The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame 9781503601611

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The Off-Screen

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MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher Editor

Stanford University Press

Stanford California

THE OFF-SCREEN

An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame

Eyal Peretz

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper Cataloging-in-Publication data is available at the Library of Congress isbn 9781503600720 (cloth) isbn 9781503601661 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.9/13 Adobe Garamond

Contents

Illustrations

ix

threshold

The Unframing Image

part 1: the off-screen:  shakespeare, bruegel, tarkovsky

3

15

part 2: the origin of film

1 On the Origin of Film and the Resurrection of the People: D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance

61

2 The Actor of the Crowd—The Great Dictator: Chaplin, Riefenstahl, Lang

78

part 3: on film genre 3 Howard Hawks’s Idea of Genre

173

4 What Is a Cinema of Jewish Vengeance? Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

200

Notes

211

Index

253

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Illustrations

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1635. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

2

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558. Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium.

24

The cradle rocks. D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916. Triangle Film Corporation.

60

Workers going into the factory. D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916. Triangle Film Corporation.

72

The miracle at Cana. D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916. Triangle Film Corporation.

74

The cradle rocks. D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916. Triangle Film Corporation.

77

The shadow of the off-screen. Fritz Lang, M, 1931. Nero Film AG.

85

The petrifying leader. Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, 1935. NSDAP Reichspropagandaleitung Hauptabt.

93

The camera/weapon. Charles Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940. Charles Chaplin Productions.

122

The Road Runner. Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Warner Brothers.

124

x

Illustrations

On the road. Charles Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936. Charles Chaplin Productions.

124

Chaplin, one of the crowd, apart from the crowd. Henry Lehrman, Kid Auto Races at Venice, 1914. Keystone Film.

125

A playful interruption of work. Charles Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936. Charles Chaplin Productions. 150 The experimenting monkey. Howard Hawks, Monkey Business, 1952. Twentieth Century Fox. 172 Diving from the sky. Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia, 1938. Olympia Film GMBH.

230

Threshold



The Unframing Image

What’s in a frame? What’s in the frame of a work of art? It is in the gap or the distance opening between these two questions, between the frames, that this book tries to find its place. While we will mostly pay attention to the cinematic frame, cinema stands as a culminating and to an extent revolutionary moment of what we will try to understand as a general logic of framing that preoccupies the work of art in modernity, that is, the work of art as it has developed from the Renaissance to the present. The question regarding the modern work of art, the question indeed of its modernity and novelty, is to a large extent one of exploring, investigating, and experimenting or playing with a new kind of frame, a frame that unframes. What does the frame of the modern work of art, the framing operation that is the modern work of art, unframe? This concern implicitly and explicitly guides my analysis. I will open by taking a look not at a film but rather a painting that strikes me as a remarkable allegorical reflection on this question of the frame. The painting is Rembrandt’s The Sacrifice of Isaac (1635).

The Interrupting Angel All artists are escape artists. Because Rembrandt is a painter, he tries to paint his way out. If what one tries to escape is always a prison of sorts, then what is the prison here, and what are the means of escape? An inscription of a prison as well as an indication of the way out, the painting itself gives us the answers.1 3

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Looking at the painting, we can say that on the most literal level, that of representation, what we seem to have escaped, or more accurately, avoided at the last minute, is the killing of a son by his father, and what enables that escape is an interrupting angel. But what precisely does this mean? What is the nature of the killing, or sacrifice, of a son by his father? Why can we describe such a sacrificial scene as a prison? And what kind of escape does the interrupting angel offer? The key to all this can be found in the operation of the pictorial frame. By pictorial frame, I mean not simply the physical limitation of the painting’s borders, but also the way in which what we see in the painting functions as the inside of a framing operation, an inside that organizes itself in relation to what we do not see, an outside of the frame. The painting’s theme, the angelic interruption of the sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham, is intimately tied here to the way Rembrandt under­stands the pictorial frame. In fact, this angelic interruption functions as an allegorical reflection on the activity of the painterly medium itself as structured by a new kind of framing operation, of a framing that unframes. I suggest that Rembrandt shows this new kind of frame to be a saving or interrupting angel. In other words, the angel is the painting: the modern medium of painting is an angelic interruption (of the sacrifice of a son by his father). But what then, more precisely, is the angel? In the most immediate way, we can say that the angel is a messenger coming from the outside. In the case of the painting at hand, this outside is indicated, at the most obvious and basic level, as whatever is beyond the frame’s borders, for it is quite clear that the angel has just entered into the painting from a zone invisible to us. In fact, the tip of its wing is cut by the painting’s frame, as if making explicit that it has just arrived from across the painting’s border. This outside, to begin with, is thus outside the frame. Yet things are not so simple, for this outside from which the angel comes is different from, say, the spatial outside, such as the wall on which the painting hangs or the outside that the painting’s observers occupy. Rather, this outside of the frame seems to be a (nonspatial) part of the painting, belonging to something we might call the fictional realm of the painting (a realm that is “larger” or “more” than what the painting makes visible), an outside only made possible by, and in fact to a certain extent co-extensive with, the painting itself. It is the outside of the painting, both in the sense that it belongs to the painting and in the sense that it is outside any actual, visible

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part of the painting. Thus, while it belongs to the painting, it has no actual presence, only a presence we can understand, for lack of a better term, as virtual, and thus as a nonexistence that is nevertheless in effect. We can name such being-in-effect of what does not actually exist a “haunting,” a term that will play a prominent role in our discussions. The achievement of this fictional realm of the painting depends on yet another aspect of the operation of the painting’s frame besides its functioning as the marker of the borders of visibility. This other aspect is that of the frame as the mark of a separation or cut between the painting and its spatial and temporal surroundings, a separation emphasized by the painting’s movability, by the fact that it can always be taken out of its present context and hung elsewhere. It is only because the painting is framed, in the sense of being cut out or separated from any specific surrounding, that it can create its own fictional realm, a realm in which a visible inside and an invisible outside, one that comes with the painting, wherever it moves, are copresent. It is this invisible outside belonging to the fictional realm that I shall designate as the dimension of the “off.” We can see, then, that the painting’s interruption of visibility and separation from its surroundings through its borders or frame are what allows the haunting invisible outside, the “off,” to become manifest: to appear as what is not actually present and visible in the painting yet is still part of it. Consequently, the appearance of the angel from the outside (an outside emphasized as being the outside of the frame) offers an allegory for the way the medium of painting, by creating a frame that cuts visibility, ­allows for an invisibility belonging to the painting to appear. The angel is the appearance of the medium itself, which makes ghostly invisibility visible; in other words, the angel stands for the being of the painterly image, which we can understand as the appearance of invisibility that belongs to the visible. But why does the angel, the appearance of an invisible outside as a presence within the borders of a frame—and thus the appearance of a modern pictorial image, broadly defined2—interrupt the sacrifice of a son by his father, and perhaps, even more particularly, this father and this son, Abraham and Isaac? To understand the matter we need to examine Rembrandt’s procedure vis-à-vis the biblical story. The painting, I suggest, should be treated as offering a profound reflection—no less weighty than other famous reflections (say, those of Kierkegaard or Kafka)—on Genesis 22 and the Abraham cycle in general.

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Rembrandt’s painting, I submit, seeks to stage an intervention at the moment of sacrifice, which is similar to but not the same thing as the biblical divine intervention. Painting the interruption of sacrifice does not mean for Rembrandt simply depicting a significant biblical episode but recognizing a potential for escape within it that it is the task of the painter to actualize. What needs to be escaped is not simply this specific act of sacrifice but an entire system within which the scene takes place, and even more than that, an entire system of which this scene is the logical center. The Abraham cycle qualifies as a system in the sense that the figures and events it presents are structurally interrelated, forming a coherent whole; and this system is the heart of a cultural logic whose consequences resonate throughout the history of the monotheistic religions. The story of Abraham is thus the scriptural center of an enormously consequential system. Rembrandt seeks to interrupt and escape this system, and painting is his means to do so. That said, it is only by using a potential for the interruption of the system found within this same system, a potential serving as a source for a new kind of activity, namely, modern painting, that escape may be achieved.3 In this sense, Rembrandt’s painting functions as the site where a scene within the Abrahamic system is repeated to allow for its own transformation and dismantling. The medium of painting, then, has the task of realizing the potential for escape that the biblical account of interrupted sacrifice already suggests. In a sense, the hermeneutic required may be found in the opening lines of the Abraham cycle: Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. (Genesis 12:1–3, KJV)

A call out of nowhere is suddenly heard. Its addressee, Abram (only later to be called Abraham), suffers complete disorientation and dispossession: loss of name, land, place, and belonging. The call empties everything out, reducing Abram to nothing—or to nothing determinate—and stripping him of all identity.4 The utterance of such a call may designate the most radical limit of the biblical text; here, in contrast to relations between mor-

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tals and higher powers in other ancient cultures, no markers of identity are affirmed. The call does not come from a specific place or time, nor does it belong anywhere or announce the existence of a standing order of things: it is a pure disruption, a stark taking away of all recognizable limits. This moment does not last, however. A series of delimiting and identifying markers immediately follows, producing what we may call the Abrahamic system. Abraham will be given a land, a territory with defined borders, a realm through which one can distinguish between those who belong and those who do not—insiders and outsiders. He will become a father—that is, the originator of identity—to successive generations of a nation, a particular people and political entity marked as belonging to this specific land. Furthermore, he will be given a signature, circumcision, to mark those who belong; those who do not bear this mark are to be cast out of his house.5 Finally, a relation is established between a divinity (increasingly understood as the giver of territory and order) and a specific sacred place (in contrast to the principle of nowhere that was first announced). This site will become the locus of sacrifice that, in keeping with the practices of other ancient cultures, functions as a privileged site for communicating with the divine—the center for organizing the territorial community, the people of a land. As such, it is no accident that Jewish tradition understands Mount Moriah, the place assigned for sacrifice, as the locus of the future Temple Mount, around which the political community comes to be organized.6 The coming-to-be of this sacred place marks the culminating moment of a theological-political logic, whereby a privileged place of communicating with the higher powers, divinities, or the divine (thus an activity we might understand as religious) becomes a center around which a community is organized (thus an activity we might understand as political). I would like to emphasize the interconnection, within this theologicalpolitical system, of three figures: the father, the son, and sacrifice. The father establishes a privileged communication with the divine, in whose name he speaks and whom he therefore mediates; in so doing, he comes to stand as a centralizing political power as well, a center around which a community, a people, is established as occupying a delimited territory. The activity of sacrifice is presented as the linking element in this communication between the father and the divine, and the paradigmatic figure of such sacrificial communication between the two is the son. Even

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Threshold

though Isaac is not ultimately sacrificed in the biblical narrative, we can nevertheless say that the ram taking his place is a symbolic son—as is perhaps the case for any sacrifice within this system. In this context, then, being a son means being the sacrificial means of communication between the father and the divine. The divine itself seems to be the product of the transformation of an empty call that strips away all identity into a transcendent principle of ordering territories. As a consequence of all of the above we can define sacrifice within this system as the activity of bringing something that did not yet have a determined identity under this divine power of territorial ordering (a bringing under achieved through the mediation of the father) so as to establish an identitarian community or perpetuate it. Sacrifice can thus be understood as the ritual of eliminating the excess of the empty call in order to establish a territory, or as a mechanism by which excess (the disorienting power of the empty call to strip away any identity and place) is transformed into territory.7 The son, within this system of relationships, is the general name for everyone and everything that falls under the jurisdiction of this transformative mechanism. Territory here amounts to a framing mechanism, a means of creating borders by introducing a division between, on the one hand, those who are assigned an identity as belonging to a sacrificial community under the power of the paternal mediation of divine orders and, on the other hand, those who do not belong and therefore have no true identity. The creation of borders through territorial framing, then, is what manages to introduce a division into the excessive call, splitting it into an inside, which possesses real identity, and an outside, which lacks real identity (yet is not a disorienting excess, for this division is what enabled the elimination of excess). This complex theological-political configuration thus establishes a relation between the centralizing figure of the father and the territorial community. Communication with the divine, which underwrites this relation, occurs through the sacrifice of the son. The medium of painting— and by extension all other modern artistic media—comes to interrupt, or unframe, this configuration. For what is at stake in the pictorial frame is a different way of thinking about the relations between the excessive call and a certain delimitation, in such a way that a different configuration of the relations between excess and identity emerges. Rembrandt repeats the biblical scene of interrupted sacrifice in order to develop a response to the empty call—a call to which the Abrahamic system

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bears witness while at the same time functioning as a defensive repression— that differs from the biblical one. Through this repetition, the interruption of sacrifice will no longer have the same meaning as in the biblical context, at least in part. In the Bible, the son functions as the paradigmatic sacrificial figure for establishing relations between the paternal principle, the divine as transcendent ordering, and the creation of a territorial community. Only after this has been established can the sacrifice of the actual son, Isaac, be interrupted by symbolic substitution—as if to indicate that the first injunction of sacrifice (sacrifice of the son!) serves as a fundamental and haunting reminder, at the heart of all acts of sacrifice to follow, that they stand under its sign. The interruption of sacrifice takes the form of a symbolic substitution, while the real sacrificial “object” on which the whole system rests remains the son. Interrupting sacrifice by means of painting, however, through a frame that unframes, is more than just the interruption of actual sacrifice through symbolic substitution; it constitutes the unraveling and transformation of the sacrificial theological-political system in its entirety— a defensive system that both keeps alive and at the same time represses the event of the pure call that stands at its origin. As such, the pictorial image opens a different way of responding to the event of the pure call from the one guiding the Abrahamic system, and the task of the artist—in this instance Rembrandt—is to serve as a nondivine (or “ghostly,” as we will see later on) interrupter of sacrifice. How does the pictorial image, qua a frame that unframes, manage to achieve this transformation of the response to the pure call? Rembrandt’s angel offers an allegory for painting as the medium that brings into appearance—and into the frame—a ghostly, invisible outside that belongs to the painting, yet in a way that cannot be seen. Paradoxically, it seems that what belongs to the painting is something that can never belong, inasmuch as it is nothing determinate and occupies no specific time or place. Such indeterminacy, such emptiness, lies at the heart of the framed painting’s mobility, its capacity to transfer to “any-spacewhatsoever.”8 It is as if what the painting makes appear and activates— what the angel is announcing—is the capacity to be anywhere equally, to defy framed territory. Such nonbelonging—and this is the heart of the paradox—emerges within a framing operation of delimitation. The painting gives us the pure call as simultaneously delimited, unterritorial, and unterritorializing: infinity that is contained and accessible, yet disappropriating.9 The pictorial frame therefore leaves a certain emptiness alive,

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Threshold

the mark of the pure call, yet nevertheless lends this emptiness a certain determinacy, a certain identity, without canceling it sacrificially and transforming it into a territory. In Rembrandt’s angel, one can see how this is worked out as a reflection about the painting’s frame. Two major features characterize the angel’s relation to the frame. First, based on the position of Abraham and his reaction to the angel’s interrupting gesture, it seems clear that just a moment earlier he, the sacrificing father, occupied the center of the frame. The angel— that is, the painterly image—is what decenters Abraham / the father, dislodging him from the frame’s center and the control it represents. The father, within what we have called the Abrahamic system, is in principle a sacrificing father occupying the center of a territorial frame inasmuch as he is the one in charge of the production of the territorial frame and the one by whom all decisions concerning who fits inside the frame and who is relegated to its outside are made. To be dislodged from such a position means no longer being the father, at least in an Abrahamic sense.10 Second, the angel—as indicated by wings that are cut at the edges of the pictorial frame—comes from the outside.11 Understood allegorically, the angel is a messenger of the off-frame. Given the painting’s theme, of course, we might have said that the outside of which the angel is the messenger is what lies outside the world, that is, the divine realm. In this light, and as it has often been interpreted, Rembrandt’s painting is a religious work that seeks to make the divine manifest. That said, the dimension of the “off ” is precisely not the dimension of the divine outside (i.e., a transcendence in relation to which the world is territorially organized). Instead—and put in negative terms, to begin with—it is the dismantling of such an outside and, as a corollary, the dismantling of the entire framing-territorial system whose center the divine occupies. The angel of the painting might thus in fact be seen as betraying the principle in whose name it was at first sent—the principle of the divine—undermining it and causing it to dissolve. From a certain perspective, the angel is actually a diabolical rebel who dreams of unseating the father.12 As a messenger from the outside, then, the angel is not a messenger of the divine but a messenger of a pure outside—an outside that achieves appearance and activation through a new mechanism, namely, a frame that unframes. This mechanism opens us, through the creation of a fictional space, to what I am calling the “off,” the invisible outside of a

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fictional space. The “off ” can therefore be defined as the appearance of the pure outside, of the pure call, by means of fictional space. We can understand this fictional “off ” as the product of an attempt to develop a strategy for responding to the pure call, or the pure outside, that differs from the biblical response. The principle of the “off,” then, aims to reactivate the pure call before divine territorialization takes it over. The painting shows this inasmuch as the angel exercises a decentering force, that is, interrupts the mechanism of territorial framing represented by the father, who occupies the heart of the system of the transcendent divine. It is also evident inasmuch as the angel/image serves to dissolve the very practice of sacrifice. In contrast to Caravaggio’s famous depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac, for instance, Rembrandt’s painting in no way allows for the victim’s symbolic replacement, the ram; instead, it eliminates all sacrificial figures. This is also why (again in contrast to Caravaggio) Rembrandt has Abraham drop his knife altogether. While the heart of Caravaggio’s painting, we might say, is the scream of the son, expressing a horror of paternal authority, Rembrandt’s painting aims to dissolve the system within which this authority takes shape to begin with. For Rembrandt, the painting itself—the modern image (allegorically appearing as the angel)—functions as a replacement for paternal sacrifice. This does not mean that the painting is substituted for the original victim in the manner of the ram—as if humanity (having advanced even beyond animal sacrifice) had learned to transfer violence away from a living being onto an inanimate object. Instead, it means that the modern image aims to replace sacrificial logic with another logic altogether. This logic of the “off,” which replaces filial sacrifice, is a new type of experience that allows excess to remain excess; we can understand this experience as the pleasure the artistic image offers beyond the paternal capacity to frame and territorialize. Such pleasure in and of the image concerns a transformation in and of our capacity to relate to excess, to the pure call. The artistic image brings to a halt, as it were, the sacrificial machine that transforms excess; it enables a nondestructive relation to the excessive call—in other words, a relation that does not involve complete emptying, disorientation, and loss. The pure call implies the complete elimination of identity and belonging; as such, one needs to protect against it—hence the rise of divine territorial logic, that is, of the elimination of the emptiness of the pure

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call. Through the invention of an open frame, a frame that unframes, the work of art manages to construct a delimitation, and thus brings about the accessibility and availability of something determined; yet at the same time this delimitation, which makes the “off ” present, allows for the emptiness of the call as such to continue resonating. This resonance is the experience of pleasure qua a suspended “space” of emptiness, which eliminates the need for the call to be transformed into sacrifice. A space that is simultaneously determinate (this painting) and indeterminate (in the sense that what this painting makes appear is an “off ”) allows for the miracle of an excess that is not destructive and, as such, does not need to be eliminated—which is precisely what the sacrificial system “had to do,” as it were. Now the pure call can become part of life. The decentering of the sacrificing father, the angel’s message of the new principle of the “off,” therefore concerns a new pleasurable object that allows for for the replacement of territorializing sacrificial logic. It merits emphasizing, however, that the delimitation at work in the pictorial frame is nonterritorial: territory does not make room for excess but rather divides excess between the real identity of those inside and the nonreal identity of those outside. In contrast, the painting allows for excess qua excess (and therefore pleasure: the experience of an accessible excess) without excess operating in the manner of the originary pure call, as a total emptying dispossession, or its being transformed, in the manner of the biblical defensive move, into a territory with the means of sacrifice. The logic governing relations between hearing the pure call and creating territory through paternal sacrifice, I suggest, provides one solution to the problematic formation of self-identity. By its nature, the human being is first exposed to a principle of pure emptiness out of which she or he emerges into who she or he is; identity is formed out of complete nonidentity and indeterminacy. In the Abrahamic system, the relations between identity and pure excess are formulated as an opposition. Within this system identity—having a recognizable place within the general context of existence—means occupying a territory, a delimited realm achieved through a sacrificial cancellation of excess. The angelic interruption of sacrifice that the modern work of art seeks to effect involves the transformation of relations between identity and excess. Henceforth, identity will no longer stand opposed to excess; it will no longer take the form of gaining territory through sacrifice that is charged with canceling out excess. Rather, identity—coming to have a place in

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the world—will prove to be a matter of remaining open to excess. The work of art will enable this by allowing us to relate to pure excess not as an all-­consuming indeterminacy to be eliminated in order that we may be (i.e., have an identity), but as a source of containable pleasure to be used as a resource for relating to identity as a work of self-formation and self-­ transformation, rather than a territory. The modern work of art, then, allows for a new relation to excess, inasmuch as it is a work of delimitation that nevertheless leaves room open for the pure call. Such openness, as we have seen, is made possible through the creation of fictional space, which makes the dimension I am calling “off ”—a dimension of nonbelonging—accessible (i.e., a point of potential belonging). This revolutionary transformation in relations between identity and excess made possible by the work of art—as a frame that unframes, or gives a place to what has no place—also dissolves the theological-political synthesis, that is, the series of connections that found a community by claiming territory through sacrificial communication with a transcendent principle of ordering. What replaces the theological-political is the artistic//political,13 which is not the aestheticization of the political; the aestheticization of the political still belongs to the system of sacrifice (though at the moment of its nihilistic demise). By making place in life for the pleasurable accessibility of excess, the work of art enables the coming together of those who share a world in a non­ territorial manner. This book is dedicated to the investigation of various implications of this new thinking of the “off ”: a new thinking that the modern work of art activates by creating frames that unframe, thereby letting the dimension of the pure call resonate and become present in our life, allowing us to have something in common (an emptying of identity that we paradoxically share, since it is something that deterritorializes us all equally) without establishing sacred communities.

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Part 1

The Off-Screen Shakespeare, Bruegel, Tarkovsky

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Who’s there? With this question that opens Hamlet—perhaps the paradigmatic work of art in the age we have come to call modernity—something new is announced: the haunting of the world—the apparition of a ghost searching for a place, seeking to be heard—at the heart of the work of art. What is the nature of this ghost, and what does it want from us? What is the nature of its connection to the modern work of art—and to film in particular?

Staging Ghosts “Who’s there?” is perhaps the most fundamental question of what we can call the modern condition. The question itself is already a response to something that precedes it, to a disturbance that might or might not— and this is its constitutive ambiguity—address, that is, mean to call, intentionally draw the attention of the one who responds. The reason for the ambiguity of the disturbance is the unrecognizability of its source. Who, or what, brings disturbance—where does it come from, and for what ­reason? It is unknown, unseen. But precisely this unrecognizability, which produces a lack of certainty regarding for whom it is meant, constitutes such disturbance as a new kind of address—if we now understand being addressed as becoming implicated in the question of one’s identity. Those who are thus addressed are disturbed in their very identity; they do not know whether the disturbance was meant for them or not. They are 17

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no longer sure who they themselves are, what their own place in a world of meaning is. If one reads Hamlet’s opening allegorically, interpreting it not just as the opening of this specific play but as making a general claim about the very mode of utterance of the modern work of art, then one can say that the modern work of art activates a disturbing address, or to use a proximate term, a call. This call puts one—and by extension puts all of us, if we take our position as readers or audience to be that of the one who asks “Who’s there?”—in question. Facing the modern work, we no longer know by whom or from where or for what reason we are addressed or called.1 We no longer know who we are. Therefore, the one who asks “Who’s there?” is immediately confronted with the demand that follows in Hamlet: “Nay, answer me: Stand and unfold yourself ” (emphasis mine). To be put into question by an unrecognizable address or call means that we no longer know who we are, that is, we no longer know what, and thus to what, we are called. We have lost our name in strangeness, in the foreign (Fremde), to borrow Hölderlin’s famous words.2 Being deprived of a proper name, of identity, of what is most our own, means suffering disinheritance. If the father, as traditionally understood, assigns us to ourselves by giving us a name and an identity, then the disinheritance experienced by one who is ambiguously called can be said to mark the failure or death of the paternal principle. The father is replaced by a ghostly disturbance, by a disquietude with no proper place and no discernible origin. Being disinherited by something ghostly means becoming a ghost oneself, that is, nameless and indeterminate, without any recognizable identity or proprietary place. What addressed one from the outside now haunts one from inside, as it were, possessing one most intimately, occupying the heart of one’s relation to oneself. As such, the encounter with the ghostly call qualifies, to use Jacques Lacan’s expression, as extimacy—an exteriority that is an intimacy. An essential ambiguity attaches to this ghostly disturbance, as Hamlet shows: What does it want? Is it calling, in the name of the father, for the paternal principle to be restored? Is it, that is, a holy ghost, the spirit that reconciles father and son? Or is it an unholy ghost, severing the father from the son, a voice from beyond the paternal principle, expressing something anterior even to the calling of the father? “Remember me,” the ghost enjoins. Is it the father we are called to remember, and so to restore, or is this calling to remember an even more ancient calling than the father’s?

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If Hamlet is indeed a paradigmatic expression of the crisis called modernity, the question then becomes: Can it be that this crisis involves the encounter with something ancient, a memory we have historically repressed slowly coming to reclaim us? Is the modern work of art the “place” in which this ancient call has been resurrected? Prince Hamlet himself, at least in the first four acts of the tragedy, seems to interpret the calling of the ghost according to the first possibility, as a call to avenge the death of the father and thus restore him to his rightful place. But from the Renaissance onward major works of art have sought to confront the challenge posed by the latter option: to figure out a different way of hearing the significance of the call, a different way of understanding what it demands. The attempt to make the ancient call resonate is implicated in the coming-to-be of a new medium charged with relaying it and providing the arena of its “resurrection.” This medium is the theater, in the logic that Shakespeare gave it: a rigorous system of relations between textual play, actors, stage, and audience. All of these elements follow from the elementary experience at the heart of Shakespearean theater as revealed by the opening of Hamlet: the encounter with a call that puts all who hear it into question. How does the theater attain its status as a medium for the relaying of this ancient call? Let us start from what is possibly the most fundamental theatrical element, which serves as a condition for all the others: the stage. Let us look again at the opening moment of Hamlet and read it now as an allegorical statement about the being of the stage as such. If the first words of the one who takes the stage are “Who’s there?,” this means that the stage is a place where disorientation and loss of identity occur, where one stands exposed to a principle of disturbance that Shakespeare understands as ghostly. The stage is an arena where a ghost manifests itself and speaks, a place where identity is unsettled. As a medium, the stage achieves this effect by becoming a space cut off from, or framed out of, the continuity of everyday life, thereby opening a decontextualized zone, literally abstracted “out of this world.” The most basic characteristic of the stage is that it can belong to any time and any place. Those who step onto the stage lose their specific identity in place and time and become exposed to the abstract power of the “any.” Onstage, one becomes an abstract “anyone”—someone who could belong anywhere and anytime, a “whoever.” “To be” onstage is “not to be” someone or somewhere specific.

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Of course, the stage is usually populated by specific characters, say, a Hamlet or a Lear. What characterizes them, however, is the singular way in which who they are, their identity, stands exposed to the power of the “anyone.” Indeed, the specificity of theatrical characters is not the specificity of an identity; rather, it is the unique way they live the dissolution of their identity, their “not-to-be-ness,” the loss of the “kingdom” as the unraveling of who they are. We might perhaps say that this abstracting power has characterized the theatrical art since its birth in ancient Greece.3 However, it was Shakespeare who most fully liberated the abstract potential of the stage, rigorously drawing out the consequences of its discovery as a realm out of context; in essence, his theater is no less abstract than, say, Samuel Beckett’s. Since Shakespeare, every stage has been the scene of an endgame, a zone where one rehearses or plays with the end of the world of time and place. The Greek stage, we may say, revealed how the “framing-out” of the world opens a decontextualized zone: a space of fiction or fictionality, in contrast to the realm of myth and ritual praxis. It transformed the zone of the sacred—the exceptional locus of communication with the gods—into a space, the amphitheater, where the gods become fictions and lose their sacred function. In a sense, then, the gods die before our eyes in the amphitheater. But for all that, the Greek stage is not yet fully liberated from the logic of the sacred place, from the power of the temenos, the exceptional locus of communication with the gods. Rather, the Greek stage may be understood as the place in which a disconnection from the gods occurs; they, however, remain in their places. This experience of disconnection reveals a fundamental and constitutive miscommunication with their power to assign destinies and provide orientation. Even if nothing challenges these powers in themselves, they become something to which we are now blind. The sacred thus disappears as communication on the Greek stage, but it persists as an inaccessible source of miscommunication and blindness. Therefore, it is only with the Shakespearean stage that the full consequence of the death of God (onstage), the full emergence of the dimension of fictionality out of the weakening of sacred logic, finally becomes manifest, and with it the loss of any transcendent ground of meaning. Shakespearean theater, while originating in a specific time and culture, conceived in relation to a specific political regime, is also abstractly universal, since it formally activates an “anytime and anyplace”—a “no specific time and no specific place”—with profound consequences.4

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Shakespearean theater became no longer a specific sacred place but the happening of a globe, or of the world qua globe, a place where any point’s relation to the center is equal to any other, and thus a place where there is no longer a (sacred) center in relation to which everything is hierarchically organized.5 Thus, the stage is no longer a locus of sacred communication but the nonplace, or anyplace, where the disappearance of the sacred is communicated so as to expose a world/globe.6 The agent of this desacralizing communication is the modern ghost. The stage, Shakespeare discovered, arises or emerges jointly with an invisible and enigmatic dimension—an offstage, an outside, to which what is onstage seems to relate or with which it seems to communicate.7 What and where is this offstage? It is nowhere specific and therefore has no actual presence. It is not the actual physical and historical world “surrounding” the stage, since the stage opens as a completely decontextualized zone and, as such, severs its ties to the actual space-time of the world in which it emerges. If “stage” refers to something that is not present—besides the ghost, Hamlet teems with speeches about events offstage or people hiding in unseen spaces, behind curtains, and so forth—what it refers to cannot be part of the actual physical-historical world; rather, it belongs to a realm proper to the theater. The offstage cannot be said to be to the side of, or above, or in any precisely defined spatiotemporal relation to the stage itself. We can distinguish between the Shakespearean offstage and the Greek “obscene” (ob-skene): what could not be shown in the amphitheater, which was usually violent in nature.8 Whereas the “obscene”—for instance, ­Oedipus gouging out his eyes—belongs to a realm continuous with the space and time of dramatic events, the offstage marks an interruption in the continuity of the world and an exposure of the stage to something that does not take place in any actual time or place, where the time is “out of joint.” We might therefore define the offstage as a force of decontextualization: discontinuity from, and suspension of, any actual spatial or temporal context.9 Even if a play refers to actual historical events, they become suspended and displaced, fictionalized, when introduced to the theater. The offstage may be understood as nonexistence that is nevertheless in effect, that is, as something that is not actual, not actually present anywhere, but that nevertheless affects what is on stage by exposing it to a dimension that displaces it. This nonactuality that is nevertheless in effect, nevertheless somehow present (as a ghost), allows a strange actuality to open: the actuality of the stage.

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The stage is paradoxical: by being an actuality that can belong to anytime and anyplace, it enables the nonexistent or not actually present dimension that is the offstage to be actual qua nonactual—to show itself as what is unseen or invisible, that is, as what is not anything specific. In other words, the stage grants a strange presence to what is nothing but a capacity not to be; here, strange or paradoxical types of actuality appear, actualities that inscribe, “incarnate,” embody, show, or materialize the power of nonexistence. When a personage with a specific identity takes the stage, he or she is exposed to the power of the “any”: the force of absolute discontinuity that I term the offstage. He or she is spirited away and comes to stand as one who has lost his or her name, been struck by a phantom or ghost; this specter is the empty power of the “any,” the restlessness of what has no time or place of its own.10 To invoke some Shakespearean figurations, the one who comes to occupy the stage turns into a blind madman roaming the heath, a sovereign stripped of his kingdom, a wanderer in an enchanted forest where no one is him- or herself, or a castaway on an enchanted and disconnected island controlled by a magician. Perhaps most significantly, however—and hence the privileged status of Hamlet among Shakespeare’s unparalleled explorations of the stage—the one who comes onstage becomes the one who loses his given name and is subject to the calling of a ghost, to the calling of that restlessness that has no time and place of its own. The ghost in Hamlet thus stands for the way in which the offstage is made present as a haunting disturbance in the theatrical medium. The modern theater can be described as a medium devised for showing the dimension of the offstage, for conjuring ghosts, for making them present. This is why Hamlet opens with the question of the night watchmen, the first witnesses of the ghost—watchers who serve as a figure for the modern audience. By aligning its thematic content, an encounter with a ghostly call, with the form of the theatrical medium as constructed upon an onstageoffstage relationship, Hamlet offers a general theory about the logic of modern theater. Moreover, the play can be seen as making a statement about the logic of the modern work of art in general; as such, I will argue, it serves as a matrix for thinking about the artistic media in modernity. I will argue for the generality of this logic by showing how it operates in two other arts, those of painting and of film. In two works, both of which deal with a son’s loss of the father, reflection about the father/son question becomes a way to think about the nature of their respective artistic media.

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The Modern Image: Falling into the Landscape The work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder illustrates how the medium of painting developed by the great Renaissance painters came to articulate and understand itself as a medium structured around a relation between an on-space and an off-space. Though a loose connection between B ­ ruegel and Shakespeare has often been felt to exist, what has not been analyzed, as far as I know, is how the Shakespearean stage and the ­Bruegelian pictorial plane operate according to a similar logic. Although I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about painting from the perspective of art history to say whether Bruegel deserves a place of honor similar to Shakespeare’s, his understanding of painting as a modern medium—that is, a medium guided by the new, nonsacred logic of the “ghost”—is as complex and profound as Shakespeare’s understanding of the theater. As such, his work serves as a particularly interesting case study for understanding how art in modernity articulates itself according to the same logic across media. One of Bruegel’s most famous paintings, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, displays, in a particularly clear way, the “Hamletian logic” guiding his understanding of the pictorial plane.11 Ostensibly, the theme comes from

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a passage in Ovid describing the flight of Icarus and Daedalus from the Labyrinth; Icarus plummets from the skies because of his urge for transcendence, which brings him too close to the sun. However, something in particular stands out upon closer observation: it is not at all clear what the painting is about, what kind of meaning it is trying to convey or make visible. This lack of meaning and “aboutness” arises because nothing in the painting seems to provide a stable point of orientation; there is nothing telling us where to direct our gaze, what occupies the center and what stands at the margins—in other words, what is more or less significant in terms of hierarchy. Accordingly, one is left with a vague feeling of indeterminacy. One starts to meander, as if lost, looking for a point of anchorage. To be sure, the prominent figure of a farmer working the land may catch our eye earlier than the sight of splashing feet, which are almost hidden in the lower right-hand corner; but there is no way to decide (among many other pictorial elements) which is more central and provides orientation: both the farmer and (obviously) the feet are effaced or faceless, like so many of Bruegel’s figures; as such, they provide no identity to hold on to or point of rest for the observer. Similarly, another prominent figure, a shepherd, though not faceless, seems to be gazing at an indeterminate spot above and possibly outside the frame (the flying Daedalus? a bird? or is the shepherd just lost in thought?); it is impossible for us to determine what is at stake in his gaze. Unsure what the painting is about, not knowing how to orient our gaze, we lose hold of ourselves, of who and where and when we are; without grounding for our existence (without a determined place and orientation), as it were, we start to fall—perhaps like those angels cast down by the Father in another of Bruegel’s famous works, The Fall of the Rebel Angels. The most famous response to the painting, W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” while undoubtedly moving and beautiful, is also reassuringly sentimental, for it restores an orientation that the painting does not grant so readily. To suggest, as Auden does, that the painting concerns unnoticed suffering, happening at the margins, amounts to restoring order. In other words, disorientation is quickly resolved by interpreting the painting as a simple mechanism: in a first step, we notice a central element, but then we reverse the hierarchy, moving the margin to the center. Consequently, one refinds and re­ orients oneself, learning through art to respond to suffering by bringing it to its rightful place, making it a center of attention, understanding its human “position,” in Auden’s words. Needless to say, this is not a bad

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lesson, yet it does not go to the heart of the work that the Bruegelian image performs. Let us continue to fall for a while, or at least follow the type of watching the painting calls forth. “Watching”—in this context, an activity that opens up when everyday perception is interrupted—refers here to the specific way of relating to an image that the modern work of art catalyzes in depriving us of meaning, identity, and orientation. The picture’s surface, not unlike the Shakespearean stage, becomes a site where we are stripped of identity and knowledge of who we are; here, we encounter various unidentified, effaced figures who deny us a place in the world. Just like Prince Hamlet seeing ghosts, we find ourselves suspended, that is, unable to orient ourselves and incapable of action.12 As in Shakespeare’s play, this moment of suspension and loss can be experienced as an address, an empty call: only when one no longer knows what the painting means or intends, and thus loses hold of one’s own sense of self, does the picture start implicating the viewer, putting her or him into question through its increasingly estranging figures. To “watch” means being captivated by the suspension of the world. This estranging disorientation arises from the fact that the two main “characters” we expect, Icarus and Daedelus, are actually missing. First of all, only Icarus’s legs are showing. (Is it even Icarus? There is no real indication these legs are his; they might belong, for example, to a sailor who has fallen off the ship that has just sailed by.) Basically, we can say or know nothing about him. More troubling still, Daedalus does not seem to be present anywhere at all (unless he himself has fallen and is the mysterious, unrecognizable corpse lying almost imperceptibly in the bushes in the left corner). ­ aedalus— Thinking of Hamlet, we wonder whether it is this absence of D the father who was supposed to orient and govern the flight from the Labyrinth—that is responsible for our own disorientation, our own helpless fall. If so, this absence has the effect of making the viewers into Icarus: we ourselves become the subject of the painting’s title, falling “Icaruses,” abandoned by the father. We might then recognize that the absent Daedalus functions as a ghost, a disinheriting absence depriving the viewer of an identifiable character. As in Hamlet, this absence can be read as an allegory for the nature of the medium—in this instance, painting. For the absence of Daedalus is an absence, precisely, from the pictorial plane, and his ghostly “presence,” his disorienting “power,” comes from the fact that

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this absence expresses a split upon which the painterly medium is constituted, namely, between a pictorial plane, what is seen on the canvas, and something we might call an off-plane or off-frame. We can understand the picture’s frame, the edges that mark the limits of what the canvas presents, as opening onto an enigmatic realm that is nowhere present and, as in the case of the theatrical stage, is nothing but the power to decontextualize the canvas, constituting it as a haunted realm populated by effaced and unidentified figures. Joseph Koerner has noted a significant difference between Bruegel and his influential predecessor, Hieronymus Bosch: Bosch not only marks the midpoint with some special element in the picture’s composition; he also connects that element, by way of its centered mark, to a divine architecture transcending the painting’s fiction. Flanked by paradise or hell, beginning and end, archē and telos, the center receives in Bosch an absolute foundation. . . . Bruegel produced no altarpieces. His vehicles were the engraving and the gallery picture. Built for mobility, and stabilized only by the structural coherence of their views, these rectangular, window-sized objects envelop us in their ample frame, wherever they hang. (“Unmasking the World: Bruegel’s Ethnography,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 2 [2004]: 245; emphasis mine)

The Boschian painting, attached to an economy of the sacred, marks a privileged site of revelation, connecting a focal point on the pictorial plane to an originary and invisible source of cosmic orientation. The visible painting is thus the locus of revelation of a divine, invisible ­origin. The Bruegelian painting, on the other hand, is designed to be, in ­Koerner’s words, “wherever.” It activates a new thinking of the artistic frame, which opens this dimension of what I am calling “anytime/ anyplace.” The frame—that which cuts the pictorial plane and marks its limits—is now to be understood as what holds the power of decontextualization, activating an absolute nonbelongingness, a pure capacity to be neither here nor there. This also amounts to a pure capacity to disorient—to neutralize any sense of order or hierarchy—so that new orientations, not given in advance, may emerge. As such, the modern artistic frame serves to undermine the conventional understanding of “frame,” that is, a device separating what it contains from what is relegated to its outside, what belongs to the order it establishes from what does not. The artistic frame actually unframes: its borders do not create a sense of inclusion but rather,

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by cutting its content out of any given context, create a sense of non­ belonging, of not being part of any given order. Bruegel’s paintings do not envelop us in their ample frames, as Koerner maintains; rather, they suspend and expose us to the dimension of the off-frame, a dimension that the frame, as a cut, activates.13 The off-frame, the haunting that accompanies the pictorial, is no longer an index to a divine invisibility guiding a cosmic order, as is the case in Bosch; instead, it activates a nothingness, signaling the possibility that no divine orientation exists. At least on a formal level, Renaissance painting intuitively explores this possibility, even if it does not yet articulate it thematically, or perhaps even know about it. The removal from a determinate context that the artistic frame introduces is therefore a pure or absolute cut; it does not cut off any specific thing but cuts the world itself, as a whole, out of order. Bruegel, in activating a decontextualizing frame that cuts, is not a painter of cosmic order but of something we may call “worldly groundlessness.” It is into this groundlessness that we, the counterparts of Icarus abandoned by a guiding father, fall. The missing father, Daedalus, is the ghostly “source” of the disappearance of orientation the painting effects. Indeed, we might say that this ghostly source, like the mythological Daedalus, is the architect of a labyrinth, namely, the painting itself; after all, the painting is a mysterious realm depriving us of a sense of where we are. The architect of this labyrinth is not a present Daedalus but Daedalus as a ghostly and disorienting absence. Significantly, figures of birds, resting or in flight, populate Bruegel’s paintings; often they seem to stand for the artist. The architect/artist, as one capable of flight, knows how not to be where we might identify and catch him or her: he or she is an escape artist. This architect/artist is able to construct a labyrinth, that is, to deprive us of orientation, by offering misleading clues, false promises of identification. What is more, the artist him- or herself is able to escape being caught in these false promises of identification, for he or she knows how to activate a power beyond that of giving and getting directions, the power of the “off.”14 The architect/artist activates a power in excess of the father, that is, nonsense over and above paternal assignments of meaning: a dada. We might thus speculate that Bruegel himself is the missing architect constructing this enigmatic painting as a labyrinth. He is the Daedalus to our Icarus; like all artists, he leaves a pictorial signature, a (dis-)identifying

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mark, a trace of the off-frame (the power of his absence) on the pictorial plane as a haunting enigma, signaling “I am not where you would look for me, and if you think you have identified me, you are doomed to wander in the false promises of a labyrinth.”15 Bruegel seems to be challenging us with this painting: Is there a way out of the labyrinth? Can the painting be both a trap as well a means of escape? (Bruegel’s interest in traps is well known, most famously in his Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap.) Bruegel is considered one of the greatest of early modern European landscape painters; but what is a landscape, and why does it take place in this newly devised ghostly pictorial realm? These questions are much too complex to answer in the context at hand; still, it is clear that in ­Bruegel’s works landscape is the realm that opens in relation to a new type of watching. A landscape, I suggest, which always gives the feeling of a certain abandoned emptiness, is what opens for the one who asks the “Who’s there?” question. The landscape is the arena of the disoriented, dreamy movement of our eyes, abandoned as they are by perception’s guidance, lost and aimlessly roaming and meandering, without any privileged point to anchor them—flâneurs on the canvas—but thus also free from any command and orientation. The landscape is the vision of a world whose orientation has been suspended, a world whose meaning is not given to us but therefore the arena in which meanings can come about. The landscape is the freedom of the world not to be this or that specific world. It is the painterly frame, cutting what we see away from any specific time and place, exposing it to an empty “any,” that opens the landscape, the realm of no given place in an order and no orientation.16 Accordingly, the disappearance of Daedalus as paternal orientation and thus the activation of an off-frame (the power of decontextualization), the fall of Icarus as the result of this loss, and the opening of a landscape are closely tied. A ­ llegorically speaking, modern painting is a landscape with a falling Icarus; here, our eyes open as a ghostly “watching” that signifies our suspension and fall. Perhaps these eyes are no longer even our own, since the ghostly call that enjoins them to “watch” indicates our loss of name and identity. A sustained look at Bruegel’s painting reveals several additional important details, particularly in relation to the types of figures that come to inhabit it. After the disappearance of Daedalus and Icarus, one of the most remarkable things is that the remaining figures are nameless, without a determinate identity; we recognize them only as a farmer, a shep-

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herd, a corpse, and so on. This marks them as allegorical types—that is, as figures belonging to no specific time or place, occupying an anytime/ anyplace. They cannot be said to belong to any specific community (say, rural society in sixteenth-century Antwerp or Brussels); they can only be designated as members of that most abstract of entities, “the people.” In contrast to classical allegory, wherein the type (and with it the dimension of anytime/anyplace) might have referred to an identitarian eternity— an eternal Being that can be incarnated in a specific “here or there”—­ modern allegory, which operates through the decontextualizing frame, marks neither an identity nor an eternity; rather, it marks time itself as a principle of nonidentity, an empty capacity for becoming, an infinity rather than an eternity. The figures populating a canvas abandoned by paternal, identitarian guidance, exposed to an off-frame as the principle of anytime/anyplace, are the nameless people. Bruegel is famous for paintings filled with anonymous multitudes whose members are nevertheless individualized (i.e., not subject to a higher principle of organization beyond the disorienting landscape in which they find themselves). He is thus perhaps the first great modern painter of the people, the first to rigorously think through the relations between the painterly medium and its population of nameless individuals belonging to no established hierarchical territory or identitarian group. “The people,” we can say, are those who are not called to be anything specific or to belong to any territory in particular; they are the nameless who stand exposed to an empty call beyond paternal orientation, celebrating their freedom and lamenting their fallen misery on canvas.17 But what exactly are these new figures who occupy the landscape doing, and why? More often than not, Bruegel paints figures in the midst of doing something—hence the remarkable sense of movement characterizing his paintings, which makes them proto-cinematic. To be in the midst of doing means that the world does not appear in relation to anticipated completion; rather, because it is not given, it is always to be made. The people on the canvas therefore occupy an arena opened by an empty call, with no direction given. They are busy doing, constantly transforming the world, never satisfied with the way it stands. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus reinterprets the story of the biblical fall and the curse that follows from it: work and toil. The painting shows that working is essentially related to falling, that is, occupying a groundless arena with no pre-given

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orientation means a life spent answering an empty call—a life of doing, transforming, moving without a final point of rest. The human being, then, assigned to doing, is also in essence an exhausted creature (hence Bruegel’s beautiful scenes of sleeping and rest, too), since the empty call always exceeds her or his capacity to respond. In Bruegel’s works, the activity of nameless people takes three basic forms: (1) cutting or breaking open; (2) exploring a beyond, whether horizontally or vertically; and (3) activity that is a nonactivity, or playing.18 These activities also stand in relation to the divisions Bruegel makes ­between land, sea, and air. The landscape, as a realm with no predetermined orientation, opens on the canvas thanks to the cutting of the frame; and the distribution of human activities is legible in relation to this cut. The human being is a creature that can cut. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this capacity belongs to the painter or the artist in general, the one capable of activating an artistic frame. Producing a cut means, at the most basic level, being able to interfere in the composition, directionality, and meaning of something, to expose it to a complete indeterminacy of direction and be able to reorient it, assign it a new meaning. Thus the farmer, who occupies the most prominent position on the canvas, is a cutter, making separations in the land to repurpose it for agriculture. Significantly, however, the furrows produced by the farmer’s cuts strongly resemble the strokes of a brush: the painter, and the artist more generally, is shown by Bruegel as being the ultimate cutter, in the sense that he or she performs what we might call a pure or absolute cut. The pure cut enabled, on a fundamental level, by the pictorial frame when it produces a relation between a canvas and an off-frame does not concern anything specific; rather, it cuts the landscape, or the world, open, detaching all that is given from any direction, context, and established meaning and opening onto the world as nothing but an empty call to . . . In this realm, everything—the human, the landscape, and all that inhabits it—stands exposed to everything else.19 Even though it is perhaps human beings alone who possess this mysterious capacity—which is also a noncapacity (i.e., it cannot exactly be willed)—to frame and therefore to make a pure cut, the canvas is a space where everything (humans, birds, sheep, stones, sea, etc.) shares the landscape equally. All the entities in this ghostly realm may show and express themselves—as opposed to being themselves (in the sense of having a determined identity)—by

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becoming exposed to each other. None of the canvas’s occupants are fully themselves; their given meanings are all suspended, as it were. Bruegel, a proto–Robert Smithson, establishes a relation between the cutting of the land and the cutting of an artistic frame. The painter resembles but is also distinct from laborers in The Harvesters, The Tower of Babel, and so forth. The painter, and the artist in general, does not cut anything in particular but rather effects a pure cut through which a landscape is opened—the realm of common exposure shared by all those whose place in a meaningful context has been suspended. Because the human (the farmer) can cut, he can also herd (the shepherd), that is, decontextualize animals from their given setting, reorient them. But one who can cut and herd, that is, change orientations, can also be suspended, caught in a state of nonorientation. Hence the relation between the cutter and the herder: the herder, who seems to have suspended his activity of herding, is the one who both cuts, that is, decontextualizes, the sheep, but also experiences the possibility of experiencing suspension and disorientation himself. At this moment of suspension, one becomes, like the shepherd, a watcher, abstractly occupied with an unrecognizable spot off-frame. From here, the state of being mesmerized by the off-frame, it is only a small conceptual step to the position of the third major figure in the painting, namely, the small figure on the right, faceless and unidentified, pointing to the fallen body in the water. It is as if the state of being held in suspense by gazing off-frame has transitioned into the state of becoming a witness to the new existential condition expressed by the modern canvas, that of occupying an exposed realm, the landscape, an arena of falling resulting from abandonment by the paternal principle. There is also a fourth figure, but he is only implied: the painter himself, transforming the act of witnessing the fall into the capacity to create the image. As our eyes follow these figures, then, it is as if they were also perceiving the birth of the artist out of the cut in the land. As they move from the largest figure, on the left, toward the decreasingly noticeable figures on the right, our eyes are finally called to go beyond the frame, to the place/nonplace and time/ nontime haunted by the artist, who creates the image out of a cut. This calling of the beyond activated by the frame, a beyond no longer understood as a transcendent being or a place outside the world but as out of any specific place and any specific time immanent in the world, structures the great Bruegelian division between land, sea, and air. Whereas the land seems to be mainly the activation of the cut as work, as an oriented

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enterprise—farming, herding, harvesting, building, and so on—the sea expresses how the cut of the landscape leaves something more that cannot be exhausted by landed work, a haunting nothing. This insistent emptiness drives those inhabiting the land to go and explore, to reach past the goals of daily existence and seek a beyond, a beyond expressed on the canvas as a mysterious and empty horizon. As the viewer’s eyes, infused with the nothingness of the cut that takes from them their perceptual bearing, start to wander, their movement opens the sea, as it were, revealing a beyond that cannot be seen: the non–place/time activated by the frame. Desire for the beyond extends in both a horizontal and a vertical direction. Horizontally, the ships sail toward the horizon; vertically, sailors climb the mast (and we should note in general the many figures in Bruegel climbing trees, as well as falling from them, since the transcending climb of course happens in a landscape of groundless falling).20 The vertical desire for ascent also underlies the famous tower of Babel; it can be seen as the attempt not to accept the landscape but instead to take possession of it, to cover it or transform the nothing suffusing it into something one can own and control. The question then arises: What is the relation between the sailor as explorer of the beyond and the painter as activator of the beyond understood as a groundless landscape whose realm is the decontextualized canvas? The artist is both similar to the sailor, in that he or she is also an explorer, yet different from the sailor in two respects. First, the sailor’s beyond has to do with an actual elsewhere, somewhere one needs to go, even if the restlessness prompting the exploration is never satisfied. The painter’s beyond, however, is not an actual place but the nowhere specific that is the canvas. This beyond is something already present for the artist, the paradoxical actuality of the groundless “off.” This brings us to the second difference. For the sailors, going beyond can be understood as a limitless, infinite enterprise—a response to the empty call that can never be exhausted. In contrast, the painter engages in another kind of enterprise: not only does she or he want to make the beyond a present nonexistence (rather than an absent actuality); she or he also wants to make the infinite beyond limited and available. Part of the mystery of the artistic frame is that it operates as delimitation, giving us a determined and defined “object.” Paradoxically, the dimension of infinity opened through the frame’s decontextualizing power thereby becomes contained—available, but precisely as limitlessness. The framed work of

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art opens us to a present and actual infinity by allowing this infinity to be simultaneously enclosed and contained, a limitation that gives us the unlimited, a slice of the infinite. The artistic frame is thus meant to satisfy, whereas the sailors remain in infinite dissatisfaction, always looking for the elsewhere. This, in turn, leads to the third activity that the people in Bruegel’s paintings are engaged in: play. Famously, his paintings abound with figures at play—most notably Children’s Games and The Fight between Carnival and Lent. Play, we might say, represents the disidentifying activity par excellence. The order of the world is suspended: those who occupy it are no longer defined by one identity or another but become joyful or mournful ghosts activating emptiness. Those who play—unlike the ­sailors, for example—are not looking for an actual elsewhere; instead, they manage to possess, in the present, an anytime/anyplace, like the painter. Also like the painter, those who play seem to be able to have a limited object, a decontextualized frame, which gives them the infinite and unlimited in contained form; they do not need to be anywhere else but have the beyond with them. This object, functioning as a gift of the infinite, is the mask. Those who play wear masks—carrying an invisible stage with them or becoming a decontextualized canvas, even if the mask is not literally present. What is a mask? It is the most basic of objects, the primal medium, allowing one to communicate with ghosts, the phantom anytime/ anyplace of our existence. The most elementary mask simply defaces; it functions as a covering of the face (as in Bruegel’s enigmatic drawing The Bee Keepers and the Birdnester), a blank erasure of identity that exposes one to the emptiness of the “off.” In a beautiful passage of his Paradox of the Actor, Diderot speculates that the origin of the actor might be children running in a cemetery, covering themselves with sheets and playing ghosts. Bruegel shows children wearing sheets in his Children’s Games (though not in a cemetery), as well as numerous people wearing masks in his various paintings. Most essentially, the figures occupying the Bruegelian canvas are always thought in relation to defacement; in a sense, they are always ghostly, masked, and communicating with the beyond that the frame activates. We can even speculate that the painterly canvas is ultimately a mask through which the painter, defaced, imaginatively plays. It may even be that the sheet with which the children cover themselves as they communicate with

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the ghosts is the original canvas, a limited decontextualizing object/mask that allows one to play by possessing the infinite anytime/anyplace here and now and upon which, in a gesture of self-reflexive repetition, one paints figures that are also defaced. It takes a ghost to paint ghostly figures. The sheet/canvas and all the figures in Bruegel—and perhaps the work of all artists—are just masks, allowing viewers to play.21

Off-Screen: The Cinematic Image and the (Im)possibility of Home Altogether the ghost ought to be the most real, concrete character in the play. Andrei Tarkovsky, on staging Hamlet

Another medium, film, both continues and transforms the logic I have traced in theater and painting. This is evident in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, yet another tale of fathers, sons, and ghosts. The story line of Solaris is fairly minimal. Psychologist Kris Kelvin spends a day at his childhood home visiting his father, with whom he has a complex and tense relationship, and walks along the local rivers and lakes. He is about to depart on a long voyage to a space station orbiting the mysterious oceanic planet Solaris. For some time now, reports from the space station have been incomprehensible; Kris is supposed to assess the situation of its inhabitants. When he arrives, he realizes that the two remaining crew members—a third has killed himself—are plagued by strange visitations or visions, transmitted from the ocean of Solaris. The nature of these visitations is not exactly clear, but they seem to have something to do with traumatic memories the inhabitants of the space station are communicating to the ocean, which in turn sends them the all-too-real visions that haunt them. Soon after arriving, Kris himself receives a visitation from his late wife, who killed herself some years before. Initially horrified, Kris tries to eliminate the visitor, who proves indestructible and keeps returning. Slowly, he comes to accept the ghost. Then, however, for reasons that are not fully clear, she departs. Her disappearance seems to be accompanied by the creation of mysterious green islands on the ocean’s surface. Left alone, Kris is uncertain whether to go back home or descend to the surface of Solaris. Finally, we see him back at his childhood home, with his father. Yet something is strange: the living room of the house is flooded. As his father goes

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out to greet him, Kris gets on his knees in a pose taken from Rembrandt’s painting of the return of the prodigal son. The camera zooms out: to our astonishment, we realize that Kris is not back in his father’s house but on one of Solaris’s green islands, a double of the paternal home. It is with this strange return/nonreturn to the paternal home that the movie ends. the baptismal image The opening of a film is always the best place to look for the rules of the game the director establishes. Solaris begins with a tightly framed view of a body of water; green plants are quietly twisting in the current. We are positioned just above the surface of the water. Our view is extremely limited: we do not know what kind of body of water it is (a stream, a river, a sea, an ocean), nor do we know where exactly it is located or at what time of day the scene is taking place. The frame is still and fixed, and for a brief moment it is as if we were in a trance, transfixed by the absence of any point of purchase. But this lasts only for a few brief seconds. Suddenly, a leaf flows from off-screen into the frame, only to float off-screen just as quickly. As the leaf enters the frame from the upper right, the camera starts to move to the left, not exactly following the leaf but going in the general direction of its movement. Awakened from our trance, we suddenly feel addressed or called by this movement of the camera. Being addressed, in this context, means that our identity has been suspended and stands in question—that we have become personally implicated in what is happening on-screen because we do not know the meaning of the situation we are confronting. Why is the camera moving? Does it move for a reason, or arbitrarily? What is the context that controls its movement, if there is one, and how should we orient ourselves toward it? We do not know, and in consequence do not know what our own place is—what our calling is in relation to the scene that has opened up before us. This watery scene deprives us of our calling or name. As such, it can be understood as a baptism, making us witnesses to a new type of image.22 Our actual names, we can say, have been suspended and are replaced by a poetic calling, the calling of the cinematic image. The camera, as mentioned, starts to move as the leaf enters the cinematic frame from the off-screen. Reading allegorically, it gains its power to move from the fact that the off-screen intrudes into the screen even as the screen bleeds into the off-screen (for the leaf immediately floats out of

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frame). The off-screen and the screen thus start communicating with each other, “allowing” the camera to move. As we have seen, the question of the modern stage and the question of modern painting acquire urgency by positing a relation between a decontextualized zone and a dimension of “offness,” the off-stage, the off-frame. A radical separation is introduced between whatever actuality may surround the artistic zone—say, the backstage of the theater (to say nothing of the streets outside the theater)—and the artistic zone “proper,” which occupies an anytime/anyplace. No communication is allowed between the stage (or canvas) and the actuality surrounding it—were this to occur, the fictional world would evaporate; the “illusion” would be ­ruined. Diderot articulated the governing principle in his famous discussion of the invisible “fourth wall”: “Imagine on the border between the scene and the spectators a big wall. Play as if the curtain was never opened” (De la poésie dramatique, in Oeuvres esthétiques [Paris: Garnier, 1959], 221). Something new happens in the cinema, something that does not even happen with photography: the actual world and the artistic zone start communicating, but according to an enigmatic new logic. The leaf floating onto the screen seems to have a double quality. On the one hand, the leaf on-screen is obviously continuous with the leaf that was at first off-screen. The water and the leaf are understood to be a slice of a larger view to which we have no access, which extends both before and after the moment we have been shown. This assumption of continuity is justified by our knowledge that the camera is simply a recording device, completely passive in relation to what it shows. The body of water is something the camera cannot help but register if it is directed to it; in this sense, what it shows must be part of a continuous world reaching beyond the screen. On the other hand, the leaf flowing onto the screen is accompanied by a sensation of discontinuity. As a disconnected surface, the screen marks an absolute cut between what it shows and its surroundings, creating an effect of invisibility. Like the canvas and the stage, it has the power to create a decontextualized zone, which activates a haunting by an anytime/anyplace. Though part of the continuous world that the camera passively records, the leaf thus seems, at the same time, to emerge from an “other­worldly” anytime/anyplace, becoming the ghostly medium of an un­locatable “­beyond” that has come to haunt the strange, decontextualized zone of the screen.23 For this reason, the floating leaf is able to serve as a messenger or

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herald of a mysterious world to come: Solaris. The leaf is thus double: it is at once an actual leaf and the medium of an unlocatable beyond. The off-screen, as the matrix of this doubling, is perhaps the fundamental innovation of the art of film, for it indicates both the continuous world beyond what the screen shows and an anytime/anyplace outside of this continuous world.24 Because what the screen shows is simultaneously continuous and discontinuous with the actual world, it exceeds the power of the stage and the canvas, creating a more mysterious communication between what can be seen and the dimension I have been calling the “off.”25 In theater and painting, the poetic realm had to be artificially ­created—fictionality emerged from divorcing reality, cutting off actuality; in cinema, however, reality as a whole, by virtue of doubling or selfdivision, appears with the ghostly aura of the fictional.26 The concept of cinematic doubling can be clarified by means of another modern concept heralding an artistic revolution: the ready-made. Famously, André Breton defined the ready-made as “an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist,” a definition that one can rephrase by noting that in cinema, reality as a whole, through the passivity of the recording camera and the decontextualization of the screen, is doubled, becoming ghostly and attaining the status of fiction. the world is not itself More than any other art, perhaps, film is dedicated to this complex fusion between continuity and discontinuity. We assume that what we see on-screen is continuous with and part of an actual world (even if it is a fantastic one). Yet, owing to the discontinuous nature of the screen as a surface cut out of its contextual surroundings, we are constantly deprived of what is supposedly “right there,” which should, in principle, be available to us and within our reach. It does not matter if the camera turns and shows us the continuous part we were missing, since this simply opens another sphere of invisibility beyond the new segment of the world that is shown. Thus, the screen always seems to be haunted by a deprivation, and a loss. The off-screen as disconnection is thus inscribed in and haunts the on-screen negatively, as a sense of the loss and deprivation of the (continuous, meaningful) world. Instead of the continuous world we were counting on, we get nothing.

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The Off-Screen

At the same time, everything that appears on-screen from the off-screen seems to arrive from nowhere locatable or recognizable, as if by miracle. This appearance cannot be calculated according to the “laws” of continuity. The incalculable and unforeseeable event of coming on-screen has the character of a pure gift, if we understand gift as something we receive out of no possible calculation or prediction.27 Yet because this gift immediately entails the assumption of a continuous world, we can say that what appears on-screen, as a gift from nowhere, amounts to the gift of the world, receiving the world as a gift. The world as a gift means an arena with no pre-given orientation. Every­thing the screen gives us is given as a gift and undergoes transformation from its position in our world of everyday meaning, for the meaning of everything on-screen is suspended—haunted by unlocatability and disconnection, the principle of the “any” (place/time) introduced by the off-screen. The emergence of the gifted world means that the world as it stands loses its actuality and is subject to the power of the openness of things, their unpredictable capacity for transformation and metamorphosis. While the canvas and the stage present a fictional arena completely disconnected from the actual world in principle, the screen makes the entirety of the world, without remainder, fictional and ghostly, exposed to the power of suspension. The continuity introduced by the camera no longer allows for a clear separation between, on the one hand, a fictional arena, the stage, the canvas, and, on the other hand, the actual world. The world as a whole has become a fable, to use and abuse Nietzsche’s famous formula. Yet it is not only the gift of the world that the arrival of anything onscreen from the off-screen seems to bring. Such an arrival also brings the gift (and curse) of the off-screen itself, introducing into our experience the nothingness of its anytime/anyplace. The leaf in our case operates as such a ghostly emissary, a medium of an otherworldly beyond, bringing the gift of nothing. Here, the off-screen functions as a sort of nonworld, or unworld, a nothingness; through the leaf, such nothingness becomes something that is present and effective yet cannot be meaningfully located in a recognizable order of existence, a decontextualizing part of the world. The leaf—and by extension, any cinematic “protagonist” that crosses the magical border of the screen—comes to be seen as an emissary from the beyond that holds the secret of this passage between incommensurable realms: the actual meaningful world and the otherworldly anytime/anyplace. This emissary holds

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the power of indeterminate existence, the power of a pure cut. The leaf, then, is not just a suspended element of the openly indeterminate world, as it was previously; now it becomes a focalizing point, a worldly embodiment or incarnation of the power of pure dislocation—an Other to the world, a power of disturbance exposing the world to unanticipated movement. Thus, the leaf entering the frame activates the unexpected movement of the camera, seemingly unmotivated by any inner-worldly meaning and reason. The camera gains its power to move from the fact that it is guided by the intrusion of the dimension of a haunting off-screen that ungrounds the meaningful order of the world and exposes it to a pure cut. This focalizing embodiment of the pure cut that the leaf gives us is not the world as suspended, as was previously the case, but the other side, so to speak, of that suspension: a pure no-specific-place/no-specific-time, which is to an extent the condition of the world. Such indefinite place and time is the world’s groundlessness, the pure originary nondirectionality of existence. The cinematic combination of continuity and discontinuity, of indeterminate “offness” and meaningful actuality, may be read in terms of three fundamental modalities, whose effects are always simultaneous: the screen as loss of the world; the screen as gift of the world; and the screen as inscription of the groundless anytime/anyplace, of the unworldly or otherworldly immanent beyond (the screen as what Tarkovsky elsewhere calls the Zone).28 We can understand their interrelationship by characterizing the screen/off-screen as the realm where the world is not itself. The world is not itself in the sense that the deprivation of continuity through the off-screen takes the world itself away from us, opening a dimension of mourning in our experience of the cinematic image. The world is not itself in the sense that the world given through the image, the gift of a world in suspension, marks the world as constantly differing from its (meaningful) self. The image becomes the place of the gift of a “not” (not being this or that), an abyssal no-time/no-place, or anytime/anyplace, which is transmitted to us and which transforms us into those who answer an empty call (not) to be. Finally, the world is not itself in the cinematic image in the sense that the image shows us the “source” of the world, its “self,” what makes what it is a world rather than a realm of predictable necessity, to be a “not,” nonteleological groundlessness. The “self ” of the world (in the sense of its “source”) is thus no longer a divine being creating it with a teleological goal, nor a cosmic order that makes it eternally be itself, but a power (not) to be that makes it forever unlike itself.

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The Off-Screen

Tarkovsky’s opening image shows not only that we cannot step into the same river twice, as Heraclitus says, understanding this impossibility as a constant change in the river’s actuality, but that we cannot even step into it once, since the river is not the same as itself. This is not because the river is constantly in flux, but because it suffers a split between its actuality and its meaning or orientation. What determines the self-identity of a river does not depend on the fact of its actuality (which is indeed constantly changing), but on the way we determine its meaning in the context of a world—for example, by tracing its source and origin, seeing where it leads and how this stands in relation to the other things in the world. This is precisely what the image of the river takes away, namely, the possibility of determining the river’s meaning; it exposes the river to the power of the off-screen, to the empty call of the world. The “self ” of the river—its source and origin, as well as its point of ending, its telos—is now the off-screen / empty call; the river no longer takes one in any determinate direction but rather on a disorienting voyage to an unknown and unlocatable zone, a voyage to Solaris. To sum up the points elaborated above, we can say that on the screen (understood as a realm on which is inscribed a haunting off-screen) or in the cinematic image, the world is constantly and paradoxically lost and found, repeatedly, and simultaneously mourned and welcomed joyfully as a gift. Indeed, to receive the cinematic image is at the same time to lose the world and to gain it, gain it as lost, and lose it as gained. v After the leaf exits the screen, the water continues to flow for a few seconds; then comes the first cut, opening onto another view of flowing water and the vegetation beneath it, still very close to the surface, without giving us anything like a context. It is thus not fully clear why the cut has been introduced. This unclarity about the motivation for introducing the cut teaches us something fundamental about a potentiality of the cinematic cut that is present in any event of editing yet not always utilized or emphasized, a potentiality we can understand as that of serving as a pure cut. The cinematic pure cut, a cut that is never motivated or explained, is a cut that cannot be fully understood according to an already existing order of intelligibility; it is one that introduces a dimension of complete disruption into any recognizable organization, a dimension we earlier de-

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fined as the ungrounding of the world, its dislodging from any meaning or directionality that we may assume guides it. Deleuze famously called this kind of cut “irrational,” which he associates primarily with modern cinema. Yet all cuts are potentially irrational, as all filmmakers from at least Griffith on have known and have often exploited. This means that the relation between any two shots separated by a cut—a major discovery of Griffithian montage—is no longer grounded by any necessary order of established (spatial/temporal/conventional) connections. In the opening scene of Solaris, Tarkovsky brilliantly exploits the capacity for disorientation involved in the cut. Although it is not fully apparent until we have seen the film in its entirety, what happens immediately following this first cut is strange, for it is not clear whether what we are seeing is (as we initially are more likely to assume) the same stream—still up close but from another perspective—or a wholly different body of water, possibly an ocean dotted with green islands viewed from a distance. Are we very close to the water, or are we very far from it—on Earth or floating somewhere in outer space? It is only toward the very end of the film, when similar images appear (the ocean of Solaris as seen from a distance through the window of the spaceship), that we can begin to articulate the ambiguity of the image following the first cut.29 Only with the doubling of the image do we realize we have been seeing double all along. But for all that, ambiguity was already present in the strangeness of this image. Indeed, one might say that the voyage from Earth to a mysterious planet simply literalizes the disorienting sensation evoked by the image as a result of the first cut. After the first cut, the camera moves slowly to the right, still very close to the surface, gradually revealing a human leg entering from off-screen. In turn, and just as slowly, it ascends and shows a fragment of the body. Finally, the camera reveals a face lost in abstraction; one is left with an opaque impression, for it is not clear what the man is watching or aiming at. Voilà, the film’s protagonist. As was the case with the leaf but now in a more complex manner, what arrives from off-screen has multiple functions. In the most general manner, we can say, this fragmentary intrusion, constantly splitting a part of the body that is on-screen from a part that is off, emphasizes that the one who thus enters the film is to be understood in relation to the division ­on-screen/off-screen, and this in several ways. First, we have already seen that the dimension of the “off ” carries with it a disidentifying

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disturbance, for its decontextualizing power takes away any orientation and directionality, any meaning and identity that we might have, depriving us of our name, making us lose our world, and inflicting upon us an empty call. Thus, the fragmented body, cut by the edges of the screen, initially seems to increase the off-screen’s disorienting, cutting power by making it even more present and noticeable. But then the face, the marker of human identity, momentarily relieves us of the anxiety of the cut increased by the fragment and resolves it by providing something to hold on to, thereby serving as a response to the empty call. It is as if we find a home and a place in which to rest, to call our own, something appropriate to our own place in the world. In brief, the arrival of our protagonist’s face on-screen serves a paternal function. Even though Kris plays the son in the fiction, on the level of the medium in this scene he serves a paternal function for the viewer. It will turn out, however, that the father presented to us is a ghost—a father who fails to be himself, that is, fails to coincide with his function of giving us a name and a place of our own. First, he looks off-screen, as if seeking something (not unlike Bruegel’s shepherd gazing abstractly beyond the frame of the canvas). His gaze is infused by the dislocating power of the off-screen; just as quickly, he is seized by the off-screen’s disorienting, identity-effacing power. The supposed father loses his paternal identity, becoming a suffering witness to the power of the off-screen. Second—and even more disturbingly—following this haunted look, the father suffers a cut, the second cut of the movie, signifying his complete exposure to the ungrounding power of the pure cut. A view of the water follows, and in an increasing close-up the camera cuts out more and more context as it gets nearer and nearer to the water, producing the vertiginous effect of drowning;30 the father who experiences a cut seems to be drowning. This cut of the father ought not to be understood in Freudian terms, as castration, but in Lacanian terms, as the failure of paternity, the failure to have undergone symbolic castration—that is, the failure to be territorialized by a symbolic frame capable of suturing and containing the excess of what I am calling the groundless anytime/anyplace, which Lacan calls the Real.31 In a brief span, the protagonist’s face—a “paternal” face, the promise of an appropriating identity and a place of our own—is revealed, in keeping with the logic that will guide the whole film, to be a disappropriating image. The father presented to us is therefore a paradoxical, p ­ oetic

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father—one who becomes a ghost instead of assigning a name and a place.32 The father has turned into an image.33 If one associates the paternal giving of identity with the giving of a home, as the film partially does, the paternal home and the cinematic image begin to enter here into a complex system of relations that will structure the entirety of Solaris and define its problematic, as well as the entirety of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. Introduced in this way, the protagonist Kris comes to have several functions. First, having been exposed to the off-screen, he becomes a communicator with a beyond, someone who has crossed the threshold of the known (contextualized, framed) world. Second, one who communicates with the beyond, a communication figured here as travel to another world (Solaris), can also come to hold the ghostly power of the anytime/anyplace “off,” the power to activate and transmit the image and as such to decontextualize and expose one to the ungrounding of the world. At the same time, however, such a figure, in whom the “off ” is inscribed, as it were, can be seen as someone who possesses a secret, someone who has access to something that we do not and thus has the power to grant meaning and rescue us from the meaninglessness with which the world is afflicted. The interruption of meaning that has been inflicted by the “off ” comes to be seen in such a case as a secret meaning that the one in whom the “off ” is inscribed possesses and that he can deliver to us. We can understand this translation of the interruption of meaning into a secret meaning as the transformation of the experience of an ontological opacity—the encounter with the groundlessness of the world, the fact that we are exposed to the world as something that has no guiding meaning—into an epistemological mystery, the search for a hidden meaning. When he first comes into view, Kris is holding a closed metal box. The image (and the figure who comes to incarnate its powers), as the inscription of a haunting by the “off ”—a haunting functioning as a disruption of meaning—becomes (when ontological opacity is transformed into an epistemological mystery) a box, or creates such a box, that is, an enclosure that seems to hide a secret answer to the disturbance with which we have been afflicted. At the end of Solaris, this box is finally opened, as if to give us an answer to what we have longed for during the entire film. Yet all the opened box reveals is that the secret it contains is simply the being of the image as such. The secret of the image, the secret that is the image, is not a secret at all; there is no hidden meaning to find, only a constitutive opacity: the fact that existence is haunted by a

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f­undamental groundlessness, an inscription of irreducible nonmeaning and nonorientation, attested and activated by the image itself.34 Third, the one who comes to incarnate the nonexistence of the offscreen becomes a watcher. As we have seen, the watcher is one for whom perception—that is, openness to the world as a meaningful orientation— is suspended, whose senses are infused with meaninglessness such that he or she is transformed into a visionary, one who sees the groundless ghosts suspending and displacing the actual meaningful world. v The close-up that follows the cut that Kris experiences can be interpreted in relation to the question of the cutting of the father and his transformation into a ghostly image. What is a close-up? On the one hand, it operates by enabling viewers to perceive a given object in greater detail; on the other hand, by cutting out more and more context, it inflicts upon viewers a certain loss, namely, the loss of the contextual world. Yet this cutting out of context also brings with it a certain gain, the increased presence of the off-screen accompanied by an increased exposure to its powers of decontextualization. Thus, as our gaze approaches the water, the meaningful world seems to grow increasingly distant. The nearer we draw to the object in the close-up, the farther we drift away from the world and ourselves. This feeling of simultaneously moving nearer to and farther from produces a sense of vertigo or drowning. But as the world is lost, the presence of the “off ” increases. This presence now becomes inscribed, as it were, in what lies before us (a stream of water), which, as a result, acquires a haunting power, as if it has been illuminated and possessed by an invisible aura, a power we may also understand as erotic. (This is particularly evident in the next close-up in the movie, shortly to follow, of a boy encountering a girl.) The erotic power activated by the close-up has several elements. First of all, the object given in the close-up comes to possess the enigmatic power of the cut; it becomes a fascinating messenger from another world, the beyond. Second, the object becomes an object of desire, in that it seems to be what we need to possess in order to restore the loss of world we have suffered due to the decontextualizing power of the cut. Erotic desire as desire for possession and the mourning of the world emerge simultaneously.

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Eros, we should note, does not involve only a desire for possession as a means of self-restoration; more than that, it involves the pleasure of selfloss. Accordingly, the object given in the close-up that is responsible for self-loss is also something one desires to hold on to in order to perpetuate the pleasure of self-loss and vertiginous drowning as long as possible. Another aspect of the gradual close-up is fundamental in this context. By providing an “object” that becomes disconnected from any definite time and place, the close-up activates an anachronic relation to time, communicating with the past and future simultaneously. Most radically, this occurs when anachronic communication takes the form of the prophetic announcement of a future event and the involuntary resurgence of an earlier scene (a scene for which we can use the Freudian term “­primal”)—something that, until the close-up, remained inaccessible to conscious memory, as it were. In the vertiginous image activated by the close-up, something we might understand as an unremembered past (i.e., a past not available to linear consciousness, since it is not locatable in any contextually specific place or time), a traumatic haunting, seems to communicate with an unknown future. Here, the close-up of the water brings about a resurgence of memory, a resurrection or repetition of the very first image of the film: the flowing water with the leaf entering the screen from out of time and place. Yet regarding the future, the leaf also announces the ocean of Solaris. It is not the body of water itself that is repeated here, but the image of water, or of the water having become an image through the decontextualizing effect of the opening shot. The opening image left the viewer with an originary scar, as it were: a memory trace in the sense of the relentless insistence of an unlocatable haunting, which can then be resurrected as an involuntary memory each time the contextual ground dissolves and we face groundlessness again. Every powerful exposure to the dimension of the off-frame— every interruption of the paternal calling and thus of the stability of the meaningful world—will reactivate the primal image of the film’s ­opening.35 This endowment of the water, through the device of the close-up, with the power of the “off,” that is, with the power to activate an absolute decontextualization, already announces its transformation from an image into an apparatus of image making: a medium imbued with the capacity to make ghostly hauntings appear, or reappear, through the establishment of a decontextualized zone. Thus, the close-up can already be said to announce the transformation of the stream of water into the ocean of Solaris,

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a ­medium capable of resurrecting an unassimilable or traumatic past—for instance, the protagonist’s dead wife—and opening an undetermined future. The ocean of Solaris is therefore cinema itself, a medium announced from the very beginning of the movie through the device of the close-up that endowed the water with the power to fictionalize. We can now also understand why every image in this uncanny film strikes one as déjà vu, which means that in a way every image in general is a déjà vu. In the first place, the image presents a view of the déjà, something that has always already been, since it cannot be located in any specific time or place. Second, the image activates an earlier traumatic scar, an originary encounter with haunting groundlessness that constantly clamors to be repeated. Finally, the image occurs as déjà vu owing to the fact that it is a ghostly doubling that adds nothing to the object it shows. In a sense, then, the image of the water is no different than an actual body of water; at the same time, however, the image adds the nothing to the water. Here, déjà vu means that when we see something in the image, we feel we have already seen it, perhaps in the past or possibly in the future, yet this other time is simply the fact that the thing is now seen doubly, both in its own, actual time and as haunted by another time—the time of the “other,” the nontime or anytime of the off-screen. v The opening scene of Solaris is remarkably complex. In a way, the film has already presented all it has to show; the rest is an elaboration and constant repetition of this first minute. Though the rest of the scene ­merits an equal amount of attention, I will not be able to continue in this way—otherwise this book will be longer than Solaris and perhaps even slower going! Nevertheless, some key points merit emphasis. As the camera returns to Kris (we don’t yet know that the man is called Kris, but the question of his name is important, as we will soon see) after the cut, we see a man in a landscape—that is, in keeping with our discussion of Bruegel, a man in a realm without predetermined orientation, exposed to the power of the “off.” Looking around, as if trying to orient himself and find a way—or his way—Kris starts to walk, exiting the screen to the right. The camera lingers on the empty landscape for a few seconds and then cuts to Kris, fully visible, from a distance, crossing the screen from left to right, then exiting the frame again.

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At the exact moment he exits the frame, another cut occurs, which shows us Kris again in yet another part of the landscape. Now the perspective is much closer; only the upper part of his body is shown. Kris is thus being associated with the very fact of exiting and entering the screen, as well as with the cut that allows him to do so. What is thereby established is that, as we have already begun to see, he is to be viewed as a principle of communication between the actual world and, through the power of the cut, the dimension of the “off,” as if constantly traveling between the actual world and another dimension. As such, he is already voyaging to Solaris, haunted by the exposure of and to the landscape in which he finds himself, disoriented, and infused with the desire of the “off.”36 Kris represents a principle of transition between frames, simultaneously exposed to and possessing the power of the cut. Accordingly, he can be understood as someone who is subject to the medium of film (indeed, as a witness to film): the medium of transitioning between frames, punctuated by cuts. As such, his adventure, namely, travel to an unlocatable place in space-time, constantly encountering ghostly images—resurrections of a haunted past—communicated by the ocean of Solaris, can be understood as an allegory of the medium. As a rule, the protagonist of a film in which there seems to be inscribed or in which is “incarnated” the exposure to the off-screen can almost always be understood as one whose adventure is cinematic, or an allegory of cinema. She or he is to be understood as the one whose destiny it is to suffer a new kind of communication of images and to be her- or himself a communicator of images, a messenger of the medium of film. from the ghost of the father  to the image of the origin Following the cut, viewers see Kris again, only half his body now visible; he approaches a body of water, a kind of pool, and stops to look. Since his back is turned, it is not clear what he is watching. What we see is a vague reflection in the water, possibly a house, but it is only after he resumes walking and exits the screen that the camera rises and shows us that the reflection was indeed a house, and a small balloon is attached to it with a string. Soon we learn that this is Kris’s paternal home. In the film water stands for the general essence of any image whatsoever: the inscription of the haunting off-screen on the screen. Our

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first encounter with water at the very beginning revealed as much. The second encounter—the vertiginous, drowning view after the cut to the ­paternal—opened the question of watching the image as drowning in the unframing power of the “off,” as well as the question of the déjà vu. In the third encounter, the question we confront concerns a deepening of the issue of watching an image: the question of reflection, as well as that of the home. To watch the water, that is, the unframing image, means watching a reflection. Yet what is it that is reflected in the water/image? To begin with, the major “coup” the scene stages is that when Kris watches the water, what we in the audience see is only a reflection; the rest of the context is not given. This introduces a fundamental ambiguity that structures the entire film. For on a “realistic” viewing that assumes the screen to be a partial showing of an actual reality out there, the reflection is obviously of an object that we are simply not yet given to see. However, if we limit ourselves to what the image presents, the reflection becomes much more enigmatic. On the one hand, it is clear that we are seeing a reflection, that is, something that points to an elsewhere, not an actual object. On the other hand, because the rest of the context is cut off, remaining off-screen, this elsewhere—the origin, if you will, of the reflection—is the nothing of the off-screen as such. It is as if the off-screen, which is by definition nothing and invisible, has left a haunting trace on-screen. The cinematic image, we saw, passively records external actuality, but at the same time it takes away this actuality and opens onto the nothing. The constitutive ambiguity of the image, then, is whether the reflection has an original actuality preceding it or is an inscription of a haunting nothing. Because Kris has turned his back on us, the enigma of his gaze is whether what he is watching is the actual house, his paternal home, in relation to which the reflection is of secondary significance, or the ghostly reflection of the nothing etched in the water as a haunting, in relation to which the actual house we later see is itself, in a way, secondary. The sequence that we ourselves follow—first seeing a reflection, then the actual house—­ suggests the second option, but the scene leaves this ambiguity open.37 This question of hierarchy, of what we can call ontological precedence, speaks to the question of the reversal of Platonism already mentioned (see n. 36). The image now, if understood according to the second option, is not a secondary reflection from which philosophical “travel” out of the cave—the realm of false, distorting images—liberates us, through an ­ascent

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(and the camera here, perhaps ironically, indeed ascends from the reflection toward what was at first unseen) toward the origin. Rather, the image is itself what inscribes and activates the “origin”—understood now as originary groundlessness and nothingness (in the sense of no given orientation)— that leaves its ghostly, enigmatic traces in the actual world. In such antiPlatonic logic, reaching the solar realm does not mean leaving the realm of images; instead, it means reaching the realm of image making, reaching Solaris. The images do not distort an origin that is a self-sufficient actuality; rather, they activate the origin as a nothing, an originating groundlessness. The ambiguity of the scene, then, concerns possible understandings of the relationship between image and origin. According to the first, Platonic view, it involves an actual origin that is reflected in a vaguer “copy.” According to the second, which “reverses” Platonism, the image itself is a showing and activation of a haunting; this amounts to an “origin” in a new sense, not a matter of selfsame actuality so much as that which originates, because no actual origin exists to dictate the directionality of the world in advance. This ambiguity also involves two understandings of “home,” that is, that to which we most belong. On the one hand, as the opening of S­ olaris suggests, the home represents the realm of the father or the paternal, which appropriates us to ourselves by giving us a name, a definite calling, and an identity. On the other hand, there is another, more enigmatic home with which the paternal home stands in a very complex relation; this home, in excess of the paternal home, is the originary image, or the image of / at the origin. But in what way can the image itself, this reflection or inscription of the “off,” be understood as a home? First of all, it can be considered a home in the sense of being an origin, a point of departure. When it comes to the image, the “origin” does not mean an original point of orientation that teleologically guides everything to follow; rather, “origin” means originary exposure, activation of the anytime/anyplace that announces an empty call from which directions and orientations not given in advance emerge. In other words, it is the origin of the world as a realm with no pre-given orientation. Yet the image can be understood as home in an even stronger way, as what evokes an even more fundamental sense of belonging, giving us the most powerful experience of who we are. The image seems to evoke a belonging, a sense of the self being most itself, in excess of even paternal calling. It is as if the paternal home were never a home to which one fully belongs; an even more powerful belonging, a more originary call, has “always already” been

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there. Yet how can this call in excess of the father—a call that is empty, that provides no definite identity and self-appropriation, that is something we cannot recognize or identify and thus claim as our own—be understood, paradoxically, as giving us the strongest sense of belonging, being what is most our own, revealing to us most powerfully who we are, as if there were nothing that belongs to us about which we care more? How can one belong to that which is most improper, that which is, in fact, as we have seen again and again, a disappropriating power, taking us away from ourselves, dispossessing us? The empty call puts us in question; in its address, who we are is at stake. But this precisely means that we are those who are most fundamentally implicated in this empty call. The empty call is what is most intimate to us, what has most to do with who we are, even if, paradoxically, it also empties us and, in a way, annihilates us—signifying both a kind of death and rebirth inasmuch as it takes away from us any property we might have had, disinheriting us as well as giving us a new, undetermined future. What renders us destitute is thus, paradoxically, what we most belong to, and it is this double quality of destitution and belonging that originates in the image. v This ambiguity concerning two conceptions of home and two conceptions of the relationship between image and origin also lies at the heart of what is perhaps the most important interpretative question of Solaris: how to understand the voyage it portrays in relation to the question of return. If we take the actual home to be primary, the film’s trajectory would seem to be, until the last second before the very end of the film, a classical odyssey or classical prodigal son story. Here, a paternal home, an originary place of belonging from which one has been alienated and exiled, possibly due to alluring false images, is finally found again and restored. Yet the last second of the film, the scene of a prodigal son returning to the blessing of the father, is suddenly revealed to be “only” an image, the imaginary creation of the ocean of Solaris. It is not the actual, paternal home that has been regained in the end but rather an image (of/as? home). Of course, we might take this to mean that Kris’s voyage has failed: that no way back is possible, that he is destined to be lost in the image/ ocean of Solaris forever—like the Russian poet in Nostalghia, who dies

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on Italian soil, unable to go back home, though also exposed at the very end to an enigmatic vision of home. Yet another reading is possible as well: the image signifies that Kris has, in some way, returned home, yet this home is now understood to be an originary image, an image/home the return to which is enabled by the artistic image—hence the reference to Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son evoked by the final image, emphasizing that it is an artistic image we are dealing with in the end. It is an artistic image that should not be understood as being only “about” a return home, but as being that which enables a return to home before home, to the originary image. For this final image—indeed, the sequence of images starting with Kris’s last vision of the ocean as he opens the secret box mentioned above—is also a ­return, not to the actual paternal home but to the origin (of the film, as well as of Kris’s adventure), to the first image of the water; a return to the origin, to an unerasable originary image, before the paternal origin; a return that, as in the case of the poet in Nostalghia, can also be interpreted as dying.38 Such a return is to die / be reborn. In conceiving such a new type of non-Odyssean, non-Christian return, I want to argue, Solaris conceives a solution to the Hamletian blockage addressed at the outset of this study. That is, it conceives a way of responding to the paternal ghost, which Hamlet failed to do. But if Solaris articulates a solution to such blockage—which is tied to the call of the ghost who, by remaining inaccessible, both prompts and frustrates a desire to restore the father—this does not amount to restoring pre-Hamletian logic (as Tarkovsky, supposedly a religious filmmaker, is often understood to do). According to Hamletian logic, the ghost is rejected or is not acknowledged as a fundamental and irreversible crisis; rather, a return to the father and the principle he embodies is advocated. Instead, Tarkovsky attempts to find a solution to the Hamletian blockage by embracing modern crisis—the crisis of the exposure to the “off ” marking the death of the primacy of the paternal ­principle—acknowledging it as fundamental and irreversible, and by trying to adhere to its demands, to adequately answer the ghostly call. This new embrace of the “off ” occurs through a transformation in our understanding of the image and of its task. All modern artistic media undertake this transformation, but film does so most radically. Here, the image does not offer a means of returning to the paternal principle; rather, it functions as a medium for returning to an even more originary principle, a medium activating a call in excess of the father. The image, then, is no

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longer conceptualized as in the tradition of Christian iconography; it does not serve as an earthly mediator incarnating an invisible command or paternal call to order. Instead, the (artistic) image is understood as the capacity to activate an originary, unconscious image—a primal inscription of a groundlessness or lack of orientation. In the beginning was not a word (a paternal call to order), but an image (an inscription of worldly groundlessness). We might distinguish, then, between a sacred understanding of the image and a modern, artistic understanding. An image by definition refers to an origin, being always an “image of . . . ,” an origin in relation to which it raises the possibility or impossibility of a return. The sacred image could then be viewed as activating a return to a paternal ground, to an invisible command marking an order, while the artistic image is now to be understood as the coming into view, the apparition, of an originary, unconscious (in the sense that it is not an actuality located in a specific time and place) inscription of worldly groundlessness. This redefinition and reorientation of the image is the message of Kris, a modern Christ. The artistic image does not call for us to return to a paternal ground from which we have been alienated, but for us to remember an originary encounter with a nonground, a primal exposure to a principle of effacement and disorientation: the principle we have been calling the “off.” The end of Solaris—as emphasized through the reference to Rembrandt—stands as the successful creation of an artistic image rather than an attempt to retrieve the sacred power of the iconic for film (a retrieval we might have presumed Tarkovsky, who also told the story of the icon maker Andrei Rublev, is engaged in). The ghost’s call to remember, then, would not mean avenging the death of the father and restoring the paternal word, as Hamlet mistakenly thought, but resurrecting something that cannot be remembered, since it has no place or time of its own. In this sense we can say that Hamlet’s tragedy may be understood as the failure of the one exposed to the call of the groundless to become an artist, to respond in the right way to the demand of the call. To go beyond Hamlet, and perhaps beyond the falling Icarus, is thus to be able to transform the ghost of the father into a poetic image. between two calls: father, eros, image After we see the actual paternal home, another cut is introduced, again linking the cutting of the paternal or the disruption to the paternal principle with exposure to water. Indeed, we soon see Kris walking along the

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water as if he were looking for something, hearing the call of the water / originary image. The next cut presents one of Tarkovsky’s favorite figures, a wild horse that moves around restlessly and quickly exits the frame. On one level, this seems to be a predictable symbol: the horse signifies Kris’s own restlessness and eagerness to go beyond the frame that holds him. But on another level, it’s as if the cinematic image presented the whole of nature as unhinged and suspended—not a territory of the human but a communication with an excess that always makes the world go beyond itself. Another cut back to Kris follows. He continues to walk along the water until, as if responding to its call, he kneels down and washes his hands in it. This is a scene of baptism, as if he were finally assuming the nameless name given by this call of the image/water. Indeed, soon we see only the water, in a manner similar to the “drowning” already discussed; though less vertiginous now, it still seems that Kris is completely enveloped by the water to whose call he has responded. A noise is heard. The film’s protagonist, “emerging” from the water, looks off-screen. It turns out that his father is calling him, uttering the first word of the movie, “Kris.” This is a very complex cinematic ­moment—that of the call, the naming, of the father, with very strong Oedipal resonances—and it has several aspects. The paternal call can be said to compete with the call of the water/image, to be the call that finally gives Kris his definite name and identity. Kris’s adventure, we might say, will amount to experiencing the tension between these two calls, that of the water/image and that of the father. This call, which detaches Kris from the water (or even forbids it to him), saves him from losing himself in it. Here—as always—the water / originary image also stands as a maternal figure. Indeed, we soon learn that Kris’s mother has died; the paternal call thus also signifies the death of the maternal. As we have seen earlier, the paternal call can be understood as the delimitation of exposure to an excess (an originary call) that can be all-consuming and thus deadly. The paternal way of delimitation is through the construction of a frame (castration, the paternal forbidding of excess, can be understood as a framing operation) that will delimit this excess, constituting an inside and an outside, providing a place, a territory, and a name. The artistic frame, which exposes one to the empty dimension of the “any,” is an unframing or deframing of the paternal frame; as such, it amounts to a re-exposure to the empty call of the water / originary image. This re-exposure, however—and this is the task and challenge of the

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a­ rtistic image—does not unframe completely but constitutes a frame in its own right, delimiting the infinity of exposure. The artistic image, if it is successfully achieved (which is precisely the challenge of Kris’s voyage, as it is a challenge of all works of art, understood as voyages toward the image), is the result of the capacity to show the originary exposure beyond the paternal frame, a showing that can only happen in the image (and the work of art in general), precisely because it is an achievement of a new type of delimitation that shows and expresses the call of the origin by managing to delimit it. Kris’s voyage to the image-producing ocean of Solaris—that is, the voyage toward attainment of the (artistic) image— both attempts to answer the call beyond the father’s, the ghostly call of the water, and to delimit it in order to avoid drowning. Another way to interpret the paternal call here is as a simultaneously restricting and liberating response to the complete disorientation introduced by the empty call of the “off.” Only after being given a name, which frames and delimits the emptiness and thus anxiety, as it were, is Kris free to make his way toward the house / paternal home. Needless to say, this does not offer a satisfying solution to his paralysis; the artistic image will prove necessary to inscribe what exceeds paternal naming, which the paternal naming can never fully repress. This unsatisfying solution is immediately evident when the father comes down from the top of the hill where he has been standing with a friend and the latter’s son. The father and the friend occupy the center of the frame as they descend toward Kris. (The father at the center of the frame almost always represents the framing power of the paternal call and its capacity to control a division between inside and outside, between what belongs to a frame and what does not. The screen, in such cases, stands for the attempt of the paternal frame to delimit.) Suddenly, the son (metaphorically standing for Kris here) exits the frame, only to come running back on the right a few seconds later and immediately exit to the left. The boy seems to be marking the power of the cinematic image to introduce movement through the off-screen, activating an excess over the paternal frame as a communication with the dimension of the “off.” Accordingly, as the boy runs off-screen for the second time, there is a cut away from the father (who has already started to disappear from view), signaling the demise of his framing power and exposure to the “off.” Now a girl appears, first alone on-screen and then joined by the boy.

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The girl—functioning now as the inscription of an erotic power in excess of the paternal frame—will occupy the arena where the problem of the restlessness that the paternal framing and naming resolves unsatisfyingly will have to be worked out. As the boy enters the screen, we get a close-up of the girl’s face. This is the second close-up of the movie; it repeats and elaborates the close-up of vertiginously pulling water, which signaled the paternal cut and “drowning” in the cut as a result of the loss of the contextual world. In both cases, the close-up simultaneously indicates, by cutting more and more of the contextual world away, the loss of and mourning for the world (a world allowed to stabilize by the paternal frame) and the emergence of an erotic “object,” the girl. And in both cases, the erotic object is double, both a desired object whose possession is seen as capable of restoring the world and a power of disruption to which one becomes attached, a power that increases in gradual proportion to the loss of the paternal frame. The girl is thus both a desired object of possession as well as an agent in whom is inscribed the disruptive power of the “off.” This discovery and creation of the erotic object/agent/image in the close-up is a repetition of the first unframing image, that is, the opening image of the water, as well as a repetition of its repetition in the closeup. At the same time, this close-up foreshadows unframing images to come involving erotic power, namely, the reappearances of Kris’s dead wife (as well as the memories of his dead mother that the repeatedly resurrected dead wife will activate). Through each close-up in the film, a whole network of possible future repetitions and activations of excessive past memories opens up. beyond orpheus The task of the erotic object/agent is to be the arena in which the excess over the paternal frame is given expression, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, does not become an all-consuming excess whose significance is a total “drowning.” Yet it is precisely from the point of view of the failure of the erotic object to thus successfully resolve excess that we can see the opening of a gap between an actual erotic object/agent and the image as inscription of the excess of the “off.” In fact, we might say that the dimension of the image emerges from the failure to fully have an erotic object/agent that successfully resolves the relation to the excess beyond

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paternal framing. If an actual, successful (in the sense of delimiting excess without destruction) erotic object/agent were found, there would be, from the point of view of the experience of the subject or self, no need for the image. Attainment of the artistic image, should there even be such a thing, would therefore take place at the limit between the failed erotic object/ agent, which is supposed to delimit the excess over the paternal frame, and the complete drowning in the empty call of the “off,” that is, death/ life. Indeed, the question of death/life flashes in between the failure of the erotic object/agent and the image, for the image emerges from the discovery that the actual erotic object/agent was to an extent always already a relation to death/life, that is, that it acquired its power through the exposure to the “off,” the annihilating cut; this relation remains hidden, as it were, while the erotic object/agent successfully delimits excess. That said, the erotic object/agent as an actual successful delimitation of excess fails at the moment when it is clear that it was never itself, that is, never a fully given, actual identity; instead, it has gained its powers from being a “not”—not an actual object, but a ghost communicating with the death/life of the “off.”39 Kris’s wife, the erotic object/agent, was even in her life—and this is what is revealed or understood on the planet Solaris, the realm of images—always already ghostly, a Eurydice; she was never herself but always already occupied a death/life zone where she both repeated previous inscriptions of the groundless call (Kris’s dead mother) and portended ones to come. There is no such thing as an (actual and identical to itself ) erotic object/agent; this is the horrifying and haunting discovery at the heart of the image. The image is a new kind of “object”/“agent,” one that is not itself, a phantom being that somehow manages to inscribe the power of the “off ” in such a way as to provide protection from total “drowning” and annihilation, yet without hiding its ghostly nature, as the actual erotic ­object/agent had done in a way. The wife’s failure and “betrayal” (her dying) opens Solaris as a realm of image making that, if understood correctly, offers the possibility of a new way of responding to the excessive and empty call of the beyond. A proper understanding of the image holds another promise, too—perhaps the one most fundamental to the movie—namely, hope for the wife’s resurrection, which traverses Solaris from beginning to end. If the wife is to be truly resurrected (in contrast to the failed resurrections on the spaceship)—that is, if there exists a tra-

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jectory leading beyond that of Orpheus—it can occur only by recognizing that the erotic never belonged to her as an actual self-identical living being so much as to someone whose very being consists in the communication with the death/life of the “off.” It is only if one discovers the Image, a discovery that uncovers the relations between the actual erotic object/agent and death/life, that one can attain a new understanding of Eros and a new relation to the beloved object. Eurydice can finally return to life once the discovery of the Image reveals that the relation to Hades was always immanent in her erotic power.

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§1 On the Origin of Film and the Resurrection of the People D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance L’historien . . . voit souvent dans ses rêves une foule qui pleure et se lamente, la foule de ceux qui n’ont pas assez, qui voudraient revivre. Cette foule, c’est tout le monde, l’humanité. Demain nous en serons . . . J. Michelet, Journal, January 30, 1842

A woman is sitting, holding her hands. In front of her rocks a cradle, and everything else is darkness. A light from above, its source unknown, starts to illuminate the scene. We see a room; in the back are three women, all covered in black, who seem to be knitting. Darkness descends again, and everything disappears. The first image, the announcement of the birth of our film, and perhaps of the cinema in general—indeed, our own birth as cinematic spectators. Who are these figures? What is this room? Who is in the cradle? Who are we? The caption following this initial image reads, “Today as yesterday, Endlessly Rocking, ever bringing the same human passions, the same joys and sorrows.” The image seems to belong to no specific time or place but to what is endless, always the same, always recurring. Clearly we are in the realm of allegory. What we see is not itself, not a specific here and now, but stands for something other. Yet what is this Other? It is not characterized by a noun, as in classical allegory; rather, it is designated by a verb—as that which brings—and with a temporal indication, “ever” or “always.” The Other given by the allegorical image always brings the same. But what is always the same? All we can say, initially, is that it involves birth: something newly born, we presume, that will occupy the cradle. Yet we do not see what has been born; its place remains empty, ever to be filled. But by whom, and how? Who is being born? Alternately, if the cradle is empty—after all, three women in black surround it—the image may not portend the joy of birth but the sadness of death or dying. The image, which evokes Whitman’s famous poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” may be echoing the line “And again death, death, death, death.” Who is ever dying, we might then ask? These questions are 61

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raised by the enigmatic opening image of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. It will be the task of Intolerance, I will argue, to develop film as a medium that will be equal to them. As is well known, Griffith is not just anyone in film history. Thanks to his own self-promotion and by the judgment of some of his most influential heirs he enjoys a quasi-mythical status: the originator of an artistic medium, the messiah of a new form of expression. Griffith is the “father of film,” as Lillian Gish said of him. In Chaplin’s words, “he is the teacher us all.” In Hitchcock’s judgment, he was a “Columbus of the screen.” Somewhat less modestly, perhaps, Griffith seems to have viewed himself as the Christ and Lincoln of film. Whether we prefer the grandiose prophetic/artistic vocabulary or a more historically informed line of scholarly judgment, broad consensus prevails, from Sergei Eisenstein to Tom ­Gunning, that Griffith inaugurated something new; for better or worse the art of film owes him an enormous debt.1 Neither the accuracy of these judgments nor Griffith’s precise role in the birth of cinema is at issue here. What concerns me, rather, is that it seems to be clear that the relations between the questions of birth and of originating, on the one hand, and that of the medium of film as an art form, on the other, are obsessions that surround Griffith and his work as with no other filmmaker. Because of the threshold status assigned to Griffith by himself and others alike—because there seems to be a before-Griffith and an afterGriffith, before the message of film and after its miraculous reception and transmission by him, his work offers a particularly rich site for examining the significance cinema assigns to its own images and the historical place cinema claims for itself within history in general, as well as the more specific histories of the modern arts and thinking about the image. With Griffith, film seems to be especially haunted by the question of its own beginning, and desires to inscribe within itself, in a particularly insistent manner, the difference its emergence makes. This desire, which haunted and obsessed Griffith from the time he started working in film in 1908, reached its culmination in the second feature he directed, 1916’s Intolerance. This film immediately succeeded his breakthrough work of the previous year, Birth of a Nation—a breakthrough often considered the birth of the movies in criticism and popular accounts. In Birth of a Nation, Griffith—who was the son of a Confederate colonel and carried with him the trauma of national division—sought to announce the art of film as the second coming, or perhaps the first true

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emergence, of the United States. In his eyes, the United States and cinema are inextricably bound: each heralds the possibility and birth of the other. American democracy—separate states riven with painful divisions—is born as a unified enterprise in film. Conversely, film—frames divided by cuts—is born as a full-fledged art form, consisting in the capacity to bring together separate frames, in and with American democracy. Standing under the double patronage of Christ, the messenger of universal love whose image concludes the film, and that of Lincoln, “The Great Heart” (as intertitles tell us) who expressed unifying love in the political realm, the narrative of Birth of a Nation represents a supplement to the missions of these two figures, to whom Griffith himself, the film seems to imply, stands as a third. It is as if Lincoln’s death, famously staged in the film itself, had left something unfinished, something that cannot be accomplished at the political level but only by means of a new and unprecedented art form. Griffith and film come to supplement Christ and Lincoln. By presenting the birth of film as the emergence of an unprecedented art form equal to the task of completing or complementing a political project, Griffith squarely inserts himself into a modern tradition that includes dramatic artists such as Wagner and Schiller. After the apparent failure of the French Revolution to deliver universal freedom, the former called for the development of a new dramatic art form, while the latter sought a new type of “aesthetic education,” both of them desiring to fulfill the revolution’s unrealized political promise through art. In all the works by these artists who saw themselves as completing a political revolution by aesthetic means, troubling fascistic elements co­ exist with compelling universalist and democratic sympathies—most notoriously in Wagner and Griffith. But my concern here is not to ask why this is so, though it is an endlessly fascinating question, nor to describe in all its complexity Griffith’s aesthetic political project, but, more modestly perhaps, to take a somewhat closer look at how Griffith—most strikingly in Intolerance—develops a conception of the medium of film, of a new type of image making, whose aim is to fulfill the high hopes invested in Birth of a Nation: to originate a democratic collectivity, a people, in whom the trauma of division, of having been cut apart from each other, enables the discovery of a new type of communication, hence a new way of understanding what being in common means. What kind of medium is film, and what kind of images can it create that will have this originating

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The Origin of Film

power? This is the task that Intolerance sets for itself and that I will try, in a preliminary way, to understand. My intuition is that although Griffith comes dangerously close to the errors characterizing the Wagnerian tradition I’ve just mentioned—often associated with the fascistic tendency of the so-called Gesamtkunstwerk to create an aesthetic state by subjecting the political realm to an organicist unity—he actually points in a slightly different direction, allowing us to conceive in a new way the place of the work of art within the context of modernity’s social revolutions. v Intolerance is Griffith’s most ambitious and experimental effort, the work where he himself felt he had finally managed to achieve a new, unprecedented form of expression, transcending traditional concepts of drama and image. The film is composed of four narratives of intolerant acts of violence and repression. The first part is a modern melodrama, involving a wealthy industrialist and his sister, who join forces with a group of social reformers aiming to correct and regulate the lives of the working poor. The second portrays selected episodes from the life of Christ, starting with the day of his first miracle, the Marriage at Cana. The third concerns the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France in 1572. The fourth—which is perhaps the most famous—takes place in ancient Babylon in the days leading up to the city’s fall at the hands of the Persians. The film concludes with a short coda evidently set during World War I, which was ongoing at the time of the film’s release; this final sequence is interrupted by a miraculous vision of the cross, giving the film a happy ending by way of utopian and paradisiacal images. Interspersed between the various narratives, the image of the cradle recurs; it belongs to none of them and appears only during transitions. In a sense, Birth of a Nation represents a fifth episode, haunting the rest as a filmic memory trace. These stories are not presented sequentially. Instead, the film constantly cuts from one to another, and with increasing rapidity. Toward the end, the transitions yield a dizzying montage, and we hardly know where we are anymore: history as a whole seems to gather into a universal cry or appeal. The final images of the film respond to the appeal, so that history is redeemed from the intolerance that has dominated it. That said, if the entirety of history seems to have been redeemed, in fact only the modern story ends happily, with a last-minute escape from

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death. One of the main interpretative challenges the film poses is to understand why this is so. I will concentrate on the opening images of the modern story and the first historical transition, to the story of Christ. These opening moments, though far from being the most cinematically exciting in the film, are nevertheless some of the most pedagogically useful. Through a close reading of these moments I mean to explicate some of the fundamental aspects of Griffith’s cinematic grammar, for in my view it is his understanding of the grammar of the cinematic image that is at the source of Griffith’s vision of the task of which this new medium is capable. In the short prologue, a group of social reformers decide to ask the wealthy socialite Mary T. Jenkins for financial support. They will try to persuade her to join their cause at a party she is hosting, and she will have to make a decision: whether to join or not to join a moralizing campaign of social reform “on behalf of ” the poor—more broadly, the people. We are at a party, where a cut offers us a closer perspective, introducing a group of four people. A distinguished-looking woman in their number, who we learn is Miss Jenkins, bids adieu to the others as she exits the frame. Another cut occurs. Now we see the same action of leaving but in the larger context of the party. Miss Jenkins begins wandering, again exiting the frame. Another cut. Miss Jenkins is now in an adjoining space; a young man comes to her and shakes her hand. Within the general setting of a social event, Miss Jenkins becomes the focus of attention through two cinematic procedures: through a cut that isolates her from a larger whole and through being marked as a character who exits existing frames and enters new ones. As such, she is subject to a pattern of transition between frames, in between which are cuts. What is this pattern, if not the way we can describe the medium of film itself? This provides an initial indication how to read a Griffith film: the content must be understood in relation to the medium itself, as reflecting or communicating with it. Thus, the question of film is implicated in Miss Jenkins’s story; in order to understand who she is, we will have to understand her relation to the medium that presents her. The coming into focus of Miss Jenkins signals to us that the question of cinema is implicated in her story and that we need to read her adventure as an allegory of the encounter with film. In this context, “allegory” does not refer to another meaning to which the content of the image implicitly points; rather, it involves the way that an Other to the content, or to a given

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The Origin of Film

meaning, an Other that is nothing but the medium of film itself, inscribes itself in the content and communicates with it. In all of Griffith’s films, the most important aspect of this allegorical encounter with the medium lies in the way the characters communicate with what is off-screen. As a rule, whoever stands in communication with the off-screen is the one whose adventure is most implicated in the question of the medium. What is this outside-the-frame, the off-screen, and why should it be, perhaps paradoxically, the most significant aspect of film, involvement with which signals to us the opening of the very question of the medium? On one level, what is outside the frame is nothing but an adjoining space within a continuous world in which Miss Jenkins moves. In this case the transition between frames is simply the articulation of the spatial-temporal ordering of a world. On another level, however, the outside, which by definition we do not see, seems to introduce a fundamental difference between the visible actual world and an invisibility with which it seems to communicate. The framed image in this case is, as it has always been, the inscription of a difference between a visible inside and an invisible outside. This invisible outside as film comes to articulate it, however, is different from the invisible outside to which, for example, a framed sacred image points. The sacred frame was a mechanism that isolated and detached a perceivable content from the rest of the world by drawing a border around it, aiming to open our eyes to what is not part of the world, a transcendence beyond the world understood as that which invisibly guides the meaning of the world, dictating its direction in advance. The framing structure of the cinematic image, however, which creates an invisible offscreen, does not aim to open our eyes to a transcendent beyond but rather to expose us to the voidance of such a beyond and thus to the voidance of any assumption of a pre-given meaning or direction to the world. This is evidenced by the fact that the off-screen amounts to nothing other than the simple cinematic principle that the transition between shots, a transition enabled by cinematic editing, is not dictated by any pre-given meaningful order of a determined world and is not subject to any privileged, unifying center of vision by which everything we see would be oriented. Famously, Griffith freed the camera from the position of the theatrical audience and thus freed it from occupying a fixed center and distance in relation to which a stage opens. This means that the perspective and sequence of shots were no longer subject to the principle of a given ­center.

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As a result, what stood outside the frame came to mark the fact that no predetermined meaning dictates the order of the shots. As such, all instances of continuity are haunted by what we may call “groundlessness,” the lack of any given ground and ordering of meaning, the possibility of being otherwise, seen from an elsewhere, and given differently. The cinematic image, created by the linking of frames and shots that are haunted by a groundlessness enabling their transition thus becomes what inscribes and brings into appearance an “abyss” haunting the actual, perceivable world, the fact that it is not subject to any pre-given meaningful order and that as such the manner of its continuity is unpredictable. Traditionally, Griffith has been understood as, and sometimes accused of, being the father of narrative continuity in the cinema. We can thus see that actually—and more importantly—his work investigates a haunting, enigmatic exposure and discontinuity, the activation of the groundlessness of the world as an interruption of any assumed given continuity. Miss Jenkins becomes subject to—or perhaps the subject of—cinema because she is placed in communication with the off-screen: the principle of cinematic groundlessness, exposure to the nongivenness of meaning activated by the cinematic image. This exposure, which occurs through a series of cuts, suspends her place in an ordered, meaningful, and continuous world. Moreover, it opens her to a space of decision, that is, a decision concerning the meaning and orientation to follow the cut, as well as a decision concerning one’s relation to the cut: whether to accept the groundlessness she has witnessed or reject it. In terms of narrative content, it is a matter of whether she will join the moral reformers or not. More important, however, Miss Jenkins’s choice has a formal or allegorical significance, inasmuch as it concerns the cinematic image itself. Will she embrace cinema—that is, a new relation to immanent groundlessness—thus becoming worthy of the implications of the new medium she is witness to, or reject it? Indeed, every single character in Griffith’s film will need to decide: “Am I with cinema or against it?” An anti-cinematic morality, the rejection of the principle of exposure revealed by the cinematic image, and the decision to operate under the assumption of being able to occupy a transcendent, elevated, and superior position from which one can decree and judge—a moralizing position to which Griffith here gives the general name “intolerance”—is weighed against an ethics of the cinematic image. Intolerance is, on the formal level, an intolerance of the cinematic image, that is, a rejection of its significance and ontological implications.

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The Origin of Film

Slowly, Miss Jenkins confronts the decision facing her. Having entered the room from out of the cut, she is joined by a young man who comes from outside the frame as well. Both figures carry disconnection and disorientation with them, as it were, the interruption of a continuity and exposure to the groundless from which they have emerged into the frame. In Griffith’s films, those who come from the outside always bring with them its disturbance as well as its powers. As enacted in cinematic editing, the groundless is a principle of linking and delinking shots and frames without a pre-given order or center. As such, when Miss Jenkins and the man join hands, it reflects the medium that has brought them into the same frame: they are joined, but without a pre-given reason. But what joins also disconnects; what brings without reason, creating new links, also takes away. The very moment when their hands join becomes the moment of a cut that will bring about their disconnection. Another dimension of the groundlessness conveyed by the cinematic image is exemplified in the second separation Miss Jenkins experiences: a split from yet another young man who has briefly joined her from outside the frame. As they join hands, another cut occurs; the audience now sees a seated woman, alone in the frame. She rises and smiles. The film cuts back to the young man: it seems he has been struck by a call from nowhere, the call of the outside, and so he takes his leave. What has happened? The woman, alone in the frame (as so often occurs in Griffith), becomes the embodiment of the communicative power of the cinematic image. This communicative power is the power of a call—in other words, the power of communication that comes from nowhere specific, carrying no particular meaning and giving no reasons. Because the cinematic image becomes a call, it can be said to operate telepathically, from a distance or a gap that cannot be located in any spatial or temporal order, outside of time and place. The man in this scene has been called telepathically by the young woman, who bears the interruptive power of the medium. Needless to say, on a purely narrative level the young woman is not far away at all: she is in the next room, at the same party; the sequence of shots simply follows the temporal and causal order of events. This brings us to one of the fundamental principles of Griffith’s cinema: the order of shots and frames almost always has a double motivation, or at least it admits of two frames of explanation: one follows a causal, spatiotemporal narrative order, the other the communicative logic of the image itself as carrier of the groundless, which seems to oper-

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ate telepathically. If one follows the second, “telepathic” frame of explanation, transitions between shots do not obey the continuous order of the world; instead they are governed by the discontinuous logic of the image. Returning to the story of the abandoned Miss Jenkins, it seems she must finally confront her exposure to cinema. In a brilliant shot, Griffith shows her looking in the mirror. Because the mirror itself is isolated in the frame, it seems to embody the principle of the cinematic image as exposure: what is reflected back to Miss Jenkins is not a face, an identity she can recognize, but only her exposure by and to the image, thus to the abyss that the image as inscription of the groundless brings, an exposure that confronts her with her own unrecognizable enigma. A decision must occur: will she accept her reflection in the image, that is, accept her exposure to film, or will she reject it and turn into an embodiment of the principle of intolerance, of revenge toward the abyss of “time and its it was”?2 At this moment, a juncture of the suspension of decision, Griffith cuts to the second part of the modern component of Intolerance, introducing another protagonist who will come into focus through her relationship to the outside. (Spoiler alert: Miss Jenkins decides against cinema, joining the intolerant reformers, and never leaves the frame again.) The second part of the modern melodrama in Intolerance, the one whose focus is the story of a young, poor girl, opens with a remarkable sequence consisting of three very short scenes, which encapsulates much of what is at stake in the film. In the first scene we see a factory worker headed to work, leaving his house; he pauses for a moment in the yard, and the girl, his daughter, comes running out to say goodbye. The second scene shows a boy and his father, leaving their house to go to work in the factory. In the third scene we see a shot of the factory; numerous workers enter the frame from various sides, on their way to work. Let us briefly look at the main elements of this masterful sequence. If read in formal terms, the father—who occupies the exact center of the frame as he pauses on the way to work, before we glimpse the girl coming from outside the frame—can be said to offer protection from the outside; against the menacing groundlessness of the off-frame, he holds the power of a frame to serve as an enclosure. When he leaves, it signals his daughter’s exposure and abandonment to the outside. Thereby she becomes the story’s focus—another character whose adventure, like that of Miss Jenkins, offers an allegory of cinematic implication. A quick cut offers a closer view of the girl. Isolated from her surroundings, she calls

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The Origin of Film

out to her father, signaling her abandonment by the protective frame and the fact that she now stands in closer communication with the outside. In principle, the closer one gets to a close-up of the face in a Griffith film, the closer one is put in contact with the outside, the more essentially one is implicated in the power of the image as such to inscribe and communicate groundlessness. Unlike what happens with Miss Jenkins—and more like what occurs with the girl at the party—the young girl’s abandonment to the groundless turns her into someone who is implicated in the image’s communicative power. This communication goes beyond the simple telepathic attraction possessed by the girl at the party. As it develops, it displays three additional aspects: an announcement of the death of the father, a communication of love, and the coming-to-be of a multiplicity without hierarchy, which Griffith understands as “the people.” The shot of the abandoned girl heralds the death of her father, as well as the death of the boy’s father. It also announces the love story to follow, as well as the appearance of the workers in the third part of the sequence. If the father, formally understood, is the one who holds the power of the frame to protect against the groundless, then the being of film as a medium, the coming-to-be of a series of images enchained through a new activation of a groundless off-screen, signifies the death of the father as an organizing principle. This death opens a communication between those who are exposed to the outside that we can understand as a communication of the abandoned (that is, abandoned by the father principle and to the groundless). Sharing this new type of communication is at the heart of what Griffith understands as love. Moreover, it marks the emergence of a multiplicity constituted by those occupying exposed frames that are connected according to a principle other than the centralizing paternal enclosure: the people. The abandoned girl with whom the sequence opened thus seems to be the mysterious agent, the medium, who announces the arrival of a new relationship between abandonment by the paternal principle, love, and the people. But the girl herself has to take one further step: to accept her cinematic destiny, which, unlike Miss Jenkins, she eventually does. This distinction between the way Miss Jenkins responds to being in and on film (ultimately refusing the cinematic image) and the way the girl responds to being in and on film (accepting the being of the groundless and becoming an ethical agent, a medium, of a new principle

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of communication) allows us to discern how traditional and influential interpretations from Eisenstein to Deleuze have missed the profundity of Griffith’s understanding of the cinematic image. Eisenstein famously criticized Griffithian montage for not being dialectical, for treating social oppositions, for example, between rich and poor (Miss Jenkins and the girl, in this instance) as simply empirically given. Deleuze, often so precise, is under the sway of this mistaken interpretation. In Cinema 1: The ­Movement-Image, he declares Griffith the father of “organic montage,” which follows the structure of a conflictual duel aiming to restore lost unity. In fact, Griffith’s idea of montage is that the two sides in conflict are not simply given social realities but, more profoundly, alternative relations to the very question of the image, or the cinematic medium they occupy, as such. What enters into conflict are not given social realities but differing relations to the image, a moralizing, intolerant relation in contrast to an ethical one. The task of the conflict is therefore not to achieve a restoration of a lost organic unity but rather to give birth to a new relation to, and being with, the image.3 As with Miss Jenkins, the girl’s subjection to film thus necessitates a decision: to accept the cinematic image and the exposure to the groundless that it brings, or to intolerantly reject it. In a much later scene, the girl starts to assume her cinematic destiny at the moment of her father’s actual death. In her most important close-up, she gazes off-screen as if hypnotized and exercises an almost hallucinatory power to summon, to become a call—a call of the groundless effected as love. Through this power, she brings the boy to the room she occupies with her dying father. This call of love—the girl’s acceptance of film as an unprecedented type of communication at the moment her father’s death exposes her to the groundless—also serves as a link to another part of Intolerance, the story of Christ. Christ appears for the first time in the film in the scene immediately following the one where the girl’s father dies. He appears from out of nowhere, through another cut, out of the telepathic call of the girl who also summoned her beloved, and he appears indeed as a principle relating love to the people. But before we analyze the Christ story and the underlying logic of the image, another aspect of film as the medium through which the abandoned communicate warrants notice. This concerns assembling “the many,” that is, the people, which occurs when the factory workers, in the third scene of the opening sequence discussed above, gather together.

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We see them emerge from out of frame, out of nowhere; each one comes out from his own groundlessness and exposure, as if summoned by the call of film. And we are summoned with them inasmuch as they stand for the cinematic audience as a multitude called by the groundlessness exposed through cuts between frames. Perhaps like no previous art form film is the art of the people understood as a gathered multiplicity, with nothing in common besides exposure to groundlessness. When it enchains exposed frames in succession, the cinematic medium brings the abandoned together. This is the essential connection Griffith tries to forge between his own project and Lincoln’s. However, the people in our scene, the workers, are quickly led through the gates, toward the factory, as if their very appearance threatened the frame that the intolerant, represented by the factory owner (Miss Jenkins’s brother), try to hold on to. This anti-cinematic, intolerant force leads them into an enclosure. A lyrical communication of love and the call to gather the many—both of which occur through the experience of the father’s death—are thus the two foci around which Griffith’s cinema, in its intimacy and its epic dimensions alike, revolves. They are also the main points around which the

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last question I wish to address revolves: the relationship between cinema and history as Griffith understands it. The history in which film is interested, according to Griffith—the history of the fall of Babel, of Christ, of the Massacre of St Bartholomew—is a history of intolerance, within which it is as if the relation between the communication of love and the gathering of the abandoned as people, a relation of which cinema, as we saw, is the announcer, has remained inscribed as an invisible excess. This excess kept haunting humanity as an unconscious memory, constantly and intolerably repressed, until with the arrival of the medium of film it can finally cry out, or perhaps bleed, through the open wounds of cinematic cuts and come to be heard and to exist. We have seen that intolerance, for Griffith, is also always intolerance of the cinematic image—iconoclastic intolerance. In this light, the unconscious history of the abandoned as people also amounts to a dormant proto-cinematic image—one that haunted humanity until the birth of film. Film brings this unconscious image of the people, repressed by the iconoclastic history of intolerance, into existence. The first transition into history the film presents—which simultaneously serves as an allegory for the general relations between history and the image—is the story of Christ. The establishing shot shows the people at the Jaffa Gate. (As an aside we can say that the people, like the girl bidding her father goodbye outside the threshold of the door earlier and the people in the famous Babylonian scenes, are always those standing just outside the gates.) Three quick shots follow. First, the camera moves along with a camel walking leisurely; next, it shows a seller of doves (­always a sign of love in Griffith); finally, it presents the image of a woman and a child alone in the frame, as if exposed to the mercy of the outside, serving as a call. Then we get a glimpse of the house in Cana, the site of the first miracle. Thus are we introduced to the story of Christ. Where is Christ? He is nowhere to be seen; instead, he is announced. What announces him is the medium of film, which becomes a call through the powers of the outside activated between the shots and the camera’s movement. Christ is nowhere to be seen in the first segment of “his” story, since he is the very event of film as such, of film as a call. If Christ appears, he does so in and as cinematic cuts. Christ, in Intolerance, is the medium allowing for the people with whom the scene opens to express themselves through a new way of communication. Christ might come from the outside—

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from somewhere non-earthly and invisible—but this outside is no longer a transcendent realm. Instead it is the groundlessness of this world, inscribed between frames as a haunting. Cinema, as the art of an “immanent outside,” summons Christ; likewise, Christ—the one called by the people, those relegated to outside the frame or gate—calls cinema. This is how history enters Intolerance, through a cut in the modern story. Slowly, this cut will expand into a complex system of Griffith’s favorite cinematic technique, crosscutting, going back and forth between the various stories constituting the film. History enters, then, as the call of an ancient people at the gate, outside the frame, waiting for a new medium. Christ’s actual appearance in Intolerance, and more precisely the moment of the first miracle, is nothing less than the appearance of the medium of film as such. The moment the miraculous power of Christ is actuated—the moment of the appearance of the medium of film itself—is simple. As Christ stands among the people and blesses the water, we see a shadow—that is, something the off-screen projects—in the shape of a cross, which implicitly cuts the screen into four frames. This splitting into four separate frames, between which there are shadowy cuts, is the miracle itself. The

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cross in this context is nothing other than the inscription of the off-frame, of a new principle of groundlessness, within the frame; the cross signifies that a new type of medium obeying a new principle arises: a principle of montage involving frames that are individually exposed to the outside, between which no pre-given order holds. Here, Christ does not embody transcendence but immanence, the bringing of a principle of groundlessness into this world as a haunting shadow. This division of the screen into four frames evokes the division of Intolerance into four stories—­stories between which Griffith, assuming as his cinematic signature the very message of Christ, cross cuts. Standing in the midst of the people, Christ introduces the outside as an immanent cut that yields a series of exposed frames, that is, the very being of the medium of film, which allows the miracle of the people communicating love to occur. The people, then, comprises all those who do not have a specific place in a framed order of connections; Christ is their messiah in the sense of the arrival of a new principle of communication. The “many” are those who have neither a place in a given order nor a specific time in a pre-given sequence nor a name (and the movie gives names only to those who have power and place, never to members of the people). Cinema, the art of exposure to the groundless, becomes the anachronic nonplace where the displaced “many,” who never had their day and were therefore never fully part of a linear history, gather. The people of Babylon, those suffering under the intolerant and powerful in seventeenthcentury France, the poor and the destitute of ancient Judea, and beyond that, the people of the French and American revolutions, all gather in and as cinema. For Griffith, it is as if they had always belonged to the cinema—prefigured it, desired and dreamed of it, but never actually possessed it. Their anachronic, anonymous dreams, forming a sort of unconscious and excessive traumatic scar on the linear body of conscious history, can be fulfilled—in the sense of finally coming to expression—only with the arrival of this messianic new medium: the medium of anachrony itself, which paradoxically gives a place to the disinherited of history—but gives them a place as placeless, that is, cinematic, not as holders of a new territory or identitarian community). The very method of editing in Intolerance, crosscutting between epochs, yields universalizing anachrony; each age is displaced and comes to haunt another, so that a universal placelessness is achieved through the powers of the medium. On this basis alone can the modern sequence,

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the story belonging to the era of film, find a happy ending, namely, the achievement of the medium of exposed frames as a new principle of communication. The happy ending is that the people lay hold of cinema itself; thereby, all those for whom linear history had no place and whose embodiment of the dream of the cinematic image avant la lettre was “intolerated” and imprisoned are given a voice.4 This cinematic desire of the people, prefiguring cinema yet not fulfilled, makes the appearance of the medium of film the miracle of the resurrection and second coming of Christ. Christ’s second coming, for Griffith, is nothing but the principle of the resurrection of the people through the medium of film. This resurrection, happening in and as the cinematic image, is the very origin of film, both in the sense that it’s as if the people who have always called film, waited for its arrival, and in the sense that the people are those whom film manages to originate, that is, give birth to and bring about. Film is thus what originates in the people, out of their desire that remained unfulfilled until the modern era, and is what originates the people, that is, as an entity that can fully come to expression only through the medium of film. What is it that film originates? All of us as the filmic audience—the many, who lack a specific origin in the sense of an assigned place in a teleological order of things; all of us as the audience, who belong to the principle of the groundless rather than to an ordered series of frames subject to a center. The origin, then, is simply the cut, understood as exposure to the groundless “off.” This cut—and hence the significance of the ever-recurring image of the cradle which appears in the cuts between stories and can be understood as standing for the cut itself—turns out to be the cradle of humanity: groundlessness, exposure to which is the event of being born / dying in the cinematic image as people. The image/cut always repeats, is always the same, since it is nothing but the ever-recurring, ever-new principle of the world as being without origin and without end.

§2 The Actor of the Crowd— The Great Dictator Chaplin, Riefenstahl, Lang The singular voice of interruption is not a voice without courage. This courage, however, is not—as one might at first think—that courage to say something that it would be dangerous to dare to proclaim. Of course, such courage exists—but the courage of interruption consists rather in daring to be silent, or rather, to put it less summarily, it consists in allowing to be said something that no one—no individual, no representative—could ever say: a voice that could never be the voice of any subject, a speech that could never be the conviction of any understanding and that is merely the voice and the thought of community in the interruption of myth. At once an interrupted voice, and the voiceless interruption of every general or particular voice. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community

A figure in uniform stands facing away from us; before an array of micro­ phones, he raises his hand in a defiant gesture and excitedly addresses a vast crowd. Who is this man? A narrator has just referred to him as “Hynkel,” but since this name is unfamiliar, we do not know yet who this might be. In another shot, we see the man’s face: an uncanny moment. Now the figure seems extremely familiar: it’s Hitler, of course. But wait a minute: it’s not Hitler, it’s Charlie Chaplin! But it’s neither, since we have already been told who he is: Hynkel. The question remains, who is Hynkel? This, I propose, is the main enigma haunting The Great Dictator. It makes this scene, the scene of Hynkel’s first speech—and by extension the film in its entirety—one of the most mysterious and portentous moments in twentieth-century art. Hynkel is neither a person nor a fictional character but a struggle—a field of combat and of tension. This struggle does not occur between two people, Chaplin and Hitler, so much as between two principles we may call “Chaplinism” and “Hitlerism.” The following does not treat these principles abstractly or as political, philosophical, or existential in general; instead, it examines them more precisely and perhaps in a more limited way. Our interest concerns the cinematic medium: two modalities of relating to the screen, 78

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two ways of interpreting what the being of the screen and what being onscreen mean. Chaplin and Hitler may be viewed as two of the most influential screen presences of the twentieth century. I would like to interpret their struggle in terms of who takes possession of the screen from whom. Their “combat” holds enormous significance, not just for the question of what being on-screen means (undoubtedly one of the fundamental questions of our time) but also for that of what being on-screen means in the context of twentieth-century politics. This field of combat between the two is part of what makes this movie a challenge of inexhaustible complexity, a fundamental modern drama rather than a settled issue. Events occur on what we might consider “Chaplin territory”—Chaplin wrote, directed, and starred in the movie. For all that, he does not command the field entirely. Chaplin took an enormous risk in entering this battle, and it is not clear how intact he left it. The clearest price he paid was the “death” of The Tramp; this figure last appears in the guise of the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator. It is primarily from the perspective of the question of the screen actor that I would like to examine this fundamental battle between Chaplin and Hitler. Who or what is the screen actor? Why do two of its most paradigmatic inflections come in the modes of Chaplinism and Hitlerism? As the Hynkel speech hints, the key lies in the relationship between the nature of the screen, the actor as activator of the screen and main interpreter of what being on-screen means, and the mysterious entity known as the crowd. Essentially, the screen actor is someone who inflects relations between the cinematic screen and the crowd.1 Why is it that these two modalities of activating relations to the crowd, Chaplin’s and Hitler’s, need to enter into a fundamental and very high-stakes conflict? In order to answer these questions, I want to broaden the picture and take a look at several other paradigmatic cinematic texts. With one exception, they take place in the momentous decade starting in 1931 and culminating with Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in 1940. The two main films are Fritz Lang’s M (1931), often considered the first German cinematic masterpiece of the talking era, and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935)—not just the most influential propaganda film ever made but also the work most responsible for creating Hitler’s screen persona and, as such, the principal cinematic impetus to which Chaplin responds in The Great Dictator.

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The Origin of Film

M : The Shadow of the Crowds M introduces our main questions from a formal point of view. Lang offers a brilliant investigation of all aspects of the cinematic medium, including a complex interpretation of those who “inhabit” it (the crowds in their relation to a figure we can call, problematically perhaps, the screen actor). This film also introduces the main questions from a historical standpoint, providing an astonishing analysis of the logic of the urban crowd and the anxieties haunting it in 1930s Berlin, just before Hitler rose to power. Lang’s films have often been seen—and justifiably so—as historically prophetic, most famously by Siegfried Kracauer. What interests me in particular is Lang’s elaboration of the relation between a certain historical moment, a specific social phenomenon, namely, the city crowd of the early decades of the twentieth century, and the problem of the image.2 Let’s start then at the very beginning of M. reality is missing A child’s voice is heard reciting a tale about a killer turning children into ground beef. The screen is dark for a moment; the voice has no visual counterpart. Slight anxiety already grips viewers. Where is this voice coming from? To whom does it belong? Finally, the visual image arrives. A group of children are standing in a circle; in the middle, the young girl whose voice we have heard is pointing at her playmates. When the song ends, one of them will be eliminated from the game. Whom the murderer’s axe will strike is a matter of chance.3 But how the scene is shot proves decisive. From a slightly elevated angle above the children, the camera shows the scene from an unclear perspective. From where, exactly, is it watching? Why is it positioned there? No obvious explanation exists; as such, the context for the scene and its rationale seem to be missing. This absence of context is at the origin of the anxiety the scene provokes: because there is no explanation for the camera’s position, it seems the children themselves are being watched by an indeterminate, impersonal gaze, a menacing gaze of no one in particular. Reality—a meaningful context in which we can orient ourselves—feels missing; the scene is punctured, as it were, by an absence that threatens to swallow our meaningful world. It’s as if this haunting absence suddenly opened at the heart of the world, producing an anxious sense of being watched, that is, of standing exposed to something whose origin and reason one cannot

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locate within the context of determinate reality. Being watched means being exposed to an absence, a hole in reality. This structure of a missing reality teaches us something about the nature of the cinematic image in general. We can understand this deprivation of a meaningful context, of reality, and the imposition of a haunting absence, as the off-screen’s becoming visible. The off-screen, that to which what is seen on-screen seems to refer or that whose presence what is on-screen seems to indicate or imply, starts to disturb viewers when what the screen shows delimits the contours of what we see in a way that obstructs our access to a fully meaningful context/world. At this moment of obstruction, what is on-screen and open to our vision starts communicating with an unlocatable and indefinable absence; we can no longer see what is “off ” simply as a temporal and spatial continuation of what is on-screen within a clearly grasped contextual reality, for reality has been, precisely, shaken. To a great degree, this absence, and thus the being of the off-screen, is nothing—that is, nothing positive; it is simply the expression and experience of being deprived of a fully meaningful context. The cinematic image opens communication between what we see on-screen and an off-screen that inflicts a loss of context, detaching it from a specific place, time, and order of rationality and causality. By “image,” I mean an artistic or poetic image: one that activates communication between what is visible and the invisibility haunting it. Most images are not poetic, because they display interest only in the actuality of what they show, that is, content. In contrast, poetic images foreground the opening between what they show and invisibility.4 Although it may be that every (artistic) image both communicates with and inscribes an absence—establishing relations between what we see and what we do not see—the cinematic image possesses a specificity and particularity inasmuch as it belongs to the photographic medium, which passively records a reality that is supposedly already “out there.” (Even in the case of an artificial set, it is still something that the camera is assumed simply to record.) The cinematic image is always understood to offer a slice of r­ eality—part of a reality that extends, by definition, beyond the limit of what stands on-screen at any given moment. But once the off-screen denies us from access to a meaningful context, we both expect a reality beyond the screen (due to the passive nature of the photographic medium) and are deprived of it, and thus we are left with frustrated expectation, the affliction with an absence that disturbingly haunts us.

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The Origin of Film

In contrast to the theater, or painting—where (fictional) reality is not supposed to continue beyond the stage or canvas—film gives rise to an expectation of which it then deprives us. To a large extent, the art of film is devoted to exploring the multiple dimensions of this mystery: a missing reality that inscribes itself on-screen as missing yet present as a haunting. the anonymous many Who are those who occupy the screen, understood as the arena of communication between on-screen visibility and a haunting off-screen absence? At the opening of M, exposed children occupy the screen—children who are being watched. To be watched in this case means, as we have begun to see, to be unable to fully locate oneself meaningfully in reality and thus to be unable to know, or to see, from where one is known or seen. Exposure is exposure to this indefinite nowhere that sees us, as it were, from we know not where. The child can be said to be exposed by definition, that is, to lack a determinate meaningful reality in which he or she can identify or recognize him- or herself. In other words, the child occupies a fragile and helpless realm in which he or she is seen by something indefinite. The cinematic screen activates this realm and even manages to show it as such. The child is an exposed and fragile being whose reality is missing and who is therefore “watched.” Not being able to recognize and locate oneself fully in reality also means that one does not possess a full identity, that one cannot entirely identify oneself as “this” or “that” person inhabiting a meaningful and recognizable realm. Such lack of identity means that exposure strikes one with a haunting anonymity and namelessness, and, what is more, muteness: the incapacity to say who one is. The child is the one living this muteness and anonymity haunted by a hole in reality. What in film occupies the place of this invisible and unknown “watcher”? It is the off-screen; even more concretely, perhaps, it is the camera. The children are those exposed to the camera, which is the activator of an off-screen and leaves a hole in on-screen reality. By definition, the camera makes something visible without itself being recognizably inscribed within the visibility it makes possible; that is, it occupies an elsewhere that cannot be fully located. In other words, the camera watches from the haunting non–place/time of a hole in reality. But if children occupy the screen qua an exposed realm of missing reality, then the audience exposed to the on-screen/off-screen relation become

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children as well, that is, nameless, anonymous, and haunted inhabitants of a missing reality. After all, we cannot fully identify on-screen reality, either; the limitations of the screen deprived us of context as well. allegories of the screen My method here is doubly allegorical. First, I take the figure who occupies the screen, if it is a child, for example, to be not (only) this or that specific child but (also) a type, someone standing for the “child as such,” understood as a figure who occupies a specific and paradigmatic relation to the problem of reality qua missing. As a typology, allegory means elucidating the modalities of missing relations to reality. Second, if those on-screen are types activating a specific modality of the meaning of being on-screen, understood as a realm of missing reality, they are also figures for the audience. The cinematic spectators can therefore be figured according to the modalities of being on-screen. Every paradigmatic screen figure also stands for spectators exposed to the screen, that is, to on-screen/off-screen relations. Besides children, other figures also paradigmatically occupy the screen as a realm of missing reality. As the children continue their game, the camera starts to move, leaving them off-frame—as if abandoning them to its power of negation. For a moment, though, their voices are heard from off-screen. A voice detached from a visible utterer and heard from off-screen is thus that in which the off-screen’s ghostly power is incarnated, the voice itself becoming the carrier of the power to puncture a hole in reality. In short order, a woman appears: a maternal figure who hears this haunting voice provoking anxiety. She turns toward the children (who remain off-screen) and cries out: “I told you not to sing that horrible song!” Her address responds, as it were, to the simple fact that she stands onscreen, exposed to the off-screen; when she pleads for the song to stop, her cry calls for the haunting of the off-screen, which threatens reality with an abyss, to be eliminated. The second paradigmatic figure /­allegorical type that M brings to our attention, then, is the anxious mother haunted by the exposure of the child she is helpless to protect. The screen becomes the arena of the anxious mother, and we, the audience, occupy a similar position: helpless to prevent the disaster the screen’s realm of exposure threatens us with.

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The Origin of Film

In the following scene, the film presents a group of adults—all standing more or less with their back turned toward the camera—waiting for children to exit their school. Who are these figures? We do not know, for they remain anonymous to us; their faces, the clearest markers of their identity, do not appear. They might all be anxious parents, waiting to pick up their children and bring them to safety. Yet any one of them— we have no way of knowing whom—might be a murderer, waiting to take a child to its doom. This anonymous group is the crowd. The crowd comprises all those assembled by the anonymity-inflicting, decontextualizing encounter with a hole in reality—all who lack a fully defined place in the context of a world. They share anxiety for the “child” that this hole has activated. The crowd feels called upon to care for the child; indeed, in a sense, its members become it. The cinematic screen—creating an image through the haunting of an on-screen space by an off-screen decontextualizing gesture—yields a paradigmatic place where the crowd assembles, a space shared by all these beings afflicted by anonymity. At the same time the cinematic audience, those assembled around the screen, is also this crowd. A major aspect of the being of the crowd, and thus of all those who occupy the screen (as well as of the audience who share the screen) as a decontextualized zone haunted by the “off,” is something we can call the principle of the “any.” Since the crowd is a multiplicity of all those who have lost their place and identity, each of its members is an “anyone,” no one in particular. Becoming a crowd, a collectivity of “­anyones,” is always accompanied by a shadow, the suspicion that anyone of their number may be deemed responsible for having turned them all into “anyones,” that is, of having deprived them of their particular identities. In other words, and as the film emphasizes, anyone in M might be the murderer. The question of the screen, therefore, is intimately tied to the question of the crowd, which activates this double-sided logic of the “any”: general anonymity and its shadowy, haunting exception, the anonymous figure responsible for the anonymity of everyone (and, in another twist of this logic, possibly responsible for the dreamed-of rescue from anonymity). Indeed, it is the being of the shadow itself, as the following scene shows, that provides the fourth main figure for being-on-screen. One of the girls exiting the school starts walking the streets alone, playing with a ball. Suddenly, she stops and starts bouncing the ball against something in

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front of her. Because we cannot yet see what it is, the girl’s throwing the ball becomes a sort of a communication with the off-screen. It’s as if she starts developing a privileged relation to, even a conversation with, the disturbing principle of the off-screen. It seems her very being depends on the relation to the “off.” Soon we see that the surface she has been bouncing the ball against is a column covered with public notices. It features a poster that asks, “Who is the murderer?” Right away, a shadow falls on the poster; just as soon, the shadow, with its off-screen voice, starts to converse with the girl. The off-screen starts to speak. Its disembodied voice is the announcement of murder. Read in a formal or allegorical manner, the off-screen itself is the murderer the girl encounters and starts communicating with. The shadow—a disembodied trace, a presence with no identifying content—is the means by which the “murderous” off-screen leaves its mark in the on-screen world. If the off-screen is decontextualization that punctures a hole in reality, depriving all its inhabitants of a fully recognizable identity and a place in the world, then the shadow “incarnates” this nothing; though a positive mark, it is the trace of a negativity—“positive” emptiness, the presence of the hole.

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The Origin of Film

The shadow is in fact the shadow of the actual murderer, who happens to stand outside the purview of the screen (and of course an actual murderer will finally make an appearance in the movie). However, because we have no access to what actually lies beyond the screen at the moment, the “off ” also has an absolute dimension, which decontextualizes and unmoors reality from its recognizable contours. The shadow, cast by something to which we have no access, not only becomes the trace of a momentarily unavailable actuality but, more mysteriously, of an absolutely unavailable dimension, a haunting dimension that can never be made actual but that announces itself as an emptiness puncturing the on-screen world, as it were. Those on-screen—children, anxious mothers, crowds—are all figures whose encounter with a hole in the world makes them shadows of themselves to an extent; they can be seen as those who find an empty trace at the heart of themselves where they expected to find someone specific, an identity. The murderer in M can be said both to incarnate a formal principle— as a murderous shadow that embodies the principle of the off-screen—and to function as a particular modality of coming to inhabit the screen. It is crucial to emphasize that the off-screen, though indeed a power of dis­ identification, is in no way essentially or necessarily murderous. Its interpretation as murderous is one possible affective modality, one that we might term paranoid, at least to some extent. M can be said to be the bringing into visibility of this paranoia, as well as the figurative narration of it.5 The murderer himself, as mentioned, is thus also a paradigmatic onscreen figure, yet another essential modality of relating to missing reality: haunted by the off-screen/camera in a particularly disturbing manner, he attempts to eliminate its shadow, a shadow that, in his case, becomes an inner voice, a disembodied, disidentifying speech he cannot recognize as his own, and that opens an intimate hole at the heart of his very being. When he murders children—those fragile and mute figures expressing the hole in the world—he is trying to eliminate the haunting, to suffocate its voice. This is precisely what the murderer (Peter Lorre) expresses in his famous speech at the end of the film, as he stands before the court of under­ ground criminals and attempts to describe the anguish of his life. This murderer of children, screaming in horror and in pain, says: I can’t help it . . . can I behave any differently? Is it that I don’t have this curse inside of me? This fire, this voice, this torment? I always . . . I always have

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to go down the street. And I always feel it . . . behind me. It’s myself. And I follow me, in silence. But I can hear it! . . . I want to, I want to escape from myself! But I can’t, I can’t escape from myself! I must follow the way that’s chasing me! I must run, run down endless streets. I want to get away. And running with me, the ghosts of the mothers and the children. They never go away. They’re always there, always! Always! Always! They only disappear when I do it. When I . . .

What haunts and pursues the murderer, if not precisely the camera ­itself—the eye of the shadowy off-screen located nowhere specific and, as such, a source of uncontrolled exposure? In a sense, desire to eliminate the camera stands at the origin of his murderous acts. In this sense, the murderer himself becomes yet another figure for the audience. Indeed, his desire to eliminate the off-screen and the camera adds an additional, crucial aspect to what characterizes the cinematic audience—an aspect we can call iconoclasm, an anti-cinematic desire, a desire to eliminate the image. The cinematic audience may come to desire the elimination of the screen/off-screen and the camera, to which it stands helplessly exposed and which seems to pursue it. Cinema, as does every image-making medium, activates an intense iconclastic desire. paternal frame versus cinematic frame The figure conspicuously absent from the opening scenes of M and on whose absence their disturbing quality depends is the father. The problematic of the screen/off-screen emerges once the figure of the father disappears. In this context, the father, as a conceptual/formal category, stands for a framing operation that clearly separates an inside from an outside— that is, between a contextual, meaningful world where one can recognize the proper place of things and a realm populated by what does not belong and is not meaningful. The cinematic frame (or the cinematic screen understood as a frame, in that it opens a distinction between an inside and an outside) undermines the project of establishing a paternal frame separating an inside and outside by creating a decontextualized realm (the on-screen) that comes to communicate with, and stand exposed to, an unlocatable dimension casting a “shadow.” One no longer has a recognizable place and context; therefore, one no longer knows where one belongs and where one doesn’t, what is inside and what is outside. The outside, the off-screen, comes to haunt every figure on-screen.

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The Origin of Film

The cinematic screen is indeed a frame inasmuch as it opens a distinction between the inside (the on-screen) and the outside (the off-screen). However, this opening of a distinction is not a separation (separation being the distinction between two actual realms, an actual inside and an actual outside), but rather a differentiation between an actuality and a background. This differentiation suspends the meaningfulness of the actuality given; it operates as the intrusion of a power of decontextualization that exposes (and exposes one to) the “invisible” background of the actual world and shows this background to be nothing (nothing actual and positive, that is) but essential and constitutive placelessness. The background is not invisible in the sense of some hidden and inaccessible actuality; rather, it is “invisible” inasmuch as it is nothing actual. The outside of the (cinematic) frame (the off-screen), then, is not a specific, actual place. Instead it is a power of placelessness whose “shadow”— the disturbance it occasions for on-screen figures—is activated and made visible by the cinematic image. What prevails here is what I call, following Deleuze, the absolute off-screen (in contradistinction to the relative, spatial-temporal off-screen). The cinematic frame, then (and the artistic frame more generally), does not make a separation between two distinct actualities; it differentiates between an actual realm and a nothing that comes to disturb its meaningfulness—a disturbance that renders each actual on-screen thing “haunted,” that is, different from itself (different from any identity and place it might have been assumed to have). However, the cinematic frame is not only a frame in the sense that it marks a distinction between an inside and an outside; it is also a frame in the sense of operating as delimitation and “containment.” That said, it does not delimit any specific thing but rather the background itself, to which it gives a specific presence. If we think of the background as infinite (i.e., not any one thing in particular), we can understand the delimiting power of the cinematic/artistic frame to allow the infinite to inhabit a finite and contained space/time. The placelessness that the background—the off-screen—is may be under­stood as the fact that our world is no longer, as traditionally held, a realm whose organization is given in advance; rather, it is a realm where the places of things must emerge without a pre-given organization. One comes to occupy a position only because this invisible background of the world—originary placelessness or groundlessness—acts as an empty call to make a place one’s own. In contrast to metaphysical thought—where

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an invisible principle of organization is understood to govern the world from above, so to speak—the background that the cinematic frame exposes does not ground but rather acts as a groundlessness, opening the nongivenness that precedes orientation and organization of the world. These concepts allow us to understand the philosophical significance of the cinematic frame, as well as its function within the general context of our lives. The cinematic frame, the opening of on-screen/ off-screen relations, exposes the world as it stands to this originary background (the nothing of ground), reopening the settled decisions responsible for the forms of our meaningful existence. In other words, it makes new “negotiations” with the background possible, the coming-to-be of new forms of existence. The cinematic frame can therefore be said to be a frame that unframes by dissolving the given negotiations with the background that brought about the meaningfulness of our world, that is, the paternal frame dividing what is meaningful from what is not. All the onscreen children, anxious mothers, crowds, and murderers, then, express modalities of unframing, different ways of experiencing the unraveling and dissolution of paternal frames. No encounter with and activation of the groundless background of our world and no confrontation with its shadow is like any other. The cine­ matic screen can both give a specific inflection and form to this encounter as well as be that which aims, by exposing the background, to undo a determinate configuration of the negotiation that shapes the actual world and thus allow for the emergence of possible new configurations. One of the main conceptual/formal as well as historical points of our analyses of M so far is that the cinematic medium functions as the activation of an encounter with a placeless dimension that leaves its shadowy traces (the traces of nothing) on-screen while also showing how this encounter, at a specific historical moment, is inflected. In the case of M and 1930s Berlin, this encounter seems to take a paranoid form: the shadowy trace of the outside is experienced and figured as a horrifying and menacing threat to a community that has lost its organizing structure and become an anonymous crowd. Even though the screen is essentially a medium of the collective loss of identity, not every collective loss must take the form of the emergence of a paranoid crowd. The struggle between Chaplin and Hitler that stands at the center of my investigation concerns competing ways of inflecting the relations between the work of the screen and the emergent multiplicity without

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The Origin of Film

identity—the crowd—that it both activates and expresses. Needless to say, the cinematic screen is neither the historical cause of the emergence of the modern crowd nor is it simply caused by a “preexistent” crowd, as it were. Rather, it is the medium (perhaps the primary medium) through which modern humanity encounters its “crowdness,” so to speak—that is, comes to communicate with its increasing placelessnes and anonymity. The screen brings this anonymity-inflicting dimension of placelessness into view, allowing humanity to occupy a state of suspension regarding it; by momentarily liberating humanity from being blindly and unconsciously dominated by its encounter with the “off ” it allows for the emergence of a possibility of decision in relation to it. What shape will humanity’s communication with the dimension of haunting placelessness take? Will it be an attempt to form a national identity that tries to turn the collective anonymity of the crowds into a monstrous anonymous unity gathered around a charismatic leader and give a specific face (the Jew, for example) to the menacing shadow? Or will humanity find a way to live its anonymity in a different, possibly nonparanoid fashion? These are the stakes of the dramatic encounter between Chaplin and Hitler qua screen figures, and hence its enormous historical significance. Before moving on with our discussion and away from M, I would like to say a few words about the cinematic figure who activates most paradigmatically what being on-screen means, namely, the actor. What, or more precisely who, is the cinematic actor? She or he is a shadow—or more precisely, she or he knows how to activate the shadow. By definition, the actor is able to lose her or his identity and take on another; she or he is capable of not being her- or himself. I want to modify this definition slightly: the actor is one who is able to lose her or his identity and take on a role. What does taking on a role mean in the context of the question of the actor? This is not to be understood as assuming an identity (in the sense of a recognizable place in a context); rather, it is a very specific poetic or artistic capacity: to show a specific modality—the role itself—of one’s encounter with the loss of identity. The structure that allows identity to be achieved—identity being a recognizable place in a determined context—is the paternal structure, a structure that depends on the creation of a frame. The poetic and cinematic moment—in this case, the activation of a role, becoming an actor—emerges from a crisis in the paternal structure, a crisis in the frame, exposing it to the power of the “off.”6

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Although the poetic moment, together with the general dimension of the artistic image (cinematic and otherwise), emerges from this crisis, it is not to be equated with it, since, to a large extent, it can be understood as a successful solution to it. This solution does not involve attaining a new identity but rather giving form to the shadowy emptiness—an excess of the “off ” haunting the inside (the framed world)—that has displaced and deprived one of identity. “Role” refers to this forming of the shadow. The actor is one who manages not to be destroyed by the encounter with the shadow but to transform this shadow into a role. The most paradigmatic modern allegorization of the encounter with the dimension of the “off ” that involves the loss of identity qua loss of the paternal frame and the opening of the question of acting is of course that of Hamlet’s meeting with the ghost that emerges in place of the disappearing father. As we saw earlier in the book, this encounter marks the intrusion of a placeless and displacing emptiness that deprives Hamlet of his identity (his inheritance of a name, a place, a territory). Within the play, the prince’s fascination with the question of the theater—the way he flirts with the idea of fiction, wears masks, and takes on roles—emerges from the loss that the ghost effected. But for all that, Hamlet’s tragedy might be that he failed to become an actor (as he suggests when comparing himself to one of the comedians) and thus never learned to transform the ghost into a role—which finally proves his undoing.

Triumph of the Will—or, the Rage against the Sky If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The sky, like the sea, forms a natural screen. Its blueness or grayness offers a zone without context or orientation, cut off from any “landish” point of direction. Its expanse opens the doors of perception to an elsewhere, which is invisible, empty, out of time and out of place: what we have been calling the dimension of the “off.” This dimension is nothing positive and actual; rather, it is the capacity of the world to open unpredictably with no pre-given orientation. Clouds, like reflections in water, are primal images—airy figures occupying a decontextualized zone,

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The Origin of Film

a­ fflicted by its disidentifying powers, blank and characterless. Like the actor, they can take on and shed multiple roles inasmuch as they incarnate the power of metamorphosis with which the “off ” endows them. At night, of course, actors become stars, illuminating our everyday life by commanding the power of the screen not to be anywhere specific, taking us on a fantastic voyage beyond. Desire for the infinite, fantasy, and the horror of falling mix together in this originary vision, a vision of a cloudy or starry sky, a primal screen play. The airplane is a technological apparatus that is inscribed with the calling that the sky, like any poetic screen opening us to the “off,” sends. Calling, as we have seen, activates the dimension of groundlessness—of that which has no pre-given reason and direction—and confronts us as an address, that is, where the very question of our identity is implicated, even though this address is empty. The airplane responds to this calling, the empty address of the primal image that is the sky; it is thus an instrument of fantasy, inscribed both with a desire for infinity and a defense against the horror of falling—which in this case does not mean actual falling but rather falling into the groundlessness activated by the image. An instrument of conquest as well, the airplane signifies the attempt to take control of the disorienting sky, to ground it, so to speak. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will begins with a vision of the cloudy sky and the modern technology of the airplane. This opening marks both her appreciation of the image’s ungrounding powers and her desire to see it grounded. She aims to eliminate the image’s threat and horror by conquering the infinity it discloses: to turn the sky into a cavern, an enclosing frame with no aperture. In fact, the film’s trajectory—opening with the sky and ending in the cathedral-like space of the closing ceremony of the Nazi Party congress—describes an arc from the sky to the cave.7 The iconoclastic desire to destroy the image is not new. It marked the West from its inception, in both the Judeo-Christian and Greek traditions, and received renewed energy in modernity with the Protestant Reformation. I am concerned here with how iconoclasm happens in relation to the disturbing discovery of the cinematic screen and of those who come to occupy it, and even more specifically, with the modality this iconoclasm takes at a specific historical moment, the 1930s. Riefen­ stahl creates a movie star—someone whose powers derive magically (i.e., without reason) from the “off,” who arrives out of the sky/screen as a messenger of a beyond. At the same time this messenger—and this is the

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quality that makes of him what we may call a fascistic star—incarnates an iconoclastic desire to destroy the sky/screen by grounding it and eliminating its disorienting powers. I am speaking, of course, of Hitler as this sky/ screen star and charismatic leader.8 The fascistic movie star falls from the sky, thereby activating its powers (the powers of the screen); simultaneously, however, he rages against the sky that brought about his fall and desires nothing more than to eliminate it.9 The entirety of Triumph of the Will is structured as a simultaneous activation of the powers of the screen and the star who comes to occupy it and the iconoclastic desire to defend against these ungrounding powers and take possession of them. I want to investigate this double movement in the following discussion of the film. As noted, our first view is that of a cloudy sky as seen through the windows of a cockpit; as the opening titles tell us, it belongs to Hitler’s plane. The rest of the aircraft remains off-screen. The camera starts moving across the cockpit’s windows (through which we continuously see the sky). When it reaches the yoke—as if looking for the pilot—there is still nothing: the plane seems mysteriously to be flying by itself or guided by

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The Origin of Film

an invisible spiritual being. There is no further attempt to find the pilot; again we behold the sky through the windows, whose imposing presence recedes, as it were, and although they continue to frame the sky, more and more space is granted to the clouds. hitler-camera The sky, as stated above, is an originary screen. As such, it exposes viewers to the “off.” For all that, the view of the sky in this opening shot does not merge with the screen itself, the latter being the human technology that activates the invisible “off,” creating a “sky” out of every surface by disconnecting it from its surrounding, creating an emptiness and an invisibility. Rather, the sky is shown as viewed through the windows, which constitute a frame that encloses it. Viewers are protected from the sky/screen by the window frame that creates a limit, a border. At the same time, we are made aware that the plane not only provides protection from the sky but is the very apparatus of visibility that makes this marvelous (yet protected) vision of the sky possible, and we remain indebted to it. Although our exposure has been diminished, however, we are not fully isolated from the dimension of the off-screen. In fact, the film actually activates and draws our attention to it by giving us a very limited view of the plane itself: most of it remains off-screen, thereby creating an obstruction in regard to what we see as well as the desire to see more. The relationships among the vision of the unframing sky, the framing of this unframing dimension by the window, and the activation of an off-screen, a beyond, produce a very complex structure. The off-screen retains its invisible mystery and haunting power, the feeling of a beyond that is not fully localizable and identifiable. Yet at the same time, this beyond is channeled into a very specific question: “Who, or what, frames?” That is to say, “Who is responsible for the creation of the frame (the windows of the plane that frame the sky)?” “Who or what is it that protects us (from the pure sky) and, at the same time, offers us this marvelous vision?”10 Since the plane/window/frame activates the “off,” the “off ” is no longer a completely indeterminate disturbance, a pure power of decontextualization without actual content; now it becomes specifically tied to what called/activated it, so to speak: the framed window of the airplane. As such, from an indeterminate power of disidentification the “off ” becomes a not yet identified, mysterious power capable of framing. If, in M,

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the shadowy and completely indeterminate disturbance of the off-screen paranoically transforms into the search for the one responsible for this shadow—thereby “solving” the problem of the off-screen by finding an agent deemed responsible for its horrifying powers—in Triumph of the Will the “off ” transforms into a realm out of which the one who holds the power of framing arrives. The question “Who frames?” is the exact opposite of M’s question, “Who is the murderer?” Indeed, the one who frames emerges as the one who provides protection from the paranoically incarnated shadow (within this historical context, the Jew). But what is off-frame and responsible for framing what we see? It is the camera, which necessarily remains outside of what it makes visible. The camera, in this context, is an invisibility that frames. That said, it is not only the camera that is off-screen and in charge of framing; the film will slowly provide us with an actual agent responsible for framing the sky—a framing that, to an extent, delimits the powers of the camera. At first this agent is ghostly, but soon it makes an actual appearance. I am referring to Hitler, whose plane this is, even though, for the moment, he remains unseen and the plane itself seems like a “ghost ship.” Hitler represents a different principle than the camera’s framing. The camera, by always remaining invisible, produces what we have called a frame that unframes. In contrast, Hitler is a visible agent and will function as the framing of the unframing frame of the camera, taking possession of its unframing power. He will be both the camera and what provides protection from the camera. If Hitler had immediately appeared as the camera moves in search of what is beyond the frame and has the power of framing, he would have been one of the things included by the camera in its frame, and as such he would have been subject to its vision and exposed to its shadowy powers, that is, the powers of the off-frame. In this case, even if he were controlling the framing of the sky by being the commander of the apparatus of vision that is the plane, he would himself have been subject to a more powerful principle of unframing and a more threatening apparatus that would have undermined his own capacity to frame. The fact that Hitler does not appear in the plane but is present in a ghostly manner means that he is an exceptional presence not subject to the power of the camera; he is fully equal to and one with it. In this way, the invisibility of the off-screen, completely indeterminate haunting can slowly transform into a more determinate invisibility. That is, a

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The Origin of Film

subtle translation and exchange occurs between Hitler and the camera, the two off-screens: Hitler assumes, as it were, the menacing place of the camera and replaces it with his own capacity to frame the unframed, thereby introducing a protective delimitation of the power of the offscreen. Only later, after the plane has landed and Hitler, after initial ghostliness, has acquired “material” being, will he actually emerge as the miraculous incarnation of a framing “off.” But once he appears on-screen, Hitler is unlike all other figures, since he is not exposed to the shadowy off-screen/camera like everyone else. He is the exception, both the camera and what it shows. Hitler shows himself, so to speak: illuminated by his own light, he is exposed only to himself and fully in control of his own apparition. Decisively, he alone is capable of being the eye and the I of the camera, both possessing its invisible powers and becoming their earthly incarnation. All others will depend on the possibility of this exception for their own “liberation” from the menacing exposure to the off-screen/camera.11 The “many” will be gathered on-screen inasmuch as they are released from the shadow when Hitler assumes the place of the camera. Indeed, his powers as framer of the sky/ off-screen depend on this complex procedure, since he is the only one not exposed to the sky and, as such, can protect everyone else from it. If Hitler is a (movie) star descending from the sky/off-screen, his arrival signals the power to possess this realm. Everything stands exposed to him, yet he is exposed to nothing; accordingly, he can both possess and activate the sky and its powers and, at the same time, turn it into enframing ground. The film constantly emphasizes that “Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler,” which means that Hitler embodies the exceptional apparatus of vision allowing Germany to come together and unite, to see itself fully without being menaced by shadows. It is crucial to notice the difference between this Hitlerian/modern gathering of the many in relation to a framer of the sky/screen and the ancient or classical articulation of the people of a city, as exemplified, say, in Oedipus Rex, where the people relate to a leader who is understood to have privileged access to the sky, a closer, mediating relation to the gods that makes him the protector (framer) of the city. In the classical model, the framer can never equal the sky, for he receives his authority and power to frame from the gods; in this sense, the frame always remains open, containing an excess from which it receives its authority (even if this excess is “domesticated” and given a sacred location).

The Actor of the Crowd

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For the ancients, we can say, the sky spoke; it was populated by the gods. As such, framing meant communicating with them, negotiating with their sacred speech, the enigmatic discourse of the divine. In contrast, the modern condition emerges from the realization that the sky has been emptied and humanity now stands exposed, in unprecedented manner, to a “pure sky”: an unpopulated and abandoned realm, whose corollary is what we have been calling the groundlessness of the world— in other words, without anything being responsible for the sky’s powers. Divine (enigmatic and sacred) speech no longer exists, only pure and disorienting emptiness (even the enigmatic and incomprehensible speech of the gods has a content, even if it is not fully decipherable). Thus, modern humanity faces a choice either to expose itself to the pure sky and articulate a reality whose heart is groundlessness and an empty call or to populate the sky with “itself ” by taking possession of its ungrounding and disidentifying powers.12 Hitlerian logic follows the latter course, producing a frame that tries to close itself fully, to eliminate any excess that might mark its exposure to the sky. As the opening scene continues, one sees more and more of the sky, at times without the intervention of the plane as a framing apparatus. Is Riefenstahl trying to expose the viewer to the pure sky? She is not. Instead, after the issue of the sky’s framing has been established, we are free to watch the sky without anxiety of exposure, since our gaze to an extent has already been “Hitlerized” (even though the crucial moment of its Hitler­ ization depends on Hitler’s reaching the ground and, with it, visibility), that is, framed and formed by a protective, self-grounding apparatus. The sky is now no longer abandoned but populated by a new type of divinity: the self-grounding political leader. Fascism—and more specifically, fascist cinema as a place in which a fundamental modality of negotiation with the modern screen is articulated—is therefore a fundamentally iconoclastic enterprise that turns the cinema against itself, a fascination with the image/exposure of the screen that seeks to master its menace by forming and framing our vision by means of a new kind of apparatus.13 Following this initial Hitlerization of the sky—a framing activity that has liberated us from the pure sky/screen and its ungrounding threat— the plane can descend to terra firma, to the ground where Hitler will reveal himself, that is, the ground that Hitler will be. Through this descent, the film discloses a new type of city and crowds very different from the Berlin of M, indeed, one that implicitly serves as a liberation from

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The Origin of Film

the Berlin of M: this is Nuremberg, where the Nazi Party congress takes place. This fairy-tale city emerges slowly as the cloudy sky clears; it is as if the framing of the pure sky/screen allows our vision to be liberated from an opacity that haunted it and opens a new kind of urban landscape free of all the anxieties previously attached to it. The screen (“sky”), as we have seen, is an exposed realm disconnected from any determinate context; as such, it marks the suspension of the world: all who occupy the screen stand apart from their proper place and identity, creating what we have been calling the modern crowd or the modern masses. At its most basic, then, the screen presents a realm with no identities, fixed locations, or social hierarchies; it gathers the many at the moment of the world’s suspension, the interruption of all appointed tasks. This gathering of the multitude on-screen may occur in many affective modalities, but the one that interests us in this context involves anxiety to the extent that the off-screen’s effect is a disidentifying dislocation experienced as a shadowy haunting, a blank and empty horror. Exposure to the unframing power of the pure sky/screen—exposure that haunts modern humanity as a result of the breakdown of traditional paternal frames—frames that have received their authority from transcendent sacred ­figures—is expressed, at this historical moment,14 in the on-screen emergence of the many as a horrified and disoriented crowd. The screen is perhaps the most fundamental arena and medium in which modern humanity comes to encounter the demise of its frames; by engaging with the screen, it seeks to work out its relation to this new condition of its existence.15 To this horrified crowd of Berlin—or any major modern metropolis— Riefenstahl’s Hitlerization of the sky/screen and the revelation of a new fairy-tale city, Nuremberg, proposes an answer. It involves transforming the anxious crowd into two different but interlinked forms of a disidentified and de-hierarchized multitude, liberated from anxiety. As the camera descends, we see these two forms of the many gathering and populating the fairy-tale city. We can name them: (1) the festival of the people/Volk as watchers of the Führer/self-showing-apparatus-of-vision; and (2) the military as a uniformed and geometrically organized collective on display with no marks of differentiation, owing its uniformity to the sole hierarchical relation allowed: the Führer-camera for the sake of and in relation to which they are organized.16 The Hitlerian relation to the screen does not seek to dismantle it in order to restore traditional identities and hierarchies; rather, it attempts to

The Actor of the Crowd

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take possession of the screen. It embraces aspects of its leveling, disidentifying, and de-hierarchizing nature, and therefore something of modernity, turning all who inhabit it into “anyones”: part of a multitude but with the shadow of anonymity exorcised. As such, the effort is to completely enframe the de-hierarchizing screen, block it from any exposure to the shadow, and leave only one distinction standing between the many “anyones” and the total frame itself, namely, the Führer-camera.17 Indeed, after awhile, in its descent to Nuremberg, where Hitler will finally reach the ground and make an appearance, the flying plane, itself unseen, markedly casts its shadow on the many, the crowds, of soldiers and the festive Volk, whom we are beginning to see on-screen. The offscreen is thus, as it was in M, inscribed as a shadow on-screen. Yet whereas in M the shadow was soon paranoically incarnated in a murderer, giving the shadow a beginning of identity and actuality so as to chase away its completely indefinite nature, here the shadow is what announces the arrival of Hitler from off-screen into visibility, thus completing his transformation of the screen from an indeterminate and exposed sky to that which is framed by a self-grounding apparatus of visibility that both shows the screen as well as being shown on-screen, with no gap between the two. If, in M, the murderer is responsible for the shadow, in Triumph of the Will Hitler is responsible for its elimination. In the rigorous metaphorical system Riefenstahl establishes, this elimination of the shadow occurs fully at the moment when the ground is reached from the sky and Hitler finally appears, completing his self-grounding gesture as framer of the sky, the only thing that can simultaneously be off- and on-screen. power of the will What logic does this exorcism of the shadow and the total enframing of the screen follow? The logic of the Will, specifically its triumph over exposure to the groundless—a grounding triumph over the sky/screen. The triumph of the Will means triumph over the cinematic image. In this context, Will is the transformation of the world’s excessive groundlessness into what Hitler constantly calls Macht, that is, power or capacity, the ability to control and dictate any possible content in advance. The Will is the taking over of the off-screen and transforming of the empty groundlessness with which it “shadowed” the given world into power over this same world. Such “power over” retains the invisibility

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The Origin of Film

characterizing the “off,” since it is nothing actual or actualized, yet it exorcises the shadow of this invisibility, since it is a dimension fully in control of itself. Accordingly, Hitler remains essentially tied to the invisibility of the off-screen from which he constantly draws his effect (the crowds are always cheering something that is off-screen, which we know that Hitler commands); at the same time, however, this invisibility is not experienced as a haunting shadow by the crowds (both the cheering festival Volk waving to, and the soldiers saluting, the off-screen) but rather as the self-controlled capacity to be liberated from the shadow’s haunting. This capacity of the Will to ground itself and have no outside to which it stands exposed makes Hitler into a total frame with no exteriority and thereby allows the unframing dimension of the off-screen to transform into a completely enclosed frame. The many, the crowds or the masses, gathered on the “Hitlerized” screen retain something of the de-hierarchizing and disidentifying nature of being on the exposed screen, but they are also completely transformed. In M, the crowd emerged as the consequence of the dislocating and decontextualizing nature of the screen, which exposed everyone occupying it to a disidentifying dimension—exiling them from their proper and recognizable place, striking them with a blank shadow. In Riefenstahl’s film, Hitler replaces this shadow with the self-reflexive and self-grounding operation of the Will. This means that all who gather on-screen are no longer equalized through shared exposure to groundlessness in excess of identity; instead, they are all equal inasmuch as they are subject to self-reflexive Will. The Will allows the many on-screen to be freed from the nonidentity they share and to gather together as belonging to the same Will. In the case of the soldiers, this commonality amounts to uniformity (and, of course, the matter of the soldiers’ uniforms is a major one in the visual language of the film); as we will see, it results in a geometrization of vision inasmuch as the “off ” now has to open in a completely calculated and predictable, unthreatening manner, without the possibility of shadows. The soldiers’ uniformity, we might say, is their relation to Macht as a capacity for war, while the commonality characterizing the (supposedly unthreatened) festival of the Volk is common joy: liberation from the shadow through unifying allegiance to, and finding secure belonging and (empty) identity in, the Führer / camera / total frame. In both cases, the soldiers and the joyous Volk, the relation to the self-grounding frame now constitutes the only mark of identity that matters, the only place of

The Actor of the Crowd

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belonging that counts. Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Hitler: a selfgrounding, tautological process of enframing that amounts to an attempt to exorcise any trace of whoever might activate a shadow threatening the integrity of the frame. Here, the movie star as a fundamental relation to the many on-screen, an actor (i.e., one who activates an excessive nonidentity at the heart of identity) of/for the crowds, realizes one of its essential possibilities. The movie star, in a fascistic modality, both activates the screen’s power of disorienting exposure—being a charismatic, placeless enigma expressing the “more” of the groundless—and takes enframing possession of the screen, becoming the self-grounding identity that liberates the masses from their anxious sense of having lost place and identity. All those abandoned spectators—with nothing in common but their exposure—are appropriated to the fascistic star capable (supposedly) of enframing and grounding the sky. This figure, then, represents the exception to the principle of universal exposure to the “off,” which renders every­one on-screen unequal to her- or himself. The (fascistic) star is the only one equal to himself, because he simultaneously occupies the place of the “off ” and has a place on-screen. He alone can bridge a seemingly impossible gap. This miraculous capacity makes him the charismatic possessor of the crowds/masses, of all those who have been exiled by the screen, a modern apparatus of exposure, and now become themselves, so to speak, through his agency. The movie star belongs to the screen, that is, is someone subject to an exposure to the “off,” but he or she occupies the screen as an exception inasmuch as he or she can somehow possess the “off,” that is, not experience it simply as a haunting power of dispossession to which everyone else is exposed. This is certainly the nature of Hitler’s movie stardom. Is it the only possible logic of the movie star? An exceptional being, the star may be characterized as someone who is both exposed to the “off ” as well as being in some way “capable of ” the “off.” His or her exceptionality is expressed in the capacity not to be helplessly subject to the “off.” Here the question arises—perhaps the major question of the confrontation between Chaplin and Hitler as movie stars as well as that regarding the estimation in which we are to hold the movie star: Can a capacity exist whose nature is not possessive mastery? Is it possible to be, paradoxically, capable of the “off ” in the sense of being capable of self-loss, of one’s dispossession? Such a capacity would not eliminate exposure by creating a total, self-grounding frame so much as represent a

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The Origin of Film

way of relating to exposure creatively. In such a case, the movie star would entertain a privileged relation to the “off,” but through his or her mediation the crowds (both on- and off-screen) would learn to establish a new relation to their own self-loss. Exposure would promise a liberatory selftransformation rather than being something one defends against. Lacan famously declared that one cannot will or decide to go mad. The paradoxical task of the nonfascistic star, in order to be capable of his or her self-loss, is to achieve this impossibility.18 This will be the challenge facing Chaplin. But before moving on to Chaplin, I want to examine one scene in which Riefenstahl practices, in a particularly effective way, the gathering of the many of the screen into a uniformed, homogenized, and geometrized collective. It is the most impressively choreographed and edited scene in the film, as well as the most blatantly and artificially constructed and staged for the sake of the camera (even as Riefenstahl notoriously pretended to have merely documented the events of the party conference), and it is in fact the only scene where Hitler openly acknowledges the conditions of visibility of the situation, inscribing the film in his speech. Addressing the soldiers for the first time in the film—indeed, speaking for the first time—Hitler declares: “And at this moment it is not only we here in Nuremberg. All of Germany sees you for the first time.” symbols The scene opens with a flag displaying two sheaves of wheat and a shovel waving in the wind. A low-angle shot follows: a soldier holding the swastika, his torso in view, monumentalized against the background of the sky. A quick cut returns to the flag with sheaves of wheat, then another cut shows the top of four poles bearing metal figures: wheat, shovel, and swastika. Then comes a close-up, still against the background of the sky; the symbols stand detached from any earthly reference. The image cuts to two soldiers blowing trumpets—against the background of the sky—and then to Hitler mounting a podium. Once again (you guessed it) he is framed against the sky; behind him stand bleachers holding some unrecognizable people. These few shots announce the organizing logic of the entire scene, an enchaining of symbols that gain their symbolic power through editing, through a series of cuts culminating in the vision of Hitler, who serves as the creative source of symbolization. Hitler functions as the one on whom

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the symbols—actual things that stand for a whole—depend in order to exist in the first place, inasmuch as he enables the opening of communication between the actual and the whole, the “great idea” in Hitler’s words, a great idea of which Hitler is the announcer. How does one create a symbol, that is, establish a communication between a concrete actual thing and a whole it is supposed to stand for? By putting an actual thing or individual against the background of the sky. In less figural terms, the creation of a symbol depends on a screen effect. As we have seen, the screen is a decontextualizing surface that opens an exposure to an unlocalizable “off.” The symbol, in turn, is something in which the very being of the screen qua communication with a beyond comes to be inscribed. We can say that the symbol is what is seen not only as an actual thing on a screen but as something infused with a relation to, receiving its significance from, what a screen opens us to: the beyond-thescreen, the “off.” However, not every communication between what occupies the screen and the “off ” is to be understood symbolically. Rather, the symbol depends on a specific interpretation of the “off ”/beyond. This interpretation emerges in a series of stages. First of all, what is on-screen and communicates with the “off ” could be understood to stand for the interruption of meaningfulness, for the experience of the loss of place and context. That is, if the “off,” as we have seen, can be understood as the power of the groundlessness of the world, the power to activate a nonbelongingness to any order of meaning, then it is not itself something that is meaningful but rather marks the interruption of any given meaning. In the case of interpreting the encounter with the “off ” symbolically, the “off ” is not viewed as an interruption of meaning but as more ­meaning—“higher” meaning, different from any actual meaning given in a contextual world. As a result, actuality on-screen becomes a symbol and may be viewed as activating this surplus of meaning, or as what itself means something more; in other words, it stands for more than the meaning of the actual thing, person, or sign situated in a determinate context. By turning the “off ”—which originally interrupted meaning—into a surplus of significance, this symbolizing transformation of the encounter with the “off ” acts in fact as protection against the groundless, defense against the interruption of meaning. At first it is unclear what this “more” stands for; though there somehow seems to be more meaning, we do not know what this “more” means,

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The Origin of Film

exactly; in this sense, the “more” seems empty, for it is nothing determinate. In the case of the symbol, however, this emptiness quickly reveals itself as referring to a meaning beyond every and any specific meaning. The beyond is now transformed into the meaning of meaning, we might say—the origin and source of all meaning, that which determines any meaning, an origin with which the symbol can then be understood to communicate and from which it draws its symbolic power. This defensive procedure of the symbol, which guards against the groundless by becoming the communicator of an original meaning controlling all meanings, seems to depend on a double move, which we can visualize as a simultaneous movement upward and downward. The symbol communicates both with the above—the “sky” understood as the All (of meaning, its directive and origin)—and, when facing “downward,” serves as a privileged representative, among actual things, of this transcendent power. As a result, the symbolic representative becomes a generative conduit in the service of the All, an agent of the All; its mediation, its relation, to the All is supposed to allow everything else to come under the power of what we can also call the One—under whose unity and unifying power all of the meanings stand. The bringing of everything, through the mediation of the symbol, under the power of the All/One can be understood to constitute a series. To become a series means becoming part of a repetitive activity in which a single thing is repeated: coming to belong to the power of the One through the mediation of a symbol. Accordingly, the symbolic representative can be understood as exemplary, both in the sense of being an exceptional thing, since it communicates with the All/One, and in the sense of providing an example to follow, inasmuch as it communicates the “message” of the All. In the scene in question, individual soldiers who have acquired symbolic power become the agents through whose symbolic exemplarity the many will be formed into a theoretically infinite series of soldiers subject to the unifying power of the All, the One, that is, in terms of the logic of the screen, the Führer / frame / self-coinciding camera. It is perhaps the very essence and logical structure of the symbol as such that is revealed through this symbolic creation of uniformed soldiers, exposing the symbol as an exemplary conduit between the One and all the instances under its power that are exactly alike (a single soldier being symbolic of all soldiers). Structurally, then, the symbol is an agent connecting the All (here, the Führer) and a theoretically infinite number of identical, uniform beings in

The Actor of the Crowd

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series. It is perhaps thus that all symbolic thinking logically culminates in a vision of a divine army (i.e., of a uniformed series coming under the power of a One and whose task is to spread this power, extend it into infinity). It is crucial to understand that the Führer himself is not a symbol. Riefenstahl makes this very explicit by filming him in a different way from the soldiers. He is not an exceptional connector to the All. Rather, he is the All—the One itself—for he only is fully self-identical. The symbol is not itself, inasmuch as it points to the All, and the instances coming under the mediation of the symbol are not themselves, inasmuch as they refer both to the symbol and, through it, to the All. Hitler alone only refers to himself. Hitler is an Antichrist, simultaneously an earthly incarnation and the dominator of the sky; he alone is capable of both appearing (i.e., being seen) and seeing, without an intervening gap—that is, without a gap in himself. This lack of an internal gap, which Hitler is and which makes him always fully himself, also makes Nazism even more closed and hermetically sealed than traditional symbolic systems. In traditional systems the symbols were, as they are in the case of Hitler­ ism, taken to communicate with some great idea or higher meaning, yet this higher meaning itself was never fully actual and part of the world. The Idea was never fully present; it was always symbolically mediated and therefore experienced as an absence. As such, some gap of freedom always remained between the symbols and the Idea/All with which they communicated and in the name of which they spoke. Not so here. Hitler himself is the truly full presence or full possession of the Idea/All/One; thus, an actual, accessible part of the world seems to hold the power to direct in a completely determinate way—without haunting as an indeterminate absence—the organization of existence. Hitler’s “incarnation,” then, signifies that there is a privileged and exceptional place in the world that does not gain its authority from a higher Idea to which it is subject (say, in the manner of the classic sovereign, who owes his authority to the divine, which itself remains absent). This place is an exceptional, full presence, the Idea itself, and therefore without any need to point to an absent beyond. This attempt at complete self-­ enclosure makes any hint of excess, such as the Jews, all the more threatening: if even a tiny bit of excess is allowed, the whole symbolic system collapses; the All disappears. Since the dimension of the “off ” is originally empty groundlessness, a non–place/time that functions as an openness to the creative possibility to

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The Origin of Film

mean precisely because it is itself not a meaning, we can see how it has the potential to turn into an All. If it occupies no place and no time, it can be understood as what transcends any and every place and time—their source, origin, all-encompassing Reason and Meaning. The symbol both helps to activate such an interpretation of the “off ” and depends on it for its power. If Hitler is indeed the All/One, the source and origin of the symbol’s power of symbolization, we can also see why he himself, as his filmic presence clearly displays, is an empty and blank figure—precisely like the empty screen he tries to take over entirely. This is the case because, as we have seen, the above and beyond—the realm with which all the symbols communicate—is itself empty insofar as it does not have any specific meaning. The one occupying the beyond must always be empty and blank. This is also a crucial aspect of Hitler the movie star. The movie star must be blank. She or he is the one in whom the dimension of the “off ” is inscribed, and the “off ” is always empty. Because there are several ways to understand and activate the “off,” however, there are several modalities of the movie star’s blankness and emptiness. Chaplin’s stardom, as we will see, though also blank by necessity, will be a creative and enlivening blankness. In contrast, Hitler’s blankness—an enframing takeover of the “off ” as the All / grounder of meaning—is suffocating and paralyzing. Hitler turns those who enter his circle of influence into frozen monuments, in a Medusa-like effect; the reciting soldiers seem almost made of stone. The complete “territorialization”19 of the “off ” by Hitler, the self-enframing and self-grounding Führer of meaning, signifies the obstruction of life in the world. But let’s see more concretely how this is worked out in the scene under discussion, which starts with a flag with two sheaves of wheat and a shovel, waving in the wind against the background of the sky. A flag is itself a screen. The figures on it are meant to draw symbolic power from the screen’s communication with the “off,” the beyond. Designed to be most fully itself, so to speak, when waving against the sky (the sky itself also being a screen, as we saw), the flag gains additional power from becoming a figure on yet another screen, namely, the movie screen.20 The screen Riefenstahl presents, therefore, is composed of communication between screens: the flag, the sky on which it is projected, and the movie screen; each one draws its power from the others. A flag on a movie screen is not just a flag, that is, a screen effect through which

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what it displays comes to be seen as a symbol; it becomes a symbol itself, since it is now an actual figure projected on a screen. This doubling—a screen effect used for the creation of symbols that becomes itself a symbol on the movie screen—underscores the fact that the flag functions as a paradigmatic symbol: a meta-symbol, so to speak, for it exposes the very form of symbols as such as figures on a screen communicating with the beyond-the-screen interpreted as the All/One. The flag displaying two sheaves of wheat and a shovel (i.e., things connecting us to the earth) with which Riefenstahl opens this crucial scene (the flag of the Reichs­ arbeitsdienst [RAD], the Reich’s compulsory labor service that the Nazis introduced or in any case expanded and made part of the economy) is even more meta-symbolic, inasmuch as it gives us the very function and aim of the symbol as such: to connect the sky (qua original screen transformed into the All/One) with the earth/ground that is now supposed to fall under its power. The symbol, then, is supposed to have a double effect: first, it represents the means by which the sky is grounded (i.e., through its creation we can turn the sky’s originally disturbing and disorienting exposure into an All, thus into something that has the power to ground, that is, to direct and orient meaning); second, it is supposed to turn earthly life, the “ground,” into something controlled by a unifying and meaninggranting All. The flag is the symbolic mediator between sky and earth, allowing for the earth to become a controlled territory and the sky to be framed. Indeed, this whole scene represents the attempt to articulate the very being of the Nazi community, the coming together of the German Volk as arising from the communication between sky and earth/ground mediated by the symbolizing and symbolic flag, which in turn mediates the relation to the Führer/All. The key word within this system of symbolic mediation is “work,” Arbeit; as Hitler stresses in his speech to the soldiers, work represents the very condition for becoming one of the German people, a member of the community.21 When understood symbolically, beyond the practical concerns of the Reich, work means coming to master the earth/ground by subjecting it to the command of the framed sky. Symbolic mediation can thus be understood as the activity of working as the bringing together of the command of the sky and earthly life, for the earthly life occupying the ground is not immediately given to such command but has to be brought under it.

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The Origin of Film

A further result of bringing the earth under the command and domination of the framed sky (rather than understanding the sky as being the very expression of earthly life’s exposure to an unframed groundlessness) is to resurrect, as it were, the dead and buried out of the ground into eternal life. As the soldiers chant: “Comrades who died in the battlefield. You are not dead. You are alive. You are Germany.”22 Work thus is what resurrects; it achieves full control of the earth/ground, understood here as a realm subject to time and change (hence as exposure to the pure sky / groundlessness), and brings it under the domination of an eternal framed sky. Germany, then, is the product of symbolic mediation between earth and sky that eliminates, through work, death and the off-screen, resulting in an eternal community. Now let’s look a bit closer at how all this works out cinematically. The scene starts by establishing a relation between successive symbols by means of cuts—from the flags to the spears with sheaves and so on. What precisely is the nature of the relationship between editing cuts and symbols that the scene as a whole follows? In this context, the cuts mean two things: on the one hand, they create exposure to a beyond through fragmentation; on the other hand, they allow for the communicative transference of symbolic power. The shots with which the scene opens, shots of successive symbols between which there are cuts, clearly mark the interest of this scene in a specific logic of fragmentation (not all logics of the fragment are alike—in our case we are dealing with a symbolic logic of the fragment), inasmuch as the symbols appear in close-ups that conspicuously cut them off from their context; it seems we are only getting a fragment. The cuts, then, are related to a work of fragmentation; the screen becomes the showing of a fragment. By definition, the fragment is part of a larger whole. But what is the whole of which these shots provide only fragments? The screen, as we have seen, is defined by its relation to an “off.” The editing cut that makes itself felt by giving a sense of fragmentation activates this relation to the “off ” in a powerful way by emphasizing the screen as what stands exposed, that is, as what prevents us from gaining a meaningful overview of a situation; the context is missing. For all that, we have seen that Riefenstahl shows no interest in emphasizing the “off ” as a dimension of a decontextualizing groundlessness that deprives us of meaning; instead, she foregrounds the “off ” as what implies an empty “more” of meaning, a “more” that we have pointed to as the main element in the symbolizing logic that guides her procedure. In this sense, the cut activates an enigmatic

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surplus, a meaningful “more,” and as such actually serves in this context as an attempt to eliminate the threat of the “off ” qua exposure to the groundless. Riefenstahl seeks to achieve this elimination of the “off“ through a very specific procedure of fragmentation, one that introduces a symbolizing logic in two steps. First, she immediately relates the question of the screen—thus the question of that which by definition gives us a partial view—to the logic of the symbol by populating the first shots with symbols (flags and spears). In this way the opacity of meaning that the screen as such activates by virtue of its decontextualizing nature is immediately transformed into that which symbolically points to a higher meaning, to the All, or the whole of meaning. The screen becomes a symbolic flag, a symbol mediating our relation to the All, rather than a decontextualizing exposure to the groundless. Having established the screen as a symbolic flag, the series of cuts that follows functions as what I have called a communicative transference of symbolic power. That is, once the first shot is established as a symbolic fragment and thus as activating a relation to a higher meaning, each successive shot, as a fragment, stands under the sign of the first one and communicates with its symbolic dimension. The succeeding fragments do not arouse anxiety by depriving us of meaning (exposing us to the “off ”) but serve to accumulate significance in terms of the Whole to which the original symbol pointed. In this way each fragment is integrated into a larger totality. Thus Riefenstahl can seamlessly move from the opening, with its symbols/flags, to a fragmented vision of a soldier that does not immediately need to be understood as a symbolic being per se. By standing in relation to the symbolic flag, however, the fragmented soldier starts to communicate with the Whole activated by the flag, gaining symbolic power in the process. But activating a symbolizing logic through the opening with the flag does not yet tell us what the Whole or All is. For this to occur, there must be one thing that is not symbolic itself, something that stands beyond symbolism, namely, the Whole itself, where the symbol’s capacity to be a symbol originates in the first place. Needless to say, this entity is ­Hitler. After a series of fragmented shots that communicate with each other through the symbolic empty “beyond” that the flag has activated, we get a view of a nonfragmented Hitler. The opening sequence closes with a vision of the All itself. Hitler constitutes the principle activating the medium of film as an enchainment of fragments in between which are cuts; all of them commu-

