Psychoanalyzing cinema: a productive encounter with Lacan, Deleuze, and Zizek 9781137116949, 9780230338555, 9781349341559, 1137116943, 0230338550, 9781283737289, 1283737280, 134934155X

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half-title......Page 2
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
List of Illustrations......Page 10
Preface......Page 12
Acknowledgments......Page 18
Lacan: Master I......Page 20
Žižek: Master II......Page 26
Slave Revolt: Guattari......Page 29
Badiou: Master III......Page 32
Revolt Slave! Deleuze......Page 36
SchizoCrets......Page 38
Part I Encountering Lacan......Page 62
1 Light, Camera, Action! The Luminous Worlds of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze......Page 63
2 Hearing Voices: Schizoanalysis and the Voice as Image in the Cinema of David Lynch......Page 88
3 Encore: Trauma and Counter-memory in Kim Ki-duk’s Time......Page 106
Part II Encountering Deleuze......Page 126
4 Antagonism or Multiplicity: The Struggle between Psychoanalysis and Deleuze in Godard’s Cinema......Page 127
5 Against Limits: Deleuze, Lacan, and the Possibility of Love......Page 144
6 Occasioning the Real: Lacan, Deleuze, and Cinematic Structuring of Sense......Page 161
Part III Encountering Žižek......Page 181
7 The Universe as Metacinema......Page 182
8 On the Possibilities of Political Art: How Žižek Misreads Deleuze and Lacan......Page 217
9 The Surplus Gaze of Legibility: Guilt, Ethics, and Out-of-Field in Deleuze, Lacan, and Žižek......Page 239
Part IV Encountering . . .......Page 258
01 Living . . . Again: The Revolutionary Cine-Sign of Zombie-Life......Page 259
Notes on Contributors......Page 281
Index......Page 284

Citation preview

Psychoanalyzing Cinema

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Psychoanalyzing Cinema A Productive Encounter with Lacan, Deleuze, and Žižek Edited by jan jagodzinski

PSYCHOANALYZING CINEMA

Copyright © jan jagodzinski, 2012. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-33855-5 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-34155-9 DOI 10.1057/9781137116949

ISBN 978-1-137-11694-9 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Psychoanalyzing cinema : a productive encounter with Lacan, Deleuze, and Žižek / [edited by] Jan Jagodzinski. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. 1. Psychoanalysis and motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures— Psychological aspects. 3. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Žižek, Slavoj—Criticism and interpretation. I. Jagodzinski, Jan, 1948– PN1995.9.P783P795 2012 791.43⬘653—dc23

2012013712

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Ian Buchanan whose collaborative generosity continues to keep critical thought alive

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xvii

Introduction . . . of Sorts, Sort of jan jagodzinski Lacan: Master I Žižek: Master II Slave Revolt: Guattari Badiou: Master III Revolt Slave! Deleuze SchizoCrets

Part I

1 1 7 10 13 17 19

Encountering Lacan

1 Light, Camera, Action! The Luminous Worlds of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze Hanjo Berressem

45

2 Hearing Voices: Schizoanalysis and the Voice as Image in the Cinema of David Lynch Frida Beckman

71

3 Encore: Trauma and Counter-memory in Kim Ki-duk’s Time Meera Lee

Part II

89

Encountering Deleuze

4 Antagonism or Multiplicity: The Struggle between Psychoanalysis and Deleuze in Godard’s Cinema Todd McGowan

111

viii

CONTENTS

5 Against Limits: Deleuze, Lacan, and the Possibility of Love Sheila Kunkle 6 Occasioning the Real: Lacan, Deleuze, and Cinematic Structuring of Sense Emanuelle Wessels

Part III

129

147

Encountering Žižek

7 The Universe as Metacinema Patricia Pisters

169

8 On the Possibilities of Political Art: How Žižek Misreads Deleuze and Lacan Robert Samuels

205

9 The Surplus Gaze of Legibility: Guilt, Ethics, and Out-of-Field in Deleuze, Lacan, and Žižek A. Kiarina Kordela

227

Part IV Encountering . . . 01 Living . . . Again: The Revolutionary Cine-Sign of Zombie-Life Jason Wallin

249

Notes on Contributors

271

Index

275

List of Illustrations

1.1 Lacan’s Three Diagrams

54

Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI (NY: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 91 and p. 106.

2.1 Aligning the body with an already determined voice

75

2.2 The present becoming thin as a mirror

76

2.3 A song and a tear that already exist

77

From Mulholland Drive (2001) directed by David Lynch, Universal Pictures

3.1 A path crossing of Se-hŭi (Park Ji-yeon) and Sae- hŭi (Seong Hyeon-a) in the opening sequence of Time

90

From Time (Shi gan) (2006) directed by Kim Ki-duk, Happinet Pictures

5.1 Manni and Lola

138

From Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) (1998) directed by Tom Tykwer, Sony Pictures Classics

6.1 Arial View, Dogville

157

6.2 Grace and Tom

159

From Dogville (2003) directed by Lars von Trier, Zentropa Entertainments

01.1 Zombie From Land of the Dead (2005) directed by George A. Romero, Universal Pictures

250

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Preface

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his collection of chapters addresses the productive encounters among three well-known figures: Lacan, Deleuze, Žižek, as applied to the field of cinema and its discontents. While there is no question concerning the influence of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze within cinema studies, the extraordinary oeuvre that Slavoj Žižek has produced is equally formidable. Love him or hate him he is a voice to be reckoned with. Can there be such a thing as a ‘productive’ encounter among|between these positions|systems? If you’re a Deleuzian you might ask whether a combination of such strange heterogeneous singularities can come together to form an interkingdom of new desires. Can a species of deleuzežižekians emerge, or is that too monstrous a creature to walk the planet? Or, there may well be a productive repulsion at work, a quarantine enforced around the creature so that its contamination doesn’t continue to spread virally. If you were a Lacanian (early, middle, late?) you might play the analyst to see if a productive signifier might emerge within the clinic of the Academy; if you were a Žižekian, perhaps you would commit an impossible revolutionary ‘act’ to crush the soul of the symbolic order. The cinematic field, after all, already has its hard divisive lines and boundaries in place: its cognitivists, neoformalists, phenomenologists, hermeneuticians, and post-structuralists. Some will never budge. Yet boundaries are necessary to play the game of life even though we don’t know when the endgame will come. All we know is that it will, for all of us. When one reads intellectual autobiographies like Elizabeth Rudinesco’s on Lacan, or François Dosse’s exploration of the lives of Deleuze and Guattari (and I am sure in the future one will be written that dwells on Žižek’s escapades—stories already circulate), there should be no surprise to learn that academics are no less besieged by demons of their own making and choosing than anyone else. Who isn’t ‘fucked up’ in some way? More important is how one relates in the world knowing one’s flaws. The cinematic field remains teaming with life like those bugs digging away under the well-manicured lawn in the opening sequence of shots of Lynch’s Blue Velvet. I have structured the book in four parts: Encountering Lacan, Encountering Deleuze, Encountering Žižek, and Encountering . . . .

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The friends who have been grouped this way are somewhat arbitrary since many engage all three positions; however, I have staged it this way since some lean more to one position than another. My own encounter in the introduction is also not ‘evenly’ balanced for those who care to read it. The last encounter of the collection is purposefully left open. Within it sits a lone essay by my colleague and friend Jason Wallin. Should you read it, you will know why. Each author in this collection has staged their own production, and has taken their own stance in relation to these three figures. It is best that they speak for themselves. My introduction that follows is of a much different order. The collection starts with Lacanian encounters, beginning with a stunning essay by Hanjo Berressem, “Light, Camera, Action! The Luminous Worlds of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze.” Hanjo meticulously explores the way light has been theorized by Lacan and Deleuze, as well as Fritz Heider. This is an underdeveloped area in cinematic theory. Hanjo’s extraordinary ability to cut through, what are always difficult theoretical conceptualizations, maintains that film studies still need to develop an optical epistemology and an optical ontology. His essay is meant as a prolegomenon to such a project. Next is Frida Beckman’s “Hearing Voices: Schizoanalysis and the Voice as Image in the Cinema of David Lynch,” which explores the voice as theorized by both Lacan and Deluze in David Lynch’s famous Mulholland Drive, which Todd MacGowan has also analyzed. Although we have frequented the same conferences together, I have not met Frida personally. I am so grateful she was willing to contribute to this collection. Her work is truly ‘breathtaking.’ Readers will find simply a superb exploration as to how Lacan and Deleuze taken side-by-side can increase the reverberation of our sensitivity to filmic sound. Her essay reminds me of the same care that Mladen Dolar takes in his exploration in A Voice and Nothing More. Here Frida, in my estimation, is able to add a dimension that even Dolar has not yet adequately thought through. Closing this section is Meera Lee’s stunning exploration of the infamous South Korean director, Kim Ki-duc’s film Time. “Encore: Trauma and Counter-memory in Kim Ki-duk’s Time” is a tour de force of theoretical agility when it comes to the contortions of the time-image. Meera is able to tease out the contemporary questions of identity, memory, trauma, and especially love in the way they reverberate through the National ‘soul|seoul’ of South Korea. It should be noted that all three authors engage Žižek in their conversations. Section II, the encounters with Deleuze, first draws on two of my friends who have both edited an extremely influential book, Lacan and Contemporary Film. I will be the first to admit that I tried to persuade

PREFACE

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them through my commentary of the ‘evil’ of their ways, but they wouldn’t crack! Todd McGowan’s essay, “Antagonism or Multiplicity: The Struggle between Psychoanalysis and Deleuze in Godard’s Cinema,” is exemplary of the intended spirit of this collection. It is crucial for its problematic. Todd explores a historical dimension of cinema by way of a pivotal figure, Jean-Luc Godard, raising the question as to the consequences of Godard’s ‘break’ within his own trajectory. Todd’s analysis shows why he is one of the foremost Lacanian cinema theorists writing today. Not only does he have a firm grasp of cinematic history, he is also very aware of Deleuzian developments in his field. He puts all those skills to work to argue that Godard indeed made the wrong ‘turn.’ Sheila Kunkle’s essay that follows, “Against Limits: Deleuze, Lacan, and the Possibility of Love,” is equally a defense of Lacan. At issue here is the question of chance and repetition when it comes to Tom Tyker’s Run Lola Run. I tried to also persuade her about the ‘error’ of her ways, but she would have none of it! We have always had a warm relationship, despite any ‘differences.’ It has been many years since I met Sheila at an Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) gathering. Sheila exhibits a quality few academics have: she is extraordinarily bright, but she is also equally modest as she is bright. When one reads any of her essays this becomes quickly apparent. They are simply works of art. Sheila is a consummate film buff in the way she can pick out details most of us miss. But more, her grasp of Lacan, Žižek, and Badiou is equally impressive, as she too admirably applies these to make the case for Lacan on love. In this section I have also included Emanuelle Wessels’s remarkable essay, “Occasioning the Real: Lacan, Deleuze, and Cinematic Structuring of Sense.” Emanuelle explores to what extent contemporary revisions of Lacanian film theory of the gaze can be aligned with Deleuze’s understanding of sense. Through careful exploratory analysis, she raises the question whether a revised return to apparatus theory and film as language may still be productive. To strengthen and make her case Emanuelle analyzes Lars von Trier’s well-known film Dogville. Section III is all about responding to Žižek. The encounters here begin with Patricia Pisters who has been gracious enough to allow me to reprint the first chapter to what has become a seminal book in the field of Deleuzian cinema, The Matrix of Visual Culture. I was indeed fortunate to have met Patricia when she feverishly worked with extraordinary energy to organize a Deleuze ‘camp’ and conference in Amsterdam in 2010. There are few scholars whose kindness and good will is immediately felt. Any graduate student under her care knows this well. Patricia continues to advance the field of Deleuzian cinema with her concept of the neuroimage. Her book, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital

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Screen Culture will be released in 2012 by Stanford Press. In this chapter, “The Universe as Metacinema,” she offers the scope of Deleuzian film studies when discussing films such as Strange Days. Yet, it is her reply to Žižek in relation to his particular take on Hitchcock that is of interest to the problematic of this collection. Robert Samuels’s chapter, “On the Possibilities of Political Art: How Žižek Misreads Deleuze and Lacan,” is a tour de force through theory. Bob is no stranger to the work of Žižek, nor to the man himself having studied with Žižek in Paris under J-A Miller. Bob’s background in Lacan is impeccable; watching him ‘teach’ is truly fascinating. He is able to render complex issues with ease and make one laugh with a boldness that doesn’t need ‘dirty jokes.’ Bob takes on Žižek’s misreading of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and Nashville. But this is really a pretense to show how Žižek fails to see Deleuze’s incorporation of CS Peirce’s semiological structure in the two cinema books, and the way this ‘structuralism’ has direct ties to Lacan’s own developments. He deftly shows how Žižek contorts Deleuze for his own ends. Bob has developed his own concept of ‘automodernity’ as a way to ‘worry’ the way the new media, cultural studies, and postmodernism have been taken up and celebrated noncritically. The last chapter of this section is Kiarina Kordela’s, “The Surplus Gaze of Legibility: Guilt, Ethics, and Out-of-Field in Deleuze, Lacan, and Žižek.” For anyone who has not yet read $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, you would find it a compelling read. Though I have not personally met Kiarina, it seems our meeting continues to be a missed encounter since we have attended the same conferences together. E-mail exchanges have been cordial and fun. One immediately senses that this is someone who loves to explore new theoretical territory, is open to the world, and willing to exchange ideas with relish. In this particular chapter Kiarina directly addresses Patricia’s concerns with Žižek and continues to further problematize Žižek’s position within the context of both Deleuze and Lacan. Kiarina opens up for us the question surrounding the ‘surplus gaze’ of the cinema. We come finally to a section that has its ‘encounter’ yet to come: the beyond that has not happened or about to happen as the ellipse . . . indicates. Its place is out of joint (01). I have purposefully put it here to break with the triadic structures that seem to proliferate in the theories I have been reading, and with the structure of the title and contents. The ‘fourth’ has its significance not only in Lacan’s sinthome but as the Outside as well. It has wormed its way in all of the chapters above. I think it is appropriate to place Jason Wallin’s essay, “Living . . . Again: The Revolutionary Cine-Sign of Zombie-Life,” here as a ‘forwarding.’ It is a zombie ‘piece,’ monstrous in its outpourings that seems to say all that has gone before just isn’t radical enough, not abstract enough! The ‘people yet to come’ are already here,

PREFACE

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so to speak. The so-called cretins have already become seers, but we are too blind to notice them walking among us. It is a magical piece in its ability to push schizo-cinema to the edge of delirium when it is read. It gives one a sense that all is not lost, although all is lost. Jason is a colleague and friend. I am indeed fortunate that we are ‘mediators’ to one another. I know it all sounds like I have simply overpraised this gathering of friends, gone into the heights of hyperbole so that they all sound so good. Well, they are. The reader will be blown away as they read each chapter, which is a jewel onto itself in the theoretical care taken to forward arguments with stance of conviction. Their integrity is remarkable. Finally, I would like to say: I wish it were possible to have all of the above authors’|friends’ names appear on the front cover as a heterogeneous ‘multitude’ that helped explore this particular problematic of the book’s title. I am simply their messenger. Alas, when I asked Palgrave, I was told it was against their policy. No more need be said.

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Acknowledgments

I

wish to thank the small group of friends who have entrusted me with their work. I hope that you will not be disappointed when you open the pages and begin to read one another’s contributions. I think you will say it was worth the wait. I want to especially thank Patricia Pisters for her support by offering to republish a groundbreaking essay, which will certainly be a classical piece in the debates that are taking place in cinema studies. I have rarely found a more open and giving person. I want to also thank Todd McGowan whom I have had the pleasure to know from the many APCS conferences we have attended. It is also rare to find such a generous scholar whose brilliance and modesty make him someone I love. His work always spins my head, as it should. Thanks also to Sheila Kunkle; there have been few precious opportunities to meet at conferences over these past years. Though I’ve lost touch with her, her endearing spirit is always at hand. Hanjo Bressemmen has my deepest respects for his remarkable intellect, his modest demeanor, and his ability to work the smooth spaces in the social order. He embodies the paradox of becoming imperceptible. There is always so much to learn from his graphic-like compositions, which seem to always take on the most difficult problematic, always unfolding worlds that I never knew existed. His contribution sparkles. Many thanks to two contributors who have exceeded the meaning of what it means to be patient. When I first approached Emanuella Wessels via e-mail about this collection, she generously offered her contribution. Little did she and I know how long her contribution would take to see the light of day! The same must be said of Robert Samuels, whose sense of social justice and activism holds no bounds. He is truly an ‘organic intellectual’ in the best sense of that word, whom I have known for many years via a chance meeting in New York. He took out the summer to reread Deleuze’s cinema books (Bob had attended Deleuze’s classes in Paris) so that he might respond adequately to Žižek with whom he studied under the tutelage of J-A Miller in Paris. It was unfortunate that his essay sat in my computer for over a year. Many thanks also to Meera Lee with whom I had a brief but fortuitous meeting in Amsterdam where the name Kim Ki-duc found a common

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ground for both of us. I thank her for her superbly crafted essay on Time. It has made me realize how far I must yet travel to reach her insights on such an enigmatic director. I would also thank Frida Beckmen for her exquisite contribution to this collection. She shares with us her most recent work on voice. Although our paths must have crossed at conferences we did not met. I believe it is only a question of time. My thanks to Kiarina Kordelia as well whose exchanges have helped me clarify my own still confused position. She is an intellect to be reckoned with. I hope that we will meet soon. Last, I would like to thank my colleague in struggle, Jason Wallin. His chapter is anything but stunning, as readers will see. Jason Wallin is as modest as he is bright, and as generous as he is courteous and respectful of others: a real gem. My sincerest thanks to my friend Ron Wigglesworth for making the valiant effort to grace the front cover with one of his amazing prints. It makes the book very special. I am so happy that the cover design was resolved thanks to the efforts of Robyn Curtis at Palgrave.

Introduction . . . of Sorts, Sort of jan jagodzinski

T

his introduction most likely has already been written (or at least some variation of) by many who have thrown themselves over the precipice and have fallen smack into the formidable theoretical edifice that the three key figures of the book’s title present: Lacan, Deleuze, and Žižek. Flattened by the fall, one slides down, arms outstretched in despair. How to pick oneself up again? This introduction is written more in the style of l’art brut than that of a graceful performance. Fèlix Guattari is missing—of course, Žižek is not sorry about this when it comes to his assessment of Deleuze. So is Alain Badiou. Anyone sorry? Well, again, maybe Žižek is, who seems to have a love|hate relationship toward Badiou, trying to betray him ‘properly,’ but nevertheless agreeing with Badiou’s indictment that Deleuze is indeed a nauseous theorist of the One. Someone is always missing, but they nevertheless haunt the Outside. Is there such a thing—Outside? We might start there and return to it later when we take up the cinematic aspects of this question by first mapping out an obvious tension that persists in the way the Real is taken up in their respective ‘systems,’ if that indeed is the right word to use. Guattari and Badiou are very much in play in the way Lacan influences Badiou and Guattari influences Deleuze. The task ahead feels daunting. Lacan: Master 1 The discrepancies in the way the Real is taken up in their respective systems foregrounds the ethicopolitical stakes that are at play in the contemporary struggle for transformative change of a neoliberal system that is wedded to global designer capitalism in the twenty-first century, which has

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been marked by a decade of ecological worry and terrorist fervor. I hope to show toward the end of this introduction how this ties up with cinema. I would like to begin with the paradoxical tension that persists in Lacan’s conceptualization of the Real that teeters back and forth throughout his teachings. This is succinctly presented by Bruce Fink’s (1995) discussion of the Lacanian subject as moving from “Real1,” which is the presymbolic Real, to “Real2“, the so-called hard kernel of the Real that remains once language situates the conscious subject through the signifier. The Real is then expulsed, what Freud called Bejahung, as an affirmation that constitutes the subject’s emergence in the symbolic order. Given that the signifier of language plays such an overwhelming role in Lacan’s system as a gap between language and subject,1 it seems right to say, in distinction, R1 characterizes the processes of conceptualization of the embryo in the Mother’s womb, the chora in Julia Kristeva’s terms, or the “matrixial borderspace” in Bracha Ettinger’s (2006) terms, which are tied to ‘Nature,’ meaning once conception begins, the ‘natural’ forces at work cannot be controlled; they may be terminated through abortion or miscarriage, the fetus influenced by diet and lifestyle, but the ‘switch’ has been thrown and the development put into motion.2 The presymbolic Real, avant la lettre, is described by Fink as “without zones, subdivisions, localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the [R]eal is a sort of unrent, undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere, there being no space between the threads that are its ‘stuff’ ” (24). ‘Stuff,’ of course, is a pedestrian way of referring to materialism, which is ‘itself’ (as we shall see) immaterial when it comes to the quantum universe and problematics of chaos. Fink sounds very Deleuzian when he ends his description with “It is the sort of smooth, seamless surface or space which applies as much to a child’s body as the whole universe.” R 2, après la lettre, is “best understood as that which has not been symbolized, remains to be symbolized, or even resists symbolization” (25, emphasis in original). It appears “after the letter which is characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself, that is, which is generated by the symbolic: “There is thus always a remainder which persists alongside the symbolic” (27, emphasis in original). Being arises only with the symbolic. What’s crucial to note here, in the register of R1, the triumph of showing (eye) and saying (ear) is more dominant during the holophrastic speech phase of child development than naming when the signifier ‘drops,’ so to speak, and language becomes more articulate forming the subject and the residual R 2. Much can go wrong, of course, from the passage of R1 to R2, technically speaking from ‘alienation’ to ‘separation,’ as the symbolic order imposes itself to organize and ‘civilize’ the ‘driven’ (Triebe) body, as each of us must surrender our particular ‘pound of flesh’ to achieve the pleasure of desire

INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF

3

in the Lacanian system and suffer the consequences of excess (jouissance). A veil or a screen has to appear to make the world ‘tolerable.’ This frame as a ‘cut’ has to emerge; otherwise the world is experienced as ‘pure’ chaos—as [R]eal.3 But pathologies emerge. They are so named but one wonders whether all pathologies are but singular responses to the necessity of this “civilizing process,” to use Norbert Elias’s term here, which psychiatry then medicalizes.4 Psychosis is one such malady as there is a failure of Bejahung. While the psychotic comes into language, language doesn’t become ‘speech.’ The subject is not subjectivized, not inviduated. Language is stripped of its embodiment. It becomes reified, ex-isting outside the symbolic texture. The voices that psychotics hear present certitude, demand, and belief that they must obey them since there is no symbolic to obey, even though these voices are taken as evil and apt to hurt them.5 Psychotics feel a gaze haunting them. The signifier of ‘foreclosure’ (Verwerfung), of the symbolic into the Real, is taken to be none other than the all-embracing objet a of Lacanian thought that seems to do its duty ubiquitously throughout his teachings. In order to ‘close’ a symbolic universe, to ‘frame’ it, to paradoxically make it appear ‘full’ when one is given a position within it, an element has to be excluded (cut, withdrawn, subtracted) from the symbolic that will create absences (lack) and presents (place) within that symbolic universe. The missing signifier orders things into a ‘set’ (or state). Values can now be assigned.6 In this explication of the Real, the hard kernel is an entity that is constructed ‘afterward,’ thereby creating a particular “distortion of the symbolic structure” (Žižek, 1989, 162)7. As Fink shows, this ordering can be reduced to +s and –s, a symbolic code to be ‘ciphered,’ which, in contemporary terms, is like the series of 0s and 1s of digitalization. The symbolic enables representation through the Imaginary, which itself is never adequate, up to the task, always subject to misrecognition (méconaissance) because there is only a vanishing point to be found, the false infinity of perception, beyond which lays the ephemeral gaze of the Real. The objet a, a bit of the Real as Žižek is fond of saying, structurally has no place in this structure. Its absence or structural lack enables a frame to emerge as ‘reality.’ Being and lack-of-being in Lacan’s system are two sides of the same coin. With psychosis the objet a is not excluded but remains sustained within their frame of reality as the hallucinated gaze or voice that has become disembodied. Psychosis is closer to R1 than to R2. There is no screen to filter or gain distance from the torturous voices and looks. Whether this is a neurological condition to be treated with antipsychotic drugs is not my place to judge. Taken at its best, the psychotic becomes what could be called an ‘Outsider artist.’ To cope with the Real of the Symbolic, he or she staves off the psychosis by artistically producing an elaborate Imaginary idiosyncratic alternative world that can be escaped into and controlled, continuously (re)created so as to develop a ‘minimal’

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screen that would ensure belonging. Most Outsider artists are recluses; they keep to themselves, taking on menial jobs that carry no authority, struggling with their ‘demons’ at home, as it were.8 It is my contention that the psychotic becomes the inspirational figure for the late Lacan of the Real (1963–1981)9 as a reply to the inspirational figure of the schizophrenic as first developed by Deleuze|Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and, to a certain extent, the hysterical challenge concerning sexuation as the denial of feminine jouissance brought into his ranks by Luce Irigaray (1970–1974) primarily through her habilitation, Specuum, de l’autre femme. This precipitated a crisis, a subjective destitution, that slowly began to unfold just after the May 68 Paris uprisings. In Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–1970), given just after the Paris uprising of May 1968 had calmed down, Lacan had already seen through the Oedipus myth as simply a Freudian fantasy (Grigg, 2006), and thus began to revise and play with it. As Elizabeth Roudinesco (1997, 347) tells us, at that time, ca. 1970, his idolatry had already turned into a theoretical tyranny as “King Ubu.” Seminar XX, Encore (1972–1973), was a response to Irigaray. In this seminar Lacan introduces the notion of lalangue (translated into the English as “llanguage” by Bruce Fink) as the Real in language, which begins to identify the affects of the mother tongue10 through its phonetic sounds, rhythms, alliterations, and so on. In general, it addresses a language’s materiality: Roland Barthes’ ‘grain’ of the voice, for instance, its sonority, textuality, and ‘litterality.’ The letter, and here we should not yet think ‘element’ given the priority of alphabetization for Lacan, takes on the function of the Real, as the Real of the material signifier.11 While further developed by Kristeva’s “semiotic” it also has direct parallels with Deleuze’s ‘logique du sens,’ and différence et répétition, his habilitation (second or confirming doctorate). Both were published in 1968–1969.12 With lalangue, jouissance undergoes a change as jouis-sens. The word play refers to an enjoyment in sense or meaning; or, as “J’ouïs sens” (I hear sense) that has also a demand about it as “I hear.” The demand of the voice, as superego, also becomes interesting when thought in relation to Deleuze’s univocity that emerges in his two immanence books where he refers to univocity as simply Voice (following Spinoza).13 Jouis-sens is, therefore, an insistence in language, and within it rather than beyond it, carrying an affective intensity. The structuralism of “The unconscious structured as a language” begins to undergo modification with this move. Lalangue is Lacan’s stepping stone to the “One of jouissance,” toward the sinthome, which identifies singularity as an enigma of the unconscious Cogito (the “it thinks”) via the ‘enjoyment’ of letters.14 With the seminars that followed, their trajectory seemed to be in response to the impact of Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, which was

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not immediately ‘fully’ felt until Thousand Plateaus came out in 1980. By that time Lacan was ill. He had dismissed his school and was to pass away the following year. As Roudinesco (1997, 348) once more informs us, Lacan “grumbled” to Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi (a former student of Althusser) as recorded in her journal that Deleuze|Guattari’s idea of a “desiring machine” had been stolen from him.15 In one sense he was right. In Seminar XX, Encore, Lacan discusses the letters of the unconscious as an assemblage. “[L]etters constitute (font) [create] assemblages. They don’t designate assemblages, they are assemblages. They are taken as (comme) functioning like (comme) these assemblages themselves” (47–48, emphasis in original). Serge Leclaire had been praised both by Lacan in Seminar XI, Four Fundamentals,16 and by Deleuze|Gattuari in A-O (323–324) for doing what amounts to the same thing. Leclaire attempted to identify a final non-sensical syntax that lay at the ‘core’ of a subject’s desire. This fiction of the unconscious, Leclaire called the “pure being of desire.”17 These were “pure signifiers” (pures singularités). Like Proust’s celebrated example of madeleine cake, the smell of which brought back a flood of memories involuntarily, Leclaire identifies what would be insignificant details (odors, beauty marks, the acidity of baked apples, modulations in a voice), technically speaking the ‘partial objects’18 that assemble and heterogeneously associate themselves unconsciously, not burdened by any necessary link, into an irreducible singularity unique for that patient. Deleuze|Guattari recognize Leclaire’s ‘molecularity’ and the “pure signifier” as a ‘desiring machine’; however, their differences with him are articulated in a round table discussion shortly after the release of the book in 1972.19 Leclaire will not radicalize the partial object to the molecular state as a radical difference. It “can be defined only ‘by difference’ and ‘in relation to the signifier’” (in Deleuze, 2004, 222). Lacan takes a different turn that eventually leads up to his sinthome, the fourth ring in the Borremean knot that becomes Lacan’s enigmatic ‘desiring machine’ that produces meaning out of nothing, structuring the jouis-sens throughout the symbolic.20 The key here is the creation of a new signifier, a fourth term that intervenes (perhaps ‘bands’ is better) the RIS triumvirate, which is addressed to the lack in the Other. How should one understand this “lack” given that manque is such a contentious concept? One way, an affirmative way, is to take this lack as referring to the Outside, the unthought, that which is to be created ex nihilo. The ensuing creativity should be seen as intervening into the authority of the symbolic given that there is no lack of the Other of the Other; that is, when one stays under the umbrella of the Other. Recalling that lalangue is the knowledge of the Real, the ‘letter’ then no longer represents jouissance; rather it is jouissance. It becomes the “One” that presides over the subject. Consequently,

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the sinthome now becomes the fundamental kernel of one’s identity in the way meaning is ‘enjoyed.’ In Seminar XXII, RIS, Lacan displaces the longstanding Name-of-the-Father that is to take the place of the lack in the Other so that the three registers can be knotted enabling jouissance to be forbidden. He now maintains that any element can become a sinthome and function in place of Le nom du père.21 Here I think is where we come to a sort of endgame that emerges with Lacan in his ‘anthropomorphic ‘ passion for parlêtre by naming “Joyce the symptom,” or “Joyce means symptom|sinthome,” as developed in his S XXIII Sinthome. Jacques-Alain Miller (2008) charts Lacan’s withdrawal of the primacy of the (big) Other in what he punningly calls “the Other side of Lacan.” “His Other thus often seems singularly inflated, a veritable junk yard, a shambles, and the more the Other grew, the more the subject shrank, the more it emptied. [. . .] In place of the Other there is a whole other principle of identity”(62, 63), which Miller, culling from the Sinthome Seminar names the One-body, from the Other to the One. An encounter with the sinthome “face-to-face” was for Lacan like “Two times zero makes [O]ne.”22 It is with the late late Lacan through what might be termed a ‘productive psychosis’ that a reply to Deleuze|Guattari’s schizophrenic is finally achieved. “How do you know if the unconscious is [R]eal or imaginary?” he says. “It presents an ambiguity between the two” (Lacan, Sinthome, qtd. in Miller, 65). When a subject identifies totally with his or her sinthome, then there is no analysis, no opening to insert a question. The Outsider artist in effect closes him or herself off in her or his own art(ifice) as a One or ego, the ego no longer referring to that of the Freudian ego of signified representation, but to an investment in the One-body in relationship to the (big) Other’s lack, an investment between the Real and the Imaginary, which itself is ambiguous. The ego here rather than being ‘filled’ with narcissism is emptied. The One becomes ignorant, just the opposite of arrogant, ‘filled’ with knowledge.23 It is perhaps no wonder that such Outside artists, such as Joyce ‘makes a litter of the letter,’ or some like Henry Darger collects discarded objects picked up daily in and around Lincoln Park, Chicago, where he lived for 43 years. Outsider artists, in effect, gather up what is usually considered the abject in the Kristevian sense, that which the symbolic order discards, sees as ‘trash.’ Joyce’s litter of the letter, the trash and discards, the waste that society throws away, is picked up and reassembled to make a new Imaginary order. A surprise seems to emerge, if I have this right, in the last seminar before Lacan decides to end his school to start fresh. S XXIV title, L’insu que sait de l’une bévue s’aileà mourre, is (apparently) a pun where “unebévue” means blunder or mistake.24 The title then might be translated as “The unknown that knows about the one-blunder chances love.” Spoken,

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with puns ignored, it becomes: “L’insuccès de l’une-bévue, c’est l’amour,” which means “Love is the failure of the one-blunder.” Verhaeghe and Declercq (2002), drawing from this particular seminar, maintain that Lacan finally addresses the controversy over the ‘formulae of sexuation’ where woman is given a special relationship to objet a and jouissance due to her nonexistence in the symbolic order. Quoting Lacan from that seminar, they write, “On the level of the sinthome . . . there is a rapport . . . there is only rapport where there is a sinthome” (76). This is rather startling given the nonrapport that Lacan maintained all those years. Is this his ‘blunder’? The sinthome is located on the side of femininity, which has affinities with what Deleuze|Guattari named ‘becoming woman.’25 With the sinthome, it seems desire is no longer defined by lack. It addresses the lack in the symbolic that is indicative of the unthought itself, the limit point of the Symbolic, the Outside. It opens up to all the worries that surround human beings as ‘divine animals,’ creating and destroying ourselves. How to go about this task remains perplexing. If there is a Joyce, there is also a “Fernando Pessoa,” whose patronym in Portuguese means “no one.” As Soler (2003, 99) points out, Pessoa proliferated his ‘names’ at least as 50 different authors (as critic, writer, philosopher, humorist, and theoretician). “A man who never was,” Pessoa was so immersed in the Real that he was “unnameable,” living it seems by generating a continuous variation of imaginary frames rather than the letter in the Real. The line between ‘madness’ and artistry is always precarious. Žižek: Master II It is, of course, Žižek who has explored the late Lacan’s emphasis on the Real most thoroughly, stemming from his tutelage with Mladen Dolar in Ljubljana and Jacques-Alain Miller in Paris. He, Renata Salecl, and Alenka Zupančič, three of the most notable members of the Slovene Lacanian School, have all traveled afar since the mid-1980s in Ljubljana. Adrian Johnston (2008) characterizes Žižek’s ontology as “transcendental materialism,” claiming it to be a sixth position (274) that can be added to the five philosophical paradigms that Badiou outlined in his Theory of the Subject. Basically the German Idealist tradition that problematizes the constitution of the subject is re-read through a Lacanian lens, with the key figures of Schelling, Kant, and Hegel doing the heavy lifting, each having gone through a ‘makeover’ to his liking in postmodernist fashion. It seems to me that, like Lacan, the psychotic subject continues to play a key inspirational role given that the primal processes are continually evoked. In the above section, the interpretative journey I took through

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Lacan to the sinthome suggested an identification with one’s sinthome (to identify with one’s fundamental fantasy in Žižek’s terms26) could be creatively affirming—dangerous—but affirming primarily through art, and that this has to be addressed to aspects of a failed Symbolic, especially the barred feminine of the symbolic order.27 Lack could be interpreted not in negative terms, but as the unthought that is to keep some semblance of freedom open. This would mean exploring the Real-Imaginary psychic dimensions in relation to one’s sinthome (fundamental fantasy). Instead of this ‘creative’ trajectory, Žižek seems to take another tact—one more in keeping with the death drive and destruction: more accurately I think, the route of Versagung (refusal) to address this lack in the Real. The subject sacrifices himself or herself in relation to the lack that is constitutive of the symbolic order through a symbolic act. It is a refusal of aphanisis, the passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, to be affirmed by it; the signifier is refused to speak (sagen) the subject. As a form of (radical) resistance one is ‘named’ for the sacrifice that can negate the symbolic order. In many cases Žižek seems to continually confirm or rather demonstrate the obvious point that “Woman does not exist” through various filmic examples. His is a continuous exploration between the Real and the Symbolic psychic registers. Most often the only road to freedom seems to be through the ‘act’ as informed by the death drive, an act of refusal that easily, in the many examples he gives, slips into a passage a l’acte that is suicidal. Either way physical death gains meaning as a symbolic act (“between two death”) that disturbs the symbolic order, or ruptures it in some way. Žižek evokes, for instance, the neo–noir femme fatale 28 as the figure who destroys the masculine “fundamental fantasy.” Most clearly the Versagung is discussed in relation to one of Lacan’s key literary figures, Syne de Coûfontaine who is often compared to Antigone by both Zupančič (2003) and Žižek (2006).29 Though this ‘act’ has been thoroughly criticized,30 it does not perturb Žižek at all. There have been plenty of other critiques.31 Alan Johnson (2010), for example, has presented an extraordinary devastating critique of Žižek’s political theory of revolutionary change, which he maintains is explicitly totalitarian, antidemocratic, authoritarian, and even cryptofascist. Paul Bowman (2010), reflecting on Johnson’s essay and Žižek’s dismissal of all the authors who addressed his work in The Truth of Žižek (2007) that he edited with Richard Stamp, concludes that there is plenty to worry about if Žižek is read seriously as many left leaning academicians do. What to make of this? Žižek appears to be the ‘bulletproof monk,’ to call on Paul Hunter’s film, the keeper of Lacan’s scroll, holding onto it in a much different way than J-A. Miller who is the consummate teacher and articulator of what Lacan ‘meant,’ or Mladen Dolar, for that

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matter, whose philosophical expositions are equally jewels of articulation. One way is to accept Žižek’s ‘God’-like position, his commentary on everything, which generates inconsistencies, obscuranticism, incoherence, rhizomatic essays, comedic relief, and Escher-like representations as an enactment of his own sinthome. Like Joyce, the ‘litter of the letter’ is the extraordinary, mind-boggling output of essays, books, interviews, and films. It is a cultivation of negation and destruction as a form of creativity.32 Žižek draws on the lack in the Real as a self-acclaimed analyst of the symbolic order, which is his ‘global’ analysand. Nothing escapes him (or so it seems). There is nothing he cannot comment on, regardless how absurd and outrageous his pronouncements are. Yet, no one seems to see through his game, confirming that he remains ‘the subject who is supposed to know.’ The One, as the nonbarred Master signifier (S) is in effect ‘stupid.’ To form a new Symbolic means disregarding the Other (S2); the S1 is a doubled being, both S and S1, the place of Authority. Žižek takes himself to be the Master: “I am what I say.”33 The academy’s embrace of his Lacanese Marxist Hegelianism that offers the promise of some sort of revolutionary subject, whose “radical voluntarism” is in fidelity to the Badiouian Event,34 fills up the lack that shapes the ‘university knowledge industry’ of the left since any claims to ‘grand narratives’ and historical progressivism have all but vanished, although they are live and well within religious fundamentalisms where eschatology holds its own. The academy seeks a Master, like those students that Lacan chastised after ’68 revolts. Žižek seems to offer a productive psychosis that, in its most generous reading, awaits a sort of sainthood or martyrdom that Lacan praised in his Television appearance to be achieved at the end of therapeutic treatment, a point reached when the analysand ‘desupposes’ the analyst as Master. Gold then turns to shit as desire drains away. One should then just walk away. The academy is a long way from this point. Žižek remains Lacan’s most fabulous monstrous child. His self-deprecating style, always joking about his inadequacies, utilizing especially the crass joke to level the playing field, as it were, with humor being the uncertain art of ‘surfaces,’ seems to confirm the Lacanian ‘ethics’ that he is practicing by not giving ground to the Other’s desire. He plays to the lack of the Other (symbolic order, academy). It’s nothing ‘personal’ although it seems to be just the opposite: full of contentious ad hominem attacks and polemics. The relation of self and other is reconfigured as ‘individual’ (as in the Sinthome Seminar) and Other (society), an impersonal structural relationship. To be done with Žižek; perhaps I now have reached this point after a fortuitous meeting when he was still unknown at Klagenfurt University in 1992. That’s a long time in therapy!

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Slave Revolt: Guattari Both Žižek and Badiou are no fans of Deleuze|Guattari, each for a different reason. But both assure each other that this particular cancer needs an operation. In this section I want to rehearse some of their complaints, point out the difference between the figure of the schizophrenic and the psychotic, and sprinkle this with my own dissatisfaction with Peter Hallward’s interventions into this mix. It’s best to begin with Žižek, whose Organs without Body (2004) has received wide attention as being ‘one of his worst books.’ 35 Anti-Oedipus, to pick up the story from the Lacan section, presented Lacan with one of the strongest challenges, which he met with the development of the fourth ring, the sinthome. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense36 might be thought as brilliant explorations of what could be taken as laying the foundations for the virtual Real37 where the event is given priority over substance. Ignoring a negative destructive creativity, the tact of Žižek, they develop an affirmative creative potential of the becoming of things. Against the ‘transcendental materialism’ of Žižek, Deleuze develops a ‘transcendental empiricism,’ a radical materialism where experience has no foundation outside itself. Using ‘minor mathematics’38 Deleuze’s early work is already drawing on General Systems Theory (Gregory Bateson) and the beginnings of what becomes complexity and chaos theory that were abuzz at the time.39 The Logic of Sense (better as ‘ontology’ of sense’ or cf. Paul Patton, the logic of the Event) remains influenced by Lacan and Melanie Klein, and the final quarter of the book engages with psychoanalysis.40 It is a structuralist book based on a tertiary structure (Lacan’s ‘logic of the signifier’), wherein the relationship of parallel heterogeneous series is theorized via a ‘differentiator’ that never ceases to circulate between them, linking the two halves of each series. This differentiator is a paradoxical element with 0 symbolic value, which creates an excess in the signifying series (n+1), and a lack in the other signified series (as n–1). At their convergence a singularity is produced, registering an ideal event. So the differentiator is never where one expects it, and it is never found where it is (following the exemplar of Lacan’s Purloined Letter). Deriving his theory of language from Stoic philosophy of propositions, where predicates express attributes of objects, and infinitives capture the becoming of things, Deleuze works with two types of becomings:41 the metaphysical surface, abstract and separate from the body on which language develops—the time of Aion, and the immaterial field of the sense-event, referring to the physical depth of the body as organized into a series of erogenous zones by a paradoxical element, the phallus as borrowed from Lacan—the time of Chronos.42 In LS, Deleuze deals with the delerium of language (délire) as the paradoxes

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between sense and non-sense,43 the structural relationships between the body and the psyche, between sounds and words, and between things and words. As Serge Lecercle (in Williams, 2008, vii) notes, LS is most often perceived as “the work of a structuralist Deleuze, still under the influence of Lacan and psychoanalysis, two unfortunate aspects which his meeting with Guattari enabled him to get rid of.” That meeting resulted in Anti-Oedipus, which, in effect, radically explores R1 of the drives (Triebe)—where there is no speaking, no pârletre, but going further already in 1972 than where Lacan arrives with his Sinthome Seminar in 1975. It was a way to save the radical core of psychoanalysis by going ‘beyond’ it being caught by the desire of the Other (the dialectic of Law and transgression) through the figure of the schizophrenic rather than the psychotic. “The schizo is not revolutionary [as in a revolutionary figure], but the schizophrenic process [as interruption or continuation in the Real1] [. . .]is the potential for revolution” (A-O, 341). While Žižek explores the Real-Symbolic of Lacan as the endgame with the act producing the Name of a vanguard that strikes at the Real of the symbolic, Deleuze|Guattari stay with the Real-Imaginary psychic registers to ‘save’ Lacan and “ give him some schizophrenic help” (N, 14). The Imaginary now draws on the Real to generate the delirium of fabulations and the “powers of the false.” Artists are the successful schizos, which is not to say that suicide, madness, and disappearances are always staved off, when they are able to push the edge of thinking|doing without ‘breaking.’44 Deleuze|Guattari is yet another monstrous child who eventually stops praising its Master. If the psychotic still ‘functions’ within language, the schizophrenic has a delirious relationship with it, caught by the flux of non-sense, madness. Schizophrenic processes are, to cite R. D. Lang (A-O, 84), the interior and exterior voyages of becoming where “the loss of the Ego” is experienced. The trajectory is a move away from the Name, the lunacy of celebrity, toward a form of ‘subjective destitution,’ but it is not one that destroys the ‘vitality’ of life; rather it intensifies it by ‘becoming imperceptible.’ While this sounds indeed mystical, its ethics mandate symbiosis with heterogeneity, with difference qua difference. Deleuze|Guattari posit, in effect, the domain prior to the ‘unconscious structured like a language,’ where there is no “çaparle.” It is the flux of chaos, the madness of the forces of creation, the same realm Žižek draws from Schelling as the Abyss, but taken in an entirely different direction. It is perhaps here that the notion of univocity and vitalism, which is such a stumbling block given that both Badiou and Žižek play it as their ace of spades against him|them, can be briefly taken up. In Difference and Repetition, univocity, as taken from Spinoza, is reworked from God and described in terms of Voice. This could easily be interpreted in terms of the Superego

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or the Gaze itself.45 Who covets the Gaze via the eye, to whose authoritative voice do I listen to, and so on. In A-O any possible transcendentalism is done away with. The Abyss is now described in machinic terms, an ‘intelligent’ materialism where all levels of existence are given equal weight. Anthropomorphism drops away. They posit “inorganic life”46 (or aorganic) that now characterizes ‘univocity.’ God, Voice, One in effect becomes life transposed simply as “intensity” not requiring organs as such. Univocity becomes a ‘sphere’ of inorganic life as processes of assembling —perhaps like our ignorance of dark matter in relation to recognizing that now something is capable of being faster than the speed of light worrying the Einsteinian cosmology that is now becoming undermined.47 This creation is via assemblages, as symbiotic and sympathetic connections, via codings and decodings, among heterogeneous elements (multiplicities). It is when assemblages break down that life (intensification) is renewed. So there is constant pulse, flow, like cell life, terrirtorialization, deteritorialization and the reterritorialization, and so on—the constant becoming of molecular desiring machines that produce large molar aggregate formations. The death drive is thus reconfigured as degree zero of intensities. The creation of a ‘body without organs’ (BwO) presents the primary repression of this flux (A-O, 120). The BwO repels partial objects establishing the minimum gap of paranoia as the drives persecute the body’s depths. This is considered the first passive synthesis: the “paranoiac machine”; this is then followed by the second disjunctive synthesis opening up some relief as partial objects are attracted. The BwO becomes a “miraculating machine.” Comparable to Lacan’s lalangue, BwO appropriates the partial objects turning them into ‘signifying’ chains that are not at the level of meaning but present a ‘spiritual’ corporeality. In the third synthesis of consumption and consummation the BwO becomes a field of intensities, gradients of repulsion (the first synthesis) and attraction (second synthesis) whereby the BwO takes on the intensity of 0, or pure autoaffection. The BwO as a source of production now takes on the same function as the “differentiator” in LS (the phallus for Lacan, and the ‘quasi-cause’ or ‘dark precursor’ in DR). From this last synthesis the acephalic subject (Lacan’s automaton in S XI Four Fundamentals, 53) of the drives (Tiebe) emerges that ‘consumes’ the body’s quantitative and qualitative intensities or affects as in “I feel.” Hallucinations (I see, I hear) and delirium (I think . . .) presuppose this deep level of I feel (A-O, 18). “The partial objects [organs without bodies] and the body without organs are the two material elements of the schizophrenic desiring-machines: the one as the immobile motor, the other as the working parts; the one as the giant molecule, the other as micromolecules—the two together in a relationship of continuity from one end to the other of the molecular chain of desire” (A-O, 327). There is no ‘organism’ per se. Rather the BwO

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is produced as a whole, “but a whole alongside the parts” (A-O, 326, added emphasis). The BwO does not unify nor totalize partial objects, but repels or attracts them. Such is their attempt to overcome the vitalism of life per se and the formalisms of mechanization. The now well-known vocabulary (plane of immanence, abstract machine, BwO, virtual, actual, war machine, and so on) becomes established over the next eight years. Badiou: Master III Anti-Oedipus marks an obvious break in Deleuze’s thought, politicized by both the events of 1968 and his friendship with Guattari. There is no reconciliation to be had between their position and that of Žižek and Badiou. For Žižek, A-O is an alibi out of facing the dead lock (as he claims) that Logic of Sense had established between two logics: the ‘virtual senseevent’48 and the ‘actual’ becoming where discrete bodies are produced (OB, 20–22). Žižek maintains that Deleuze fails to adequately address the “passage” from one to the other. The problem is one of genesis. Given that affects are immaterial and impersonal (neutral), as expressed in the ‘free-floating’ sense-events, how then is this related to bodies and persons? Time and time again Deleuze is accused of this oppositional dualism put in either/or terms in Žižek’s case: idealism versus materialism; the idealism of LS is that the virtual sense-event (as an excess) is the effect of the bodily cause, or the materialism of A-O where it is said that bodies actualize themselves from the field of virtuality— “the logic of sensation” as the title of Deleuze’s book on Bacon suggests. LS and A-O are basically inversions of one another: LS being an accusation of transcendental height while A-O being the accusation of ‘material spiritual’ depth. Drawing on his arsenal of Schelling-Hegel-and a version of Spinoza (OB, 33–34), Žižek then proceeds to “take Deleuze from behind.” Deleuze is ‘lacanized,’ while the sense-event is co-opted in terms of a more revolutionary Event (he has Badiou in mind). The politics of A-O are thus deemed catastrophic. Concentrating mostly on LS, which Deleuze himself called a “psychoanalytical fiction,” Žižek is mostly in sync with its structuralist leanings, transposing key concepts (i.e., quasi-cause = objet a) into the Lacan, but not the Lacan of the sinthome, of the drives (Triebe), as much as the Lacan of desire, also playing a dualist game that can side with either R1 (drive) or R 2 (desire) when needed throughout the book. The dualist accusation against Deleuze is the standard retort made by Badiou in his Clamour of Being, which Žižek relies on, and most recently Peter Hallward (2006) wrote, “The crucial point is that all of the productive, differential or creative force in this dual configuration stems from

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the virtual creating alone, and not from the actual creature” (28, added emphasis). This is just plain wrong.49 The tertiary structure that is found throughout Deleuze’s work can already be identified in Difference and Repetition in the way virtual structures produce various actualizations. The heterogeneous series of differential elements, their relations and singularities that compose these structures enter into a tripartite process of “coupling,” “resonance,” and “forced movement” (DR, 117–118) as induced by a paradoxical element. This ‘differentiator’ (which reappears in LS), communicates the differences between two heterogeneous series, and by means of this triple operation a third is produced—the New in difference. This third realm is “individuation,” the actualized individuated entities (of the Idea) made possible by intensity, which is the ‘dark precursor’ of the virtual and actual series. The complex repetition of the dark precursor (its direction is in both|and directions between the virtual—as differenciation and actual—as differentiation) produces actual differences. By A-O, the dark precursor (differentiator, or for Žižek it is objet a), undergoes a ‘flat’ change to avoid any implications of transcendence, emerging as an ‘abstract machine,’ where a ‘double articulation’ takes place: the first articulation draws chaos (BwO) into a plane of consistency, and the second articulation actualizes this consistency into minimally an identifiable state. Rather than surface or depth, Deleuze with Guattari in A-O opt for assemblages, planes, and surfaces.50 An assemblage51 is a process before it results in an entity. It is always a duality, a combination, “an unholy mixture of events and territory . . . a machinic assemblage of desire, and a collective assemblage of enunciation. [It] combines what one does and what one says, the objects of the word and their groupings, the utterances in the world and their enunciation” (Lecercle, 1962, 186, emphasis in original). So, in this sense, when Žižek disparagingly accuses Deleuze|Guattari of “escaping the full confrontation of a deadlock via a simplified ‘flat’ solution” (OB, 21, added emphasis), he is right. What is for Žižek an ‘escape’ is their ‘solution’ to this deadlock. As ‘inheritors’ or ‘bearers’ of the weight of Lacan’s psychoanalytic influence in France, the political stakes seem to be quite high between Badiou/ Žižek and those who have taken to heart Deleuze|Guattari’s political trajectory52 when it comes to addressing the disarray of|on the left: the question of “what is to be done?”53 Who betrays the Master the best may be a way to put it? Which monstrous child to follow? Badiou’s magnum opus Being and Event (2007) (L’Etre et L’Élévement), eventually followed by Logics of Worlds (2008) (Logiques des Mondes), of course, presents the full force of a structuralist system whose debt to Lacan is quite obvious in the way the Event is theorized. The differences between him and Deleuze could not be farther apart.54

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Badiou offers another account of the Real to the one found in Lacan. The trick to ‘getting’ his ontology is to recognize that he (like Deleuze) posits an inconsistent pure multiplicity as the void [R1], which has the ‘effect’ of one-ness, that is, consistency. Pure multiplicity is anterior to the One. That is the key to what seems to be a paradox: how can multiplicity be One? The consistency of unity that is experienced in day-to-day life (or situation) rests on the pure multiplicity (the void), which is radically unknowable. Further, this inconsistent multiplicity is ‘Nothing’—a void, since it must be subtracted from the situation to be counted (since it is consistent). Yet, there is always a remainder. Because there is a remainder the void is also in the situation! The void [R1] is, therefore, both excluded and included in the situation. The void is, therefore, the gap between the situation (consistency) and what that consistency rests on (or comes from), the inconsistency of its being. So from the situation, the inconsistent multiple—presymbolic being [R1], being qua being, appears as Nothing. The Real is an inconsistent multiplicity, being qua being, and all that is comes from the Void that can, according to Badiou, be placed into the axioms of the advances in set theory. What can’t be counted or anticipated is the Event. It belongs outside the ontology in the Void itself. In skeletal terms, the Event is the apex of a system of this ontology. It starts then with a situation (an established order), with language and a set of beliefs. All these are the ‘consistent multiplicity’ of the situation, the ordered being-as-beings. This ‘state of the situation’ is represented and ‘counted’ as One. This situation (symbolic order for Lacan) is punctured by an Event—an excess, what cannot be counted. The site of the Event is in the situation but it is not part of it. It is a supplementary occurrence. There is no proper duration of the Event. It can be the instance of a flash. It is only after the Event’s occurrence that it becomes articulated by the traces that are left behind. The traces enable an encounter to take place via witnesses within the situation, which in turn makes way for a conviction or conversion to take place. The Event, therefore, initiates a truth-process, which requires investigation by those involved in the experience to confirm their faith to an indiscernible truth that has seized them in the way it has disrupted consensual knowledge. If it’s indeed not illusionary but becomes confirming, then one becomes a faithful subject, subject not as ‘individual,’ but as one of the bearers of the particular truth. Fidelity is called for here. So something is subtracted from the multiplicity of the Void and then added to the situation. The Event founds another time. It is thus linked with infinity, immortality, and subjective constitution. The Event makes an ‘historical’ cut before and after, and hence the time of commitment raises the specter of Evil (how can one not think of Social Nationalism here?). The truth can be ruined and even annihilated. Events, Badiou maintains, occur in

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science, art, politics, and love—but not religion. Given his ontology, he is a committed atheist. The site of the fantasmic apparition of the Event is at the edge of the Void, a sublime experience; it hovers between immanence and transcendence, offering a potential Good that can reconfigure the situation. The Event is of the order of infinity, immortality, and inhumanity, rather than finitude, mortality, and humanity: the ‘transhuman body’ over ‘Lacan’s signified body.’ Žižek’s account of the Event (as an encounter with the Real) is consistent with his Real-Symbolic explorations.55 He uses it often to explain how the arbitrary Law comes into being that separates the before and after of the symbolic split. This is also how we should understand his reliance on an act (as mentioned above) that still harnesses the death drive, which disappears in Badiou’s promise of immortality. Badiou’s subtraction of the Event from the void is constitutive of the ‘subject’ rather than destructive of it as in Žižek’s act. Authentic fidelity for Žižek is the fidelity to the void itself, a fidelity to the object of attachment, which also means a fidelity to the death drive. Though there is no teleology involved in Badiou’s Event, it does create a retrospective teleology of the truth that the faithful are to articulate. (Does this not sound like a possible danger of cult or religion? One should perhaps scratch Deleuze off the subtitle of Hallward’s book, Out of this World, and write in Badiou!). The chance ‘call’ of the Event still comes from the Void. It reintroduces transcendence.56 Further, Badiou makes the claim that there is a ‘silence’ surrounding the Event when it first ‘happens.’ It exceeds language. “[T]ruth only exists as it is indifferent to [language], since its procedure is generic inasmuch as it avoids the entire encyclopaedic grasp of judgments” (BE, 433, emphasis in original). If truth emerges from the Void, which exists between the gaps of discourse, then the truth-Event is beyond discourse itself. In the Lacanian event, the signifier and the signified are decoupled, the ‘quilting point’ is ruptured, but this happens within language. Badiou’s truth-Event is in excess of normative language. Yet, if the Event is inexpressible in the language of the ‘situation,’ how then is it to be expressed since there is no language available? Eventually it must find its ‘text’ and become represented as evental statements since “there can be no ontological remnant of the event” (Badiou in Hallward, BSA, 124, emphasis in original). The differences between Badiou and Deleueze’s understanding of event have been well discussed.57 Perhaps they are indeed inversions of each other? In the preface to the English edition of DR, Deleuze (xvi) writes: “We tried to constitute a philosophical concept from the mathematical function of differentiation and the biological function of differenciation” (added emphasis). It would almost be a caricature to say that each takes the opposite side of this problematic—now to finish Deleuze’s sentence—“in asking

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whether there was not a stable relation between these two concepts which could not appear at the level of their respective objects.” Yet the Deleuzian event seems so ubiquitous and less dramatic.58 With Badiou, Events take on Names. In some cases the subject disappears into the Other as in Proletariat, Christian, Revolutionary. In other instances it is the name itself—Haydn, Schoenberg, Picasso, and so on that is credited with the Event. “Badiou subjects are always solitary, singular, endangered,” writes Hallward (BSA, 124). The politics of such developments when it comes to ‘generic’ change, that is, change that must address the unthought of humanity, Badiou (2005) now terms “non-expressive dialectics” in distinction to the old “expressive dialectics” of the vanguard (Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Castroism—but Maoism is ‘strangely’ absent!). One wonders to what extent Deleuze continually haunts his thoughts since “non-expressive dialectics,”59 still ‘explained’ by the mathematics of set theory, now calls for “a great fiction without proper name” (12, added emphasis).60 It is again another extraordinary appropriation of Deleuze’s thought, the ‘powers of the false,’ or fabulation that surrounds the problematic of a “people yet to come,” which I shall come to.61 Revolt Slave! Deleuze What Badiou now evokes politically, cast in his own superior system,62 has been the creative ‘playing field’ of Deleuze|Guattari all along: the question of the Outside, theorized, as I understand it, in another direction where the now virtual Real and the Imaginary psychic registers are put to work to keep the future Open; the Symbolic is treated as ‘representation’ in the way categorization usurps difference as such, and the way control society is able to ‘creatively’ manipulate the flows of life for capitalist ends. In TP authoritarian, socialist, and liberal democratic states are treated in relation to (global) capitalist markets. Thousand Plateaus, which expands on the so-called vitalism, offers the tool-kit for such explorations and experimentation. Inorganic life becomes the process of assembling in the Void (to paraphrase Badiou). The plane of consistency (or plane of immanence) now replaces univocity. Haecceities become the contents on the plane of consistency, whose plane of expression is then asemiotically informed to break with formal signification. Assembling becomes a pragmatic program, empirical in its aim to bring more life into the assembled situations. The single authored books that followed were Deleuze’s explorations and experimentations for ‘a people yet to come.’ Against Badiou’s Names, Deleuze favors ‘mediators’ (N, 125) to help with creative achievement. To be on the ‘left’ for Deleuze meant

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forever deterritorializing, eschewing egoism,63 and always taking on the ‘minoritarian’ position, challenging, always challenging existing doxa. “[Deleuze|Guattari’s micropolitical] aim is a becoming of the world as a possibility of inventing new forms of life, different modes of existence” (Marrati, 2001, 214). It is to work with the Imaginary so as to ‘deterritorialize’ the world that is always already political. So, the arts do not simply mediate the reality by way of representation—they intervene in it; they are ‘real’ to the extent that they participate in the order of things; they can be involved in the “fabulation” of a “new earth” or a “new people,”64 to create and think new forms of political subjectivity.65 They are events that have their own force as we encounter them as ‘signs.’ I come now to the question raised in the beginning: Is there an Outside? Or better, what is the Outside? Can cinema think the Outside?66 Cinema is an assemblage that directly impinges on our senses, as the direct presence of moving images. Cinema for Deleuze is sensation, radically prelinguistic, an asignifying and asyntaxic material, composed of a system of images and signs that are independent of language that have direct sensory affects on the brain,67 rather than on the symbolic imagination.68 Cinema is a neuropyschological vibration, and, as radically Deleuze develops this in C2, “the brain is the screen,” meaning that the brain and screen have a direct relationship; the vibrations ‘touch’ the cortex immediately at an unconscious level. The screen is where immediate and direct encounters take place between the past and the future, between the inside and the outside. Hence, when I talk about the Imaginary psychic register (above), it has to be qualified in terms of perception in the way Deleuze theorizes it in DR. There is a debt to paid to Lacan in the sense that the objet a is reconfigured as the ‘imperceptible.’ As far back in his study of Proust, as an ‘apprenticeship of signs,’ Deleuze takes the position that only chance encounters and burning, pressing questions can yield to a necessity or urgency in production, what in DR he called counteractualization (also countereffectuation).69 This means only a ‘violent’ encounter, a contingent event with the Outside, which affects the subject, enables the emergence of ‘truth’ (insight into life). If there is no ‘connection’ to the Outside there is no thought or thinking. In this view thought always presupposes a contingent unexpected encounter with an object that forces us to think. ‘Signs’ are the objects that provide the external pressure, the intensity to provoke thought. The ‘sign’ exceeds recognition. It can’t be categorized, and hence Deleuze’s debt to Lacan. But misrecognitions (méconnaissance) are affirmative happenings. It’s the chance for thought and learning. When an object emits a sign, and it is perceived as troubling, confusing, and demanding a response, Deleuze takes such an experience as being “imperceptible.” What is perceived has exceeded recognition for it has been the “transcendental”

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or “involuntary” use of the faculty of perception that has penetrated the limit that has been set empirically or voluntarily. In this accounting, the sign can only be perceived as an event. Such a sign can’t be ‘imagined’ or ‘recalled’. It happens. Such a process continues to keep the thought process open until some sort of conclusive recognition takes place and the object is ‘exhausted.’70 This encounter of what is imperceptible is an encounter with difference in-and-of-itself. It’s what enables the ‘becoming’ to take place. Deleuze gives priority to the Outside in such an encounter. The object (great cinema, art, etc.) makes you ‘think.’ It can’t be easily digested. It is not the faculty of imagination that is at issue here, but the psychic Imaginary, though not the psychic Imaginary of gaze theory in the all-encompassing way Lacan presents it. The object does indeed ‘look’ back, but entirely differently. It looks back as ‘difference.’71 In C2 Deleuze theorizes this as an “irrational cut,” which disturbs the image.72 The Bergsonian turn here is that consciousness (perception) is the image received.73 Light here plays a dominant role.74 Such encounters then reveal our desire, not as a lack for the object but because of the object. The transcendental occurrence of the event can be quasi-traceable to an unsettling, violent encounter between us and another ‘body.’ Like Badiou, there is a fidelity to the event, but as a modest form of counteractualization in the production of desire, as a response to the event, which is a virtual happening, never fully graspable in the present.75 Here Badiou and Deleuze are in agreement. The counteractualization is thinking through the actualization of the event that has taken place with the ‘imperceptible’ object. There may well be different counteractualizations of the event, a series of them that produce a body of ‘work’ in response to the event: in philosophy this would be the creation of concepts; in science it is the creation of functions; in art this is the creation of sensory aggregates through films, installations, and so on. Such a body of work helps to articulate or grasp the unknown event, to finally make some ‘sense’ of it. The aim of such production, for Deleuze|Guattari, is then to actively intervene “in” this world to make a difference within it. SchizoCrets Deleuze’s two cinema books, Cinema 1: The Movement Image and the Cinema 2: Time Image, present an account of the transition between roughly the prewar period (early 1940s) and the postwar period—from the classical to the modern.76 The two volumes vibrate with references to virtually all of Deleuze’s previous work77 and have been primarily applied to the development of national identities and postcolonial

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studies.78 Rancière, who is no fan of Deleuze,79 reads them as a redemption narrative. For Rancière, they are to be read as a form of continuity. There is no difference and no critical break.80 A much more Deleuzian account for the reason underlying the break is provided by Julian Reid (2010b) who convincingly shows how this ‘break’ between the cinema books acts as a “war machine.”81 Reid recognizes the schizoanalysis that Deleuze is engaged in through the interplay between C1 and C2. I shall return to this, but for now let me give a quick synopsis of the two books. Deleuze contrasts classical cinema with modern cinema that rose to meet the crisis and exhaustion of the post–World War period. He contrasts two regimes of the image, an organic and a crystalline regime. The organic regime had a ‘people’ (an audience). It was characterized by narration, whereas the emerging crystalline image, where the people were ‘missing’ (there was a search to reestablish an audience) is characterized by story. Narration solidifies the commonsense world by reinforcing spatiotemporal structures through nation building. Movement is subordinated to time, and there are clear boundaries between what is true and what is false. The crystalline regime through story begins to worry those movement structures by introducing two kinds of timeimages that put the ‘truth’ of common sense to question—what Deleuze calls the “powers of the false.” The first sort of time-image structures the “order of time” in two ways: via “sheets of the past” and “peaks of the present.” This then is the cinematic exploration of the coexistence or simultaneity of past (virtual) and present (actual) events internal to time. In contrast, the second kind of time-image concerns “the series of time.” This is the paradoxical exploration of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ within complex series of successions. Such image reveals ‘becoming’ as that process of constant change that shakes up any determinate and fixed notions of true and false. Virtual and actual become ‘indiscernible’—a forms a crystal image.82 Cinema’s powers of the false then are capable of thinking the unthought. This is the power of cinema’s fabulation—the power to create and invent novel visions, bodies, pure optical (opsigns) images, and pure audio sounds (sonsigns) cut off from sensory-motor movement. While it appears that these two regimes are (again) oppositional dualisms (either/or), subject to the usual critique levied at Deleuze|Guattari, they remain complexly interrelated. 83 What is presented as a dualism is separated by Deleuze’s own “irrational cut” between the time the two books were published, which provides an exemplary case in the way the Outside had been thought to intervene into C1 with a new cast of characters. C2 is then a version of thought as a “war machine.” It allies itself with a “singular race,”84 which is qualified as being always oppressed and inferior. These characters are “seers”85

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in the sense that they have lost their power to act, are no longer agents, and yet have gained worldly insight. And that insight has to do with the fascist tendencies that the movement-image has established. For many, the potential of the “seer” that Deleuze developed may well be over in the contemporary global capitalist system. The advent of the postcinematic forms and the digital age has brought a renewal of speculation86 as to what would be an ‘image of thought’ that enables a way ‘forward’ in this global age of designer capitalism where, it seems, the high costs of image production ensures that nothing is left to chance when it comes to consuming films and ensuring profit success. It becomes increasingly impossible to produce a shock to thought. The ability to think the Outside is becoming to be progressively more difficult as the senses are being continually colonized by the cinema industries.87 The ‘neuro-image’ as Patricia Pisters is attempting to theorize it, may well offer a renewed cinema for a ‘people to come.’ Julian Reid (2010b) evokes the late works of Jean-Luc Godard88 and his thought on love to renew cinema’s capacity to sense, see and think anew. In her conclusion to her cinema book on Deleuze, Paola Marrati (2008) reminds readers that the two cinema books are exemplary of what one encounter with cinema might look like, and, therefore, how to think the unthought of the Outside so as to keep the future open.89 Theorists like Giuseppina Mecchia90 are attempting to rethink Deleuze|Guattari’s two key books in terms of a political philosophy, what she calls “anthro-politics.” It may well be that minoritarian deterritorializations are already underway right ‘under our very noses,’ but we are not able to ‘see’ them as yet. It is perhaps too early to tell to what extent the development of object-oriented ontology (OOO), as heterogeneously developed by Graham Harman, Levy Bryant, Ian Bogost, Jane Bennett, Karan Barad, Tim Morton, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier as well as many others, dovetails with Deleuze|Guattari’s inorganic materialism when it comes to the ethicopolitical implications of this development given that OOO also recognizes ‘passive vitalism’ of ‘things’ as they do (see Colebrooke, 2010). There has been a concerted attempt to develop a schizoanalysis of film,91 the key to which, I believe, is to follow what Ian Buchanan (2008) has pointed out as Deleuze’s failure to examine the “cretinizing schlock” that makes up for the bulk of contemporary cinema. Patricia MacCormack92 seems to be one of the few who is engaged in this endeavor. It is not ideology critique that is required, rather it is engaging in the media of everyday life where aspects of ‘soft’ fascism are to be found everywhere so as to expose the cruelty.93 The popularity of Žižek is that he has been able to do just this through his particular Lacanian stylistics. This seems to be the

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task, which is why this particular collection ends with a meditation on the Zombie as an encounter on its own.94 * * * The wager of this introduction . . . of sorts has been in effect to struggle with which politics of the cinema we are to choose for a ‘people yet to come,’ as those of us who remain committed to a ‘leftist’ orientation, if that ‘direction’ means anything at all anymore? Perhaps this is a ‘false’ choice; perhaps it’s more of a matter of position or disposition? I am always fascinated by the extraordinary cinematic analysis Todd McGowan makes, and he is committed to the Lacanian position. Yet, coming from the arts, I share the rich arsenal of concepts that Deleuze|Guattari offer me, rather than being confined to representation and discourse. Deleuze|Guattari, it should be noted, were never contra chipping away at the molar ‘standard’ that is in place through ‘representational struggles,’ which unfortunately have turned into bitter ‘identity politics.’ As they write, “This is not to say that the struggle on the levels of axioms is without importance; on the contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse levels: women’s struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of the oppressed masses and minorities in the East or West” (TP, 470–471). Nevertheless, they continue, “But there is also always a sign to indicate that these struggles are the index of another, coexistent battle.” A point is reached when “the axiomatic [emphasis in original] cannot tolerate: when people demand to formulate their problems themselves . . . hold to the Particular [added emphasis] as an innovative form.” The molecular and the molar remain continually entwined. That ends my introduction . . . sort of. Notes 1. “Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language” (224). This is the kernel of Seminar III, The Psychosis (1955–1956). 2. Ideally such a development should be historically analyzed in terms of the technologies that become available and influence, what is never strictly ‘natural.’ Crassly put, the Neolithic fecund female body, where grains become a dietary staple and infant mortality makes bonding with the child less of an issue when it comes to the productive economy of agriculture, cannot be equated with the contemporary technologies of insemination in postindustrial societies where women bear children in their forties, have C-sections to ensure birth, and place a high value on their offspring. Likewise ‘preemies’ are given as much attention and care as

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possible through artificial womb-technologies to ensure their survival (see Trevathan, 1987). 3. In the Deleuzian account the ‘brain is the screen.” The screen is replaced as a “plane of consistency” or “plane of immanence,” which intervenes in chaos to produce an event. Such an event is singular, a One as defined by the indefinite article “a.” Chaos is that Nothing, which for Deleuze does “not exist.” It remains an “abstraction,” a “pure Many” that becomes a singular One when the screen is placed between subject|object (Deleuze, Fold, 76). In Deleuzian terms, the circuits of the brain’s molecular biology take up the intervals of the (moving) image via the shot|montage couplet of the cinematic assemblage. The image begins to move, contra the predominately ‘still’ image as theorized by Lacan. Rather than a translucency in Lacan’s case regarding the screen, Deleuze maintains an ‘indiscernibility.’ The mirror presents a hyalosign (C2, 71) akin to two mirrors face-to-face, which cause a mise-en-abyme effect, thereby making the actual and virtual indeterminate. Deleuze’s mirror is Alice’s looking glass, which is quite different from that of Lacan, where the imago (dialectics between Ideal ego/ego Ideal) is eventually stabilized (although never completely). The mirror’s mis-en-abyme serial paradoxes of virtual|actual go to the limit set by infinity that is the Outside. The Deleuzian ‘event’ can be understood as a synaptic trace of the sensate ‘world’ that is registered in the moment as presence (as an infinitive). The event has already passed or about to happen, but is never happening. For the ‘middle’ Lacan of S XI (Four Fundamentals) and the mirror stage, the screen is a veil that establishes an imaginary relationship between ‘something’ (being) and ‘nothing.’ The body as an imaginary Gestalt in R1 begins to ‘fade’ (technically, aphanisis) and becomes organized via symbolic signifiers. The infant (subject) is incorporated or put into the picture (tableau) to find its place in the symbolic. For Leibnitz the screen is God in that it is a divine interdiction into the Nothing (chaos) so that Something (Being) can emerge. Atheistically, the screen is better seen as simply a ‘cut’ (synonyms would include trace, surface, screen, mark, each of which has its nuances) as the violence of an arbitrary Law that creates ex nihilo this ‘something,’ however slight, from ‘nothing.’ The paradox that emerges from this is that the prohibition of the Law is itself prohibited. The Law erases itself; its origins become lost. The Law both excludes the subject (therefore being transcendent) and, at the same time, always includes us in it. It is, therefore, also immanent. With Lacan, it can be said that the veil is a translucent screen of the imaginary surface between the subject and the imagined ‘object’ behind it. The veil enables a play between showing and hiding this object, which Lacan names objet a (the ‘cause’ of desire). It is the supposed transparency (the showing) of the object and the supposed opaqueness (hiding) of it where fantasy emerges. The dialectic between the two establishes the translucent veil of mystery and lure. Méconnaissance is nothing other than translucency at ‘play.’ It is the ‘play’ with|of the symbolic world, its seduction and threat, its smoke and mirrors. The image becomes a screen for what cannot be seen. For the psychotic, however, there is no delibidinization, no extraction of the objet a to be caught up in such a ‘play.’ The

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voice and the gaze are real ‘objects.’ There is no hiding, only showing. Things ‘look’ at you. Voices ‘speak’ to and at you. The Adam and Eve myth illustrates all this so well. With the interdiction of God not to eat the fruit off the tree, a ‘cut’ (Law) is established—the apple being the object of excessive jouissance, which is forbidden. Tasting it causes expulsion from an Ideal symbolic order (Garden of Heaven where all wants and needs are met). Such a transgression brings a ‘cover up’ of the genitals (delibidalization as a primary repression) via a fig leaf, as the pair is expelled from the blissful Garden (womb). Clothes (from fig leaf to g-strings, thongs) are but a variant of the veil. Exposure of the [R]eal self, the core objet a, the ‘cause’ of desire, brings shame rather than guilt, as now an anxious object has come ‘too close’ and is exposed. Guilt, on the other hand, remains caught in the defiles of the signifier. It’s an excuse for having been caught. Shame by the analysand was for Lacan the end of therapy (see Copjec, 2006, 106–110). It is difficult not to equate ‘original sin’ with objet a in this account. 4. This stance is the radical psychiatry of people such as R. D. Lang and Wilhelm Reich. 5. Once more, the symbolic should be ideally historicized in such a discussion. To what extent, for example, were early homo sapiens psychotic as a normative way of being? Paleontological speculation has it that there was not much ‘talking’ among early homo sapiens. The mouth is often missing or not elaborately rendered in the early sculptured artifacts. Further speculation by such linguists as Julian Jaynes (1976) whose notion of the ‘bicameral mind’ suggests that the physiology of the brain changes with the emerging writing technologies, which I would support. His claim is that when early ‘writing’ begins to emerge, the (psychotic) voices from the divine gods invested in leaders (authority) begin to die down as an independent check is introduced between what is said and what has been written down, establishing a minimal gap between divine ordinance and the priestly class as to the question of ‘reality.’ Eventually the brain physiology also changes for a set niche population. The residual of what may have once been widespread psychosis might be a way to understand why the bizarre theatricality of such rites as exorcism and voodooism, which try to dispel possession, still persist, since psychotics ‘believe’ in these Real voices. Lacanian system is based on the ‘alphabetization of the mind’ (see the many writing of Brian Rotman, especially Timothy Lenoir’s introduction, 2008), which has held sway in the West, as has the ‘ideographization’ of the mind held sway in the East. Current screen digitalized technologies have only just begun on a global scale what might be called a ‘postalphabetization’ and ‘postideographization’ of the mind, bringing these two systems together, decentering the hold of the ‘word’ and ‘ideograph,’ producing something entirely ‘new.’ We might think ‘attention deficit disorder’ as a symptom of this change. It is too early to see how the physiology of the brain will change through ‘exaptation,’ to use Steven Jay Gould’s term, with the continued changing technoecologies of sensation (see Parisi, 2009). The strength of Deleuze and Guattari’s account in Anti-Oedipus is to speculate on the recoding of the symbolic through ‘savagery,’ despotism, and capitalism, offering a political philosophy that has yet to be taken seriously.

