The Expressionless: Law, Ethics, and the Imagery of Suffering

The essay discusses law’s inability to address the phenomenon of human suffering and, at the same time, investigates a possible theoretical kinship between Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘the expressionless’ and Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of suffering as the foundation of an interhuman ethics. The kinship between Levinas and Benjamin is examined with reference to suffering in the visual arts and, more specifically, in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and Francis Bacon’s crucifixion triptychs. The essay argues that in the crucifixion scenes of both Grünewald’s medieval altarpiece and Bacon’s triptychs, suffering is what constitutes ‘the expressionless’. After every detail of the image, every element of attribute, motif, composition and colour have been accurately depicted, a residue still remains, an ethical truth that cannot be appropriated into a meaningful unity but that nevertheless calls for a response. While law must always give suffering a utilitarian value in its attempts to assign responsibility for the injury occurred, the essay argues that the fragmentariness in all true art that Benjamin calls ‘the expressionless’ is akin to Levinas’s understanding of the constitutional uselessness of suffering, its essence as ‘for nothing’.

Panu MinkkinenEmail: