Piera Benedetti King’s College London 1 Formalist Po-ethics and Centrifugal Perspectives: The Restoration of Otherness in Ulrich Seidl’s Cinema Through the delineation of a trans-disciplinary parallel between wonder as the constitutive stage of philosophical thought and aesthetic defamiliarisation as a set of techniques through which the supposedly familiar is given back its wondrous face, this essay will investigate the possibility for cinema to act philosophically – or rather ethically, as philosophy is here intended in its Lévinasian inflection – by disrupting the totalising impulse of habitualised perceptions of otherness through the deployment of formalist modes of representation. Specifically, the po- ethics of formalist representation will be explored through some of the works of controversial Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, whose obstinate commitment to the formal collection of the oddities and miseries of the human condition has often raised inflamed debates on the ethicality of his filmmaking. Diverting its attention away from the differentiation of documentary and fiction films, the essay will limit its scrutiny to Seidl’s formalist encounters with a formless Other that infinitely eludes representation. From the very infancy of Western thought, the origin of philosophical thinking has been linked to wonder (thaumazein), 1 understood as a rupture in the homogenous fabric of the familiar. The first classical attempt to articulate an organic relationship between philosophy and wonder appears in Plato’s Theaeteus, 2 as Socrates posits wondering as the very foundation of the philosophical condition (‘For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else’). 3 Indeed, the notion of wonder - understood as originating from a natural or human interruption on the landscape of familiarity - as the inaugural moment of philosophy itself seems to cross the history of philosophical thinking as a sort of conceptual fil rouge. Thus, although notoriously critical of the totalising tendencies of Western philosophical traditions, French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas analogously recognises that philosophy, which he equates with ethics, begins with an 1 Michael Funk Deckard, Peter Losonczi, eds., Philosophy Begins in Wonder: An Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy, Theology and Science, (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008). 2 Peter G. Platt, ‘‘Believing and Not Believing’: Shakespeare and the Archaeology of Wonder’, in Culture and Authority in the Baroque, Massimo Ciavolella, Patrick Coleman, eds., (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 12. 3 Plato, Theaetetus, ed. by Bernard Williams, trans. by M. J. Levett, rev. by Miles Burnyeat, (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), p. 19.