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

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As far as I know, Ian Buchanan, through a series of lectures in Amsterdam in 2010, has been able to show how this account explores the Freudian edifice that lies disguised throughout their work. A brief comparison can be made with Deleuze’s account in Logic of Sense. In LS, rather than absences|presences he develops the notion of parallel series: two series with a limit (border, frontier) between them so that they fail to contact. If we imagine the border to be the ‘cut’ that lies between them and mediates them, then a both|and logic of indiscenibility and folding can be theorized, a logic other than that of Lacan. The cut can be envisioned more as a membrane that both links and separates the two series that remain distinct but similar. From the pairing we have the ‘something’ emerging from ‘nothing’ as well, but it is cast in terms of non-sense|sense. One immediately asks, “What then would a non-distorted symbolic structure look like?” Answer: the Real. This Real then becomes multiplicities in the systems of Deleuze and Badiou, which I discuss later. I have tried to develop this thought in the three figures of Henry Darger, Daniel Johnston, and Mark Hogancamp (jagodzinski, 2012). A figure like Joan of Arc, portrayed as a psychotic in Luc Besson’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), presents another approach to the foreclosure of the symbolic by staging what seems like an ‘impossible’ Event. This is an arbitrary periodization. One break down has it conveniently put as Imaginary (1936–1952), the Symbolic (1953–1962), and the Real (1963–1981). Kaja Silverman’s (1988) long forgotten Acoustic Mirror should not be forgotten in this context either. The affected letter of lalangue is abstracted more to simply an element in the Deleuzian system. Jean-Claude Milner (1990), one of the founders of Cahiers pour l’Analyse, characterizes lalangue as “knowledge in the Real.” We are close to Deleuzian “intelligent materialism” as Bernd Herzogenrath (2009, 6) identifies it. The Real of language for Milner is “homonomy,” that is, all elements in lalangue are indistinct and so they all sound the same. As Christian Kerslake (2009) maintains, these two works of immanent philosophy never saw the light of day as Deleuze was in the shadow of the Lacanian-Althusserian group Cahiers pour l’analyse (1966–1969), whose interests were more epistemological dwelling on the ‘logic of the signifier.’ Alain Badiou was part of this circle. However, it should be noted that Serge Leclaire and André Green, who contributed to the journal, already began to question Lacan’s orthodoxy of desire. On the exploration of voice between Deleuze|Guattari and Lacan, see Frida Beckman (chapter 2) As then picked up by Maurice Chion’s (1994, 109–111) notion of rendu (voix acousmatique—the voice-over as a voice without a subject, 71–73) when it comes to the audiovisual sounds which has close affinities with Deleuze|Guattari notion of the refrain. The asignifying elements of language have been masterfully examined from a Lacanian perspective by Mladen Dolar’s (2006) A Voice and Nothing More. Again Frida Beckman (chapter 2) in this volume supersedes Dolar’s account.

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15. For a brilliant analysis of Lacan’s meeting with Deleuze during this incident see Daniel Smith (2004). 16. The first instance of praise in S XI, Four Fundamentals, comes for Leclaire isolating “the sequence of the unicorn” as an “irreducible and senseless character qua chain of signifiers” (212), making it a non-sense assemblage that is a “pure signifier.” Lacan returns to this example much later in the year. The non-sense signifier of the unicorn sequence turns out to be Poordjeli, “which links the two syllables of the word licorne (unicorn)” (250). This nonsense signifier is said to animate Leclaire’s patient’s desire. It is thus a “desiring machine” in Deleuze|Guattari’s terms. 17. See specifically the explanatory note on Serge Leclaire in A-O (309). They write: “In desire he sees a multiplicity of prepersonal singularities, or indifferent elements that are defined precisely by the absence of a link.” 18. The translators of A-O provide an explanatory note (309) where they translate Deleuze|Guattari’s “object partiels” as “partial objects” rather than “part-objects” that informs Melanie Klein’s work from which they depart. In Klein, the partial object as “part of” ends up being part of a lost or future (molar) unity, whereas the molecularity of partial objects are truly distinct “beings,” invested with intensities that do not lack, but select organs. “[P]artial objects are the molecular functions of the unconscious” (324, emphasis in original). 19. The discussion appears as “Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back. . .” in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974). 20. This is other than Jean Laplanche’s (1999) well-known theory of the “enigmatic signifier,” which is a translation (as inscription and reinscription) of the enigma of the other’s desire, developing a general theory of seduction. 21. In RSI this is represented by f(x), where ‘f’ refers to the function of jouissance (the Real of lalangue) while ‘x’ can be any element in the unconscious that is raised to the status of a letter. One gets from this that Lacan never lets go of the parlêtre; he never sees the unconscious as inhumanly machinic even though it is the drives (Triebe) that we are to identify with so that a minimal distance has to be maintained. This is not unlike Deleuze|Guattari’s warning about tampering with making a BwO when they caution, “You don’t do with it with a sledgehammer, you can use a very fine file” (TP 1980, 160). 22. This saying by Lacan comes from Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and R. B. Kershner’s (1988, 124) review of Jacques Aubert’s edited book Joyce Avec Lacan. Oddly, this ‘formula’ resonates with what quantum physics no longer takes as being weird: when two single photons are sent down separate noisy optic fibers, making transmission effectively ‘useless,’ they can nevertheless become ‘useful’ at the other end as information can paradoxically be extracted, the difference being that representational bits in a digitalized symbolic world are the combinations of 0s and 1s, while quanta in distinction can exist in an infinite number of intermediate states between 0 and 1 (Anderson, 2008). Lacan’s formulation is not as weird as thought. In his final two seminars (S XXV, S XXVI), before the dissolution of his school to start up The Cause

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23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

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freudienne so as to “resume again . . . ,” as Josefina Ayerza, the force behind Lacanian Ink, always says. Lacan buried himself in the question of time and more topological issues. Deleuze already has an answer to this weirdness in the Logic of Sense. See n6. See Dany Nobus’s (2002) exploration of “illiterature.” http://www.answers.com/topic/seminar-lacan-s Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (2002) is in some agreement with this. “[T]his impossible sexual relation can be accessed in or by the feminine and articulated through art as sinthome. [. . .] The sinthome is therefore the other sex, it is what ‘woman’ is to ‘man,’ and it is the product of art” (91). “[The sinthome] has to do with a dimension of the feminine beyond the Phallus” (96, emphasis in original). Ettinger tries to poetically develop her own concept of “matrixial sinthome,” to break with Lacan’s One-body coming close to Irigaray’s (2002) “sensible transcendental” and her poetic proximity of “being two.” Colette Soler’s (2003) assessment of this seems to be the same but much more ‘reserved.’ She concludes that Lacan’s “love letter” (as in Seminar XX, Encore) is the “matheme of the signifier of the barred Other, that is the matheme of woman’s jouissance or of woman as absolute Other” (101), which is the only possible love letter that “tries to make place for the unsayable, unpronounceable Other” (101). As Chiesa (2006, 355) explains, this is the Other-jouissance (JA) as the Not-All of the Symbolic. However, since there is no Other of the Other, JA cannot be part of the symbolic. Chiesa qualifies this via Lacan’s Sinthome Seminar maintaining that Other-jouissance must remain JA barred (jouis-sans). However, it is the barred JA that constitutes the ‘individual.’ Joyce “develops ‘his own’ Symbolic from that lack” (357, emphasis in original). Either way, Woman remains the sinthome of Man. But this is why certainly Deleuze|Guattari take ‘becoming woman’ as the first step for transformative change. And why Lacan’s Tous (All) and pas-Tout (not-All) undergoes a radical change as One (All) and the multiple (not all) with them as it does with Alain Badiou where his formulae of sexuation are reworked through set theory. (For anyone who enjoys these mathematical gymnastics, see Grigg, 2005.) To identify with one’s fundamental fantasy would be to suggest that the subject is already within the defiles of the symbolic signifiers by (1) being bound up by an intersubjective dialectic with the ‘desire of the Other,’ and (2) the drive has been sublimated by acceptable fantasies. So identification with one’s symptom here is some sort of recognition that you are being ‘framed’ in a particular way, and that you either accept this as a form of your enjoyment (jouissance) and live with the consequences (‘it’s as good as it gets,’ to quote Jack Nicholson); or, you attempt to break out of the frame, so to speak, face the Real of your desire that holds you where you are, and enter into another relationship with the symbolic structure that now ‘has’ you. This is quite different if that very ‘frame’ is not secured and identity is fragile as in Lacan’s sinthome. In the feminist literature there was a love|hate relationship with this possibility, especially in the late 1990s. This can be strikingly seen, for example, in an

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29. 30.

31.

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intellect like Elizabeth Grosz who moves from an acceptance of Lacan with reservations, through to a rejection of this position, on then to a Derridean phase of thinking, and now she is a committed Deleuzian, with a queer twist of course. J-A. Miller (2000) continues to ‘work’ on this problem as well, evoking the act of the ‘real woman’ or the ‘true woman,’ who is capable of obliterating phallic jouissance. The primary figure here is Medea. Žižek seems to embrace this position as well. (See Žižek, 2000a, 11) This is in response to Hoens and Pluth (2002) who seem to equate Versagung as Lacan’s adumbration and prefigurement of the sinthome. Probably the most thorough attempt is by the veteran Lacanian|Millerian Russell Grigg’s (2008, 119–131) “Absolute Freedom and Radical Change: On Žižek.” This is a version of an article that first appeared in Paragraph (Grigg, 2001). Ed Pluth (2007) has also attempted to ‘reform’ Žižek’s act. Aside from those many ‘debates’ that are scattered throughout journals, which Žižek answers to with equal impunity, there is the nasty spat between him and Ian Parker’s (2004) concerning his assessment of his politics, and the equally nasty spat between him and David Bordwell over film theory. There is also Sharpe and Boucher’s (2010) measured assessment of Žižek’s oeuvre, and the collection edited by Boucher, Glynos, and Sharpe (2005) that has Robert Paul Resch’s article—a long-standing critic of Žižek from almost the inception of Žižek’s career—cheekily entitled, “What If God Was One of Us—Žižek’s Ontology.” No question mark is found at the end of the title. Resch calls Žižek’s seduction the “Žižek Effect.” Ian Buchanan (2005) as well refutes Žižek’s reading of Hitchcock’s Birds. See also Robinson and Torney’s (2005) analysis of his “ticklish subject” as left activism based on the “One who Acts.” Which is why I cheekily maintain that Žižek is a ‘disguised Deleuzian in denial,’ given that Deleuze is pretty much on the side of affirmative creativity rather than its destructive side. But there is also a delerium (délire) to Žižek’s quasi-rhizomatic writings that forms his sinthome. His readings of Schelling and Hegel for his own ends are equally as ‘monstrous’ as Deleuze, except that Deleuze was meticulous in his care to read philosophy (as was Derrida) (see jagodzinski, 2010). Žižek’s appropriation of psychoanalysis remains informed by the master-slave dialectic that Lacan ‘bought’ from Alexander Kojève lectures on Hegel. He can’t shake it. It informs his death drive. Drawing from the Discourse of the Master (the founding discourse of the four that Lacan develops in Seminar VXII), Žižek articulates what are the stakes to be a Master—for instance, Lacan (Žižek, 1998, 75–78). In effect, le sujet suppose savoir is a master signifier, the doubled S1. Or, perhaps the ‘truth’ Event has already arrived? The primary instance of its display could be heard and seen at Birkbeck Conference, London, on March 13–15, 2009, called “On the Idea of Communism.” The prestigious gathering seemed to confirm a new|old white vanguard (Žižek, Badiou, Hardt, Negri, Vattimo, Rancière, Eagleton) with Žižek maintaining that the time for guilt

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35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

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for the past crimes of communism was over, and a new reconciliation was necessary. To echo Žižek’s (2004) own remark that A-O was Deleuze’s “worst book” (21). Among some of the better known commentaries are Greg Lambert’s (2006, 81ff.) reply to Žižek’s reading, irreverently calling him a “dummy.” Then there is Jeremy Valentine’s (2007) response to Žižek, which has the vehement fervor of Deleuze’s own “Letter to a Harsch Critic” (N, 3–12). Berressem (2005) and Sinnerbrink (2006) form equally harsh criticisms to Organs without Bodies. It should be noted that Logic of Sense appeared in 1969 while Difference and Repetition before it in 1968. It is already a ‘mature’ work. Deleuze had by then already published a book on Hume (Empirisme et Subjectivité, 1953), on Nietzsche (Nietzsche et la Philosophie, 1962), on Kant (La Philosophie critique de Kant, 1963), on Bergson (Le Bergsonisme, 1966), on Proust (Marcel Proust et les Signes, 1964), on Sacher-Masoch (1967), and on Spinoza (Spinoza et le Problème de l’Expression, 1968)! This is a bit of a misnomer on my part since the virtual is ‘real’ for Deleuze, but here I think virtual Real holds in the sense that the psychic register that is ‘beyond’ the Imaginary and the Symbolic is being reconfigured as radical materialist territory. Here again Daniel Smith’s (2003) extraordinary analysis of how and why Deleuzian minoritarian mathematics is opposed to Badiou’s axiomatic set theory is crucial. A number of Lacanians have tried to bring Lacan up to speed with complexity and chaos theory. Harari (2002) tries to move the sinthome in the direction of turbulence and dissipative structure, while the best-known writings are by the law professor Dragan Milovanovic where Deleuze|Guattari finds some slight recognition in his last works that introduce aspects of ‘chaotic’ systems. However, in Ragland and Milovanovic’s Lacan: Topologically Speaking (2004), the exploration is confined to the paradoxes of more ‘axiomatic’ geometries via the cross-cap, möbius strip, Borromean knots, and Klein bottle. Seminar XXVI, Typology and Time, is not mentioned. The Deleuzians are on top of these developments (see the collections by Bernd Herzogenrath, 2008, 2009). See Serge Lecercle two excellent studies on notion of sense and event in LS: Philosophy through the Looking Glass (1985) and Deleuze and Language (2002). See LS 164 where he elaborates on the “two becomings” (genesis) as time of Chronos and Aion as two heterogeneous series. The genesis of the body and the genesis of the noncorporeal sense-event are what are at stake. There is much to explore here, especially with Deleuze’s Kleinian appropriations, which need elaboration (see n18). For instance, the literary or pictorial abyme where it becomes impossible to fix interpretation as it circulates from one element to the next, proliferating perspectives. The abyme (Abyss, Sans-fond) (LS, 106) confirms that no

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49.

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51.

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one interpretation can be fixed and there is no sure way of deciding between sense and non-sense (i.e., Velazquez’s Las Meninas). One exploration of this art brut is by Dan O’hara (2009). L’art brut was favored by Deleuze|Guattari. Dolar (2006) explores this possibility as is suggested by the very title of his book, The Voice and Nothing More. For a further grasp of this concept see Claire Colebrook (2010, 99–108). I am thinking of the so-called God-particle (Higgs boson) of quantum physics that has caused such a stir. In LS sense is theorized as a fourth dimension of propositions that enables ‘meaning’ to take place within linguistic propositions themselves that function through designation, manifestation, and signification. “Sense is, in the proposition, that which is expressed, a complex incorporeal entity, on the surface of things, a pure event, which insists or subsists in the proposition” (LS, 19, added emphasis). Sense is informed by non-sense, which produces the many paradoxes of language Deleuze explores throughout the work. Peter Hallward’s analysis of Deleuze in Out of This World reminds me of a similar accusation made by the Greek playwright Aristophanes in Clouds, which lampoons Socrates who is presented as floating in the clouds. Of course, we have nothing written by Socrates to defend himself, and Deleuze is long since gone as well. Deleuze (1967) already moves away from ontological issues in his “The Dramatization of Method,” where he is concerned with the pragmatic questions that surround any problematic as to how the Idea actualizes itself or ‘differentiates’ itself: The Who? How? How Much? Where? Or When? Here he famously asserts: “Virtual is not opposed to real; what is opposed to the real is the possible. Virtual is opposed to actual, and, in this sense, possesses a full reality” (98–99). Lecercle (2002, 1986) explains that agencement has a geographic connotation: a territorial organization as an arrangement or array of elements as well as a chart or puzzle, as much as a machine. The qualification is made in this way since Deleuze has also been taken up in the Academy by dropping his and Guattari’s political agenda. See the authors of French Theory in America, edited by Lotringer and Cohen (2001), and more recently Faucher’s (2010) “McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal Than the Big Mac?” Peter Hallward (2010) (again) in a cherry-picked analysis between Lacan and Deleuze’s ‘differences’ demonstrates to his satisfaction as to why Lacan’s system trumps over the ‘vitalism’ of Deleuze. He has at least the title right: “You Can’t Have It Both Ways.” One would be hard pressed to find a more vehement critique of A-O than the one found in “The Flux of the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus” first published in 1976 (2004), where Badiou defends the need of leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Moa (all of whom have their differences and failures) in relation to The Party that must be ever renewed. These long-standing differences are yet again succinctly repeated in LW as “The Event According to

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Deleuze.” What is curious is that Deleuze’s position is presented as “axioms,” four of them. Axioms would never be a designation Deleuze would have used. Each ‘axiom’ is then overturned via Badiou’s own position. Lacan, however, is also questioned in Section 2. Badiou presents what are at first ‘differences’ between him and Lacan, shows that some of these are minor and solvable, but then claims that Lacan was not enough of a philosopher, still caught by psychoanalysis and the signifier. He was not willing to ask the question of infinitude in proper philosophical style. Lacan remains caught by a ‘symptomatic body’ rather than the ‘transhuman body’ that Badiou is developing, which is none other than the ‘evental sublime’ of the Event, wherein subjectivity is given over to the “Other Body,” or Subject-body of a truth. The section ends with a note on Joyce-sinthome, which for Badiou is no solution. 55. Best account can be found in Žižek’s Fragile Absolute (2000b, 92). 56. As Deleuze and Guattari maintained in WP (156). 57. In his well-received study of Badiou (BSA, 2003), before he crushes the thought of Deleuze, Peter Hallward offers a scintillating comparison between these two systems of thought (174–180). Despite showing the pros and cons of both systems, Hallward opts on the side of Badiou’s characterization of Deleuze as the philosopher of the One and all the distortions that follow from this initial accusation. Gregory Flaxman (2012, 175–180) answers these accusations, and also points to the shrewdness and cleverness of Badiou’s approach in the way that he appears to praise Deleuze so as to only take him down and elevate his own system. Clayton Crockett (2010) also points out how Badiou refuses to confront the radical Nietzschean heart of Deleuze’s philosophy, refusing to recognize the radical nature of the Eternal Return where only that which becomes (becomes different) returns. The phrase ‘the clamor of Being,’ which forms the title of Badiou’s book on Deleuze, appears on the closing page of DR (304). Yet on that same page, what came before that sentence and after it suggests that this is not a return to the One but always an opening up based on a condition. Deleuze wrote: “‘Everything is equal! And ‘Everything returns! [in Badiou’s terms—the One] can be said only at the point at which the extremity of difference is reached. [. . .] on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess—in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in so turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return” (added emphasis). The condition marks Nietzsche’s imperative that only what ‘becomes’ returns; that is, only difference returns as difference. In CB Badiou flattens out Deleuze in terms of representation and identity, especially when it comes to the dice throw, which he takes to be just one throw (CB, 73), whereas Deleuze is quite explicit that it is not the case (DR, 198). While this is not the place to continue to develop the intricate differences between them, it might well be to point to Mogens Laerke’s (1999) careful analysis where he takes Badiou to task concerning the way his Spinozan appropriation is pitted against Deleuze’s when the question of Substance (God, Nature) is taken up. More radically, in WB, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that after the death of God and Man, philosophy will eventually have to pass through the death of Substance as well.

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58. In LW (374), Badiou tones down the magnitude of the Event, offering three varieties of evental becomings presented as a chart. This is a typology that runs from weak to strong singularity in terms of change. Badiou was previously criticized for his inadequate explanation as to what might be referred to as the ‘preevental situation’ This is his counter to that worry by maintaining that not all Events are comparable in terms of outcomes. 59. The neologism is a volley in the way ‘expressive’ has been taken up by Deleuze as a plane of expression, the assemblage of enunciation. Moreover, his Birkbeck Institute speech ends with a poem by Wallace Stevens that sums up his agenda: “It’s possible, possible, possible, it must be possible” (13). Again a volley against the attack of representation by Deleuze where the ‘possible’ remains caught by the variety of predetermined solutions rather than by the ‘virtual potentialities’ that can be actualized subject to fate and chance. Žižek (2007, 255, n10), when answering his critics, confirms his distaste for the nomadology of Deleuze by confirming his stance with Hallward. What is needed is “well-defined and delineated social spaces in which the reign of the system is suspended: a religious or artistic community, a political organization.” Aren’t these precisely the nomadic spaces existing in smooth spaces as opposed to striated space of the social majority? 60. This pronouncement should not be understood within the context of what has been termed “post-political populism,” which refers to the technomanagement of planning by experts, doing away with ideological or dissensual contestation in the name of ‘the people’ (see Swyngedouw, 2010). 61. Gregory Flaxman (2012) notes in his summation of the way Badiou has dismissed Deleuze: “Never mind, then, that Deleuze explicitly appeals to subtraction (the foreclosure of the transcendent dimension) as the basis for writing and the writing of philosophy; never mind that Deleuze explicitly defines the plane of immanence as both consistent and inconsistent; and never mind that after the death of God and man, Deleuze will insist that philosophy pass through the death of substance: Badiou makes his arguments in spite of these points” (n91, 355–356). 62. This is defended in an extended footnote by Hallward (2006, 185, n14) where he cryptically remarks on a whole host of Deleuzian minoritarian positions as developed by Nicholas Thorburn, Patton, Read, Protevi, Hardt, Negri, and others. He opts for his own “politics of prescription” that is aligned with Badiou, Sartre (whom Deleuze admired), Fanon, and Lenin. 63. In his summation of DR Williams James (2003) says it best, “Do not impose identity on the other. Do not impose an identity on yourself for the other. However, by expressing your singularity, by repaying the events that make and unmake you, prompt the other individual to express what sets it in motion and makes it significant” (210). 64. For another view of this see Jason Wallin (chapter 01, this volume) on how the Zombie vivifies the implications of the phrase ‘a people yet to come.’ 65. Kathrin Thiele (2008, 2010) presents a sustained meditation on Deleuze|Guattari’s demand “to believe in this world” by adding “as it is” in answer to Badiou and

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66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

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Hallward’s damning accusations. Rather than maintaining that Deleuze|Guattari present an ontology of becoming, Thiele shows their ontology to be an ethics. On fabulation see Bogue (2010) and John Mullarkey’s (2009, 173–180) account as presented by Bergson. For the Outside theorized as a ‘surplus’ see Kordela’s chapter 9 in this collection. This aspect of Deleuzian cinema has received more and more attention. The brain is not theorized from the perspective of cognition nor examined for its ‘organic’ physiological aspects (FMRI scans and so on) that pervades so much media research. Deleuze’s account is much more radical than that. “Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectifiable brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject, Thought brain” (WP, 209–211). For the best explorations of this see Lambert and Flaxman (2002, 2005) and the recent output of papers by Patricia Pisters (2010, 2011a, 2011b) who is developing the “neurological image.” In visual art I would point to the installations and writings of Warren Neidich (2003). Some of the best systematic explorations of system of signs as Deleuze develops in his cinema books are by Ronald Bogue (2003) and Felicity Colman (2011). In PR Deleuze writes, “Thought is nothing without something that forces and does violence to it (95).” In DR he says, “‘Everybody’ knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under the impulse of a shock that is the excitement of a taste for thinking” (137). My own example comes by way of a book on the Marco Bellocchio’s fim: The Devil in the Flesh that ‘stayed’ with me for a period of 23 years until I felt I had ‘exhausted’ it (see jagodzinski, 2011). Žižek claims that he watched Alfred Hitchock’s film Psycho some 20 times before he felt he had reworked it to his satisfaction. In other cases he admits to having ‘faked’ his commentary on films he has not watched, what he calls his dirty little secrets. In DR the importance of ‘difference’ to thought coming from the Outside is forwarded in this way: “This element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself, as that which is at once both imperceptible for empirical sensibility which grasps intensity [. . .] and at the same time that which can be perceived only from the point of view of a transcendental sensibility which apprehends it immediately in the encounter” (144, added emphasis). This is not the ‘normal’ reading of the irrational cut. Generally it is simply seen as an operation that has been incorporated into Hollywood cinema as just another ‘shock’ effect. Rancière (2006), who has no love for Deleuzian cinema, is pretty straightforward in his devastating dismissal of the ‘irrational cut.’ “Deleuze sees in it the infinitization of the interval that disorientates the spaces and separates the images. But we could also see the fragmentation as doing the inverse, as intensifying the coordination between the visual and the dramatic” (122). I would take this in another direction and take it to be consistent with the notion that this is the moment of the event that remains contingent initiating ‘thought’ and learning as such.

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73. The other figure in the cinema books is Charles Sanders Peirce who is overshadowed by the Bergsonian account of the cinema books (see Robert Samuels chapter 8 in this collection). Bergson sees the material universe as an aggregate of images. However, Deleuze is interested in the ‘image of thought’ via the unthought. Not all images apply, although we are bathed in their swarm through movement and time (duration). Many images are simply consumed and categorized, registered as ‘common sense,’ confirming the way things are. There is no ‘shock to thought’ to call on Brian Massumi (2002) here. In C2, he calls it the rule of the cliché, which the time-image overcomes. The elaborate typology of images that he offers in the two books (perception image, affection image, action image, crystal image) that are complexly related to each other through editing intervals present the becoming of the image between objective and subjective poles, moving with different speeds and intensities, and endowed with different attributes. 74. In C1 he says: “In short, it is not consciousness which is light, it is the set of images, or the light, which is consciousness, immanent to matter” (61). Again, brain and image form a materialist identity. See the first chapter by Berressem in this collection regarding light. 75. The Deleuzian event is placed in the virtual time of Aion (as opposed to Chronos) where it alludes the present: either it has happened or about to happen. When we watch a film, the affects that the film have on us is always felt ‘after’ (so to speak) we have watched it. The happening is during the ‘unfolding’ time when the film does its work (its affects or forces) on us as our bodies undergo conscious and unconscious contortions. 76. The key early work here is that of R. N. Rodowick (1997, 158–160) who identifies their application to postcolonial idea of nationhood and the development of nations. 77. Mullarkey (2009, 81) presents a list of his books that influenced the various developments in C1 and C2. 78. The key work on national identity is by David Martin-Jones (2006), and for postcolonial studies Laura Marks (2000) has been given credit for her early work here. 79. A primary example can be found in his dismissal of Deleuzian aesthetics (see Rancière, 2004). 80. In his particular vicious review of Deleuzian cinema, Rancière (2006) presents it as a classical narrative, a “history of redemption” and “some sort of philosophy of nature.” “In short,” he says, “we pass from images as elements in a philosophy of nature to images as elements in a philosophy of spirit” (113). The ‘brain as a screen’ is given a bad rap, reduced to a kind of narcissistic superego. “The brain confiscated the interval between action and reaction for its own benefit and proceeded from this interval to place itself at the center of the world” (111). Mullarkey (2009) surfs on Rancière’s analysis: C1 begins with a state of nature, followed by its fall and subsequent redemption. “There was once a cinematic image adequate for expression (movements that mattered), that then fell into crisis (the shattering of the movement-image),

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81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88.

89.

90. 91.

92.

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before its resurrection as a time-image, and image adequate for its time, even when it is a time of loss and decay” (87). War machine is developed in TP (351–423). This is the splitting of time into the past and future: “[T]ime has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature [. . .]it has to split the present into two heterogeneous directions, the one that is launched towards the future while the other falls towards the past [. . .] it is time, that we see in the crystal” (C2, 81, emphasis in original) The complexity of time is already developed in DR as three passive syntheses. TP, 379. C2, 126. See D. N. Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film; Garrett Stewart’s Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, Steven Schaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect, and Todd McGowan’s Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema that brilliantly continues his exploration from a Lacanian perspective yet recognizes full well the many contributions to that project that Deleuzian cinema has made. This is the assertion Gregory Flaxman made on a visit to my campus (January 25, 2012) where he argued that a film like James Cameron Avatar is so meticulously produced and calculated (apparently only nine frames were not rendered by the use of GSI digitalization). The presentation was entitled “Off-Screen and Outside: Gilles Deleuze and the Future of Film.” Flaxman will be releasing his second volume, entitled Gilles Deleuze and the Filming of Philosophy, to Powers of the False, which I am sure will expand on this very point. At the height of her power, the late Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier (2010) expends on the necessity for the Outside for cinema, drawing on Blanchot and Deleuze’s reading of Foucault. Reid draws on the Chrisopher Pavsek’s (2006) in-depth analysis on Godard. See also Todd McGowan on Godard in this collection (chapter 4), and on the sort of ‘love’ Godard is referring to, see the exploration that Meera Lee undertakes of love in this collection (chapter 3). The thought of Toni Negri and Michael Hardt (Empire, Multitude) is decidedly missing in the remains of this ‘introduction,’ partly because of space, but partly because I do not agree with the way the ‘multitude’ has been theorized in light of TP. See Reid (2010a) who provides a very good analysis of this problem. Lecture at Manchester University is available at http://www.frequency.com/ video/anthro-politics-re-considering/24806506 See Buchanan and MacCormack (2008) and the Deleuze Studies special, Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture, edited by Philip Roberts and Richard Rushton (2011). MacCormack’s (2008) schizo-engagement with the horror and the gothic genre can be found in Cinesexuality. See her exemplary schizoanalysis of the television series, Third Rock from the Sun (2001) and her website: http://fuckyeahgillesdeleuze.tumblr.com/post/2703863447/macdonald-3rdrock

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93. One sees what a chord Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games has sparked through literature and Gary Ross’s film. 94. Jason Wallin’s chapter that starts at 01.

References Anderson, Mark (2008). “Quantum Weirdnesss: Two Times Zero Doesn’t Always Equal Zero.” Available at http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/quantumweirdness-two-times-zero-doesnt-always-equal-zero, September 4, 2011. Badiou, Alain (2000). Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. [1997]. Trans. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (2004). “The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus [1976].” Polygraph 15 (16): 75–92. ——— (2005). “Politics: A Non-expressive Dialectics.” Paper presented at ‘Is the Politics of Truth still Thinkable?’ a conference organized by Slavoj Žižek and Costas Douzinas. Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, London. ——— (2007). Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum. ——— (2008). Logics of Worlds. [2006]. London: Continuum. (Designated as LW) Berressem, Hanjo (2005). “Is It Possible Not to Love Žižek?” On Slavoj Žižek’s Missed Encounter with Deleuze [Slavoj Žižek: Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2003)]. Electronic Book Review www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/stringency Bogue, Ronald (2003). Deleuze on Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. ——— (2010). Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Boucher, Geoff, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe. Eds. (2005). Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoy Žižek. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Bowman, Paul (2010). “How to Read Žižek.” Global Discourse: A Developmental Journal of Research in Politics and International Relations 2 (1). Available at http://global-discourse.com/contents/slavoj-Žižek%E2%80%99s-theory-ofrevolution-a-critique-by-alan-johnson-with-reply-by-paul-bowman/ Bowman, Paul and Richard Stamp. Eds. (2007). The Truth of Žižek. London: Continuum. Buchanan, Ian (2005). “Žižek and Deleuze.” In Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoy Žižek. Ed. Geoff Boucher, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe (69–88). Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. ——— (2008). “Introduction.” In Deleuze and Schizoanalysis of Cinema. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack (1–14). London and New York: Continuum. Buchanan, Ian and Patricia MacCormack (2008). Deleuze and Schizoanalysis of Cinema. London and New York: Continuum. Chiesa, Lorenzo (2006). “Lacan with Artaud: j’ouïs-sens, jouis-sens, jouis-sans.” In Lacan: The Silent Partners. Ed. Slavoj Žižek (336–364). London: Verso.

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Chion, Michel (1994). Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Ed. and Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Colebrook, Claire (2010). Deleuze and the Meaning of Life. London and New York: Continuum. Colman, Felicity (2011). Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts. Oxford and New York: Berg. Copjec, Joan (2006). “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” In Lacan: The Silent Partners. Ed. Slavoj Žižek (90–114). London: Verso. Crockett, Clayton (2010). “The Clamour of Being.” Available at http:// crestondavis.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/deleuze-and-badiou-the-debateof-21st-century-philosophy/ Deleuze, Gilles (1967). “Method of Dramatization.” Available at ses.library.usyd. edu.au/…/adt-NU20051202.14522707appendices.pd. ——— (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Designated as C1) ——— (1989). Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Designated as C2) ——— (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Designated as Fold) ——— (1995). Negotiations: 1972–1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. (Designated as N) ——— (2000). Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Trans. Robert Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Designated as PS) ——— (2004). Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974). Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Michael Taomina. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles and Fèlix Guattari (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. [1972]. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Designated as A-O) ——— (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. [1980]. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Designated as TP) ——— (1994). What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. (Designated as WP) Dolar, Mladen (2006). A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ettinger, Lichtenberg Bracha (2002). “Weaving a Trans-subjective Tress or the Matrixial Sinthome.” In Essays on the Final Lacan. Re-inventing the Symptom. Ed. Luke Thurston (59–83). New York: Other Press. ——— (2006). The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Faucher, Kane X. (2010). “McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomatic Than the Big Mac?” Deleuze Studies 4 (1): 42–59. Fink, Bruce (2005). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Flaxman, Gregory (2012). Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy, vol. 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grigg, Russell (2001). “Absolute Freedom and Major Structural Change.” Paragraph 2 (2): 111–124.

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——— (2005). “Lacan and Badiou: Logic of the Pas-Tout.” Filozofski vestnik 26 (2): 53–65. ——— (2006). “Beyond the Oedipus Complex.” In Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (50–68). London and Durham: Duke University Press. Hallward, Peter (2003). Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Designated as BSA) ——— (2006). Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation: Out of This World. London: Verso. ——— (2010). “You Can’t Have It Both Ways: Deleuze or Lacan.” In Philosophical Essays on Deleuze’s Debate with Psychooanalysis (7–32). Ed. Leen De Bolle. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press Harari, Roberto (2002). “The Sinthome: Turbulence and Dissipation.” In Essays on the Final Lacan. Re-inventing the Symptom. Ed. Luke Thurston (45–58). New York: Other Press. Herzogenrath, Bernd Ed. (2008). An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze|Guattari. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. ——— (2009). Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoens, Dominiek and Ed Pluth (2002). “The Sinthome: A New Way of Writing an Old Problem?” In Essays on the Final Lacan. Re-inventing the Symptom. Ed. Luke Thurston (1–18). New York: Other Press. Irigaray, Luce (2002). The Way of Love. Trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek. London: New York. jagodzinski, jan (2010). “Struggling with Žižek Ideology: The Deleuzian Complaint, Or, Why Is Žižek a Disguised Deleuzian in Denial?” International Journal of Žižek Studies 4 (1): Available at http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ ijzs/index ——— (2011). Misreading Postmodern Antigone: Marco Bellocio Devil in the Flesh (Diavolo in Corpro). Bristol, UK, and Portland, OR: Intellect Books. ——— (2012). “Outside the Outside: In the Realsm of the Real (Hogcancamp, Johnston, Darger).” In Art Education beyond the Classroom: Pondering the Outsider Sites of Learning. Ed. Alice Wexler (159–186). London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jaynes, Julian (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Johnson, Alan (2010). “Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Revolution: A Critique.” Global Discourse: A Developmental Journal of Research in Politics and International Relations 2 (1). http://global-discourse.com/ Johnston, Adrian (2008). Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kerslake, Christian (2009). “Deleuze and the Meanings of Immanence.” Paper presented at ‘After 68,’ Jan van Eyck Academy. Maastricht, June 16, 2009. Available at www.after1968.org/app/webroot/uploads/kerslake-paper(1).pdf Lacan, Jacques (1977). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans.

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Alan Sheridan. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. (Designated as Four Fundamentals) ——— (1993). The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III. 1955– 1956. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. with notes, Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton (Designated as Psychosis) ——— (1998). On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore. Trans. with notes, Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton. (Designated as Encore) ——— (Unpublished). “The Sinthome, Seminar XXIII.” Available at lacaniens.org.ua/lib/Lacan-Seminar23+Sinthome+English.pdf Laerke, Mogens (1999). “The Voice and the Name: Spinoza in the Badioudian Critique of Deleuze.” Pli 8: 86–99. Lambert, Gregg (2006). Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? London and New York: Continuum. Lambert, Gregg and Gregory Flaxman (2002). “Five Propositions on the Brain.” Journal of Neuro-aesthetic Theory 2. http://www.artbrain.org/tag/ neuro-aesthetics/ ——— (2005). “Ten Propositions on Cinema and the Brain.” Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 16: 114–128. Laplanche, Jean (1999). Essays on Otherness. Trans. John Letcher. London and New York: Routledge. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (1985). Philosophy through the Looking Glass. La Salle, IL: Open Court. ——— (2002). Deleuze and Language. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lotringer, Sylvère and Sande Cohen. Eds. (2001). French Theory in America. New York and London: Routledge. MacCormack, Patricia (2001). “Becoming Hu-Man: Deleuze and Guattari, Gender and 3rd Rock from the Sun.” Intensities, the Journal of Cult Media 1. http://criticalstudiesintelevision.com/index.php?siid=6190 ——— (2008). Cinesexuality. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Marks, Laura (2000). The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Marrati, Paola (2001). “Against Doxa: Politics of Immanence and Becoming-Minoritarian.” In Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari. Ed. Patricia Pisters (205–220). Amserdam: Amsterdam University Press. ——— (2008). Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy. Trans. Alisa Hartz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Martin-Jones, David (2006). Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Massumi, Brian (2002). A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze. London and New York: Routledge. Miller, Jacques-Alain (2000). “On Semblances in the Relation between the Sexes.” In Sexuation. Ed. Renata Salecl (13–27). Durham and London: Duke University Press. ——— (2008). “The Other Side of Lacan.” Lacanian Ink 32: 60–71.

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Milner, Jean-Claude (1990). For the Love of Language. Trans. Ann Banfield. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mullarkey, John (2009). Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. (Designated as RR) Neidich, Warren (2003). Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain. New York: Distributed Art. Nobus, Dany (2002). “Illiterature.” In Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan. Ed. Luke Thurston (19–44). New York: Other Press. O’Hara, Dan (2009). “Deleuze and the Art of Psychosis.” In Deleuzian Events: Writing|History. Ed. Hanjo Berressem and Leyla Haferkamp (270–284). Berlin: Lit Verlag. Parisi, Luciana (2009). “Technoecologies of Sensation.” In Deleuze and Guattari and Ecology. Ed. Bern Herzogenrath (182–199). London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Parker, Ian (2004). Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press. Pavsek, Christopher (2006). “What Has Come to Pass for Cinema in Late Godard.” Discourse 28 (1): 166–195. Pisters, Patricia (2010). “Numbers and Fractals: Neuroaesthetics and the Scientific Subject.” In The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy. Ed. Peter Gaffney (229–254). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. ——— (2011a). “Flashforward: The Future Is Now.” Deleuze Studies 5 (Supplement): 98–115. ——— (2011b). “Synaptic Signals: Time Travelling through the Brain in the Neuro-Image.” Deleuze Studies 5 (2): 261–274. Pluth, Ed (2007). “Against Spontaneity: The Act and Overcensorship in Badiou, Lacan, and Žižek.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 2 (1). Available at http://www.zizekstudies.org/ Ragland, Ellie and Dragan Milovanovic. Eds. (2004). Lacan: Topologically Speaking. New York: Other Press. Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie and R. B. Kershner (1988). “More French Connections: Review of Jacques Aubert, ed. Joyce avec Lacan, 1987.” James Joyce Quarterly 26 (1): 115–127. Rancière, Jacques (2004). “Is There a Deleuzian Aesthetics?” Trans. Radmila Djordjevic. Qui Parle 14 (2): 1–14. ——— (2006). Film Fables. Trans. Emiliano Battista. Oxford and New York: Berg. Reid, Julian (2010a). “Of Nomadic Unities: Gilles Deleuze on the Nature of Sovereignty.” Journal of International Relations and Development 13: 405–428. ——— (2010b). “What Did Cinema Do in ‘the War,’ Deleuze?” Theory & Event 13 (3). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/ Resch, Robert Paul (2005). “What If God Was One of Us— Žižek’s Ontology.” In Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek. Ed. Geoff Boucher, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe (89–104). Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Roberts, Philip and Richard Rushton. Eds. (2011). “Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture.” Deleuze Studies 5 (4): 151–162.

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Robinson, A. and Simon Torney (2005). “A Ticklish Subject: Žižek and the Future of Left Radicalism.” Thesis Eleven 80 (1): 94–107. Rodowick, D. N. (1997). Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire (2010). “Image or Time? The Thought of the Outside in the Time-Image (Deleuze and Blanchot).” In Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Fim Philosophy. Ed. D. N. Rodowick (15–30). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Rotman, Brian (2008). Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Roudinesco, Elizabeth (1997). Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press. Sharpe, Matthew and Geoff Boucher (2010). Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Silverman, Kaja (1988). Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana Press. Sinnerbrink, Robert (2006). “Nomadology or Ideology? Žižek’s Critique of Deleuze.” Parrhesia 1: 62–87. Smith, Daniel (2003). “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Badiou and Deleuze Revisited.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 41 (3): 411–449. ——— (2004). “The Inverse Side of the Structure: Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan.” Criticism 46 (4): 635–650. Soler, Colette (2003). “The Paradoxes of the Symptom in Psychoanalysis.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (86–101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swyngedouw, Erik (2010). “Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change.” Theory, Culture and Society 27 (2–3): 213–232. Thiele, Kathrin (2008). The Thought of Becoming: Giles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life. Berlin and Zürich: Diaphanes Verlag. ——— (2010). “‘To Believe in This World, As It Is’: Immanence and the Quest for Political Activism.” Deleuze Studies 4 (Supplement): 28–45. Trevathan, Wenda (1987). Human Birth: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Valentine, Jeremy (2007). “Denial, Anger and Resentment.” In The Truth of Žižek. Ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (177–196). London: Continuum. Verhaeghe, P. and F. Declercq (2002). “Lacan’s Analytical Goal: ‘Le Sinthome or the Feminine Way.’” In Essays on the Final Lacan. Re-inventing the Symptom. Ed. Luke Thurston (59–83). New York: Other Press. Williams, James (2003). Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ——— (2008). Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso. ——— Ed. (1998). “ Four Discoures, Four Subjects.” In Cogito and the Unconscious. Ed. Slavoj Žižek (74–113). Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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——— (2000a). The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington. ——— (2000b). The Fragile Absolute. London: Verso. ——— (2004). Organs without Bodies. New York and London: Routledge. (Designated as OB) ——— (2006). The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ——— (2007). “Afterword: With Defenders Like These, Who Needs Attackers?” In The Truth of Žižek. Ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (197–255). London: Continuum. Zupančič, Alenka (2003). “Ethics and Tragedy in Lacan.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (173–190). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part I

Encountering Lacan

1

Light, Camera, Action! The Luminous Worlds of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze Hanjo Berressem

[R]elations of light (Deleuze, Bacon 94) [I]n the actuality of the atomic nucleus, the nucleon is still close to chaos and finds itself surrounded by a cloud of constantly emitted and reabsorbed particles; but at a further level of actualization, the electron is in relation with a potential photon that interacts with the nucleon to give a new state of the nuclear material. (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy 153)

Luminous Thought

Luminous Desire

Luminous Worlds

G illes Deleuze’s complementary books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image set up an immediate conceptual relation between philosophy and the cinema. In the work of Jacques Lacan, the relation between psychoanalysis and the cinema is less evident. Although there are numerous instances in Lacan’s work that address the visual field, he is more interested in painting than in the moving image; a preference that echoes Freud who often used paintings and painters to illustrate psychoanalytic concepts but who was extremely suspicious of the cinema and

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the cinematographic apparatus. Even when the movie industry offered him massive amounts of money for his collaboration, Freud refused to have anything to do with the movies, and although the proliferation of moving images around him made a comparison of dreams to movies seem almost inevitable, he preferred almost stubbornly to define the dream in terms of the still image. Symptomatically, the one reference to the cinema in Freud’s work stresses its superficiality and the fact that it disseminates clichés: “The uninstructed relatives of our patients, who are only impressed by visible and tangible things—preferably by actions of the sort that are to be witnessed at the cinema—never fail to express their doubts whether ‘anything can be done about the illness by mere talking,’” Freud notes somewhat despairingly in the Introductory Lectures to Psycho-Analysis (17). Despite the absence of cinema in psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis has become extremely present in film studies, which have, from the moment of their conception, literally soaked up psychoanalytic concepts. In the long and illustrious list of film scholars whose work is driven by psychoanalysis, Slavoj Žižek is the most psychoanalytically informed. In fact, Žižek’s work is so saturated with filmic references and it moves at such a conceptual speed that it might be said to be itself eminently cinematic: 24 concepts per second. Most of the cinematic references and implications in the works of Lacan and Deleuze are well-rehearsed. This said, there is as yet little research into the possible relations between a Lacanian and a Deleuzian film studies. One reason is the often deep ideological faultlines that run between the Lacanian and the Deleuzian camps. A more important reason, however, lies in the ‘real’ difficulty of aligning their conceptual a priori. Where there were encounters between Lacan and Deleuze in film studies, these tended to revolve around the differences between Oedipal and anti-Oedipal movies, or, more generally, between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis. While it is important to address these clear and present differences, such inherently agonistic encounters could not develop a common cinematic platform for Lacan and Deleuze. To develop such a platform, perhaps one needs to go beyond an engagement with specific movies and|or genres and beyond a thematic and|or formal focus; that is, beyond character constellations and|or structural characteristics of specific movies and|or genres. Maybe the cinematic similarities between Deleuze and Lacan lie on a more fundamental level. What, for instance, about their respective attitudes toward the optical universe? What do they say about the notion of light as the most fundamental cinematic medium and the prerequisite for any form of the image and of the cinema? In surrealist terms: could the concept of light become the medium for a meeting of Lacan and Deleuze on the operating table of the cinema?

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Light1 | Heider The polaroid photo is a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object. (Baudrillard, America 37) Is the plate on which this particle of light stops not in fact its “cause?” Can we really speak of the photon before (or after) having captured it on a screen or photographic plate? (Baudrillard, Strategies 81)

In addressing the similarities between Lacan and Deleuze in the light of the question of light, one needs to align four of the fields into which the notion of light is refracted: the cinematic, the philosophical, the psychoanalytic, and the scientific. Each of these works with a different notion of light. In film studies, light is by default treated as a technological and|or aesthetic element of cinematography. What is less noted is that it is not only a technological medium but also the fundamental material medium of the cinema; the milieu in which the cinema literally embodies itself: the optical plane of composition to which every filmic action is immanent. From this perspective, film studies might still need to develop both an optical epistemology and an optical ontology of the cinema. My chapter is meant as a prolegomenon to such a project. The history of philosophy is suffused with different, eminently complex notions of light. These go from religious light to rational light and further to phenomenological light. Most commonly, light is used metaphorically or symbolically to denote processes of enlightenment. In an act of ‘mining knowledge,’ something unknown is hauled from the geological darkness of ignorance into the clear light of the understanding and|or of reason. Psychoanalysis stands in the tradition of enlightenment, except that the hauling being done is now from the depths of the unconscious. In fact, when Freud and Lacan talk about light, they usually do so in the context of a luminous hermeneutics that relies on the philosophical notion of the light of reason|consciousness. Yet, even while psychoanalysis aims to shine the conceptual light of consciousness into the famously dark continent of the unconscious, this enlightenment never aspires toward a full consciousness or, in optical terms, toward the pure, white light of reason. Although science also uses light metaphorically, ‘scientifically,’ light is a fundamental photonic medium. Photons are modeled as discrete particles|quanta of electromagnetic energy that have 0 mass, no electric charge, and an indefinitely long lifetime. However, they also show characteristics of waves. As both wave and particle, they are defined by a fundamental complementarity. As elemental particles|waves, photons are the subatomic building-blocks|radiations of the world’s electromagnetic— which means for optical perception luminous—reality. At the same time,

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and this refers directly to the visual perception of movie images, ‘a photon’ is the unit of retinal illumination and as such a measure of the empirical perception of light. In this double definition of the photon, science brings into play both ontological and epistemological registers. In the cinematic field, then, light is commonly treated as either a technological and|or as a perceptual medium, in philosophy and psychoanalysis as a conceptual medium and in science as a material medium. Often, however, conceptualizations of light combine these fields. In his essay “Object and Medium” (1923), for instance, the Viennese psychologist Fritz Heider stresses the scientific character of light as a material medium within which images are actualized. As a psychologist, however, he is interested specifically in the relations that pertain to light as a material and as a perceptual medium; in the “perception of far-away objects that is mediated by waves” (wellenvermittelte Fernwahrnehmung) (Heider 322).1 In his article, which has become a founding text for media studies, Heider develops, if only implicitly, an ontology and an epistemology of the cinema. As Heider notes, the overall medium of visual perception is the atmosphere, such as the air in a room in which a movie is being projected. As Heider notes, while “the objects of perception are the solid and half-solid objects of our environment [. . .] the transmitter is the space that is filled with air, the medium that surrounds the objects” (322).2 The photonic medium within which images of objects are incarnated is a secondary medium; the “multiplicity of light-waves” (Lichtwellenmannigfaltigkeit) (323) that travel through this atmosphere. In mediological terms, the loosely coupled multiplicity of photons moves within the loosely coupled multiplicity of the molecules that makes up the atmosphere. In cinematic terms, the photonic medium is made up of the beams of light that travel, through the air, from the movie projector to the movie screen. Optical aggregates are formed within the photonic medium by way of the refraction, diffusion, scattering, absorption, and dispersion of light.3 The complete darkness of outer space, in fact, results from the fact that it is a vacuum in which the photons that are emitted by the sun never enter material media or hit material forms, which means that they are not refracted, diffused, scattered, absorbed, or dispersed. The glitter of the motes of dust that reflect the light in the beam of the movie projector, however, is paralleled in outer space by the sparkling of abandoned satellites. It is only when they enter the earth’s—or any other planet’s—atmosphere that photons bloom into the spectral milieus of ‘visible light.’ To say ‘visible light,’ however, is somewhat misleading, because although the photonic medium forms the ontological ground|cause of the optical world, it is itself curiously invisible because in terms of epistemology, we do not experience light directly as something that touches our eyes and ‘points’ to something else. Rather, we see the lighted object. In terms of

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visual perception, in fact, light is always already incarnated or refracted. As Niklas Luhmann notes, “one does not see the light, but the objects, and when one sees light, then through the form of the things” (Gesellschaft 201).4 In the cinema, for instance, we see the images that are projected onto the screen rather than the light ‘itself ’ as the medium in which these images are incarnated. It is only when we turn around that we see the projected light, but then we no longer see the movie images. Perceptually, in fact, the photonic medium functions best ‘under erasure,’ a characteristic Marshall McLuhan has extended to all forms of perceptual media. This perceptual characteristic has to do with the material “characteristic of the medium” to be “mostly unimportant for the form of things” (für die Form des Geschehens weitgehend gleichgültig) (Heider 324). As the medium of light does not have an “Eigenoscillation” (Eigenschwingung)” (331), it invariably takes on the “Eigenform of the substrates” (323) in which it “actualizes itself ” (324). In other words, the photonic medium in and of itself does not form a coherent “unity” (325). As an inherently formless carrier, it is a ‘substrate without characteristics.’ It does not have an ‘eigenpattern’ for the observer|spectator, because it is a pure multiplicity of “many unrelated parts” (326). Light rays make up a ‘photonic multiplicity,’ or, as Heider calls it, an “atomistic neighbourhood” (Nebeneinander) (332–333). The structural difference between objects and light, therefore, is that between ‘eigenhood’ (Eigentlichkeit) and ‘un-eigenhood’ (Uneigentlichkeit).’ In mediological terms, between form and medium. While “objects contain the real dynamics of a unity” (Einheitsgeschehen), “the Eigenoscillation” (329), Heider notes, the medium’s oscillations are the “forced oscillations” (329) that originate in the object, which is why they form only “fake unities“ (329). The optical medium functions as a material and perceptual carrier that incarnates itself in specific forms. This, however, does not mean that it is itself immaterial. It merely means that on a macroscopic level it ‘takes on’ the form of the objects it illuminates. At the same time, for optical perception, objects are invariably lighted and they depend on the ambient light around them: on its changing intensity and its invariably site-specific assemblage; on the local specificities that make for the differences between, say, a Dutch and an Italian light. In terms of the cinema, for instance, there are important differences between the changing light on location, and artificial studio light, although these two parameters are often mixed. Light2 | Lacan Eyes so long untortured by light. (Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee 153)

As a psychologist, Heider is interested in the function of light as a material and a perceptual medium because it helps to explain the visual perception

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of objects, and although he conceptualizes light as the optical carrier of forms, he ultimately considers these forms as the most important elements of visual perception. The light waves proceed from the object, the effect disseminates into details, which contain something of the unity of the object, but which are themselves not a unity. The organism takes in these singular effects, it gathers them and they become effective in the field of the large objects [. . .] the effect of the object glided latently within the medium, physically unreal, in order to resurface and become actual. In this way something related to the object and something physically unified comes to exist again. (332)5

Heider provides an important reference for theories of light as a material medium and, implicitly, for theories of cinematic perception. While this would suffice to draw attention to his work, a more specific reason is that Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of light, which he develops in the chapter “The Line and Light” of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, shares many of Heider’s assumptions about light as both a material and a perceptual medium:6 For Lacan, light is the medium of optical desire. This specifically psychoanalytic light might allow film studies to go beyond their common psychoanalytics toward a more general cinematic theory of luminous desire. The chapter’s conceptual frame is the scopic drive and the way it defines the optical field as a libidinous field in which the gaze functions as the object of desire or, in Lacan’s terminology, as the object a. Early on, this frame has been taken up by film scholars such as Laura Mulvey as the way people—and in extension the camera—look at other people.7 Lacan’s ‘libidinous optics,’ however, go deeper than that. To recapitulate: Lacan develops his libidinous optics through the juxtaposition of the symbolic structure of geometral space and the imaginary structure of the visual perception of space; or, as he calls it, ‘the subject of the eye’ and ‘the subject of the gaze.’ As Lacan notes about the logic of the eye, “[w]hat is at issue in geometral perspective is simply the mapping of space, not sight” (Fundamental 86). What is constructed on this level is an optical Symbolic that is governed by the laws of the central perspective that Leon Battista Alberti introduced into visual representation during the Renaissance. As the symbolic subject of the eye relies in its constitution on the mathematical and geometric laws of this perspective, Lacan models it as a geometrical abstraction; as an a-corporeal, geometral point without extension. It designates “that punctiform being located at the geometral point from which the perspective is grasped” (96). Philosophically, this subject is analogous to the Cartesian “subject of the representation” (105) to which Lacan refers in directly optical terms as

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precisely “a sort of geometral point” (86).8 In this purely geometral field, what is important is “the path of light” (86); the direction of the rays of light rather than light’s character as a luminous body or as a medium of visual perception. This is why the laws of the eye can be understood and even visualized by the blind. Ultimately, the subject of the eye denotes a logics of light and a philosophy of vision. In the cinema, the space of the eye denotes, among others, the position and movement of the camera as well as, in extension, the overall ‘narrative geometry’ of the movie. For Lacan, however, the notion of a self-transparent subject is a fata morgana and the notion of a purely symbolic consciousness “seeing itself seeing itself” an idealist “illusion” (82). The phantasmatic character of a fully enlightened subject is based on the fact that the symbolic subject of the eye “finds its basis in the inside-out structure of the gaze” (82), whose imaginary logic subverts the optical idealism of the symbolic subject. While the geometral field is related to the eye and to a viewer positioned outside of the visual field—“in the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am not in the picture” (96), Lacan notes—the gaze, which forms the “underside of consciousness,” is “that which turns me into a picture” (83; 105). According to the logic of the gaze, light is the carrier of visual desire: the refracted light of desire rather than the reflecting light of reason. Ultimately, to say that the gaze is the visual object a is to say that the subject literally desires the gaze of the other. The subject of the gaze, therefore, denotes a rhetorics of light and an aesthetics of vision. Unlike the clearly obscure symbolic light, the imaginary light is obscurely clear. In the cinema, the gaze denotes, among others, the film’s visual field as a field of the intensity, the composition, and the change of light: mood and atmosphere. The milieu of the gaze is defined by the visual laws of light and vision rather than the optical laws of geometry and the central perspective. In opposition to the symbolic, abstract, a-corporeal, empty light of consciousness|reason, the imaginary light is a full and “embodied light” (90). In the same way that the subject of desire is a corporeal subject rather than an abstracted, punctiform being, Lacan’s imaginary light is the material medium of visual desire. In the visual medium of the gaze, Lacan maintains, “I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometral point from which the perspective is grasped” (96). If the geometral world relies on the straight ‘line of light,’ the light of the libidinous world makes up a dense, almost tactile and richly complex, illuminated ‘spectral milieu.’ The libidinous milieu is quite literally voluminous, and the embodied light that fills it has, invariably, a specific temperature and intensity; from the ‘magic hour’ of a warm, magnetic gaze to the repellent intensity and coldness of a cruel, hateful stare. If embodied light becomes too intensive,

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in fact, it hurts the body, which has built-in filters and protective procedures against its white intensity: “Light may travel in a straight line,” Lacan notes, “but it is refracted, diffused, it floods, it fills—the eye is a sort of bowl—it flows over, too, it necessitates, around the ocular bowl, a whole series of organs, mechanisms, defences” (94). One of these defenses is to squint when the ambient light becomes too strong, or to wear ‘Ray Bans.’ As Lacan notes in a 1974 press conference, Human beings demand only that light should be tempered. Light as such is absolutely unbearable. Moreover, one has never talked of light, of the age of Lights, one talked of the Enlightenment [d’Aufklärung]. “Please bring a small lamp,” that is already a lot. Actually that is already more than we can bear. (Lacan “Conférence” 19)9

When Lacan argues that the perception of light does not only pertain to the organ of the eye, this makes the voluminosity and extensivity of light even more tangible. For Lacan, the whole body is immersed in light, because “[t]he whole surface of the tegument” is a “photo-sensitive” (Lacan, Fundamental 94) surface. Pigment “comes and goes in functions that [. . .] suggest the depth, the complexity and, at the same time, the unity of the mechanisms concerned with light” (94).10 As in Heider, in fact, Lacan’s imaginary light is always already perceptually filtered, and thus a ‘phenomenological phenomenon.’ As Lacan notes, “there is no objective correlative in the spectrum to enable us to attach the quality of colour to the wavelength, or to the relevant frequency at this level of light vibration” (97). The logic of the eye, then, describes how pictures are created inside of the subject through imagination, while the logic of the gaze describes how the subject is itself ‘in the picture’ as well as the ways in which it is aesthetically affected, through the various senses, by its immersion in a universe of light: That which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depths of my eye, something is painted—something that is not simply a constructed relation, the object on which the philosopher lingers—but something that is an impression, the shimmering of a surface. (Fundamental 96)

While it would be inviting to think that symbolic images are objective and unambiguous while imaginary ones are subjective and ambiguous, it is important to realize that both fields are potentially ambiguous, although imaginary images are differently ambiguous than symbolic ones. While the symbolic can be anamorphotically and thus geometrically distorted— Lacan’s virtuoso reading of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors attests to the conceptual complexity of these distortions—the ambiguity

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of the imaginary lies in the subject’s immersion in a ‘deep-focus’ optical milieu that it can never fully comprehend: [T]he depth of field, with all its ambiguity and variability [. . .] is in no way mastered by me. It is rather it that grasps me, solicits me at every moment, and makes of the landscape something other than a landscape, something other than what I have called the picture. (96)

Not only does the subject constantly lose itself in these depths, it invariably misses something. If death is ‘missed’ in the Holbein painting by virtue of the geometral ‘stain,’ the imaginary image always contains something ‘obscure.’ As Lacan notes, “[i]n our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, [. . .] something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded by it— that is what we call the gaze” (73). While the symbolic is about geometrical distortion, the imaginary is about dissolution and diffraction. While the geometrical line is unrefracted and abstract, the optical line is diffracted and fuzzy, and while the geometrical point of perspective is a-temporal and mathematical, the optical point of view is temporal and concrete. Both the symbolic and the imaginary register are eminently ‘cinematic.’ To see the potential for a Lacanian reading of not only filmic narratives and of filmic techniques in relation to these narratives, one might look at the symbolic distortions created by the position and optics of the camera, as in Orson Welles’ creation of spatial anamorphoses by way of excessive camera angles, or Alfred Hitchcock’s use of complex camera movements to create affective spaces. As fundamental ‘givens’ of optical and visual space, the position and optics of the camera go beyond an Oedipal or anti-Oedipal framework. At the same time, Lacan’s imaginary light illuminates the modes of the creation of specific spaces of differently affective cinematic light; from the black and white composition of Joan of Arc to the diffused, candle-lit spaces of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, or from the noir universe to realistic light and to the cinemascopic saturation of Hollywood in the light of the melodrama. In fact, Lacan’s diagram of the meeting of the symbolic and the imaginary vectors is itself eminently cinematic in that the “locus of mediation” (107) is a image|screen that is in many ways analogous to a movie screen. Symptomatically, the projection onto this plane refers not only to an optical superimposition but also to the topological notion of suturing, which has itself become a seminal concept in film studies, where it denotes the alignment of the symbolic and the imaginary according to the topology of the unilateral ‘projective plane.’ The topological complementarity of the symbolic and the imaginary creates a truly ‘stereo-scopic,’ chiasmic reality. The symbolic “immanence of the I see myself seeing myself” (81) is twisted into a diagrammatic “chiasma” (95).

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Object

image

Geometral point

Point of light

The gaze

Figure 1.1

image screen

screen

Picture

The subject of representation

Lacan’s Three Diagrams

Source: Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 91 and p. 106.

Lacan’s superimposition shows that the virtual, symbolic “immanence of our thought” (Žižek 53) and of our consciousness is always filled up—in Deleuzian terms, is actualized—by the optical immanence of our desire: “In the subject’s relation to the image, the geometral logic is quite literally filled up with the optical atmosphere of the ego’s phantasmatic landscapes and its densely luminous desire. The point of perspective is surrounded by the play of light” (96). The libidinous gaze refracts the rational light of thought that supposedly fully penetrates the darkness of a meaningless and thoughtless world: philosophical chiaroscuro and spectral psychoanalysis. Whereas film studies have read suture mainly in terms of the affective and cognitive insertion of the spectator into the diegetic space of the movie through its double capture by the affective plane of identification and the logical plane of the narrative, in Lacan suture goes much deeper: it defines the world as cinema and the cinema as the world; a claim to which I will return. Lacan’s photonics of desire and his descriptions of the field of the gaze and of the subject “of desire” (89) are pervaded by a luminist lyricism that is quite exceptional in his work. They cover precisely the conceptual parameters that allow to cinematically relate Lacan’s psychoanalytic light and Deleuze’s philosophical light: the immanence of luminous desire in a

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photonic medium and the description of the “spectacle of the world” (75) as a multiplicity of human and nonhuman gazes in which scopic desire diffracts. Lacan’s world of desire is a fully cinematic, luminescent world that gives itself as the optical milieu in which living systems—what Deleuze and Guattari call “desiring machines”—live and move. It is a medium that stretches from the glitter of surface refractions to the deep shadows of almost complete, cold darkness. Light3 | Deleuze: Fundamentally, I am a matter of Light. (Cy Twombly: Gaeta, 1993)11 Poetry, fiction, drama—I am interested in the arts of incident only so far as fiction touches life; oh, no, not in any vulgar, autobiographical sense, rather at the level of the most crystalline correspondence. (Delany, Dhalgren 360, emphasis in original)

Deleuze’s notion of a philosophical light is arguably one of his most seminal concepts. In fact, of the various models of the plane of immanence invented by Deleuze, what one might call the ‘photonic plane,’ is arguably the most comprehensive one, because it contains the atomic plane, which in turn contains the molecular plane.12 The photonic, luminous “plane of immanence” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 59) is the plane of electromagnetic radiation, parts of whose spectrum some living systems register optically as light, but which can also be registered, as Lacan had noted, as warmth or as a magnetic current. As a pure multiplicity of radiation, it comes close to Henri Bergson’s description of the universe as “made up of modifications, disturbances, changes of tension and of energy, and nothing else” (Deleuze, Bergsonism 76). Conceptually, the photonic plane of immanence participates in the photon’s oscillation between particle and wave; a complementarity that allows for its refraction into Deleuze’s equally complementary conceptual spaces of the actual and of the virtual. As both particle and wave, the photon partakes of individual and communal behavior, and it is related both to the materiality of the onto-optical world within which the cinematic world is assembled and to the ‘immateriality’ of perceptual images. In fact, the complementary pair of ‘actual color | virtual light’ corresponds directly to that of ‘actual body | virtual thought,’ with light incarnating itself in color similar to the way thought incarnates itself in a body. In physical terms, the photonic plane of immanence is the field of particular, actual photonic movements and perturbations. In psychic terms, it is the field of communal waves of virtual energy. In optical terms, it is the open set

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of all movement-images; “a homogeneous continuity, a universe or a plane [. . .] of genuinely unlimited content” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 16). In perceptual terms, finally, it is the overall field of optical disparity that is defined by “universal variation, total, objective and diffuse perception” (64). Within the photonic plane, a living being creates a cohesive milieu that defines it as systems against an outside environment. In that porcess, it becomes what other living beings perceive as an ‘image,’ or, to use a German term used by Lacan in “The Mirror-Stage,” a “Gestalt.” On this conceptual background, a living system can be defined as a ‘moving image,’ or, in Deleuze’s terminology, a ‘movement-image’: a ‘figure’ that moves. The conceit that defines both Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, in fact, is the equation of cinematographic images with these movement-images because “each one of us,” as Deleuze notes, “is nothing but an assemblage [agencement] of three images, a consolidate [consolidé] of perceptionimages, action-images and affection images” (66). Within this conceit the books recapitulate, in cinematographic registers and terminology, the genesis of ‘desiring machines’—a term that, like ‘centers of indetermination,’ denotes living systems—within the photonic plane. “It is an operation which is exactly described as a framing: certain actions undergone are isolated by the frame, [. . .] [the] executed actions are no longer immediately linked with the action which is undergone” (62). On the perceptual level, such framings happen, among others, through the filters of the senses, which register only certain spectra of photonic intensity. On the cognitive level, such framings happen through specific decisions and cognitive bifurcations. On the biomaterial level, finally, they happen through the construction of material borders and membranes such as the skin. For these movement-images, the optical milieu forms the “plane of consistency” on which a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude). Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds. (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 287)13

A first resonance between Lacan’s and Deleuze’s respective relation to the luminous world is that Deleuze’s loving, graceful slow-motion account of how singular movement-images emerge autopoietically within the multiplicitous plane of pure light recalls Lacan’s luminous and libidinous lyricism.

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Conceptually, the Deleuzian challenge is to imagine a cinematic world that is made up purely of “[l]ight” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 60). As a “machine assemblage of movement-images” (59), this world is a “collection of lines or figures of light; a series of blocs of space-time” (61).14 The composition of movement-images is immanent to this dynamic field, which is in turn modified and qualified by local movements in complicated sets of feedback loops. In fact, the field is made up of always already nothing but the multiplicity of local movements. In optical terms, systems subtract light from the fundamental multiplicity of the optical plane through the development of spatio-temporal frames. Deleuze notes, however, that all sets retain a direct, structural relation to the outside of the frame; the cinematic ‘off ’: “A closed system is never absolutely closed; but on the one hand it is connected in space to other systems by a more or less ‘fine’ thread, and on the other hand it is integrated or reintegrated into a whole which transmits a duration to it along this thread [. . .] a duration which is immanent to the whole universe“ (17). In fact, “everything which is closed is artificially closed” (10). For Deleuze, this open optical multiplicity forms the conceptual ground of his cinematographic philosophy. It is a state of things which would constantly change, a flowing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor centre of reference would be assignable. On the basis of this state of things it would be necessary to show how, at any point, centres can be formed which would impose fixed instantaneous views. It would therefore be a question of ‘deducing’ conscious, natural or cinematographic perception. (57–58, my emphasis)15

While systems are defined as material and perceptual reductions of this field’s complexity, Deleuze stresses that these reductions do not originate in the system. Rather, the system is itself the result of its specific perceptual and material reductions: We perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a function of our needs [. . .]. Which is a way of defining the first material moment of subjectivity: it is subtractive [. . .]. An atom, for example, perceives infinitely more than we do and, at the limit perceives the whole universe. (63–64)

In luminous terms, these reductions are obscurations, which means that living systems obscure the plane of a pure, white light—the total|ideal luminosity of the optical plane of immanence—by contracting elements of the overall optical set into singular color spectra. This is why the cinema

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of the human world is an art of obscuration and of deceleration: “In short, it is not consciousness which is light, it is the set of images, or the light, which is consciousness, immanent to matter. As for our consciousness of fact, it will merely be the opacity without which light ‘is always propagated without its source ever having been revealed’” (61). In this reversal of the optical logic of the enlightenment, human as well as nonhuman consciousness has to be subtracted from the ideal of a pure, unrefracted light; from the universal, anonymous, white dance—what Bergson calls the ‘undirected movement’—of photons. In his book Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences, Žižek refers to this optical ontology when he notes that Deleuze’s discussion of light brings one “to the constitutive ambiguity of the relationship between actual and virtual” and as such to the most basic premises of Deleuzian philosophy. On the one hand, Žižek notes, “the human eye reduces the perception of light; it actualizes light in a certain way (perceiving certain colors, etc.) [. . .]. The flow of light ‘in itself ’ is nothing actual, but, rather, the pure virtuality of infinite possibilities actualized in a multitude of ways” (Žižek 4).16 On the other hand, the eye is the organ that, in relating perception to memory, “expands perception—it inscribes what it ‘really sees’ into the intricate network of memories and anticipations (like Proust with the taste of madeleine), it can develop new perceptions, etc.” (4).17 Žižek’s project is to install the psychoanalytic logic of belatedness into the heart of Deleuzian philosophy: Human consciousness has always already reduced the preperceptual, multiplicitous optical reality, and with it the virtual ontology of multiplicity, to an actual ontology of lack. From the logic of quantum physics that, famously, puts the observer into the scene of observation and thus makes him|her an agent within the observed, Žižek deduces that, ontologically, the first virtual reality is ‘in actual fact’ always already the observed, actual reality. And is this ambiguity not homologous to the ontological paradox of quantum physics? The very ‘hard reality’ that emerges out of the fluctuation through the collapse of the wave-function is the outcome of observation, that is, of the intervention of consciousness. Consciousness is thus not the domain of potentiality, multiple options, and so on, as opposed to hard single reality—reality previous to its perception is fluid-multiple-open, and conscious perception reduces this spectral, preontological, multiplicity to one ontologically fully constituted reality (4 fn2, emphasis added).

