Abstract

In this article I wish to elucidate a form of receptivity in our relation to televisual images that cannot be reduced to the postmodern formula of a closed circuit of desire through which the self infinitely reproduces itself. Through analysis of the peculiar experience of viewing Gore Verbinski’s 2003 film The Ring, I argue for the possibility of an experience of alterity in and through the televisual. I pair this event with the religious experience of viewing the icon that Jean-Luc Marion opposes to the televisual in his recent works collected in The Crossing of the Visible. The purpose of the comparison is not to conflate the two experiences but rather to suggest that the possibility for reclaiming a space for difference in a postmodern world lies within the televisual itself, the very medium that Marion credits with the bankruptcy of the aesthetic. In The Ring, the process through which the viewer expects to see her own desire reproduced is violently interrupted by a vengeful image that shatters the mirror of reflection between viewer and viewed and threatens to cross over that threshold — to cross the visible, in Marion’s terms.