema in the Age of the Second Intifada," Mikan 13 October: 5-30. (Hebrew).