What Žižek fails to note, however, is that within the quantum paradigm the presence of the observer is a material, actual presence rather than an immaterial, virtual one. In Lacanian terms, the presence of the observer in the experiment is that of the embodied ‘gaze’ rather than that of the abstract ‘eye’ of the observer. It is as an embodied consciousness that the observer is

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immanent to the observed milieu; a fact that reinforces Deleuzian immanence rather than Freudian belatedness. The second problem is that in Deleuze there is no temporal shift or succession from an idealized multiplicity and potentiality to a realistic reality that is constructed within a reductive consciousness. Rather, the subject emerges from the anonymous electromagnetic field simultaneously as both an actual and a virtual reduction. Most importantly, Deleuze is careful to always maintain a constitutive gap between the actual eye and what it ‘really sees’ and the virtual eye of the imagination. In terms of the cinema, Deleuze treats this as the gap between the ‘perception motor-arc’ of Cinema 1 and the ‘cone of memory’ of Cinema 2. For Deleuze, the art of seeing lies, like the art of philosophy, not in conflating the two planes, but rather in bringing them into resonance across the gap between them. In Cinema 2, Deleuze uses the term ‘crystal-images’ to designate images that reduce the gap to a minimum by showing the “smallest internal circuit” (Deleuze, Cinema 2 70) between the actual and the virtual series. Crystal-images show “the indiscernibility of the actual and the virtual” (87); moments at which art and life become ‘almost’ identical: “life as spectacle, and yet in its spontaneity” (89). Within the internal architecture of the two cinema books, crystal-images designate the impossible moment when the two volumes of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 would become one volume, when the distance between them would be reduced to zero: ‘crystal images,’ ‘crystal philosophy.’ While Žižek shifts temporally from virtual to actual light, then, for Deleuze light is always already both virtual and actual; wave and particle. There is only one projective plane whose ‘two sides’ are composed of virtual|actual light. In Žižek, the reference to a Deleuzian optics is part of a larger project to implement the ‘immanence of our thought,’ which Žižek uses to show that Deleuze is ‘in actual fact’ a Lacanian. Ironically, however, in this project, Žižek does Lacan without Lacan, because Žižek’s consciousness concerns only the subject of the eye. In actual fact, Lacan’s Lacan is much more Deleuzian than Žižek’s Lacan, because for both Deleuze and Lacan, the most fundamental, anonymous optical medium is the luminous, “allseeing” world. In some surprising passages Lacan talks about this “not exhibitionistic” (Lacan, Fundamental 75) world in the content of how the material milieu of the optical world ‘gives itself ’ to perception in the pure, diverse play of its refractions. In an explicit reference to Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, Lacan notes that the “original point of vision” from which the gaze and thus the subject as embodied perception emerge is “the flesh of the world:” “From the toils (rets), or rays (rais), if you prefer, of an iridescence of which I am at first a part, I emerge as eye, assuming, in a way, emergence from what I would like to call the function of seeingness (voyure)” (82).

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In developing his theory of voyure, Lacan draws, as he does quite often during that phase of his work, on Roger Caillois, in particular on Caillois’ work on mimicry. The biology of nonhuman life—Lacan notes explicitly that he is concerned with the biology of life-forms that are “scarcely animals” (99)—shows that mimicry functions in order to “[defend] oneself against light” (98) and to inscribe oneself “in the picture” (99) of the world in order to elude the gazes of possible enemies. Deleuze and Guattari note something quite similar in reference to the notion of ‘becoming imperceptible’ when they state that a fish “worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, [to become] imperceptible” (Plateaus 309). Like Deleuze’s, Lacan’s anonymous optical milieu reaches, quite programmatically, all the way to the seemingly inanimate. Famously, it includes even the gazes of such nonhuman objects as empty sardine cans. It is within the multiplicity of these nonhuman and human gazes that the subject is constituted as an optical aggregate: “It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which [. . .] I am photo-graphed” (Lacan, Fundamental 106). The milieu of gazes, of luminous perception, and of the embodiment of optical desire forms a fundamentally ambiguous milieu to which the subject is immanent and in which it functions as a both refracted and refracting surface. Suture, therefore, to return to the cinematic, goes well beyond the insertion of the spectator into the diegetic narrative of a film; it denotes the subject’s immersion in the world of gazes. Within the kaleidoscope of its both human and nonhuman gazes, the subject is quite literally a movement-image. In the same way in which a jewel catches and refracts the light, the embodied subject of desire is a literally brilliant, constantly changing being of light: In what is presented to me as space of light, that which is gaze is always a play of light and opacity. It is always that gleam of light [. . .] it is always this which prevents me, at each point, from being a screen, from making the light appear as an iridescence that overflows it. In short, the point of gaze always participates in the ambiguity of the jewel. (96, emphasis added)

Maybe the deepest resonances between Lacan and Deleuze reverberate through this terminology: the ambiguity of jewels and the ambiguity of crystal-images. Camera The light and the shot, that is the philosophy of the director. (Douglas Sirk, cited in Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 11)18

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Douglas Sirk’s statement recapitulates precisely the two registers in which Lacan and Deleuze converge: the luminous intensity of embodied light and the geometrical position of the camera. Ultimately, all cinema is about light, and the camera is the apparatus that captures light by registering photons on a sensitive medium|surface. In fact, Deleuze goes so far as to talk about a “camera-consciousness” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 74) because he considers the emergence of “centers of indetermination” (65)—yet another name forlivingbeings—incinematographictermsasthe‘comingalive’ofthecamera at the moment when it starts to move. When the static montage of shots that are in themselves static is taken over by the animated montage of inherently moving and moved shots, the technological apparatus of visual perception quite literally comes alive. The cinematographic reference is Griffith versus Welles, the static optical collage of The Birth of a Nation versus the optical fluidity of the opening shots of The Lady from Shanghai. With a moving, animated camera the cinema begins to truly resonate with the concept of a moving, animated world; of an intelligent matter and a living phylum on which perception operates and to which it remains immanent. Both the camera, as the perceptual relay between the world and the cinematic image, as well as the material world come alive: the camera gains an inherent appetitus, conatus, or élan vital. When the cinema comes alive, life becomes cinematic.19 Action All that is left now is to animate the scene that is later related to other scenes in a complex montage; a scene that is immanent to a luminous field that is everywhere already active and alive. Ultimately, all that is needed to create a cinematic world is: Light, Camera, Action! To conclude: Can one—and if one can, should one—reconcile Lacan and Deleuze? Yes and no. While the conceptual and rhetorical similarities of what they individually develop as optical media allow for a reapproachment that is grounded on a comparable ‘photonic poetics,’ these poetics do not level out important conceptual differences: in Lacan, the projective movie screen superimposes the desires and phantasms of the ego and the logic of the subject. In other words, it aligns the Symbolic and the Imaginary, with the Real functioning, famously, as the twist or fold needed to construct a projective reality. The Real, therefore, is not ‘on’ the plane. Rather, it is what defines its topology as ‘moebial.’ There is no place for materiality on the Lacanian plane other than for the materiality of language; of the material signifier. In Deleuze, the distribution of desire is different and it is a different form of desire. Deleuze’s projective plane aligns on its ‘two sides’ the series of materiality and that of immateriality; in Deleuze’s terminology,

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the actual and the virtual. In the Deleuzian topology, the notion of the complementarity of the two series—particle and wave—takes over the function of the twist or fold. Deleuze’s plane aligns matter and mind while Lacan’s aligns logics and phantasmatics: ego and subject. If one were to describe Deleuze’s plane in Freudian terms, it would align, on the one side, the subject and the ego, and on the other, the id. If one were to describe Lacan’s plane in Freudian terms, it would align, on its ‘two sides,’ the ego and the subject. The id would be the twist or fold. Outside of his development of an optical physics, this difference can be seen in that Lacan is more interested in psychic reality than in physical reality. The latter is important only in its symptomatics and, more generally, as the ‘excluded’ field of pure materiality that is designated as the vacuum of the Real. In opposition, Deleuzian philosophy cannot be thought without the full implication of the ‘actual’ machinics of physical reality in the virtuality of thought. While Lacan’s optical milieu refers to an individual scopic desire and to a human subject’s entanglement in the asymmetrical sexual field and its vicissitudes, Deleuze’s optics concern a human subject that attempts to resonate with its nonhuman environment and to both extract from and implement into that environment appropriate concepts and conceptualizations. To forget these differences between Lacan and Deleuze would be counterproductive. Despite these obvious differences, however, Lacan’s and Deleuze’s celebration of the body of light provides a platform on which they can be aligned. In fact, even if for Lacan desire is by default human desire, while Deleuzian desire is a more general élan vital that permeates the world, Lacan comes close to such an élan vital in a crucial passage that describes the libido as an “extra-flat [. . .] lamella” (Lacan, Fundamental 197), which denotes “the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructable life” (198). Although Lacan conceives of this lamella as an organ, it is almost as if he were conceptualizing a ‘body without organs.’ As with Deleuze, the genesis of refracted desire is when the subject emerges as a subtraction from the pure life of the lamella—at the moment when through the fissures of the egg the lamella escapes and becomes that elusive thing the subject will not stop hoping to find back, for instance, in the gaze of the other. The lamella “is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives” (198). Even though Lacan tends to stress the detours of the signifier and of the object a, the concept of the lamella implies that beyond human desire lies an anonymous, amoeba-like life; a libidinous, nonhuman ‘plane of immanence.’

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The resonances between Lacan and Deleuze, then, lie in that both base their notion of light on the anonymous luminescence of the world as an optical media milieu.20 Both stress the importance of light as a natural and as a perceptual medium; as the electromagnetic field as ‘given to itself ’ and, at the same time, as ‘given to perception.’ In physical terms, as an anonymous photonic reality and as an individual visual reality. In optical terms, as image and as gaze. From “objective perception which is indistinguishable from the thing, to a subjective perception which is distinguished from it by simple elimination or subtraction” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 64). As Niklas Luhmann argues, perceptual processes imply specific perceptual media such as light, air or electromagnetic fields, which are bound into forms by the perceptual organism [. . .] In the cathedrals, light is allowed, it becomes form in order to play with the columns and arches. The physical structure of the world must allow, but the difference between medium and form is an accomplishment [Eigenleistung] of the perceptual organism. (Luhmann 197)

While Heider and Luhmann are mainly interested in this optical constructivism in relation to human perception and tend to put the natural medium under erasure—“small actions [das Kleingeschehen] of the molecules” (Heider 329) are “unimportant for the objects on our scale” (für das Übergeordnete gleichgültig) (329), Heider notes—both Lacan and Deleuze acknowledge them as the smallest building blocks in a universal photonic constructivism. For both Deleuze and Lacan light functions as a natural and as a perceptual medium within which living beings—as well as, in extension, the cinema—operate. From this convergence, one might develop both a theory and a poetics of cinematic light that might come to function as a basis for film studies. Such a theory would go beyond the thematic and the structural—beyond questions of content and form—toward the optical as the truly cinematic field; both epistemologically as well as ontologically. Both Lacan and Deleuze invite film studies equally to take another look at the material medium of the cinema; at its light and its refractions, and the way these link the cinema to its overall milieu. From such a point of view, the cinema is no longer constrained to being a distorted mirror of reality. It creates jewels of gazes and geometry in the case of Lacan, and crystals of light on a photonic plane of immanence in the case of Deleuze. A specific plane of light carries the singularity of every movie and allows the spectators to resonate with it, as they resonate with their fellow spectators, as well as with other living beings in general; both human and nonhuman. In Two Regimes of

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Madness, Deleuze proposes a classification of cinematic lighting. You have one kind of light that presents a composite physical environment, and whose composition gives you white light, a Newtonian light that can be found in American cinema, and perhaps in Antonioni’s films, though in a different way. Then you have a Goethe-light, an indestructible force that slams into shadows and picks things out [. . .]. You have another kind of light defined by its contrast not with shadow, but with shades of white, opacity being a total white out [. . .]. You have also a kind of light no longer defined either by composition or by contrast, but by alternation and the production of lunar figures [. . .]. The list could go on forever, because new lighting events can always be created [. . .]. (Deleuze Regimes, 286)

Within this classification, every movie is a singular luminous event, an optical milieu that contracts the world’s photonic field onto the ‘projective’ movie screen. Symptomatically, both Lacan and Deleuze relate the optics of the cinema to the optics of life and vice versa. This relation is shown, quite touchingly, by none other than Freud. Although, as I noted, his work contains only one reference to the cinema, in a letter he wrote to his family from Italy, he describes an autobiographical experience of ‘cinematic life’ when, in 1907, he attended an open-air screening of silent movies in the Piazza Colonna in Rome. The event consisted of an assemblage of advertisements, musical performances, slideshows, short documentaries, and short slapstick movies. In his letter, Freud notes the “free-floating attentiveness” (freischwebende Aufmerksamkeit) with which he watches the “cinematographic screenings, which are the reason why the big children and your father patiently put up with the advertisements and the boring photographs” (Freud, “Rom” 224).21 During the breaks and the advertisements, Freud strolls around the piazza until he sees, reflected in the expressions of the other people, that their attention has been captured by a new film: “When I turn around, a kind of tension in the crowd makes turn to watch again, and indeed, a new performance has begun, for which I remain” (224).22 For Freud, there is a magic to the event, but also a lingering melancholia, because he feels alone and isolated: “The magic tends to work until 9 o’clock, but after that I do feel too lonely in the crowd [. . .]” (224– 225).23 At home, he remembers, slightly sadly, the erotic tensions that played themselves out on the piazza; “the people who walk around undici, dodici[24] [. . .] as long as the music and the images continue” (225).25 When he leaves, the last thing he sees is “in a corner of the piazza one of the torturing transparencies that flash periodically and vanish again” (225).26 Freud experiences the cinematic event as part of the larger optical milieu he lives and moves in; a milieu that he experiences as eminently erotic and

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libidinous but also as melancholic. He is immersed in a play of gazes that includes his gazes—both those directed at the screen and those directed at his fellow spectators—other people’s gazes, as well as the many anonymous gazes of the world in general. The mesh of gazes shows Freud that, somehow, he does not quite belong into this milieu, similar to the way that the gaze of the can of sardines had shown Lacan that he does not belong on a fishing boat. As a movement-image, Freud wanders through a milieu filled with optical affects; with memories and an almost palpable loneliness and isolation. Life as affect. Light as affect. Cinema as affect. Notes 1. All translations from Heider are mine. 2. “[D]ie Objekte der Wahrnehmung [sind] die festen und halbfesten Dinge unserer Umgebung, und Vermittlung ist der lufterfüllte Raum, das Medium, das die Dinge umgibt” (322). 3. The refractive index of the material is the factor by which the speed of light is decreased in a material. 4. As with Heider, all translations from Luhmann are mine: “Man sieht nicht das Licht, sondern die Dinge, und wenn man Licht sieht, dann an der Form der Dinge.” 5. “Vom Dinge gehen die Lichtstrahlen aus, die Wirkung zerspellt sich in Einzelheiten, in denen wohl etwas der Einheit des Dinges Zugeordnetes, aber nicht selbst eine Einheit vorhanden ist. Der Organismus fängt diese einzelnen Wirkungen auf, in ihm sammeln sie sich wieder und werden im Bereich der großen Dinge wirksam [. . .]. Die Wirkung des Dinges glitt im Medium latent, physikalisch unwirklich dahin, um im Organismus wieder emporzutauchen und aktuell zu werden. So gibt es in meinem Hirn wieder etwas dem Dinge Zugeordnetes und physikalisch Einheitliches” (332). 6. While Lacan’s references to philosophical light in his descriptions of how the spirit illuminates the hermetic chiaroscuro of the dream can help situate him within the field of philosophy, they do not add anything to the notion of ‘luminous thought.’ 7. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. 8. Lacan calls this subject the subject of “the reflexive consciousness” (Lacan, Fundamental, 89) See also Lacan’s reference to Raymond Ruyer when he describes this subject as “the subject in an absolute overview” (98). 9. The original: “Les êtres humains ne demandent que ça, que les lumières soient tempérées. La Lumière en soi, c’est absolument insupportable. D’ailleurs on n’a jamais parlé de lumière, au siècle des Lumières, on a parlé d’Aufklärung. ‘Apportez une petite lampe, je vous en prie.’ C’est déjà beaucoup. C’est même déjà plus que nous ne pouvons en supporter” (19). 10. In his lectures on Spinoza, Deleuze develops a philosophy of light from such a bodily immersion in light, as when the body lies in the ‘actual sun’: “[i]n that

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13.

14.

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sense these are particles that act on my particles and the effect of one on the other is a pleasure or a joy. That’s the sun of the first kind of knowledge, which I translate under the naïve formula ‘oh the sun, I love that.’ In fact, these are extrinsic mechanisms of my body that play, and the relations between parts, parts of the sun and parts of my body” (Deleuze, “Lecture”). For Deleuze, however, this actual experience needs to be virtualized and it needs to be inserted into a logic of immanence; a movement he relates to the work of D. H. Lawrence. While the first is a purely actual sun, the second sun is virtual. “I am no longer in the effect of particles of sun on my body, I am in another domain, in compositions of relation. And at this very moment [. . .] I am not far from being able to say, ‘the sun, I am something of it.’ I have a relation of affinity with the sun. This is the second kind of knowledge” (ibid.). The third sun, finally, is a truly immanent sun; “a mystical union” in which “the rays by which the sun affects me are the rays by which I affect myself, and the rays by which I affect myself are the rays of the sun that affect me. It’s solar auto-affection” (ibid.). Symptomatically, in his philosophy of the three suns, Deleuze starts, like Lacan, with the notion that pure light is destructive. Deleuze notes that “an intensity which exceeds your power of being affected is bad [. . .] a blue that is too intense for my eyes will not make me say it’s beautiful, it will perhaps be beautiful for someone else” (ibid.). Quoted from Giorgos Seferis’ poem “On a Ray of Winter Light.” While Deleuze refers to the atomic plane mostly in the context of the realm of physics, as well as filtered through various forms of atomist philosophies, of ontology, the molecular medium concerns mostly the sociopolitical, economic, and psychoanalytical dimensions of his philosophy. From within the molecular, Deleuze develops a comprehensive theory of the various modes of molecular bonding, of the complex dynamics between the molecular and the molar, of the political spectrum from the politics of molecules to the politics of global capitalism, of the bureaucracies and protocols of consolidation, but also of the possibilities of undocking and of becoming other. In general, of the dynamics between territorializations, deterritorializations, and reterritorializations. If a perceptual system is completely molecularized and deterritorialized, it dissolves into this photonic plane, becoming once more anonymous: “In the final analysis, we would have to speak of a perception which was no longer liquid but gaseous. For, if we start from a solid state, where molecules are not free to move about (molar or human perception), we move next to a liquid state, where the molecules move about and merge into one another, but we finally reach a gaseous state, defined by the free movement of each molecule” (Deleuze, Cinema 1, 84). In these terms, the question about the genesis of living systems is that of the difference between an ‘image in movement’ and a “movement-image” (Deleuze, Cinema 1, 2). Like the single photon, this open multiplicity runs ‘at the speed of light’ through any seemingly closed and organized system. “It is rather a gaseous state. Me, my body, are rather a set of molecules and atoms which are

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17.

18. 19.

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constantly renewed. Can I even speak of atoms? They are not distinct from worlds, from interatomic influences. It is a state of matter too hot for one to distinguish solid bodies in it. It is a world of universal variation, of universal undulation, universal rippling: there are neither axes, nor centre, nor left, nor right, nor high, nor low . . . This infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane [plan] of immanence [. . .]. It is a set, but an infinite set. The plane of immanence is the movement [. . .] which is established between the parts of each system and between one system and another, which crosses them all, stirs them all up together and subjects them all to the condition which prevents them from being absolutely closed” (Deleuze, Cinema 1, 58–59). While the human eye is indeed an organ that reduces|refracts light in a particularly human manner—as opposed to the modes the eye of, say, a fly or the eye of a whale reduces light—one should note a minute difference that would seem too microscopic to mention without becoming sophistic if it were not for the fact that it cascades into a general misunderstanding: For Deleuze, it is ultimately not ‘the human eye that reduces the perception of light.’ Rather, it is perception as such that reduces the ideal luminosity of an unperceived, pure light. In other words, there is no ideal perception that would see all of the light. As such a perception would be purely virtual, light would not be refracted, and as such would be ‘light no more.’ In fact, there is no ‘virtual light,’ because even ‘in itself ’—which means as unperceived—light is always both actual and virtual, a fact captured by the notion of the complementarity of the photon. Once more, Žižek’s Deleuze is slightly askew, because in Deleuze’s topology, the virtual plane of memories is invariably embodied in an actual system. The threshold between actual perception and virtual memory—from the ‘movement-image’ in Cinema1 to the ‘time-image’ in Cinema 2—is not the actual organ of the eye, but rather the threshold where actual perception turns into virtual imagination. “[D]as Licht und die Einstellung, das ist die Philosophie des Regisseurs.” This is why, as Deleuze notes, the difference between Bergson’s two theses falls into the interval between a static camera (the time of the first thesis and of images in movement) and a moving camera (the time of the second thesis and of movement-images): “We can therefore define a primitive state of the cinema where the image is in movement rather than being movement-image. It was at this primitive state that the Bergsonian critique was directed” (Deleuze Cinema 1, 24). “Of course the medium is also important in that it has an immediate biological influence on the mode of the formation of the organism” (Heider, 330) (“Freilich ist das Medium auch insofern wichtig, als es unmittelbar biologisch einen Einfluß auf die Art der Gestaltung des Organismus ausübt”), Heider notes, and Luhmann: “obviously the environment always exerts an influence and nothing, absolutely nothing, can happen without it” [“[d]ass die Umwelt immer mitwirkt und ohne sie nichts, absolut gar nichts geschehen kann, ist selbstverständlich”] (Gesellschaft, 96).

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21. The original: “[. . .] kinematographische Vorführungen [. . .], wegen welcher sich die großen Kinder u Euer Vater mit dabei, die Reklamen u eintönigen Photographien ruhig gefallen lassen” (224). 22. “Kehre ich dann um, so macht mich eine Art Spannung in der Menge aufmerksam, daß ich wider [sic] hinsehe, u wirklich hat eine neue Vorstellung begonnen, bei der ich also noch bleibe” (224). 23. “Bis 9h pflegt so der Zauber zu wirken, dann fühle ich mich doch zu einsam im Gewühl [. . .]” (224–225). 24. The reference is to the operetta “Boccaccio” by Franz von Suppé, in particular to a song about the fact that people should not be all alone. 25. “zu Zweien oder undici dodici lustwandlen, [. . .] solange Musik u Lichtbilder anhalten.” 26. “In einer Ecke des Platzes [. . .] eines jener qualvollen Transparente, die periodisch aufblitzen u verschwinden” (225).

References Baudrillard, Jean. America, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2000. ———. Fatal Strategies. London: Pluto, 1999. Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996 [1974]. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1990. ———. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003. ———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ———. Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ———. “Lecture on Spinoza, (24/03/1981),” trans. Timothy S. Murphy. Available at http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=114&groupe=Spinoza&la ngue=2; last time consulted: January 30, 2012. ———. Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004 [1980]. ———. What Is Philosophy ? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University, 1994. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. “Imitations of Life. Über die Filme von Douglas Sirk.” Filme befreien den Kopf. Ed. Michael Töteberg. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984. 11–24. Freud, Sigmund. “Brief aus Rom an die Familie. 22. September 1907.” Unser Herz zeigt nach dem Süden. Reisebriefe 1885–1923. Ed. Sierek, Karl and Christfried Tögel. Berlin: Aufbau, 2002. 224–227.

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———. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Heider, Fritz. “Ding und Medium.” Kursbuch Medienkultur. Die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard. Ed. Claus Pias, Joseph Vogl, Lorenz Engell, Oliver Fahle, and Britta Neitzel. Stuttgart: DVA, 2000 [1921]. Lacan, Jacques. “Conférence de presse du docteur Jacques Lacan au Centre culturel français, Rome, le 29 octobre 1974.” Lettres de l’École freudienne 16 (1975): 6–26. ———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998 [1973]. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889. Žižek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.

2

Hearing Voices: Schizoanalysis and the Voice as Image in the Cinema of David Lynch Frida Beckman

It is, nevertheless, very important that the pure image insert itself into language, into names and voices. (Deleuze, 1995, 9) What I need is someone like you. (Lacan to Deleuze, in Smith 635–636)

Introduction T he voice brings us straight into the core of schizoanalysis.1 To begin with, both Lacan and Deleuze follow a general as well as long-standing philosophical interest in the nature of the voice and its relation to issues of self-presence and interiority, or of the Other and inaccessible exteriority. Indeed, Mladen Dolar (2006) notes, the voice is “inherently and necessarily linked with all major metaphysical preoccupations” (42). From Emperor Chun in the 2200 BC through Plato to St. Augustine, from Freud through Lacan to Derrida, Dolar shows how the tensions between presence and absence and between the sound of the voice versus the logos of meaning have haunted both religious and philosophical discourses. Also, an ostensible friction emerges between, on the one hand, Lacan’s promotion of the voice to the status of petit objet a and thus to an object of perceived absence and, on the other, Deleuze’s positioning of the

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voice as indicative of full presence; as an expression of possible worlds. The voice of interdiction (the voice of the father) and of fantasy (the voice of the mother) are thus contrasted with the voice as conferring a variable and plural reality. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari do not reject Lacan’s theory but rather decide “to give him some schizophrenic help” (Smith, 2004, 647) and affirm the petit objet a as part of real production. What are the implications of this “help” on how we may understand the voice and the way in which it links the absent and the present? At the same time, cinema offers its own configuration of voice in terms of absence and presence. As Mary Ann Doane (1980) notes, the relationship between voice and body in cinema is in itself capable of suggesting different conceptions of the body. Whereas the classical mise-en-scène typically synchronizes sound and image so as to represent a coherent bodysubject unity, the way in which, for example, Godard uses voice-off rather resists imaginary cohesion in favor of a body of dispersal and fragmentation (47–48). Still, and despite the crucial issues of physicality and metaphysics that the question of the voice raises, Kaja Silverman argues that while the feminist critique of cinema has appropriated Lacan’s emphasis on the gaze and thereby focused heavily on the visual regime, the politics of the voice and the sound regime have been given considerably less attention (Silverman, 1988, viii). This neglect of the politics of the voice, which Silverman since then has taken a crucial part in amending, exists also outside feminist film criticism. In fact, if Plato posited a danger of the voice in its capacity to disassociate itself from the word—“the voice beyond logos, the lawless voice” (Dolar, 2006, 45), the development of Western cinema and cinema theory would have offered him some reassurance. As Michel Chion (1999) notes, we often conflate voice with speech and thereby forget the materiality of the voice itself (1). Apart from being assumed by speech acts, the voice in film is also readily subsumed under the general notion of the soundtrack—a “deceptive and sloppy notion” (3), Chion suggests, that subsumes all audio elements into one bloc. The cinema of David Lynch provides a good example of the singular significance of the voice. In most of his audiovisual work we find complex expressions of voice and intriguing employment of the sound regime. His collaborative practices that, as Annette Davison (2004) points out, are quite contrary to the compartmentalized and standardized production of sound and music in Hollywood (170), and not the least his longtime collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti, positions his works as a network of sound as much as of images. Extradiegetic sounds such as, for example, what Martha Nochimson (1997) describes as “hums, rumbles, throbs, pulsations” (36), and what Davison calls “aural close-ups” (172) produce affective expression that often seem to be without signifying function.

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This way, a singular usage of visual and aural images comes to dominate Lynch’s cinematic expression to the point at which narrative continuity becomes secondary. In terms of the voice, the linkages of image and sound outside a distinct narrative logic entails that the relationship between the voice, the body, and logos is unsettled. If we want to speak with Plato, we could definitely call the voice in Lynch’s films “lawless” as it frequently exceeds its use as a medium for logos. The inaudible advice given by the log in Twin Peaks, for example, and the famous lip syncing scene in Blue Velvet and the unidentified voice on the telecom in Lost Highway all unsettle any clear relation, not only between voice and body, but also between sound and word. To the extent to which the voice in cinema is explored, it is undoubtedly Lacan who has given cinema theory the tools to interpret it. Both Doane’s and Silverman’s works constitute examples of how readings of cinema and voice tend to be inflected by Lacan. Indeed, Chion notes, it was Lacan who first enabled a “serious theoretical elaboration of the voice as object” (1). That Lynch’s experimental use of sound and voice has been interpreted along Lacanian lines is, therefore, not surprising. Add to this experimental use of sound and voice the frequent tensions between dream and reality, the fluctuating identities, and the fact that his films sometime seem to stand in for “a master class in Freudian dream theory” (Lentzner and Ross, 2005, 120), and it becomes even clearer why Lynch’s work has been so attractive to psychoanalyst film scholars. Many are the ways in which Lynch’s films yield to Freudian, Lacanian, and, we might need to add at this point, Žižekian readings. Slavoj Žižek has produced a considerable set of Lacanian responses to Lynch. Žižek, as Sarah Kay (2003) notes, reads Lynch searching for the negotiations between the real and reality that he sees pluralizing in his work (61). Žižek (2005) also points specifically to sound as that which holds the Lynchian universe together; “the ontological horizon, the frame of reality itself, the very texture of reality” (115). If there was ever any hesitation about reading Lynch through psychoanalysis, the plentiful Žižekian analysis has contributed to what is virtually a complete co-option of Lynch into Lacanian film theory. This is problematic for two reasons both of which are related to Deleuze. To begin with, the potential that the Lynchian cinematic universe contains is limited to a particular kind of response that, even if it differs internally, always seems to pull Lynch’s work into the same kind of structural patterns all of which serve to claim Lynch’s wild images into a narrative logic and psychoanalytic explication. Just as Deleuze and Guattari work to rework the structural and interpretative patterns of psychoanalysis, their philosophy could also be useful to rework such readings of Lynch. Deleuzian readings of Lynch, however, are rare. While Deleuzian film scholars such as Felicity Colman,

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Patricia Pisters, and Anna Powell all tend to devote at least a little space to Lynch in their work, there is nothing like the sustained production of Lacanian-inspired readings of Lynch. The second and presently more important reason why the predominance of Lacanian readings of Lynch is problematic is that if the Žižekian/ Lacanian dominance engulfs the possibilities that would emerge with a Lynch/Deleuze relation, Žižek’s dominance also casts a shadow over the potential of a Deleuze/Lacan relation. The relation between Deleuze and Lacan is complex and as Daniel W. Smith notes, Žižek typically does not make this relation any clearer. In his review of Žižek’s Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (2004), Smith points out that Žižek ignores the specificities of Deleuze’s understanding of Lacan. Centrally, he notes that Žižek fails to recognize Deleuze’s crucial separation of the Lacanian phallic signifier from the objet petit a (638). This is related, Smith points out, to Žižek’s own distinction between the “good” Deleuze (of Logic of Sense and sense as effect) and the bad Deleuze (of what he sees as the un-Lacanian Anti-Oedipus) (638). But is there not, Smith asks, a sense in which Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus has a more profound fidelity to Lacan’s thought than does the more easily recognized version in Logic of Sense? (639). By reading Lynch through Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s Lacan (and this is an important distinction as I am interested here in Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of Lacan more than in Lacan’s own work), this chapter juxtaposes the voice image with the voice as objet petit a and works to address more directly this very specific connection between Deleuze and Lacan. As we will see, reading voice through Deleuze’s Lacan enables an alternative reading of voice as figure. At the same time, Lynch’s work is revisited as what Deleuze (1989) calls a “truly audiovisual” cinema (243): a cinema with the capacity not only to make visible links between philosophers but also to relink visual images by means of the sound-images or, more specifically, through voice. The Hinge: Absence Revisited Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is very much a film about film. Not only is it set in Hollywood and features the making of a film, Lynch overtly plays with a number of the most typical clichés of mainstream Hollywood cinema.2 The film brims over with characters such as the perky blonde, the dark, voluptuous brunette, the espresso sipping Italian Mafioso, the paper-mug-coffee-drinking cops, and even the pool man. Furthermore, the script is full of unconvincing and clichéd lines that the characters, as Heather K. Love (2004) puts it, are forced to “mouth” (128). This blatant

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Aligning the body with an already determined voice.

superficiality makes the role of both words and voices central in a reverse way. The repetition of formula words hollow out subjectivity as they become “noise” rather than meaningful enunciations. At the same time, the role of the voice is unsettled by recurrent miming. Miming, as Chris Rodley (2005) has pointed out, is a frequent theme in Lynch’s films (293), and Mulholland Drive is particularly rich in this respect. By making the voice, on the one hand, a medium for clichés and, on the other, an entity separated from the visible body, the relation between the voice and logos and the voice as subjective expression is weakened. The repetition of clichés undermines the production of meaning and referentiality. Lynch’s open address to the function of the voice as a medium of a double mimicking in mainstream cinema seems particularly directed at the role of female characters. At an audition for a film within the film, “The Sylvia North Story,” for example, expectant actresses take their place behind a wall of glass and mime to the popular 1960s tunes: Connie Stevens’ “Sixteen Reasons Why I love You” from 1960 and Linda Scott’s 1961 hit “I’ve Told Every Little Star.” It seems wonderfully ironic that the audition (from the Latin “auditio”: hearing) in which expectant actresses should show their talent is based solely on, first, their physical appearance and, second, their ability to lip sync to a set of prerecorded voices. The traditional female role in Hollywood is underlined with a vengeance. As Silverman (1984) writes, it is axiomatic that mainstream cinema positions the female subject, not only as the object of the gaze but also without an active role in discourse (131). The audition scene stages this position of the female subject in mainstream cinema with perfect clarity: she is to be seen

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(framed by the glass wall as by the cinema screen) and to be heard (singing songs of love), but her voice does not belong to her. Her success is based on aligning her body with an already determined voice. As long as the visual and the sound-images are synchronized, the role of lip syncing at least confirms the mainstream tradition of coherent body-subject unity. Pressed into perfect mimicking, the female subject is caught up in an economy of synchronization typical, Silverman argues, of homocentric and “ideologically consistent cinema.” The insistence on synchronizing voice and body, she suggests, “drastically curtails the capacity of each for introducing into the narrative something heterogeneous or disruptive” and minimizes “the number and kinds of connections which can be activated” (132–133). Tested for their capacity to mime, the female characters in the audition scene doubly confirm and conform to their traditional role. In mouthing scripts and in coming into being only through someone pressing the play button, the priority of unity is confirmed while the role of the female voice is downplayed. Later in the film, however, Lynch introduces the image of time as that which opens rather than sutures the coherence of the body-subject unity. By making the sound machine independent rather than complementary to the visual, a temporal disjunction emerges that frees the voice from the matrix of ideological and conventional synchronization. The disjunctions between voice and body in Mulholland Drive are foregrounded in the body of the film in itself. The coherence between events does not correspond to any conventional narrative logic, and about

Figure 2.2

The present becoming thin as a mirror.

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two-thirds into the film, there is a radical break with everything that has gone before. Typically, scholars identify the different parts of the film as portraying dream versus reality (e.g., Hayles and Gessler, 2004) or fantasy versus desire in a Lacanian sense (e.g., McGowan, 2004). The scene that serves as “a hinge,” as Love (2004, 122) puts it, takes place in a highly atmospheric and slightly surreal theater with the by now classic Lynchian red curtains: Club Silencio. In the middle of the night, the two protagonists Rita and Betty are woken up by Rita’s mumbling of the words “Silencio. Silencio. Silencio. No hay banda. No hay banda. No hay orquesta. Silencio.” By pronouncing these words, she foreshadows the words of the concierge at the Club Silencio to which she immediately goes after waking up, taking Betty with her. At this club, they find a concierge who is proudly presenting a show in which “it is all recorded.” “No Hay Banda,” the concierge insists, “There is no band. Il n’y a pas d’orchestre.” And yet, the concierge points out, “we hear a band.” He illustrates this physical absence but audible presence of a band by conjuring up different instrumental sounds and flashes simply by naming them. This means that while the sound is associated with the name of the instrument—the clarinet, the trombone, the muted trumpet—it is severed from the musicians and the singer who visually appear to be producing it. As the sound continues after the trumpet player stops playing and after the singer stops singing, we realize that this relationship is the opposite. The sound does not originate from the performers, but rather, the performers come to be through sound.

Figure 2.3

A song and a tear that already exist.

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Next on stage is Rebekah del Rio. Appearing as “La Llorona de Los Angeles”—the weeping woman—Rebekah sings “Llorando,” the old Roy Orbison classic “Crying” in Spanish. Her made up face seems like a thick mask almost as if the face is lifting from itself. In addition, there is a small artificial tear attached to the corner of her eye. The highly emphatic face of Rebekah expresses a complete involvement in the singing that is so emotionally charged that it makes both Rita and Betty cry. But despite this seeming commitment to the emotion of the song, the song does not emanate from Rebekah’s body but, rather, it exists outside it. She is only miming. This becomes clear as she collapses on the stage while the voice, now coming from the past in relation to Rebekah, continues to fill the theater. Even as two men enter the stage and drag her apparently lifeless body out, the highly emotional voice endures. As many readings of this scene have suggested, the foregrounding of eye as well as voice in this scene, and of the uncanny relation between subjective presence and absence, clearly anticipates a Lacanian analysis. The voice of Rebekah that is left in the air without a body, Allister Mactaggart (2010) argues, for example, points to the Lacanian positioning of the voice as the objet petit a, and as feminine jouissance, the lack particular to woman within the symbolic (63). Similarly, Todd McGowan (2004, 82) positions this scene as the inevitable rupture of Diane’s fantasy (in which she is recast as the successful Betty and her rival and her lost lover Camilla is recast as the helpless and loving Rita). The scene, he argues, exposes the rift between the realm of fantasy that we have witnessed previous to it and the realm of impossible desire that succeeds it. Rebekah’s voice has become an object, an objet petit a, that signifies this loss. Rita’s and Betty’s affective response is such in lieu of the fact that they know that the voice is not “real”; their response is one of jouissance, they weep for that which is inevitably lost. Diane’s fantasy, McGowan suggests, has allowed her to mourn the objet petit a but when Rebekah falls to the floor at Club Silencio this objet petit a is exposed in all its emptiness and the fantasy collapses (83). After this, she, and the viewer, has to return to the reality of the world of desire. According to Lacan, the voice endows the subject with a place in relation to the signifying chain. At the same time, its position as a petit objet a indicates that it is simultaneously a cause of anxiety and loss as well as “the cause of desire” (Lacan and Mehlman, 1987, 82). Miller (2007) notes how Lacan’s understanding of the voice as petit objet a is influenced by the way in which Ferdinand de Saussure understands the structure of language. As the subject is constituted by, rather than being the constituting entity of the signifying chain, the voice assigns the subject a place in relation to the structure of signification (140). In the indirect and citational nature of language, the subject “takes a step back” to determine its position in relation

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to the words that are already out there and the voice determines that position. In this light, Rebekah’s voice could be seen as an extreme instantiation of the inherent emptiness of the subject position itself. Deleuze and Guattari argue, however, that Lacan’s linguistic revision of psychoanalysis is not as structural as it may seem. Although their most directly formulated claim to this effect is hidden in a footnote, one of Deleuze and Guattari’s central purposes when rescuing Lacan from the Lacanians is to differentiate between the parts of Lacan’s theory of desire relating to the objet petit a and those relating to the Other as signifier.3 This delineation saves the objet petit a from its position in Lacan as “a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking” (Lacan, 1981, 103). Lacan, they admit, does seem to reintroduce lack into desire through a “despotic signifier,” which many of his disciples has picked up on in order to re-Oedipalize his theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 83). The objet petit a, however, is, somewhat surprisingly, not suggestive of such a lack in Deleuze and Guattari’s reading and is, therefore, claimed as part of their theory of partial objects. Instead of forever turning like an “analytic squirrel, inside the wheel of the Imaginary and the Symbolic,” Lacan, they suggest, opens for an understanding of a reverse structure of partial objects that allows us to understand them as transverse intensities rather than extensive parts of an imagined whole (308–309). At heart, here, is the difference between the structural and the machinic. As long as the object is understood as part of a structural unity determined by a “despotic symbol,” it can be represented only in terms of lack and absence—the signifier that necessarily points toward absence (310). However, and despite Lacan’s insistence on the petit objet a as signaling lack throughout The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Deleuze and Guattari find, on the Lacanian reverse side of such structures, objects that are not representative but rather part of a structure relying on—“a positive principle of nonconsistency that dissolves it: where desire is shifted into the order of production, related to its molecular elements, and where it lacks nothing” (311). If Žižek obscures the usefulness of a Deleuze/Lacan encounter, other readings of Mulholland Drive, such as McGowan’s and MacTaggart’s, are not based on such misunderstanding but rather excludes Deleuze altogether. While this is obviously not a problem in itself, such readings nonetheless make apparent the added value a Deleuzian inclusion would entail. One might say that they reveal the missing link between Lacanian (not Žižekian) readings and Deleuze. From a Deleuzian perspective, it becomes clear that such readings could use some further “schizophrenic help” if we want to take Lacan and Deleuze on this joint trip. “Put crudely,” Smith (2004) remarks, “psychoanalysis begins with the symbolic and seeks out

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the ‘gaps’ that mark the irruption of an ‘impossible’ Real; whereas schizoanalysis starts with the Real as the immanent process of desire and seeks to mark both the interruptions of this process (reterritorializations) and its continuations and transformations (becomings, intensities . . .)” (645–646). What a Deleuzian reading could add, in other words, and that many Lacanian-readings to some extent lack is the exploration of the productive possibilities of their own analysis, not the suturing but the making vibrant of the images themselves. In the case of the readings of voice and the objet petit a in Lynch, this difference in strategy between seeking the gaps and seeking ways in which such irruptions cause transformations becomes particularly clear. From a Deleuzian perspective, identifying the different parts of fantasy and desire leaves half the job to be done. When Deleuze and Guattari claim Lacan, they claim the part of his theory that lends itself to a constructive understanding of desire, and part of this strategy is to affirm the objet petit a while rejecting the phallic signifier. There is “no question,” Deleuze explains, “that we’re all the more indebted to Lacan, once we’ve dropped notions like structure, the symbolic, or the signifier, which are thoroughly misguided [mauvaises], and which Lacan himself has always managed to turn on their head in order to show their inverse side” (Smith, 647–648). Lynch’s cinema, one might argue, is a master of the inverse. It begs the question whether the connective, disjunctive employment of voices, images, sounds, and colors does not also open for something more than an illustration of the absent and the impossible. Is there not an inverse side, where structures and signifiers are replaced with what Deleuze and Guattari (1983) call Lacan’s strange domain of multiplicity, “a multiplicity so complex that we can scarcely speak of one chain or even of one code of desire,” but of signs that are not in themselves signifying but are part of a polyvocal connectivity (38). Taking a close look at Mulholland Drive and the events at Club Silencio from a Deleuzian perspective yields an expanded understanding of these tears in time and body-voice coherence. We may begin by noting how the separation of body and voice is not just one of space but also one of time. There is a clear temporal disjunction, for example, in the fact that Rita, while still in bed, has uttered words the status of which would have to be something like a repetition of what has not yet taken place. At least if we assume a linear temporality, she inhabits neither the place nor the body to which these words belong. The blank expression on her face when pronouncing these words further suggests her detachment from them. Giving the impression of an automaton, she is not expressing the words so much as echoing their future expression. By echoing what is to come, her pronunciation pulls her into the future while her body remains in a present

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that is emptied of her subjectivity. Rather than a linear temporality, this temporality is of the event. Instead, as Deleuze (2004) writes, of “the most profound, the most fully present, the present which spreads out and comprehends the future and the past, an unlimited past-future rises up here reflected in an empty present which has no more thickness than a mirror” (171). For Rita at this point, the future and the past are not successive moments in time in which her voice marks that which she can never regain. Rather, she is pulled into the future and the past at the same time, the present becoming thin as a mirror that reflects other temporalities. In a similar temporal disjunction, Rebekah comes to embody, for a moment, a song and a tear that already exist. If we look at her as she walks up to the microphone, her face is utterly motionless and in complete opposition to the emotion that will be set in motion by the song. Her emphatic expression is thus framed between states of blankness (the end of it, as has already been mentioned, being her collapse). The externalization of the voice and the artificial tear in the corner of her eye indicate that even the most emotional and subjective expression comes from outside. McGowan’s (2004) Lacanian reading points to “the unimportance of the signifiers themselves relative to what they cannot capture-the absence of the objet petit a.” Through the prerecorded sounds, he argues, “the fantasy indicates overtly its central concern—the object in its absence rather than in its presence” (82). It is equally possible to argue, however, that this outside need not be one signifying absence. As Nochimson (1997) suggests, there is a difference between films that seem to revel in the pleasurable illusions of ideal forms and films that do not chase such illusions. Films by directors such as David Cronenberg and Peter Greenaway, she suggests, endow their images with the enchantment as well as the inevitable loss of the wholeness of Lacan’s mirror image. Lynch’s images, on the other hand, inspired as they are by painters such as Francis Bacon and Edward Hopper, do not mourn impossible illusion but rather connect to the real through the visceral and the emphatic (9). Instead of marking the inevitability of irrecoverable absence, Rebekah expresses a relation not of subject-lack so much as a coming into being that is mutually ignited by an assemblage of physical and aural attributes. Instead of a subject and its enunciation, the voice lingers as a virtual dimension to be actualized through the event: a becoming-visceral, a becoming-emphatic. That there would be a band—or subject—outside the event is sternly dismissed by the concierge: “Il n’y a pas d’orchestre. It is an illusion.” Dismissing the link between the sound and its point of origin, the concierge may also be said to dismiss the notion of an illusory wholeness from which lack appears. By positioning lack in the Symbolic and not as an originary state, Lacan, as Eugene Holland (1999) notes, enables Deleuze

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and Guattari to see lack as “a secondary after-effect of the illusions of ego and meaning” (51). If so, Lynch’s cinema either preempts or supplants this illusion. It does not ever give us such an illusion because there is no ego or meaning in this sense. Thereby, the illusion does not cover up a lack of meaning; the illusion itself is meaning. In the context of cinema, the fact that it is all an illusion and that is “all recorded” is obviously not particularly groundbreaking. Emphasizing these facts, the concierge at Club Silencio may even be said to state the obvious—do not forget the falseness of what you are watching. Through such self-reflexivity, the film points to the fact that what we see here is not so much about representation as about expression in and for itself. We are not representing subjective trauma, the film seems to be saying, we are becoming expressive, intensive, affective. Reading the film as expression rather than representation, we would also have to concede that the band is in fact not entirely missing. It is missing only if we continue searching for the lost unity of origin. In fact, the film exposes the inverse side of the structure, the symbolic, and the signifier that Deleuze and Guattari find in Lacan; signs in their polyvocal multiplicity. For Deleuze and Guattari (1983), of course, partial objects have never been part of a lost unity but are dispersed and form multiplicities. “With every structure dislodged, every memory abolished, ever organism set aside, every link undone, they function as raw partial objects, dispersed working parts of a machine that is itself dispersed” (324). Instead of a missing band to a bereaved subject, we get a disjunctive machinery of visual and aural images that refuses to suture its own gaps but rather makes space for affect to be born from them. Mactaggart (2010) suggests that the separation of voice and body and the artifice that Club Silencio so clearly places at the fore is not a device of alienation in the modernist sense but rather a reaching out, through the layers of cliché, repetition, and familiarity of the audience, by means of the power of affective response (61). While Mactaggart moves on to a Lacanian analysis, the cutting through the padding of cliché, repetition, and familiarity could also be understood in terms of a pure image in the Deleuzian sense. To get there, however, we first need to consider the materiality of the voice. The Grain: Presence Revisited In a playful staging of fictional encounters between philosophers from Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin through Rousseau to Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, and Deleuze, to mention a few, Jean-Luc Nancy (2006) brings out overlaps and tensions between different understandings of the relation between the voice and the subject and “the voice before speech” (38).

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The “voiceness” of the voice, Nancy’s essay shows, is associated with the physicality of the body that is then in different ways associated with absence or presence, with lack or with “an existence opened and run through by this throw, an existence thrown into the world” (42). The voice, Roland Barthes (1991) argues, has a grain that is individual to the body it emanates from. The voice is, therefore, not an expression of subjectivity so much as it is an expression of the physical nature of the body. Barthes strives to capture the singularity of expression that is not about subjectivity but about the materiality of the signifier. He theorizes “the grain of the voice” as a way of accounting for “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue” (270). The grain, or the timbre, of the voice thus has a meaning that bypasses the subject and connects its expression and signification directly with the body. Silverman (1988) sees how this linkage between voice and body through the grain of the voice is employed, in Hollywood cinema, to keep the female voice securely submersed in the body thereby delimiting its linguistic and independent capacity. The materiality of the female voice in cinema contributes to “its consequent alienation from meaning” (61). In this sense, the dangers of the voice disconnecting from logos pointed out by Plato is given a distinctly contemporary, cinematic, and feminist angle as the primacy of the materiality of the voice over the words it expresses becomes a threat to subjectivity itself. In Mulholland Drive, Rebekah’s performance seems closely connected with the kind of materiality that Barthes discusses; put together, the powerful emotional timbre of the voice, the translation of the Orbison classic into Spanish, and her role of the La Llorona, the weeping lady of the Hispanic folktale, all seems to suggest exactly an embodied but impersonal “grain.” At the same time, however, the signifying role that Barthes gives to “the depth of the body’s cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilage” (270) is exchanged for an invisible recording machine outside Rebekah’s body. Her bodily expression during her performance is highly emphatic only on cue of the recorded voice. This seems to suggest a reversal—rather than the grain of the voice as an expression of the body, the body becomes an expression of the voice. In a sense, then, not only the voice but also the expression of the body is mechanized, ignited by the play button. The subject of speech is misplaced here and a nonsubjective, but nonetheless material, relationship between voice and body is configured. This new assemblage resists any simple correlation between the materiality of the voice and the body. Logos was never the objective of this voice. This assemblage gives priority to affect without inscribing its materiality to a fixed subject-body. In “The Exhausted,” an essay that was first published as an afterword to a book on four plays for television by Samuel Beckett in 1992, Deleuze

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develops his interest in the role of the voice in audiovisual work that he discusses in his cinema books. In order to capture the pure image of the voice that is unchained to the subject, he distinguishes between three different languages. The first two may be said to correspond roughly to the Saussurian langue and parole, for whereas the first (langue I) is about the naming of objects and the presumed correlation between objects and their words upon which language systems are built, the second one (langue II) adds the dimension of enunciation as voices produce “waves or flows that direct and distribute linguistic corpuscles” (Deleuze, 1995, 7). In order to account for dimensions of expression that the first two languages do not cover, Deleuze proposes a Langue III, a language that is no longer “chained” to object or to transmitting voices but is rather about visual or aural images. Instead of imagining language as a “whole” series, or as “making inventories of memories,” this third language captures the impersonal by means of a pure image (8–9). This image is not of words and voices but has to insert itself into them as to smash the chains of words and memories. This image doesn’t define itself through the sublimeness of its content, but through its form-its “internal tension”-or through the force it gathers to make the void or to bore holes, to loosen the grip of words, to dry up the oozing of voices, so as to disengage itself from memory and reason: little alogical image, am-nesic, almost aphasic, now standing in the void, now shivering in the open. (9)

Released from the economy of the subject, on the one hand, and from the economy of logos, on the other, the voice refers back neither to a lost object nor to the production of rational meaning. If we add to this theory of the voice as pure image Deleuze’s theory of sound in cinema, we could argue that what is at stake in Mulholland Drive, in fact, has little to do with the subject and its past at all. What is at stake is rather the potential of film to mean beyond both representation and signification. Having mapped the history of cinema and sound through the added music of the silent film that carried an obligation to complement the visual image descriptively and illustratively, through the direct enunciations of the talkies, Deleuze (1989) identifies a modern cinema where the sensory-motor schema collapses as “the speech-act is no longer inserted in the linkage of actions and reactions” (238–243). Here emerges the sound image, a truly independent image that finally makes cinema “truly audiovisual” (243). This break with the continuity of movement and independence of sound makes the speech-act turn back on itself with the result that the voice “refers only to itself and to other voices” (243). Through such connectivity, the voice is no longer connected with a subjective position. In Mulholland Drive,

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the Club Silencio scene expresses affect with detailed but also impersonal attributes in terms of a celebration of the voice as image. Rather than the voice that refers back to a lost connection with the Real, Lynch makes full use of the medium of cinema to make the voice one component in a set of singularities, a voice, a tear, a color, a sadness. As Chion (1999) argues, “[S]ounds and voices that wander the surface of the screen, awaiting a place to attach to, belong to the cinema and to it alone” (4). Reading the events at Club Silencio in terms of pure images, this curious nonplace that is positioned between fantasy and desire in a Lacanian reading becomes “any-space-whatever” (une espace quelconque). In cinema, as the voice releases itself from the sensory-motor link with the image, Deleuze (1989) explains, space becomes empty, disconnected, unpeopled (243). Through its powerful combination of expressive detail and atmosphere with the impersonal and asubjective, the mise-en-scène of Club Silencio is unassigned to spaces of meaning and subjectivity. As Deleuze qualifies, however, spaces like this one are not well described in terms of emptiness or disconnection because there is actually nothing missing (244–245). These spaces are not characterized by gaps or absence of links but present the emergence of an infinite possibility of linkage. Reading such images is not to search for links lost—rather, this is schizoanalysis of cinema; desiring production made possible by the right, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) put it through Leclaire and Lacan, “to nonsense as well as to the absence of a link” (314). We need to “relink instead of link” “to turn, and turn round, instead of to follow on the right side; a new Analytic of the image” (Deleuze, 1989, 245). Relinking instead of linking suggests an approach to cinematic affect where the purpose is not to search for the Real but to affirm the possibility of affective assemblage. In such a space, the absence of body-subject-voice coherence would not testify to that which is impossible to capture but rather to an image that is trembling with its own expression. Even if the Club Silencio scene is a particularly powerful example of the voice as image and has, therefore, come to carry the greater load of the argument of this chapter, the scene is also emblematic for much of Lynch’s work. Both in the larger sense and in the detail, Lynch’s films tend to embrace the linking and relinking of images that releases them from narrative and structural patterns of meaning and allows them, like Deleuze’s time-image, to rise up “to the surface of the screen” (Deleuze, 1989, xi). Thereby, he stages the constructive breakdowns in the ideological and conventional synchronization that Silverman calls for and opens for alternative modes of connectivity. In Mulholland Drive, we have, for example, the sounds of sleeping without the image of a body in the beginning of the film and the disruptive disjunction between the visual and the aural images in the end just before Diane commits suicide. From Twin Peaks to Blue Velvet

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to Wild at Heart, the characters as well as the audience are haunted by a particular affectivity of singing voices, frequently mimed by the characters. Other examples can be found also in movies such as The Elephant Man and Lost Highway. The voice in Lynch’s cinema can frequently be positioned less as part of a subjective trauma of loss or lack and more as part of what Deleuze calls “the developer [révélateur] of time” in the false movements of the time-image (ix). The internal tension is immanent—the voice has become a pure expression that lacks nothing. In one way, Smith argues, Deleuze could be seen as one of Lacan’s most profound disciples. More independent than more obvious followers such as Miller and Žižek, Deleuze follows a different route and invents “a whole new set of concepts to describe the inverse side of the symbolic structure” (Smith, 2004, 648). As a rather unorthodox inheritor of Lacanian thought, Deleuze offers new ways of thinking about the voice inflected by full presence. “What I need,” as Lacan is supposed to have said to Deleuze, “is someone like you” (635–636). Although Deleuze’s and Lacan’s perspectives on voice can obviously be discussed in themselves, it seems to me that cinema offers a particularly fruitful arena on which to stage Deleuze/Lacanian encounters. As I have tried to show in this chapter, these tensions between Lacanian and Deleuzian theory are not necessarily those of opposition but can also, like Lynch’s images, provide disjunctive and productive readings. “All we need,” I imagine Deleuze and Lacan saying in turn to Lynch, “is someone like you,” someone who unchain images from conventional roles and interpretations. As Lynch lets go of mainstream cinema’s synchronizing illusions of unity, the value of Deleuze’s inverse readings of Lacan are made visible and, indeed, audible, as Deleuze puts Lacan’s partial objects to work. Reading Lynch through “Deleuze avec Lacan” not only elucidates the potential usefulness of such encounters, it also illuminates productive ways in which the machinery of a truly audiovisual cinema can be employed to activate the number of linkages that can be made beyond representational demands on narrative continuity and synchronization. It is, as Chion (1999) puts it, with the “sounds and voices left to wander the surface of the screen that the real and specific power of cinema comes into play” (4). Reading Lynch through Deleuze and his Lacan brings out not only the voice as image and the specificity of film but also the power of Deleuzian philosophy to schizophrenize Lacan a little. Notes 1. I would like to thank Ron Broglio and David Martin-Jones for their generous feedback on this chapter.

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2. Parts of some of the close readings in the following sections have been borrowed from my doctoral dissertation Reconfiguring Subjectivity; Experimental Narrative and Deleuzean Immanence. 3. “Lacan’s admirable theory of desire,” Deleuze and Guattari (1983) write in Anti-Oedipus, “appears to us to have two poles: one related to ‘the object small a” as a desiring-machine, which defines desire in terms of a real production, thus going beyond both any idea of need and any idea of fantasy; and the other related o the ‘great Other’ as signifier, which reintroduces a certain notion of lack” (27).

References Barthes, Roland (1991). “The Grain of the Voice.” The Responsibility of Forms. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 267–277. Chion, Michel (1999). The Voice in Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Davison, Annette (2004). Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s. Aldershot, VT: Ashgate. Deleuze, Gilles (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1995). “The Exhausted.” Trans. Anthony Uhlmann. SubStance 24 (3): 3–28. ——— (2004). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Doane, Mary Ann (1980). “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” Yale French Studies 60: 33–50. Dolar, Mladen (2006). Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayles, Katherine N. and Nicholas Gessler (2004). “The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers.” In The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City and Mulholland Drive.” PMLA 119 (3): 482–499. Holland, Eugene (1999). Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, London: Routledge. Kay, Sarah (2003). Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Lacan, Jacques (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques and Jeffrey Mehlman (1987). “Introduction to the Names-of-theFather Seminar.” October 40: 81–95. Lentzner, Jay R. and Donald R. Ross (2005). “The Dreams that Blister Sleep: Latent Content and Cinematic Form in Mulholland Drive.” American Imago 62 (1): 101–123. Love, Heather K. (2004). “Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in Mulholland Drive.” New Literary History 35 (1): 117–132.

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Mactaggart, Allister (2010). The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory, Bristol, UK, and Chicago: Intellect. McGowan, Todd (2004). “Lost on Mulholland Drive: David Lynch’s Panegyric to Hollywood.” Cinema Journal 43 (2): 67–89. Miller, Jacques-Alain (2007). “Jacques Lacan and the Voice.” In The Later Lacan: An Introduction. Ed. Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf. New York: State University of New York Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2006). Multiple Arts: The Muses II. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nochimson, Martha. P. (1997). The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rodley, Chris. Ed. (2005). Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber and Faber. Silverman, Kaja (1984). “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice.” In Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams. Frederick, MD: America and the American Film Institute. ——— (1988). The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Smith, Daniel W. (2004). “The Inverse Side of the Structure: Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan.” Criticism 46 (4): 635–650. Žižek, Slavoj (2005). The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso.

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Encore: Trauma and Counter-memory in Kim Ki-duk’s Time Meera Lee

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n unidentified woman in a white mask and dark sunglasses is walking out of an aesthetic clinic; she is presumably a patient who underwent the plastic surgery. In the background, on the door of the clinic, the viewer can see a large image of a female face; each half of the visage is dramatically different. Next to the face is the conspicuous phrase “Do You Want a New Life?” As the patient walks out, another woman who is walking past the clinic accidentally bumps into her, causing the patient to drop the picture frame that she was carrying. The frame contains a photograph of a forlorn, injured female face (presumably her own). The other woman quickly picks up the frame, says apologetically that she will repair it, and then walks away. This is the opening and the closing sequence of the South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s thirteenth film, Time (2006), which is set in a Korean city. Near the end of the film, the viewer learns that the two women are the same person. The film portrays the female protagonist Se-hŭi’s selfdestructive love for her love object, the male protagonist Ji-u, along with Ji-u’s subsequent trauma and retaliation in a reverse or revolving chronology. This opening/closing sequence is perhaps the most powerful image of the film, capturing its themes of the return of trauma and the repetition of time. These ‘twin’ scenes are also striking from a theoretical standpoint; they resonate with and serve as a perfect visualization of the Lacanian idea of split-subjectivity and the Deleuzian concept of bipolar time. Essentially, Kim shows that the concept of time is not always one of progression but rather entails regression or repetition in the cycle of a failed love. Here we

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Figure 3.1 A path crossing of Se-hŭi (Park Ji-yeon) and Sae- hŭi (Seong Hyeon-a) in the opening sequence of Time. Source: Kim Ki-duk, 2006.

may wonder why Kim chose to portray love as failed and time as reversing or revolving; more specifically, why did he present an image of failure rather than success and of regression rather than progression? Does the film carry a political message about South Korean society? One might say that Time belongs squarely in the category of clichéd psychodrama insofar as it portrays the madness of a woman driven by jealousy and the deprivation of love, or that it simply depicts an instance of female hysteria. Further, it might be argued that for this reason, the film does not present a political stance, nor can it be read as a political allegory representing South Korean society.1 It is indeed true that Time is completely devoid of any social or political references or national events that mirror late-modern South Korea. Rather, it focuses on an individual history and psychic trauma, both of which are important subjects in the fields of South Korean literature, cinema, and arts. The film’s focus on an individual history and individual perception of time evokes Benedict Anderson’s genealogical account of nations as imagined communities. Anderson attributes the simultaneity of the past and the future that solidifies in the present moment, along with the temporal coincidence of individual and national histories, to national identity.2 It may be the psyche of some South Korean intellectuals, writers, or artists who attempt ceaselessly to revisit historical events and render individual memories and psychic wounds, but South Korea as a nation does not conceive its identity in the way that Anderson describes. The nation-state is rather more concerned with the future than the past, ironically displaying a melancholic desire for the premodern Confucian order and sovereignty. Using the Confucian patriarchal structure as an instrument to continue its persistent pursuit

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of capitalist democracy, as Tod McGowan notes, the nation-state will not allow temporal regression or failure in the making of its history.3 One can argue that it is rather the historical traumas that give rise to the Korean nation’s single-minded perspective of history suggesting its attempt to overcome the subsequent national psychic, in turn. This homogeneousness of South Korea’s national imagination about nationhood and citizenship is, nonetheless, precisely what gives political significance to the film’s void or devoidness—whether consciously or unconsciously intended by the director—of national events and memories. By not showing the way the historical scars (e.g., colonization, dictatorships, the Korea War, etc.) have occurred or been mobilized, the film paradoxically draws our attention to two things that are missing in the South Korean national identity: the attachment to trauma—which I identify as part of the Korean sentiment han (grief or lament)—and the nonchronological temporality that are evident in the individuals Se-hŭi and Ji-u and their history.4 The construction of (individual) time in Kim’s film stands in complete contrast to the national conception of time as moving in a forward direction alone as the nation pursues a capitalist democracy. The individual melancholy for the lost love in the film contrasts with the national melancholy for the Confucian order and the repression of trauma or overcoming its failure as well as with the nation’s portrayal of the future with a singular image of success. In effect, both the absence of the South Korean national psyche in the film and the characters’ detachment from the nation’s consciousness focus our attention on individual psyches, leading viewers to disengage from the utopian image of national happiness and from the Oedipal image of the national repressive unconscious. This chapter will attempt to examine the ways in which trauma and memory return or repeat against (chronological or national) time both literally and metaphorically the time-construction in which the national identity and imaginings are constructed, and how they affect individual identity and temporality in Kim’s Time, with particular attention paid to the protagonists’ personal love relationship with each other. Finally, we will come to notice that Kim suggests no address to trauma and no temporality that either ‘looks back’ (reverse) or ‘looks forward’ (progress). In this task, in coordination with the film’s schizophrenic image as foreshowed in the opening/closing sequence, I will utilize the temporalities of Jacques Lacan’s “encore” and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “crystalline time.” Trauma as the Line of Memory I will begin this section with a brief discussion of a relatively recent event in South Korea—individual South Korean citizens’ public mourning

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for their former president Roh Moo-hyun—that may serve to illustrate Anderson’s account of nationalism as the convergence of national imaginings and individual memories, contrasting with the Korean neoliberalists’ dissociation between South Korea’s national identity and individual identity. Roh committed suicide on May 23, 2009, not long after resigning his presidency. The neoliberals’ rebuking moralist rhetoric, based on the Confucian superego, characterizes Roh’s suicide as a psychic withdrawal from society and an act of self-destruction, concluding that the grief that the masses felt for Roh was a collective hysteria of individuals in reaction to Roh’s self-destruction. They say that his death should not serve to inspire national love since it was a result of his personal distress rather than a concern for public affairs, and hence has had no impact on South Korean society. However, Roh was known to many South Korean citizens as a national icon of righteousness, and, for that reason, the day of his suicide remains one of the nation’s most distressing historical moments.5 The public mourning by the masses in the wake of Roh’s ‘self-destruction’ was a token of their personal love for the South Korean nation, as well as for him. Of course, the love that individual citizens felt for the nation contrasts strongly with the institutionalized nationalism that the South Korean nation-state imposes on the Korean people through repression of the past and its trauma and by promoting Confucian affiliations and hierarchy in their old boys’ networks in order to maintain their economic and political powers. The public mourning ritual suggests a desire on the part of the younger or progressive-leftist people to return to the past, with the trauma or melancholia serving as a rebellion against South Korea’s national identity. This communal grief generates a passive temporality, the temporality that is not forward-moving. Hence, the passive temporality of the masses’ recollection of the trauma stands in stark contrast to the active temporality of the nation-state’s moving forward with capitalist democracy and the national Confucian repression of the past. At first glance, Time, as briefly summarized in the previous section, provides us with a bold image of the passive temporality of individual identity that surrounds Roh’s death, especially in terms of the representations of trauma and love. In fact, some major Korean films prior to Time such as Peppermint Candy (1999) by Lee Chang-dong and Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) by Hong Sang-soo portrayed the national and personal traumas and their histories, as well as the national unconsciousness in reverse chronology. Similar to the representations of trauma and time in these films, depicting love as destructive failure through the rotating cycle of the female protagonist Se-hŭi’s obsession and her love object Ji-u’s subsequent trauma in turn, the director Kim delves into the phenomenon of the love relationship vis-à-vis the notion of nonchronological time as

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cycling between the past and the future: in the end, Se-hŭi experiences a full-blown trauma and becomes self-destructive. Through this rotating cycle, Time portrays love as perpetually impossible, and this perpetual impossibility of love generates repeated trauma. In Kim’s film, therefore, to speak of love is to speak of trauma; and it is almost impossible to describe an individual identity without speaking of love (or trauma). Jacques Lacan alludes to love as the impossible in “On jouissance.”6 He proposes the French term encore as a trope for the impossibility of love. Encore is translated as “still” or “once again.” Another name for encore, according to Lacan, is “the gap (faille) in the Other from which the demand for love stems”:7 that is, the term refers to the discrepancy in desire between the One and the Other. Love exists in this gap (encore) that is always present in the space of the intersubjective love relationship. For this reason love can never be accomplished but rather continues to return as failure, thus ensuring that love is still (encore) love and impossible; it is impossible sexually as well, as Lacan’s formulae of sexuation suggests. Love reappears precisely because it fails ‘once again’ or ‘endlessly’; and because of its endless failure, love becomes trauma. Encore thus marks the eternal return of love while causing the perpetual failure of love. Simply put, love progresses in regression in a series of traumas. It is in this sense that love is “impotent, though mutual, because it is not aware that it is but the desire to be One, which leads us to the impossibility of establishing the relationship between ‘them-two’ (la relation d’eaux).”8 This effect, the impossibility of love, engenders the temporality of interruption, of a break, of returning, of repetition, of involution or revolving, or simply, the image of schizoid. Thus time here exists in a passive temporality, and encore love continues to come to life in this schizoid, dizzy line of fractures or caesuras in time. Viewed in this way, Lacan’s “the gap (faille) in the Other” can be understood as a rupture rather than a lack as deficiency, and yet, it is encore that is ‘still’ a passive temporality. This theoretical plane of the Lacanian gap leads us to arrive at the new nodal point of love where love equals trauma as the perpetual flow of splitting up or the Deleuzian flux of the “line of flight.” This idea of the return of trauma implicitly stresses the subject’s multitudinous relations with the Other in the social realm, thus breaking away from the hegemony of unity and the jouissance of the superego. Because of the impossibility or passive temporality of the intersubjective love relation, the subject continues to reemerge as “the subject who is supposed to know” in the Lacanian sense through the accumulation of love interests. Bearing in mind Lacan’s view of the temporality of the intersubjective love relation, let us now offer a more detailed summary of Time that further examines the return of trauma (or love) in the realm of the reality portrayed by Kim. The film’s prologue invites the audience to view the visually

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disturbing process of plastic surgery as the camera captures in detail the doctor’s incisions and subsequent suturing of the patient’s mouth, nose and more. The opening sequence described earlier follows this scene, and then there is a sequence showing the second woman (who ran into the patientwoman) entering a café—which will be a primary setting for the film—with a broken frame. She is here to meet her boyfriend Ji-u, the photographer/ video artist. In this scene, the viewers learn that her name is ‘Se-hŭi.’ As Se-hŭi watches Ji-u casually interacting with a female customer who is asking Ji-u to move his car outside the café, Se-hŭi suddenly becomes extremely jealous and then doubtful of his love for her. Furious about his interaction with another woman, Se-hŭi argues with Ji-u and leaves the café. The camera zooms in on the broken picture frame that has been left behind. In mortification, Se-hŭi constructs a collage of a face from eyes, a nose, and lips that she randomly chose from magazines. She goes to the aesthetic clinic (presumably the same one described earlier) and presents the collage to the doctor as a rendition of the face she wants. Despite the doctor’s concern, she is determined to change her face; she believes that Ji-u will once again desire her if she has a new face. After the surgery, the doctor tells her that it will take six months for her face to feel normal and pain-free. Meanwhile, Ji-u believes that his girlfriend Se-hŭi has disappeared for those six months. Melancholic because he misses her, and also confused, Ji-u encounters a series of mysterious and uncanny incidents. As this part of the narrative develops, the camera angle is changed, so that now it follows him from behind and creates a sense that he is being watched and menaced. One of the first mysterious incidents happens on his way to the seaside sculpture park on an island that he used to visit with Se-hŭi. Ji-u sees a strange woman on a boat, wearing a mask of a female face and appearing to gaze at him; later he sees her again in the park. In another incident, he is walking along a street and a little girl in the costume of an angel suddenly appears with a letter for him. The letter seems to be undecipherable since ). the phrases are overlapped, all in red ink, and it is signed ‘Se-hŭi’ ( As Ji-u tries to decipher this letter at the café, the waitress casually remarks that it looks like the words “I love you” overlapping in repetition. At this point, the viewer might speculate that the letter was written and sent by the waitress since a previous sequence had just shown her scribbling the words “I love you” on a piece of white paper in red ink. As she looks at the name signed on the letter, she tells Ji-u that her name is also ‘Se-hŭi,’ which, of course, surprises him. The waitress then immediately changes the character ‘ ’ (Se) to ‘ ’ (Sae) to indicate that the first syllable of her name is spelled differently and that she is a different Se-hŭi, that is, Sae-hŭi ( ). This unexpected action upsets Ji-u, and he later corrects the spelling of the name on the letter.

