Voyeurism, Victimhood, and the Temporality of Witnessing in Lebanon

In this paper, I contrast a series of image pairs, drawn from photojournalism, documentary film, and avant-garde film and video, in order to draw out important insights about the politics of witnessing in a place like Lebanon. Differences in the image markets notwithstanding, these examples provide critical positions on the role of witnessing in sites where the recurrence of violence seems never ending and thus help us reconsider inherited modes of witnessing. Indeed, one of the central arguments in this paper is that the paradigm of witnessing needs to account for a temporality of suffering that is not bound to the primacy of a singular event of violence. To make this point, I consider two cataclysmic moments within the history of Lebanon that have an unsettling sense of déjà vu — the 1982 and 2006 Israeli invasions.