Pensar a imagem outramente: à escuta ética do rosto e a política por vir

Abstract

The present work proposes to think about communication at an ethical perspective, especially in the field of image analysis, using concepts such as: Face, Hospitality, Responsibility, Vulnerability, Testimony and Listening, developed from the philosophical view of Emmanuel Lévinas and of authors who dialogue with him. I discuss the interlacing of the sonorities of Saying and Said of the faces / bodies exposed in the photographs, taking into account the conceptual basis of Lévinas, combining it mainly with the contributions of Derrida, Didi-Huberman, Marie-José Mondzain, Jean-Luc Nancy and Judith Butler. I understand that the concepts presented by these authors are based on the notion of openness as listening to others in an ethical perspective. The research chooses as one of its focuses a set of photographs related to street people, most of them in the city of São Paulo, whether by photographers or others, produced by the people living on the streets. The corpus is organized in seven series, a total of 60 images, with emphasis on the Thiago Fogolins photos. The analysis of the images seeks to develop reflections about how these photographs could give life to the gesture of opening oneself to the listening of the other and from which apprehensions of the visualities relative to these people this becomes viable. The methodology is articulated in four main movements, namely: (1) incursions, the text records the experience lived for me with Thiago Fogolin on São Paulos streets; (2) interviews; (3) assembly of photographic sequences; (4) analysis of the images in relation. Because they are presented in this sequence, it does not mean that such movements followed a chronological order: during the research, they occurred many times concomitantly, referring to the findings of each other. I prioritize the protagonism of susceptibility in the conduction of research, in which are valued the corporeal forms that act as catalysts of significances, for exceeding and surpassing, valuing crossings of the contact that is established in the face to face constituted by the triad me-other-third. In this work a position is pursued before vulnerable faces, the precarious life that is shown in the photographic images, faces that do not exactly coincide with the faces/bodies photographed. The thesis seeks to recognize the image as a gordian knot of the aesthetic experience that we suffer in daily life. A way of study and reflection on the relations we establish with the images and for which we believe it is possible to make a politics otherwise, from a kind of visitation and transcendence of these precarious faces, towards a democracy to come from infinite singularities subjectively gestated and exposed on pictures; composed of white, black, but first by countless shades of gray.