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Melodrama is a popular mode of address that privileges affect at the expense of reflection and critique. Generally held in disrepute, melodrama's simplicity and sensationalism are widely read as a sign of social and psychological alienation. Melodrama responds to its critics, however, with ever-renewed and self-assured appeals to affect itself. Melodrama's irreducible privilege of affect in mind, therefore, the thesis proposes that affect admits description in Levinasian terms as a "radical passivity." The Levinasian proposal on affect, moreover, is extended to a theory of cinema, which, it is shown, is particularly well suited to melodramatic expression. / Affect or "embodied passivity," Levinas explains, is irreducible to phenomenological notions of intentionality, psychoanalytic conceptions of psychic investment or cognitive appraisals of psychic processing. To be a body is to be exposed to wounding but it is also a naIve agreement to the conditions of its sustentation. To be a body, in short, is to be capable of being affected. For Levinas this passive relation to what is other is the condition of an ethical responsibility that is absolute. Levinas's notion of embodied passivity, however, has aesthetic implications about which he was deeply ambiguous. Hence it is in the context of an aesthetics of embodied passivity, largely unexplored by Levinas, that the thesis examines melodrama's focus on affect and the specifically cinematic expressions of embodied passivity. / Melodrama's accessible address, however, reduces the Other, as Levinas would say, to caricatures, mobilizes affect in the direction of a "monopathic" response and disavows, in the process, the encounter with alterity to which it appeals. Nonetheless melodrama "fleshes out the cliche" or exploits the stereotype in the service of having, precisely, some affect. Such is the melodramatic privilege of enlivenment over the circumstances of its orchestration. Hence it is possible to appraise melodrama's heightened orchestrations of style, its recourse to emphasis and its enduring appeals to suffering and happiness, as prevailing testimony to the (unspeakable) nature of the body's irreducible vulnerability. Melodrama's elemental if simplistic vision is that affect matters absolutely.

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