What’s So Human? Apophatic Subjects and Emergency Cinema

Abounaddara in Arabic means a man wearing glasses. Under this nom de guerre, hundreds of videos have been uploaded to Vimeo since March, 2011, when a wave of political protests inspired by the Arab Spring swept across Syria, catapulting large portions of the country into conflict with the Ba'athist government. In this paper, I will examine Abounaddara’s struggle to construct a political counter image against the exploitation of human suffering by humanitarian media. Rejecting the framework of human rights that have been imposed upon Abounaddara’s practice of “emergency cinema,” I will instead focus on the appearance of a silhouetted speaking subject whose very opacity interrupts the evidentiary force of photography. This distinctive mise-en-scène is by now a stylistic calling card for the collective, yet its critical significance has been overlooked by both art critics and political commentators. Attending to the iconic logic that animates this composition, I will argue that its inverted perspective formalizes the ethical problem of treating humanity as an end-in-itself. The displacement of the human presence by an inhuman absence materializes a practical and political dilemma faced by Abounaddara filming in Syria: how to represent someone who cannot be made visible because they must not be identified, but who needs all the more urgently to appear as an image? By engaging with the problem of dignity outside of human rights discourse, my paper will attempt to rethink the basic relationship of human beings to their own images.