Finding sunbeams in the darkness: Michel Serres’s analogical thinking and the ethics of listening in The Zone of Interest

This article addresses the fundamental concept underpinning Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which recognizes selective empathy and extraordinary empathy dissonance within our contemporary cultures as a continuum, not a moment. The article uses Michel Serres’s philosophical process to provide an ontological and epistemological framework within which The Zone of Interest can be understood analogously as a warning about darkness enveloping the world. Glazer has emphasized the axiom of his film is focusing upon the present. The Zone of Interest asks questions about humanity’s contemporary cultural sensibilities, which determine how societies engage with diversity, difference, and the multiplicities of perspective that are an inescapable part of the global geopolitical landscape. Serres’s process is inherently analogical, recognizing patterns of knowing and being that recur isomorphically across space and time. This article brings together the immersive sensibility mediated through the screen – situating The Zone of Interest as a cinematic experience that elevates sound over vision – with Serres’s assimilation of Lucretian atomism, which links materialism and ethics; the importance of noise as a source of knowledge within Serresian thought; and a topological approach to time and space, which shapes the analogical, qualitatively relational, processes characteristic of Serres’s philosophy.