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Eventually, Ji-u becomes attracted to the waitress Sae-hŭi ( ). They visit the seaside sculpture park and take pictures of themselves. The viewer can immediately sense that their experiences may be the same as those of ), although Ji-u does not recognize these Ji-u and the ‘original’ Se-hŭi ( uncanny resemblances between the two ‘S(a)e-hŭis’ until later. The new lover secretly changes the spelling of the name in the letter once again. As she comes to realize that Ji-u seems to be falling in love with her, the new Sae-hŭi asks whether he loves her and what would happen if the old Se-hŭi were to reappear. Ji-u evades her question by responding that the old Se-hŭi will never return, and then he makes love to her. In the following scene Ji-u is asleep and Sae-hŭi suddenly turns to the audience, grimly saying “This turns out exactly the way I wanted, but do I look happy?” Then she slaps Ji-u in anger and says to him, “I love you.” At this point, some viewers might be certain that the new Sae-hŭi is the old Se-hŭi who sadly changed her face earlier on. Shortly after this scene, Ji-u finds another letter placed under the windshield of his car. This time the letter is from his original lover Se-hŭi, saying that she is going to return to him. Finally, at the café where they broke up, Ji-u has a rendezvous with Se-hŭi. She appears in a frowning/smiling mask of her own face prior to the plastic surgery. Ji-u instantly realizes that the new Sae-hŭi whom he had come to love is in fact the original Se-hŭi. During this strange meeting, Se-hŭi confesses that her jealousy of the other woman and her fear of not being desired led her to change her face. For her, a new face, which suggested a new life, was necessary for regaining his love. She admits that she is afraid of time, which has changed things in their love relationship. Traumatized by this revelation of S(a)e-hŭi’s identity, Ji-u leaves the café in agony, saying “I am afraid of you” while Se-hŭi sadly responds “I love you.” The film squarely focuses on personal love as trauma that is expressed through the psychic states of narcissism and bipolar. Such an asocial or ahistorical character of the film contrasts with the allegories that many internationally known mainstream Korean films use to portray late-modern South Korea’s political situation as well as with the explicit commentaries on contemporary South Korean society that are found in other mainstream films. Through the exclusion of family, community, state, and nation, Time carries no allusion to South Korea’s national identity. This serves to underscore the individual and personal nature of the memory and history that are portrayed in the film; the audience sees only single men and single women with no familial or community relationships and no attachment to national events. The relationship between the lovers does not involve any external social or national forces (as there are none in the film). Moreover, the lovers rarely appear in public spaces other than the café and the seaside

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park (and even these are enclosed or isolated locations). In the cinema’s context, time exists only in the cycle of the lovers’ personal memories and trauma. The film’s spatio-temporal presentation is thus situated in the cycle of the protagonists’ personal lives rather than dominated by social or national memories. As in many of Kim’s other films, Time’s intimacy of focusing on the personal does not evoke the intimacy of Confucian affiliation or national kinship that South Korea as a nation imagines. Rather, it reveals only masks, alienation, and the void of human connections that individual people sense in contemporary South Korean society. This image of fracture or disconnect in human relationships contrasts strongly with the nation-state’s unified and utopian vision of its national history and its citizenship. The South Korean nation-state refuses to acknowledge the fact that late-modern national identity must encompass the multiple facets of social and individual memories and history. Viewed in this context, the love that cycles through a repetition of failure or trauma in Kim’s film paradoxically serves to underscore the nation-state’s disavowal of both national and individual trauma, if not their utilization of it, to mobilize the capitalist spirit through a proclaimed unified identity, and also, as a consequence, of the melancholy experienced by individual South Korean citizens—thus pointing to the dichotomy between individual identity and national identity in South Korean society. Since the repetitive failure indicates a passive temporality as implied above, the love portrayed in Kim’s film meshes with Lacan’s notion of love as the impossible that once again returns (encore): the love relationship between the two protagonists or the two lovers is placed in a perpetual cycle of failure and uncanny horror. Se-hŭi, the original I, perpetually demands Ji-u’s love while he fails to present an image that she desires as her love object. Ironically, she creates a new image of herself by replicating herself in the body of the other (Sae-hŭi), namely Se´-hŭi, the modified I, so that she can perceive Ji-u as the image that she demands.9 However, the modified Se-hŭi ‘still’ mourns the original Se-hŭi ’s lost love with Ji-u as she inhabits the body of her double, and eventually her success in having him fall in love with her evolves into a failure as she reveals her true identity. Ji-u also experiences failure, first because he was unable to recognize the original Se-hŭi, despite the uncanny events that she had staged, and then because he could not accept the new body of the original Se-hŭi. His failures lead him to repeat the same trauma that Se-hŭi went through, that is, creating a double of himself, and this eventually leads her to undergo yet another traumatic transformation of her face. It is precisely this perpetual cycle of incomplete love, this line of fracture, that enables the two to continue to meet as lovers, thus prolonging their love relationship and intensifying their love interests; consequently, their individual subjectivities multiply. As our more detailed

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reading of Time will show, this love that Kim passionately develops—love as failure or trauma in endless repetition—falls outside of the frameworks of Oedipal love and Confucian-capitalist-nationalism. Expanding on the multiplicity of subjectivity that is embodied on the chancing faces as the exterior signs of love and desire, let us turn our attention to the re-turn of the trauma of failed love in the split-body of Se-hŭi (and also in that of Ji-u later on, to which I shall return). Se-hŭi ’s subjectivity appears to be split between Se( )-hŭi( ) and Sae- or Se´( )-hŭi( ), or the original I and the modified I. In explaining his doctrine of intersubjectivity, Lacan points out the discrepancy between the image of the self on the virtual space of the mirror, which is called the imago, and the image of the real corporeal body that sees the self ’s mirrorimage.10 He notes that the subject tends to identify the mirror-subject as the real subject, thus creating the split-self. Imago is thus a narcissistic image of the subject that is misrecognized as the real self. In particular, this virtual or narcissistic image is a product of misrecognition (meconnaissance) created in the psychical workings of the intraself. Lacan does not equate this misrecognition with the child’s primary narcissism that typically appears at the infantile phase and that is considered to be hallucinatory or phantom. Rather, he takes care to emphasize the function of misrecognition, where the gap between the Real and the Imaginary serves to reinforce the Symbolic self as the Real in the context of the subject’s interrelation with the Other. Simply put, the Symbolic (Other) and the Real (One) are tied through the Imaginary (secondary narcissism). The scene that shows Se´-hŭi looking nostalgically at the picture of her original face, for example, manifests her imago. Experiencing melancholia because of the death of the original self, Se´-heu misrecognizes herself as the woman in the picture, and, of course, this is ironic because she must distinguish herself from the original “I” in order to regain Ji-u’s love. While Se-hŭi and Se´-hŭi are spelled differently because of the position of one vowel, phonetically the names sound the same in Korean. Visually, however, the viewer at first sees two completely different Se-hŭis through both the different pictographic patterns of the names and the different physiognomic structures of the faces. Thus, what makes the original Se-hŭi into the modified Se is not only the replacement of her old face but also the change in her name. However, despite the dissimilarity of her appearances, it is hard to dissociate the two selves from each other because of the recurrence of the name Se-hŭi throughout the film. The uncanny double is the result of this very similitude, if not difference, in the letters of her names, which serves to link Se´-hŭi to Se-hŭi. The double makes the case that Se-hŭi’s body is not the physical body but an immaterial or impersonal body. With this nonphysical understanding of the body, the double

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can still identify herself with the original ‘I’ through the window of the flipped symbol ‘–’ (converting to ) in the vowel where Se´-hŭi ’s imago is created. As a result, the more Se´-hŭi feels loved by Ji-u, the more this modified ‘I’ desires to return to the body of the original ‘I.’ Her split-self is recalling the trauma of her past love. If the pictographic difference in the ), the return of letter ‘ ’ made Ji-u fall in love with the new Sae-hŭi ( the symbol ‘–‘ to the original location in her name traumatically terrifies Ji-u, like the ghost that returns to haunt. Viewed this way, Se- hŭi’s imago ‘Se´’ ( ) is not a symbol of deception but is rather a mask, representing the immaterial face that brings the trauma and multiple-memories of the past into the realm of the present, reevoking the melancholy for the impossible love. Now we can perhaps better understand why Se´-hŭi chose to reveal her identity, even though she could have successfully carried out her new love with Ji-u. Her love for Ji-u would not be possible with Ji-u’s love alone but also required her to double her memory and trauma associated with the old love in her new body. The lost love can return once again (encore) only if, and when, Ji-u affirms the spirit of the original Se-hŭi, namely, her split-self or trauma, in the body of the modified Se-hŭi. Her masquerade, in which the modified face serves as the external manifestation of narcissism, is the key to hiding the truth and her love and lies beyond the realm of the Symbolic languages or apparatuses that produce phallic jouissance. Through this masquerading of an “[re]appearing” that substitutes “having,” Se-hŭi embodies herself as a schizo who ‘enjoys’ suspension between fear and thrill or the past and the present.11 It is through this repeated tension or trauma between the subject (Se-hŭi) and the uncanny ghost (Se´-hŭi) that her subjectivity multiplies. At this point, it is no longer possible to tell which self marks the real and which the delirium, or which holds the eye and which the gaze. That is to say, the Imaginary is in flux as a schizoid persona between the mask (the modified I) and the haunt of the mask (imago) paradoxically designating the original I. The imago’s transformation into the Real, which itself is impossible, suggests the power of the Imaginary in relation to the subject-formation. To echo Deleuze’s concept of desire, there is no such thing as the social production of Se´-hŭi as reality and that of Se-hŭi as “psychic reality” in her narcissistic (mis) identification.12 Rather, the two poles swing back and forth in the realm of personal psychosis in orchestration with the social assemblage of voices, actions, passion, crying, and so on. And so, Se-hŭi is not the subject of hysteria as there is no Oedipal symbolic to ‘play’ with; she is bipolar moving between two differently constructed assemblages. Her psychosis (not paranoia) manifests differently as to what assemblage is formulated in a particular social setting. Therefore, Se-hŭi’s bipolar characteristics indicate

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the multiple points of memory of the split-self, serving to multiply the viewpoints of national history. Split-self or the return of trauma is, however, precisely what the South Korean nation-state denies as it manifests its capitalist-democratic national identity. Contrasting with the South Korean nation-state’s visions of its citizens as victors and the consequent expression of nationalism as thoroughly rejoicing, the love in Kim’s Time forever engenders the image of the defeated and a sense of melancholia that is to be avoided in the national consciousness. In effect, Se-hŭi’s heightened schizoid performance and her memory’s unceasing interplay between personal and public in the love trauma render the simultaneity of the past and the present and the coexistence of individual memory and collective memory. Such temporal effects of Se-hŭi’s bipolar workings eventually suggest also the merging of individual citizens’ imagos and the national imago. Hence, this active passive temporality of the Lacanian interrelation stands in great contrast to the progressive self-image of South Korean national identity that returns to neither the past nor trauma. Paradoxically, the film serves to magnify the South Korean nation-state’s disavowal of individual history and memories of traumatic events, as well as its Confucian Oedipal hegemony of homogeneity. The Schizoid as Against Time The passive temporality of Lacan’s intersubjectivity is in certain respects correlated with the bipolar temporality of Deleuze’s theorization of schizoid. The characteristics of schizoid, for example, the confusion between past and present or reality and fiction, mirror the two faces of Lacan’s split-self as described earlier. As the split-self travels freely between the Real and the Imaginary or thrill and fear, the two poles in schizoid do not diverge but rather oscillate between the Real and the Symbolic or the Imaginary and the Real. As the subject continues to move back and forth across the borderline of the opposing psyches, the body becomes schizoid. Here, the borderline functions as the mirror itself that projects the subject’s unconscious. This correlation between two thinkers gives rise to the premise that Deleuze’s schizo-body resonates with Lacan’s concept of the split-body (or face) as the immaterial. Deleuze’s bipolar body may at first appear to be physical or material since it refers to the real body. But what constitutes this body is not the corporeal elements of the abnormal but the noncorporeal elements of the anomalous, hence it is immaterial. To be the immaterial body to Deleuze is to be the impersonal body as well. In terms of Deleuze’s theorization of the subject and society, subjectivity

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is (re)formed according to the accumulation of social assemblages, and therefore, the body accordingly projects the subject’s reshaping unconscious or desire. Through the process of such (de)subjectification, what forms the subject is not the material/personal body but the immaterial/ impersonal body that multiplies (via facial masks in the case of Kim’s film), in order to be liberated from the familiar, and from social law as well. While Deleuze’s joy in the body is distinguished from Lacan’s jouissance through the process of love crafting, especially in the context of Kim’s film, it is in this multiplicity that the Lacanian love subjects in encore overlap with the Deleuzian bipolar love subjects. Put another way, each encore, that is, love trauma, is part of multiplicities where Oedipal relationships are escaped as the dizzy line, designating the Deleuzian schizoid. In Deleuzian thinking, needless to say, the schizo-body in multiplicity involves a unique notion of time, a bipolar swing as opposed to the strictly progressive path of social or national time. Deleuze describes this bipolar temporality of time as “crystalline time.”13 Using an analogy from cinema, he explains that time is structured with an amalgamation of the past and the present in the same manner that the memory of a moving image is the product of an actual image and a virtual image, the real and the illusory, and the present and the nonpresent. Each half reflects the other to create what we habitually conceive of as time. Our concept of time is thus neither opaque nor constrained in one direction, but rather, as the productive element in the construction of personhood and society, it takes a translucent free form like a crystal. Mirroring this crystal image, time in Time “simultaneously makes the present past and preserves the past in itself.”14 The film, therefore, manifests “two possible time-images, one grounded in the past, the other in the present . . . as a whole” against (i.e., as opposed to) the temporality of (nation’s) forwarding time, thereby producing the ‘schizophrenic’ view of society contained in the subject’s unconscious.15 This manifestation serves to intensify both individual and national subjectivities. Time poignantly depicts this Deleuzian schizoid face that exists in South Korean society, nonetheless, that is to be repressed; Kim reminds us of ‘the people’ who are ‘missing’ in the national imaginings. Se-hŭi’s schizophrenic attempts to change her body to gain a new life (or love), her subsequent bipolar desire to return to the past, and Ji-u’s subsequent retaliation through physical transformation, all suggest a flight from the familial or national law. Stressing these manifold caesura of the individual persons’ unconscious via bipolar time, Kim conveys Deleuze’s vision of schizoid as an alternative system for the Oedipal society. Deleuze claims that schizoid may be the potential for revolution in a society that is fixated on the compulsive panoptic orderings of the moral and unity in the familial, social,

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and national realms through a repressive singularity of subject and time.16 This Deleuzian notion of bipolar society stands in apparent contradiction to the South Korean concept of society that aims at producing a national hegemony of unity and affiliation by disavowing individual memory and disregarding individual and collective posttraumatic symptoms that tend to be inherited from one generation to the next. Hence, the inherent multiplicity bubbling within the Deleuzian ‘I’s (or ‘the missing persons’) in the film contrasts with South Korea’s national identity, with its innate neuroses and melancholies associated with capitalist democracy and Confucianism, and with its desire for moving strictly forward into the future. More specifically, the film’s temporal narrative structure with its reversing/revolving chronology reflects Deleuze’s idea of crystalline time rather than the South Korean national concept of time. The narrative’s progression is initially placed in a reversed time frame, such that the opening sequence showing the unidentified woman coming out of the aesthetic clinic portrays the closing sequence, or, simply, such that the ending is the beginning. The viewer makes sense out of the opening sequence as the narrative unfolds and produces a motive for the woman’s decision to change her face (once again). Se-hŭi’s uncanny encounter with the modified Ji-u or Jung-u, in his studio, throws her into trauma, which results in a car accident on her way to the aesthetic clinic. Finding her in horror and witnessing her wounded face, the doctor suggests that he once again change her face to be completely different so that nobody can recognize her. The following scene presents another anatomically vivid facial plastic surgery, and then we see the closing sequence/opening sequence. Chronologically, the viewer eventually understands that the twice-modified Se-hŭi is the patient who dropped the picture frame in the opening sequence. In this closing sequence, we thus come to understand that the face in the picture frame is the face of the second Se-hŭi after the car accident and prior to another facial transformation. Here we are facing Se´´-hŭi as the redoubled-I who is doomed to return to the genesis of love in the narrative of the film. At this point, it becomes very clear that the other woman who picks up the frame is the original Se-hŭi who goes to the café to meet Ji-u. The film presents, in endless ways, its temporal narrative as reverse chronology involving the repetition of failure, in particular, the failure of love. Time in the film thus becomes crystallized and we imagine that even after the film ends, the story repeats (once more) in a loop of time and events. This construction of time in reverse chronology in Kim’s cinematic world contrasts with the construction of time in the South Korean nation-state’s imagination as strictly forward-moving, with an unwavering image of success. The events in Time, therefore, “[do] not move backward in time in order to illustrate the successful progress of the South Korean nation.”17

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Rather, the film transforms time to the form of regression “in order to depict the reoccurrence of a failure or a failed reoccurrence and thus to undermine the spectator’s attachment to nation as a foundation for identity.”18 The multiple Se-hŭis suggest the unceasing flow of the body public through the generations, changing their ‘face’ but never overcoming or eluding the (national, social, or political) trauma inherent beneath the masks. This gap or passivity between time and trauma calls to mind once again that individual citizens’ melancholy for the past and trauma stands in tension with the national South Korean desire for Confucian order and capitalist progression.19 It becomes even more obvious that the film intends to dissociate the viewer from national time as we look at the ending sequence from another vantage point. The (re-)appearance of the original Se-hŭi, that is to say, the (re-)return of the face of the original ‘I,’ creates yet another spin on the construction of time in Time. Kim’s use of reverse chronology paints a more complex image of time than that of regression, blurring the lines between past and present through the cycling narrative in its perpetual recurrence, thus crystallizing time. Once again, who is this supposedly unknown woman who has the face of the original Se-hŭi? What do we make of her? In the logic of the film’s narrative, as remarked earlier, she is Se-hŭi, who encounters the redoubled Se-hŭi coming out of the clinic and repeats what we have already seen in the film. Following this reading, strangely enough, we can say that she (the original Se-hŭi) sees her future second double as her remainder or reminder. Does this path crossing perhaps designate the apocalyptic moment in which Se-hŭi recognizes her own misrecognition? In other words, does the (past/present) Se-hŭi see her (present/past) narcissistic self coming from the future in the body of the Other, alluding to Lacan’s future anterior? That is, does Kim imply that there are so many ‘Se-hŭis’ after all—whose present love is always already delayed in the future tense—a sign of perpetual failure and trauma, indicating an inexhaustible world? Or could she simply be another stranger who happens to look like Se-hŭi, and may or may not repeat the impossible love? In either case, the film makes the case that the concept of time, or its individual subjectivity, cannot be confined to a one-dimensional direction, that is, either backward-moving or forward-moving. Rather, time in Kim’s film advances oxymoronically against time, in revolving or forking temporality with repetition of the failed love. Revolving Chronology as Hetero-Memory This paradoxical image of time that Kim portrays is embodied more concretely in the lovers’ faces. They are bipolar faces, in that both Se-hŭi’s

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and Ji-u’s subjectivities each swing back and forth between the original I and the modified I, or between the past and present in the realm of reality. This suggests that not only the present image but also the past image, in the sense of what Deleuze calls a “recollection-image” or “affectionimage,” makes up time and produces a world memory.20 Hence, the present is the memory that comes upon a world memory. In classical cinema such as Ingmar Bergman’s films, recollection images usually appear in shot and reverse shot or the overlapping of the present face with the recollected face in a subject’s memory. Recollection images emerge in Kim’s film too, though somewhat differently. Kim manifests a memory effect by utilizing multiple shot points, by focusing on reappearing objects, including masks, sunglasses, bandages, letters, and photos, and by repeating uncanny actions such as holding hands or placing a duvet cover over a head and words such as “Se-hŭi” or “I love you.” These uncanny actions and linguistic phrases are associated with the past and thus serve as affection-images that bring the perception of the past into the present. In this way, echoing Deleuze, they function as symbols of the double reference of the schizoid subject and bipolar time. In more detail, the camera’s shifting views of Ji-u, and later on Se-hŭi, represent multiple points of history-telling and memory-crafting as the film’s nonchronological narrative structure progresses. Some scenes employ shots from a third point of view. For example, when Se-hŭi walks hysterically along the street and through the subway station to look for Ji-u after he has disappeared, the viewer sees multiple views of her as if she were being watched by the individual people in the background. These shifting camera motions effectively capture the film’s schizoid undertone of time and subject: that the bearers of memory are multiple, and an individual memory and a collective or national memory do not always coincide. The conspicuous picture of the female face with two similar/dissimilar facades on the door of the aesthetic clinic appears at the beginning and at the end of the film, and this double appearance alludes to the double reference of time and the simultaneity of that double reference that is inherent in subjectivity. As Se-hŭi and Ji-u continue to manipulate the objects of memory, their doubles are no longer discernible by a division between the subject I and the imaginary I, the present and the nonpresent, or the personal and the social.21 The poles of each face manifest an affection-image that serves to inject itself into the unconscious of the social realm. The two poles of Se-hŭi and Ji-u signify the paradoxical traits of schizophrenic time: rotating, returning, or revolving. As Lacan would say, one could no longer tell whether he or she was the butterfly or the butterfly was him or her, suggesting the indiscernibility of the virtual and the actual.22

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As the story unfolds, the bipolar face appears once more, although this time in the body of Ji-u. Se-hŭi meets the strange man again, taking photographs in the park. It is the same man who had appeared with his face covered with a mask and sunglasses about six months earlier, but this time he returns with an uncovered face. The rendezvous leads Se-hŭi, and perhaps the audience as well, to presume that the strange man is the real Ji-u— although the film never makes this clear. The strange man’s plastic surgery and physical masquerade uncannily mirror those of Se-hŭi’s double, which is a secret between Ji-u and herself (along with the doctor). To the viewer, the parallel between this man and Se-hŭi’s own double may be evidence enough to identify him as the real Ji-u. The convincing moment for Se-hŭi is when she unexpectedly finds the pictures of herself in the man’s studio. She fearfully and yet excitedly asks whether he is Ji-u, but the man responds that his name is “Jung-u.” Looking at Se-hŭi in despair, he shrouds his head with a duvet cover, the same action that Se-hŭi had mournfully performed earlier in the film. Ji/Jung-u’s actions are a replication of Se-hŭi’s manifestation of her double, the narcissistic action that generated her schizophrenic unconscious and consequently gave rise to Ji-u’s trauma. In the same way, the man’s double is the external manifestation of his schizophrenic subjectivity and causal responsibility for Se-hŭi’s trauma. Perhaps the two poles of his face express his posttraumatic love that repeats Se-hŭi’s failure and that haunts the secrecy between Se-hŭi and Ji-u about her double. In this sense, Ji/Jung-u is not only an incarnation of himself but is also an image of Se-hŭi, thus denoting his recollection-image of the love between them. It is in this bipolar face or recollection-image that his memory of love (or trauma) returns against the progression of national time. “He assumes his responsibility for this [failed love] by means of a suicidal gesture by deciding not to escape [not the same as Deleuze’s escape] and to attend the duel he is certain to lose.”23 In this apparition of his face, love (re-)appears— that is, encore love—as the impossible goal in the perpetual cycle of failure and trauma. Paradoxically, by virtue of revolving or forking time, which is in contrast with national time, Se-hŭi and Ji-u (re-)vitalize their love and thereby their personal subjectivities multiply. In this revolving chronology, Kim portrays the subject as not merely a product of memory but also as a bearer of memory. Se-hŭi’s memory of her past thus cannot be reduced to a personal memory of her failed love. Her memory is bound also to encompass a social memory or a world memory, yet in a pure form devoid of historical references, especially when she returns in the body of the Other—in the so-to-speak ghost-body. Perhaps it is not accidental that most of the background in the film consists of a single group of individuals or couples who seem to repeat the memories of Se-hŭi and Ji-u—for example, the random men whom Se-hŭi encounters

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as misrecognized doubles of Ji-u and a nondescript couple who argue at the café, an argument that ends with the boyfriend fighting with Ji-u. The epilogue of the film that shows the numberless faces of the masses on the street, the multiple bipolar faces, also serves to symbolize the amalgamation of an individual memory and a world memory. Through the love machines of bipolar time and faces, Time draws our attention to the existence of individual personal trauma and melancholy and to their presence in the social realm. Kim highlights precisely “this reminder[/remainder] of failure” that “[South Korean] nationalism cannot tolerate.”24 In this paradoxical way of emphasizing personal time in the revolving loop, the film leads its viewers to detach themselves from the forward direction of South Korean national time, as well as from its repressive national consciousness. In effect, Kim is reminding South Korea of what Lee did in his film Peppermint Candy by exploring time in a much more complex way than a simple reversal. The passive temporality depicted in Time now becomes an odd stasis, consisting of a series of cuts and flows of time and love, which speaks to Kim’s particular control mechanism toward trauma. In conclusion, let us return to my earlier discussion of the citizens’ memory and melancholy surrounding Roh’s death and its political ramifications in South Korean society. In the individual citizens’ memory, his death became ‘undead’: he is neither dead nor living. The unusual public mourning for him was a symbol of the citizens’ elevation of their memory and trauma beyond remembrance of a thing of the past and onto the nation’s image of the future. The personal identity rendered by Kim mirrors the individual memory and melancholy that surrounded Roh’s death. The (failed) love of Se-hŭi and Ji-u in encore leads them to perpetually (try to) mourn one another and thus to experience melancholy. Se-hŭi’s and Ji-u’s melancholies apparently cause them to reconstruct their memories of love by revisiting the past and its trauma. For them, to revisit the past and its trauma is to intensify the present and their subjectivity by producing the multiple Se-hŭis and Ji-us. Just as the citizens’ individual melancholy for Roh comes into being as a component of the national consciousness, Se-hŭi’s and Ji-u’s melancholies for their failed love become part of social memory. As their love continues in their multiple bodies, it grows as multitudinous shared memories beyond private love. Thus, the multiple Se-hŭis and Ji-us have eventually become the “thinking memory” of South Korean history that springs to life in the present to crystallize time;25 they are the bearers of the nation’s past and trauma by virtue of transmitting them into the future. The bearers of this thinking memory are not merely the subjects of a remembrance that consists of subjective or private recollections. They are also the public bodies that carry national memories and trauma, what I will otherwise call the bodies of han and,

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therefore, intensify nationality. Essentially, Se-hŭi’s and Ji-u’s melancholies are an allegory for individual South Korean citizens’ temporal pause with the purpose of rewitnessing the nation’s tragic events in contrast to the nation-state’s melancholy for Confucianism and forward-moving with late-modern capitalist democracy, void of memory or trauma. By focusing on individual memory and trauma, Kim’s film Time proves to be a quiet and subtle critique of the South Korean hegemony of homogeneity and unity. The lessons that Kim’s film evokes can also be applied beyond South Korean society, as Kim suggests a world other than this hegemony, the world of a countermemory, multiple-memories or heterotopia, namely, the world of counteractualization. Notes The Romanization of all of the Korean names follows the original forms, except for those of the film’s characters that follow McCune–Reischauer. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my colleague M. Gail Hamner from Religion Department at Syracuse University, who has essentially inspired me to reshape this chapter with her profound and pivotal comments. Finally, I am dedicating this piece to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who had given me her most wonderful and encouraging words on this chapter just five months before she passed away. 1. Kim is typically criticized by many (Korean) film critics and scholars on the ground that his films present nothing more than auteurism without political consciousness. In light of a more positive reception of his films in Europe than in South Korea and his personal history in France, it seems inappropriate to evaluate Kim’s work within the indigenous framework of cinema studies. In fact, Kim has openly said that he is no longer making his films for the South Korean audience, a statement that may indicate his strong political convictions about South Korean society. 2. Anderson (1991, 24). 3. For the description of South Korea’s national consciousness, see McGowan (2007). 4. The Korean term han is understood to be the particular Korean sentiment, alluding to the complex feelings of grudge, resentment, grief, lament, or even love. 5. The Korean people’s anguish on the occasion of the death of former president Roh emerged from the belief that the current regime led by President Lee Myung-bak caused Roh’s suicide through the government’s severe interrogation of his alleged political corruption. 6. Lacan (1999b). 7. Ibid., 4. 8. Ibid., 6.

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9. Hereafter, I use ‘Se´-hŭi’ or the ‘modified’ Se-hŭi to refer to , in order to distinguish it from the original Se-hŭi ( ). 10. Lacan (1999a, 76). 11. Lacan (1985) 12. Deleuze and Guattari (1985, 27). 13. Deleuze (1989) Cinema II, Chapter 4. 14. Ibid., 98. 15. Ibid. 16. The ranking of educational institutions, that is, highs schools and universities, and the shadow education that is bounded by testing scores in Korea may well exemplify a kind of a panoptic society to which Deleuze points. 17. McGowan (2007, 173). In this essay, he describes the effect of reverse chronology in Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (2000). 18. Ibid., 173. 19. Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is a good cinematic example that shows how the South Korean government disavows individual people’s (or the family’s, in specific) trauma and loss in alliance with the US military and the global organization. 20. Delezue distinguishes a recollection-image from a pure-recollection of the past. According to Deleuze, what exists in memory is not an exact copy of the event but the image of what our recollection presupposes. See Deleuze (1989, 98). 21. Deleuze explains that the bipolar face cannot be accounted for by the distinction between the Symbolic and the Imaginary or between the real and nonreal. For more details, see Deleuze (1986, 88). 22. Lacan (1986, 76). I believe that Lacan’s reference to a butterfly was inspired by a poem written by the Taoist Zhuāngzı˘ during the Song dynasty in China and it describes the surreal feeling of his dream about a butterfly. 23. Žižek (2001, 22). 24. McGowan (2007, 177). 25. The term “thinking memory” is from Derrida (1989). “Thinking memory” refers to a particular act of remembering and is distinguished from “remembrance” as a subjectivized recollection.

References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community. New York: Verso, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema I: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ———. Cinema II: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

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Derrida, Jacques. Memories for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. ———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sherida. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1986. ———. Écrit. Trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999a. ———. Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999b. McGowan, Todd. “Affirmation of the Lost Object: Peppermint Candy and the End of Progress.” Symploke 15 (1–2) (2007): 170–189. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! New York and London: Routledge, 2001.

Part II

Encountering Deleuze

4

Antagonism or Multiplicity: The Struggle between Psychoanalysis and Deleuze in Godard’s Cinema Todd McGowan

The Break of 1968 A radical change occurs in the aesthetic of Jean-Luc Godard toward the end of the 1960s. Though even his first feature broke the traditional rules of continuity editing through its inventive use of the jump cut, À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) seems like a traditional Hollywood film in contrast with those that emerge in the late 1960s and in his many subsequent films. One could trace a gradual evolution away from narrative cinema in films like Pierrot le fou (1965), 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, 1967), and La Chinoise (1967), but the radical break occurs at the end of Week-end (1967), which turns away from any narrative cohesion in the latter part of the film and concludes with the words “fin du cinema.” Throughout the rest of his career, Godard would move through several different aesthetic phases, but he would remain true to the departure from narrative cinema announced at the end of Week-end.1 The differences between later films such as Le Gai savoir (1969), Détective (1985), and Notre musique (2004) cannot obscure the essential trait that holds them together—an abandonment of traditional cinematic storytelling in favor of the juxtaposition of disparate images or the discursive structure of the film essay. The turn from Godard’s early cinema to the later rejection of narrative does not only reflect his increasing political radicality but also makes clear the distinction between psychoanalysis

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and Gilles Deleuze in their approach to the cinema. While a psychoanalytic approach to cinema emphasizes the gaze as the point where antagonism manifests itself in the image, Deleuze’s theory of cinema stresses film’s capacity for displaying the movement and temporality inherent in the multiplicity of being.2 In a word, the difference concerns antagonism on the one hand and multiplicity on the other. In 1967, Godard did not covert from being a psychoanalytic filmmaker to being a Deleuzean filmmaker. He never had an overt or conscious investment in psychoanalysis, and the communism he adopted in 1967 was closer to Mao than to Deleuze. Nonetheless, the dramatic change in his aesthetic reflects a shift from a psychoanalytic approach to a Deleuzean one. Until Week-end, Godard’s films still have some investment in narrative structure, but this investment in narrative structure accompanies a focus on sexual antagonism—that is, on the point at which romantic unions fail not because of contingent or empirical causes but because of the opposing structural logics of those involved. All of Godard’s early films stress the failure of the sexual complementarity and thus militate against one of the ideological pillars of traditional cinema—the concluding romantic union. Godard’s early films make evident Jacques Lacan’s famous dictum that “the sexual relationship doesn’t exist.”3 The political force of Godard’s films in this period stems not so much from their disruption of narrative as from their use of narrative to depict sexual antagonism. The narrative structure enacts a struggle between two different logics associated with male and female characters, but rather than concluding with their reconciliation, Godard always illustrates their fundamental incompatibility. This is what places his filmmaking from this period firmly within a psychoanalytic understanding of the cinema and of society. But this focus does not survive his personal revolution in 1967. What drops out in Godard’s films from the 1970s onward is not just narrative structure but also the focus on sexual antagonism that typifies his earlier films. In the later films, sexual antagonism is replaced with a multiplicity of loosely related images that flow together outside the constraints of narrative. But this abandonment of narrative, far from radicalizing his cinema, effectuates a depoliticization because it forges a wholeness that corresponds to multiplicity, and this wholeness replaces antagonism.4 We can identify a similar effect of multiplicity generating wholeness in the thought of Deleuze. The move from antagonism to multiplicity—from Lacan to Deleuze—strips Godard’s cinema not only of its watchability but also of its political edge. In other words, when Godard becomes a more explicitly political filmmaker, he inadvertently loses the key to his political radicality. Though narrative most often works to ideological ends and to depoliticize the spectator with an image of social harmony, narrative is also requisite for making evident the antagonism that undermines the functioning

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of ideology.5 Political awakening doesn’t occur in spite of narrative but through it. A filmmaker can use narrative against itself, use narrative to expose the social fissures that filmic narratives traditionally obscure. This is what occurs in Godard’s early cinema, where betrayal emerges out of the very attempt to constitute a complementary—and thus ideological— romantic union. This occurs most famously at the end of À bout de soufflé, when Patricia (Jean Seberg) cooperates with the police and thereby precipitates the death of her lover Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Even when a romantic union does result, Godard takes care to highlight the antagonism between the couple just when the spectator expects the image of perfect complementarity. The conclusion of the underrated Alphaville (1965) depicts hero Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constatine) walking off with Natacha (Anna Karina) after having defeated the computer that has created a society without emotion. They appear to be the typical complementary and harmonious couple whose image concludes the standard Hollywood film. But Natacha’s use of the formal “vous” form in her expression of love to Lemmy—“Je vous aime”—indicates on the audio track the continued existence of an antagonism that the film’s visuals hide. Natacha’s formality here shows her still ensconced in the emotion-less world that Lemmy has tried to destroy. All of Godard’s films before Week-end share this emphasis on sexual antagonism, and in this way they allow the spectator to experience the gaze as a point of failure within social relation. The gaze is the incompleteness of the image that embodies the incompleteness of the social order—its failure to constitute itself fully.6 The gaze emerges out of the narrative structure but at the same time marks the limit of this structure from within. Through the experience of the gaze, the spectator encounters a point of impossibility that the specular field cannot accommodate. Without some narrative structure, one cannot depict its limits, and this is the fate that befalls Godard’s later films, films that are ostensibly more radical than the early ones. Godard’s early films and psychoanalysis have an implicit political valence that stems from their shared sense of antagonism’s irreducibility. For psychoanalysis (as for Godard), antagonism constitutes the desire for the sexual relationship at the same time that it renders this relationship impossible. The intractability of antagonism erects a barrier to the smooth functioning of the social order, which is why the fundamental task of all ideology consists in convincing subjects that they can overcome antagonism. This is a task that Hollywood films have taken up with great ardor, as they work to show that the seemingly insurmountable barriers cannot block a romantic union. So many films end with the image of perfect complementarity because this image assures spectators that the social order

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itself can work out and that there is no space for politics founded on its failure to work out. The Psychoanalytic Godard Certainly the most conspicuous dimension of Jean-Luc Godard’s refusal of the Hollywood aesthetic in his early films is his departure from traditional narrative structure. Godard does not begin with exposition and then proceed to lay down a straightforward narrative arc. Instead, the exposition often lasts throughout the film, and the narrative circles back on itself rather than moving forward toward a clear resolution. As David Bordwell puts it in his analysis of Godard’s deployment of narrative, “Godard delays and distributes his exposition more than any other director.”7 For Bordwell, Godard is a representative figure of art-film narration, a narration that he contrasts with the classical Hollywood type. But Godard’s distance from Hollywood should not be measured primarily by his attitude toward narrative. It is instead his insistence on depicting sexual antagonism in his early films that separates him not only from the Hollywood aesthetic but from most auteurs outside of Hollywood as well. The fundamental form that contemporary ideology takes is the idea that the romantic union has the ability to resolve antagonism. Even as belief in social authorities wanes, the belief in the complementary partner who would resolve the subject’s lack in a romantic union remains almost perfectly unassailed and provides subjects with a sense that lack is not insurmountable. As psychoanalytic film theorist Hilary Neroni puts it, “much more is at stake in the idea of complementarity between male and female than just an individual sense of completion. The coherence of the social order as a whole rests on this idea.”8 The idea of the soulmate penetrates the most cynical veneer, and Hollywood plays an essential role in sustaining this idea. More than providing spectators with a sense of social stability and meaning through narrative, Hollywood cinema supplies them with the ideology of romance. Godard’s early films represent a response to the predominance of this ideology. Godard’s critique of the complementary romantic union manifests itself in every film before Week-end, from À bout de souffle and Une Femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961) to Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964) and Masculin féminin (1966), among many others. In his films, desires never match up no matter how ideal a couple may seem, but perhaps the definitive instance of the sexual antagonism appears in Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), which shows this disjunction of desire through

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the relationship between Paul (Michel Piccoli) and Camille Javal (Brigitte Bardot). The film depicts the deterioration of their marriage, and it reveals the roots of this deterioration in the interplay of their desires, desires that resist complementarity rather than facilitating it. Paul and Camille’s relationship plays itself out against the backdrop of Paul’s decision to work on rewriting the script for a film version of The Odyssey being directed by Fritz Lang (played by himself) and produced by American producer Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance), who hires Paul to “fix” the film. Neither Paul nor Camille has a sense of what the other really wants, and this ignorance leaves them completely isolated as desiring subjects. And yet both believe, at the same time, that they do know what the other wants, and it is this shared belief that ultimately destroys their relationship. As Godard shows, it is the attempt to fill the emptiness of another’s desire with an actual object that destroys romance, though this is precisely what cinema typically offers its spectators. After the opening credit sequence (in which the credits are spoken rather than written), the film begins with Paul and Camille in bed together. Though this opening scene seems to show Paul and Camille experiencing a kind of happiness that they would subsequently lose, it already exposes the antagonism that exists between them. Here, even at this early point, their desires are completely at odds. At the precise moment that Paul believes he is giving Camille what she wants, he reveals to her that he fails utterly to love her in the way that she wants to be loved. Godard reveals this through their verbal interaction in the scene. Camille asks Paul a series of questions about his feelings toward the various parts of her body—if he loves her shoulders, her breasts, her legs, and so on. Each time, Paul avows his love for the particular body part. After Paul responds affirmatively to all of the questions, Camille then asks him, “Donc tu m’aimes totalement?” (Then you love me totally?). Paul answers, “Je t’aime totalement, tendrement, tragiquement” (I love you totally, tenderly, tragically). Here, Paul seems to express total love for Camille—precisely what we would assume she wants to hear. However, as Paul is speaking, Camille looks away from his face, seemingly disappointed with this response. This show of disappointment stems from Paul’s belief that she constitutes a whole that he can love “totally.” Paul’s love for Camille can only be total in this way as long as it ignores what Jacques Lacan would call her objet a, what is most essential to Camille and yet cannot be reduced to any positive characteristic. This is what Camille recognizes in Paul’s profession of total love and in his response to each of her questions. When Paul hears each of Camille’s questions about his feelings for the different parts of her body, he assumes that she wants him to express his love for each body part. But what this assumption misses

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is the irreducibility of desire to the signifier. Camille wants something more than what she seems to be asking for. She herself doesn’t know what she wants, but it is clear that she doesn’t simply desire the affirmation that Paul gives. She wants Paul to desire the something extra in her that cannot be located in any particular body part (or in all of them added together).9 Because Paul reduces the objet a to a series of empirical objects, he is able to view Camille as a whole, a being without any gaps that would resist this totalizing procedure. He thus relates to Camille narcissistically, never acknowledging that there is a part of her that resists his image of her. This narcissism allows Paul to avoid confronting Camille’s desire and to avoid enduring the fundamental deadlock of desire itself. In his description of the objet a from his Seminar X on anxiety, Lacan underlines precisely its irreducibility to the specular image.10 He notes that the object “is this remainder, this residue, of which the status escapes from the status of the object derived from the specular image, that is to say, from the laws of the transcendental aesthetic. Its status is so difficult to articulate that it is in this way that all the confusions have entered into analytic theory.”11 For Paul in this scene, there is only the specular image, but Camille desires something more. In this sense, rather than marking an ideal that is later lost, this opening scene sets the tone for the entire film: all of the later disjunctions between Paul and Camille’s desire are prefigured in this scene. Here, Godard shows the inability of the romantic union to overcome the deadlock of desire and deliver any degree of respite from it. This scene also enacts this revelation on the audience. It is well known that Godard added this scene under pressure from his producers for nude shots of Brigitte Bardot. In delivering what the producers (and undoubtedly many audience members) want, however, Godard actually reveals the inability of the filmic image to deliver this object. This becomes evident through the way in which Godard constructs this scene. He shoots Camille lying on her stomach on a bed with Paul sitting on the bed next to her. The scene begins with the image tinted red, which has the effect of partially obscuring Bardot’s body. The red color suggests eroticism and, at the same time, produces a sense of anticipation for what will be revealed. As the camera pans down Bardot’s body in order to focus on her butt, the red tint disappears, and we see her body in natural light. After the pan concludes, the camera returns back up her body, the light again shifts, this time from natural light to a blue tint. In this scene, Godard foregrounds the naked backside of Bardot as the object that arouses desire, but he also constitutes this object as impossible. One can view it only indirectly, through a tinted lens or through a panning camera. The use of color and the pan highlights the failure of the image to capture the object. Or, in the terms of Catherine Russell, “the

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subsequent breakdown in communication is already ironically alluded to by the mediating use of colored filters.”12 The filters make clear the failure of the subject in relation to its object. Just as Paul and Camille cannot connect on the level of desire in this scene, the spectator remains unable to relate successfully to the object in this image. Here we see the evidence for David Sterritt’s claim that “Godard’s works are haunted by the invisible.”13 Even in the seemingly complete visibility of the nude scene, Godard’s film emphasizes what we can’t see more than what we can. This emphasis on the invisible—on what resists visibility and vision—allows us to experience the object in its absence. In the subsequent interactions between Camille and Paul, we see the underlying antagonism between the two come to the surface. This becomes most apparent through Paul’s attempts to leave Camille alone with Jerry Prokosch, who clearly has sexual designs on her. The first occurs when Jerry offers to drive Camille to his flat while Paul takes a taxi. Camille says that she wants to remain with Paul, but Paul opens the door of Jerry’s car for her and even ushers her into the car. From this moment on, Camille’s contempt for Paul becomes obvious. Later, while on a location shoot in Capri, Paul repeats this behavior when Jerry again makes advances on Camille and asks her to go with him to his villa. Again, rather than resisting this coupling or even remaining neutral, Paul encourages Camille to go with Jerry, in effect pushing her into the other man’s arms. Paul pushes Camille toward Jerry in order to clarify her desire, to find a way of resolving his relationship to this desire. The contempt that Camille feels for Paul stems from his refusal to sustain the position of the desiring subject. He wants a clear resolution to her desire rather than the desire itself. Neither Paul nor Camille is able to estimate correctly the desire of the other. As he tells Camille, Paul takes the job of rewriting the script for The Odyssey because he believes that this is what she wants. The script will help to pay for the construction of their apartment and the upper-middle-class life that Paul assumes Camille desires. However, Camille reveals to Paul that she likes the apartment only because Paul seems to desire it. Paul acts in order to address a desire that Camille doesn’t have, and Camille creates the impression of having this desire in order to address Paul’s desire for it. What results is a loop of misunderstanding that no one can close. In fact, just before she leaves Paul, Camille says that she will never reveal the reason for her contempt for him, even if she were dying. Le Mépris shows that desire is this kind of failure to discern the desire of the other, which always remains an impossible object even in the closest romantic relationship. The struggle between Camille and Paul takes place amid the struggle between Jerry and Fritz Lang over Lang’s film of The Odyssey. It is tempting (and in some sense correct) to view Lang as “the moral center of Le

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Mépris,” as Wheeler Winston Dixon does.14 Lang expresses a classical ideal that stands against Jerry’s vulgarity and commercialization. But the problem with this idea of Lang as an ideal is that, unlike Camille and Paul, he does not experience the traumatic impossibility of an intractable desire. He suffers from no uncertainty about what he wants but must simply navigate an external barrier—the American producer Jerry—to the realization of his aims. In this sense, though they occupy opposed positions ethically, there is a kind of similarity between Lang and Jerry. Neither Lang nor Jerry experiences the deadlock of desire or makes evident the gaze—Lang because he exists nostalgically in a tragic universe in which one can reconcile oneself to absence rather than struggling against it, and Jerry because he refuses to acknowledge absence as such and instead treats is as a merely empirical obstacle. Both Lang and Jerry know precisely what they want. They have clear visions about what they want in the film: Lang wants to create a film that captures the grandeur of the Greeks and the heroic struggle of Odysseus, and Jerry wants a film that titillates the audience.15 Despite Lang’s heroic insistence on his vision in the face of Jerry’s pressure, the film depicts Lang as an ethical but ultimately ineffectual character. His ethical position is no longer tenable. The shots that we see from Lang’s film within the film reveal the problems with Lang’s aesthetic sensibility and ethical position in the film. The shots depict immobile statues of Greek gods and heroes and, alternately, highly stylized actors enacting the characters from The Odyssey. Unlike Godard’s film itself (in which Lang’s film exists), Lang’s film is completely uncinematic. The scenes are static, and when we do see the characters acting, they lack the heroic grandeur that the majestic statues suggest. Through this juxtaposition, Godard stresses the anachronistic quality of Lang’s vision. One can no longer make this type of film—if one ever could—because it tries to sustain a static world rather than acceding to a world of desire, but it tries to do so within the world of desire (using actors and sets from that world). Like Jerry’s vision of the perfect fantasmatic film, Lang’s film attempts to avoid confronting the problems wrought by desire. This has the effect of undermining the ethical status that Lang seems to hold in the film. Lang’s ethical position is further undermined by the manner in which he opposes himself to Jerry. Jerry represents the ideological force that commands subjects to compromise their desire, and while Lang does resist Jerry, he does not do so effectively. When Lang ironically undermines Jerry, he either does so in a language Jerry doesn’t understand (most often French) or through an allusion that Jerry misses. As a result, Jerry never directly experiences Lang’s critique of him, nor does it have any effect on him. While this represents, on the one hand, a clear indictment of Jerry (as when, for instance, Lang associates what Jerry says with what the fascists

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used to say), on the other hand, it reveals Lang’s ultimate fecklessness in the face of Jerry. Lang puts up the show of resistance to Jerry, but in the end he capitulates not only in allowing Jerry to change his film but also in never directly confronting him. This failure emphasizes the problems with Lang’s position in the contemporary world. Even though Paul and Camille fail to sustain the position of the desiring subject, they do remain closer to this ideal than Lang. Despite its show of appreciation for the position that Lang represents, Le Mépris reveals the limitation inherent in it. By refusing to confront the impossibility of desire, Lang removes himself from the struggle of sexuality itself. In the opposite manner than that of Jerry, he retreats from a sexualized world. Though Lang as a character and as a filmmaker acknowledges absence, he does not allow it to animate him as a desiring subject. He wants to mark the presence of absence without allowing it to disturb the field of vision within his film. As a result, the sympathy of Le Mépris lies with Paul and Camille, even as it depicts their respective failures and the undoing of their relationship. Their failed union is the form in which romance must work itself out if it is not to fall into the ideological image of complementarity. The critique of romantic love put forth in Le Mépris in no way invalidates romance itself as a project. Instead, it resists the image of romance as an arena in which one can overcome the impossibility constitutive of desire. Romance does not provide a ground on which the subject can discover a fantasmatic reconciliation, but it does offer a place where the subject can experience the failure of any fantasy to capture the objet a. Like the other early films of Godard, Le Mépris exposes the impossibility of the object within the romantic relationship, which is precisely where contemporary ideology—and Hollywood cinema—locates the object as a possibility. In this sense, Godard’s early cinema has at its foundation a profoundly political project. This cinema asks the spectator to resist accepting a resolution of desire and to insist on embracing the troubled position of the desiring subject. In so doing, spectators sustain their freedom. The Deleuzean Godard The notion of freedom through the confrontation with antagonism and the impossibility of the object disappears in Godard’s cinema after Weekend. What emerges in its stead is a series of films in which sexual antagonism no longer plays any role at all. It is thus one of the most violent and astounding shifts in the history of cinema. Godard’s fundamental preoccupation and the essence of his political vision give way before a

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completely different conception of filmmaking and politics. This shift is more significant than his turn away from narrative, but the two are linked. Without a narrative structure, Godard loses the ability to depict the sexual antagonism that occurs at the moment where narrative fails. The later nonnarrative films confront the spectator with significance through the juxtaposition of images. The denunciation of American imperialism, global capitalism, and universal commodification become more evident in the later films, and Godard turns away from narrative in order to avoid producing a work easily assimilable by commodity relations. A film like Le Gai savoir simply depicts two militants discussing contemporary political events on a soundstage without any narrative structure at all, while Passion (1982) and Prénom Carmen (1983) focus primarily on the making of a film rather than on what that film narrates. The move away from narration and toward the juxtaposition of images becomes even more exaggerated in Godard’s more recent films, such as Éloge de l’amour (2001), Notre musique (2004), and Film socialisme (2010).16 In these films, antagonism, which uses a binary logic to evince its breakdown, gives way to an attempt to convey the multiplicity of being. The disconnection within scenes or between scenes suggests an escape from the binary antagonistic logic of the early films. Here, Godard shows that no possible binary can contain the infinite diffusion of being. In order to evoke the diffusion or multiplicity of being, one must avoid narrative as much as possible. The films that Deleuze celebrates as exemplary expressions of the time-image, like those from the Italian Neorealists, almost always minimize the effects of narrative in order to immerse spectators in the untrammeled temporality of events. Narrative is a way of rendering multiplicity invisible and locking spectators into patterns of perception or clichés. Deleuze views the cinema as a struggle not so much against the ideological form of the romantic union but against the cliché, which obscures multiplicity. The point of the cinema, for Delueze, is “tearing a real image from clichés.”17 The cinematic cliché becomes a barrier to perception itself, and this form of cliché reinforces those that predominate outside the cinema as well. As Paola Marrati puts it in a discussion of Deleuze and the cinema, the great danger is that of “a system of values that sticks to the very perception of things and risks always making thought slide into the conformism of the doxa and the affects into preestablished schemas.”18 Traditional narrative structure, even when a filmmaker uses it to emphasize antagonism within the narrative, necessarily falls into “the conformism of the doxa.” In order to avoid this, one must attempt to leave narrative behind altogether, which is the aim of Godard’s later—and thus vehemently Deleuzean—cinema.

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What replaces narrative, for Godard, is description. This is why the explanatory voiceover plays such a central role in the later films. The images require voiceover because they are pure descriptions rather than parts of a narrative structure. Deleuze sees modern cinema turning from narrative to description. He notes: “In the same movement, descriptions become pure, purely optical and sound, narrations falsifying and stories, simulations. The whole cinema becomes a free, indirect discourse, operating in reality.”19 For Deleuze, this discourse remains in between subject and object, in a position that reveals multiple impossibilities. Unlike narration, description never fully constitutes itself in a specific identity, and this constitutes its radicality. New positions thus become visible, but at the same time, the constraints of antagonism become invisible. Description allows for the creation of the new without the limits that haunt narration, but it is precisely these limits that provide the engine for political contestation. The later Godard represents the pinnacle of this movement from falsifying narrative to the purity of description. His later films of description present possibilities that his earlier narrative films refuse. Description becomes the privileged vehicle for showing the multiplicity of being, but the filmmaker must describe in a specific way, a way that hides the antagonism that narrative can privilege. In order to depict the multiplicity of being, a filmmaker must present a series of disjunctions, and this can be done, Deleuze theorizes, through the cut, which he sees occurring in modern cinema. He claims: “Images and sequences are no longer linked by rational cuts[,] which end the first or begin the second, but are relinked on top of irrational cuts, which no longer belong to either of the two and are valid for themselves (interstices). Irrational cuts thus have a disjunctive, and no longer conjunctive, value.”20 The irrational cut populates all of Godard’s later films. He cuts not to show the connection between images but rather their disjunction. In these films, we see how sequences don’t fit together, and thus we see the multiplicity of being. As Deleuze conceives it, insight into the multiplicity of being is inherently political because it frees us from the structures, like subjectivity itself, that coalesce the disjunction of being into hierarchical and stable forms. Politics breaks down stable forms into active multiplicities: it transforms the molar into the molecular.21 Of all Godard’s films after 1968, Éloge de l’amour is closest to his early work. Though like all of his later films it eschews a traditional narrative through line, it does depict a relationship between a couple and the political difficulties that they encounter. But the politics of Éloge de l’amour never touch on the relationship itself as in Le mépris or À bout de soufflé. Instead, through the course of their relationship, the couple encounters the politics of the French Resistance and the power of American imperialism

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manifesting itself, though this power doesn’t infiltrate their relationship. The couple and the film comment on politics without showing how the relationship itself bespeaks the politics of sexual antagonism. Like many of Godard’s later films, Éloge de l’amour is a film about a filmmaker making a film. The film proclaims that the film within the film will concern the four moments of love—the encounter, physical passion, separation, and rediscovery. When the filmmaker Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) announces this at the beginning of Godard’s film, it becomes clear that the understanding of love here will be different from what it is in Le mépris, where there is no possibility of rediscovery. Éloge de l’amour reveals the separation that occurs in the romantic union, but it also reflects a belief in reconciliation that never appears in Godard’s early films. In order to emphasize the possibility of rediscovery, the film moves backward in time. Godard shoots the first part of Éloge de l’amour in black and white, and it depicts Edgar making his film on love and, while doing so, interviewing people. We also see his relationship with his girlfriend (Cécile Camp), which often involves political discussion or interaction with political events. The second part of the film is in color and occurs two years earlier. In this part, Godard shows the relationship between Edgar and his girlfriend beginning as he witnesses agents from Steven Spielberg buying the story of his girlfriend’s parents’ involvement in the French Resistance in order to make a film about them. Here, the political critique of the film becomes apparent, but Godard makes no clear connection between the critique of American imperialism and the relationship between Edgar and his girlfriend. When a Hollywood agent comes to buy the rights, he proclaims himself to be “American.” But this prompts Edgar’s girlfriend to ask which American he is. She points out that Mexicans, Brazilians, and Canadians are also Americans, and when the man tries to identify himself with the United States, she points out that other nations in the Americas are also united states. This is one of the most Deleuzean moments of the film because it calls into question identity in the name of multiplicity. American imperialism doesn’t simply function through the imposition of economic and military might but also through establishing a stable identity that obscures the multiplicity of America itself. America is a multiplicity, as the film shows, but this multiplicity becomes just the USA. Godard’s work resists this congealing identity by revealing its tenuousness and the inability of the agent from Hollywood to answer the questions concerning his identity. But this political critique of identity comes at the expense of any depiction of sexual antagonism. This becomes evident in a moment of love in the first part of the film.

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In one particularly evocative shot, a couple appears together beneath a highway overpass in the bottom right part of the image. Though they are conversing, the noise of the traffic obscures most of what they say to each other, but one can hear their condemnation of the American lack of memory and the American attempt to bomb “les images parlantes” (the speaking images). Here, the couple is together, though dislocated, in the image, and they articulate together a critique of American imperialism. As a couple, they become the site of political discourse. This scene tellingly alludes to another at the beginning of Godard’s career, though the difference is as stunning as the similarity. In Vivre sa vie (1962), Godard opens the film with a conversation between Nana (Anna Karina) and Paul (André S. Labarthe) in which Nana expresses her desire to split with Paul. Just as in Éloge de l’amour, Godard shoots the conversation from behind the heads of the participants, and, also as in the later film, the ambient noise makes it difficult at times to hear the conversation. Instead of traffic noise, the sounds of a pinball machine obscure what Nana and Paul say. But more importantly, the subject matter of the conversation is completely different: whereas the couple in Éloge de l’amour talk about the politics of American imperialism, the couple in Vivre sa vie talk about their break-up. Godard also shoots the scene differently. In the earlier film, the camera tracks back and forth to emphasize the division between the couple, while in Éloge de l’amour the camera remains stationary, which suggests the couple’s unity because they remain together within the image. The difference between these two similarly structured scenes reveals how Godard has changed as a filmmaker. As he has become more overtly political and more descriptive, he has turned away from sexual antagonism. As he has focused on the multiplicity of being, he has abandoned the terrain of antagonism. Godard’s increasingly explicit politicization has implied an embrace of Deleuze’s philosophy, and this has had the effect of diluting his capacity for presenting antagonism, which, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, is the essence of all political struggles. Toward the end of Éloge de l’amour, multiplicity again comes to the fore. Godard dissolves a shot of the back of Edgar’s head with a shot of the ocean, and we hear him say, “Quand je pense à quelque chose, en fait, je pense à autre chose toujours” (When I think of something, in fact, I always think of something else). Just as the image contains two images simultaneously (Edgar’s head and the ocean), the voiceover suggests that thought resists any reduction to identity. When Edgar thinks of one thing, he is also thinking of something else. There is no identity, only multiplicity—or identity always involves multiplicity. Both the image and thought are ontologically multiple, and the task of the filmmaker, Godard comes to believe, consists

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in conveying this multiplicity, not in depicting antagonism, which was the clear aim of his films prior to Week-end. The central idea of psychoanalysis is irreducibility of antagonism and the inevitable failure of the sexual relationship, and this implies a definite ontology. For psychoanalysis, being is always divided against itself and thus allows for no possibility of social unification or reconciliation. This is why, from this perspective, we are inherently politicized. The split in being informs our political freedom by leaving the social order at odds with itself. But we can recognize this split in being only so long as we confine ourselves to a binary antagonism, such as sexual difference. Once we consider being and antagonism as multiple, we lose antagonism as such. This is a point that Slavoj Žižek insists on in his book on Gilles Deleuze. He notes: “[T]he ‘binary’ tension is flattened or homogenized the moment that it is transformed into the difference of a multitude…. The moment we pass from the single underlying antagonism to the multitude of antagonisms we endorse the logic of nonantagonistic One-ness: the proliferating multitude of antagonisms exists against the background of a neutral One as their medium, which is not itself marked or cut by an antagonism.”22 One must decide between antagonism and multiplicity because the moment that one makes the choice for multiplicity, one renders invisible the failure of the binary structure through which antagonism becomes evident. Godard’s career as a filmmaker is theoretically instructive because of the vast difference between his early films and his later ones. It is tempting to see compromise with the demands of commercial cinema and with Hollywood traditions in the early films and liberation from these limits in the later ones. While there is certainly some truth to this vision of Godard, one must also recognize that his liberation from narrative and his turn to more explicitly political filmmaking comes with a political cost. He loses the ability to depict sexual antagonism, an ability that was unequalled in his early films. The early Godard stands out as the filmmaker of sexual antagonism and thus as one of the great political filmmakers of his time, given the ideological centrality of the image of sexual complementarity. While he was making films like this, Godard revealed the power of a psychoanalytic conception of politics. His later films, in contrast, show what is lost with Deleuze’s politics of multiplicity. Notes 1. Week-end marks not only the end of Godard’s narrative filmmaking, but also the end of his relationship with commercial cinema production in France. As Colin MacCabe tells it in his biography of Godard: “Godard has always claimed that he was absolutely prepared for the revolutionary break of 1968,

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and Week-end confirms this to be true. It is clearly made by someone who has reached a position of total disgust and rejection of his own society . . . With Week-end Godard demonstrated that he was ready for revolution. He even told the crew he had worked with for almost a decade that they should seek other employment” (MacCabe, 200). The gaze appears as a filmic object due to the inherent incompletion of the filmic image, and this incompletion is the result of the existence of antagonism within every field of representation. In his discussions of the gaze, Jacques Lacan always insists on its opposition to the field of the visible. It is a gap within this field, a hole within seeing, rather than a positive object that we can see. Lacan, 1998, 57. The idea that Deleuze’s emphasis on multiplicity results in a philosophy of wholeness or oneness finds its foremost expression in Alain Badiou’s controversial book on Deleuze. Deleuze’s defenders have countered that Badiou simply fails to account for certain splits or continuing tensions within Deleuze’s thought, various lines of flight that cannot be reconciled in oneness. Badiou’s critique simply views Deleuze’s insistence on the multiplicity of being as fundamentally disingenuous. Badiou notes: “The multiple acceptations of being must be understood as a multiple that is formal, while the One alone is real, and only the real supports the distribution of sense (which is unique)” (25). Deleuze’s celebrated hostility to representation leads him to an embrace of fabulation, which involves the creation of fictions that have no connection to narrative structure. The fabulation invokes multiplicity, while narrative leads to antagonism (even if it tends to obscure the antagonism that it articulates). For an argument on behalf of fabulation against representation, see Flaxman, 2011. For a complete psychoanalytic discussion of the gaze as an object on the screen rather than as the look of the spectator, see McGowan, 2007. Bordwell, 1985, 323. Neroni, 2005, 88. Paul’s mistake relative to Camille’s involves a failure to read her desire that lies beneath the demand that she articulates. She uses signifiers in order to express her desire, but desire cannot exist on the level of the signifier itself. The signifier communicates a demand and obscures a desire. There is a stark contrast between how Lacan and Deleuze talk about the image. For Lacan, the image is almost always static, whereas Deleuze views the image in either spatial or temporal movement. But here the distance between the two thinkers is perhaps not so vast. The specular image that Lacan identifies as static represents an attempt to bypass the real, to construct a reality bereft of any gaps. In contrast, the movement of the image enables the subject to confront the real in the form of the absence that disrupts the wholeness of the specular image. This disruption of the real is unthinkable without movement. Even when Lacan famously theorizes the encounter with the real in the act of a subject viewing a painting, Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, the absence emerges only when the subject itself moves in relation to the

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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painting in order to look askew. (I am indebted to Jan Jagodzinski, University of Alberta, for suggesting this line of thought to me.) Lacan, 2004, 51. Russell, 1995, 149. Sterritt, 1999, 24. Dixon, 1997, 47. Jerry’s desire for titillation makes itself manifest most clearly during a screening of the dailies from The Odyssey. As he is watching the dailies, Jerry is visibly and audibly annoyed by the tedium of Lang’s film. But there is one point—a shot of a woman swimming naked in the ocean—at which Jerry perks up and becomes excited. Here, Godard underlines the clarity of Jerry’s desire (in order to mock it). The classification of Film Socialisme as a work in Deleuze’s politics of multiplicity is ironic given the presence of philosopher Alain Badiou, one of Deleuze’s ardent philosophical opponents, in the film. The film depicts Badiou as a source of political insight when it shows him giving a lecture. But despite the distance that separates Badiou and Deleuze, they share an ontology that conceives being as multiple. The problem is that Badiou maintains that Deleuze’s philosophy actually betrays this ontological claim and covertly conceives of being as one. Deleuze, 1989, 21. Marrati, 2003, 79. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 155. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 248. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) put it in A Thousand Plateaus, “every system is in variation and is defined not by its constants and homogeneity but on the contrary by a variability whose characteristics are immanent, continuous, and regulated in a very specific mode” (93–94). Žižek, 2003, 67.

References Badiou, Alain (2000). Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Trans. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bordwell, David (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (1997). The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: SUNY Press. Flaxman, Gregory (2011). Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy: Powers of the False, Volume 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Jacques Lacan (2004). Le Séminaire, livre X: L’angoisse, 1962–1963. Ed. JacquesAlain Miller. Paris: Seuil. Lacan, Jacques (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 1972–1973. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton. MacCabe, Colin (2003). Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. McGowan, Todd (2007). The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. Albany: SUNY Press. Marrati, Paola (2003). Gilles Deleuze: cinema et philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Neroni, Hilary (2005). The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Albany: SUNY Press. Russell, Catherine (1995). Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sterritt, David (1999). The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Žižek, Slavoj (2003). Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge.

5

Against Limits: Deleuze, Lacan, and the Possibility of Love Sheila Kunkle

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n his “encounter” with Deleuze’s philosophy in Organs without Bodies, Slavoj Žižek (2004) pinpoints the essential difference between Hegel and Deleuze, as follows: “The difference is not between immanence and transcendence but between flux and gap. The ‘ultimate fact’ of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is the absolute immanence of the continuous flux of pure becoming, while the ‘ultimate fact’ of Hegel is the irreducible rupture of/in immanence” (60). It is indeed the crucial and incommensurable difference between the notion of a gap, which is constitutive of the Lacanian subject, and Deleuze’s concept of continuous flux, that distinguishes two very different philosophies, and ultimately, two very different openings for possibilities of love. For Deleuze, love emerges through nomadic movement, chance, and novelty in repetition, while for Lacan, the love relation manifests through a supplementary nonrelation, and contingent choice (as distinct from chance) is open to the subject as one pathway, along with necessity, to experience the love relation. And while Deleuze sees repetition of difference as the opening to new ways of being, with Lacan we can distinguish between modes of repetition in the Symbolic, Imaginary, and the Real. Further, as Alenka Zupančič (2008) relates, if Deleuze is interested in the failure of repetition, Lacan is more interested in what “disturbs the failure of repetition,” or in “what happens in the intervals between” (162, 172). This chapter traces these two distinct ways of conceiving the love relation through the metaphysics of the constitutive gap and immanent flux, and illustrates these differences

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in an analysis of Tom Tykwer’s 1998 film Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt in German). Both in form and narrative, this film allows us to explore how difference, repetition, contingency, and chance all bear on the possibility of a love relation from both a Deleuzian and Lacanian perspective. Essentially, to be “against limits” has a different meaning for each line of thought. For Deleuze it is associated with boundless freedom. As he writes in Difference and Repetition (1994), “every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences; a properly differential and original space and time; all of which persist alongside the simplification of limitation and opposition” (50). In contrast, from a Lacanian perspective, limits are configured within the logic of the signifier, where an alienated subject must choose between Being and Meaning, existing in the gap of nonmeaning between the two. In Seminar XI (1981), Lacan presents the forced choice that the symbolic order imposes on the subject: she can choose either being or meaning, but never both. “If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into non-meaning. If we choose meaning, the meaning survives only deprived of that part of non-meaning that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realization of the subject, the unconscious” (211). For Deleuze, there is no similar subject of language or of the unconscious that is primary, but rather a world of continuous flux. Life, to Deleuze, is a swarm of affects and encounters, where machinic connections and interactions take place. His conception is configured within his idiosyncratic treatment of chance. In Difference and Repetition (1994) he writes that each throw of the dice is distinctive and not determined by a series of throws or what came before. “The different outcomes are no longer separated according to the distribution of the hypotheses which they carry out, but distribute themselves in the open space of the unique and nonshared throw.” Further, these different throws “invent their own rules and compose the unique throw with multiple forms by a single response which leaves them open and never closes them” (283). Conceiving chance in this way, Deleuze (2000) replaces the hypothetical and categorical with difference and repetition. And in terms of love, difference and repetition are articulated through the interplay of the particular and the general, series and group, and “extrinsic conditions and subjective contingencies” (75). In Proust & Signs (2000), Deleuze writes: “The beloved appears as a sign, a ‘soul’; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted” (7). Difference and repetition, according to Deleuze, are two elements of “essence,” which is located both in the series of successive loves

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and within each particular love. “[E]ach love contributes its difference, which was already included in the preceding love, and all the differences are contained in a primordial image that we unceasingly reproduce at different levels and repeat as the intelligible law of all our loves” (68). Two dimensions are at work here, because Deleuze’s reference to “variation” in love refers both to each particular love and to the more general “trans-subjective” love that unfolds to include “all humanity” (72). Further, there is something both comic and tragic that occurs here, for as Deleuze believes, the series of love encounters unfold in different variations, and essence comes to assume the generality of a theme or Idea: “[T]he phenomena are always unhappy and particular, but the idea extracted from them is general and joyous” (75). Intelligence discovers a theme that was unconsciously there from the beginning. It finds that “the loved beings were not autonomously functioning causes but the terms of a series proceeding within us, the tableaux vivants of an internal theater, the reflections of an essence” (75). For Deleuze, one need not only be able to decipher and interpret signs of love, for they are always deceptive, but more importantly, one must understand the artistry at play in love. This is encapsulated in a quote he reproduces from Proust’s work In Search of Lost Time: “The whole art of living is to make use of the persons who make us suffer as though of a stage permitting us to accede to that person’s divine form, and thereby to people our lives, day by day, with divinities” (75). Deleuze would give privilege to those experiences in love that reach and go beyond a limit to a virtual possible world not yet in existence; an interplay of joy and suffering that would invite variations of the way essence is incarnated in love, which is ruled by the law of deception. This is illustrated in Deleuze’s delineation of masochism as distinct from sadism. For clearly there is, for Deleuze, a freedom and creativity found in masochism and its disavowal through the fetish that is not found in sadism. In masochism, the same scenes are reenacted in a sort of frozen progression, but they allow for creatively shifting roles among the characters. As Deleuze (1991) writes, “the aesthetic and dramatic suspense of Masoch contrasts with the mechanical, cumulative repetition of Sade” (34). It is, according to Deleuze, masochism that goes against all limits to arrive at something new, because the masochist is one who creatively confronts the Death Instinct with disavowal and suspense, but unlike the concept of disavowal found in Lacan’s diagnostic structure of perversion, Deleuze sees it as “radically contesting the validity of that which is: it suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it” (31). Sade and Masoch not only gave expression to new connections between lust and cruelty, violence and eroticism, they further produced entirely

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new conceptions of man, culture, and nature, offered new ways of thinking, and even created an original language, according to Deleuze. Whereas Sade employed an institutionalized possession and Masoch a contractual alliance, it was the mechanical repetitions of the latter that brought something entirely new, for they proceeded through dialectical reversals, disguises, and displacements, and thus, according to Deleuze, it was Masoch who used reason against itself. The freedom Deleuze (1991) attributes to Masoch opens up into a world of repetition that transcends Masoch himself in that he “has a particular way of ‘desexualizing’ love and at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity”(12). Perhaps one of the most “Deleuzian” characters in Western history is that of Don Juan, who according to Francois Rachline in Don Juan’s Wager (2001), appears as a figure who exists between an Idea and a real person throughout his many incarnations in music, culture, and literature. In all of his relations he takes what he desires without making good on any promises he makes, and in doing so he rejects the idea that human relations should be conducted through a necessary compensation. Don Juan is a figure whose actions parallel those of Masoch in terms of freedom and repetition, for in a Deleuzian way, and according to Rachline, “sex is in no way sufficient to describe Don Juan’s behavior, and his temperament is not limited to an erotics that is restricted to sex, but opens out onto a general erotics of life” (134). Don Juan lives in the moment by enjoying each woman he desires and makes love to; and ultimately, according to Rachline, he is a figure who creates ruptures at every turn for his actions go against all of society, not only its sexual norms, but its economic relations and ethics as well. Don Juan is a lover who engages both in serial love and sexual relations that extend to “all humanity”; a figure who goes beyond “worldly signs,” such as “vacuity, stupidity, forgetfulness,” to incarnate love through an endless series of women, who also brings out the Idea of love as artistic encounter (Deleuze, 2000, 81–82). An interesting parallel character to Don Juan in film is that of Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) in King Vidor’s 1944 film The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand’s novel of a driven architect who opts out of both the symmetrical relations of capitalist exchange and the symbolic dimension of success, for he neither asks for nor accepts charity, and refuses to alter his creations for the sake of either status or gain. Roark’s love relation with Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal) is conducted under the same ethic, for he neither actively courts her nor anxiously waits for her to come to him; rather, he remains true to his desire to create and allows her to enter his life only after she accepts that she cannot expect to redirect his passion. Whereas the figure of Don Juan found an alternative to death by embracing the state of being perpetually in debt, Roark rises to the top of his profession,

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both literally and figuratively, without giving way to his desire. We could say that while Don Juan’s repetitive sexual encounters serve to release erotics from preestablished limits, Roark’s Act, in a Lacanian sense, of destroying one of his buildings that has been architecturally altered, serves to reveal to others the limits that the symbolic order places on all human relations. In distinct contrast to the immanent flux that pervades Deleuze’s metaphysics, Lacan’s subject is constituted through the logic of the signifier, as always already out of joint or noncoincident with itself, existing in the space of nonmeaning in the gap between Being and Meaning. And although Lacan admired Deleuze’s work on Masochism, he nonetheless takes a very different perspective of concepts of contingency, chance, and love. In love, according to Lacan, we do not encounter another new and possible “world,” with a lover, as Deleuze would have it, but rather, a nonrelation that itself exists as an actual relation. As Alenka Zupančič (2008) puts it, “[w]hat happens in a love encounter is not simply that the sexual non-relation is momentarily suspended with an unexpected emergence of a (possible) relation, but something rather more complex: it is that the non-relation itself suddenly emerges as a mode, as well as the condition) of a relation” (135). The thing that arises in any love relation, that simultaneously and paradoxically makes the love relation possible and also becomes its obstacle, is the Lacanian object a. And the way the subject relates to this object of lack puts it on a pathway of desire or drive. In the metonymy of desire, the subject tries to obtain an answer to what the Other desires, in order to keep desire itself alive; and in drive, the lack itself becomes the object of pleasure/jouissance. For Lacan love is treated as drive (and runs parallel to desire), because while desire opens up into a world of fantasies about the love relation and its impossibilities (i.e., the impossibility of ever obtaining the object of desire), drive has to do with the Real of desire, or that which makes lack itself and the circular movement around it the ultimate enjoyment. When in Seminar XX Lacan (1998) writes that all love tends to make the displacement of the negation from the ‘”stops not being written” to the “doesn’t stop being written,” in other words, from contingency to necessity, he is referring to two ways the subject approaches being in the gap (the Real) of the nonsexual relation (145). Confronting this gap, the subject either chooses to play on contingently by continuing to find pleasure in this “supplemental” nonrelation, this love that pleasantly but unexpectedly happened, or she can necessarily found this love “by retrospectively formulating the demand to which this surprisingly produced satisfaction was supposed to reply” (Zupančič, 2008, 134). However, we must be careful to note here that the subject that “chooses” does not know what the choices, the stakes, or the consequences are; she does not weigh certain options or

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consider certain probabilities; instead she either constructs a fantasy that keeps desire at play and ensures a distance from the object of desire, or she tries to inscribe a necessity between demand and its satisfaction, or desire and jouissance. As many Lacanian analysts relate, in terms of the love relation, the latter move can lead to a kind of nostalgia that is stuck in an eternal past; it creates the conditions for an impossible love where lovers forever “miss” each other, for whatever reasons: they are with other partners, it’s the wrong place or the wrong time, or one lover tragically dies. Thus a final yet crucial difference between Deleuze and Lacan exists in their treatment of temporality and repetition, which arises from the founding metaphysical difference between gap and flux. Deleuze’s conceptualization of time is bound to repetition and the eternal return. As Žižek writes in Organs without Bodies (2004), “perhaps the core of Deleuze’s concept of repetition is the idea that, in contrast to the mechanical (not machinic!) repetition of linear causality, in a proper instance of repetition, the repeated event is re-created in a radical sense: it (re) emerges every time as New” (15). But Alenka Zupančič (2008) goes deeper here to find a more serious difference between Deleuze and Lacan in terms of their conceptualizations of repetition. According to her, for Lacan “the failure of repetition itself fails at some point, or, something disturbs the pure failure of repetition: something fleeting, elusive, something perceptible at one moment and gone the next” (173). What is fleeting is the object a, and it is precisely this object that allows the subject to experience its semblance in the dimension of the Real, or as Zupančič (2008) puts it, it is “the object via which, for a moment, the subject sees herself on the outside,” and which offers “a radical diversity that belongs to a different order than variety and novelty” (173), as found in Deleuze. For both Deleuze and Lacan, repetition is not caused by a failure to accurately represent reality or identity, but rather, repetition itself constitutes a radical diversity. But whereas for Deleuze something radically new can arise through a selective process of an eternal return, for Lacan, as Zupančič shows, the failure of repetition produces something itself, and it is the Thing (the object a in the Real). She writes (2008), quoting Mladan Dolar (2005, 200), “In the tiny gap between one occurrence and the next one, a bit of real is produced. In every repetition there is already, in a minimal way, the emergence of that which escapes symbolization, the haphazard contingent object appears which spoils the mere repeating of the same, so the same which returns is never the same, although we couldn’t tell it apart from its previous occurrence by any of the he positive features or distinguishing marks ” (164). Turning now to Tykwer’s Run Lola Run, we can analyze the film in two distinct ways, according to Lacan’s constitutive gap and Deleuze’s

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continuous flux, and reveal how each one’s metaphysics bears on the emergence and possibility of the love relation. Briefly, the film presents three variations of an event where a young German punk girl, Lola (Franke Potente), has 20 minutes to get 100,000 deutschmarks to her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) to save him from criminals waiting for the cash.1 The clock begins as Lola launches into a frenetic fast-paced run through the streets of Berlin. She goes through three iterations of the run, making various split-second decisions along the way that result in three distinct outcomes. In the first run, she goes to the bank where her father works, but he refuses to give her the money. She reaches Manni and helps him rob a market, and in this run Lola ends up being shot by policemen. In the second run, she goes to the bank where her father works and when he refuses her, she robs the bank, but when she reaches Manni, it is too late and he is run over by an ambulance. And in the third run, she goes to the bank, but her father has already left, so she keeps running and makes a split-second decision to stop at a casino on the way and play the roulette wheel, thus winning the money and meeting up with Manni who has also just acquired his lost cash. In this third and final run, she not only escapes with Manni and a surplus of money, but all of the many accidents, coincidences, and misfortunes that occurred in her first two runs are not repeated; no one is accidentally hurt or killed, and everyone’s life continues along a positive trajectory. Slavoj Žižek (2002) discusses this film as an exemplar of a recent trend in cinema that mirrors developments in science and computer technology; that is, the multiple possible worlds scenario that has different versions or outcomes of the same plot repeatedly enacted, or life as a form of multiple parallel destinies that “interact and are crucially affected by meaningless contingent encounters” (198). While it is true that Lola repeats the same run three times, these repetitions are independent of each other and, therefore, Žižek is incorrect to see these three different episodes as offering a “better” or best choice, since the subjects do not have access to the knowledge of what happens in the other two runs; they do not learn which choice is the correct choice, for it all unfolds under the constant confrontation of contingent circumstances, with the subject making different choices at every turn. At first it appears that each tiny change of movement or action leads to a very different chain of events, and subjects are at the mercy of randomness. For example, in the third run nothing impedes Lola’s run to her father’s bank (she does not trip or bump into anyone on the street), and she thereby avoids distracting her father’s business partner, which caused him to crash his car in the first two runs; instead, in the third run, she rolls over the top of his car and he avoids the crash, which enables him to pick up her father on time. Therefore, when Lola arrives at the bank in this run,

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her father has already left and she cannot demand money or rob the bank, but instead keeps on running. However, this film clearly delineates chance from contingency in Lola’s final run, where she makes the split-second decision (choice, made under conditions of contingency) to enter a casino and play the roulette wheel (a game of probability and chance). A Deleuzian encounter with Run Lola Run proceeds from vastly different coordinates than a Lacanian analysis. Such an encounter would follow his consideration of director Josheph Mankiewicz’s use of flashback and “forking” in the third chapter of Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989). What interests Deleuze here is Mankiewicz’s fragmentation of all linearity, and his “perpetual forks like so many breaks in causality.” “At each point where time forks the multiplicity of circuits thus finds a new meaning.” In films such as The Barefoot Contessa, or A Letter to Three Wives, Deleuze finds that, similar to his take on the writings of Masoch, repetitions lead to something new. He writes: “In The Barefoot Contessa, its repetitions are not accumulations, its manifestations refuse to be aligned, or to reconstitute a destiny, but constantly split up any state of equilibrium and each time impose a new ‘meander,’ a new break in causality, which itself forks from the previous one, in a collection of non-linear relations” (49). What Deleuze (1989) finds in Mankiewicz’s use of the flashback and forking is a kind of bestowal of something necessary (in a world of contingent encounters). “Time’s forks thus provide flashback with a necessity, and recollection of images with an authenticity, a weight of past without which they would remain conventional,” and this is so because “the forking points are very often so imperceptible that they cannot be revealed until after their occurrence . . . it is a story that can be told only in the past” (50). In that difference inhabits repetition, by extension the flash-forward can take on the same function as the flashback. In Run Lola Run there are very fast-paced montage “snapshots” that flash on the screen of several minor figures’ lives who in one way or another come into contact with Lola while she is running (a woman with a baby carriage, a bank attendant, a man on a bicycle, and a homeless man). And in each run’s circuit we find that Lola’s encounters with these figures suggests a different unfolding of a life (in retrospect, projected from the future of a life having been lived). For example, a woman with a baby carriage in Lola’s path has three different lives in montage snapshot in each of the three runs: as an unfit mother whose child is taken away; as a woman who wins the lottery in the second; as having a religious conversion in the third. The mind can barely register what the eye is seeing during these split-second stills, but what is being registered is that indeed our lives are filled with contingent encounters that

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are never predetermined; that we can never predict what the contingent circumstances of our lives will be and what choices we will make that will change everything in the course of our lives. People may repeat their days, their actions, but in every iteration, something different is “selected out” that changes everything and everyone who comes in their path. To Deleuze a univocal All underpins the repetitions, no matter what the outcome, for each ending suggests a new point of departure, a new fork for another possible world.2 This Deleuzian perspective is corroborated by the quotations appearing in the opening credits of Run Lola Run, the first from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which states that at the end of our explorations, we will “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” And the second quote is from the famous German soccer coach Sepp Herberger: “After the game is before the game.” Both quotes suggest that although outcomes are unpredictable (win or lose), the time to begin will come around again and offer the chance to repeat but experience something new. A final quote by Herberger launches the film as follows: “The ball is round, the game lasts for 90 minutes,” to which Tykwer added: “everything else is pure theory.” The quote lends itself to Deleuze’s philosophy of transcendental empiricism, for it suggests the flux of existence that has no transcendental thought, but an immanence created by movement and consequences, a pure flux of existence. Lola and Manni’s love relation is one of multiple possible events in the flux of such a world. Whatever arises in terms of contingent life circumstances, a space is opened for Lola to choose one pathway over another and allows her to play the role of her lover’s savior. The univocity of the All unfolds into different variations, each repetition offering something different by the way the game is played. The eternal return, or “the system of the Future,” according to Deleuze (1994), “has no pre-existing rules because the game bears already upon its rules” (116). The immanence of flux, the release of linear time, the necessity of Lola’s mission, her repetitive runs through the circuit of chance and contingency, all open onto the possible love relation between Lola and Manni. Deleuze’s concept of repetition here is crucial, where what is repeated is difference—a different pathway, a different chain of causal events, different choices, sacrifices, and so on, which is distinctly opposed to Lacan’s reference to repetition especially as it bears on the love relation. In Lacan’s logic, love—which is structured in the same way as comedy—vis-à-vis the object a, compels a repetition and offers the subject an enjoyment in the very movement itself. Both comedy and love, as Zupančič shows, momentarily suspend the subject in an in-between place, in between Being and Meaning. Comedy repeats the Real and the repetition of this “nonsense”

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makes us aware that sense always already has the structure of an error (Zupančič, 2002). In a parallel way, love can also repeat the pleasure of missing the object; the pleasure/frustration (of desire) of trying to obtain the lost object, the object a, or the pleasure (jouissance) of circling around it. Zupančič (2008) agrees with Deleuze that repetition is not the repetition of a failed representation, but she posits that Deleuze is missing something that happens between repetitions themselves. “Repetition is always a repetition of representation . . . but it is also a repetition of the inherent gap or interval between its terms, which is the very locus of surprise in repetition, of the Real encountered in it” (167). Returning to Run Lola Run, in order to understand the love relation between Lola and Manni and the choices between contingency and necessity, in a Lacanian sense, we must reverse the theme of the film. That is, the theme is not the running, the three circuits of contingent encounters, the three outcomes of the lovers’ actions; instead, it is found in both the structure and the narrative of the film, in the spaces, the intervals, between the repetitions. The repetition of difference is not Lola’s three circuits, but rather the questions she asks in the scenes between these runs, mirroring the gap between Being and Meaning. In these instances, when first Lola and then Manni lie dying in the street, the mise-en-scéne is filtered red as they find themselves in an imagined “conversation” with the other while sharing an intimate moment in bed; as if time has stopped and the interval allows them to question their purpose and meaning for the Other. In Lola’s “red scene,” after she has been shot, the following “dialogue” ensues (figure 5.1)

Figure 5.1

Manni and Lola.

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Lola: Do you love me? Manni: Sure I do. Lola: How can you be so sure? Manni: I don’t know, I just am. Lola: I could be some other girl. Manni: You’re the best. Lola: The best of what? Manni: The best girl. Lola: Of all the girls in the world? Manni: Sure Lola: You think so? Manni: Okay, I think so. Lola: How do you know? Manni: I just do. Lola: You see, you aren’t sure. Manni: Are you nuts or what? Lola: What if you never met me? You’d be telling the same thing to someone else. Manni: OK, if you don’t want to hear it. Lola: I don’t want to hear anything; I want to know how you feel. Manni: Okay, my feelings say that you’re the best. Lola: Who is “your feelings” anyway? Manni: It’s me, my heart. Lola: Your heart says, “Hi, Manni, she’s the one?” Manni: Exactly. Lola: And you say “Thanks for the information; see you around?” Manni: Exactly.

What does not translate for the reader here is the way the above dialogue takes place in a mise-en-scène filtered red, suggesting a dimension beyond the world of contingent encounters, a kind of stasis, or rather an inbetween moment of what has just happened, and what will happen next. In this stasis the incessant techno-music that had accompanied Lola’s runs goes silent as if to signal something very serious. Yet, in the “dialogue” above we can grasp a kind of comedy unfolding in the love relation, where the subject will never obtain her object of desire. When Manni asks Lola if she is about to break up with him, she answers, “I don’t know,” but at this precise moment, we find her back in the street where she states, loudly, to no-one in particular, “But I don’t want to break up,” after which she shouts “Stop!,” which puts her back at the beginning of the run, where the phone rings and it is Manni telling her that he is in desperate need of her help to get 100,000 deutschmarks in 20 minutes.

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When Manni lies dying in the street and experiences his red scene, his line of questioning takes a slightly different turn as follows: Manni: Lola, what would you do if I died? Lola: I wouldn’t let you die. Manni: Yeah well, what if I were fatally ill and the doctor said “one more day”? Lola: I’d throw you in the ocean—shock therapy. Manni: What if I were dead anyway? Lola: What do you want to hear . . . . I’d go to the isle of Rügen and cast your ashes to the wind? Manni: I know what you’d do—you’d forget me. Lola: No. Manni: Sure you would, what else could you do? Sure, you’d mourn for a few weeks, and everybody’s real compassionate, and everything’s so incredibly sad, and everyone feels sorry for you. You can show everyone how strong you are: “What a great woman,” they’ll say, “she really pulls herself together,” and all at once a really nice guy with green eyes shows up. And he’s super sensitive, listens to you all day. Then you’ll hop into his lap and cross me off your list. That’s how it goes. Lola: Manni Manni: What? Lola: You haven’t died yet.

Manni’s questions and his “inner dialogue” project a future world in his absence, a world where he mourns himself as the lost object before he is lost. Like Lola, he secretly wants assurance from her that he is the irreplaceable One. At the end of his red scene, he responds to Lola’s “You haven’t died yet,” with a questioning “No?” And in the next second we are returned to the beginning of Lola’s third and final run. From a Lacanian perspective each red scene acts as an interval between the repetitions of the runs, and tells us the way each lover “ex-ists” in the love relation—in terms of being the subject of the other’s desire and of the impossibility of the two sexes ever becoming one. Lola wants to be assured that she’s the “One,” above all others; with her questions she wants assurance of her partner’s love, and Manni constructs a fantasy of how he will be replaced after he’s gone, seeking assurance that he’s really irreplaceable in Lola’s life. The monologues masquerading as dialogues outside of space and time reveal not only that love is inherently narcissistic, but also that it happens in an impossible place, in the gap between Being and Meaning where the subject confronts the Real (the nonexistence) of the sexual relation. For Deleuze (1989), in distinct contrast to Lacan, the “red scenes” can be registered as “crystal of time,” when the actual and virtual are indistinguishable; what cracks the crystal both times is the desire/drive to experience another

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circuit, to burst forth into life again (81). In these in-between irrational cuts, the red filter places us in a world outside of meaning derived directly from the narrative, rather, the red offers us the experience of an intensity: “Colour is on the contrary the affect itself, the virtual conjunction of all the objects which it picks up” (Deleuze, 1986, 118). In contrast to Lacan, Deleuze would interpret the love relation between Manni and Lola through the categories of the particular (the irreplaceable one) and the general (the phenomenon of replaceability itself). Something transcends the iterations of love between Manni and Lola, of which they remain unaware, and it is the original Idea, or theme, according to Deleuze. The lovers remain unaware of the comedy of the terms of their relation, because they remain unaware of the outcomes occurring in the other two runs. In a crucial way, then, Lola and Manni remain unaware because what occurs in the film is not so much a serial repetition, but a simultaneity— each of Lola’s runs is entirely possible, given the rules of the game, which are created as the game plays out. With this reading, the three runs appear not as random, but as three alternatives that mirror three different states of the relationship between the two lovers. The first run ends with Lola questioning Manni’s love; the second run ends with Manni questioning Lola’s love; and the third run, which ends happily, has neither of them questioning each other’s love. The iterations appear within the relationship, although they must run in serial form on the screen before us. Both Deleuze and Lacan see the interplay of choice, contingency, and chance as occurring outside of the logic of linear causality and temporality. As Deleuze (2000) writes, “nothing shows the externality of the choice better than the contingency that governs the identity of the beloved” (76). And further, “this choice is not made without uncertainty and contingency” (77). The logic of love for Lacan, however, follows the mode of enjoyment, where in a temporal sense, the subject never catches up with its object (the beloved), or, it dwells in the dimension of drive, experiencing the “nothing” at the center of desire.3 In Lacan, anything, even the impossible, can happen when the Real appears as the meaningless void of the Symbolic. This occurs with Lola’s earth-shattering, piercing screams at three distinct moments where all words, rational logic, and response fails; when the world, that is, the situation, becomes too much to process, too much too bear, such that nothing but a scream can break the hold of time, space, and causality itself.4 The first scream comes at the end of the opening phone call from Manni who is caught up in his impending doom and the fact that nothing can be done; he shouts into the phone that he is already dead and the situation is impossible. Lola screams for him to “shut up,” in a decibel that shatters the glass in her room, a moment right before she throws the phone up

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in the air and thinks of her opening move, just before she launches her run. The second scream comes when she is at the bank begging her father for 100,000 deutschmarks to save Manni. When her father asks, “Who’s Manni?” Lola screams that Manni has been her boyfriend for over a year, and when her father refuses her the money, telling her that he is leaving the family to be with his lover, Lola screams and breaks the glass clock on the wall. The third scream occurs in the final run at the casino where she has placed her bet just before the marble rolls into its slot in the roulette wheel before it stops spinning. Everything bears on her winning this game of chance and the scream she lets out, which forces people around her to cover their ears, signals that something impossible is about to happen— her number wins, not just once, but twice, giving her the money she needs to save Manni. For Deleuze, Lola’s screams might be the essence of the subject’s pure affect or intensity outside of rationality and words; but for Lacan what is repeated in Lola’s screams is the subject’s presence in the Real, a dimension where she is able to break the logic of probability (the impasse of the Symbolic) itself. The screams signal that the repetition of the subject in the Symbolic and Imaginary is different from the repetition that occurs in the gap of nonmeaning of the Real where the impossible becomes possible. This “impossible possible” is precisely what takes place in love. As Zupančič (2002) reveals, the other that we love is neither the banal nor the sublime object, but “neither can she be separated from them, since she is nothing else but that what results from successful (or lucky) montage of the two. In other words, what we are in love with is the other as this minimal difference of the same” (73). Love, as it emerges in terms of a repetitive drive, as a nonsexual relation that lasts, is found in the “transcendent accessibility of the other,” because the banal object and the object of desire are semblances, neither one being more real than the other. Zupančič (2008) locates here another crucial difference between Lacan and Deleuze, for while the latter treats the Real as a “cosmic whole, an inherently productive self-differentiating substance,” Lacan treats the Real as an impasse, as something that interrupts a process, or an impossibility in the structure of the field of reality, caused by the split at the very heart of the Symbolic itself (161–162). From both a Deleuzian and Lacanian perspective, the cinematic experience is transformative, but in very different ways. Deleuze’s attention to the details of the formal elements of film analysis, for example, his discussion of Welles’s depth-of-field, Resnais’s tracking shots, the repetitive “dreamlike” sequences of Bunuel, all work to change our experience of time and space through the image. But what Lacan offers us is a way to see how film allows us to play with the gaze; how the gaze itself is inherent in the filmic image. As Todd McGowan (2007) writes, “the gaze is a blank point—a point

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that disrupts the flow and the sense of the experience—within the aesthetic structure of the film”; “film holds out the promise of enjoyment through the way that it deploys the gaze as object petit a”(12). While Deleuze and Lacan’s perspectives point to differences in the filmic experience, in terms of their metaphysical orientation of the gap and flux, their most profound difference occurs in their conceptualizations of topology. For Lacan it is the topology of the subject as it crosses the impossible twist in the paradoxical Möbius strip that is crucial, where the inside can trade places with the outside, and there are an infinite number of possibilities for the love relation to come into existence between the suspension points of necessity and contingency. For Deleuze, a topology is presented where time occurs in “sheets,” and the present is identified by “peaks.” In his film analysis, Deleuze addresses “states of body, states of world, states of history,” which are all redistributed, transformed and reconfigured according to whether they follow the “statistical probabilism” of Resnais or the “indeterminism of the quantum type” in Robbe-Grillet (1989, 120). Love is registered as “a feeling which stretches out on a sheet and is modified according to its fragmentation,” and which can be transformed by “crossing another sheet.” When this happens, “it is as if feelings set free the consciousness or thought with which they are loaded: a becoming conscious according to which shadows are the living realities of a mental theater and feelings the true figures in a ‘cerebral game’ which is very concrete” (Deleuze, 1989, 125). According to Žižek, it is Hegel’s gap that supercedes Deleuze’s flux of pure becoming because there is finally no duality (of Being and Becoming, of the virtual and the actual, etc.) in the first place; and the Lacanian gap of nonmeaning within the logic of the signifier and the alienated subject arises within immanence itself. Therefore, we need to see that the virtual already exists within the actual, much like the Real that is already constituted within the Symbolic, or drive that is found at the core of desire. And in terms of repetition, it is not a case of the difference between the Same and the Other, but rather the noncoincidence of the Same with itself. What’s crucial for Žižek (2006) here is not to think of radical contingency as an “ontological openness” (203) or the ability to choose “the correct path” of alternative future realities, but rather the ability to assume “a self-referentiality of knowledge” (204), a tautology of causality and subjecthood. Deleuze’s movement of flux and Lacan’s impasse of the gap entail two distinct ways love becomes possible; it emerges as either paradoxical, existing outside meaning yet inextricably always part of it (Lacan), or as arising in the stretching, folding, overlapping, and cutting of planes of existence, sheets of time, and possible worlds (Deleuze). Deleuze would have us create a new world to go beyond limits of what went before, to find novelty

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in repetition, and a future game that makes up its own rules, while Lacan would have us see how the object compels our fascination again and again. The movement in the Deleuzian universe repeats either in a way that becomes stagnant in its accumulations (Sade), or in a way that approaches a frozen moment, a moment of suspense, before the new bursts forth to start again (Masoch). In contrast, Lacan’s subject can experience something impossible in between the repetitions themselves. As Zupančič (2008) writes, what’s at stake in repetition “is the fact that we can tell something a hundred different ways and the fact that we cannot, absolutely not (not even by literally repeating it) tell something in only one way” (172). Lacan would have us see how the object a compels our fascination, and how we demand, like a child, to see or hear it again and again, because the movement of the “object” in love is precisely the same movement of the subject as it hovers and goes back and forth between Being and Meaning in the gap of nonmeaning. This movement, as Zupančič illustrates in her comparison of love and comedy, brings with it the stumbling, the interruptions, the impasses, and “all kinds of fixations and passionate attachments” that subjects find in their search for meaning (8). What we get in love is something that is not lost, but rather something supplementary emerging in an unexpected place, something very akin to comedy, because the repetitions in both allow the subject to repeat the Real (the gap) of its existence. If Deleuze would have us exchange one mask for another in love, to creatively and repetitively exchange roles, Lacan would have us experience the Real that exists between the changing of masks, to experience the Thing that exasperate, lures, and even repulses us in love. Notes 1. Lola Rennt has many parallels to Kristoff Keizlowski’s 1981 film Blind Chance, which was said to influence Tykwar’s narrative despite the vast difference in style, technique, and sound between the two films. See Jonahtan Hedernson’s featured review at Jonathan Henderson // © 2010 Cinelogue. com. 2. “Mankiewicz’s characters never develop in a linear evolution: but each time [they] constitute a deviation which makes a circuit, allowing a secret to inhere in the whole, and serve as a point of departure for other forks” (Deleuze, 1989, 49). 3. Zupančič (2002) puts it most articulately when she states: “What is involved in the drive is not so much a ‘time difference’ as the ‘time warp’—the concept that the SF literature uses precisely to explain (scientifically) the impossible that happens. Time warp essentially refers to the fact that a piece of

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some other (temporal) reality gets caught in our present temporality (or vice versa), appears there where there is no structural place for it, thus producing a strange, illogical tableau” (75–76). 4. In Lola’s three runs, what appears as difference in the repetitions is found in all three of Lacan’s registers of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real. The repetition of her Symbolic “identity” re-occurs in different variations as a daughter who finds herself as loved and unloved by her father, as both legitimate and cuckolded offspring. The repetition of the Imaginary occurs when her body appears as interchangeable with a cartoon character, as well as when she sees herself as the object of her lover’s desire; and the repetitions in the Real occur in Lola’s piercing glass-shattering screams.

References Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1991). Masochism Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books. ——— (1994). Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (2000). Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Trans. Robert Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dolar, Mladen (2005). “Comedy and Its Double.” In Schluss mit der Komödie! [Stop That Comedy!]. Ed. Robert Pfaller. Vienna: Sonderzahl. Lacan, Jacques (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton. ——— (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore 1972–73. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton. McGowan, Todd (2007). The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. New York: SUNY Press. Rachline, Francois (2001). Don Juan’s Wager. Trans. Susan Fairfiled. New York: Other Press. Run Lola Run (original: Lola rennt) (1998). Film. Directed by Tom Tykwer. German, X-Filme Creative Pool. Zˆizˆek, Slavoj (2004). Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge. ——— (2006). The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zˆizˆek, Slavoj and Mladen Dolar (2002). Opera’s Second Death. New York: Routledge. Zupančič, Alenka (2002). “On Love as Comedy.” Lacanian ink 20: 62–79. ——— (2008). The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Occasioning the Real: Lacan, Deleuze, and Cinematic Structuring of Sense Emanuelle Wessels

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his chapter explores the extent to which contemporary revisions of Lacanian film theory, which posit that the gaze belongs to the register of the Real as opposed to the Imaginary, can, when read through Gilles Deleuze’s notion of sense, open the possibility that the cinematic apparatus, as a language, can structure the gaze as comparable to Deleuze’s understanding of sense. Although Deleuze begins to investigate some of the ways in which cinema can act as a sense-structuring system in The Time Image, this aspect of his theory of sense, as articulated to film, needs further development. Thus, using the film Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003) as an illustration, this chapter delves into the potential productivity for film studies in a revised return to apparatus theory and the framework of film as language. I attempt to ascertain whether these models, when theorized in the context of Lacan’s notion of the Real gaze and Deleuze’s concept of sense, can supply a useful paradigm for conceptualizing film as a signifying system, which acts as a vehicle transmitting sense in the form of the Real gaze, an event that has been discussed in terms of its potential for allowing more radical modes of spectatorship than afforded by prior approaches to Lacanian film theory. Contemporary neo-Lacanian film theorists, such as Todd McGowan and Slavoj Žižek, have argued that understanding the gaze as a moment of Real terror or shock can provide potential for resistance through spectatorship, insofar as it enables spectators to embrace experiential, new modes of being not previously ideologically defined by the signification system of

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film. For early Lacanian film theorists working in the Imaginary, such as Christian Metz, Jacques Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” essay was paramount, and “the reception of film was an imaginary experience that had the effect of binding the subject to its interpellation in the symbolic order” (McGowan 2004, xiii). This imaginary process of identification was used to argue that cinema, essentially, functions as an auxiliary mechanism constituting and hailing subjects-in-ideology, by way of their misrecognition in film. Louis Althusser (1971), whose thoughts on ideology largely inform these projects, states that “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject” (173). Thus, according to early Lacanian film theorists utilizing the role of the Imaginary, film creates ideological subject positions, and subsequently hails spectators as subjects-in-ideology through misrecognition. Film, then, becomes ideology’s accomplice, deceiving subjects into identifying with various subject positions. The problem with this approach is that it leaves no room for resistance, and construes film as a wholly ideological machine, completely implicated and flawlessly functioning, in the perpetuation of dominant culture. Attempts to revive Lacanian film theory hinge on moving beyond the hegemonic focus on an overdetermined imaginary register, and returning to the Real as the Lacanian order offering possible resistant potential, or at least an alternative to the notion of ideology as a completely closed loop. Further, this approach enables the constitution of subjects more radical than those invested deeply in the imaginary, who are allegedly duped by the forces of ideology. For Lacan, the Real represents a point of intrusion or disruption in the symbolic order, an intervention that cannot be made sense of with the preexisting symbolic codes. “The Real,” he explains, “can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse in formalization” (Lacan, 1998, 93). Todd McGowan understands this Radical Real to involve terror and ecstasy, fundamental challenges to the subject in ideology. Ultimately, he posits, confronting this “ecstatic, often horrific Real” may supply “new coordinates for the subject” that challenge current ideological subjectivities in the symbolic order (McGowan, 2004, xxvii–xxviii). The Real, a gap in the symbolic order, is thus a void that is paradoxically rich with constitutive power, having the ability to reform and disrupt existing ideology. Thus, confronting and acknowledging the Real has the potential to form new subjects, which McGowan argues is a truly radical move. Locating the Real, and thus the ability to utilize it constitutively, involves, for new Lacanian film theorists, identifying it as a gap within the ideological subject. The Real is, then, the void or lack within the subject that ideology cannot fill, the space that ideology cannot touch. This is the space that must be accessed. Slavoj Žižek explains that the “subject is the void, the hole in

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the Other” (Žižek, 1989, 196). Subjects emerge, then, because the symbolic order is not seamlessly unified; there are points within it that cannot be neatly reconciled. Imaginary constructs manifest to suture the gaps in the symbolic order, in an attempt to make it complete and integrated. However, these gaps keep emerging, and the process repeats ad infinitum. The notion of the gaze as a process of egotistic mastery over objects in the visual field, moreover, supplies a central point of contention in revisions of Lacanian film theory. Joan Copjec, for example, contends that an initial, fundamental misreading of Lacan led to the conclusion that the gaze, theorized as rooted in the imaginary, involved spectators’ identification with the look, and subsequent attempts to master the images; to claim them as objects of possession. This notion of the screen as a “mirror” stipulates that the process of spectatorship involves the spectator “accept[ing] [them] as its own” as “belonging to the subject” (Copjec, 1994, 21). However, Lacan’s Seminar XI, Copjec argues, presents an entirely different understanding of the gaze. Rather than attempting to identify with the gaze and master objects, Lacan understood the gaze to be the object petit a itself, the hidden Thing lurking behind the veil of representation that is rich with profound meaning. What constitutes subjects, then, is the desire to make meaning out of images by grasping the Thing behind them. However, Copjec argues, Lacan understood this beyond to consist of a fundamental absence or nothingness, a realization that occurs when the gaze is actually apprehended. “At the moment the gaze is discerned, the image, the entire visual field, takes on a terrifying alterity. It loses its “belonging to me aspect” and suddenly assumes the function of a screen” (35). This moment, rather than providing mastery, reveals to the subject its nature as constituted by a lack or negativity. “Lacan argues, rather, that beyond the signifying network, beyond the visual field, there is, in fact, nothing at all” (35). An excess of representation, this beyond that the image cannot fully capture, is in turn what constitutes the subject. “[L]anguage’s opacity is taken as the very cause of the subject’s being, that is, its desire or want to be” (35). The extent to which film can serve as a tool to structure this moment of the Real involves reaching an understanding of its function as a language and structuring system. Gilles Deleuze (1990) writes in The Logic of Sense that “we have seen that although sense does not exist outside of the proposition that expresses it, it is nevertheless the attribute of states of affairs and not the attribute of the proposition” (24). In this respect, can Deleuze’s notion of sense as quasi-caused, as occasioned by language, be reasonably understood as analogous to film’s ability, as a signifying system, to occasion an excess of meaning that can be construed as the Real gaze? Deleuze’s concept of sense, like Lacan’s formulation of the Real Gaze, indicates a realm of connotation and interpretation. Both are rooted in what

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lies outside of denotation and the represented. “To pass to the other side of the mirror,” Deleuze explains, is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression . . . it is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it expresses, that is, to sense. (25)

Further, Deleuze understands this excess to be related to an outside. For Lacan, apprehending the gaze involves grasping an excess of representation, something beyond that which is captured by the image, which in fact indicates a nothingness or lack. Deleuze also maps this similarity, contending that an excess of the signifier also entails an outside to the order of the signified, or meaning. “Its excess always refers to its own lack and conversely, its lack always refers to its excess” (41). In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze (1990) begins to map the process by which representational structures, or language, can carry sense. He states that “representation must encompass an expression which it does not represent” (145), which he likens to the moment of death, an event that could also be compared to the moment of terror and ecstasy realized when experiencing Lacan’s Real gaze. Although Deleuze does not discuss here the specific processes by which a visual representational system can quasi-cause sense, he gestures to its ability, even necessity, to do so. “Representation envelops the event in another nature, envelops it at its borders . . . This is the operation which defines living usage” (146). When representation fails to transfer or bring forth the excess, it ceases to live, remaining “only a dead letter confronting that which it represents, and stupid in its representiveness” (ibid.). In The Time Image (1989), Deleuze begins to formulate some of the ways in which cinema acts as a structuring system that carries an important, constitutive excess. Movement or motion is, for Deleuze, a form of sense which comes forth through structuration of the objects represented. “[T]he movement image,” he explains, “has become a reality which ‘speaks’ through its objects” (28). However, there is another order occasioned by the ordering and construction of a semiotic system of images, that of narration. [U]tterances and narrations are not a given of visible images, but a consequence which flows from this reaction. Narration is grounded in the image itself, but it is not a given. (29)

The flow of narration, distinct from an utterance or enunciation, belongs to the order of sense, or interpretation, in that it constitutes an effect

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produced and occasioned by the structuring system. Cinematic sense, or eligibility, also develops within and flows through represented bodies, and resonates in spectator bodies through viewing experiences. “It is through the body,” Deleuze contends, “that cinema forms its alliance with spirit, with thought” (189). Moreover, Deleuze deals with the issue of concealment, a matter of high importance to Lacan and neo-Lacanian film theorists. “The body,” he explains, “forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from life, thought” (189). Classic apparatus theory as well as Christian Metz’s (1974) understanding of film language offer models for conceptualizing the cinematic structure. Although both were initially informed by ideological critique, they can be revised and revisited in order to become conducive to a Lacanian and Deleuzian understanding of the gaze as sense. Thus, a neo-Lacanian/ Deleuzian revision of gaze theory can be used to recover and revisit a useful language to discuss film’s structural aspects, while infusing the model with more resistant potential. Conventional apparatus theory relies on the now strongly refuted understanding of the gaze as located in the register of the imaginary, thereby constructing its function as a spectatorial attempt to gain mastery over the images, or objects, on the screen. Early apparatus theorists such as Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean-Louis Baudry argue that the cinematic structure establishes a centered subject and privileges the eye and sight as modes of understanding. Baudry understands the spectator position inscribed by the text to constitute a permutation of linear, singular perspective, which creates a centered viewing subject who constructs unified meaning. The cinematic apparatus is patently ideological, he argues, in the sense that it forms a hegemonic viewing subject. This mode of viewing allegedly strongly privileges the eye, understood by Baudry as interchangeable with a certain omniscient, omnipresent, and disembodied gaze. As a “support and instrument for ideology,” the cinematic apparatus creates an ideological spectator through its positioning of the illusory delimitation of a central location-whether this be that of a god or any other substitute. It is an apparatus destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology creating a phantasmatization of the subject, it collaborates with marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism. (Baudry, 1986, 295)

The primary ideological work of cinema, for Baudry, lies in its ability to structure the look, understood as an extension of the eye, in a way that produces a centered subject capable of gaining mastery over the world through this look. Thus, by creating a world that can supposedly be “known through the senses,” the cinematic apparatus constructs a

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stable, transparent reality conveyable through representations, as well as a stable, rational subject capable of transparently, unambiguously understanding it (305). The camera, moreover, perpetuates “the dominant ideology” by equating “the real with the visible,” thus establishing hegemony of sight and transparent meaning of images. Further, this structured way of looking allegedly produces “a blind confidence in the visible, the hegemony, gradually acquired, of the eye over the other senses, the taste and need society has to put itself in spectacle” (Comolli, 1980, 126). What Comolli’s analysis makes apparent is that his conception of the cinematic apparatus’ ability to structure a spectatorial experience is limited to the realm of the imaginary or the function of images in and of themselves. No space is left for theorizing an excess of the image, an affect or experience of viewing-as-event that escapes representation. The move to locating breaks in the ideological narrative of filmic structure can be more cogently made by returning to apparatus theory through Lacan’s notion of the Real and Deleuze’s concept of sense. This formulation, rather than ignoring the ideological implications of the structuring apparatus and attempting to locate breaks in the ideological narrative via images, focuses on the excess of the represented that is carried or transmitted by a symbolic, structuring system. Thus, rather than operating on the level of the imaginary, this engagement with apparatus theory functions on the level of the Real, as read through Deleuze’s notion of sense, in order to analyze what is carried by the cinematic language. Hence, this theoretical supposition also entails a return to conceiving of the cinematic structure as something akin to a language system. Christian Metz’s analysis of cinematic language fundamentally understood the signifying semiotic system, which he conceived of as a unique sort of language, as patently ideological. Represented images in film, he explains, do not transparently reflect a stable reality. Rather, they construct a new state of affairs infused with an ideological dimension, as a result of being filtered through the structural apparatus. Even the most “realistic” cinema, he argues, does not show spectators real events, but rather those “refracted through an ideological point of view, entirely thought out, signifying from beginning to end. Meaning is not sufficient; there must also be signification” (Metz, 1974, 37). Metz’s analysis raises two important issues. First, he implies that meaning is not transferable on its own. It must attach itself to an inherently ideological, signifying system. Second, although the vehicle is necessary, the meaning nonetheless remains a separate entity. This mode of conceptualizing film as a language system is conducive to both Lacan’s notion of the (failure of the) signifier in the Real, as well as Deleuze’s formulation of sense. In an early formulation of the notion of

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the Real, which he names “the peace of the evening,” Lacan forwards the idea that this moment of “the limit of the phenomenon’s grip on us” can be construed as an instant where a radical break in discourse, an unsignifiable moment, is occasioned by language itself. We have come to the limit at which discourse, if it opens to anything beyond meaning, opens to the signifier in the real. We shall never know, in the perfect ambiguity in which it dwells, what it owes to this marriage with discourse. (Lacan, 1993, 139)

In this passage, Lacan appears puzzled and unsure as to why these gaps and breaks in discourse must be necessarily occasioned by a discursive system. Metz seems to grapple with a similar predicament when trying to locate the exact relationship between meaning and signification vis-àvis film. “A sequence of film,” he explains, “like a spectacle from life, carries meaning within itself. The signifier is not easily distinguished from the significate” (Metz, 1974, 43). Most of Metz’s project on cinema as a language system struggles to pinpoint understanding of how exactly to conceive of cinematic meaning as something separate from the signification system. Especially considering what he understands to be a relatively short distance, to the point of being nearly (but, importantly, not entirely) collapsed, between signifier and signified. The unique aspects of this particular semiotic language system, which Metz calls “image discourse,” create a “specific vehicle” in which “it is impossible to break up the signifier without getting isomorphic elements of the signified” (58, 63). However, even within this nearly collapsed representational system, Metz grants much importance to an excess of signification, an element that escapes the image, and is in turn highly constitutive of the entire order. The language is enriched by whatever is lost to system. The two phenomena are one. It is as if the code’s signifying abundance were linked to that of the message in the cinema—or rather separated from it—by an obscurely rigorous relationship of inverse proportions . . . the message, as it becomes refined, circumvents the code. At any given moment, the code could change or disappear entirely, whereas the message will simply find the means to express itself differently. (49)

Thus, for Metz, the most important aspect of the signification system is the message or meaning, which parasitically depends upon the structure, yet, at the same time, exists independently of it, and possesses a certain freedom to seek out another host, if need be. Thus, although the peculiarities of an image-based, cinematic language system present unique challenges in separating the meaning from the structure, this process is nonetheless

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possible. Ergo, in Deleuzian terms, we have entered the realm of sense, moving past denotation, signification, and the image. Understanding cinema as a language system, through Metz, facilitates this connection with Deleuze’s sense, who conceptualizes this excess as occasioned by the structural system it travels with. The next step, then, is to link up this notion of cinematic sense with Lacan’s understanding of the Real gaze, in order to begin to understand how film, as a structural and signifying apparatus, can be understood as quasi-causing the Real gaze. The Eye, the Look, and the Gaze In Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Žižek argues that the kernel of meaning that supposedly lies beyond representation is, paradoxically, always occasioned by the symbolic structure; it cannot exist without it. Moments of the Real occur in the context of ideological structures; they never exist independently of them. “This is what Lacan means,” Žižek explains, “when he says that the traumatic Real is encountered in dreams, this is the way ideology structures our experience of reality” (Žižek, 1993, 63). This notion of the Real manifesting in a dream-text is akin to Lacan’s notion of the signifier in the Real. Advancing this theory, moreover, entails reconfiguring the relationship between the eye and the gaze. The original Lacanian film theorists and proponents of apparatus theory understood the gaze as an extension of the eye, with the camera serving as a cyborg-type prosthetic extending its scope of power. However, aligning the gaze on the side of the Real involves separating it from the eye, thus creating a split subject, fracturing of the look, and removing the gaze from the domain of the sight organ. This figuration is, according to Lacan (1988), constitutive of subjectivity. “The split that occurs in relation to an encounter with the Real,” he explains, “enables us to understand the real, in its dialectical effects, as originally unwelcome” (69). The gaze, Lacan explains, constitutes the subject around a lack. “The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency . . . as the thrust of our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety” (73). The gaze, which Lacan understands as a form of the object a, comes to “symbolize this central lack” (77). Thus, according to Lacan, the gaze is best located on the register of the Real, and an encounter with it involves not a moment of mastery, but a profoundly traumatic, self-abnegating encounter with the Other. Further, Lacan explains, an encounter with the gaze cannot simultaneously involve a sense of oneself as a subject; the gaze is ego-negating, and thus the two experiences are mutually exclusive. The gaze, as initially conceived of by Jean-Paul Sartre, is

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the gaze by which I am surprised-surprised insofar as it changes all the perspectives, the lines of my world, orders it, from the point of nothingness where I am . . . insofar as I am under the gaze . . . I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears. (84)

In Deleuzian terms, this gaze more closely resembles the ‘body without organs’ (1990), or ‘full speech,’1 than the phallic, castrated organ without a body implied by the ideological eye-gaze attempting visual apprehension and mastery over the visual field. This process of removal involves a sense of separation, the feeling that “we are not immediately identified with our look, but stand somewhere ‘behind’ it” (Žižek, 1993, 64). Through this splitting event, the spectators’ illusions of mastery are disavowed, and we become aware that there is actually somebody hidden behind the eye and observing what is going on. The paradox here is that the gaze is concealed by an eye, i.e. by its very organ. (64, emphasis in original)

Thus, the eye structures the gaze, but in a manner that immobilizes and paralyzes the subject, denies her mastery, and renders him powerless and helpless. The experience is fundamentally masochistic, involving an abnegation of subjectivity and ego, and surrender to the gaze-as-other. Further, Lacan (1988) explains, images are vessels for the Real gaze, although deliberate attempts to seek, apprehend, and master such an experience will inevitably lead to a missed encounter. “The picture is simply what any picture is,” he explains, “a trap for the gaze. In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear” (89). Revisiting the gaze through the lens of Deleuze’s sense allows for it to be situated as an excess of cinema’s linguistic, structural semiotic system. The significance of refiguring the gaze, and rearticulating it to cinema, lies in the importance of ascribing political valence and progressive potential to the act of spectatorship, a move that continues to disarticulate Lacanian film theory from its original, mistaken ideological applications, and reclaim it a more productive and constitutive manner. Far from being merely an ego-driven process allowing preconstituted subjects to gain mastery over the visual field, the gaze is, conversely, a traumatic and constitutive process that allows for, when fully experienced, the recognition of the virtual at the heart of symbolic identity, and the reconfiguration of identities and subjectivities around it. In other words, moments of the Real—of the gaze— change the world, and shifts in the gaze—moments of radical realization— prompt spectators to fundamentally alter their modes of being.

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Contemporary Application of Gaze Theory and Lacan: An Intervention Contemporary film theorists revisiting Lacan through film are beginning to explore possibilities of retheorizing the gaze. However, although these critics are revising their understanding of gaze theory, they nonetheless still operate at the level of the filmic text, and stop short of advancing an intervention in spectatorship theory vis-à-vis the Real gaze. Their analyses thus remain limited to the ways in which film characters experience the Real gaze, as opposed to how the cinematic apparatus can structure this experience for spectators. Thus, this project will build off of those contributions by situating an intervention into spectatorship theory. The final piece of this analysis will consist of an examination of how the film Dogville structures spectatorship to occasion the Real gaze. The following scholars discuss numerous instances of how subjects can emerge in film narratives. The symbolic order is not seamlessly unified in the texts they discuss; there are points within it that cannot be made sense of. Mark Pizzato (2004), for example, argues that Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut exemplifies the emergence of the Real by attempting to locate gaps and lacks in the gaze’s attempt to master its objects. This film, he argues, challenges the totalizing power of Mulvey’s gaze by presenting a focus on directing the erotic eye of masculine desire towards the feminine drive of an Other jouissance: From Imaginary visions and Symbolic rites towards Real mortalities. (88)

This is accomplished in Eyes, he argues, by the fact that the protagonist’s gaze is never allowed to assert total mastery and control; it is variously challenged by humiliation, danger, and the threat of destruction. Although the women in the film seem to fill the hollow gap in the gazing male’s ego, challenges to said ego reveal that very gap, a gap indicating incompletion, vulnerability, and lack of mastery. The gaze, as instantiated in Eyes, exemplifies a lack that desires the Other-as-woman for its fulfillment. However, rather than demonstrating mastery and control, Pizzato posits that this process exemplifies the gap itself, and its potential for ideological disruption. [T]he film presents the arousal, yet insecurity, of the male gaze-in its dependence on the erotic beauty and symbolic knowledge of the woman to bolster the hollow ego and repair its loss of identity. (89)

This hollowness or lack is exactly what, according to Žižek, constitutes the subject itself. What the Real reveals in this particular case is the death

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drive and masochistic fear and desire of feminine jouissance. Through his commingled fear, titillation, and curiosity when faced with the rituals of the sexualized death cult, Eyes’ male protagonist reveals this hollow kernel in his subject. The spectator of Eyes, according to Pizzato, can choose “looking beyond the beautiful illusions of the screen Sacrifice towards the Real-the gaze of mortality and lack of being in the apparatus and its audience” (108). Locating the radical potential of neo-Lacanian film theory involves reading and dealing with more than the images themselves. Although the above-discussed example breaks ground in its reformulation of gaze theory, it nonetheless remains on the level of the filmic narrative, and does not investigate the ways in which the apparatus itself can structure a moment of the Real-qua spectatorship. Thus, ironically, this study and others like it ultimately limit themselves to the register of the imaginary, analyzing the ways in which the films’ storylines contain moments of Real eruptions for their various characters. The next step of neo-Lacanian film theory involves investigating how the cinematic apparatus, when conceived of as a language system in the Deleuzian sense, can carry or structure a moment of the Real. The following discussion of Lars van Trier’s film Dogville will posit a theory of Real spectatorship through apparatus theory and the understanding of film as a language. Dogville’s Virtu(Re)al Moments: A Case Study Dogville tells the story of Grace, a trusting and naive young woman fleeing her mob-affiliated family. While on the run, she discovers the small mountain town of Dogville. The residents agree to hide her in exchange for manual labor and other miscellaneous services. The situation seems tolerable at first, although the longer Grace stays and the better she

Figure 6.1

Arial View, Dogville.

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treats the residents, the crueler, more abusive, and more exploitive they become. The film utilizes a minimalist set, relying only on a few props and chalk etchings on the ground. This particular aesthetic choice allows for more focus on dialogue, shot composition, and camera work to build the story. From the opening shots of the film, the spectator is positioned as omniscient, able to see the entire town from above. A deductive shot sequence, moving from wide angle to close-up, carries the spectator into various homes. Further, a narrator walks spectators through the story and explains characters as camera follows them, ostensibly supplying absolute knowledge of their inner states. Early moments of contrast between shots and narration structure sense, allowing spectators to make meaning from the film through extrasemiotic events. For example, Tom—a “young philosopher” and important figure in the town—visits a young woman, Liz, with whom he is obsessed. Liz is described by the narrator as a “horizon, bound by luscious curls,” and a “seductive; a sweet, painful abyss.” The role of the narrator, revealing Tom’s perception of Liz, structures an ideological read of her, framing her image as the sort of construct described by Mulvey and Rose: woman as the limit, the erotic break in the narrative. However, the introductory shot of Liz belies this construction. She is performing manual labor, and behaves in an irreverent and familiar manner, greeting Tom with a sarcastic, not remotely flirtatious tone, and mockingly cocking her head to one side. She notices his infatuation and dryly comments that she’s moving away, and thus he will have to find “some other girl’s skirt to peek up.” This incongruity between the narration and the shot composition is an element that will constitute the sense as structured by the film. Gaps appear in Dogville’s narrative throughout: the spectator is invited to realize this obvious incongruity and question the narrator’s reliability. This moment establishes an instance of sensemaking: the language of the text has framed a meaning beyond the image, has occasioned a moment of sense in the spectatorial perception. As the film progresses, and the insidious characters of the townsfolk are revealed, these gaps become larger, more pronounced, and more shocking. Immediately before Grace is introduced, the narrator remarks that “it hasn’t exactly rained gifts on this particular township,” gesturing to the disadvantaged status of Dogville, a moment that ultimately foreshadows the ethical issues important to Dogville’s story. Upon hearing the gunshots of the mobsters pursuing Grace, the narrator walks spectators through Tom’s thought process and reactions, informing that he wanted to “hang onto the feeling of danger.” Tom then begins to contemplate his self-appointed depth and acumen as a writer, as close-ups capture his wistful and smug expression, while long shots frame him lounging pensively on the bench. Again, like the scene with Liz, the meaning of this sequence lies not in

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the conveyed or represented, but the unsaid. This time, by pairing Tom’s reaction to the gunshots with the narrator’s description of his inner states, spectators are invited to experience an affect of shock, outrage, and disgust at the level of egotism and self-absorption manifested by this particular character. Unconcerned with the safety of others or the source of the shots, Tom loses himself in moments of selfish contemplation, instances that are left to the realm of sense and excess, carried by the film’s inner structure but not registering at the level of the signifier. It is on the level of the Real, the connoted, and expressed that spectators are invited to feel disdain for Tom. The unstated, the obvious but absent excess that emerges from the juxtaposition of shot composition and narrative, constitutes the Real gaze that will ultimately come to characterize the power of this film. Grace’s introduction on the set is accompanied by descriptions of her character. She “could have kept her vulnerability to herself,” informs the narrator. “But she chose to give herself up to [Tom], at random, a generous gift.” Following this narration, the camera pans from Grace to Tom who, the narrator informs, is thinking of her as “generous, very generous.” The tone is somewhat sly, and Tom’s face bears a slight smirk as he nods. Again, this moment of contrast structures an excess, a moment of the Real gaze as spectators are invited to the sinking realization that Tom’s motives are far from pure, especially compared to Grace’s innocence. Tom convinces the townspeople to accept Grace for two weeks, “because we care about human beings,” although the sequence after he heard the gunshots structured the sense that he lacks this benevolent side. Thus, the town meeting scene, contrasted against the previous sequence, carries the sense that Tom and the citizens of Dogville, who wish to, the narrator informs, “look in the mirror” and see good people, ought to be read with cynicism and suspicion, that they lack a thorough understanding of the “morality” and ethics they profess.

Figure 6.2

Grace and Tom.

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Thus, the cinematic structure, through occasioning an excess of imagery, also establishes the dialogue of both the narrator and film characters as incomplete and lacking full meaning. Through this excess, the reliability of discourse as able to supply complete access to meaning is questioned. Dogville then revolves around the incompleteness and unreliability of the signifier; the majority of the film’s meaning occurs not on the level of the image/imaginary, but the moments of the Real gaze, manifesting within the spectator’s perception and body. Grace is allowed to stay, and increasingly more taxing amounts of unpaid physical labor are demanded from her in exchange for boarding. Shots of Grace offering her help as repayment are followed by close-ups of the faces of Dogville residents; unexpressive, blank, ranging on suspicious and hostile. These montage sequences further establish the radical disconnect between Grace’s worldview and her hosts’. By the third chapter of the film, the involvement of the narrator has tapered off, supplying an initial set up, but leaving spectators to their own devices after informing them that “[Grace] had shown the town of Dogville her true face.” At this point in the film, the structural work focuses primarily on character dialogue and shot composition. At the next town meeting, Tom frames Grace’s openness as “weakness.” “Grace had borne her throat to the town and it had responded with great gifts, with friends,” the narrator offers, framing Grace’s reaction to the discovery of small gifts in her clothing hamper as her face beams in a warm smile. Over the course of her labor tenure, the narrator informs, she serves as “brains for Ben, hands for Martha, and eyes for McKay.” Grace’s labor power is fragmented and objectified, construed as discrete parts serving a specific and disjointed role. Although relatively innocuous at this point, the sense is that, given the layout of the previous chapters, the situation will become more exploitive and unethical. The camera oscillates between a more natural, organic mode of looking that evokes a spectator present in the narrative, and an omniscient, bird’s eye gaze capable of viewing the entire town from above. The look afforded to the eye, when combined with narration informing of character’s inner states, ostensibly constructs a spectator that is all knowing, fully informed, and privy to every detail of outward and inner occurrences. However, the excess emerges through the unreliability and lack of transparency provided by this very illusion of full access. Although, on the one hand, spectators have access to every detail of the characters’ inner states, incongruities establish the insincerities and limits of this very information. Discourse is unreliable and lacking, and the fullness is punctured by moments of the Real, occasioned by the revelation of something existing beyond the level of speech. Full access to information within the text, then, indicates the very lack at the level of the signifier, the inability of signification to convey full meaning. The meaning comes from

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the unsaid, the moments of the Real. “What are you trying to say,” Grace asks Tom at one point, “are you trying to say that you are in love with me?” Stumbling over his words and pondering the meaning of the concept aloud, Tom eventually replies “yeah.” Grace replies, warmly, “that’s good, because I think I’m in love with you too.” The camera, in a close-up shotreverse-shot sequence, pans between the two characters at moments of speech and reaction. Grace appears engaged and sincere, her body turned toward Tom, smiling and making eye contact, focusing on him. Shots of Tom, conversely, capture him looking up, his body pointed straight ahead, as he ponders the concept aloud and characterizes Grace’s admission as “interesting, psychologically.” Again, although Grace construes a moment of communion and understanding between the two, the spectator is moved to a realization achieved through the shot sequence and dialogue—that the conversation between them has failed to generate a shared sense of meaning. Discourse has failed, and the cinematic language, by pointing this out, has structured the realization not on the level of the images, but in the connotation that escapes it, the moment of Real gaze achieved through voyeurism of this encounter, which reconstitutes Dogville’s spectator as one suspicious of the ability of codes and surface communication to instantiate understanding. Dogville’s spectator, then, is one characterized by doubt, dread, one who knows too much, one who is privy to the natures of Dogville’s residents in a way that Grace is not. Grace’s fatal flaw is her faith in discourse and surface meaning, whereas, conversely, the spectator is made to question and doubt that level of meaning. Eventually, Grace tries to escape, and overhead shot of her riding in the truck bed as she sneaks out provides full visual access. Even the tarp covering the truck bed is rendered quasi-transparent; no image escapes the spectator’s visual field. However, despite the seeming omnipotence of the gaze supplied by the text, the classical, eye-centered look always fails to convey full meaning. Conversely, it is the Real gaze, the gap emerging between the representations, that constitutes the node of constitutive meaning and realization. Although the classical gaze appears powerful, its attempts at mastery always fail, and such shortcomings indicate the lack of plentitude offered by the representative field. After Grace is returned, she is punished by Dogville’s makeshift court, run by Tom. “Moral issues” are Tom’s obsession: rules, regulations, and codes of conduct are, he believes, the tools necessary for structuring life in a good society. This is a key point of the film: demonstrating the ultimate failure of code systems to capture the kernel of meaning that they profess to constitute themselves around. Tom’s project of implementing a moral structure onto Dogville fails to cultivate ethical understanding in the residents. In fact, it has the reverse effect, privileging

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abstract, universal principles such as “education” and “justice,” without any clue of how to ethically implement these principles in complex, contingent situations. Similarly, the film text, through various framings of spectator positions, establishes the fragility and inability of code-structures to fully convey “true” meaning. Discourse is always unreliable in the same way that Tom’s moral mandates are. Moments of understanding are not conveyed by the eye, regardless of how much power it claims, but by the revelations of the Real gaze. Grace finally experiences a wake up call, a moment of the Real that radically alters her worldview and understanding of Dogville’s residents. While changing a resident’s sheets one day, she mutters that “nobody is gonna sleep here,” a revelation that initially shocks and disorients her, and is perceived as, the narrator informs, a “startling utterance” from “outside.” Grace’s first moment of understanding that she is being abused and exploited is experienced as a powerful, shifting event. In a conversation with her mobster father, who has tracked her down, Grace acknowledges that justification of one’s actions in Dogville is interpreted as weakness. When read against her prior realization, spectators are moved to the understanding that a moment of the Real has dramatically reconstituted Grace’s outlook. In Deleuzian terms, a potential affect—an instance of the virtual—has become real, has actualized. Regardless of its point of origin outside, inside, from deep in the unconscious or upon a smooth plane, the material effects of the eruption are palpable. Although she is beginning to accept what has happened, Grace still defends the residents of the town. “I call them dogs,” her father responds, unsympathetic. “Dogs only obey their nature, why shouldn’t we forgive them?” Grace implores. Grace’s father accuses her of condoning unredeemable subjects by overdetermining the role of circumstance. Dogs, according to the father, obey only the lash. He then discusses penalties, accountabilities, and accuses Grace of being “arrogant” for having excessively “high ethical standards” that prompt her to exonerate those who are allegedly beneath her cultivated sensibilities. As with Tom, Grace’s father represents the Law, the symbolic order, a manifestation of faith in abstracted code-structures and rules. Shot-reverseshot sequence features her confusion and frustration, and her father’s smug self-assuredness in his own position; another impasse. “The people who live here are doing their best under very hard circumstances,” Grace explains, arguing that material circumstances such as abject poverty may not be the best ground for cultivating a sense of other-centered ethics. Grace initially empathized with the townspeople, assuming that, given the circumstances, she could have easily engaged in similar behavior. However, suddenly, Grace sees all of their flaws and experiences another moment of the Real. She finally understands their worldview, accepts it,

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and realizes that she has failed to change the world through her benevolence and kindness. Deciding that the world would be better off without the town, Grace succumbs to the symbolic order and aligns herself with it, ordering her father to shoot all of the residents, starting with the children, to teach the mother a lesson about stoicism. “I owe her that,” she muses, now completely assimilated into the interpretive framework of Dogville. Grace’s worldview has shifted; she has been changed and reconstituted by her Real experiences, or, for Deleuze, her Events, in Dogville. Similarly, based on the constructions within the film’s signifying system, the spectator is also reconfigured by being moved to an understanding of the flaws of Dogville, its obsession with unreliable code structures and universal standards of judgment, fidelities that led to a fundamental inability to understand ethical conduct. The film concludes by denying an answer, as the narrator hails the spectator with the call “some things you have to do yourself.” Conclusions Given the ideological nature of the imaginary, politicized Lacanian film theory must move beyond analysis of the images themselves, especially the notion that they possess a plentitude of meaning, and read the gaps, The Real, the sites where excess meaning beyond the images emerges. Cinema, as a language and semiotic system, occasions these moments in a manner analogous to the way in which language, for Deleuze, brings forth sense. Dogville, by repeatedly moving spectators toward moments of realization through gaps between visual images and dialogue, structures this mode of understanding. Indirect discourse is a predominant mode of storytelling. This process can allow for the introduction of new subjectivities outside of and not determined by ideology. Hence, the politics of NeoLacanian film theory is one of individual resistance through moments of awareness, one that empowers the viewing subject to break ideology’s hold on him/her. The fundamental site allowing for this process of resubjectification to occur is the Gaze. Specifically, a political Lacanian film theory rooted in The Real involves removing the Gaze from its privileged seat as an ideological handmaiden producing mastery and control, and refiguring it as an object revealing the very lack in ideological subjectivity that new subjects can embrace. The stakes of film and spectatorship involve dramatically reversing and reformulating the nature of the gaze. Far from constituting a tool achieving hegemonic mastery, the gaze is quite the opposite: the object petit a itself, a fetish pursued to complete the gap in one’s ego. Gazing indicates a necessity, the need for the subject to include the other, and unite with the other,

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in order to achieve completion. Approaching film from the perspective of the Real, then, drastically changes the process of spectatorship. As McGowan (2007) explains, “[t]he gaze is a blank point-a point that disrupts the flow and sense of the experience . . . As the indication of the spectator’s dissolution, the gaze cannot offer anything resembling mastery” (8). Radical subjectivity, thus, requires a return to The Real and facing the lack present in the self, as opposed to internalizing the ideological promise that this lack can be completely filled by promises of commodified, egocentric total enjoyment. Real enjoyment is, like masochism, the giving of oneself to the event, letting go of the ego, not attempting to control, possess, and master enjoyment-in-objects. The first step toward breaking the ideological stranglehold is noticing its grip on oneself, a process that can be occasioned through cinematic spectatorship. The politics of the masochistic gaze, thus, involves its ability to empower individual spectators to “wake up” and realize their subjective presence in symbolic authority and discursive code structures. As the film Dogville demonstrates, another important aspect of realizing and eschewing subjectivity in ideology involves a subject’s recognition of the inherent limitations of semiotic and linguistic structures to convey full meaning. A thorough understanding of how cinematic spectatorship can function in this process of Real resubjectification is crucial for developing and advancing a theory of the subject around Lacan’s notion of the Real gaze. In a sense, this intervention reverses the conclusions reached by early Lacanian theorists of film and ideology. Whereas in these phases of the theory, film was situated as an ideological apparatus hailing subjects on the level of the imaginary, this reformulation situates it as a mechanism with potential to construct and bring about those definitive Real moments able to radically change selves and worlds. By moving the gaze to the register of the Real and examining how the cinema can, in a Deleuzian sense, carry the Real gaze in the manner of a language, I hope to have shown how film, through a revised understanding of apparatus theory and spectatorship, contains potential to serve as a reconstitutive, even revolutionary, device. Note 1. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘Body without Organs’ is a virtual dimension of the body that is defined by a collection of potentials and not yet actualized affects. The BwO is permeated by unformed matters, “flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 40). Lacan (1987) understands “full speech” as speech that emanates from the big Other itself, not a subject, and thus is able to supply a plentitude or fullness of meaning. Without

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the empty spaces that allow for interpretation or ambiguity, the speech is “full” with meaning. Full Speech is found in the unconscious, in symptoms and repressed signifieds. The Gaze, in its ability to instill in the subject an awareness of the absolute void from the Big Other, gives an indication of the meaningless nature of full speech. What characterizes both of these concepts is profound, yet nascent, and amorphous affects and potential energies, not annexed by the partial, incomplete signifying and meaning-making capacity of language vis-à-vis its presence in subjects. Both potentials are present in “actual” bodies.

References Althusser, Louis (1971). “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (127–186). Trans. B. Brewster. New York: Monthly Review. Baudry, Jean-Louis (1986). “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Ed. Phillip Rosen (286–299). New York: Columbia University Press. Comolli, Jean-Louis (1980). “Machines of the Visible.” In The Cinematic Apparatus. Ed. Theresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (121–142). New York: St. Martin’s. Copjec, Joan (1994). Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1989). Cinema 2: The Movement Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1990). The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum. Lacan, Jacques (1987). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–4. Trans John Forrester, with notes by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X1: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton. ——— (1993). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses 1955–1956. Trans. Russell Gregg. New York: W. W. Norton. ——— (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore 1972–1973. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton. McGowan, Todd (2004). “Introduction.” In Lacan and Contemporary Film. Ed. Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle. New York: Other Press. ——— (2007). The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. Albany: SUNY Press. Metz, Christian (1974). Film Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mulvey, Laura (1998). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 5th Ed. Ed. Leo Braudy and Michael Cohen (833–845). New York: Oxford University Press.

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Pizzato, Mark (2004). “Beauty’s Eye: Erotic Masques of the Death Drive in Eyes Wide Shut.” In Lacan and Contemporary Film. Ed. Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle (83–111). New York: Other Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso. ——— (1993). Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press. ——— (2004). “An Ethical Plea for Lies and Masochism.” In Lacan and Contemporary Film. Ed. Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle (173–187). New York: Other Press.

Filmography Kubrick, Stanley (1999). Eyes Wide Shut. USA. Von Trier, Lars (2003). Dogville. USA.

Part III

Encountering Žižek

7

The Universe as Metacinema Patricia Pisters

Ernie, do you realize what we are doing in this picture? The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment we play this note and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way. And someday we won’t even have to make a movie— there’ll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we’ll just press different buttons and they’ll go “oooh” and “aaah” and we’ll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful? (Alfred Hitchcock on the set of North by Northwest1)

H

itchcock’s fantasy about directly entering people’s brains seemed very futuristic and absurd in the fifties when he expressed these words to his scriptwriter Ernest Lehman. However, a few decades later, scientific and cinematographic technology has improved to such an extent that Hitchcock’s joke seems to be not so far-fetched anymore. In Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983) and Katherine Bigelow’s film Strange Days (1995) direct recording and playing of brainwaves is possible. Of course these films belong to the genre of science fiction, and the actual possibilities of such techniques are not as refined as they portray. But I am not interested in the exact state of affairs that might be represented in these films. Rather, I am challenged by the implications for the relationship between human beings (subjects), images and the world – and for the underlying image of thought that Hitchcock’s words express, both in respect of his own work, and in respect of developments in contemporary cinema and contemporary audiovisual culture. What if we do not consider Hitchcock’s words as merely a never-to-be-fulfilled fantasy of having effects on people without representations, bypassing the eyes of the spectators and reaching them directly via the brain, as the psychoanalytic model of thought

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does? What if we consider him to be a visionary, anticipating contemporary scientific and cinematographic preoccupations, as would a rhizomatic model of thinking, according to which the brain is literally the screen? Would Hitchcock’s fantasy then not be a very Bergsonian statement about the immanence of body, brain and images? For, as Deleuze argues in The Movement-Image, Bergson was ‘startlingly ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, a metacinema.’2 After all, Hitchcock’s wish seems to entail a revolutionary conception of images that are not representations of something else, but exist in themselves. In The Time-Image Deleuze attributes to Hitchcock explicitly anticipatory insights in respect of the nature of images in contemporary society. When he discusses the developments of the image (cinematographic or ‘real’) he argues: ‘Hitchock’s premonition will come true: a camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into.’3 However, if Hitchcock is not only a visionary and the first of the modern filmmakers, but is indeed also the ultimate classic director, who completes the classic action-images, his fantasy would after all be a symptomatic fantasy.4 In any case his work is a very rich source for tracking down some of the assumptions of the different images of thought that are presupposed by a classic psychoanalytic and a rhizomatic view of the subject, the world and cinema. In order to bring to the surface some of these presuppositions and implications, I will first give a comparative reading of Hitchcock’s universe, concentrating on the concept of the subject that is defined by desire. Then I will focus on the status of cinema and the cinematographic apparatus by looking at Rear Window and especially two other metafilms: Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Strange Days. Although Strange Days has a lot in common with Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), it has more often been compared to Peeping Tom. Both Peeping Tom and Strange Days deal with the (darker) implications of our cinematographic voyeurism. Nevertheless I will argue that in comparing Strange Days to Peeping Tom one misses some essential differences between the two films, especially the way in which a new kind of camera consciousness has entered our perception, our experience of the world and ourselves. I will therefore return to Hitchcock, especially to Vertigo, and look at the ambiguous status of this film: at once a classical picture of an obsessive love affair (a movement-image) and a very modern film about the confusing experience of time and virtuality (a timeimage) that anticipates Strange Days. Contemporary cinema, for which Strange Days is paradigmatic, demonstrates that both Bergson’s futuristic insights and Hitchcock’s premonition have indeed come true: we now live in a metacinematic universe that calls for an immanent conception of audiovisuality, and in which a new camera consciousness has entered our perception. In this chapter I will explore various implications and effects of

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the ‘universe as metacinema’ and the new camera consciousness by considering Peeping Tom, Strange Days and Hitchcock’s universe as philosophical pamphlets. Hitchcock’s Universe: Žižek and Deleuze Representations of Guilty Subjects or a Logic of Relations I will begin this exploration by looking again at Hitchcock’s work using both the Lacanian ideas of Slavoj Žižek and the Bergsonian film theory of Deleuze. In this comparative way I will try to relate Hitchcock’s films both to the psychoanalytic model of the eye and to the rhizomatic model of the brain. This will allow me to specify a few of the main differences and similarities between the two models of thought. My aim is not to judge one model over the other. Rather I will try to find out what the different models make possible or impossible to see, think and feel. I will concentrate in this section on the idea of the subject and its relation to images and to the world. A few remarks about Hitchcock made by Žižek and Deleuze make their respective (presup)positions very clear. First of all, both Žižek and Deleuze refer to Rohmer and Chabrol’s study on Hitchcock’s work.5 Both recognize the importance of that study and refer to the Catholic interpretation that Rohmer and Chabrol give of the Master’s films. But here is the first big difference: Žižek sees Hitchcock’s ‘Catholicism’ as an even more profoundly religious form of Jansenism. According to Žižek, both in Jansenism and in Hitchcock all human subjects are sinful, and for that reason their salvation cannot depend on themselves as persons; it can only come from an outside, from God, who has decided in advance who will be saved and who will be damned.6 Deleuze, on the other hand, precisely rejects the Catholic (and by implication Jansenist) dimension of Rohmer and Chabrol’s analysis: there is no need to make Hitchcock a Catholic metaphysician, argues Deleuze. On the contrary, Hitchcock has a very sound conception of theoretical and practical relations, which have nothing to do with a guilty subject or a terrible and impossible God.7 A second point raised by both Žižek and Deleuze is Hitchcock’s own metaphor of ‘tapestry’. Žižek sees this in connection with the impossible Gaze, again the God’s Eye view that has caught the subject on the screen in its web of predestination. This subject on-screen (the character) represents the subject off-screen (the spectator). The spectator can identify with the character’s eye/look and at the same time feel his guilt and fear of the Gaze of God or the Real, as Žižek calls this impossible entity; the spectator can never identify with the Gaze of God.8 So, according to Žižek, the cinema

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of Hitchcock gives an ultimate representation of how subjects outside cinema experience the world: the represented subjects are under the same constraints as the spectators in their own lives. Deleuze, however, sees the tapestry as a network of relations, carefully set up by Hitchcock to implicate the viewer in the (mental) actions. It is not a matter of the look and the eye. At the very most we can speak of a mind’s eye. The spectator is not looking for representations of his own life, but is participating in the game of relations set up by Hitchcock. A third and final difference in approach between Žižek and Deleuze concerns Hitchcock’s above-quoted remark about directly influencing the brain. In his expressed wish to reach spectators directly, without mediation, Žižek emphasizes the symptomatic aspect of Hitchcock’s fantasy: according to Žižek it is this urge to function without representation that constitutes the psychotic core in Hitchcock’s universe. In ‘reality’ there is always representation as a kind of ‘umbilical cord’ between Hitchcock and the public, between the subjects on-screen and the subjects off-screen.9 In representation, subjects off-screen constitute their identity by identifying with subjects on-screen, taking these subjects as models. Again it is obvious that Deleuze has a completely different philosophy. Going back to Spinoza and Bergson, Deleuze does not believe in the all-encompassing force of the concept of representation, and hence the concept of identification as a means of modeling subjectivity. According to Deleuze the brain, which is both an intellectual and an emotional entity and functions parallel (not hierarchically) to the body, can give more insights about how we perceive ourselves as subject. So for Deleuze, Hitchcock’s remark about the electrodes in the brain is not symptomatic in leaving out the most important thing, but is a philosophical reflection about how images work, about the direct effects of images in themselves. Therefore, even without taking the electrodes in the brain literally, it indicates that it might be useful to think about images in terms of effects and affects that are set in motion by a complex interplay between body and brain, perception and memory. Transcendental or Immanent Desire Having established these basic presuppositions of the psychoanalytic and rhizomatic models concerning the relationship between the (cinematographic) image, the subject and the world, it is now necessary to look more closely at the subject and one of the most important aspects that constitute the subject: desire. Therefore, before returning to Hitchcock, let me briefly recall the concept of the subject in relation to desire in both models. First the psychoanalytic subject: in early psychoanalysis, according to

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both Freud and Lacan, desire is based on lack, the absence of an original and Imaginary wholeness, which is lost as soon as the subject enters society, the Symbolic order. The subject, marked by this lack, desires an object to find original wholeness, which is always impossible. Needless to say, sexual difference is the crucial difference in this respect (lack is based on castration anxiety, feared by the male subject). Feminist film theory has demonstrated in great detail how the subject, mostly male, takes the woman as its object of desire, appropriating or fetishizing her, at the cost of women’s status as a subject. The gaze is often seen as an all-knowing entity, often assigned to the male patriarchal subject, comparable to the Cartesian Eye/I. Sometimes the gaze refers to a more abstract notion of the other as such. The look on the other hand is related to the embodied subject in the diegetic world. Slavoj Žižek, however, and with him some feminist psychoanalysts like Joan Copjec,10 puts the gaze not in the powerful position of the Symbolic order but in what Lacan calls the Real. The Imaginary and the longing for the lost object of desire no longer haunt the late-Lacanian subject, instead it is increasingly haunted by the Real. The Real is that which the subject cannot understand and cannot see, and which cannot be represented in the Symbolic, but nevertheless imposes its traces on the subject; it is a third term that goes beyond the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Žižek relates the Gaze to the Real. The Gaze, according to Žižek, is not an instrument of mastery and control, but on the contrary is that which the subject can never know. It can be defined in several ways: the amorph, the raw, skinless flesh, God, ultimately Death. Sexual difference is still crucial, woman being closer to the Real than Man (and therefore being an impossible subject: ‘woman is a symptom of man’). The Real is the ‘night of the world’, the absolute negativity, void and lack, which is at the basis of the subject. So desire is still based on lack and absence, but it has now become a transcendental notion. And because the subject cannot know the Real, it defines its desire as the desire of the other (the subject desires what it thinks the other desires, in the illusion of thinking that the other possesses the Real). According to Žižek, the Lacanian/Hitchcockian subject is a guilty subject, always already guilty of wanting enjoyment, jouissance, which has its impossible origin in the Real. Here we see what Žižek meant by Jansenism based on guilt and God.11 If we look at Hitchcock’s film in a Žižekian Lacanian inspired analysis, we could say that the hero of Rear Window represents an early Lacan, still tied to the Symbolic order that is sometimes ruptured by symptoms of the Imaginary order, but is mostly in control, having an overview. But increasingly the stain of the Real has entered the Hitchcockian image. The hand with a knife in Psycho, the birds in The Birds, the plane in North

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by Northwest is, according to Žižek, not perceived simply as part of diegetic reality; ‘it is, rather, experienced as a kind of stain which from outside, – more precisely: from an intermediate space between diegetic reality and our “true” reality – invades the diegetic reality.’12 It is precisely the Real that stains the Symbolic and therefore threatens not only the subjects on the screen, but also the spectator’s sense of security: his or her position of safe distance, bridged by the eye, is suddenly threatened by something out of control. In short, the Lacanian subject, which according to Žižek is a Hitchcockian subject, is philosophically subjected to an a-historical transcendental principle that is always mediated by representations (the umbilical cord). Its guilty (Jansenist) desire is based on a fundamental lack that is to be related not so much to the Imaginary, but to the impossible and horrible Real, which imposes its Gaze like a dangerous imprisoning web (the tapestry, according to Žižek). In a Deleuzian|Guattarian rhizomatic philosophy Hitchcock’s universe presents us with a completely different image of the subject. Desire, first of all, is an important notion but, according to Deleuze, it is not based on lack and the absence of an original perfect but impossible whole or dangerous void-like negativity. Moreover, desire is never related to an object (that obscure object of desire).13 Rather desire is a fundamental wish to live and to preserve life by connecting with and relating to those things/ persons that give us joy, i.e. that increase our power to act. This does not mean that there is no sadness or hatred or fear, but they are all reactions to this fundamental drive to preserve life: what is bad for us inspires sadness, and other sad passions. Joy should not be confused with jouissance, the Lacanian enjoyment, which, as we saw above, is a guilty pleasure related to fearful death and the negativity of the Real. As is well known, Deleuze is in this respect very much influenced by Spinoza. According to Spinoza, joy is related to the power to form adequate thoughts and to act.14 To be active is to enjoy life; to be joyful is to desire connections that are related to affirmative powers, not to the negative ones, as ‘prescribed’ by psychoanalysis. The subject is not by definition a guilty subject, controlled by a transcendental notion, although of course the subject can do bad things and become guilty. This also does not mean that the subject controls everything, because in Spinozian/Deleuzian terms the self is or can be confused by the immanent forces of time. The subject in this perspective is not so much challenged by the Real, or God as an external force, or Das-Ding-an-Sich, but rather by time and memory. Genevieve Lloyd explains in her work on Spinoza how this influences the idea of the subject, or the self: The Spinozistic self is both the idea of an actually existing body, moving into a future, and the idea of all that has been retained of that body’s past.

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The mind struggles to make itself a unity – a well-functioning temporal as well as spatial whole. In the context of this view of the self as a constant effort to articulate itself, and to maintain itself in being amidst the wider wholes on which it depends, borders become unstable.15

This description of the Spinozistic self demonstrates clearly how the subject changes in time, how it becomes in time and therefore cannot always be the same. Deleuze is very Spinozian and Bergsonian when he talks about concepts of becoming in time and duration, and unstable selfhood. In any case, according to Deleuze, the subject is not a fixed and transcendentally controlled entity, but an immanent singular body whose borders of selfhood (or subjectivity) are challenged in time and by time. The indetermination and insecurity that time brings to the subject is not the negative limit of desire and knowledge, but precisely that which brings about on-going movements of thought: the gaps in our knowledge are needed to continue living and thinking. Looking at Hitchcock, then, Deleuze sees the hero of Rear Window not as someone possessing the (Symbolic) gaze, but as someone who, forced into immobility by his accident, becomes a seer, someone who starts making mental relations (mental relations start when the action – temporarily – stops and the subject opens up to time). And where Žižek sees the Real introduced into the Hitchcockian universe (the knife, the birds, the plane), Deleuze stresses the fact that these ‘things’ do not come from a beyond. On the contrary, they have a natural relation with the rest of the image. The birds must be ordinary birds, the plane is an ordinary plane, the key in Dial M for Murder is an ordinary key; it belongs to the world of the image, it becomes a sign (a relational indication) when it does not fit the lock. Deleuze distinguishes different signs (demarks and symbols) that together form the network of what he calls the mental-image or the relation-image, that puzzle the subject on-screen as well as the subject off-screen, but not always in the same way: Hitchcock plays with all minds in different ways. In short, Deleuze sees the Hitchcock universe as a network of relations (the tapestry). There is no a-priori guilt (no Catholicism or Jansenism), only an attempt to reason and to establish adequate relations that could improve life and increase the power to act. The subject’s desire is not based on negativity and lack (and hence not primarily based on sexual difference and castration), but is a positive desire to make connections. The image is not seen as a representation, an umbilical cord, but as a thought-provoking encounter. Hitchcock’s universe can thus be interpreted according to two different philosophical traditions: a transcendental Cartesian/Kantian/Lacanian tradition, which is represented by Žižek, and an immanent Spinozian/

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Bergsonian/(Nietzschean) tradition, which is elaborated by Deleuze. As I explained in the introduction, in the transcendental tradition the eye is important because it collects all the impressions that are necessarily unified by an a-priori ‘I’: ‘I see, I think, I feel’ is what synthesizes all “my” experiences, hence the subject finds itself before and beyond perception and experience; it is a transcendental subject.16 In an immanent tradition, the subject is not a-priori given, but perception and experience form it. It is by the multiplicity of perceptions that the ‘I’ is formed, the brain being the nervous center of all connections and constructive subject formations. Desire, as one of the most constituting elements according to both psychoanalysis and rhizomatics, is equally conceived as either a transcendental imposing category or an immanent constructing force. From the Žižekian and Deleuzian analyses of Hitchcock’s work, it now becomes clear what the implications for the subject are if we conceive images, subjects and the world according to these different traditions. A transcendental philosophy gives a stable concept of the world, the subject and images: although there is always something unknown haunting the subject, it is also the only thing that gives our experiences a solid basis from which we can compare and identify ourselves. In an immanent philosophy, the subject is in constant formation, always changing through multiple encounters. It is a concept of the subject that is much less sure, which can create unwanted uncertainties, but perhaps also unexpected possibilities. In subsequent chapters the implications of such an immanent model for truth, ethics and politics will be elaborated more extensively in relation to specific audiovisual encounters. Here I want to focus on the metalevel of the audiovisual universe, on the status of the cinematographic apparatus and the (cinematographic) image. Metacinema and the Cinematographic Apparatus: Peeping Tom and Strange Days Opening Sequences: Displaying the Cinematographic Apparatus In the fifties the critics of Cahiers du Cinema considered Hitchock’s Rear Window as the prototype of a film about film: James Stuart’s immobile position, voyeuristically directed toward the scenes in front of him, spying on his neighbors, was considered as the position of the film viewer.17 When Strange Days, a modern or even futuristic metafilm, came out, it was not so much compared to Rear Window. Bigelow’s film was more often compared to yet another metafilm, Peeping Tom. More explicitly than Rear Window, and like Strange Days, Peeping Tom shows the negative implications of (cinematographic) voyeurism. Before returning to

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Hitchcock and some more aspects of transcendental and immanent conceptions of the (Hitchcockian) universe, and finally the new camera consciousness, it is necessary to have a closer look at the different conceptions of the cinematographic apparatus. I will do this by investigating the ways in which these are displayed in Peeping Tom and Strange Days. The story (form of content) of Strange Days takes place in Los Angeles at the eve of the third millenium. Lenny Nero is an ex-cop who deals in digital recordings of real-life experiences for vicarious adventures. When he receives a digital clip of the real murder of Iris, a prostitute who delivers recordings for him, Lenny gets drawn into a dangerous world of crime, racism, power and paranoia. Still in love with his ex-girlfriend, Faith, he tries to protect her from a fate similar to that of his murdered associate. He is assisted by his two friends, personal security expert Mace and ex-cop and former colleague Max. In terms of the form of content, this film is an action-image with a milieu in which characters act and react, the type of image that is typical of classical and commercial Hollywood cinema, as Deleuze explains in The Movement-Image.18 As for the form of expression, Strange Days’ overloaded visual style is overwhelming: the images stretch way beyond the frames, seemingly without spatial beginning or end. In fact, the images are so overloaded that they seem ‘out of joint’ and have a special relation to time.19 I will return to this point in a later section. Let me first mention something of the critical reception of the film and the apparent links with Peeping Tom. When Strange Days first came out, it received strong critiques. In BBC’s cultural program Late Review the three male critics did not like Bigelow’s work, whereas the only female critic, despite some reservations, defended the film for its thought provoking images.20 In the same program, Strange Days’ voyeurism and subjective camera movements were compared to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Especially the scene of the brutal killing of a prostitute in both films was taken as an example. But are the voyeurism and subjectivity in the two films really that similar? Peeping Tom is the story of a psychopathic murderer, Mark Lewis, who films his victims when he kills them. He also films the police investigations of the murders he has committed. His insane behavior is caused by a trauma in his childhood, when his father did all kinds of ‘scientific’ experiments on the boy. His neighbor, Helen, and her blind mother unmask him. Except for the scene where a prostitute gets killed, there are not many similarities between the two films on the level of the content, mainly because the points of view from which the stories are told, and the kinds of subjectivity they aim to establish seem very different: although they are both drawn to the power of images and visual technology, hustler Lenny Nero is a very different character than murderer Mark Lewis. Also on the level of the form of expression,

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Peeping Tom differs from Strange Days: Peeping Tom follows a much more chronological and spatially coherent logic than the out of jointness of the world of Strange Days. However, if one compares the opening sequences of the two films, some striking similarities can indeed be observed. In both films the very first image is an extreme close-up of an eye: clearly an indication of the voyeuristic inclinations of the protagonists. This close-up is then followed, in both films, by subjective camera images, presumably from the point of view of the beholder of the eye in close-up, who at that point is still unknown to the audience. In Peeping Tom we follow a prostitute through the viewfinder of a film camera, until she gets a scared expression on her face, stares in agony into the camera and we understand that she is being murdered by the man who was filming her. We know it is a film camera that has been recording the images because, in a short sequence between the close-up of the eye and the subjective camera-images, we have seen in a more ‘objective’ establishing shot the street in which the woman is waiting for a client, the person who is filming seen from behind, and a close-up of the camera-eye; we also see a hand throwing away a Kodak film box, and we constantly see the hair cross of the viewfinder in front of the images. After this scene ends with the scared face of the woman, we see a projector that projects the same images onto a screen while somebody (the man with the camera, protagonist Mark Lewis, as we will understand later) watches them. And then the credits come up. So in this way the whole cinematic apparatus is staged before the actual film starts: from the very beginning it is clear that Peeping Tom is a film about film. In the opening sequence of Strange Days the only clue we get that the images following the close-up of the eye are technically mediated is the fact that the first image after this close-up is obviously digitized (it takes some time before the pixels constitute a sharp, clear image). But then we are immediately, again via subjective camera movement, in the middle of a robbery; the robbery goes wrong, there is a flight to a roof top in order to escape from the police, and finally we experience that the person via whose senses we have lived through all the previous events, falls from the roof: ‘we’ fall from the rooftop. With a little nausea we then discover that this was a virtual-reality experience of the film’s main character, Lenny Nero. He had his brain connected to a squid (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), a futuristic device that can record experiences and play them back immediately (other people’s experiences or personal experiences from the past).21 Lenny buys and sells these digital drugs, but he is infuriated by this tape: it is a ‘blackjack’, a recording of death. When he pulls the playback rig from his head he exclaims to his dealer that he does not deal in snuff. In contrast to Peeping Tom, the opening sequence of Strange Days makes clear

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that there is no longer the distance of the camera and the projector, but a direct physical involvement of body and brain. How can we account for this difference on a theoretical level? Peeping Tom seems to be paradigmatic for the so-called apparatus theory, developed in the seventies by Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Commoli and Christian Metz.22 The film can also be read as a commentary on psychoanalytic interpretations and feminist gender implications of the apparatus theory. Baudry saw the cinematic apparatus as similar to Plato’s cave: the cinematic apparatus ‘offers the subject perceptions which are really representations mistaken for perceptions’.23 Peeping Tom, because it displays the cinematic apparatus, demonstrates how the representation model conceives the world and by extension art: the image that we eventually see is a re-presentation, a copy of the original reality. Philosophy of representation is based on the idea of a model and a copy (the original and the image, the essence and its reflection). Furthermore Peeping Tom demonstrates that in representation there is also a clear distinction between the one who is looking (the subject, Mark, the photographer, the peeping Tom) and that which is being looked at (the object, the prostitute, the object of desire). Related to the mobility of the camera, the subject in the cinematographic apparatus is conceived as a transcendental subject: [The] eye-subject, the invisible base of artificial perspective (which in fact only represents a larger effort to produce an ordering, a regulated transcendence) becomes absorbed in, ‘elevated’ to a vaster function, proportional to the movement which it can perform. (…) The mobility of the camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the ‘transcendental subject’.24

Baudry argues that cinema provides the subject with a fantasy of an objective reality that can be controlled by the subject’s intentional consciousness. Baudry is a phenomenologist when he argues that this consciousness is a consciousness of something, which he then relates to the status and the operation of the cinematographic image: ‘For it to be an image of something, it has to constitute this something as meaning. The image seems to reflect the world, but solely in the naïve inversion of a founding hierarchy: “The domain of natural existence thus has only an authority of the second order, and always presupposes the transcendental”.’25 Clearly, the way in which the cinematographic apparatus is conceived, relates film theory to representational thinking, as defined by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. As I explained in the introduction, this model of thinking is based on a principium comparationis of a conceived identity, judged analogy, imagined opposition or perceived similitude. In Peeping Tom we

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are always aware of the distance between the model (that which is filmed) and the copy (the represented image). We also notice a distance between the subject who perceives and the object that is perceived. On the laserdisc edition of Peeping Tom Laura Mulvey, who gave her comments on the film on a separate sound track, demonstrates how Peeping Tom not only is a film about film and filmic representation, but also refers to the history of the cinematic apparatus (at least to the origins of the cinematic apparatus as it has been conceived traditionally). At the end of the film we see that Mark Lewis has rebuilt a sort of Muybridgean installation of photo cameras that, in quick succession, take pictures of him while he commits suicide by throwing himself onto a spear that is hidden in the tripod of his camera. According to Mulvey, by relating the tragic end of the film’s hero to the origins of the cinematic apparatus, Peeping Tom also makes a statement about the death of this apparatus. Therefore it is not surprising that in Strange Days we do not find the same kind of apparatus: we find ourselves drawn into a frantic world of images and sounds where there is no self/other boundary. There is also no longer a distance between perceiver and perceived (there is no distancing camera). The virtual experience is a real experience: body and mind receive intensive energy at the same time. It is through diminished distance between who is seeing and what is seen, through the physical and intensive implication of the spectator, that we have an encounter with another world that at the same time forces us to think differently about images that are no longer representation. The cinematographic apparatus that is displayed in Strange Days is a Bergsonian one, where matter, body and brain are the image: An atom is an image, which extends to the point to which its actions and reactions extend. My body is an image, hence a set of actions and reactions. My eyes, my brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images since it is one image amongst others? External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement? (…) This infinite set of images constitutes a kind of plane of immanence. The image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter: not something behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement. (…) [A]ll consciousness is something, it is indistinguishable from the thing, that is from the image of light.”26

We see here a very different kind of cinematographic apparatus than in traditional philosophy and film theory. It is a cinematographic apparatus in which the brain is the screen and in which ‘subjects’ are formed by acting and reacting to various images on a plane of immanence.

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Gender Implications: Differently Voyeuristic Apart from the fact that the cinematographic apparatus in Peeping Tom is related to the idea of images as representations in a transcendental logic, the film also relates the cinematic apparatus explicitly to a Freudian discourse. Director Michael Powell even first intended to make a film about Freud, but because John Huston was slightly earlier with this idea (he made Freud, the Secret Passion), Powell decided to make instead ‘a film about a man with a camera who kills the women he films.’ This obviously says something about the relation between the cinematographic apparatus and psychoanalysis, and it is not surprising that feminists have demonstrated how cinema has very often been misogynist. Of course in her commentary on Peeping Tom Laura Mulvey, who was one of the initiators of these feminist critiques, comes back to this question. Peeping Tom presents a classical Oedipal anxiety drama, in which a young man suffers from childhood traumas inspired by his father, which are displaced onto the women he encounters. The women he films and kills are all sexually active (prostitutes), because they represent the biggest threat. It is not for nothing that only Helen, the innocent, decent and non-sexual girl-nextdoor who refuses to be filmed, can reach him (but of course too late to offer any cure). In Peeping Tom’s opening sequence it is the man who is the subject of the look and the woman who is ‘to-be-looked-at’, using Mulvey’s famous words from her ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.27 And because we are in the realm of representation, we can either identify sadistically with the masculine subject or masochistically with the female object. In psychoanalytic terms voyeurism is related to sadistic distance and the pleasure of imposing punishment (on the woman because she inspires castration anxiety); subjectivity is related to identification and appropriation of the other in order to gain fullness; and difference is based on gender opposition between male and female. Desire, the keyword of psychoanalysis, is also negatively defined on the basis of a lack and the longing for an object that can be appropriated, to be integrated into the self-same system. Peeping Tom exposes the relationship between the cinematographic apparatus as theorized in the apparatus theory, psychoanalysis and gender binaries, all of which follow the logic of representational philosophy that underlies these paradigms in film theory. Strange Days has also been read following this representational model of the voyeuristic eye: Laura Rascaroli, for instance, considers Bigelow’s film as paradigmatic for the cinematographic apparatus and the Lacanian mirror.28 In this logic Strange Days also follows the gender opposition that is so strongly at work in psychoanalytic models. Although this view

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on the film is certainly defendable, I would argue that things are in fact more complicated. Already in the opening sequence it is clear that we are dealing with a similar yet also very different scopic regime, and perhaps even a different philosophical model. During the film, gender relations are equally presented differently. Although the hero of the film is rather ‘weak’ and the main female characters are strong women, it is not a matter of a simple role reversal (the woman having the look and the man the to-be-looked-at-ness), which would keep us in the same paradigm. The difference is also not due solely to the fact that in Strange Days there are no more oedipal families, although that certainly has some significance. More importantly, in this film the look is connected to all other senses and is completely embodied. There is no longer a clearly defined subject filming, watching and appropriating an image / filmed object. A real virtual experience is presented, involving the protagonist and the spectator both physically and mentally. The relation between subject and object becomes a two-way process, an encounter between different forces (different in all its variations, not only in terms of opposition). On the basis of this idea of encounters, the nature of desire also needs to be redefined. Here we can see a more Deleuzian conception of desire. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is just as unconscious and just as important as in psychoanalysis, but as indicated in the previous section, it is conceived positively, as a connection with something or somebody else. This positive definition of desire, then, again has great implications for gender theory. We can no longer speak of a (male) subject desiring / filming a (female) object. In Strange Days Lenny considers himself as a ‘shrink’, somebody who helps people to fulfill their desires. But his version of a shrink is related to his capability of connecting (wiring) people to all kinds of experiences (as a ‘switchboard of the soul’), which makes him quite the opposite of traditional psychoanalysts, whose task is to eliminate all desire that goes beyond the oedipal norm. In the beginning of the film he says to a client: ‘What would you like to experience? Would you like to make love with a girl, with two girls maybe? Would you like to do it with a boy? Or, would you like to be a girl maybe?’ Of course there is a utopian element in this presentation of sexual relationships, but nevertheless it indicates a different and positive attitude toward gender relations: one of multiplicities and becoming (a becoming other, instead of having and possessing the other), one of unstable identities and changing relations, in short one of differences and repetitions in many encounters. Unfortunately this does not mean that all the abuses have disappeared. Like in Peeping Tom, one of the central scenes in Strange Days is a rape/ murder scene of a hooker, which is absolutely unpleasant to watch. This is the scene that the male critics of Late Review were indignantly referring

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to. However, there is a difference between the rape/murder scenes in the two films. In Peeping Tom (and many other similar scenes in the history of cinema, such as in Hitchcock’s Frenzy), the voyeurism and sadism of these rape scenes is related to the distance between the subject of the crime and his object, the female victim, who is literally appropriated in death. In Peeping Tom, however, there is also a sort of identification of the murderer with his victims. While he murders the women with a knife from the tripod of his camera, he also holds a mirror before their faces, so they see the terror of their own death in their eyes, which he again films. It is with this terror that Mark ultimately identifies. However, the identification takes place after the fact, when Mark watches (again at a safe distance) the representations on the screen. It is through this distance that he can continue to be a subject. Nevertheless, in the end the identification with the psychoanalytic female position is complete, and the only possible solution for the man who identifies too much with his victims is death. He comes to his tragic end by killing himself while being photographed. One could therefore say that in Peeping Tom this moment of masochistic identification with the victims brings the peeping Tom into a position that is normally ‘reserved’ for women. However, this does not challenge the basic opposition between object and subject, since Mark now becomes his own object. Although a shift is possible between subject position and object position, there is no solution for the full subject, except in death. One has to choose either the distance (voyeurism, power) or the proximity (masochism, death). Peeping Tom is a very strong but sad film, which demonstrates in a critical way the (hidden) implications of psychoanalysis and the cinematographic apparatus. In Strange Days there is also a shift between subject and object, but in a different way, and with different implications. Both the victim and the murderer are wired to the same squid, and both experiences are transmitted simultaneously. Which implies that the one who puts on this playback and receives the images also experiences both perspectives at the same time. There is no longer a distance between having the image and being the image. As I said, this does not make the event less harmful or painful, but because of the degree of involvement in voyeuristic experiences Strange Days gives us another critical perspective on voyeurism and the hunger for images. A perspective that implicates the audience to the point where we ourselves become the rapist and the victim. As Joan Smith quotes from James Cameron’s screenplay in her article ‘Speaking Up for Corpses’: ‘We put the knife up to her throat, and she whimpers, afraid to cry out, and then we draw the flat side of the blade down across her body as if to tease her with the prospect of her death. Even more dramatically Lenny Nero, who has been sent the tape anonymously, is forced when he plays it to

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feel the killer’s excitement and the woman’s terror: “Lenny is feeling the stalker’s exhilaration, pounding heart, flushed skin, panting breath, overlaid with her own senses … so the excitement and terror merge into one thing, one overwhelming wave of dread sensation.” Lenny goes to pieces as the tape rolls.’29 It is the worst thing he has ever experienced; to make this clear, unlike in Peeping Tom, close-ups of Lenny’s horrified face frequently interrupt the rape scene. He literally gets sick and throws up. This immediate physical reaction ‘contaminates’ the spectator as well, without leaving any room for safe distance. Joan Smith also refers to the violent reactions of mainly male critics to this film, and explains why they are so furious. After explaining that prostitutes in cinema are often coded in a very stereotypical way and seldom become ‘real’ persons because we know through the codes that they will die soon, Smith continues: ‘What is different about Strange Days is that Iris, although her character is coded in exactly this way – tight, low-cut dresses, wildly unstable behavior – becomes a real person for Lenny Nero, and for the audience, at the moment of her death. Male viewers are not permitted to maintain the customary safe distance from which they observe the process, which turns these women into corpses: instead, they are forced through Lenny’s reaction to realize what Iris is suffering. … It is hardly a coincidence that [the film] has prompted furious reactions, specifically the accusation that women should not be dirtying their hands like this. There is something illogical about this response, for it is precisely these women – the victims of serial rapists and killers – whose voices are silenced first in real life and second by the authors and directors who find their attackers endlessly fascinating. Men, it seems, can bump off as many women as they like in novels and on screen. What will not be tolerated is women speaking up for corpses.’30 The violent reactions of the male critics on BBC’s Late Review seem to be related to the shock of the experience of female terror for male viewers (which by the same token is no longer female terror) and to the fact that women ‘speak up for corpses’ (‘You would have been furious if a man had made this picture’, one critic told his female colleague – ‘but men wouldn’t’, seems to be the tacit implication). One could of course also argue that it is again the Lacanian Real that enters the picture here. This could indeed be one explanation of the rape/ murder scene in Strange Days (the hooker becomes a subject only at the moment of her death). However, whereas the subject in Peeping Tom seems to tell us (like psychoanalysis) that actually men are just as much tragic victims as women, and cannot help being sadistic voyeurs, the message in Strange Days seems to be different. In creating an experience of becoming both rapist and victim, a critique is given on the whole traditional subjectobject opposition. Strange Days does not say: ‘men can’t help it, we are all

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victims’, but rather ‘do something, change your concept of what it means to be a subject’. Another important aspect of the rape scene in Strange Days is the place it has among other (squid) experiences that are presented: the rape is one of the many other things that happen at the same time. Strange Days cannot be judged on the basis of only this one scene. Unlike in Peeping Tom, this scene is not paradigmatic for the whole film. One of the other most important aspects that are raised in Strange Days is the execution of a black rapper, Jerrico One, by Los Angeles police officers. Of course this reminds us of Rodney King and other dramas caused by ethnic and racial differences. The Los Angeles that is presented in this film is slightly exaggerated, but the atmosphere of an overpopulated, crazy and intolerant city certainly ‘makes a rhizome’ with the actual situation.31 Strange Days presents a critical attitude to our intolerance of other people in a multi-cultural society. That intolerance, clearly, is still based on the desperate quest for a selfsame model of delineated identity at the cost of the oppositional ‘other’, black people being considered as much ‘other’ as women. At least to the same extent as any gender problematic, the film presents questions of race and ethnicity as a basic problem that we have to face as we enter the second millennium. It is therefore also significant that the strongest character in the film is a black woman, Mace, played by Angela Bassett. Because of its overwhelming visual style and catchy soundtrack Strange Days can be seen as pure and even excessive entertainment. But through its intensity (both in images and sound) and physical involvement (both of the protagonists and the spectators) the film implicitly also calls for new strategies of analyzing and understanding contemporary cinema and society. Explicitly Strange Days scrutinizes voyeurism and subjectivity: both of these can no more be conceived in terms of subject, object and distance; the gaze has become embodied and intimately connected to an energetic way of experiencing the world. All these questions can no longer be dealt with in terms of representation but have to be conceived in terms of multiple differences and repetition, in terms of encounters that agitate both our bodies and our minds. If we look at the cinematographic apparatus that is displayed in Peeping Tom and Strange Days it is now possible to conclude that a different type of camera consciousness is implied as well. In the psychoanalytic apparatus theory the camera gives the spectator (the illusion of) transcendental control and the ability to distinguish between what is objective and what is subjective, which according to Žižek is in fact always an imprisoning illusion. In a rhizomatic model this distinction cannot very clearly be made. There are of course more subjective and more objective images, but they seem to oscillate in what Deleuze, following Pasolini, calls a semi-subjective or

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‘a free indirect discourse’. In his exposition of the perception-image, a type of image that is ‘presupposed’ by all other images, Deleuze argues that a camera consciousness as free indirect discourse is the essence of cinema: We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images; we are caught between a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-consciousness which transforms it.32

Although Deleuze recognizes the possibility of subjectively and objectively attributed images, he claims that the mobile camera has ultimately led to ‘the emancipation of the viewpoint (…) The shot would then stop being a spatial category and has become a temporal one’.33 Since Hitchcock is the director who, according to Deleuze, ultimately introduced this type of camera-consciousness into the image and into perception both of which are becoming more temporal, I will turn once more to his work, before finally returning to Strange Days. Camera Consciousness and Temporal Confusion: Strange Days and Vertigo Indiscernibility of Subjective and Objective, Virtual and Actual Vertigo is the film of Hitchcock that most clearly permits both a transcendental and an immanent reading of the subject. Let me elaborate on this a little. Vertigo’s story is well known: the film is situated in San Francisco, where John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson leaves the police force because of his fear of heights. When an old friend asks him to shadow his wife, Madeleine, Scottie follows her, saves her from drowning, and falls in love with her. Nevertheless Scottie cannot prevent her from committing suicide. Believing Madeleine is dead, he meets Judy, the living image of Madeleine, and he becomes obsessed by the idea of recreating the image of the dead woman. If we look at Vertigo in a psychoanalytic way, obviously a lot of feminist criticism comes to mind. In early psychoanalytic critiques Hitchcock’s male protagonists are seen as sadistic bearers of the gaze, trying to appropriate their object of desire, the woman. Clearly, the scene in Ernie’s Restaurant, in which Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time, could be read in this way: he (the male subject) looks at his object of desire (the woman). During the first half of the film he tries to save her from a strange possession (she thinks she is her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes) and tries to make her his (‘I have you, I have you,’ Scottie exclaims at some point). When he does not succeed in this, he becomes obsessed by bringing his ideal object back to life, at the cost of female subjectivity: Judy first becomes Madeleine again and then

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dies for the second time, punished for her, by definition, ‘guilty femaleness’. As Laura Mulvey demonstrated, identification – a prime indicator for spectatorial pleasure and subject positioning – is extremely hard for a female audience, unless by masochism, transvestitism, narcissism or bisexuality (all psychoanalytic terms that do not create a powerful subject). Other feminist psychoanalytic positions present a more complex structure of male and female subject positions. Tania Modleski, for instance, demonstrates that, although women are explicitly ‘designed’ by Hitchcock, Vertigo is not as one-dimensional as is often thought in the first instance.34 The male protagonist does not just master the guilty female object, but also identifies with her. In Vertigo Scottie identifies with Madeleine. According to Modleski, woman thus becomes the identification for all of the film’s spectators as well. Modleski places her arguments in a Freudian framework, and demonstrates how masculinity is unable to control femininity; femininity is ‘the unconsciousness of patriarchy’. Žižek would argue differently, but nevertheless not too far from Modleski, that both men and women, on-screen and off-screen, are under the constraints of the Real (but women are closer to it than men, hence their enigmatic nature). In this light, Scottie’s acrophobia could be seen as the fear of an encounter with the Real. In Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, Žižek states that Scottie does indeed have such frightening encounters, especially in the nightmare in which he sees his own decapitated head transfixed, while the ‘world’ around it is moving very fast. This is the Gaze of the Thing (of the Real), which is the most frightening encounter one can have. After this dream Scottie becomes mad. But when he recovers he again starts searching for his desired but fearsome object. Whatever the differences may be in a psychoanalytic explanation of the film, the questions always center on subject positioning and identification strategies through desire. Increasingly it is seen that none of the subjects in the film is in control, either because there is an overall identification with the fragile feminine position, or because of a (common) encounter with the Real. Now what happens when we consider the image not as a representation but as an expression of mental relations? What happens when we consider the dimension of time that is clearly present in Vertigo? What happens to the subject on screen? And what to the spectators? Deleuze already stated that Hitchcock brings the spectator into an active relation to the film. This remark becomes clearer when we consider Hitchcock’s answer to the question why he revealed so early in Vertigo that Judy is actually Madeleine: Though Stewart isn’t aware of it yet, the viewers already know that Judy is not just a girl who looks like Madeleine, but that she is Madeleine! Everyone

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around me was against this change [in respect of the original novel]. they all felt that the revelation should be saved for the end of the picture. I put myself in the place of a child whose mother is telling him a story. Where there is a pause in her narration, the child always says, ‘What comes next, Mommy?’ Well, I felt that the second part of the novel was written as if nothing came next, whereas in my formula, the little boy, knowing that Madeleine and Judy is the same person, would then ask, ‘And Stewart does not know it, does he? What will he do when he finds out?’35

Modleski reads this quote as indicative of the power of the mother/ woman and the female point of view that undermines the male positions in Hitchcock even though she is always punished for that. I would say that Hitchcock’s strategy undermines processes of identification: the viewer does not identify with Stewart/Scottie because he/she knows more. Instead, Hitchcock gives the spectator a special place. Knowing more than the protagonist, a different kind of relation and subjectivity is aimed at. As I will try to demonstrate, this is entirely because of the experience of time. As Deleuze has made clear in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, cinema is Bergsonian in its conceptualization of time. Bergson’s major thesis about time is known: The past co-exists with the present that it has been; the past is pre-served in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved. (…) The only subjectivity is in time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way around. That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, [time is] the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live, and change.36

As one of the films that show how we inhabit time, Deleuze mentions Vertigo. In his film Sunless (1982) Chris Marker emphasizes the complex layers of time in Vertigo. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi in his work Une idée du cinéma elaborates this point in a Deleuzian perspective. 37 According to Esquenazi, the scene in Ernie’s restaurant is a scene that contains everything that will follow. In Vertigo there are three women: Carlotta, Madeleine and Judy. These three women are the same, but they do not inhabit the same time. It is up to Scottie to distinguish between the different levels of time, which is sometimes impossible because they conflate. Scottie is confused by experiencing several layers of time (the virtuality of the past, the actuality of the present) at the same moment. In a detailed and beautiful analysis Esquenazi

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demonstrates how Madeleine’s face in profile in the restaurant scene is a crystal-image: it is at the same time in the past and the present, virtual and actual. It is quite possible to relate Scottie’s look to Madeleine’s profile, and hence to identify with Scottie, as psychoanalytic readings have done. But in doing so one fails to notice that the relation between the two looks is not a classic shot/counter-shot, imposing a look from a subject to an object. Then before Madeleine enters the bar, Scottie has turned his back; he even looks in the same direction as Madeleine and therefore cannot see her in the same way as we, the spectators, see her breathtaking profile. Which means we have to conclude that the image of Madeleine is a virtual image actually presented. 38 In this first profile the different layers of time germinate; also the doubling of Madeleine in the mirror, when she leaves the restaurant, is an indication of the temporal doubling that will follow. Because it is sometimes unclear whether what the spectator sees is an actual or virtual image (Madeleine’s profile could be actual to the spectator but virtual to Scottie) the question of the point of view is raised: from which point of view is the story told? The confusion, and at the same time beauty of this scene, is due to the fact that this question becomes difficult to answer. We can understand now when Deleuze says that a camera-consciousness starts to make mental connections in time: The camera is no longer content sometimes to follow the character’s movement, sometimes itself to undertake movements of which they are merely the object, but in every case it subordinates descriptions of a space to the functions of thought. This is not a simple distinction between the subjective and the objective, the real and the imaginary, it is on the contrary their indiscernibility which will endow the camera with a rich array of functions (…) Hitchcock’s premonition will come true: a camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into.39

In the profile of Madeleine the actual and the virtual conflate. From this crystal-image Madeleine will multiply (Carlotta, Madeleine, Judy), occupying each time a different layer in time. Following Madeleine/Carlotta, Scottie starts to wander and wonder. Deleuze stresses the importance of Scottie’s real (ordinary) vertigo: it does not so much have a Symbolic meaning (although in terms of style it is an important recurrent structure), nor does it relate to any concepts like the Real (or the Big Void), as was noted earlier. Rather, Scottie’s inability to climb stairs and to master spatial relations puts him in a state of contemplation. It is useful to recall here some of the characteristics that Deleuze establishes for the time-image: instead of

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performing actors, characters become more like seers and wanderers, confused by the experience of time. In Vertigo both Scottie and Madeleine are wanderers. In that capacity they become visionary, capable of seeing the crystals of time. They even decide to wander off together in the forest. In this scene we can see how Scottie is fascinated by the virtuality of Carlotta in Madeleine, just as later he will be absorbed by the virtuality of Madeleine in Judy. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi gives a much more elaborate analysis of the crystal-image in Vertigo. I will here try to draw some conclusions for the concept of the subject in such an image. As I said earlier, the concept of time makes the notion of selfhood and the subject unstable: one could say, like Tania Modleski, that all identification boils down to the woman, which makes the male subject position unstable. But in a Spinozian/Deleuzian perspective of time, there is not so much to identify with: both Scottie and Madeleine lose their identity, are confused about their identity; they live in the past and the present at the same time. The notion of the subject is obscured by a desire to connect with virtual worlds of the past. And the spectator is a third term, sometimes consciously addressed by the camera, sometimes presented with a point of view of one of the protagonists, but clearly part of the network of relations, more than just by identification. The spectator starts wondering and wandering on his or her own terms. To conclude about Hitchcock, one can say that his work demonstrates, as Žižek has shown, that the subject can be seen as a concept that depends on the transcendental notion of the Real. The subject’s fundamental desire is ultimately based on this nothingness of the impossible Real. When Scottie sees his own decapitated head in his dream, he has a maddening encounter with the Real. The spectator constitutes him or herself as a subject by identifying with the character(s) on the screen, feeling the same constraints (of the Real or otherwise) as the protagonists. However, like the protagonist, the subject off-screen can never identify with the Gaze of the Real, which is unrepresentable. The Eye and the unrepresentable Gaze are important models for understanding subjectivity. According to Deleuze, however, Hitchcock saturates the representing movement-image by introducing mental-relations into the image. The spectator is no longer invited to identify, but to think and make connections between the different images. It is now the model of the brain, the rhizomatic mental connections that it can make and the way it conceives time, that are important. The sense of self is still important, but is confused, loosened and made more flexible. Because Scottie literally loses the ground under his feet, the space of the look (his vertigo), he opens up to time and to the confusion between virtual and actual. One can even wonder if the second part of the movie, after Scottie’s nightmare and mental

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breakdown, is not completely taking place in his mind (we never actually see him leaving the hospital, nor do we see his loyal girlfriend Midge again). In any case, Hitchock’s Vertigo displays certainly a new kind of camera consciousness. Brainwaves and Time: Strange Days’ ‘Vertigo’ Comparing now the opening scene of Vertigo with the opening scene of Strange Days, we notice another striking case of repetition and difference. In terms of form of content, in both films the first image of the eye is followed by a chase sequence on a rooftop, ending in a vertiginous image of a dissipating deep space. In Vertigo it is still up to the viewer to relate the eye of the opening sequence to the mind’s eye: one can easily forget this because the film’s opening is very classic. Scottie/Stewart is following a thief on a rooftop and the spectator is in the first instance invited to identify with him. He is first represented objectively: we see Scottie climbing up some stairs to a roof) later followed by a subjective point of view: we see his vertigo when he looks down. Stylistically (form of expression) subjective and objective points of view are carefully displayed to make sure with whom the spectator should identify. Only gradually does the problem of time emerge in the image, and subjectivity and objectivity become more and more blurred. The ambiguity of the film lies in the fact that the time layers are centered on a psychoanalytic theme of sexual difference. Hence the two possible readings of the film as demonstrated above. Strange Days has a different form of expression: in this film the spectator is immediately confronted with what seems to be a subjective point of view. The only problem is that we don’t know who is the subject in this scene: there is nobody to identify with (in Peeping Tom, there was still an indication of the subject holding the camera through which the images are recorded), so, as was remarked before, the spectator is immediately drawn into the image without any distance. What is also implied is that this could be anyone’s brainwave. Immediately this raises the question ‘What happens then to the sense of self if we can connect to anyone’s memory or experience?’40 In a futuristic context Strange Days plays with the idea of direct brain stimulation and what this could mean for human beings.41 If direct brain stimulation became possible (as is clear by now, a philosophical basis for this is not new and scientifically it is becoming ever more plausible), the question of time and memory would become increasingly relevant. And in contemporary cinema time and memory in relation to subjectivity and selfhood is indeed already a frequent theme. Not only in the time-image as it has been described by Deleuze, but even in

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the Hollywood action-image, time has made its dazzling entrance, which apparently was set off by Vertigo. Time and memory is a central preoccupation in films like Blade Runner, Total Recall and Twelve Monkeys.42 In Blade Runner memories are no longer conditions of authentic selfhood because they can be implanted.43 In Total Recall the past is equally not guaranteed to be personal. And in Twelve Monkeys the hero lives at the same time in the past, present and future. Is it possible to become more Bergsonian in thinking time? In Twelve Monkeys there is even a reference to Vertigo (the film is being shown in a theater where the protagonists of the film are hiding), and when the heroine Kathryn dyes her hair blond, how can we not think of Madeleine, the woman from the past in the present?44 It is striking though that all these contemporary films that deal explicitly with time are set in the future (one can add to this list the Back to the Future and Terminator films and as the non-science-fiction film Peggy Sue Got Married). Maybe this is to keep the problem of time at a distance, as if it does not really concern us now and is only an entertaining fantasy. But at the same time the preoccupation with time and memory indicates that it concerns us now more than ever, and that in the future it will become an even bigger preoccupation; it clearly indicates that time and the world are ‘out of joint’. These films, like Strange Days, present themselves as classical movement-images in terms of their form of content. But in their form of expression (albeit through excessive spatiality or through time-travel narratives) they cannot escape Vertigo-like confusions of the subjective and objective, the virtual and the actual.45 Although Strange Days is also presented as science fiction, it speaks about what is already the past, the last day of the second millennium. And the scientific tool that it presents is not so far-fetched either. Neuroscientists work with squids and brain stimulations to induce memories or at least neurological actions and feelings. It is inconceivable only on one crucial point; namely that it is still very improbable to recall other people’s memories. This indicates again the importance of time for the concept of selfhood. In Face Off the two protagonists (John Travolta and Nicolas Cage) literally swap faces, so that the face, the look and the visible appearance are no longer the guarantee of identity and selfhood. The only way that Travolta’s wife recognizes her husband is through a blood tissue type (a code) and a personal memory. So before tackling the question of whose memory or brain this is, let me look at the way Strange Days plays with personal memories. Like Scottie, Lenny Nero in Strange Days is an ex-police officer who, after quitting his job, becomes obsessed with a woman from the past: by replaying the tapes of his experiences in the past with his girlfriend at that time, Faith, he keeps on going back to the past. What was virtual (enclosed

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in the actual image) in Vertigo is made actual, presented as a memoryimage in Strange Days. As Bergson demonstrated in Matter and Memory, there is a profound relation between memory, body and perception. Every perception is related to a certain memory, which makes it possible for the body to move and to act. We are simultaneously childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age. At every moment in the present we have to jump between these different regions of non-chronological time in which we live. Someone who lives in pure presence, reacting immediately to every excitement of the body, is impulsive, not able to react properly. But on the other hand it is also possible to give too much preference to memory and memory-images; such a person Bergson calls a dreamer. Between these two extremes Bergson places a memory that is willing to follow the demands of the present moment, but that can resist irrelevant demands.46 If we consider Strange Days now from a Bergsonian perspective of time, we can see that Lenny’s addiction to his own memories makes him unable to act, in a similar way (though in a totally different context) to Scottie being unable to act in Vertigo. The fact that Lenny can recall his memories whenever he wants by plugging in his brain only makes it worse. The memorized women in both films are unable to break the spell of the past: Judy in Vertigo because she consents to becoming Madeleine again, and Faith because Lenny cannot see (because of his recollection-images) that she has become somebody different than she was. The only person in Strange Days who seems to have a sound balance between past and present, between mind and body is Mace. Placed in a Bergsonian perspective, her remark to Lenny that ‘memories are designed to fade away’ is very relevant. Memories are necessary and link up automatically with perceptions, but they should not always be actualized. They should only be recalled in so far as necessary for the present moment. It is also significant that Mace’s memories do not come from a squid, but are recalled by a present situation of her body. Her first memory is actually presented as a flashback when she remembers how she met Lenny (this is what Deleuze calls the movement-image’s way of actualizing the past). Interestingly this flashback is not just a subjective point of view. In the mind we conceive ourselves as both other and I as Mace sees herself as another person in her flashback.47 It is also Mace who encourages Lenny to search his memory for relevant information that Iris, the prostitute who has been murdered, has tried to give him just before her death. These images of the past are the other actualized flashbacks, necessary for the present moment. The second recollection that Mace has is more a direct presentation of a crystal-image, which encloses time virtually in an actual image. It happens when Mace looks at her son, who is not aware of his mother looking at him. But in the relation between the image of the boy and Mace’s look,

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the mind’s eye brings in time: when the boy was little, how one day he will be big .… And the only occasion when Mace consents to playing back a squid is when she realizes that Iris has given Lenny a very crucial playback tape, which holds evidence of the brutal murder of the black singer Jerrico One and some friends. Although these images resemble the Rodney King beatings, which did not really change the world, Strange Days expresses the hope that through an opening up of the mind, there will eventually be some kind of tolerance. In spite of the film’s high degree of action-images, in terms of the role of memories Strange Days presents us with a Bergsonian ethics of time.48 New images like digital images and contemporary high tech cinema are said by Deleuze to present chaotic spatial relations without beginning or end, going in all directions.49 The spaces in Strange Days are like that: no room seems to end, there is always an opening to another connecting space and the characters always find themselves in the middle of all this spatial abundance. Because of this, Strange Days opens up to time. As the brain experiments with memories and different time layers also indicate, time and memory do not need to be personal. Related to this, the film also asks questions about the sense of self. As I already indicated, the fact that the squid experiences seem te be subjective points of view means that the spectator is not given many assurances about whose point of view it is. Moreover, it has been demonstrated (for instance by Robert Montgomery’s subjective camera experiment Lady in the Lake) that a subjective point of view alone does not increase the experience of identification in the spectator.50 What Strange Days adds to this is not only that identification does not work by purely subjective camera movement, but also that the sense of self becomes very unstable when we can experience anybody’s memory. This can provide new possibilities, once the concept of desire is seen as a Spinozian/Deleuzian wish to make multiple connections (creating Bodies without Organs, as Deleuze would say), but it also has its dangerous sides. We have already seen this in Lenny presenting himself as a new kind of psychiatrist: ‘I am your shrink, your priest, I am the magic man, the Santa Claus of the soul.’ The combination of shrink/priest and magic man/Santa Claus of the soul is interesting in the sense that again a transition is indicated. The shrink/priest seen as the traditional psychoanalyst, forgiving the subject its guilty enjoyment, has become the magic man/Santa Claus of the soul, who has a very different way to ‘cure’, namely by stimulating new connections without being afraid to lose the self-same, knowing that desire is an affirmative and creative element in order to construct the subject. But if one thinks of the horrible rape scene analyzed above, or the racial murders, there is still enough to feel guilty about (the danger of micro-fascism, internal in ourselves, is always present, according to Deleuze).

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At the same time Strange Days expresses very clearly the wish for more flexible nomadic visions on concepts of the self and desire, necessary to survive in a jungle-like world. The self/subject is no longer dependent on the supposed desire of the other (although the other remains important for connections), desire is no longer connected to sexual difference only (‘we have to liberate desire’ and ‘a thousand tiny sexes – that can be on every part of the body’, are famous words from Deleuze and Guattari). Spectators can no longer confirm their identity by identifying with subjects on-screen, but have to negotiate between the images presented to their minds and the memories induced by their own bodies. Body, brain and perception work together to establish a sense of self in each point of time that differs according to the demands of specific situations. Strange Days demonstrates an ethics of Bergsonian memory; it also takes scientific possibilities one step further in asking us what would happen if we could induce other people’s memories. Maybe the shock of this mental possibility is necessary to change our ideas about the self-same subject in the first place. In his article ‘The Imagination of Immanence: An Ethics of Cinema’ Peter Canning explains why this change is necessary in the first place. He speaks of a war against the delusionary signifier (which is the classic apparatus) that is ‘a struggle for liberation, not for annihilation, even of an enemy. (…) To survive the end of mediation, we should learn to think without Law, without the Father, to develop an absolute ethics that begins where symbolic-moral mediation leaves off and an aesthetic experience of nonrelation appears. It remains an ethical experiment, however, in that it is always a question of discovering and inventing new relations, new powers, without falling into the nostalgia or perverse denial that never seems to tire of killing the father (in reality it lives and dies in despair) – but never risks a step beyond it.’51 Although I did not talk explicitly about the Law of the Father nor of the signifier, clearly the transcendental apparatus, the representational image of thought and the psychoanalytic model are part of that discourse. As a metafilm Strange Days demonstrates how the cinematographic apparatus of Peeping Tom has become only one aspect of contemporary image culture and that the apparatus has changed. From a transcendental apparatus, designed to give the subject the illusion of control, but actually controlling the subject, the apparatus has become an immanent one, to the point where the whole universe becomes cinematic. As Hitchcock already anticipated in Vertigo, we have entered an age where a new camera consciousness makes the clear distinction between the subjective and the objective impossible; the past and the present, the virtual and the actual have become indistinguishable. Strange Days tells us in what ways the brain has literally become the screen, and how this necessitates an immanent conception of the image. Better still Strange Days invites us to a plane

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of ‘cinemance’52 where it is necessary to have immanent conceptual tools for looking at images in themselves and for understanding the ethical and political implications of such a philosophy. Moving from the metalevel of the cinematographic apparatus, in the next chapter I will work with some of the conceptual tools that Deleuze presented in his cinema books and elsewhere, to see in what ways aspects of subjectivity can be constructed on the plane of images. Notes 1. Hitchcock during the shooting of North by Northwest, quoted in Donald Spoto. The Dark Side of the Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Ballantine 1984: p. 440. 2. The Movement-Image, p. 59. 3. The Time-Image, p. 23. 4. The Movement-Image, p. 205. 5. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. Hitchcock – The First Forty-Four Films. New York: Frederick Ungar 1979. 6. Slavoj Žižek (ed.). Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan… but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London and New York: Verso, 1992: pp. 212/213. 7. The Movement-Image, p. 202. 8. Everything You Always Wanted to Know, p. 254. The Gaze, in contrast to the eye, is related to this impossible realm of the Real. In ‘The Ideological Sinthome’ in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Massachusetts, Cambridge and London: MIT, 1991). Žižek explains the difference between the eye and the gaze. The latter marks ‘the point in the picture from which the subject viewing is already gazed at. Far from assuring the self-presence of the subject (i.e. the gaze as instrument of mastery and control), the gaze introduces an irreducible split: I can never see the picture at the point from which it is gazing at me.’ (p. 125). See also note 11. 9. Everything you Always Wanted to Know, p. 241. 10. See Joan Copjec (ed.). Shades of Noir. New York and London: Verso 1993; Supposing the Subject. New York and London, Verso 1994; Joan Copjec. Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge and Massachusetts: MIT, 1994. 11. Žižek refers to Racine’s Phaedre, who misreads her lover’s expression and thus brings about her own downfall. ‘In his Bold Gaze my Ruin is Writ Large’ are Phaedre’s words and these are borrowed by Žižek as the title of his main article in Everything You Always Wanted to Know; the title reflects Lacan’s idea that the gaze we encounter is not the gaze of the other, but the gaze as we imagine it ‘in the field of the Other’ (p. 258). In other words, our desire is constituted by what we think the other desires: ‘desire is the desire of the other’, according to Lacan. Žižek calls this form of desire ‘intersubjective’: it is only

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14.

15. 16.

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through the other that we can desire. One could argue that in this conception of desire the O/other is always an object of desire, which makes it rather difficult to speak of intersubjectivity. But of course this should be seen as an exchange of positions: each subject functions as the other’s ‘object of desire’. Žižek himself demonstrates how the status of the ‘object’ has changed (both in Lacan and in Hitchcock): ‘For Lacan in the 1950s the object is reduced to the role of the “stake” in the intersubjective game of recognition (to desire an object is a means to desire the desire of the other who claims this object, etc.), whereas for the later Lacan, the object is what the subject is looking for in another subject – what bestows upon the subject his/her dignity.’ (p. 223–224). Žižek argues, with Lacan, that we are all haunted subjects, desiring something that is by definition impossible. Everything you Always Wanted to Know, p. 236. In his film That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) Luis Buñuel presents an image of desire related to an object that can very well be analyzed psychoanalytically. Mathieu, the protagonist (the subject) desires Concha, the woman-asobject, played by two very different actresses. One could say they represent the virgin and the whore, or one could say they are interchangeable (Mathieu never sees the difference) because they merely represent the object that has to fill the funda mental lack in the subject, from which desire is born. Buñuel also provides highly symbolic images, such as the final image in which a woman in a shop window is sewing a bloody gown (a metaphor for the fetishistic ‘covering up’ of the wound; the shop window referring to the commodity aspect of objects of desire). The notion of subject is thus very much related to the notion of object, and desire based on lack can never completely be fulfilled by the object of desire. However, one might actually wonder whether Buñuel is perhaps joking, giving us these images in order to bring them to the fulfillment of their cliché aspects: it is all too obvious and thus reaches a different dimension. Therefore Buñuel, like Hitchcock, can also be read differently. According to Deleuze, Buñuel’s choice of two actresses to play one person is more connected to a mental image related to time: ‘It is as if Buñuel’s naturalist cosmology, based on the cycle and succession of cycles, gives way to a plurality of simulta neous worlds; to a simultaneity of presents in different worlds. These are not subjective (imaginary) points of view in one and the same world, but one and the same event in different objective worlds, all implicated in the same, inexplicable universe’ (The Time-Image, p. 103). According to Spinoza, the role of imagination is to think also of what might be good for others. To be joyful also means wanting joy for others, which can mean very different things than for the self; Spinoza believes that every person has a singular essence. Genevieve Lloyd, Spinoza and the Ethics. London and New York: Routledge, 1996: pp. 96–97. In his book Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) Michael Shapiro discusses Kant’s concept of the subject: ‘Kant’s solution to the aporias of experience is to make the subject larger than the world’ (p. 13). He does this with the aim

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20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

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of moving the subject toward creating a common sense. See also Deleuze, La Philosophie Critique de Kant. Paris: PUF, 1963. See, for instance, François Truffaut. Hitchcock/Truffaut. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967: p. 160. The Movement-Image, pp. 141–196. When the third dimension of spatial depth and coherence is abandoned, we open up to other dimensions. In his discussion of the affection-image and Dryer’s use of the close-up, Deleuze states: ‘Flattening the third dimension, he puts two-dimensional space into immediate relation with the affect, with a fourth and fifth dimension: Time and Spirit’ (The Movement-Image, p. 107). Late Review, BBC television. The critics were Mark Lawson (presentation), Tom Paulin, Tony Parsons and Suzanne Moore. The most striking masculine objection to the film was (I quote all three critics addressing their female colleague): ‘If this film had been made by a man, for instance Brian de Palma, you would have been disgusted’ (it sounded almost as if they were jealous). In a similar way at the conference Tender Bodies, Twisted Minds (University of Amsterdam, depart ment of Film and Television Studies), where this film was discussed, whenever anyt hing positive was said about the film, it was no longer a Katherine Bigelow film, but a James Cameron script. In any case one could say that in its initial reception Strange Days shared a fate similar to that of Peeping Tom and Vertigo. Squids, although not as sophisticated as presented in Bigelow’s film, are actually used in neurological research. See for instance Louis Bec, ‘Squids, Elements of Technozoosemiotics – a lesson in fabulatory epistemology of the scientific institute for paranatural research’ in Joke Brouwer and Carla Hoekendijk (eds.). Technomorphica. Amsterdam: De Balie and Idea Books, 1997: pp. 279–314. In the television documentary on Strange Days (VPROlaat, October 1995), neuroscientist Michael Persinger talks about the scientific research on direct brain stimulation. See Jean-Louis Baudry. ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’ (first published 1970) and ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema’ (first published 1975). Both articles reprinted in Philip Rosen (ed.). Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 (references hereafter are to this edition, pp. 286–298 and 299–318); Jean-Louis Commoli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds.). The Cinematic Apparatus. Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Columbia University Press, 1986: pp. 121–142; Christian Metz, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’ in Screen, vol. 16, no. 2, 1975: pp. 14–76. See also Robert Stam et al. New Vocabularies of Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. ‘The Apparatus’ , p. 315. ‘Ideological Effects’, p. 292. ‘Ideological Effects’, p. 292. The Movement-Image, pp. 58–59 and 60–61.

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27. Laura Mulvey. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. First published in 1975, reprinted in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, pp. 198–209. 28. Laura Rascaroli. ‘Strange Visions: Kathryn Bigelow’s MetaFiction’ in Enculturation, vol. 2, no. 1, Fall 1998. 29. Joan Smith. ‘Speaking Up For Corpses’ in Karl French (ed.). Screen Violence. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1996: p. 198. Smith quotes here from James Cameron’s screenplay. 30. ‘Speaking Up For Corpses’, p. 204. 31. For a media evaluation of the Rodney King beatings see John Caldwell. Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995: pp. 302–335. For a deeper analysis of the King beatings and Strange Days see Patricia Pisters. ‘The War of Images: Appropriation and Fabulation of Missing People’ in ASCA Yearbook. Amsterdam: ASCA Press, 2000: pp. 69–81. 32. The Movement-Image, p. 74. 33. The Movement-Image, p. 3. 34. Tania Modleski. ‘Femininity by Design’ in The Woman who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York and London: Methuen, 1988: pp. 87–100. 35. Hitchcock quoted in The Woman who Knew Too Much, p. 100. 36. The Time-Image, p. 82. 37. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi. Image-mouvement et image-temps: une idée du cinéma. Paris: PhD thesis, pp. 134–172. See also his book Film, perception et mémoire. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994: pp. 196–201. 38. In his book on Bergson, Deleuze explains that according to Bergson we do not go back from the present to the past, but move from the past to the present, selecting the images from the past that are necessary for the present: ‘Integral memory responds to the call of the present by two simultaneous movements: one is a movement of translation, by which memory places itself in front of the experience and contracts more or less in respect of the action of the present; the other movement is a rotation of memory around itself, by which it orients itself toward the situation of the moment in order to present its most useful side’ (Deleuze. Le bergsonisme. Paris: PUF, 1966: p. 60. My translation from the French). The rotating movement of Madeleine’s profile in close-up could be seen as such a movement from the virtual toward the actual. 39. The Time-Image, p. 23. 40. The Australian techno-performance artist Stellarc has demonstrated in several performances (e.g. Stimbod; Ping Body) that not only the brain, but also the body can be extended beyond the self-same. For instance through touchscreen muscle stimulation, a programme that enables touching of the muscle sites on a computer model, he has made his body ‘a host’ so that other people (at remote places) can make it move and act. Touch-screen muscle stimulation also makes it possible for two people to touch each other at a distance: ‘Given tactile and force-feedback, I would feel my touch via another person from another place as a secondary and additional sensation. Or, by feeling

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42.

43.

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my chest I can also feel her breast. An intimacy through interface, an intimacy without proximity’ (Stellarc in ‘Parasite Visions – Alternate, Intimate and Involuntary Experiences’ in Technomorphica, p. 23). See also his website: http://www.merlin.com.au/stellarc. Many consider one of the first films to play with the idea of brain stimulation, Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1987) to be more successful in showing the possible consequences of such experiments. I don’t agree with that. The film does indeed demonstrate the dangers of overdose, but so too does Strange Days. The difference lies in the context. In Brainstorm the experiments take place in a laboratory, scientific context, whereas in Strange Days squids have become a more common (though illegal) use. See also Anke Burger. ‘Strange Memories – Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days und “Erinnerung” in Science-Fiction-Film’ in Blimp – Film Magazine, no. 34, Summer 1996. In his book Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) Scott Bukatman emphasizes the spatial dimensions of the cinematic dimension of Blade Runner: ‘the specificity of cinema lies, not in the emphatic dramaturgy of narrative temporality, but rather in a spatial exploration that complexly binds multiple perspectives and scalar shifts’ (p. 137). Bukatman adds that the effectiveness of Blade Runner lies in the fact that this space finally becomes terminal. See also his monograph on Blade Runner in the BFI series Modern Classics. London: BFI, 1997. In this essay he does in fact briefly refer to time as constructed memory (p. 80), which could be seen as an immanent way of constructing subjectivity. In Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987) Vivian Sobchack discusses the problem of time in Blade Runner more elaborately. According to Sobchack the temporal gets lost in the spatiality of the film; at least the kind of classical chronological kind of temporality: ‘The New SF tends to conflate past, present, and future – in décor constructed as temporal pastiche and/or in narratives that either temporally turn back on themselves to conflate past, present, and future, or are schizophrenically constituted as a “series of pure and unrelated presents in time”’ (pp. 273/274; Sobchack quotes here from Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’). With this observation she actually describes a Bergsonian conception of time that has entered American Science Fiction cinema. For an elaborated applied Deleuzian analysis of Blade Runner see Ian Buchanan. Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000: pp. 127–140. Buchanan is not satisfied with the many psychoanalytic interpretations of Blade Runner (such as the ones from Slavoj Žižek and Kaja Silverman) and argues for an analysis of assemblages, abstract-machines and ‘schizzes’ or breakflows, intertextuality and finally the plane of composion of the film, where he uses specific concepts from Deleuze’s film books. Twelve Monkeys is based on Chris Marker’s film La Jetée. However, the scriptwriters of the film, David and Janet Peoples must have been influenced by

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45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

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Marker’s other film about time and loss of identity Sunless. In this film Marker also ‘follows’ Scottie and Madeleine, wondering about their relation to time. See for a narrative analysis of the ‘out of jointness’ of time in contemporary Hollywood, Sasha Vojkovic. Subjectivity in New Hollywood Cinema: Fathers, Sons and Other Ghosts. Amsterdam: PhD University of Amsterdam, 2001. Matière et Mémoire, p. 170. Jorge Louis Borges’ short essay ‘Borges and I’ comes to mind here. Borges describes how he conceives of himself as two people: ‘Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I don’t know which of us has written this page’ in The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. London, New York, etc.: Penguin 1981: p. 20. In ‘The Cinema as Experience – Kathryn Bigelow and the Cinema of Spectacle’ Yvonne Tasker emphasizes the physical and spectacular dimensions of Bigelow’s films Near Dark, Blue Steel and Point Break (in her book Spectacular Bodies – Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London and New York: Rout ledge, 1993). Steven Shaviro refers to the embodied visual fascination that the images of Blue Steel provoke (‘Film Theory and Visual Fascination’ in his book The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Though the appeal of the visual spectacle and action in Strange Days is undeniable, I have tried to demonstrate that the challenges to the mind are just as important in Bigelow’s work. Deleuze says: ‘The organization of space here loses its privileged directions (…), in favour of an omni-directional space which constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates’ (The Time-Image, p. 265). Maybe this is because each person conceives itself in the brain as several other persons as well, as became clear in Borges’ story ‘Borges and I’. Peter Canning. ‘The Imagination of Immanence: An Ethics of Cinema’ in Gregory Flaxman (ed.). The Brain is the Screen, pp. 351 and 357. ‘The Imagination of Immanence’, p. 346.

References Baudry, Jean-Louis (1986). Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus [1970]. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Philip Rosen. Ed. (286–298). New York: Columbia University Press. Baudry, Jean-Louis (1986). The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema [1975]. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Philip Rosen. Ed. (299–318). New York: Columbia University Press. Bergson, Henri (1939). Matière et Mémoire. Paris: Les Presses Universitaires. Brouwer, Joke and Hoekendijk, Carla. Eds. (1997). Technomorphica. Amsterdam: De Balie and Idea books.

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Buchanan. Ian (2000). Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bukatman, Scott (1993). Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bukatman, Scott (1997). Blade Runner. London: BFI, 1997. Burger, Anke (1966). Strange Memories – Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days und “Erinnerung” in Science-Fiction-Film,” Blimp – Film Magazine, 34, Summer. Caldwell, John (1995). Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Canning, Peter (2000). The Imagination of Immanence: An Ethics of Cinema. In The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of the Cinema. Gregory Flaxman. Ed. (327–362). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Commoli, Jean-Louis (1986). Machines of the Visible. In The Cinematic Apparatus. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. Eds. (121–142). Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Columbia University Press. Copjec, Joan Ed. (1993). Shades of Noir. New York and London: Verso. Copjec, Joan (1994). Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge and Massachusetts: MIT. Copjec, Joan (1994). Supposing the Subject. New York and London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles (1963). La Philosophie Critique de Kant. Paris: PUF. Deleuze, Gilles (1966). Le Bergsonisme. Paris: PUF Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (designated as C1) Deleuze, Gilles (1989). Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Esquenazi, Jean-Pierre. (1994) Film, perception et mémoire. Paris: L’Harmattan. Hofstadter, Douglar R. and Daniel C. Dennett (1981). The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. London and New York: Penguin. Lloyd, Genevieve (1996). Spinoza and the Ethics. London and New York: Routledge. Metz, Christian (1975). ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, Screen, 16(2): 14–76. Modleski, Tania (1988). Femininity by Design. In The Woman who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. (87–100). New York and London: Methuen. Mulvey, Laura (1986). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ [1975]. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Philip Rosen. Ed. (198–209). New York: Columbia University Press. Pisters, Patricia (2000). The War of Images: Appropriation and Fabulation of Missing People. In ASCA Yearbook (69–81). Amsterdam: ASCA Press. Rascaroli, Laura (1998). Strange Visions: Kathryn Bigelow’s MetaFiction,” Enculturation, 2(1): http://enculturation.gmu.edu/2_1/rascaroli.html Rohmer, Eric and Chabrol, Claude (1979). Hitchcock – The First Forty-Four Films. New York: Frederick Ungar. Shapiro, Michael (1999). Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Shaviro, Steven (1993). The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Joan (1996). Speaking Up For Corpses. In Screen Violence. Karl French. Ed. (196–204). London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Sobchack, Vivian (1987). Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. Spoto, Donald (1984). The Dark Side of the Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Ballantine. Stam, Robert, Burgoyne, Robert and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (1992). New Vocabularies of Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge. Stelarc (1999). “Parasite Visions – Alternate, Intimate and Involuntary Experiences,” Body& Society, 5(2–3): 117–127. Tasker, Yvonne (1993) Spectacular Bodies – Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London and New York: Rout ledge. Truffaut, François (1967). Hitchcock/Truffaut. New York: Simon and Schuster. Vojkovic, Sasha (2001). Subjectivity in New Hollywood Cinema: Fathers, Sons and Other Ghosts. Amsterdam: PhD University of Amsterdam. Žižek, Slavoj (1991). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Massachusetts, Cambridge and London: MIT. Žižek, Slavoj. Ed. (1992). Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan… but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London and New York: Verso.

8

On the Possibilities of Political Art: How Žižek Misreads Deleuze and Lacan Robert Samuels

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eading Savoj Žižek’s Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, we gain insight on why and how so many scholars have misread Deleuze’s film theory. I will argue that there is an inherent logic and system to Deleuze’s theory, and this logic is Lacanian. Moreover, contemporary readers, like Žižek, continue to ignore Deleuze’s system, and instead, they simply sample and remix fragments of his work in order to locate predetermined ideologies. Furthermore, I read Žižek’s misreading of Deleuze as paradigmatic of the post-postmodern backlash against progressive social movements, social construction, and minority discourses. In turn, by illustrating Žižek’s repression of the political aspects of Deleuze’s film theory, I will elaborate a theory of political cinema. Thus, I will use Žižek’s misreading of Deleuze and Lacan to show how contemporary film theory is dominated by the desire to turn to the socio-symbolic order only to repress the significance of social mediation. Strategies of Misreading To see how Žižek misreads Deleuze, we can look at Žižek’s discussion of Robert Altman, which not only ignores the fact that Deleuze has analyzed the director in question, but also that Žižek’s analysis is in complete opposition to Deleuze’s own commentary. For example, near the start of his book, Žižek posits that Altman is one of the contemporary

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filmmakers “who lends himself ideally to a Deleuzian reading” because films like Short Cuts and Nashville reveal how contingent encounters produce “meaningless machanic shocks, encounters, and impersonal intensities that precede the level of social meaning” (6). This stress on the lack of social meaning in Altman’s films is followed by an examination of Nashville, where Žižek refers to Brian Massumi’s argument that songs in the film display the autonomy of affect, and that “we totally misread Nashville if we locate the songs within the global horizon of the ironicocritical description of the vacuity and ritualized commercial alienation of the universe of American country music” (6). In other words, Žižek turns to another critic’s work (Massumi) in order to imagine how Deleuze would read this particular film, and it just so happens that the imagined Deluzian interpretation matches Žižek’s own theory stressing emotion and enjoyment over social signification. What Žižek’s analysis does not mention is that in his book Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze writes about Nashville in the following manner: “Altman’s film Nashville fully grasps this operation which doubles the city with all the clichés it produces and divides in two the clichés themselves” (210). In other words, instead of arguing that Altman’s films represent the dominance of affect over social meaning, Deleuze posits that the city Nashville circulates and critiques symbolic clichés. Moreover, Deleuze continues by arguing that this depiction of clichés in Altman’s films is a central aspect of the transition from the classical films based on the movement-image to the new form of film introduced after World War II. In other words, Nashville is used to examine the central thesis of Deleuze’s first book on film, which is that the transition away from the movementimage was caused in part by the downfall of the “American Dream”; however, to understand this idea, one has to first understand Deleuze’s notion of the movement-image and his particular way of examining film. Yet, Žižek appears to be either uninterested or unaware of Deleuze’s actual texts and theories, and so he can write several pages on Deleuze’s film theory without counsulting Deleuze’s actual texts. While one could argue that this is only a minor problem, I posit that this form of secondary misreading represents a very revealing aspect of contemporary culture and scholarship. Furthermore, while Deleuze himself developed a theory of interpretation that tried to go behind the back of authors in order to give birth to a new creature, Deleuze’s own writings on philosophers like Bergson and Nietzsche spend a great deal of time repeating and acknowledging the arguments of the original text. To restate my case against Žižek’s reading of Deleuze’s film theory, I am arguing that Žižek simply ignores Deleuze’s own theory and system in order to refind his own theory, and this secondary reading involves the

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emptying out of content from cultural analysis so that one can concentrate on the pure form and experience of nonsignifying elements. In my book New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernity (2010), I argued that Žižek’s general interpretative strategy is to reduce most matters to an opposition between social signification and real enjoyment, and in this binary, meaningless enjoyment is privileged over social meaning. For example, Žižek divides Lacan’s work into the bad Early Lacan of the Symbolic and the good Late Lacan of the Real. Not only does this division leave out the importance of the Imaginary, but it imposes a linear and progressive reading onto a system that is synchronic and interconnected. Moreover, Žižek often confuses the pre-Symbolic and the postSymbolic Real, and the result of this confusion is that the original Real, which is defined by its resistance to symbolization becomes the effect of the Symbolic order. For example, nature as part of the Real is turned into a product that is determined by the Symbolic social order as an internal limit. Thus, we see nature as something that society cannot completely colonize; yet, this resistant aspect of nature is itself a result of a symbolic definition. To be precise, societies produce their own outsides and limits as an element of social control. One way of thinking about Lacan’s conception of the pre-Symbolic Real is through his use of Sartre’s claim in Being and Nothingness that the real is always where it is, and, therefore, it is never missing or out of place. In his early works, Lacan refers to Sartre’s in order to argue that loss and absence are introduced into the Real only through the Symbolic order of language and symbolization. Thus, a book is missing from its place in a library only because its symbolic place has been marked and catalogued; however, the book in the Real is wherever it currently resides. In Lacan’s temporal logic, this natural Real has to be distinguished from the Real that is produced from within the socio-Symbolic order, but Žižek often fails to make this distinction. Understanding Deleuze’s System The reason why Žižek’s confusion of these categories is so important to our understanding of a Deleuzean film theory is that Deleuze himself relies on a careful distinction among several layers of reality and experience. For instance, his concept of the movement-image is based on the distinctions among affects, actions, and mental relations. In this structure, affects belong to what the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called Firstness, and they are equivalent to Lacan’s notion of the Real, while action or Secondness relates to the Imaginary duality of an

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object and a reaction to an object. This combination of Lacan and Peirce is articulated in Cinema 1 by Deleuze in the following manner: “After distinguishing between affection and action, which he calls Firstness and Secondness, Peirce added a third kind of image: the ‘mental’ or Thirdness. The point of Thirdness was a term that referred to a second term through the intermediary of another term or terms. The third instance appears in signification, law or relation” (197). This use of Peirce to define the basic concepts of cinema reveals how at the foundation of Deleuzian film theory, we find a coherent and consistent system, and if one simply chooses to ignore this system, one is no longer really reading Deleuze. Furthermore, there can be no Deleuzian film theory without an active engagement with the system that Deleuze carefully constructs. While Žižek ignores Deleuze’s logic, it is important for us to first understand the basic foundations of Deleuze’s theory of cinema, and it is also essential to note the Lacanian nature of the Deleuze’s conceptual architecture. For example, in defining the relations among Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, Deleuze turns to the Marx Brothers to posit that the silent Harpo represents Firstness because he is determined by his affects, and he presents the pure affect-image (199). Likewise, Chico represents the Secondness of the action-image since “it is he who takes on action, the initiative, the duel with the milieu, the strategy of effort and resistance” (199). Finally, Deleuze ties Groucho to the presence of Thirdness: “Groucho is the three, the man of interpretations, of symbolic acts and abstract relations” (199). This move from affect to action to mental relation determines the unfolding of Deleuze’s first film book, which also traces the history of Western cinema from its inception to late Hitchcock. Moreover, following Lacan’s temporarl logic, Firstness represents the pre-Symbolic Real, while Secondness constitutes the duality of the Imaginary, and Thirdness stands for the ternary nature of the Symbolic order. There is thus a certain logical temporality to Deleuze’s basic film categories, and this logic is articulated clearly in Deleuze’s “How Do We Recognize Structuralism.” In this text from 1967, Deleuze shows himself at his most Lacanian and Peircian: “We can enumerate the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic: 1, 2, 3 . . . For the real in itself is not separable from a certain ideal of unification or of totalization: the real tends toward one, it is one in its ‘truth.’ As soon as we see two in ‘one,’ as soon as we start to duplicate, the imaginary appears in person” (260–261). While Peirce is not mentioned in this analysis, it is clear that Deleuze is combining Lacan with Peirce in order to determine a temporal logical pointing to the symbolic nature of social relations: “The first discovery of structuralism, however, is the discovery and recognition of a third order, a third reign: that of the symbolic. The refusal to confuse the symbolic with the imaginary, as much as with the real,

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constitutes the first dimension of structuralism” (260). According to Deleuze, there is a logical movement from the Real to the Imaginary and to the Symbolic, and this movement is understood through Peirce’s categories and Lacan’s central concepts. By the time Deleuze publishes Cinema 1 in 1983, he has purged his work of most references to Lacan, but it is clear that he maintains Lacan’s temporal logic. Moreover, while Žižek would like to divide Deleuze into the good Deleuze of The Logic of Sense versus the bad Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus (xi), it is clear that Deleuze maintains a consistent system that Žižek simply ignores or represses. In contrast to Žižek’s mis-appropriations, I argue that if we do want to stay faithful to Deleuze’s logic, then, it is necessary to employ his central concepts and to understand how they fit into his more general system. The Logic of the Movement-Image Returning to the differentiations among affect-images, action-images, and mental-images, we not only understand how perception works in film production and consumption, but also gain a better sense of the logical history of cinema. In fact, Deleuze’s central historical claim is that the movement-image dominated film until World War II, and as a result of the war and the crisis in modernity, the movement-image was undermined and replaced by the time-image in the works of directors like Rossillini, Fellini, Godard, and Antonioni. Moreover, his second cinema book, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, continues Deleuze’s analysis of what happens after the movement-image, and it is essential to understand that Deleuze combines philosophy with social history in order to develop a temporal logic for the cinema. In his Preface to the English edition of Cinema 1, Deleuze states: “Everything perhaps suddenly appears in a shattering of the sensorymotor schema: this schema, which had linked perceptions, affections, and actions, does not enter into a profound crisis without the general regime of the image being changed” (ix). According to Deleuze’s logic, World War II caused such a profound crisis in modernity that the relations among perceptions, actions, and affects were seriously rearranged, and time became a new variable that replaced space with a fourth dimension. Not only does this concern for time make Deleuze consider Einstein’s theory of relativity, but the issue of temporality is a major emphasis for his whole philosophical project, and the central thinker of time for Deleuze is Henri Bergson. Once again while Žižek seems to either ignore or repress Bergson’s influence on Deleuze, we will see that one can understand little of Deleuze’s work if one does not follow how he reads Bergson.

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Bergsonian Time Throughout his work, Deleuze returns to Bergson’s notion that the past coexists with the present and that we are affected by virtual representations that have yet to be actualized. In fact, Cinema 1 opens with a chapter called “Theses on Movement: First Commentary on Bergson” where Deleuze argues that film combines instantaneous sections or images with the impersonal movement of images in time (1). This dialectic between the frame and the perception of movement is resolved by Deleuze through his conception of the movement-image. From this perspective, the Real or Firstness of film is determined by the material reality of the image: “This in-itself of the image is matter: not something behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement” (59). Since the Real is whatever it is and knows no sense of lack or loss, we see that on a primary level, film presents the Realness of the image and the fact that filmic images are always moving. Moreover, for Deleuze, the basic property of cinema is light, and it is the diffusion of light that combines movement and images (60). In drawing from Bergson’s notion that light is propagated without loss or resistance, Deleuze is able to combine materialism with idealism and argue that with the movement-image, “there are not yet bodies or rigid lines, but only lines or figures of light” (60). Cinema on its most fundamental level allows for a pure perception of space and time, and instead of seeing light as coming from consciousness, cinema sees light as something already present in things themselves (60). Moreover, for Deleuze, the Real is defined by a plane of immanence where a “collection of lines or figures of light” produces a “series of blocs of space-time” (61). In other words, Deleuze wants to start his film theory by beginning with a notion of the pure materiality of the image and movement before consciousness or action interrupts the primal flow of light. What then blocks the flow of light in a second logical time is an interval separating actions and reactions (61). In his book on Bergson, Deleuze stresses how this interval defines the human subject and allows for a selection of perceptions; in fact, Deleuze calls this gap between reality and consciousness the “cerebral interval,” and in Cinema 1, the process of framing is equated with the interval since film allows one to select and isolate particular actions (62). According to Deleuze, in film, all actions become reactions, and the initial sensation is separated from a delayed action. In turn, instead of light being propagated in all directions, it comes up against an obstacle (the screen), which in turn constitutes an Imaginary dual relation of Secondness (62). In fact, Deleuze posits that “an image reflected by a living image is precisely what we call perception” (62). Since there is always

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delay between a perception and our awareness of a perception, and this delay allows for the filtering and selection of particular sensations, perception itself is never part of the Real and always represents a dual nature or Imaginary relation. Furthermore, due to the interval, the subject is defined as the gap between the cause (sensation, action) and effect (perception, reaction), and this notion of the subject as gap or interval follows Lacan’s idea that the subject of the unconscious is a gap or a hole. This dialectic between light and vision closely follows Lacan’s discussion of photography in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (105–110). In this seminar, Lacan presents a diagram of two interacting triangles, and at one end, he puts the source of light and the gaze, and at the other end, we find the subject of representation. Part of this structure shows how the screen functions to block light, while the subject becomes an object of the gaze placed in the position of the Other. Lacan uses this structure to argue that the subject becomes an object through being photo-graphed, and in this dialectic, the visual quest for Imaginary mastery is uprooted by the fact that the subject is looked at from multiple points of light. Like Deleuze’s distinction between the Firstness of light and the Secondness of subjective perception, Lacan seeks to account for the secondary nature of our perceptions. For Deleuze and Lacan, perception is, therefore, possible only because there is an interval between the Real and our perceptions of the Real, and this gap does follow Žižek’s constant reference to Hegel’s and Schelling’s notion that the subject must first remove himself from the world and enter into the night or darkness in order to develop consciousness (75). However, it is clear from Deleuze’s analysis that unlike Hegel and Žižek, this interval is both neural and Imaginary. Moreover, since the subject of consciousness originates through a gap or interval, consciousness itself is considered to be “indeterminant” and part of an “acentered universe of movement-images” (62). This decentering of the subject, which we also find in Lacan, is according to Deleuze avoided by the ego because we inject our needs and interests into the interval between sensations and perceptions: “[W]e perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us a function of our needs” (63). Form this perspective, subjectivity is “subtractive” and perception is reductive (63). How Films Perceive After establishing how natural perception works, Deleuze makes a surprising turn and argues that cinema does not follow natural perceptions because the mobility of the camera and the variability of its framings

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allow “it to restore vast acentered and deframed zones” (64). Film is then revolutionary because it gives us access to the primal regime of the movement-image and allows us to experience pure sensations before subjective reduction and selection. At the same time, cinema also exposes how this acentered perceptual universe (the Firstness of the Real) is converted by consciousness (Secondness) and selective framing. Through the use of editing and montage, cinema reveals the selective nature of subjective framing, while it depicts the intervals between actions and reactions. In another surprising move, Deleuze posits that between the Firstness of the sensation and the Secondness of the action-image, we find affection: “Affection is what occupies the interval, what occupies it without filling it in or filling it up. It surges in the center of indetermination, that is to say in the subject, between a perception which is troubling in certain respects and a hesitant action” (65). For example, a close-up of a face, what is often called the emotion shot, represents the gap between action and reaction. From this perspective, affect is the proof of the subjective and the cerebral, and the affection-image reveals that we have selected some of our organs to receive perceptions from a point of immobility, while other organs are liberated for action (65). Humans are in this sense divided between reception and reaction, and the subject is the split between these two primary activities. Deleuze affirms that for Bergson, an affection is a motor effort placed on an immobilized receptive organ (66). In other terms, affect represents a reversal of the normal movement from reception to action, and it is in the face, where we find the immobilized organs registering the movements of the affections (66). However, before Deleuze elaborates on the role of affect in cinema and subjectivity, he argues that some filmmakers have been able to remove subjectivity by presenting a pure acentered universe. In looking at Beckett’s Film with Buster Keaton, Deleuze asks how “we can rid ourselves of ourselves, and demolish ourselves” so that we can enter the “primary regime of variation” where an acentered purity is “untroubled by any centre of indetermination” (66). What Deleuze seeks in certain films is the absence of a privileged image or subjectivity and the presence of a purely objective perception of images as they exist in relation to each other in all of their facets and parts (76). It is in what he calls liquid perception or the “cine-eye” that he first locates the possibility of a cinema where subjective subtraction is itself subtracted (80). What cinema can do, and what the human eye cannot accomplish, is to rid itself from a central point of view. Here the mobility of the camera is opposed to the immobility of the human eye, and it is this mobility that opens up the possibility to be liberated from a privileged image (81). From this perspective, montage and film editing allow cinema to transcend the limitations of the human eye

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and consciousness and enter into a realm of universal variation and interaction (81). Here objectivity is constructed, and the Real is encountered through artificial means. For Deleuze, this camera eye is an eye of matter no longer subjected to time, and instead of the interval existing in the subject, it now exists in matter. While the perception-image concentrates on re-presenting the Real of pure materiality, the affection-image represents the subject being caught between the Real and the Imaginary. For instance, Deleuze argues that the close-up of the face abstracts the image from space and time by focusing our attention on the pure affection of the image/subject (96). Yet, Deleuze is quick to mention that once an affect is located in time and space, it enters into the dual world of the action-image: “that is to say they are actualized in particular state of things, determinant space-time, geographical and historical milieux, collective agents or individual agents” (98). In order for an affect, then, to maintain its Firstness, it must be experienced as something in itself without reference to anything else, and it must be presented as something new, yet eternal (98). In this sense, the Real of affects are virtual for Deleuze, and once they become actualized, they enter the realm of Secondness and become tied to spatial and temporal determinations. This conception of affects allows Deleuze to argue that affections are fundamentally impersonal and distinct from “any individuated state of things” (98). In Bergman’s Persona, Deleuze locates the focus on the face in closeups as an effort to separate affects from individuals and to present people without defined social roles or efforts to communicate: “The close-up has merely pushed the face to the regions where the principle of individuation no longer holds sway” (100). For Deleuze, it is necessary to focus on these moments of pure affect in order to define how individuation comes into being. Thus, he argues that in Kafka’s works, modern technologies are split in two: on the one hand, we have the technologies leading to communication that serve to dominate space and time, and, on the other hand, we find the expressions that summon phantoms and affects no longer coordinated in time and space. Deleuze adds that the former order leads to the military and translation of people into social puppets, while the latter allows for the void to enter subjectivity (100–101). Deleuze summarizes the logic of his first two principal concepts in the following way: “We must always distinguish power-qualities in themselves, as expressed by a face, faces or their equivalents (affection-image of Firstness) and these same power-qualities as actualized in a state of things, in a determinant space-time (action-image of secondness)” (106). The foundation of a Deleuzian film theory would have to start with a recognition of these two very different vectors; the one pointing to the actualization of perceptions and individuals in time and space, and the other

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pointing to the pure perception of affects divorced from individuals and the effort to communicate. Furthermore, the Firstness of the Real of cinema appears in what Deleuze calls the “any-space-whatever” (109), which is a singular space that has lost its homogeneity and can be defined as “a space of virtual conjunctions” (109). The End of the Movement-Image and the American Dream To understand this notion of the virtual, we can return to Žižek’s reading of the songs within Altman’s Nashville. On the one hand, the film does isolate the Firstness of pure affect and a resistance to communication through the repetition of meaningless songs, and yet, this pure affect is placed within a defined historical and social context. Nashville then constitutes a constant dual between the affection-image and the action-image, and this duality is itself placed in a series of mental relations that mediate the affects and actions. To understand this third level of movementimages (mental-images), we need to turn to Deleuze’s analysis of Peirce’s Thirdness: “[T]hirdness gives birth not to actions but to ‘acts’ which necessarily contain the symbolic element of law (giving, exchanging); not to perception, but to interpretations” (197). This stress on symbolic mediation and social relations pushes Deleuze to say that in Hitchcock, actions are always done for someone else, and so every action is always an exchange and an interpretation (200–201). Furthermore, Deleuze adds that Hitchcock usually considers three parties, the director, the film, and the public (202). It is then the spectator who always knows the relations in the film, and in this way, the spectator’s expectations and interpretation are an essential part of the film itself. While Hitchcock represents the actualization of the movement-image and the introduction of the mental-image as the third term completing the classic film sign, for Deleuze, Hitchcock’s work also signals the undoing of the movement-image and the fragmentation of Western culture after World War II. In fact, after discussing Hitchcock’s work as the transitional point between the movement-image and the time-image, he asks what maintains a world after it loses totality and linkage, and his answer is clichés (208). To explain this fourth dimension of film after affects, actions, and relations, Deleuze turns to Nashville: “[T]he city locations are redoubled by the images to which they give rise—photos, recordings, television—and it is in an old song that the characters are finally brought together. The power of a sound cliché, a little song, is asserted in Altman’s A Perfect Couple” (209). Instead of, as Žižek argues, songs playing the role of pure affect or meaningless enjoyment, Deleuze shows how, they within the context of

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Nashville present a reflection on clichés and the failure of social cohesion: “It is a crisis of both the action-image and the American Dream” (210). By linking the crisis of the action-image to the fall of the American dream, Deleuze combines a concern with social history with an emphasis on subjectivity and perception. In this historical version of phenomenology, our perceptual processes are tied to social conditions, and film becomes a place where the dialectic between the Real and the Symbolic is presented. Deleuze adds that while film is itself a producer of clichés, certain directors are able to use clichés to explore other clichés, and yet he is also aware that “the rage against clichés does not lead to much if it is content only to parody them; maltreated, mutilated, destroyed, a cliché is not slow to reborn from its ashes” (211). The dead end of what is often called postmodern culture is that it is condemned to only parody the clichés that it recirculates; thus media about media and consciousness about consciousness can never escape from the trap of reflexivity. Still, Deleuze posits that this post-Hichtcockian reflection on clichés is not the only alternative, and that after World War II, we find in Germany, France, and Italy an attempt to start cinema again outside of the American tradition (211–212). In the development of a new type of filmmaking, the elliptical and the disorganized were affirmed in order to call into question the dominance of the action-image. For example, in Fellini we begin to lose track of how events are related and why particular actions are significant (212). Likewise, in Antonioni, film locations start to lose their specific significance as they enter into the anyplace whatsoever. The New Wave against the Action-Image In the case of the New Wave in France, Deleuze emphasizes the role of meaningless journeys where “the voyage is freed from the spaciotemporal coordinates” (213). In this depiction of a transitional society, we see the emergence of a “new pure present” where characters seem unaffected by what happens to them (213). Deleuze also stresses that in these French films, there is a proliferation of sensory-motor disturbances and a slowing down of time (213). As a direct attack on the American action-image, Eurpean “art” films reveal that “Under this power of the false all images become clichés, sometimes because their clumsiness is shown, sometimes because their apparent perfection is attacked” (214). Deleuze reveals here the true political character of what we can call postmodern or Late Modernist cinema, which took on the growing dominance of American cultural capitalism by deconstructing the foundations of the action-image. Thus, near the end of his first cinema book, Deleuze asks what an image

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can be that would not be a cliché (214). For him, this is clearly a political and philosophical question that needs to be answered. It is then the task of the second cinema book to answer this question and provide the grounds for a truly political cinema. On the Possibility of a Political Cinema The preface to Cinema 2 begins by tracing two historical movements; the first describes the philosophical revolution of reversing the subordination of time to movement, while the second concerns the transition from the classical cinema’s stress on the movement-image to the post–World War II emphasis on the time-image (xi). In making this correlation between the history of philosophy and the history of film, Deleuze is able to equate the temporal logic of cinema with that of philosophy. From this perspective, there is little difference between film theory and philosophical analysis, and both areas of culture are tasked with combining historical analysis, scientific understanding, and aesthetic categorization. This interdisciplinary approach to film can be quite taxing for the reader who is used to the Kantian distinction among foundational philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics. Moreover, while a contemporary thinker like Žižek appears to follow this interdisciplinary approach, it is clear that he does not derive his analysis from an integrated system or philosophy. In other words, contemporary thinkers often suffer from a lack of systematic thinking, and the result is often a fragmentary form of analysis that does not hold onto any sense of philosophical and historical consistency. One reason why Žižek misreads Deleuze, then, is that Žižek does not understand or value Deleuze’s systematic approach, and once a reader lets go of the author’s system, one can make an author say almost anything. However, before we get back to the consequences of Žižek’s misreadings, we should first turn to the logic of Cinema 2 that follows the logic of Cinema 1 and begins with an analysis of what happens after the fall of the American movement-image. Deleuze’s first observation on this point is that after World War II, Europe becomes dominated by “situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe” (xi). We can call this failure of knowledge “postmodern” because it represents a countermovement to the modern stress on knowledge and the mapping of space. Deleuze’s postmodernity, then, is not the consumption and parodying of clichés; rather, before the dominance of a self-reflexive media culture, we find the emergence of a political cinema dedicated to showing the discontinuities of perception and social relations. Deleuze’s central argument

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here is that the first result of the break-up of the movement-image is the emergence of time on the surface of the screen (xi). Not only is time to be shown to be “out of joint,” but the continuity of images in films is undermined by “irrational cuts.” Through the presentation of missed encounters, fragmentary images, and thematic disruptions, we see the disuniting of perception, action, and thought in post–World War II cinema (1). In this structure, the actor’s actions no longer lead to a resolution; instead, “the character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs, and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of response or action” (3). From Deleuze’s perspective, in postmodern cinema, the audience identifies with the character, but the character on the screen is immobilized and subjected to sounds and images that appear to be displaced in time. Deleuze adds that in the classical cinema of the action-image, objects and settings always fit the demands of the situation, but in postmodern film, “objects and settings take on an autonomous material reality which gives them and importance in themselves” (4). This break with a functional realism allows directors to experiment with sounds and images that no longer have to serve the plot or character development. For Deleuze, the result of this new aesthetic is that “it is no longer a motor extension which is established, but rather a dreamlike connection through the intermediary of liberated sense organs” (4). Here, the cultural revolution that will take off in the 1960s is shown to have some of its roots in an aesthetic movement motivated out of historical, philosophical, perceptual, and political concerns. Not only do people desire to be liberated from constraining structures, but according to Deleuze’s theory, our senses seek to be liberated from their immobilized roles and situations. Therefore, in post–World War II Italian cinema, Deleuze finds constant disruptions of time and place; in the case of many of Antonioni’s movies, subjects are placed in dehumanized landscapes and empty places that absorb the character into the geographical location, while in many of Fellini’s films, not only does reality turn into a spectacle, but subjects are invaded by multiple temporalities and pasts (5). In this sense, Neo-Realism is tied to an aesthetic of disruption, and the concentration on the trip or the stream of consciousness in postmodern film shows that the aesthetics match what is often called late Modernism. Just as in Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf, the dominance of a subjective view is coupled with a loss of intentional control; what we find in postmodern film is the desire to match form with content. Thus, instead of simply describing the loss of subjective and cultural unity in traditional narrative order, the postmodern filmmakers and the late modernist writers experiment with form and present their material in a disruptive fashion.

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Deleuze posits that these experiments in form result in an aesthetic and politics where traditional cultural and philosophical oppositions are undermined: “We run in fact into a principle of indetermination, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask” (7). In this passage, Deleuze points to the central political problem facing postmodern art: while art after modernity opens up possibilities and liberates us from modern restrictions, it can also undermine our ability to take on a stable perspective with certainty and predictability. Furthermore, in postpostmodern culture and politics, this merging of the real and the imaginary will be used to promote imaginary solutions to real social problems. As Deleuze posits, already with Fellini, the formation of a spectacle culture is developed, and yet Fellini’s spectacles are disruptive, while contemporary pos-postmodern productions represent seamless combinations of fact and fiction. This difference between disruptive and nondisruptive aesthetics can be best understood by looking at the work of Jean-Luc Godard and his ability to isolate sounds and images from their functional roles in plot and character development. For instance, in the summary of Godard’s Made in USA, we are introduced to “a witness providing us with a series of reports with neither a conclusion nor logical connection . . . without really effective reactions” (9–10). It is hard to image a mass audience sitting through this type of structure, and yet, postmodern filmmakers in Europe did present a disruptive art form for a nonelite audience. As Deleuze highlights, Godard’s disruptive art not only presented itself through stuttering speakers, coughing protagonists, and inhibited actions, but this aesthetic and political cinema sought to decompose and not compose fantasies and realities (10). By isolating sounds and images from the plot, Godard was able to attack the action-image and the ideology of closure that maintained the classical American film. As Deleuze insists, the mutations in Godard’s films represent the mutation of European culture after World War II, and this matching of form and content makes cinema political (19). By presenting the intolerable and the unpleasant, postmodern film tried to disrupt our normal way of turning away from negative stimuli: “We have schemata for turning away when it is too unpleasant, for prompting resignation when it is terrible and for assimilating when it is too beautiful” (20). Deleuze continues his text by insisting that clichés play the central role of allowing us to use our sensory-motor system to deny the unpleasant and disruptive: “We perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what is in our interests to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands. We therefore normally only perceive clichés” (20). Since film produces and

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circulates clichés, it tends to reinforce our economic, ideological, and psychological interests, and yet political art can challenge these interests by getting us to encounter the unpleasant, while we witness the undoing of the action-image: “But, if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in unjustifiable character” (20). In this jamming of our sensory-motor schemata, Deleuze posits the possibility of a politics of the image and an attention to the materiality of representation. In turning to his conception of the time-image, Deleuze focuses on how the disruption of the linearity of the movement-image (and the sensorymotor schemata) allows for a Bergsonian coexistence of multiple temporalities. Not only does the past coexist with the present, but multiple virtual pasts are put into a circuit through the process of montage and editing (48). However, Deleuze reminds us that we have to distinguish between the conservative way the action-image classical film places flashbacks into the linear narrrative of a movie, and the way postmodern films disrupt narrative closure by presenting multiple pasts: “In short, it is not the recollection-image or attentive recognition which gives us the proper equivalent of the optical-sound image, it is rather the disturbance of memory and the failures of recognition” (55). What Deleuze then seeks out in the timeimage is the disruptions of consciousness by memory and the inability of the subject to control mental representations. Thus, like Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce, disruptive postmodern cinema invokes multiple pasts not to show the subject’s mastery of time, but rather, the intentional control of the psychological ego is undermined by the intrusion of the past. Through the cinematic use of dreams, fantasies, delusions, and hallucinations, European cinema showed how “a character finds himself prey to visual and sound sensations . . . which have lost their motor extension” (55). In upsetting the classical motor-image structure, these films present images that float outside of time, and they, therefore, take on the structure of the unconscious. Not only do these films present a lack of negation and temporal order like dreams, in postmodern cinema, abstract ideas are rendered concrete as mental images are translated back into material perceptions. While Deleuze appears to be approaching a psychoanalytic theory of the cinema, he is quick to distinguish his project from what he sees as the reductive intentions of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Even as Deleuze affirms the Freudian and Lacanian notion that the images in dreams all represent other images and, therefore, every image is actually a symbol of displacement or substitution, Deleuze uses Bergson to distance himself from psychoanalysis because he sees classical analysis as centered on the motor-image and the translation of unconscious impulses into

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static representations. From this perspective, Deleuze goes against Žižek’s desire to oppose the good Deleuze of pure philosophy to the bad Deleuze of political, antipsychoanalytic Anti-Oedipus. It is clear that Deleuze’s philosophical work is political and psychoanalytic, but Deleuze’s version of psychoanalysis is highly critical of the imposition of set structures like the Oedipus complex. Deleuze’s Virtual Realities Not only does Deleuze differentiate himself from classical psychoanalysis by rejecting any set interpretation of dream images, but he also adds a Marxism component to film theory and philosophy by identifying time with money. From this perspective, since cinema must always pay for its time with money, and time has been equated with money in modern culture, the central drama of the time-image is the battle between images and money (78). Deleuze posits that cinema gives images for money and gives time for images, and in this structure an endless circuit is generated out of an impossible exchange. This dissymmetry between images and money (time) is doubled by the coexistence of real and virtual images since the virtual images represent the presence of the past in the present (79). In using Bergson’s theory of the deja-vu, Deleuze posits that this perceptual distortion actually provides the truth of our relation to time, which is that as we remember the present, we also coexist with the past. To prove this point, he cites the following passage from Bergson: “Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other” (79). This conception of the virtual is at odds with Žižek’s pithy summarization of Deleuze’s theory: “What matters to Deleuze is not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual (which, in Lacanian terms, is the Real)” (3). If for Lacan, the Real means that which is impossible to symbolize, then clearly what Deleuze is describing as the virtual has no relation to the Lacanian Real. In contrast to Žižek, Deleuze turns to the virtual and the unconscious in order to locate memory systems represented through a network of images, and while these images may not be actualized or conscious, they act as a symbolic structure of mental associations. To understand the virtual in Deleuze, it is important to comprehend his view of structuralism and the Symbolic order. For example, in his text on structuralism, he posits that symbolic structures have no relation with a sensible form or an intelligible essence; instead, structural elements are differential relations determined by topological locations (261). From this perspective, the Symbolic order is virtual, and it is actualized only when

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particular people or objects fill predetermined positions and functions. As Lacan argues, we are born into a world that is already structured by symbolic relations and differences, and so the subject affirms his or her position by being subjected to a place within the predetermined social structure. In fact, it is Lacan’s structuralism that Žižek rejects when he opposes the bad Early Lacan of the Symbolic to the good Late Lacan of the Real. In turn, Žižek’s desire to equate Deleuze’s notion of the virtual with the Lacanian Real can be seen as the result of his dismissal of Deleuze’s understanding of the Symbolic order. Lacan’s and Deleuze’s Conceptual Structuralism If we do grasp that for Deleuze the virtual is the Symbolic, and the Symbolic represents the Thirdness of social structures, we can also affirm that Deleuze’s film theory is Lacanian because both theories share the same structuralist understanding of the Symbolic. This closeness between Lacan and Deleuze can be located at the end of Cinema 2, where Deleuze posits that “a theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others” (3). Just as Deleuze sees Hitchcock as presenting mental relations as the culmination of the action-image, he posits that the virtual network of interdisciplinary concepts determines the role of film theory. Like Lacan, Deleuze asks what the fundamental concepts are that determine a domain and how these concepts relate to other conceptual areas. In turn, each concept must be placed within a differential network, and thus, a concept means nothing in itself and can be understood only through its relation to other concepts. The question then of what a Deleuzian or Lacanian film theory would look like must be understood by the interaction between each thinker’s central concepts and the conceptual relations that are generated out of individual films and film history. While Lacan and Deleuze often share a similar conceptual framework, a secondary interpreter like Žižek can impose his own meanings because he simply rejects or neglects the predetermined conceptual system. Moreover, this rejection of the symbolic structure is symptomatic of our post-postmodern culture where automation leads to a heightened sense of individual autonomy. I have called this new cultural period “automodernity” not only to distinguish it from postmodernity, but also to show how the seemingly seamless combination of automation and autonomy represses social and symbolic mediation as it hides the disruptive aspects of postmodern culture.

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Žižek’s Automodernism versus Deleuze’s Postmodern Politics In seeing Žižek as an automodern philosopher, I posit that his rejection of the postmodern is based on four unrelated strategies: (1) he wants to differentiate his theories and intellectual product from what is often called postmodernism, post-structuralism, and post-Marxism; (2) he rejects the new social movements based on minority rights in favor of a totalizing Marxist fight against global capitalism; (3) he affirms a Hegalian interpretation of Lacan that stresses the universal void of subjectivity; and (4) he provides intellectual entertainment by being politically incorrect. All of these four automodern components are clearly at play in Žižek’s misreading of Deleuze’s theory of the cinema, and just as the automodern subject rebels against minority rights and social determinism in order to affirm the power of the liberated individual, Žižek avoids dealing with the political dimensions of Deleuze’s work. A central aspect of Deleuze’s film theory that Žižek and other commentators have missed is his stress on how the disruptive nature of postmodern films is tied to the emergence of minority-based discourses: “The deathknell for becoming conscious was precisely the consciousness that there were no people, but always several peoples, an infinity of peoples, who remained to be united, or should not be united, in order for the problem to change. It is in this way that third world cinema is a cinema of minorities” (220). What then breaks up the classical action-image after World War II is not only the destructive nature of the war, but also the emergence of multiple minority-based movements calling into question the universality and equality of the modern world. One of the results of this postmodern emergence of minority discourses is that “private business immediately becomes public” (220). Here, Deleuze echoes the call of the women’s movement that the “personal is political,” and by calling for this recognition of the political foundation of everyday relations, we see how a structuralist interpretation of culture can lead to a call for collective action. Since structuralism tells us that society is ruled by symbolic relations and not by any natural or religious foundation, it becomes possible to imagine changing these symbolic social structures. In terms of film, Deleuze argues that the third world artist has to produce a new social utterance that breaks away from the dominant Symbolic order of the colonizer (221). The role of the postmodern speech-act is here posited as creating a people through the social construction of a new collective memory: “Not the myth of a past people, but the story-telling of the people to come. The speech-act must create itself as a foreign language in a dominant language, precisely in order to express an impossibility of living under domination” (223). Deleuze thus posits here two opposing functions of

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postmodern political cinema: on the one hand, it must disrupt our normal way of seeing the world through action-images and clichés, and, on the other hand, it must build a new collective voice. What the break-up of the action-image and the emergence of the postmodern time-image produce is the possibility of political art through the process of denaturalizing symbolic representations: “[I]nteractions caught at the point where they do not derive from pre-existing social structures are not the same as psychic actions and reactions, but are the correlate of speech-acts or silences, stripping the social of its naturalness, forming systems which are far from being in equilibrium or invent their own equilibrium” (227). Disruptive art, therefore, denaturalizes social relations and opens a space for new relations to be formed. In response to Deleuze’s combination of the breaking up of the actionimage and the promotion of a new collective voice forged out of the speech-acts of minority discourses, Žižek presents only the negative side of Deleuze’s discourse. For instance, after noting that Hitchcock plays a decisive role in Deleuze’s cinema theory, Žižek adds that the passage from the movement-image to the time-image shows that the “subject is excessively overwhelmed by the shock of the Real; the intrusion of the Real disturbs the unity of the action/reaction, the subject’s direct insertion into a reality in which he can simply (re)act as an engaged agent” (151). Instead of seeing how the postmodern experimentations with images and sound serve to denaturalize Symbolic social relations, Žižek focuses on how the intrusion of the Real renders the subject immobile and passive: “Overwhelmed by the Real, the subject is transformed into a passive spectator of himself and of the world” (151). While this stress on the passivity of the subject fits in well with Žižek’s theory of contemporary subjectivity, it is at odds with the way that Deleuze turns the seeing subject into an active agent of collective storytelling. Moreover, Žižek mistakenly argues that for Deleuze, Hitchcock represents the emergence of the time-image, while in fact, Deleuze posits Hitchcock as the culmination of the action-image. It is very telling that after Žižek himself misrepresents Deleuze’s theory, he discusses how certain film theorists tend to misrecognize what happens in Hitchcock’s films because of an “excessive subjective engagement” (152). According to Žižek, since the facts do not match the theory, the theorists invest the screen with their own “hallucinatory distortions” (152). Of course, it has been my argument that Žižek is often guilty of misreading Deleuze and other theorists in order to find proof of his own theories; furthermore, I have tied this type of misrepresentation to the dominance of secondary interpretations in our post-postmodern culture. If we look at what Deleuze actually says about Hitchcock, we find that his central argument is that films like Vertigo display the dominance of

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the mental-image and the idea that for Hitchcock, everything has be read on the level of a symbolic exchange. For example, the detective played by Jimmy Stewart desires a woman after he has been hired by another man to investigate that man’s wife. In this structure, the detective desires through the desire of another, and his actions must be read as a social exchange. However, when Žižek reads this same film, he does not stress the social mediation of individual desire; instead, he emphasizes how many of the images in the film represent a subjectivity without a subject or an organ without a body (153). In other terms, Žižek replaces the Symbolic realm of the mental-image with the acentered return to the presubjective Real. In stressing the Real over the Symbolic, Žižek is able to argue that what Deleuze locates in Hitchcock is the disruption of the Real disconnected from any type of social history or social context. Furthermore, Žižek posits that what political films should do is to present this return to the Real through the presence of a cinema-eye no longer tied to any subject: “This, precisely, is what revolutionary cinema should be doing: using the camera as a partial object, as an ‘eye’ torn from the subject and freely thrown around” (154). This theory of political cinema ignores Deleuze’s careful distinction between how classical film used a subtractive method to return to a presubjective vision, and how postmodern cinema uses disruptive techniques to denaturalize the Symbolic and open a space to articulate new collective speech-acts. Instead of locating political cinema in the social and Symbolic order of exchanges and mental relations, Žižek confuses the Real and the Imaginary as he excludes the Symbolic. For example, in another passage discussing Vertigo, he displaces Deleuze’s understanding of the social exchange with his own interpretation of the self-oriented gaze: “In Vertigo also Scottie has to accept that the fascinating spectacle of Madeleine, which he was secretly following, was staged for his gaze only” (158). This idea that the image of the woman was designed for only the main character’s gaze can serve as an example of how contemporary global consumer capitalism has been able to convince subjects that mass produced objects respond to individual desires. In other words, instead of seeing Hitchcock as an example of disruptive cinema, Žižek reads Vertigo as a metaphor for how ideology works today. As Althusser posited, ideology represents the imaginary resolution of social conflicts, and what we find in Žižek’s description of Vertigo is that even in the face of the decentering gaze placed in the field of the Other, the subject is able to personalize and internalize the potentially disruptive image. While Žižek is fond of locating the present of the traumatic Real in our lives, what his automodern texts actually do is to show how our contemporary culture is able to translate all disruptive social tensions into Imaginary structures where real sensations are subjected to individualizing

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perceptions. In fact, in the concluding sections of Cinema 2, Deleuze points to how the new cybernetic culture enables this type of Imaginary appropriation through the development of a new type of vision and information: “Power was diluted in an information network where ‘decisionmakers’ managed control, processing and stock across intersections of insomniacs and seers” (265). In this early anticipation of the logic of the Internet, Deleuze posits that as information spreads through decentralized networks, a new type of control society is born, and central to this new cultural formation is the transformation of the human and nature into pure data projected on screens: “And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a table, an opaque surface on which are inscribed ‘data,’ information replacing nature, and the braincity, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature” (265). The dehumanization of our world is here coupled with the development of a brain-city where information is presented on an opaque surface, and due to this type of data representation, subjects are given the Imaginary illusion that they control all aspects of the world. What most commentators of Deleuze’s work have missed is this historical and political consideration of media that pits the disruptive function of the pure speech-act against the reduction nature of computer-mediated information: “It is thus necessary to go beyond all of the pieces of spoken information; to extract from the pure speech-act, creative storytelling. The life or afterlife of cinema depends on its internal struggle with informatics” (270). Here, Deleuze posits that political art must now find a way to combat the dominance of information in our cyber cultures, and one of the central places for this confrontation is how images are produced and consumed. For example, in his description of the computerization of the filmic image, Deleuze critiques the way images are now being processed: “But, when the frame or the screen functions as instrument panel, printing or computing table, the image is constantly being cut into another image, being printed through a visible mesh, sliding over other images in an incessant stream of messages, and the shot itself is less like an eye than an overloaded brain endlessly absorbing information” (267). As the subject of automodernity becomes overwhelmed by the information and the gaze of the Other, the image and the eye become replaced by an interactive network that excludes the cerebral interval. In other terms, the incessant coupling of images produces a cultural information overload that prevents the opening of a space for social disruption and the formation of a collective speech-act: “Redemption, art beyond knowledge, is also creation beyond information” (270). By tying art to political revolution, Deleuze seeks to offer an alternative path to our media information culture.

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References Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement–Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1988). Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Thomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. ——— (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1998). “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” In The Two Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Guildford Press. Samuels, Robert (2010). New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmoderntiy: Automodernity from Žižek to Laclau. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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The Surplus Gaze of Legibility: Guilt, Ethics, and Out-of-Field in Deleuze, Lacan, and Žižek A. Kiarina Kordela

The question of the father isn’t how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn’t find any. The hypothesis of a common innocence. . . shared by father and son, is thus the worst of all hypotheses. In it, the father appears . . . as the man who demands only that the son submit because he himself is in submission to a dominant order in a situation from which there is no way out . . . . In short, it’s not Oedipus that produces neurosis; it is neurosis—that is, a desire that is already submissive and searching to communicate its own submission—that produces Oedipus. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, 10)

Overture We often hear today that the central difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis—which is all-too easily equated with Slavoj Žižek’s work— and Gilles Deleuze’s theory lies in their respective conceptions of lack and guilt.1 Patricia Pisters illustrates this difference by comparing Žižek’s and Deleuze’s readings of Hitchcock’s films: According to Žižek, the Lacanian/Hitchcockian subject is a guilty subject, always already guilty of wanting enjoyment, jouissance, which has its

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impossible origin in the Real. Here we see what Žižek meant by [Hitchcock’s] Jansenism based on guilt and God. (19)

By contrast, Deleuze sees the Hitchcock universe as a network of relations (the tapestry). There is no a priori guilt (no Catholicism or Jansenism); there is only an attempt to reason and to establish adequate relations that could improve life and increase the power to act. The subject’s desire is not based on negativity and lack . . . but it is a positive desire to make connections. (21)

Adopting as her premise that “the Lacanian subject . . . according to Žižek is the Hitchcockian subject” as read by Žižek, Pisters treats the Žižekian Hitchcockian subject as emblematic of Lacanian psychoanalysis (19). While “in early psychoanalysis, according to both Freud and Lacan, desire is based on lack, the absence of an original and imaginary wholeness, which is lost as soon as the subject enters society . . . the imaginary and the longing for the object of desire no longer haunt the late-Lacanian subject; instead it is haunted by the Real.” In late psychoanalysis, the subject’s “guilty (Jansenist) desire is based on a fundamental,” as well as “a-historical” and “transcendental . . . lack related not so much to the Imaginary but to the impossible and horrible Real, which imposes its gaze like a dangerous imprisoning web (the tapestry, according to Žižek)” (18–19). In Pisters’s account, the psychoanalytic subject of imaginary lack finds its destiny in the guilty “late-Lacanian” and Žižekian Hitchcockian subject. This reduction of the psychoanalytic subject to guilt is not unrelated to Pisters’s disregard of another and, I would argue, corollary central motif in Žižek’s approach to cinema. This concerns not guilt but what Žižek claims to represent the ethical position. As we shall see, the psychoanalytic subject is neither Pisters’s Žižekian subject of guilt nor Žižek’s own ethical subject. Nevertheless, Pisters’s account perspicaciously indicates that the decisive criterion in the constitution of any film theory is its conception of the ultimate cinematic gaze. Being organized around the opposition between two gazes—one imprisoning the subject in a web of guilt and another enabling liberating relations—Pisters’s account invites the question whether, in order to obtain insight into the cinematic gaze, it suffices to affirm that cinema establishes connections that rouse guilt or the power to act, and, further, whether the assumption that guilt is necessarily imprisoning while the power to act is always liberating, is justified. These questions, in turn, point to the overarching issue: What kind of connections does the cinematic gaze establish? I shall pursue this line of inquiry by engaging in a

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dialogue with Deleuze, Lacan, and Žižek, within which the two Žižekian approaches to cinema—the narrative of guilt and the claim to ethics—will serve as a foil for both the gaze and the relation between psychoanalysis and Deleuze. Hitchcockian Guilt, or, Relation As Žižek (1991) reminds us, “Rohmer and Chabrol” were the first to suggest that “the ‘transference of guilt’” is “the central motif of the Hitchcockian universe” (74; referring to Rohmer and Chabrol, 1979). The key term here is “transference,” that is, the dependence of Hitchcockian guilt on a network of relations in order to circulate. As Žižek (1991) writes, In Hitchcock’s films, murder is never simply an affair between a murderer and his victim; murder always implies a third party, a reference to a third person—the murderer kills for this third person, his act is inscribed in the framework of a symbolic exchange with him. (74)

On this, Žižek concurs with Deleuze (1991), who writes that “what matters is not who did the action” and, therefore, who is guilty, as is the case in “what Hitchcock calls with contempt the whodunit”; rather, what matters is “the relation in which the action and the one who did it are caught” (200). Hitchcockian guilt is the object of exchange through which “Hitchcock introduces the mental image into the cinema,” and thereby “he makes relation itself the object of [the] image” and instigates, against his intentions, “a crisis of the traditional image of the cinema” that would lead to the “time-image” of “Italian neo-realism, the French new wave,” and so forth (Deleuze, 1991, 203 and 205). This reminds us, first of all, that not all cinema is cinema of relations; the whodunit, for instance, and all the cinematography that, according to Deleuze’s criteria, can be classified as movement-image, are not. Second, Hitchcockian guilt as the ground of relation means that “if there are Christian themes in Hitchcock, beginning with original sin, it is because these themes have from the beginning posed the problem of relation, as the English logicians knew” (202). Or, as Žižek (1991) puts it, referring particularly to Hitchcock’s “great ‘trilogy of the transference of guilt’: Rope [1948], Strangers on a Train [1951], I Confess [1953],” in all three films, murder functions as a stake in an intersubjective logic of exchange, i.e., the murderer expects from the third party something in return for his act—recognition (in Rope), another murder (in Strangers on a Train), silence before the court of law (in I confess).

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The crucial point is, however, that this ‘transference of guilt’ does not concern some psychic interior, some repressed, disavowed desire . . . but quite the contrary a radically external network of intersubjective relations. The moment the subject finds himself at a certain place (or loses a certain place) in this network, he becomes guilty, although in his psychic interior he is totally innocent. (74)

This is why, as Deleuze (1991) writes, “it is therefore not sufficient to define Hitchcock’s schema by saying that an innocent man is accused of a crime that he has not committed (201),” for this statement misses that the essence in these themes is the problem of relation. If “Rohmer and Chabrol have analysed Hitchcock’s schema perfectly” it is because the criminal has always done his crime for another, the true criminal has done his crime for the innocent man who, whether we like it or not, is innocent no longer. In short the crime is inseparable from the operation by which the criminal has “exchanged” his crime, as in Strangers on a Train, or even “given” and “delivered up” his crime to the innocent, as in I Confess. One does not commit a crime in Hitchcock, one delivers it up, one gives it or one exchanges it . . . . The relation (the exchange, the gift, the rendering . . .) does not simply surround action, it penetrates it in advance and in all its parts, and transforms it into a necessarily symbolic act. (201)

That the act is “symbolic” means, as much for Lacan as for Deleuze, that “there is always a third and not an accidental or apparent third, as a suspected innocent would simply be, but a fundamental third constituted by the relation itself” (Deleuze 1991, 201; emphasis mine). This excess “third” that does not appear in the image is “the camera attending to what remains” beyond everything that is in the image, and “this remainder is the essential or the mental relation” (201). For instance, it is “the camera, and not a dialogue . . . in Sabotage” that accounts for the fact that “the woman, the man and the knife do not simply enter into a succession of pairs, but into a true relation (thirdness), which makes the woman deliver up her crime to the man” (201). With these last remarks concerning the symbolic character of the camera’s “thirdness” Deleuze refers us both to another concept central to his cinema books—the out-of-field—and to his earlier work on the “symbolic” as the very condition for structural relation. The Symbolic, or, Structure In “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” Deleuze (2004) writes that, while “classical philosophy” had “conditioned” thought to a “distinction

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or correlation between the real and the imaginary,” the “first criterion of structuralism . . . is the discovery . . . of a third order . . . a symbolic order, irreducible to . . . the real and the imaginary, and deeper than they are” (171 and 173). While “the real tends toward the one” and “is one in its ‘truth,’” as “soon as we see two in ‘one,’ as soon as we make doubles [dédoublons], the imaginary appears”; but “the symbolic is three,” that is, “there is always a third”—“at once unreal, and yet not imaginable”—“to be sought in the symbolic itself,” which is why “structure is at least triadic” (172). In any structure, its “atomic elements” must “account both for the formation of wholes” and for the fact that the “symbolic elements . . . are organized necessarily in series” (173 and 182). The “third” “differentiating” and “eminently symbolic object” is the “empty square” or “Object=x,” which “belongs to no series” but “is nevertheless present in both” and, thus, guards against the “doubling, and duplicating” role “of the imaginary” by “preventing the one [series] from imaginarily falling back on the other” (184–186). The emergence of structuralist thought constitutes for Deleuze a radical advance beyond classical thought. While “we already had many fathers in psychoanalysis: first of all, a real father, but also father-images,” so that “all our dramas occurred in the strained relations of the real and the imaginary . . . Lacan discovers a third, more fundamental father, a symbolic father or Name-of-the-Father” (Deleuze, 2004, 172). The function of this third “Name-of-the-Father” or “Object=x” can be played by just about anything, depending on the particular structure in question, such as “in one of Lacan’s most famous texts . . . on ‘The Purloined Letter’ by Edgar Allen Poe,” the letter itself, insofar as it fulfills two major conditions: it organizes the “relational terms according to an order of places” in at least “a double series,” and its content is never revealed, so that it itself is essentially nonsensical (183). For the third is nothing other than the nonsense that is presupposed for the elements of the structure to make sense. In Deleuze’s (1990) words, Inside the series, each term has sense only by virtue of its position relative to every other term. But this relative position itself depends on the absolute position of each term relative to the instance=x. The latter is determined as nonsense and circulates endlessly throughout the series . . . . In short, sense is always an effect . . . produced by the circulation of the element=x in the series of terms which it traverses. (70)

When the structure in question is cinema, the “instance=x” is the camera’s gaze, insofar as it is not revealed or justified (as a character’s gaze), but rather constitutes that unseen thread that traverses the seen images,

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allowing them to make sense as a coherent ensemble. But before we go there, I would like, first, to clarify a possible confusion regarding the terms “real” and “symbolic” in Lacan and Deleuze, and, second, to examine further the “third” that structures the series while preventing their collapse into an imaginary mirroring. As is evident from the above, Deleuze employs the term “real” unambiguously in the sense of the undifferentiated one, or, in Hegelian or Sartrean terms, in the sense of an in-itself prior to the existence of a for-itself (consciousness), as, for instance, matter is conceived in traditional thought. In Lacan, on the other hand, the real, as many other concepts, is employed, depending on the context (i.e., on the structure at hand), in different senses.2 As Žižek (2002) observes, “there are three modalities of the Real”: the “real Real” (the horrifying Thing, the primordial object . . .); the “symbolic Real” (. . . the signifier reduced to a senseless formula, like quantum physics formulas which can no longer be translated back into . . . everyday experience . . .); and the “imaginary Real” (the mysterious je ne sais quoi . . . on account of which the sublime dimension shines through an ordinary object). (xii)

Evidently, by “symbolic” Deleuze refers to what Žižek calls the “symbolic Real” in Lacan, that is, the aspect of the structure as a “senseless” and meaningless formula, as the nonsense that circulates endlessly throughout the series so as to allow their terms to obtain sense. Turning now to the function of the “third” or “symbolic real,” the best source for grasping it is a philosophical text from the Romanticist era, which, as I argue elsewhere, paved the way for both structuralist and psychoanalytic thought (Kordela, 2013). In his System of Transcendental Idealism, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1976) intuits the symbolic real by first noting that in the endless sequence of reflective acts—in which the subject becomes the object each time it becomes self-conscious of its own act of consciousness or intuition—“self-intuition could potentiate itself . . . to infinity,” whereby “the series of products in nature [objects] would merely be increased, but consciousness would never arrive” (376). Therefore, there must be an “intuitive activity . . . to the second power . . . a purposive activity, which is, however, unconsciously purposive,” that is, capable of intuiting all preceding intuitions, but incapable of intuiting its own act of intuiting—because, if it did, it would objectify it, the series of obectifications would commence again, and consciousness would never arrive (376). This “ground . . . can only lie outside the ego,” as “another rational being” unconscious of its own reflective activity—an unconscious thinker that is no ego but a thing that thinks, and which, without belonging

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to any of the series of objects and subjects constituted throughout the reflective acts, is present in both, for, without presupposing it, the two series would perpetually collapse on one another, without consciousness ever emerging (376–377). The paradox of consciousness lies in the fact that it is grounded on its incommensurable other, the unconscious or the thinking object. This is possible only because the object itself, albeit unconscious, thinks—not unlike, as we shall see, the case of cinema, in which, as Deleuze shows us, the visible and its incommensurable other, the invisible, are both permeated by thought. Absolute Out-Of-Field, or, Surplus Gaze Cinema poses exactly the same problem as consciousness. For every time the camera is revealed to have assumed the point of view of a specific character, its gaze represents that character’s consciousness, which, in turn, becomes objectified the moment this character is shot from the point of view of another character, and if this continued infinitely, the film would consist only of objects and no consciousness would emerge. This means that beyond all gazes of the camera that are retroactively justified as belonging to diegetic characters (conscious gazes) there must remain some unjustifiable (unconscious) gaze. A justified gaze pertains to what Deleuze (1991) calls the “relative aspect” of “the out-of-field: when a set is framed, therefore seen, there is always a larger set, or another set with which the first forms a larger one, and which can in turn be seen” (16–17). But, Deleuze adds, this is possible only “on condition that it gives rise to a new out-of-field, etc.”—and this “to infinity” (16–17). The character whose gaze is embodied by the camera in a given image can become visible only under a new gaze, which, in turn, must also be justified as someone’s gaze, and this ad infinitum, which is why “the set of all these sets” that constitutes a film may form “a homogeneous continuity” but “is certainly not a ‘whole’” (16). This expansion to infinity points to an absolute gaze that is impossible to be presented within the shot field. By this absolute gaze, “the closed system [shot] opens on to a duration which is immanent to the whole universe [film], which is no longer a [closed] set and does not belong to the order of the visible” (17). In other words, we must “confirm that the visual image has a legible function beyond its visible function,” or, in Lacan’s own words, that “if beyond appearance there is nothing in itself, there is the gaze,” in its absolute, non-justifiable sense (Deleuze, 1991, 15; Lacan, 1981, 103). We must recall, of course, that Lacan (1981) situates the gaze beyond

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the realm of the visible and sharply differentiates it from “the place of the geometral point defined by geometric optics” (95). Rather, the gaze—in its absolute aspect—is the “light . . . which is something that introduces what was elided in the geometral relation” that constitutes the optical matrix of the visible, and this is “the depth of field, with all its ambiguity and variability, which is in no way mastered by me.” Rather, it is the gaze or the “light [that] looks at me, and [that] by means of that light in the depths of my eye, something is painted” (96). This means that the absolute gaze of legibility “testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist,’” or, if you prefer Lacan’s term, to “ex-sist” (Deleuze, 1991, 17; Lacan, 1977, 264). All these terms are meant to indicate that the source of this gaze subsists in both the interiority and the exteriority of the film, so that the film as a “whole is . . . like thread which traverses sets . . . to infinity,” so that “the whole is the Open, and relates back to time or even to spirit rather than to content and to space” (Deleuze, 1991, 16–17). By “time” Deleuze means not the empirical time in which we perceive change but “time as open and changing totality,” which “goes beyond all the movements, even the personal changes, of the soul or affective movements, even though it cannot do without them” (Deleuze, 1995, 238). By involving a time that goes “beyond all relative movements,” cinema as the “indirect representation of time as changing whole,” has the effect of “forcing us to think an absolute,” while this “absolute, or the changing whole, does not merge with its direct presentation” (238 and 240). This thinkable or legible, yet invisible mental/spiritual absolute testifies to the “intercommunication” of “the visual image . . . with something that goes beyond it, without being able to do without it” (237). In short, the film as the set of all gazes is an open whole, a not-all set, which, as such, is inhered by the incommensurables of the relative visible and the absolute invisible, not unlike the incommensurables of consciousness and the unconscious. This internal incommensurability of cinema explains why Deleuze locates in music, as used in sound cinema, the direct presentation of the absolute or of the “living concept, which goes beyond the visual image,” and its indirect presentation of the absolute: “sound cinema adds a direct, but musical and only musical, non-corresponding presentation to the [visual] indirect presentation of time and changing whole” (Deleuze, 1995, 240, emphasis in original). Music as accompaniment to the visual in silent cinema could not do this because there “music found itself subject to a certain obligation to correspond to the visual image, or to serve descriptive, illustrative and narrative ends, acting as a form of intertitle” and, thus, remaining fully subservient to the “principle of correspondence” (238 and 241). By contrast, sound cinema enacts “a reaction between the musical foreign

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body and the completely different visual images,” so that the “achievement of sound consisted . . . in expressing the whole in two incommensurable, non-corresponding ways,” the indirect (visual) and the direct (invisible) (239). Thus, “in the case of cinema, which is first of all a visual art, it will be music which will be thought to add the immediate image to mediate images which represent the whole indirectly” (239). With its use of music, sound cinema redoubles the presentation of the internal incommensurability of the changing whole or the not-all, which “already applied to silent cinema,” “by imposing,” beyond the incommensurable noncorrespondence between the visible and the legible, the further “dissociation between [music] and the visual image, a disjunction which must not be surmounted,” so that “the irrational cut between the two . . . forms the non-totalizable relation, the broken ring of their junction” (238 and 279). Nonsense, or, the Unconscious of Sense and Cinema In Schelling’s account of the unconscious or the symbolic real as the precondition of the structure of consciousness we see already the distinction, eventually sanctified by psychoanalysis, between thought and consciousness. Not all thought is consciousness—just as not all image is visible— there is also unconscious thought—just as there is invisible, legible thought-image; and this latter thought, which is as much the unconscious of thought as of cinema (its absolute out-of-field), is a nonsensical formula or code. For, as Lacan put it, “the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a Kern, to use Freud’s own term” for the unconscious, “of non-sense”; the statement that, as is often said, ‘psychoanalytic interpretation aims at unearthing the unconscious’ makes sense only if it is meant to be interpreted as “to bring out irreducible non-sensical—composed of non-meanings—signifying elements” (Lacan, 1981, 250). It follows that, as Deleuze (1990) puts it, “sense and nonsense have a specific relation which can not copy that of the true and the false, that is, which can not be conceived on the basis of a relation of exclusion” (68). Rather, since nonsense is the precondition of sense, nonsense must encompass in itself the potentiality of all sense that it can possibly enable, whether this sense will eventually be perceived by consciousness as true or false. To paraphrase Schelling, nonsense is sense to the second power, a nonsensical sense that is the sole absolute truth, insofar as it is the standard of both true and false senses, according to Spinoza’s conception—“truth is the standard both of itself and of the false” (Spinoza, 1985, 479; Ethics, part II, prop. 43, schol., emphasis in original). Therefore, the formula of the unconscious, nonsense, or the third symbolic real is always antinomic.

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In order to exemplify nonsense and its relation to sense Deleuze (1990) turned to Lewis Carroll and to paradoxes. Right after posing the question “what would be the purpose of rising from the domain of truth to the domain of sense, if it were only to find between sense and nonsense a relation analogous to that of the true and the false?” insofar as the latter is taken to be a relation of exclusion (68), which expresses “the most general problem of the logic of sense,” Deleuze writes: An element cannot be part of the sub-sets which it determines, nor a part of the set whose existence it presupposes. Thus, two forms of the absurd correspond to the two figures of nonsense, and these forms are defined as “stripped of signification” and as constituting paradoxes: a set which is included in itself as a member; the member dividing the set which it presupposes—the set of all sets, and the “barber of the regiment.” (69)

The two figures of nonsense are expressed through the two forms of the paradoxes of set theory: the set of all sets, which should include itself in order to be indeed the set of all sets, yet by including itself within itself it ceases to be a closed set; and the “barber of the regiment,” who is supposed to shave only those men who do not shave themselves, so that if he is among those who shave themselves he must not shave himself, and if he is among those who do not shave themselves he must shave himself. The crucial point about nonsense or the unconscious is that it retains the contradiction unresolved: both the thesis and the antithesis—the set of all sets is and is not a member of itself; the barber belongs and does not belong to those whom he must shave—are equally true, or, for that matter, equally untrue; but they cannot relate in terms of exclusion, the one being true and the other untrue. As Freud (1963) put it, the elements constituting the unconscious “are coordinate with one another, exist independently side by side, and are exempt from mutual contradiction” (134). Consciousness is predicated on the unconscious, just as cinema is predicated on the absolute out-of-field, that is, on the nonsense of antinomic statements that cohabit side by side, without mutual contradiction. The logic of sense is the logic of cinema, as Walter Benjamin (2008) was the first to discern: “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (337). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis In his eleventh seminar, when Lacan (1981) states that “the status of the unconscious is ethical,” he encapsulates in one brief statement his thesis on ethics, which he had developed in his seventh seminar (34). Namely, that the ethical act can advance only under an antinomic gaze. Relevant

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to Lacan’s thesis on ethics is his other, notorious, thesis that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” which anticipates that the ethical act, too, will also be predicated on the structure of language (149). In his extensive reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, Lacan takes recourse to the distinction between discourse and language in order to differentiate King Creon’s (and the city’s) position from that of Antigone, who persists, against Creon’s decree, on burying her brother, Polynices, regardless of the fact that he has committed treason and fratricide. Already in his third seminar, Lacan (1993) had differentiated discourse from language as follows: “Firstly, there is a synchronic whole, which is language as a simultaneous system of structured groups of opposition, then there is what occurs diachronically, over time, and which is discourse” (54). In his seminar on ethics, Lacan (1992) positions Creon in the realm of discourse, in whose diachrony Polynices cannot be detached from his past acts, for there “the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself.” By contrast, the “unique value involved” in Antigone’s ethical stance “is essentially that of language,” that is, “that purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he [Polynices] has lived through” (279). The ethical act presupposes a detachment from discourse: the “historical drama” and its “consequences,” as determined by the historical moral values that define “good and evil” and reward the former while punishing the latter. As opposed to established morality, the ethical act involves “an horizon determined by a structural relation; it only exists on the basis of the language of words,” which is why Antigone invokes no other right than that one, a right that emerges in the language of the ineffaceable character of what is—ineffaceable, that is, from the moment when the emergent signifier freezes it like a fixed object in spite of the flood of possible transformation. What is is, and it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed. (Lacan, 1992, 278–279)

To invoke the right of language is to persist on the ineffaceable fixation of the signifier in spite of the flood of the possible transformations that the signifier might undergo in its historical drama. This is why Antigone’s plea does not attempt to exculpate her brother; rather, her entreaty opposes Creon’s and the city’s position by fully embracing his guilt. Lacan echoes her voice as follows: My brother may be whatever you say he is, a criminal. He wanted to destroy the walls of the city, lead his compatriots away in slavery. He led our enemies

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to the territory of our city, but he is nevertheless what he is, and he must be granted his funeral rites. He doubtless doesn’t have the same rights as the other. You can, in fact, tell me whatever you want, tell me that the one is a hero and a friend, that the other is an enemy. But I answer that it is of no significance that the latter doesn’t have the same value below. As far as I am concerned, the order that you dare refer me to doesn’t mean anything, for from my point of view, my brother is my brother. (278)

In short, my brother is my enemy and is my brother. Ethics and Psychosis Now we can return to Žižek and the other motif in his analysis of cinema, the claim to ethics. Central in this narrative features what we could call Rossellini’s ‘great trilogy of ethics’: Germany, Year Zero (1948), Stromboli (1950), and Europa ’51 (1952)—all of which exemplify “the assumption of a distance from the symbolic universe,” which for Žižek (1992a) encapsulates the ethical act (42). Undoubtedly, Antigone’s defiance of the city’s laws and Creon’s decree, not to mention her eventual literal entombment, amply demonstrate a distance, in this case both voluntary and enforced, from the symbolic order, as a result of the ethical requirement to ignore established morality, norms, and values. Yet, not any distance from the symbolic order qualifies as an ethical act. To explain, let us examine Žižek’s reading of Edmund, the protagonist of Germany, Year Zero, a boy of ten living with his elder sister and sickly father in the ruins of occupied Berlin in the summer of 1945 . . . . He falls more and more under the influence of his homosexual Nazi teacher, Henning, who fills him with lessons on how life is a cruel struggle for survival where one must deal mercilessly with the weaklings who are just a burden to us. Edmund decides to apply this lesson to his father who constantly moans and groans that he will never recover his health and that he wants to die, since he is only a burden to his family. (34–35)

Edmund poisons his father, thereby “granting his request,” and in the remaining of the film we see him “wander[ing] around aimlessly among the ruins of the Berlin streets,” being “unable to let himself go in the game” when he runs into other kids, and when “his sister calls him” he “can no longer accept her solace, so he hides from her in an abandoned, half-ruined apartment house, walks to the second floor, closes his eyes and jumps” (35). As Žižek comments, one could argue that Edmund’s act was “caused by the teacher’s word” as much as that his act “at the same time meets his father’s explicit will to die” (35). Thus, his act is “at the same

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time an act of supreme cruelty and cold distance and an act of boundless love and tenderness, attesting that he is prepared to go to extremes to comply with his father’s wishes” (35). “This coincidence of opposites (cold, methodical cruelty and boundless love),” Žižek surprisingly, yet characteristically, concludes, “is a point at which every ‘ foundation’ of acts in ‘words,’ in ideology, fails” (35, emphasis in original). I would rather argue that this “coincidence” of the two opposite ideologies—Nazi cruelty and the liberal demand for familial love and human mercifulness—in Edmund’s act can only testify to its absolute fixation to all of the words to which he is exposed, transcending their mutual contradiction. It is the combined distance from the symbolic order and proximity to language that forces ideology to crumble. Rather than a “subject . . . reduced to an empty place,” a “null set,” “without support in imaginary or symbolic identification” (36), Edmund represents an oversaturated set, not unlike the set of all sets, that includes within itself that which is not supposed to include if it is to retain the appearance of a closed set, as any ideology endeavors to do. If Edmund “embodies the pure spirituality of a will” it is not because this “will [is] delivered from every ‘pathological’ [in the Kantian sense] motivation,” but because it dares to be inspired by all available “pathological” motivations. It is true that “what propels him into [the] act is an awareness of the ultimate insufficiency and nullity of every ideological foundation,” but the reason for this is not that “he succeeds in occupying that impossible/ real empty place where words no longer oblige, where their performative power is suspended” (36). Rather, it is because he succeeds in occupying that symbolic real and excessive place where all words begin to oblige and the performative powers of all of them are actualized, side by side, without contradiction. If, as Žižek (1992a) argues, “we can call” this ethical “distance taken from the Other” also “psychosis,” this is not just because “‘psychosis’ [is] . . . another name for freedom” from the symbolic Other (36). The affinity of the ethical act to psychosis owes also to the fact that both concern “a relationship between the subject and the signifier in its most formal dimension . . . as a pure signifier” (Lacan, 1993, 250). This means that both the ethical and the psychotic positions engage in the self-referential paradox that characterizes the non-all set of sense as an effect of nonsense. Still, ethics and psychosis should not be hastily conflated, insofar as the ethical subject emerges out of a “neurotic [who] inhabits language” at the very moment that she dares to invoke the right of language (its self-referential paradox), whereas “the psychotic is inhabited, possessed, by language” (250). This means, as Kojin Karatani (1995) puts is, that “psychotics . . . live the self-referential paradox (78),” so that, returning to Lacan (1977), we find that there is a constant slippage of the signified under the signifier,

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a ceaseless “cascade of reshapings of the signifier from which the increasing disaster of the imaginary proceeds” until “the level is reached at which signifier and signified are stabilized in the delusional metaphor” (217) and the “disorders at the level of language” (Lacan, 1993, 92) necessary for the constitution of psychosis to begin. The Surplus Gaze of Cinema If brought together, Žižek’s two motifs, the narratives of ethics and guilt, can shed further light on the question of the absolute out-of-field or gaze in cinema. To follow up on the argument presented above, Žižek’s scheme is predicated on the opposition between presence and absence of meaningful (ideological) mandates, without considering the difference between meaning (ideology/discourse/symbolic order) and signification (language/code/nonsense). As a result, the Žižekian universe consists of two worlds: the one is dominated by meaning and invariably enthralls subjects in a network of exchange of guilt; in the other, meaning is voided, enabling subjects to attain absolute freedom. What is elided in this scheme is that absence of meaning does not amount to absence of structure—signification as a purely machinic network of abstract relations, without or outside of which there can be no subjects and, for that matter, moles, molecules, or particles in quantum physics. This disregard entails the collapse of the symbolic Other—where a subject may be interpellated by this or the other message, or (imagine that s/he is interpellated) by no message—and the real Other—that is, the nonsense of the pure structure itself, which coincides with the compossibility of all possible messages that could occupy the empty places of the structure. In this regard, one is tempted to see in Žižek’s work an allegory of the current relation between so-called Deleuzeans and so-called Lacanians. It is as if Žižek’s work had internalized within itself the external opposition between the two camps: on the one hand, the “Deleuzean” rhizomatic scheme which, pace Deleuze himself, is supposed to know nothing of guilt and, through its disregard for meaning and predilection toward affect, to offer a liberating network of relations apparently dominated by a remarkable equilibrium, in which no position is ever in debt; on the other hand, “Lacanian” psychoanalysis, which, pace Lacan himself, persists on its “umbilical cord” to “representations” and their meaning, its fixation on the father and the law, and its ubiquitous guilt (Pisters, 2003, 19). What is being missed in this debate— both the internal and the external—is, first, that whether we like it or not, there is no equilibrium, and, second, that submission to the law is caused not by the law itself but by (specific types of) desire.

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Regarding the first point—there is no equilibrium—here again we have something to learn from Hitchcock’s films, about which Deleuze (1991) writes: The innocent-guilty equilibrium, the restitution to each of his role, the retribution upon each for his action, will be achieved, but at the price of a limit which risks corroding and even effacing the whole—like the indifferent face of the wife who has gone crazy in The Wrong Man. (203)

Arguably, The Wrong Man (1956)—albeit for Žižek (see 1992b, 211–216) a failure—masterfully testifies to Hitchcock’s intangible affinity to Italian neorealism most vividly than any of his other films. But the indifferent face of Balestrero’s wife is only one of several examples in Hitchcock’s oeuvre that corrode and even efface the whole and its only ostensibly established equilibrium. Think of the finale of Shadow of a Doubt (1943), where justice can be distributed only insofar as niece Charlie, the good “average American family” girl from Santa Rosa, develops the hatred for and desire to kill her double (her widow-murderer uncle Charlie) to the point of actually carrying out the act (in self-defense, of course—this is after all Hollywood). This is a finale later replicated—not in self-defense, but in the name of society—in Rope (1948), where the mores of liberal democracy are asserted against Nazism, but only at the price of the ‘good’ hero, teacher Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), becoming himself a murderer by delivering Brandon and Philip—the two murderers of their innocent friend—to the police, after the following dialogue: Brandon: What are you doing? Rupert: It’s not what I am going to do, Brandon. It’s what society is going to do. I don’t know what that’ll be, but I can guess. And I can help. You are going to die, Brandon. Both of you. You are going to die.

Ironically, or rather quite Hitchcockianly, Rupert utters these words right after having repented for all his preceding (Nazi) teachings about “superior” and “inferior” people. As Foucault (2003) discerned, “racism . . . is fully operational” in “all modern States,” whether “capitalist,” “Nazi,” or “socialist” (260–261). One way or another, Nazi or liberal, one has to kill; it is only the criteria of “superiority” and “inferiority” that shift. And it is not only guilt for committed or uncommitted crimes, but also the impulse to commit crimes that circulates as an object of exchange in the Hitchcockian universe of disequilibrium, which is that of our modern States.

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But the cherry on the top of the cake—which can also teach us something about the desire entailed in the psychoanalytic ethics of the unconscious—is I Confess. As Žižek (1991) observes, this film presents “a significant exception” to the films of the trilogy of guilt, insofar as “Father Logan recognizes himself from the very beginning as the addressee of the murderous act,” something that is facilitated by his “position as confessor” (78). Thus, Žižek concludes, “the film makes visible the hysterical, ‘scandalous’ kernel of Christianity,” namely, that the suffering of Father Logan consists in the fact that he accepts the transference of guilt, i.e., that he recognizes the desires of the other (the murderer) as his own. From this perspective, Jesus Christ . . . appears in a new light: insofar as he assumes the guilt of sinners and pays the price for it, he recognizes the sinners’ desire as his own. Christ desires from the place of the other (the sinner) . . . . Christ is clearly a hysteric. For hysteric desire is the desire of the other. (78–79)

This reading is only partly true, for both Father Logan and Jesus identify with the desire of the other/sinner and that of a position incapable of sinning—otherwise, they themselves would simply become sinners, instead of risking or giving up their lives for the sinners. It is because Father Logan’s position is not just that of the hysteric—a disposition that invites identification—that identification with him is undermined, as one’s indignation can only exasperate in the face of his persistent determination to submit himself defenselessly to the murderer’s exploitation. The truly Christian motto, “obscured by its institutionalization” (Žižek, 1991, 78), is not ‘I am hysteric,’ but ‘I am and am not a sinner.’ Not unlike Germany, Year Zero, it is from the gaze of this nonsense that I Confess is shot. Under this gaze, the meanings of all ideologies converge to and performatively entice the ethical desire and act that define the psychoanalytic subject. This nonsensical gaze is the absolute out-of-field, the filmic unconscious, or surplus gaze of legibility. At stake in conceiving the gaze of legibility is neither the opposition between absence and presence of meaning nor that between guilt and empowering relations, but the intrinsic relation between meaning and meaningless formula, as the former’s precondition, or, the relation of the “more radical Elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time,” as the precondition for homogeneous space and time (Deleuze, 1991, 17). Yet, between Hitchcock’s and Rossellini’s films there persists an important cinematographic difference. As Deleuze (1991) writes, although “the two aspects of the out-of-field,” the relative and the absolute, “intermingle

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constantly,” generally “one aspect prevails over the other, depending on the nature of the ‘thread’” (17). That is, the thicker the thread which links the seen set to other unseen sets the better the out-of-field fulfills its first [relative] function, which is the adding of space to space . . . . But the finer it is . . . the more effectively the out-of-field fulfills its other [absolute] function which is that of introducing the transspatial and the spiritual into the system which is never perfectly closed. (17)

The thicker the thread, as is the case of Hitchcock’s films, the more closed appears the image as the presentation of homogeneous space and time; the finer the thread, as in, among others, Dreyer, Antonioni, Godard, and, of course, Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero, the more open the image becomes, allowing its relation to the heterogeneity of the absolute, legible and thinkable (hence, spiritual), yet invisible whole to transpire through it. However, this does not mean that a thick thread and a closed image must necessarily impend the indication of the absolute and “most mysterious” aspect of the absolute out-of-field. For instance, Hitchcock’s frames are not content to neutralize the environment, to push the closed system as far as possible and to enclose the maximum number of components in the image; at the same time they make the image into a mental image, open . . . on to a play of relations which are purely thought and which weave a whole. This is why we said that there is always out-offield, even in the most closed image. And that there are always simultaneously the two aspects of the out-of-field: the actualisable relation with other sets, and the virtual relation with the whole. (Deleuze, 1991, 18)

In Germany, Year Zero, the virtual relation to the whole “is reached indirectly, on to infinity, through the intermediary and the extension of the first, in the succession of images”; in Hitchcock’s films, “it is reached more directly, in the image itself, and by limitation and neutralization of the first” (18). This cinematographic difference between indirect and direct manifestation of the image’s relation to the whole is paradoxically perceived in an inverted form. That is, the indirect is a more explicit manifestation of the relation to the whole, whereas the direct is more implicit. As a result, it is practically impossible to watch Germany, Year Zero without being ‘disturbed’ by the intrusion of nonsense (whole) into the image, whereas a film like Rope requires an intellectualizing or reflective mediation in order for it to become ‘disturbing.’ A spectator watching Rope without noticing that the largest part of the film is shot from the perspective of the corpse—the end product of both Nazism and liberal justice—is

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far from inconceivable. Depending on its indirectness or directness, the surplus gaze of legibility can be more or less explicit, that is, the unfolding of its thread may or may not be overlooked. But, in either case, it always reveals the relation of the visible to the legible, to the nonsense of the contradictory ideological gazes. For, as Žižek (1992a) puts it, referring to René Girard’s (1987) commentary on Job, the biblical character “who resists assuming the role of a scapegoat/victim” and instead “continues to raise the question of the meaning of it all, of what God wants from him”: What is here so subversive and pathbreaking, what confers upon the story of Job its dramatic tension and at the same time its truth, is the very confrontation of the two aspects . . . . The effect of truth proceeds solely from the confrontation of the two perspectives. (56)

May we always keep them both in sight. Notes 1. I would like to thank jan jagodzinski for his helpful comments on this chapter. 2. This relational or structural use of language as practiced by Lacan—who performs the content of his theory on the level of the means through which it is expressed—is aptly described by a notoriously keen observer of style, Fredric Jameson. As Jameson (2006) writes, in Lacan’s seminar there is a “slippage of meanings within the space of A as, for instance, the space of the ‘Symbolic’ order, which ‘might better be thought of as a shifting of gears from one power or logic to another.’ This transition between powers or logics “is predicated on this very ‘chain or ladder of signifieds’” that are linked together and allow for a “movement [from an old space] into a new space” such that it “carries properties of the old along with it” (388–389).

References Benjamin, Walter (2008). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (327–343). Ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Oxford: Blackwell. Deleuze, Gilles (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boudas. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (1991). Cinema 1: The Movement—Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1995). Cinema 2: The Time—Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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——— (2004). “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” Trans. Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale. In Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974. Ed. David Lapoujade. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Foucault, Michel (2003). “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–6. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. Freud, Sigmund (1963). “The Unconscious.” In General Psychological Theory: Papers of Metapsychology. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 116–150. Girard, René (1987). Job, the Victim of His People. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. London: Athlone Press. Jameson, Fredric (2006). Lacan: The Silent Partners. Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 365–397. Karatani, Kojin (1995). Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money. Ed. Michael Speaks. Trans. Sabu Kohso. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kordela, A. Kiarina (2013). “Value.” In Keywords in German Aesthetics. Ed. J. D. Mininger and Jason M. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1977). Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton. ——— (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton. ——— (1992). Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton. ——— (1993). Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–56. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton. Pisters, Patricia (2003). The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rohmer, Eric and Claude Chabrol (1979). Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films. Trans. Stanley Hochman. New York: Ungar. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1976). System of Transcendental Idealism. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. In Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. Ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (347–377). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [System des transzendentalen Idealismus, in Schellings Sämtliche Werke: Ausgewählte Schriften in sechs Bänden, Bd. I, Frankfurt/Main, 1985, 395–702]. Spinoza (Baruch) Benedict de (1985). The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1. Ed. and Trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1991). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ——— (1992a). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge. ——— (1992b). Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan . . . But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London: Verso. ——— (2002). For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. 2nd edition. London: Verso.

Part IV

Encountering . . .

01

Living . . . Again: The Revolutionary Cine-Sign of Zombie-Life Jason Wallin

If we revel in Apocalypse, it is . . . because it inspires each of us with ways of living, surviving and assessing. [The Book of Revelations is for] everyone who thinks of themselves as survivors. It’s the book of Zombies. (Deleuze, 2002, 8)

I

f the pedagogical import of zombie-cinema can be linked to a question, it could be one that asks how a life might become. That is, the problematic of zombie-cinema asks how human-all-too-human life might go when confronted by the intractable problems of viral contagion (Plague of the Zombies, 28 Days Later, Pontypool), toxic contamination (Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead), unchecked scientific experimentation (28 Weeks Later), unabated economic exploitation, and interminable class warfare (Dead Snow, Land of the Dead). Born upon the obsolete image of the bounded human organism, this chapter will argue that zombie-cinema involves surveying another form of life and style of living. Fulminating into a filmic-practice, this experimental survey-machine functions to assess the terminus of the human organism through the production of a “radically malevolent life” (Colebrook, 2011, 19). Mobilizing the immanent destructive and suicidal impulses of living, zombie-cinema reterritorializes life upon a radically inhuman image of the body, or rather, the potential for the body to be reorganized in a manner that no longer represents the human organism. Living on in

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Figure 01.1

Zombie.

Source: Retrieved from amctv.com.

a manner antithetical to the representational image of the equilibrated, autopoietic, or homeostatic body, zombie-cinema posits a malevolent life poised to betray the image of the human organism in preparation for a perverse people yet to come. What Is a Zombie-Life? If zombie-cinema questions how a life might become, it does so by palpating the problem of representation. Embodying the disjunctive synthesis of both life and death, the zombie’s ‘undeath’ short-circuits the normative image of human vitality. It is precisely this unresolved disjunction that underscores the psychoanalytic theorization of the monster as a return of repressed infantile beliefs (Gabbard and Gabbard, 1987; Clover, 1987). Following this theoretical trajectory, the zombie is made to represent the ‘full’ presymbolic milieu of the unalientated and undifferentiated body of the infant prior to Oedipal castration. “All abjection,” Kristeva (1982) writes in Powers of Horror, “is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (5). The ‘bodily wastes’ that populate the zombie’s milieu ostensibly palpate the unconscious wish to re-create the ‘full’ body prior to its separation and distinction from a ‘chaosmos of orgonal’ energy (Creed, 1986). Here, the zombie figures as the nondifferentiated, nonnormative body prior to its social-symbolic distribution. Formulated thus, the pleasure of zombiecinema insists through its mis-en-scène of mastery over the traumatic

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passage from undifferentiated wholeness through to the formation of sustainable self-identity (Clover, 1992; Wood, 1978). Following the Freudian (1919) theorem that repetition is born from repression, zombie-cinema seemingly reencounters the nondifferentiated body (of the zombie) that is necessarily disavowed through the production of the ‘bounded’ and distinct organism (Kristeva, 1982; Metz, 1982). It is in this vein that the symbolic obliteration of the zombie parallels the movement of undifferentiated life into the social milieu of language and law, where desire for absolute wholeness is foreclosed through the imposition of social norms and normative social practices informing the body (Levine, 2004; Wood, 1978). In a narrative deployment not uncommon to zombie-cinema, for example, the nondifferentiated zombie “herds” of AMC’s The Walking Dead posit the necessary supplementation of unchecked anarchic social desire by regulatory laws. Conceptualized as a psychcosemiotic parallel to the socialization of unconscious drives, zombie-cinema fulfills the unconscious wish to reencounter inorganic life prior to its normative distribution and organization while concomitantly restaging the trauma of socialization at a safe distance for the anxious spectator. What is a zombie-life? If we were to accept the general psychoanalytic exegesis that the zombie is fundamentally a representation of human social-psychology, the answer is relatively straightforward: We are zombies. This revelation is hardly novel. In 1978, Romero had already fulminated an ostensible parallel between mall-walking zombies and the ravenous schizo-impulses of the politically bereft contemporary consumer. The Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright penned Shaun of the Dead (2004) recapitulates this parallel by palpating the banal routines of human life to which zombies seem perfectly adapted, if not indistinguishable. To think zombielife relative to unconscious wish-fulfillment or the human-all-too-human process of Oedipal socialization, however, marks a failure to apprehend what Lacan already detects in the relationship between the body and its image. That is, in theorizing zombie-life as a corollary to anthropocentric vitalism, the inhumanity that inheres Lacan’s theorization of the body is covered over (Colebrook, 2011). Prior to the self-reflective establishment of what it means to be human, Lacan’s (1987) mirror stage intimates that the image of the human must first be formed. In other words, before it can be (mis)recognized as such, the human organism must first be made. This is not only to say that the image of the human is both politically and historically contingent, but further, to recover a virtual inhumanity prior to representation. Beneath the territorializing gestalt typically associated with the mirror stage then, the body remains virtual, or rather, a “dispersed collective of organs” subtending the historical image of what it means to be human (Colebrook, 2011). Lacan’s predecessor Roger Caillois (1961)

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palpates something of this ‘dispersed organism’ in his study of animalenvironment assemblages. As Caillois detects, the affective organ-ization of life need not proceed via a marriage of self-resemblant forms. That is, the camouflaged insect does not assume its own image, but more radically, becomes resonant with the ‘organs’ of its environment. Put differently, animals do not simply adapt. Their becomings are linked to their potential to affect and be affected by the virtual organs of their milieu. Such an insight is already tacitly assumed in Lacan’s (1987) analysis of the mirror phase wherein nascent egoic organization always-already proceeds by inexact recognition. That is, the image of the human organism upon which the gestalt actuality of the body is mapped functions to cover over an inhuman virtuality teeming with affective potential. To contort Lacan, the mistake of the mirror phase is not simply an effect of misrecognizing oneself in the image of the Other, but rather, of occluding the virtuality of potential arrangements through which different modes of living might be operationalized. In place of this virtuality, the mirror stage marks a historical phase in the organization of the human organism born of a fundamental if not productive tyranny. Specifically, where mirror representation provides the human imago its gestalt actuality, this process is exacted in opposition to the larval inhuman affects of the body. Herein, the kind of motile alien organs harnessed by insect and microbial life are excised as potential resources for difference. Infected-Lacan The problem of representation fulminated in this bastard reading of Lacan (1987) produces an alternative trajectory to the theorization of zombie-cinema as the mis-en-scène of human desire and psychical development. To take seriously the inexact recognition operative in Lacan’s mirror stage reintroduces the problem of representation into the reflective circuit that has been established between human and zombie-life. Simply put, the theorization of zombie-cinema as a mode of unconscious representation and catharsis fails to comprehend what is key to Lacan’s mirror stage: The image of the body must first be made. To produce a corollary between human and zombie-life, function(s) of desire and image(s) of ontological development must first be presupposed. It is on this point that we might ask how the representational correlation of human and zombie-life is founded in the first place. Put differently, where Lacan’s mirror stage supposes a more profound ontological difference inhering between zombie and human life, their theoretical correlation must first be explained. Such an explanation might begin through the detection of

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another name for the dystopic battleground palpated in zombie-cinema, for what has tethered the representational linkage of the human and zombie but an ‘oedipal’ image of life (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983)? Concerning such films as Danny Boyle’s (2002) 28 Days Later, Ruben Fleischer’s zom-com Zombieland (2009), and AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010), zombie-life must be ‘overcome’ in order for the ‘family’ to persevere. Herein, the zombie’s function as an anathema to the unification and survival of ‘familial life’ fulfills its supposed representational corollary to the ‘perverse’ destruction of familial normality prevented in Oedipalization. That is, the Oedipal battleground implicitly mapped in much contemporary zombie-cinema conjoins desire to a ‘molar’ image of family life wherein a variated ‘mommy-daddy-me’ triad retains its normative economy by being drawn into relation with the preservation of both human civilization and the human species ‘itself ’. Behind the alien social manifestations palpated by the proliferation of zombie-life, the familial complex is maintained as a strange attractor, or basic perspective through which humanity is maintained. It is ostensibly Oedipus, or rather, the regulation of social life and its organization into familial patterns of arrangement that zombie-life places under the greatest threat. In what stands as a more ‘generalized’ function of Oedipus, zombiecinema ostensibly restages a correlation between human life and those specific regimes of signification informing upon its orthodox image. It is in this vein that the survival of human life has become enmeshed with the regulatory powers of morality (28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later), authorial law (Walking Dead), egoic heroism (Zombieland), and ideational teleology (Resident Evil). Put differently, where human desire is not overtly linked to an oedipal image of the family as its basic perspective, it is otherwise fettered to Oedipus by way of its reflection in a human-all-too-human image of its orthodox organization. Such self-reflection functions to dramatize Oedipus by other means, since it is upon such “oedipal territories” (morality, law, and the orthodox image of the human organism) that the express connection between human and zombie-life is articulated. It is not the case that the zombie constitutes an image of life directly opposed to the human. There is enough that remains of the zombie’s former motorhabits to maintain a recognizable parallel. Thus posed, the zombie marks a potential becoming of the human once its ‘oedipalized’ fetters have been jettisoned. That is, once the ‘human’ loses its orientation to the transcendent formations that inform upon its orthodox image, it becomes the zombie’s ontological equal (an animal, a savage, a terrorist, a barbarian). While the preservation of human life requires the neuroticized and habitual territories of Oedipus to inform upon its management and regulation, zombie-life might become an experiment in the radical decoding of both

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‘human society’ and the image of human life itself. In particular ways, zombie-life constitutes an anti-oedipal ontology insofar as it is malevolently antiego and antihomogenesis. It is this radical counterontology that is covered over via the theorization of zombie-life as a representation of both human desire and the statistical life of human being. Where the zombie might otherwise fulminate an ontological survey of the “obsolete organism,” or rather, the radical mutation of the human as a necessity of its becoming, the representational link between human and zombie-life already presupposes the immutability of anthropocentric life inhering beneath difference. Here, a particular representational impasse insists insofar as becoming is reduced to “one complex, the complex of molar determination” (Ansell-Pearson, 1999, 182). Against Lacan’s insight on the inhuman forces teeming beneath self-reflection then, the representational correlation of zombie and human life insists upon rehabilitating the ontological primacy of the human. From this perspective, the zombie is easily reduced to a representational metaphor of molar social order (marginalized social and racial classes) or otherwise a psychical taxonomy particular to human development (the investment of desire in regimes of social organization). Such anthropocentrism effectively annihilates the virtual by presupposing the actuality of human life as a horizon of thought. Herein, zombie-life can only be thought as a substandard ontological image to the oedipal territories upon which ontology is ostensibly founded. This is to say that the inhuman life Lacan detects at the periphery of the mirror stage becomes fully recaptured in the image of human life, or rather, the image of human life cut from the chaosmos of the virtual. Here, what is reflected is an image of desiring-production reduced to the representation of the given. Put differently, in order for representation to function in the first place, a particular territory or border must be drawn. In part, this territory can be thought as an extension of Oedipus, which functions as a refrain against the threat of organismic obsolescence or rather, the necessity that a species survives “by not being itself ” (Colebrook, 2011, 18). Zombie-Problems The mode of oedipal territorialization informing upon the analysis of zombie-life produces three distinct problems. First, it becomes incapable of thinking zombie-becomings as anything but what Foucault dubs a “category of the negative.” In this mode, the zombie is rendered into a figure of lack devoid of both law and limit (Foucault, 1983, xiii). Rather than detecting the expressive potential of the zombie as a means upon

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which to rethink social and biological limits, zombie-life is made to represent an image of the human lacking oedipal coordination. Following this conceptualization, the second problem born from an overemphasis on the preservation of oedipal territories pertains to the conceptualization of zombie-affects as regressive. The zombie becomes, in this conceptualization, a representation of repressed social orders, psychical desires, or infantile beliefs overcome by ‘proper’ development. This orientation to thinking the zombie purports that zombie-becomings represent a retrograde ontological desire, hence terminating the potential for thinking the mutation of the human as anything but a failure to fully embody a given organismic image, or rather, “a ‘molar’ order of genus and species” (Ansell-Pearson, 1999, 180). Finally, the oedipal attractor that functions to tether the zombie and human enters into fidelity with a dialectical model in which human and zombie ontologies are brought into direct conflict, or rather, brought to bear upon a battle for homo(geneity) through the termination or control of the ‘inferior’ species (Fido). With the notable exception of Romero’s (2005) Land of the Dead, the dialectical organization of human and zombie-life is often made to proceed by conflict and negation, where thought is oriented to the inevitable overcoding of a species. In this banal formulation, it’s either them or us. Limited to the rubric of human survival, or rather, the survival of humanall-too-human forms of organismic and social organization, the analysis of zombie-cinema risks becoming caught in a habit of overdetermining the question of how a life might go. That is, what zombie-film ostensibly produces is the mis-en-scène of human annihilation on behalf of preserving what is most common to humankind. As Murray (2006) avers in her analysis of how normative social hierarchies are maintained in zombie-films, “when [zombies] aren’t eating us, they bring us together”! (211). Through the threat of the zombie, the necessity of a social contract, or rather, acquiescence to transcendent codes of social regulation are revered as fundamental human needs. Thus posed, such conceptualizations have yet to think how the image of the body is made and by extension, how it might be made differently. Such a question would recommence a virtual life overdetermined through the ossification of the actual, or rather, those “oedipal territories” of familial and organismic identification ostensibly under threat in zombie-cinema (see MacCormack, 2008). This liberatory tactic is operationalized in the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, whose approach to thinking film implicates the production of new signs for thinking and living. That is, Deleuze’s philosophical approach to film commences a way of thinking cinema as a machine for the production of new signs “that both affect the body . . . and give us a new image of thought” (Zepke, 2005, 77). It is in this vein that the affective power of film might be mobilized to eclipse

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the image of the human body given in advance, or rather, the image of the human sedimented within an oedipal stratum. Such an approach would entail thinking zombie-life in a manner delinked from its conceptualization as an ontological regression or otherwise, as a corollary to molar categories of race and class along which its significance has been distributed (see Giroux, 2010). In this vein, the cinematic zombie might be thought as a sign for assessing life at the horizon of human survival, where the sustainable and homeostatic image of the human organism is drawn into assemblage with problematics of viral contagion, nonrepresentational thought, and the radical decoding of the social sphere under capitalism. It is along the lines of this experiment in rethinking both organismic and social organization that the zombie palpates a malevolent form of life for thinking “inhuman futures” (Colebrook, 2011, 24). Infected-Deleuze The ‘malevolent life’ of the zombie palpates a radical rethinking of the ‘bounded’ human organism. In this manner, the zombie is not simply a sign of the body’s termination, but instead, of a desiring-production aimed at overcoming a particular image of the body. It is here that Artaud’s (1976) critique of the “strongly patterned body” and the overdetermination of bodily drives via the orthodox arrangement of organs and their flows functions to give the body back to a ‘malevolent art’ of deterritorialization (Alliez, 2006, 158). “The body . . . [has] . . . no need of organs,” Artaud (1976) writes, “[o]rganisms are the enemies of the body” (17). Recapitulated in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Artaud’s attack on the overdetermined image of the body seeks to liberate its affective potentials from neurotic forms of territorialization. Artaud’s challenge commences a way of thinking the body as actual-virtual, or rather, as an assemblage of desiring-circuits and part-relations that could and must be made differently. The modern illness of man, Artaud claims, is an effect of his botched construction. Hence, to liberate the affective potentials of the body requires that the anatomy of man be remade in a manner no longer betroved to an image of life derived from either nature or morality emanated from the transcendent judgment of God (Artaud, 1976). It is here that the Deleuzian provocation that film become adequate to the creation of new signs for thinking that Artaud’s project is rejoined. That is, the ‘malevolent life’ of the zombie palpated in cinema becomes a way of thinking beyond the neurotic territories of the human. ‘Zombie-cinema’ creates an experimental plateau upon which the body might be re-created, or rather, reconnected with larval affects subtending

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the orthodox “image of the [human] body” (Deleuze, 2003a). Minimally, the zombie might be thought in terms that recommence the philosophical provocation advanced by Artaud’s antecedent in Spinoza, for as Spinoza suggests, we do not yet know what a body might do. The strongly patterned body of the human is radically deterritorialized by the image of the zombie. Functioning to decompose the homeostatic, equilibrated, and ‘bounded’ image of the body, the zombie composes a line of flight oriented to thinking the body without image (Deleuze, 2003b). This trajectory toward a body without image breaks the body from its enslavement to prior forms of organization, potentially palpating “the moment [at which] the body has had enough of organs and wants to slough them off ” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 150). Filmically, the organs of zombie-life no longer function in the image of autopoietic sustainability or in terms of ‘proper’ flow. The zombie-body displays a radical reorganization of abject flows, recommencing the function of the organs by terminating their functional operations. For example, while zombie-life is driven by an inhuman impulse to consume human organisms, such acts have nothing to do with the familiar assemblage of food with human processes of mastication, digestion, and elimination. The organs of the body and the libidinal drives short circuit. As Rick encounters after waking from his coma in The Walking Dead (2010), zombie-life maintains in a variety of decaying or perverse formations. This variated ontology of part-bodies and gutted organisms deterritorializes the image of the whole body or, in other words, the coordination of libidinal impulses via the transcendent image of Oedipus. Corrupting the anthropological machine’s hierarchical distribution of human over nonhuman organisms, the experimental ontology of zombie-life dispenses with the image of “a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically” (Agamben, 2004, 40). In distinction, the malevolent life of the zombie produces an “infinite variety of . . . worlds . . . linked together as if in a gigantic musical score” (40). In this horrific musicological composition, zombie-life might be thought as a becoming-molecular of the anthropological stratum, where the hitherto ‘bounded’ organism is reterritorialized within a world of microbial or viroid forms of becoming always-already swarming across the body. Palpating the inhuman life of the virus, the zombie destroys the “state of exception” that founds the human organism, or rather, the presupposition that ‘we’ have always been human proper (37). Herein, zombie-life becomes a way of surveying what Ansell-Pearson (1999) dubs “the filthy lesson of symbiosis,” where life is thought as a molecular multiplicity no longer functioning “in accordance with the superior laws of race or blood, genus or species” (182–183). Schizzing the ‘authentic’ organism by drawing a radical line of flight from the oedipal image of the family and the arborescent image of

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genealogical relation, the zombie outmodes taxonomies of anthropological capture. Escaping molar categories of gender, class, and race through the malevolent corruption of both biological and cultural orders, the zombie posits the necessity to relaunch the question of how a life might go. In this vein, the zombie becomes probe-head for commencing the radical corruption of ‘nature,’ cultivating an unnatural nuptials that overspills the anthropological strata in all directions (Ansell-Pearson, 1997; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Zombie Ethologies In Deleuzeguattarian (1994) terms, mimicry is a poorly made concept insofar as it reduces difference to patterns of imitation and resemblance. While the zombies of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) maintain the motor-habits of human obsession, their difference from humans and line of flight from the molar edicts of humanity suggest the becoming of a radically different ‘people.’ Filmically, this difference has been amplified in such films as Land of the Dead and 28 Days Later, where the image of zombie-life is increasingly drawn away from its correspondence to the human. Hence, to link the analysis of zombie-life to a representation of the human fails to explain what is new to such a malevolent force of becoming. The necessity for a new trajectory of thought no longer linked to mimicry is already at work in Lacanian psychoanalysis, whose extension of Caillois’ (2003) Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia anticipates a way of thinking life without reducing it to a matter of ‘direct’ correspondence. That is, Caillois argues that organisms do not assume the characteristics of their environment as a function of survival but rather, as an effect of being captivated by their surroundings. Building upon Caillois’ premise, Lacan’s theorization of the mirror stage launches a psychological conceptualization of why organisms come to morphologically mimic the images of their surroundings. As Lacan implies, it is via the inexact correspondence of an ‘obsessed’ organism and its surroundings that the derealized imago or ideal ego is produced. This posed, the radicality of Lacan’s conceptualization is not to be located in the image of the mirror whereupon the human organism is territorialized according to the general typology of oedipal or rational man. Rather, it is in Lacan’s conceptualization of the mirror’s outside that a more radical difference might be detected. “In our opinion,” Lacan (1934) writes in his review of Minkowski’s Le Temps vécu, “the most original form of intuition . . . [is] that of another space besides geometrical space, namely, the dark space of groping, hallucination and music, which is the opposite of clear space” (cited in Caillois, 2003, 90).

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Here, Lacan points to a zone of indiscernibility or outside thought where one might begin to think the dissolution of form that no longer seeks its definition in a body, bodily zones, or subdivisions. In other words, Lacan mobilizes a trajectory of thought upon which life might be drawn into experimental relation with the forces of the ‘Real’ through which the body might be hollowed out and dilated upon the inhuman affects and rhythms of its milieu. In a trajectory minimally inhering both the thinking of Caillois and Lacan, the organism is no longer definable in terms of either the function of its organs or its representational correlation to a specific genus or species (Ansell-Pearson, 1999). Rather, it is here that we might begin to understand the manner in which zombie-life relaunches new potentials for ethological thinking. Inhuman Potentials Zombie-life counteractualizes an ontology limited to resemblance and imitation. Ultimately, the zombie is no longer definable in terms of molar resemblances to the human, but might more adequately be thought in terms of speeds, slowness, and potentials of relations. Occupying a dark space of comatose hallucination and viroid rhythms, zombie-life becomes an experiment in affect, or rather, a question of what the body can do and undergo (Spinoza, 1985). As Mohammad (2006) elides, the cinematic shift delinking the zombie from voodoo wielding ‘master manipulators’ palpates the idea of another kind of life inhering beneath the anthropological perspective. That is, opposed to the manipulation of Madge Bellamy in Victor Haperin’s (1932) White Zombie, Romero’s image of the undead inhere an inhuman force delinked from transcendent control. It is this inhuman force, or what might be dubbed the affective potential of the body, that has become intimate to thinking zombie-life in contemporary cinema. Where the shambling zombies of Romero’s (1968) Night of the Living Dead are drained of affect, the undead of 28 Days Later (2002) and House of the Dead (2003) refigure the zombie as an organism capable of vigorous speed and agility. Similarly, where the ‘psychically manipulated’ Madge Bellamy or Christine Gordon of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with A Zombie demonstrate a limited ability to affect others, contemporary cinematic zombies affect easily through bites, viral transmission, and chemical contagion at molecular levels. What differs across these altered manifestations is less the image of zombie ‘identity’ or its metaphorical representation of the social. Rather, insofar as the zombie can be thought as a cinematic sign for remaking the body, it might be said that it has transpired new filmic involutions for thinking affect. It is here that a

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Spinozist approach to thinking zombie-life begins to survey the radicality of inhuman forces for commencing an antihumanist ethology. In Ethics (1985), Spinoza contends that “the human Body can . . . be changed into another nature entirely different from its own” (39). Where Artaud’s permutation of Spinoza’s challenge addresses the need to remake the arrangement of organs and flows of bodily energy, Spinoza’s remarks on the becoming of the body entail in addition the reconfiguration of physical and mental states. As Spinoza elides, the affective potential of the body is augmented through processes of composition and recomposition in which machinic relations to other bodies and forces might be composed. Zombie-films palpate the event of this recomposition by surveying the machinic potential of the body, its affective decomposition, and subsequent recomposition as another life-form. Simply put, zombie-films might be thought in terms of the body’s capacity to enter into affective relation with the bodies of others. Here, the zombie commences a modal ontological thinking via its radical decomposition of the body and, further, its recomposition along inhuman vectors of speed. In Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, “rage”-infected zombies assume the inhuman rhythms of an accelerated viroid life, moving and reproducing at a virtually unabatable rate. This assemblage of body and viroid malevolency figures in the hyperactive and frenetic use of rapid cuts to produce a cinematic “strobe-effect” for accelerating zombie-movement along inhuman trajectories. A similar recomposition inheres Zach Snyder’s (2004) remake of Dawn of the Dead, where zombie-life is thought through the affective force of malevolent viral life. This malevolent sign is filmically constituted through the removal of shots from motion sequences, producing a life born of alien rhythms that accentuate affective speed and nearly instantaneous parasitic assemblage over narrative pacing and continuity (Fhlainn, 2011). Such filmic techniques not only palpate the inhuman affects of zombie-life, but further, diagram the malevolency of contagion by transposing its circuit-breaking rhythm into the visual register. Here, the movement-image undergoes a schizoid intervention where what is produced is less a coherent representational image than fragments of filmic code composing and decomposing along an alien chronometrics. In this vein, Snyder’s Dawn and Boyle’s 28 Days Later modulate the affective composition of the zombie-body by producing a filmic diagram of the malevolent decomposition of the anthropocentric perspective. Short-circuiting the ‘human time’ of the film, the zombie mobilizes a schizoid temporality that palpates molecular speeds of transmission, contagion, and reproduction. Further, the human face, its performative gestures, and surface signification of class, race, and gender are radically decomposed in both 28 Days Later and Dawn, where life is recast upon a line of

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flight poised to betray the image of human faciality that informs upon the subject a single-point, anthropocentric perspective (MacCormack, 2011). While such forces of inhuman decomposition pose a malevolent destiny for the human, it is one that nevertheless functions to “dismantle the face and facializations” that overcode the body as a screen of signification (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 60). Akin to the schizoid decompositions composed by Francis Bacon, the zombie rediscovers a decoded meat-head beneath the face, or rather, a zone of confused sensations not yet governed by spatial organization or the orthodox face of humanity: Jesus Christ Superstar (Deleuze, 2009). Where faciliality functions to assimilate nonconformist traits by emitting “waves of sameness,” the zombie palpates the virtual potential of bodies to vary, metamorphose, and enter into relation with other species (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 178). It is here that the inhuman life and becoming-molecular of the zombie ‘begins’ to function as a “tool for blazing life lines . . . toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless” (187). A similar trajectory inheres the conceptualization of zombie-life in Bruce McDonald’s (2009) Pontypool, where the unique ontology of the zombie produces a mode of expression likened to the chattering and swarming properties of insect life. Herein, the very terms of ‘common sense’ upon which meaning relies are radically dismantled through the projection of a contagious minoritarian language. The ‘Agit’ Kingdom: Zombieland Beyond its composition as a cinematic sign for breaking normative patterns of representation, the temporal continuity of character development, and tropes of signification, the zombie marks the introduction of a new kind of life recalcitrant to the human perspective and the presumption that the future will be a human one. Herein, the cinematic sign of the zombie works to expand a field of potential expressions that eclipse the capture of unnamed connections in the image of a prior semiotic possibility. Herein, the continual reconfiguration of the zombie marks an escape velocity toward the production of a body without image antithetical to the ideal ego born through mirror correspondence and representational self-reflection. This is to say that the zombie diagrams a zone of indiscernibility between the homeostatic organism and the multiplicity of molecular life (viroid, chemical, radioactive) transversally informing upon it (Agamben, 2004). Despite the composition of the body’s image from the formlessness of the Lacanian Real, what insists nevertheless is an indistinct life through which new life-forms might be thought.

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To operationalize indistinction as an ontological trajectory is already to think beyond the limitations of the anthropological stratum toward a “radical dehumanization . . . of nature” (Agamben, 2004, 39). Here, Uexküll’s (2010) ethology of the sea urchin, the dragonfly, and tick suggest that there is not one unified world, but rather, a multiplicity of overlapping perceptual worlds. The creation or territorialization of a world, Uexküll demonstrates, is produced via the organisms’ ability to affect and be affected. It is in this manner that a world can be minute, as in the case of the tick (Ixodes rinicus), whose world is produced of only three affects: sensitivity to light, the smell of mammals, and of burrowing at the point of easiest access to the blood supply of its host (Deleuze and Parnet, 2008). Populated by unique diagrams that imagine the human world according to the affective powers and percepts of bees, flies, and hedgehogs, Uexküll’s work functions to not only disorient the perspective of the reader but also to insist that a world must first be made (Agamben, 2004). Drawing from Uexküll, the question might be posed as to what, if anything, composes a zombie-world, for what characterizes the zombie across a myriad of filmic iterations is less its composition of a territory than a disregard for the territorializations of human life. Breaking patterns of territory at varying scales, from the nucleated organization of the body through the disruption of geopolitical boundaries (Resident Evil, 28 Weeks Later), the zombie might more adequately be thought in terms of its deterritorializing power. The zombie functions to compose a ‘malevolent rhizome’ growing into every corridor of intensive and extensive space (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Intensively, zombie-life creates lines of assemblage into the molecular archi-tecture of the human. With the inhuman contagion in Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, a rhizome in which entry and exit points are always motile and open to further outgrowths is produced. Opposed to progressive accumulation, zombie-life is born in the middle of things, in the zone of human and inhuman and, further, as an immanent event nonreliant upon transcendent dimensions of overarching morality, images of organismic life, or the psychical dimensions of imaginary or symbolic registers. Extensively, the zombie violates all demarcations of sociocultural boundary, regulations of public space and privatization of property. Developing rhizomatically, the zombie hordes of Walking Dead, Zombieland, and Diary of the Dead extend in all directions as a mass capture apparatus. Where one is deanimated, another takes its place. Where a line of movement is barred, zombie-life masses and overflows as an amoebic superorganism, or in the case of the ‘intelligent’ zombies in 28 Days Later, sets off in another direction altogether. Where the zombie meets human life, it forms a connection and produces a new trajectory of malevolent life. Weed-like in its proliferating force, the zombie-life spreads horizontally, continually escaping the

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attempt to capture or otherwise terminate its malevolent powers of connection and production. Every(bodies) Working for the Weekend? Where Halperin’s White Zombie or Bellamy’s I Walked With a Zombie might function as an allegory for the exploitation of labor and the alienation of the laborer within deadening institutional systems, the postmodern zombie is said to produce an alternative metaphor. Where early and retro (Fido) conceptualizations of the zombie imagined an organism perfectly adapted to the banality of factory routine and the will of an authoritarian master, the prevailing analysis of Romero’s iteration of zombie-life recast it as the burnt-out shell of modern consumerism. Here, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead figures as a diagram for the bankrupt state of modern consumption in which the zombie functions to satirize the consumer as an unthinking, co-opted, and insatiable ‘thing’ driven by a monological will to consume (Walker, 2006). Uncoupled from the representational analysis that has dominated zombie-film studies, however, Romero’s diagram of contemporary consumption might be taken further still. Specifically, where the ‘malevolent rhizome’ produced by zombie-life can be delinked from its representation of ‘consumers,’ it might be taken as an inexact diagram for the function of capitalism itself. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, capitalism is born from a radical deterritorialization of the industrial social milieu and its regulation of the socius by way of strict regulatory codes. It is in this sense that capitalism is fulminated upon a line of revolutionary decoding in which social norms, circuits of exchange, and the overdetermination of desire are rendered fluid. Schizzing the social terrain, capitalism ‘frees’ social desire to enter into new forms of linkage and assemblage largely irrespective of geopolitical borderlines, public institutions, and property rights. Piercing the body of the organism, capitalism remakes life according to its potential to keep (capital) flows in circulation. Herein, the schizo-impulse of capitalism functions virally in its ‘liberation’ and subsequent capture of the organisms’ desire, instantiating a radical disequilibrium capable of maintaining the very forms of crisis and contradiction it requires to fuel its powers of proliferation and potential to produce the new. While the apocalyptic augury of the zombie-film might be thought as a way of imaging life at the end of capitalism, it might concomitantly become a means to rethink the problem of capitalism itself. Herein, zombie-life might be thought as an image of life swept along by the powers of deterritorialization intimate to the schizophrenic impulse of capitalism

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(Larsen, 2010). To return to the question of what kind of world the zombie produces is to detect a transversal relationship between the viral proliferation of the zombie, its rhizomatic outgrowth, unleashed desires, and the schizophrenic impulse of capitalism itself. It is here that the zombie functions as a malevolent force proliferating their deterritorialized affects through the unceasing surplus production. Zombies always produce an overabundance of zombies. Toward the absolute deterritorialization of all planetary life (Resident Evil), the zombie restlessly multiplies its particular form of virulent becoming, producing a disequilibrium that continually seeks out new vital forces with which to contract itself. In this vein, the filmic zombie functions as something of a noology (an image of thought) into which much of its cinematic world is inexactly actualized. In the course of such films as Dawn, 28 Days Later, and Resident Evil, the world undergoes a schizophrenic deterritorialization populated by the perverse affects of zombie-life. Cities hunch with radically recirculated flows (Land of the Dead), altered temporalities, and sufficiently malformed utility. Living inhabitants in this deterritorializing world are left to form neoterritorialities around the State military (28 Days Later), religious convictions (The Walking Dead), and the nostalgic relaunch of life as wilderness survivalists. Zombie Revolution Thought as an inexact image of life caught within the milieu of neoliberal capitalism, the zombie becomes a probe-head for the absolute deterritorialized exhaustion of the world. This posed, such a conceptualization of zombie-life overlooks the Deleuzeguattarian proposition that while capitalism dispenses with external social limits, it must retain an internal limit upon which life can be made equivalent to the abstract body of capital itself. Hence, while capitalism produces revolutionary lines of flight that liberate thought and action from prior circuits of regulation, its revolutionary impulse maintains a limit attractor informing upon the potential of revolutionary becomings. As Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007) write, “[i]n the process of multiplying flows of decoded desire, [capitalism] cannot help but also produce flows of desire that escape; flows which, instead of moving in line with capitalism, go against it, or run off in other direction” (15). While the zombie begins to diagram the deterritorializing impulse of neoliberal capitalism, it concomitantly escapes reterritorializing on the body of capital. For example, where the last remnants of human civilization in Romero’s Land of the Dead vie for a position within the flagging refuges of capitalist society, the zombie figures in absolute

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contradistinction as a schizo-revolutionary force or war-machine for deposing capital accumulation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Zombie-life rides the unleashed flows of capitalism (revolutionary movements, madness, and terrorism) to fulminate a schizophrenic deterritorialization of the capitalist machine’s internal limit. In this vein, zombie-life becomes a probe-head for detecting how the deterritorializing desire of capitalism (scientific expansion, finer controls over molecular life, and the insertion of life within the axiomatics of capital profit-motives) is also the potential of its undoing. The (Un)dead Don’t Shop Along these renewed lines of revolutionary potential, the filmic zombie might be rethought as an instantiation of a people yet to come. As such cinematic carryovers as public zombie-walks increase in popularity and participation, it is crucial to remark that people are not simply ‘overcoming’ zombies, but rather, forming connections with particular practices specific to the revolutionary impulse of zombie-life. Constituting a warmachine from the outside thought of capitalism and State power, zombies work through occupation. Producing a nomadic smooth space, zombies ‘hold the street’ by arraying themselves within the striated space of the city (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Opposed to entrenching themselves within fortifications or amassing into nodes of power, zombies utilize their potentials of mass, movement (swarming), and speed (acceleration or waiting with infinite patience) to occupy and retard the mobilization of State control. Functioning rhizomatically, zombie-life produces an ‘inverse geometry’ or ‘countercartography’ that remaps the striated routes of city corridors by punching holes through buildings, occupying subterranean space, and distributing themselves fractally throughout the milieu. While Romero’s Land of the Dead begins to suggest the emergence of leadership qualities among zombies, zombie-life is typically smooth (nonhierarchical) and devoid of leadership. Postinfestation, zombies become schizoidanybodies recalcitrant to modes of contemporary control that necessitate the constancy of identity or the continual registration of identificatory passwords. Occupying by alternative means, zombie-life produces a malevolent line of becoming-imperceptible, revolutionizing their deterritorialized milieu in a manner wherein the zombie no longer ‘stands out,’ but rather, is an expected motile feature of the surroundings (ibid.). Such imperceptibility is palpated in 28 Days Later, where it is ultimately the human, or an encounter with humans, that becomes most incongruous. In this revolution from the periphery, the zombie palpates a malevolent art

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through which the habits of humans and the anthropocentric judgment of life are radically recast. Put differently, the cinematic sign of the zombie is not simply that which reifies the necessity of what is, but produces a line for thinking what is not yet. In this vein, the zombie becomes a spiritual automaton for revolutionary action capable of taking life beyond the human, or rather, beyond the humanisms that capital manipulates in its production of new markets, tastes, and orthodoxies of enjoyment. Where zombie-life escapes enslavement (Fido) as a ‘standing’ labor force, it fulminates a slow-motion (or accelerated) general strike, breaking the circuit of capitalist production, corporate use-value, and the designer lifestyles of the bourgeoisie (Holland, 2012). Herein, the zombie might be thought as the screen of the event, or rather, as the actualization that something has both happened and is happening (Deleuze, 1992). Where the event is born of a chaotic and incorporeal multiplicity (something has happened), the zombie becomes a cine-sign or screen for thinking molecular or larval desire oriented to the revolution of the public sphere (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Herein, the zombie palpates a malevolent revolutionary line intimate to molecular revolutions being prepared throughout the contemporary world. Zombies become a power of the false for overturning the already deadly trajectory along which life is oriented (Deleuze, 2003a). In this vein, zombies might be thought as a screen for molecular (nonidentitarian, nonhierarchical) potentials of connection, occupation, and affectations capable of undergoing a radical revolution of the socius. When the zombies Romero’s Dawn of the Dead Zombies return to the mall, this repetition must be understood as a repetition with difference. Zombie-life does not shop. It occupies and perverts. Ultimately, zombies are not us, but rather, an inhuman impulse of what we are not yet. As Larsen (2010) writes, “[t]he issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the [zombie hunting] ‘heroes’ . . . if they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future” (p. 4). No Future If zombie-life can be thought as a screen for a people yet to come, or rather, for a revolutionary people in the process of becoming, the zombie composes a ‘malevolent art’ for the deterritorialization of what is. This malevolent line of flight produced by zombie-life fulminates upon an empty body without organs, or rather, a completely deterritorialized and catatonic affect that might reach a limit point of productive potential. This posed, the empty BwO of the zombie creates its own form of dissonance as a noncommunicative, unproductive, and autistic life-form, functioning as a “refusal to be born [into the symbolic order], connecting

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with death before its patriachalized ascent into the symbolic” (Land, 2011, 399). Here, zombie-life resists the very prospect of a future or rather, a future continually reterritorialized in a mirror image of what is. Apart from what is, the zombie continues to function as a unique cine-sign for surveying and assessing a life-form born of the deprogramed body, its savage metronomic pulsations, and the extreme revolutionary deterritorializations of capitalism (ibid.). References Abraham, M. (Producer), Newman, E. (Producer), Rubinstein, R. P. (Producer), and Snyder, Z. (Director). (2004). Dawn of the dead (Motion picture). United States: Universal Pictures. Agamben, G. (2004). The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stafford University Press. Alliez, E. (2006). “Anti-Oedipus—Thirty Years On (Between Art and Politics).” In Deleuze and the Social. Ed. M. Fuglsang and B. M. Sorensen (151–168). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Anderson, P. (Producer), Bolt, J. (Producer), Eichinger, B. (Producer), Hadida, S. (Producer), and W. S. Anderson, P. (Director). (2002). Resident evil (Motion picture). Germany, United Kingdom: Screen Gems. Ansell-Pearson, K. (1997). “Viroid Life.” In Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer. Ed. K. Ansell-Pearson (180–210). London, UK: Routledge. ———. (1999). Germinal Life. London, UK: Routledge. Artaud, A. (1976). Selected Writings. Ed. S. Sontag. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bellew, B. (Producer), Boyle, D. (Producer), Garland, A. (Producer), Lopez-Lavigne, E. (Producer), Macdonald, A. (Producer), Reich, A. (Producer), and Fresnadillo, J. C. (Director). (2007). 28 weeks later (Motion picture). United Kingdom, Spain: 20th Century Fox. Boll, U. (Producer), Herold, W. (Producer), Williamson, S. (Producer), and Boll, U. (Director). (2003). House of the dead (Motion picture). Canada: Brightlight Pictures. Caillois, R. (1961). Man, Play and Games. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ——— (2003). “‘The Edge of Surrealism’: A Roger Caillois Reader. Trans. C. Frank and C. Naish. Durham: Duke University Press. Carlson, T. (Producer), Cassavetti, P. (Producer), Corbet, B. (Producer), Eastwood, K. (Producer), Iron, D. (Producer), Shepard, M. (Producer), Waterhouse, M. A. (Producer), Wight, K. (Producer), and Currie, A. (Director). (2006). Fido (Motion picture). Canada: Lions Gate Entertainment. Canton, M. (Producer), Goldmann, B. (Producer), Grunwald, P. (Producer), & Romero, G. A. (Director). (2005). Land of the dead (Motion picture). United States: Universal Pictures. Clover, C. (1987). “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations 20: 187–228.

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Uexküll, J. (2010). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: A Theory of Meaning. Trans. J. D. O’ Neill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Walker, M. (2006). “When There’s No More Room in Hell, the Dead Will Shop the Earth: Romero and Aristotle on Zombies, Happiness, and Consumption.” In The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless (81–90). Ed. R. Greene and K. S. Mohammad. Chicago: Open Court. Wood, R. (1978). “Return of the Repressed.” Film Comment 14 (4): 25–32. Zepke, S. (2005). Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge.

Contributors

Frida Beckman is a postdoctoral researcher at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research centers around Deleuze’s philosophy focusing on topics such as sexuality, history, and political agency as expressed through media such as literature, cinema, and television. Her recent publications include the edited collection Deleuze and Sex (Edinburgh University Press) and articles on the TV series Carnivàle, the femme fatale, and Alice in Wonderland in SubStance, Cinema Journal, and Journal of Narrative Theory. She is also coeditor of two special issues of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on theories of sadism and masochism. She is currently writing a monograph on Deleuze and sexuality for Edinburgh University Press. Hanjo Berressem teaches American Literature at the University of Cologne, Germany. His publications include Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text (University of Illinois Press) and Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz’s Fiction with Lacan. (Northwestern University Press). He has edited, together with Leyla Haferkamp, Deleuzian Events: Writing|History (Lit, 2009) and site-specific: from aachen to zwölfkinder – pynchon|germany (Sondernummer der Pynchon Notes, 2008). Currently, he is completing a book on the work of Gilles Deleuze entitled Crystal Philosophy. jan jagodzinski is Professor of Visual Art and Media Education in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta, Canada. His most recent books include Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Musical Fantasies: A Lacanian Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Television and Youth: Televised Paranoia (Palgrave, 2008); Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism: Deconstructing the Oral Eye (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Misreading Postmodern Antigone: Marco Bellocchio’s Devil in the Flesh (Diavolo in Corpo) (Intellect Books, 2011), Arts Based Research: A Critique and Proposal, with Jason Wallin (Sense, in progress). A. Kiarina Kordela (PhD Cornel University) is Professor of German & Director of the Critical Theory Program, at Macalester College, and Honorary Adjunct Professor at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of Western Sydney, Australia. She publishes on topics such as German literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical, political, and film theory, intellectual history, and biopolitics. She is the author of $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007), Being,

272

CONTRIBUTORS

Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (SUNY Press, forthcoming, 2013), and (coedited) Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Her articles have been published in the collections European Film Theory (Routledge, 2008), Keywords in German Aesthetics (Harvard University Press, forthcoming), Literary Paternity—Literary Friendship (University of North Carolina Press), Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (SUNY Press, forthcoming), Spinoza Now (University of Minnesota), The Dreams of Interpretation (University of Minnesota), and journals such as Angelaki, Cultural Critique, Hihuo kukan [Critical Space] (in Japanese translation), Modern Language Studies, Monokl (in Turkish translation), Parallax, Political Theory, Radical Musicology, Rethinking Marxism, and Umbr(a). Sheila Kunkle is Assistant Professor of Individualized Studies at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She has published various articles on psychoanalysis, film, and culture in journals such as Paraoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres, American Imago, Journal of Lacanian Studies, International Journal of Žižek Studies, and Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, as well as coedited a collection along with Todd McGowan, entitled Lacan & Contemporary Film (Other Press, 2004). Meera Lee is Humanities Faculty Fellow at Syracuse University where she researches and teaches Korean cinema and literature, trauma, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial criticism. She has written articles on Korean cinema, gender, and subaltern in both English and Korean, as well as a book on psychoanalysis in Korean. She is currently working on a book manuscript, titled In Search of Han: Trauma, Haunting and Identity. Todd McGowan teaches cultural theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007), and other books. He is also the coauthor (with Paul Eisenstein) of Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (Northwestern University Press, 2012). Patricia Pisters is Professor of Media Culture and Film Studies and Chair of the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She has published on film-philosophical questions on the nature of perception, the ontology of the image, and on politics of contemporary screen culture and the idea of the “brain as screen” in connection to neuroscience. Her publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003), Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values (ed. with Wim Staat; Amsterdam University Press, 2005) and Mind the Screen (ed. with Jaap Kooijman and Wanda Strauven, Amsterdam University Press, 2008). Her latest book is The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012). See also www.patriciapisters.com Robert Samuels is President of the University Council—AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and he teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.

CONTRIBUTORS

273

He is the author of the popular blog “Changing Universities” and several books, including New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernity. Jason Wallin is an Assistant Professor of Media and Youth Culture Studies in Curriculum in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta, where he teaches courses in visual art, media studies, and curriculum theory. Jason’s most recent book, A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life, is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Jason is reviews editor for Deleuze Studies. Emanuelle Wessels is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Augsburg College. Her work focuses on Media Convergence and New Media Storytelling, the Ethics and Politics of Viewing and Interactivity, Media Technologies, and Affect. She can be reached at [email protected].

Index

abject, 250, 257 abyme, 23n3, 29n43 abyss, 11, 12 action-image, 56, 170, 177, 192, 213–215, 217, 219, 221, 222–223 actual|virtual (actualization), 13, 14, 19, 20, 23n3, 30n50, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 58, 59, 62, 66n10, 67n16, 81, 100, 103, 140, 143, 162, 164n1, 186, 189, 190, 192–193, 195, 220–221, 239, 243 affect, 252, 255–256, 259–260, 262, 264, 266 affection-image, 103, 198n19, 209, 212–214 Alberti, L B: and central perspective, 50 Altman, Robert, 205–206, 214; Nashville, 206, 214–215; Shortcuts, 206 anthropocentrism, 261–262, 266 Antigone, 237–238 antinomy, 233, 235, 236, 239 Anti-Oedipus (A-O), 4, 10, 12, 24n5, 26n17, 26n18, 74, 209, 220 Antonioni, M., 209, 215, 217 Artaud, A., 256–257, 260 asignification, 18, 25n14 assemblage, 5, 12, 14; between voice and body, 83 automodernity, 221–225 autopoiesis, 250, 257, 268 Badalamenti, A., 72 Badiou, A., 13–17; on A-O, 30–31n54; against Deleuze, 31n57, 32n59, 32n58; Event, 15–16 Barthes, R., 83 Beckett, S., 212

becoming-imperceptible (imperceptible), 11, 18, 19, 33n71, 60, 136, 265 becoming-woman, 7, 27n25 Bejahung, 2, 3 Benjamin, W., 236 Bergman, I., 213 Bergson, H., 19, 170, 172, 175, 180, 188; memory-image, 193, 194, 199n38, 209–210, 212, 219; on time biopolar, 89, 95, 99, 103; face, 104; love, 100; temporality, 100; time, 89 Blade Runner (film, Ridley Scott), 200n43 body, 99; bipolar-, 99; immaterial, 99; immaterial/impersonal, 100; impersonal, 99; material/personal, 100; public bodies, 105; schizoid-, 100; split-, 99; see also bipolar and schizoid Body without Organs (BwO), 12, 194, 266 Borges, J.L., 201n47 brain: Bergson, 180, 190; brainwaves-191–196, 200n41, 201n47; is the screen, 18, 23n3, 169, 170, 172 Buchanan, I, 21, 25n5, 28n31 Caillois, R., 251–252, 258–259 camera, 230–231, 233, 236 capitalism: consumer, 224, 256, 263– 267; cultural, 215; designer, 1, 21, 24; global, 66n12, 120, 222; late, 200 Carroll, L., 236 Chabrol, C., 229–230 chance, 130, 133, 136, 137, 141, 142

276

INDEX

Chion, M., 25n14, 72, 85, 86 Chronos|Aion, 10, 29n41, 34n75 cine-sign, 266–267 Cinema 1 and 2, 19–20, 34n73, 34n74; Cinema 1, 206, 208, 209–211; Cinema 2, 209, 216, 220, 225 (cinema of) relations, 228–230, 240, 242–244 cinematographic apparatus, 46, 61, 147; classical and conventional, 151–152, 154, 156, 157, 164, 176, 177, 179–180, 181; Peeping Tom and Strange Days compared, 185–186, 195 cliché, 74–75, 82 communism, 28n34 consciousness, 232–236 contingency, 130, 133, 136, 137, 141, 143 Copjec, J., 24n3, 149, 173 counteractualization, 18, 19, 106 Creed, B., 250 crystal-image, 20, 35n82, 59, 60; in Strange Days, 193; in Vertigo, 189–190 crystalline time, 91, 100, 101; see also crystal-image death drive, 8, 12, 16 Deleuze, G., 10–11; affection-image, 103; audiovisual cinema, 74; avec Lacan, 86, 91, 99, 100, 101, 104, 129, 133, 140, 143; and Beckett, 83–84; on Bergson, 199n38; bipolar-temporality, 99; brain is the screen, 18, 23n3; on cameraconsciousness, 189; compared to Žižek, 171–175; crystalline time, 100, 101; desire, 62, 80; difference and repetition, 130–131, 134, 137, 138, 144; eternal return, 134; event16–17, 19, 18, 23n3; flux of “line of flight,” 93; How Do We Recognize Structuralism, 208–209, 227–236, 240–243; irrational cuts, 141; Lacan, 18, 19; Mankiewicz and, 136; Masoch/masochism and, 131, 132, 144; Proust and, 18, 130, 131; and

pure image, 85; recollection-image, 103, 104; Sade/Sadism and, 131,132, 144; schizoid-face, 100; temporality, 134; the Real, 142; voice, 86; worldmemory, 103, 104; see also body Deleuze|Guattari, 5, 6, 10, 11; sign, 21, 22 diagram, 53, 211, 260–264 dialectic, 11, 17, 23, 27n26, 28n32, 132, 154, 210, 211, 215, 255 diegetic reality, 174 Difference and Repetition (DR), 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 31n57, 33n71, 179 desire, 2, 5, 7, 9; assemblages of, 14, 19; ‘cause’ of, 23, 24, 25n12, 26n16, 26n17, 26n20; and Deleuze, 62, 80; fundamental, 190, 195; impossible, 78; Luis Buñuel and, 197n13, 227– 228, 230, 240–242; luminous, 45, 50, 54; and objet a, 79; optical, 50, 54, 60; of the Other, 11, 12, 13, 27n26; in Peeping Tom, 181; scopic, 55, 61, 62; in Strange Days, 182; subject of, 172– 176; transcendental or immanent, 172–176; visual, 51 desiring machine, 5, 12, 26n16 differentiator, 10, 12, 13 Doane, M.A., 72 Dogville (film, Lars von Trier), 147, 156, 161, 163 Dolar, M., 8, 25n14, 71, 72, 134 Don Juan, 132 drives (Triebe), 2, 11, 12, 26n21 ego, 6, 11, 232 Elliot, T.S., 137 encore, 91, 93, 96, 98, 100, 105; gap, 93, 97, 102; love, 104; once again, 98; still, 93 enjoyment, 227 ethics, 228–229, 236–240, 242 Ettinger, B., 2, 27n25 Event (also event), 9, 10; becomingvisceral of- 8, 260, 262–263, 266; cinematic, 64, 76; as evental sublime, 31n54, 32n58, 33n72,

INDEX

34n75; sense-,13, 14, 15–19, 20, 32n3, 25n8, 28n34, 29n40, 30n48, 30n54 excess, 150, 152, 155, 160, 164 fabulation, 18, 20 faciality, 261 failure, 91; destructive, 92, 93; love as, 97; of love, 101; repetition of, 101; repetitive, 96 fantasy, 4; between –and desire, 77, 80, 85, 119, 134, 140; fundamental, 8, 23, 27n26, 72, 78, 81, 87; Hitchcock’s, 169–170 fascism: micro-, 194; soft, 21 Fellini, F., 209, 215, 217, 218 flashback, 136, 193–194, 219 Flaxman, G., 32n61, 33n67, 35n87 Fink, B., 2, 3 Foucault, M., 35n87, 241 Freud, S., 2, 4, 6, 173; -ian discourse, 181; -ian framework in Vertigo, 187, 228, 235–236 fundamental fantasy, 8, 27n26 gaze (Lacan), 3, 11, 19, 24n3, 50–55, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 72, 75, 94, 98, 112, 113, 118, 125n2, 125n6, 142–143, 147, 150, 151, 154, 157, 160, 164, 171, 173; in Vertigo, 187, 196n8, 196n11, 228–229, 231, 233–234, 236, 240, 242, 244 Girard, R., 244 Godard, J-L., 21, 35n88, 72, 218 Guattari, F., 1, 11, 13, 227 guilt, 227–230, 237, 240–242 haecciety, 17 Hallward, P., 13, 30n49, 30n53, 32n62 han, 91; bodies of 105 Hegel, G. W. F., 129, 143, 222 Heider, F: and light, 48–50, 63 Hitchcock, A., 169–170; I Confess, 229–230, 242; Rope, 229, 241, 243; Sabotage, 230; Shadow of a Doubt, 241; Strangers on a Train, 229–230; on Vertigo, 187–188, 208, 214, 221,

277

223–224, 227–230, 241–243; The Wrong Man, 241; universe, 171–176 Holbein, H: The Ambassadors, 52, 53, 125 Holland, E., 81 image: action-, 170; aural-, 82; imaginary- 52,53, 54; moving-, 18, 21, 23n3, 45, 46, 56, 57, 60, 63, 65, 66n14, 67n17, 67n19, 170; neuro-21, 33n67, 34n74, 34n80; pure-, 83, 84, 85; relation-, 175; sound -, 72, 73, 74, 76, 84; still, 23n3, 19, 20, 46, 48, 49; symbolic-51; of thought-21, 34n73, 169, 170; time-20, 34n73, 34n80, 85; voice-74 imaginary, 228, 231–232, 239–240 imago, 97, 99; the mask, 98 impossible, 93, 96; impossibility of love, 93 indiscernibility, 23n3; of subject and object, 186–191; of virtual and actual, 59, 103 inhuman, 249, 251–252, 254, 257–262, 266 instance=x, 231; see also object=x inorganic, 12, 17 intersubjectivity, 93, 97, 99 invisible, 233–235, 243 Irigaray, L., 4 irrational cut, 19, 20, 33n72 James, W., 32n63 Jameson, F., 200, 244n2 Jansenism, 171, 173, 175, 228 Job (biblical character), 244 Johnson, A., 8 Johnston, A., 7 jouissance, 3, 4; feminine, 4, 78, 93; jouis-sans, 27n25; jouis-sens, 4, 5; phallic, 98 Kafka, F., 213 Kant, I., 197n16, 216, 239 Karatani, K., 239 Kordela, A. K., 33, 232 Kristeva, J., 2; semiotic, 4, 250

278

INDEX

Lacan, J., 1–7; assemblage, 5; desire, 133, 140, 144; drive, 133, 141; forced choice, 130; Imaginary, 207–211, 213, 224–225; intersubjectivity, 99; love, 129, 133, 137, 140, 141, 143, 144; love subjects, 100, 129, 134, 141, 143, 144; mirror-phase, 251–254, 258; object a, 133, 144; Real, 2–7, 129, 133, 134, 141, 142, 144, 207–209, 210–214, 215, 220, 223–224; repetition, 129, 134, 137; S III, Psychosis, 22n1; S XI, Four Fundamentals, 5, 23n3, 26n16, 79, 211; S XX, Encore, 4,5, 27n25; S XXII, RIS, 6; S XXIII, Sinthome, 6; S XXIV, 6–7; subject, 129, 130, 133, 140, 141, 143–144; Symboic, 207–209, 215, 220–224, 227–237, 239–240, 244; temporality of intersubjectivity, 99; and theory, 29n39; and voice, 71–72, 78, 91, 93; also see encore, imago, jouissance lack (manque), 5, 8, 19, 79–80, 81, 82, 83, 173–174, 227–228 lalangue (llanguage), 4,5 Laplanche, J., 26n20 larval, 252, 256, 266 law, 16, 23n3; city, 238, 251, 253, 254, 257; of the Father, 195, 240; -less, 72, 73; national, 100; of perspective, 50–51; of transcendental aesthetic, 116, 162 Lecercle, S., 11, 14, 29n40, 30n51 Leclaire, S., 5, 26n16, 26n17 legible/legibility (as opposed to visible), 233–235, 242–244 light, 12, 19, 23, 34n74, 45–68 Lloyd, G., 174–175 Logic of Sense (LS), 10–11, 25n6, 29n36, 30n48, 209 logic of the signifier, 10, 25n12 Luhmann, N: and light, 49, 63 Lynch, D., 71–87 MacCormack, P., 21, 35n92 malevolent art, 265

malevolent-life, 250, 256–257, 260–261, 264 Marrati, P., 21 Martin-Jones, D., 34n78 Marx Brothers, 208 materialism: intelligent, 12, 25n11 Massumi, B., 34n74, 206 McGowan, T., 22, 77; Mulholand Drive, 78, 81, 142 McLuhan, M: and perceptual media, 49 Mecchia, G., 21 méconaissance (misrecognition), 3, 18, 23n, 97 mediators, 17 melancholy, 91, 96, 98, 105; individual and national, 91; melancholia, 92, 97, 99; melancholic desire, 90 memory-image, 193 Miller, J-A., 6, 28n28; and voice, 78 mirror: effects in Vertigo, 189–190; imago, 97, 99, 104, 135, 141, 149, 150, 159, 181, 183; Lacan and Deleuze, 23n3; stage, 56, 63, 81, 148, 251–254, 258 mis-en-scene, 250, 252, 255 Modleski, T., 187; on Vertigo, 188, 190 molar|molecular, 12, 79, 255–259; becoming-molecular, 257–260; molar, 255–259; molecular-life, 265–266 movement-image, 18, 21, 23n3, 45, 46, 56, 57, 60, 63, 65, 66n14, 67n17, 67n19, 170, 177, 190, 192; actualizing the past, 193, 206, 209– 212, 216–217, 219, 223, 229 Mulholland Drive (film, David Lynch), 74–76, 77–83, 84 Mullarkey, J., 33n65, 34n77, 34n80 multiplicity, 15, 26n17, 48, 49, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 66n15, 80, 82 Mulvey, L., 50, 156, 158, 180, 187 Nancy, J-L., 82 narration vs. story, 20 necessity, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 143 Nietzsche, F., 31n57, 176, 206

INDEX

nonsense|sense, 25n6, 85, 137, 231– 232, 235–236, 239–240, 242–244 not-all set, 234–235 object=x, 231; see also instance=x object-oriented ontology (OOO), 21 objet a, 3, 23–24n3, 71, 72; and phallic signifier, 74; in relation to Deleuze, Guattari and Lacan, 78, 80; as voice, 74 Oedipus (also, oedipal), 46, 53, 79, 91, 97, 98, 99, 100, 181, 182, 227, 250–258, 261, 267–268 Organs without Bodies (Žižek); 10, 12, 29n35, 32n59, 58, 74, 129, 134, 205 out-of-field, 230, 233, 235–236, 240, 242–243 Outside, 1, 5, 7, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 33n66, 33n71, 35n87 Outside artist, 3–4, 6 paradox, 3, 10, 14, 20, 23n3, 29n39, 30n48, 58, 91, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 133, 143, 148, 154, 155, 188, 233, 236, 239, 243; see also antinomy partial objects, 5, 12, 13, 26n18, 79, 82 Pasolini, P: free indirect discourse, 186 Peeping Tom (film, Michael Powell), 170, 176, 177, 180 Peirce, C.S., 34n73, 207–210, 214 people yet to come, 17, 18; missing, 20, 21, 22, 32n64 perception, 18, 19; transcendental, 176 perception-image, 186, 213 perspective, 29n43; Deleuzian, 79, 80; geometrical, 50, 51, 53, 54 Pisters, P: neuro-image, 21, 227–228, 240 postalphabetiztion|postideogrphizat ion, 24n5 postmodernity, 216–219, 221–223 powers of the false, 11, 17, 20, 266 progression, 89, 90; against the, 104; capitalist, 102; temporal, 91, 93

279

psychoanalysis, 4, 10, 11, 22n1, 23n32, 31n54, 45; and schizoanalysis, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54, 73, 79, 111, 112, 113, 123, 124, 172, 174, 176, 181, 227– 229, 231, 235–236, 240 psychoanalytic subject, 228, 242; see also subject psychosis, psychotic, 3, 4, 6, 7, 23n3, 238–240 pure image, 83–85; see also image quantum physics, 26n22 race and ethnicity: in Strange Days, 185 Rachline, F., 132 Rancière, J., 20, 33n72, 34n80 Rand, A., 132 rape: scene in Strange Days, 183–185 recollection-image, 103, 104, 107n20, 193, 219 rhizome (rhizomatic), 9, 28n32, 170, 171, 172 Real (Lacan), 1–7, 8–11, 15, 16, 17, 24n5, 25n7, 25n11, 26n21, 27n26; occasion the 147–165, 171; in Strange Days, 184; in Vertigo, 187, 189, 190, 207–209, 210–214, 215, 220, 223–224, 228–229, 231–232, 235, 239–240; virtual, 10, 17, 29n3, 61, 62, 73, 80, 85, 97, 98, 99, 129, 133, 134, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145; and Žižek, 173–174; see also R1 and R 2 Real (R1 and R 2), 2, 5, 6–9, 13; R1, 11, 15, 23–24n3; as virtual, 10, 17 regression, 89, 90; love progresses in, 93, 102; temporal, 91 Reid, J., 20; Godard, 21, 35n88, 35n89 relation-image, 175 repetition, 89; endless, 97; of failed love, 89, 102; of failure, 96,101 representation: beyond, 149, 150, 152 reverse chronology, 89, 92, 101, 102 revolving chronology, 89, 101, 104; loop, 105 rhizome, 185, 262–265

280

INDEX

Rodowick, R.N., 34n76 Rohmer, E., 229–230 Romanticism, 232 Romero, G. A., 251, 255, 258–259, 264–266 Rossellini, R., 209, 238, 242–243; Europa ’51, 238; Germany, Year Zero, 238–239, 242–243; Stromboli, 238 Roudinesco, E., 4,5 Sartre, J-P., 32n62, 154, 207, 232 Schelling, F.W., 7, 11, 13, 28n32, 82, 211, 232–233, 235 schizoanalysis, 20, 21, 71, 80, 85 schizoid, 93, 98, 99, 103; -body, 99, 100; face, 100; see also body schizophrenia, schizophrenic, 4, 6, 11; schizoCrets, 19–21, 35n91 schizophrenic, 91, 100, 103, 104; schizo, 251, 260, 263–265 self-reflection, 253, 261 seers, 21; in Rear Window, 175, 190 sense, 147, 150, 151, 154, 157, 160, 164, 231–233, 235–236, 239 senseless, see nonsense|sense, sense shot|montage couplet, 23n3 sign: in Deleuze, 18, 33n69 signifer: despotic, 79; as S and S1 , 9, 28n33 Silverman, K., 25n10, 72, 75,76; voice and body, 83, 85 sinthome, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 27n25 Smith, D., 26n15, 29n38; Lacan and Deeuze, 72, 79, 85 Soler, C., 7, 27n25 Sophocles, see Antigone smooth space, 32n59, 162, 265 spectator (spectatorship), 49, 54, 60, 63, 65, 102; Godard and, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 155–164, 169, 171, 172, 174, 180, 182, 184, 185, 187; in Strange Days, 191, 195; in Vertigo, 188, 190 Spinoza, B., 4, 11, 13, 31n57, 65n10, 172, 174–175, 197n14, 235, 257, 259–260, 269

structuralism, 4, 208–209, 221–222, 230–232, 235, 237, 240, 244 surplus, 227, 233, 240–244 symbolic, 229–232, 235, 238–240, 244 Stelarc, 199n40 Strange Days (film, Katherine Bigelow), 169, 170, 176, 177, 182–185 subject: of desire, 172–176; in Peeping Tom, 183; transcendental, 179 sujet suppose savoir, 28n33 symbolic act, 8 temporality, 91; active temporality, 92, 93, 99; bipolar, 100; of interruption, 93; no temporality, 91; non-chronological 91; passive temporality,92, 96, 99, 105; revolving or forking, 102; see also movement-image, time-image Thiele, K., 32n65 Thousand Plateaus (TP), 5, 17, 22 time: ethics of, 194, 195, 234, 237, 242–243; and memory, 86; in Time, 89–106, 174, 191–193 Time (film, Kim Ki-duk), 89–106 time-image (C2), 19, 20, 34n73, 34n80, 35n82, 67n17; image of, 76, 85, 86, 170; in Strange Days, 191, 209, 216, 219, 220, 223, 229; in Vertigo, 189 totality, see not-all set trauma, 89, 91, 92, 93, 98, 104; individual personal, 105; love, 100; love as, 95, 97; national and personal traumas, 92; psychic, 90, 92; return of , 89, 97, 99 Twelve Monkeys (film, Terry Gilliam), 192, 200n44 Tykwer, T., 130, 134, 137 unconscious, 4, 5, 6, 26n18, 26n21, 47, 91; national, 92, 99, 100, 103, 104, 130, 131, 162, 165, 182; of patriarchy, 187, 211, 219, 220, 232–237, 242, 250, 251, 252 universe: as metacinema, 169–201 univocity, 4, 11, 12, 17

INDEX

Versagung (refusal), 8, 28n29 Vertigo (film, Alfred Hitchcock), 170, 186–191 Verwerfung (foreclosure), 3 virtual|actual, 20, 30n50 virtual Real, 10 visible, 233–235, 244 voice, 71–87; and Deleuze, 84; and female subject, 75–76; grain of the-, 83; with image and sound, 72–73; J-L Nancy on -, 82–83; as miming, 75–76, 78; and Rebekah del Rio, 78–79, 81, 83; recorded -, 77, 81–83; and time, 80; voice image, 74, 84 von Trier, L., 147, 157 voodoo, 24n5, 259 voyeurism, 176; gender, 181–186; in Strange Days and Peeping Tom, 177–178 war machine, 20, 265 whodunit, 229

281

whole, 228, 231, 233, 235, 237, 241, 243; see also not-all set Žižek, S., 3, 7–9; concerns with, 28n31; against Deleuze, Organs without Bodies, 10, 12, 29n35, 32n59, 205; and Deleuze, 171–176, 205–209, 211, 214–215, 216, 220–225, 226, 227–229, 232, 238–242, 244; disguised Deleuzian, 28n32; dominance over Deleuze, 74; on Event, 16; German Idealism, 7; and Hitchcock, 171–176; and Lynch, 73, 129, 135, 143; Schelling, 11, 13; symbolic act, 8, 16 Zombie, 22, 32n64; -life, 249–267 Zupančič, A., 129, 144n3; comedy, 137, 138, 144; on Deleuze, 129, 134, 138, 142; Lacan and, 129, 133, 134, 142, 144; love, 133, 137, 138, 142, 144; object a, 134,137, 138, 144; Real, 142; repetition, 134, 144