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The Origin of Film

nicate with each other through an All that manages to be simultaneously off- and on-screen, thereby guaranteeing a guiding sense of meaning and eliminating exposure to nonmeaning.23 Again, we can see how Hitler, in this context, essentially represents a cinematic apparatus deployed against the cinema—a cinematic response to the threat of exposure haunting film more than any other visual medium. Having established its symbolic system, the film can now elaborate its implications. First and foremost, they concern the relations among (1) Hitler as the All; (2) the soldiers in the rally who become exemplary carriers of symbolic power; (3) other soldiers constituting an anonymous multiplicity that gains significance from being related to these symbolic archetypes and, through them, to the All/Führer; and finally, (4) the German people as such, the Volk (established as a uniform entity through the symbolizing process the scene enacts). Only when we reach a vision of the All/Hitler can the symbolic editing (or symbolic montage) fully establish itself as a unifying principle, the creation of the identity-giving power of the One, under which the many can unify as an anonymous, uniform, faceless collective. In this context, the anonymous, uniform union is the enframed coming-together of every­one on-screen under the symbolic self-grounding principle of the All; in relation to this principle, they are exactly the same, all receiving their being and identity from their relation to the self-grounding frame / the Führer in equal measure. Following the establishment of her symbolic montage as a unifying principle through the vision of Hitler, Riefenstahl cuts back to the soldiers. Now she isolates a symbolic few who will serve as mediating instances between Hitler and the anonymous collective, as if allowing for individuals who arrive on-screen as this or that particular exposed face to transform without anxiety, via the symbolizing principle, into being one of the anonymous many. M reveals that any specific person who arrives on-screen becomes, through an anxious and haunting exposure, one of a crowd. To discover oneself on-screen is thus to anxiously discover oneself as one of many, all of whom have been equally deprived of place and identity. In Triumph of the Will, through symbolic montage and the logic of the self-grounding ­Führer/frame/camera, discovering oneself on-screen—which also means the audience’s self-discovery of its relation to the disidentifying screen— immediately amounts to becoming one of many who are all alike inasmuch as they gain exactly the same identity and meaning through a process of

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depersonalizing symbolization tied to the All/Führer. Via the technique of symbolic montage, the screen itself becomes the means through which one gains an identity as one of many who are exactly alike. The symbolic screen guards against the nonsymbolic screen, that is, against cinema, and the uniformed many serve as a “healing” of the anxious crowds. If, as we saw, it was the off-screen qua exposure to the groundless that was at the source of the horrifying process of disidentification, which transformed those who come on-screen into being one in a crowd, then here it is precisely the off-screen that has been controlled, taken over and neutralized through a symbolizing procedure creating the Führer as the All/One. The Führer/All is thus a “cinematic” mechanism enabling the takeover of the off-screen through symbolic montage. Having eliminated the threat of the off-screen by means of a symbolic montage authorized by the Führer, Riefenstahl can then move on to using other cinematic techniques that activate the off-screen, a territorialized and territorializing “off ” now engaged in the service of the All. Thus, for example, a horizontal tracking shot moves slowly from soldier to soldier, each time introducing from the off-screen onto the screen more soldiers who are exactly alike in a process that, by its logic, can go on to infinity. What the off-screen now contains are only more and more soldiers who are exactly alike. The off-screen has thus become a reassuring principle of infinite symbolic expansion rather than of a disidentifying and haunting interruption. Once the Führer as cinematic principle occupies the “off ” as the All / meaning-granting agency, everything that comes from the “off ” is always already subject to his symbolizing power, that is, the Führer principle. Another technique Riefenstahl uses to turn the off-screen into an instrument of symbolic expansion involves having one of the soldiers call out a question and receive an answer from another who occupies the offscreen. Here, the voice coming from the “off ” provides a reassuring continuity of meaning, implying that all the voices off-screen already belong to the same speech and have the same meaning, because they effectively belong to the Führer. Riefenstahl is trying to conquer the disjunction ­between visual image and voice that has haunted cinema from the very beginning of the talkies, a haunting most paradigmatically explored in early cinema through the great experimentations with sound and voice in Fritz Lang’s early talkies such as M and The Testament of Doctor M ­ abuse. For the voice, as Lang recognized very early on, is ­essentially related to

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The Origin of Film

the question of the off-screen in that by its nature one can hear it without recognizing its source. As such, it contains a disturbing and haunting quality of placelessness that cinema was very quick to explore, using it to puncture the capacity to locate that belongs to the visual realm.24 The appropriation of the disturbance of the voice and its subjection to the symbolizing power of the Führer principle is particularly important when Hitler addresses his speech to the soldiers. This is, as we noted, the very first time Hitler speaks in the film, and his speech thereby becomes the transcendent origin of meaning to whose jurisdiction every other possible speech, thus any possible disturbing voice, belongs in advance. The elimination of the “off ” brings forth what we may call the symbolizing monologue of the Führer, which prevents the emergence of any and all discourse that is not subject to its symbolic power. This is why the soldiers speak one by one, implying the infinite extension of the Führer’s reign through symbolic expansion. It is also why their individual voices eventually turn into a chorus, an all-togetherness, a single voice uniting them all. This chorus of the soldiers, meant to evoke the grandeur of a Greek tragedy, in fact perverts the tragic structure. In tragedy, the chorus—the discourse of the citizens of the city—always expresses an attempt to come to terms with the irreconcilable tension between the discourse of the sovereign and the speech of the gods. But the Hitlerian chorus expresses the elimination of the dialogical tension between god and man. Here, speech is not the expression of the many gathered to confront a tension but that of the many assembled through the cancellation of any tension between earth and sky: they stand united under the power of the One who simultaneously occupies both. Thus, at the end of the scene, we see a group of soldiers march toward the off-screen singing; they leave the frame without anxiety. They are no longer marching toward an exposed and unpredictable “off ” but toward an “off ” that has been conquered. The cancellation of the gap between the “on” and “off ” that allowed for the unifying gathering of the many under the principle of infinite symbolic expansion is also the source of the geometrical organization of the many, arranged in parallel lines that seem to extend to infinity. The geometric principle here represents an infinite expansion that is calculable in advance. Geometry itself does not necessarily belong to a logic of symbolic expansion, but when made the organizing principle of the assembling of the many, it comes under the power of this logic and joins forces with it. The masses of the fascistic screen,

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then, are all those assembled through symbolic montage and the various techniques of the cancellation of the “off ” in order to establish a principle of gathering that defends the screen against itself, iconoclastically destroying the cinematic image and canceling its threats. art or propaganda? Before moving on to Chaplin, it might be opportune to make a few general remarks about the way I view Triumph of the Will. There is a longstanding debate whether Riefenstahl’s film is a great work of art or cannot qualify as such, since it is obviously a morally reprehensible piece of propaganda. Some have even claimed that, on account of its extremely boring and repetitive nature, it is not even a particularly effective work of propaganda but simply a failed piece of filmmaking. Brian Winston, for example, writes: So why is it [Triumph of the Will] so highly regarded? Why did it win the Gold Medal at the Venice Film Festival in 1935, and, more surprisingly, the Grand Prix at the Paris Film Festival in 1937? Why have film critics (assuming they are not themselves Nazi or neo-fascist) continued to claim, in the words of film-buff Glenn Infield that Triumph of the Will is “one of the technical and artistic masterpieces of film history, a truly great film,” when it is palpably no such thing? The answer is Albert Speer. It is in fact the glamour of the spectacle that Speer created for the 1934 Party Congress that has blinded us to the extremely limited value added to the event by Riefenstahl. Given more or less professional film coverage of a stadium filled with 100,000 anonymous uniformed men in perfect formation, it would be very hard to produce an unimpressive image. And that is all that Riefenstahl does. The power of Triumph of the Will is not one conjured up by the film maker. It is rather the raw power of the original event which even a modestly talented (if lavishly resourced) film maker could not obscure.25

Clearly, this assessment is mistaken. To my mind, Triumph of the Will (which created Hitler the screen star) commands interest because it is a brilliant piece of filmmaking, that is, it displays an almost uncanny understanding of the nature and logic of the cinematic medium and the screen’s place in modernity. What I find most fascinating about the joint visual project of Riefenstahl and Hitler is the way it tries to take possession of the screen by simultaneously activating and negating its radical powers, creating a new type of iconoclasm.

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The Origin of Film

Several critics, such as Eric Rentschler and Linda Schulte-Sasse, have pointed to the fact that Riefenstahl, in nondocumentary films such as The Blue Light and Tiefland, is both the eroticized star and a director trying to eliminate and repress the erotic. If the erotic belongs in essence to the artistic image, we can say that Riefenstahl’s relation to herself is iconoclastic, a desire by the image and at the heart of the image to destroy itself. But what should we call this iconoclastic effort? “Propaganda” seems too broad and weak. Walter Benjamin’s famous expression, the “aestheticization of politics,” comes closer, inasmuch as it points to a relationship between a certain destruction of something in art (which he calls “aura”) and the emergence of the modern masses.26 However, Benjamin’s discussion is extremely ambiguous and underdeveloped. We need to unravel some of its knots to think about what is at stake in the new kind of iconoclasm (as the desire to destroy the image, as well as the desire of the image to destroy itself ) that belongs to a work such as Triumph of the Will and how it relates to the question of the masses or crowds that inhabit its screen. Benjamin recognizes two essential phenomena that he fuses together too quickly: on the one hand, the demise of the logic of the sacred in the work of art; on the other hand, a desire to cancel distance, to bring things “closer,” in the interaction between the mass audience and the work of art. Sacred objects, Benjamin recognizes, have a dimension of distance and separation inscribed in them; by definition, they mark a privileged relation to something divine, something beyond this world. Thus they seem to be “surrounded” by an invisible magic circle, what Benjamin calls “aura,” separating them from the world and holding them apart from ordinary things. Another crucial aspect of the aura of sacred objects lies in their singularity, or unique individuality. This particular object in space and time is sacred, since the divine has inscribed itself in it. It is this auratic distance that increasingly begins to disappear in modernity—a disappearance Benjamin connects to the rise of technologies of reproduction. The process culminates in the arrival of film, which Benjamin—­correctly, I think— considers an art extremely removed from the sacred. This disappearance of sacred logic occurs at the same time as the emergence of the masses. Why? Although Benjamin does not elaborate on this point, it is clear that the masses are a collective that emerges when the hierarchical organization of existence in relation to a privileged source (for instance, the king, himself the sacred representative of the divine origin of authority) vanishes.

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If a logic of the sacred disappears, so too does the political organization and social articulation (the regulation of the sharing of the world) that depended on its logic. The masses, as a disorganized and unarticulated multiplicity, therefore emerge simultaneously with the disappearance of sacrality. Yet Benjamin tells his story too quickly, at least in the famous essay on the work of art. The disappearance of the logic of the sacred does not mean the disappearance of the relation between art and distance. On the contrary, we can say that art itself, as a new kind of (opening of ) distance, emerges as a fully liberated phenomenon only with the demise of the sacred. This new distance, of which art becomes the privileged medium, is not the distance of a sacred object in which the divine as an origin of authority is incarnated; rather, it is the consequence of art’s becoming a medium exposing us to the fact that there is no divine and no sacred origin of authority—what I have been calling the groundlessness of existence. Art in modernity announces that existence has no sacred origin in relation to which it organizes itself but rather that existence is openness: things have no predetermined and presupposed order but stand open to newly created configurations and organizations. Why does this emergence of art as the medium for the groundlessness of existence imply a new kind of separation and distance? Because (as explained at length in the opening chapter of the book) the opening into the groundlessness of the world effected by the work of art implies that it cannot itself be an actual part of the world, that is, it cannot occupy this or that specific place in an order and context of existence. In a different way than the sacred object, the artistic realm is now also apart from the (actual) world, not in the sense that it points to a divine elsewhere but in the sense that it activates what we may call the possibility of the world, the possibility of existence to open (and to close) out of no given order, which as such cannot itself be part of the world. The work of art creates distance in the sense of activating an absolute nonbelonging to any actual context and order of a world, and as a result it can be said to activate an originary disorientation and disidentification that takes us away from our recognizable place and time and exposes us to the possibility of creating. This separation and distance of the modern work of art as the medium of the groundless has been described in terms of “autonomy” (which Benjamin overhastily assimilates to the logic of the sacred). The autonomy of the work of art does not mean that the work is some privileged substantial thing that is fully self-sufficient and not exposed to the context of worldly

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The Origin of Film

activity within which it has emerged. Rather, it means that the work is an absolutely nonsubstantial thing, a nothing, in a way, that does not belong to any context precisely because it activates the groundless as that which exceeds any and every context, being nothing but the possibility of the emergence of new and unpredictable contexts. The work is autonomous in the sense of being fully and absolutely itself without depending on any actual context precisely because, paradoxically, “itself ” is nothing, or is nothing but the very activation of the annihilation of any given order and meaning of existence and the exposure to the possibility of the emergence of unforeseeable new orders. As such, the modern work of art as that which has no place and time in an order of the world can be said to begin communicating with the masses, that is, with all those who are not anyone specific, those who have no rank or identity in an order. Modern art as the medium of the groundless is by definition that which communicates with the masses as those who do not belong in any given order. This means, for example, that even though Renaissance paintings (the first fully modern paintings) were initially meant to be viewed by a limited number of people, the possibility of the museum as a space for the masses, those who are “anyones,” is already inscribed in them and in their essentially dislocatable frame. The same holds for Shakespearean theater inasmuch as it activates a detached zone communicating with the nonplace of ghosts. This capacity of the stage to be detached, to belong nowhere and thus to be open to anyone, already inscribes Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran in Macbeth and King Lear. Thus, we can see that the possibility of reproduction, and the possibility of a technology of reproduction, is already inscribed in the ontological status of the modern work of art as a completely dislocatable and groundless medium. We can therefore say that artistic reproducibility in principle does not destroy distance but only sacred distance; it opens up a different distance, as medium of the unlocalizable groundlessness of the world (there are, of course, various logics of reproducibility and repetition that should be distinguished if one wants to think this through rigorously). The masses, then, are those who confront this ghostly distance characterizing the modern work of art, a distance perhaps most disturbingly present in the most spectral medium, film. The masses reject the auratic (if this is understood as belonging to the logic of the sacred; but if we view the auratic as being a trace of an even deeper distance than the

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s­ acred, we can talk about modern art itself as auratic in a new sense) and are faced with a new kind of distance. Does this mean there is no desire in the masses to overcome distance? Not at all. Benjamin is obviously correct that one of the main urges of the masses, this placeless multiplicity that emerges with the disappearance of the sacred, is to eliminate distance. Needless to say, this desire has multiple dimensions—from the democratic anti-sacred urge to level hierarchical structures to the resentful urge Nietzsche identified when he pointed to those who, disempowered and dispossessed, wish to destroy everything that has life and power (a dispossession that is also an essential aspect of the masses insofar as they are those who have no place, property, or identity). Nietzsche, of course, did not want power and life to be conceived on the model of entitled possession by those occupying a place in a hierarchical order but rather as something that can be achieved by those who have overcome the logic of divine sacrality. Those who resent power and life in this Nietzschean sense thus not only desire to eliminate others’ possessions, of which they are deprived, but to destroy the liberation from sacrality that the powerful activate. In this way the resentful masses unwittingly collaborate with the very order that desires to oppress them, to subject them to a hierarchy, the order whose logic is still sacred logic. The cinematic work of art, we have seen, can be said to activate “massness” or “crowdness” (so to speak) in those exposed to the screen. It dispossesses, disidentifies, and de-hierarchizes. This moment can be experienced as an anxious, indeed a horrifying event. The work of art distances those who come in contact with the screen from themselves, from their place and identity. It is this “self-distance” that the masses desire to cancel, which underlies what we can understand as the root of a new kind of modern iconoclasm. However—and this is another crucial aspect of modern iconoclasm as a desire to eliminate the screen—it seems that only the screen can heal the wound of and to the masses. The masses need, as it were, a screen event, a new mode of relation, to liberate them from the very distance the screen itself opened. This complex logic, I submit, lies at the source of the unholy modern phenomenon Benjamin calls the aestheticization of politics. The aestheticization of politics is the mechanism whereby the masses try to eliminate the distance from themselves—a distance the work of art has exposed and activated—by instituting an agency that will take possession of the self-distancing nature of the work of art and, by this means, allows them to become self-possessed. It’s as if only a

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The Origin of Film

work of art—or more precisely, something in a work of art that eliminates itself—will enable the masses to overcome distance from themselves. This strange modern phenomenon of a self-negating work of art therefore comes to occupy the heart of the aesthetic-political regime. We have seen above how Hitler is conceived as precisely such an agency taking possession of the screen through the screen (the only way the screen can be possessed), thereby becoming the possessor of the masses. Possessed by a new screen entity, the masses find a place and identity. Accordingly, we might say, a work such as Triumph of the Will, inasmuch as it eliminates the ungrounding screen and allows for its possession and grounding, is at the very heart of Nazi Germany—perhaps its most central creation and the condition of success for everything else (and this is yet another significance of the term “aestheticization of the political” in that it is the iconoclastic screen-work, a work destroying the exposure of the screen and allowing the masses to be possessed, that becomes the ground for the organization of society, thus of politics). It has often been remarked that the aestheticization of politics attempts to cancel the distance between art and actual political life; indeed, this is so because modern political life involves the emergence of the many, the masses, the crowds, as those who are distanced from themselves, and modern art reflects and activates this self-distancing. That said, the masses may want to escape themselves qua distanced from themselves, that is, exposed to a threatening imaginative life that now haunts them. (Imagination, the “faculty” of the image and thus of the inscription of exposure to the groundless, having been liberated from its possession by the sacred, becomes an extremely prominent feature of modern life.) If such escape is to occur, it must be through the (self-negating) work of art. The fascistic state organized around the aestheticization of politics, then, can be understood as the desire to eliminate the distance between art and the masses, which is simultaneously the elimination of the distance between the masses and themselves. The result is a monster that allows for neither art nor political life (i.e., a life in which the masses live as masses, or as what we will later call the people, thus as those who have no place in a hierarchy); instead, one bleeds into the other in a modern iconoclastic configuration. Triumph of the Will is this bleeding. The challenge for someone like Chaplin, then, will be to resist the iconoclastic temptation of the modern fascistic state and create a new relation between the modern crowds and the screen that does not cancel the distance activated by art as medium of the groundless.

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Chaplin: The Life of Anyone definitions The world is a medium, a “background” allowing for anything and everything to emerge unpredictably and without grounding. It is nothing specific itself; rather, it exceeds all specificity. “World” means that the place and sense of all phenomena is at stake constantly, in ever-renewed ways. In consequence, we can call the world a Whole, since it provides the excessive background for everything. As a groundless medium—allowing for the constant reconfiguration of meanings, orientations, and reasons, unpredictable connections and contextual relations—it qualifies as an “open Whole” (to use Gilles Deleuze’s felicitous formulation). We can also understand this open Whole as the excess that passes “in-between” each and every thing yet belongs to none; it “haunts” all phenomena equally inasmuch at it itself is nothing actual or existing in place or time. It is what insists at the heart of everything and in which everything shares. Although the open Whole lies beyond each and every concrete entity, it also allows all things to communicate with each other through constant and unpredictable configurations of their being-in-common, that is, being part of a Whole. The world is one—a universe—since it amounts to the background signaling the interrelationality and communication of everything with everything else; as is the case for Spinozan Substance— even though the world is not a Substance—nothing that exists does not form part of it. The oneness of the world does not mean a pre-given unity of meaning and directionality; on the contrary, one world exists because there is no given meaning—only communication, being-in-common, a shared background of groundlessness and excess. Humanity is a privileged witness to and activator of the world (or universe) as such. Its very mode of being entails both standing open to the world—trying to understand the totality of extant meanings and ­relationships—and being able to activate the world,: that is, to create new meanings, reasons, and relations, new modes of organizing existence. Humanity is defined by communication, the question of the ever-changing configurations of being-in-common. Politics may be defined as the negotiations humans conduct with each other (and perhaps also involving negotiations with the modes of communication of nonhuman beings) in order to reach a decision about sharing the world, that is, the meaning of being-in-common, and the modes

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The Origin of Film

of organizing life this entails. By definition, the world is something many have in common, thus it is inherently shared. (And because the world is not a substance, an actual thing, or a single guiding meaning, but rather a passage in-between actual things and a “background” to them all, the oneness of the world necessarily presupposes a multiplicity of beings.) War represents the limit of politics; it declares the impossibility of reaching a decision about sharing the world, the meaning and organization of being-in-common, and in its more extreme cases, about who is allowed to share, or have a share in, the world. The cinematic screen, as we have seen, is a decontextualizing surface, that is, one that functions equally well in any context. It is made to host a slice of the actual world that begins to communicate with an “empty” dimension, an off-screen; the latter does not stand in any specific temporal or spatial relation to what occupies the screen. To be an actual part of the world means being situated in a system of relationships. All such contexts and actualities are constantly haunted by an insisting and excessive dimension that is the groundless world, a groundlessness that we can understand as the existence of a non–place/time, a pure power of displacement, that allows for the actual world to emerge without any pre-given orientation and meaning. The screen/off-screen brings into view and activates the exposure of the actual world to its groundless “background”; as such, we may say that the screen/off-screen suspends the actual world. This suspension of the world concerns all existing actual contextual relations in the world, exposing them to the possibility of reconfiguration; likewise, it concerns any decision about the sharing of the world—and therefore all political decisions. Needless to say, however, this suspension of political decisions is not apolitical. Rather, it opens a realm that is neither political nor nonpolitical, one that is internal-external to the political; as such, it can be said to be political precisely insofar as it is not political, that is, it intervenes in the political by allowing it to open onto something in excess of itself. This internality and externality of the (artistic) screen to the political (and the artistic screen, in contrast to the fascistic screen, whose desire is precisely to possess the screen and eliminate its haunting nature, is precisely the screen that insists on activating a suspension of the world before and beyond any decision on its sharing) also allows us to see the relation between the artistic screen and war; war, as we have observed, is both

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external and internal to politics, too, inasmuch as it marks its limits and likewise suspends it.27 But while war suspends politics in order to enforce a decision regarding the political (i.e., the sharing of the world) or at times in an effort to end the political (i.e., its negotiations about the world), the artistic screen suspends the political by disclosing a space where no decision is required; instead, a showing of the world and the question of how to share it occurs. Hereby the possibility of politics comes into view. Accordingly, while Clausewitz may have overstated his case when he claimed that war continues politics by other means, it might be argued that, in one of its main aspects, art represents the continuation of war—the suspension of politics—by other means. In other words, art occupies a space between war and politics that belongs to neither; it allows for the limit of politics not to be transformed into war and opens the question of the sharing of the world prior to any decision. This complex logic also means that there is “war”—or perhaps, more accurately, a struggle—between war and art inasmuch as war involves the desire to eliminate not just politics but the possibility of the opening onto politics, that is, the (artistic) screen itself. War may seek to eliminate the artistic screen inasmuch as the screen announces the possibility of politics. At the same time, this means that the screen involves something we might not call war but rather a revolutionary struggle for freedom from war—a liberation that embraces the exposure to groundlessness that represents the condition for politics. Such a struggle does not dispense with violence; in any case, it involves the illegitimate use of force (i.e., it cannot be sanctioned by any existing legal/political system, which is suspended by art). And force— by definition, a pressure to which one stands exposed beyond one’s capacity to determine meaning and orientation—may be understood as the excess of the world’s groundlessness. The screen activates this excess by introducing a nonmeaningful disturbance, an uncontainable “more,” that makes everything in the given context suffer an incomprehensible violence that defies one’s capacity for orientation. Every real confrontation with an artistic screen entails the experience of something like illegitimate violence. What is at stake in the struggle against Hitler (and the Hitler/­Riefenstahl cinematic duo) that Chaplin undertakes in The Great Dictator—a film that explicitly presents itself as a cinematic-political intervention—is a sort of declaration of war. Indeed, in Chaplin’s first screen appearance, he is standing next to an exaggeratedly large cannon (which looks like a giant

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The Origin of Film

camera), as if to say, “This is the (comic, cinematic) weapon with which I am going to blast Hitler.” If this giant weapon misfires in the first scene of the movie, it indicates that Chaplin’s “weapon”—the screen, with which he wages a “war”—is failure, misfire, and malfunction. In other words, Chaplin’s weapon is the interruption of intended orientations and exposure to unpredictability and disorientation. When Chaplin activates the screen as a failure and misfire, he illegitimately uses force in a revolutionary struggle to liberate the screen from its suffocating takeover by Hitler, opening the simultaneous possibilities of art as suspension of the world and of politics as negotiations over sharing the world. Exemplary scenes from earlier films clarify “Chaplinism”—a particular way of relating to the screen that culminates in what, in my opinion, stands as Chaplin’s most complex, important, and tortured work, the poetic-political The Great Dictator. This film is not necessarily Chaplin’s best (whatever that means) or his most successful aesthetic artifact. It may even be that, as André Bazin suggests, The Great Dictator is to some extent a failure.28 Yet like certain other formally chaotic modern works of extraordinary ambition and daring—for example, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Griffith’s Intolerance, Van Gogh’s paintings, and Celan’s poetry—this

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failure opens onto something larger and deeper than art, something like what Artaud called the cry of life itself.29 In failing to achieve a poetic frame, the enclosure of excess that lets excess remain visible even while delimiting it, a fiery tongue seems to lash out of these tortured works, consuming both its creators and us, its witnesses, putting us in real danger and leaving us scarred.30 Chaplin, for one, was never the same after The Great Dictator, the film, as mentioned above, that signaled the end and in a way the death of the figure of The Tramp and probably the partial destruction of Chaplin the artist as well, however interesting his subsequent films may be. chaplin is chaplin is chaplin But who is Chaplin? He is a paradox, a nobody who can only be himself. He is neither an actor in the classical sense of the term—someone who can become anyone, take on any role (though, as I will emphasize below, a role is not an identity)—nor a persona like Cary Grant, ­Humphrey Bogart, or Marilyn Monroe; the latter are always themselves no matter what role they play, veritable cinematic archetypes expressing a singular modality of being on the cinematic screen. Chaplin, in contrast, inhabits a unique realm in the history of film. He is a blank nobody who cannot be anyone but himself; he is always immediately recognizable, even as a shadowy silhouette (perhaps indicating that a shadowy nothing is his very essence), yet we can say very little, almost nothing, about him, as if he escaped all efforts to assign him a place and identity in the order of existence. Chaplin is like an escape artist who, in the manner of Poe’s purloined letter, hides in the most visible place possible, becoming the most seen person in the history of humanity, in order to disappear all the better, escape our identifying police work (as he escapes policemen in so many of his films). C ­ haplin is, as it were, someone whom we can unmistakably identify precisely as missing, a call we respond to as incomprehensible, someone we immediately recognize and love as a hole in reality—like the cartoon roadrunner who breaks through all barriers and leaves only a trace behind. Chaplin is never in his place; he never plays the assigned role or performs the given task, always misfiring. This not being in his place is his cinematic place, finding a home on-screen. This never being in his place, always escaping our identificatory grasp, is at the source of the Chaplin paradox of being no one who is always himself. He is no one, has no

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identity, since to have an identity one needs to have a place of one’s own, a name in an order of existence, tasks one is capable of performing, and so forth. Chaplin has none of these and seems always to be in excess of name, identity, place, and function. Yet this no-one-ness is always the same, always itself, insisting on returning as that which is in excess of place, repeating as an interruption of identity, like a mechanical jack-inthe-box that refuses to be put in its place. Already in Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914), the first short in which he appears as The Tramp, Chaplin establishes this stubborn insistence of always returning to this nonplace that is his own, the screen. Playing a figure who stumbles onto the screen accidentally, as it were—only to be pushed out of the frame by the director (whose task is to provide an order of meaning and place, deciding what belongs inside and what outside)—The Tramp insists on coming back into view, only to be pushed off again, and so on. The force of this insistence seems to derive from an understanding of the screen as an arena that does not belong to a paternal power to separate between on and off; it belongs to the one who “incarnates” permanent “offness,” who is always out of place and out of frame, who has no place of his or her own.

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The Origin of Film

This insistence of the no one who is always already himself establishes a new kind of relation between the actor and the crowd. Chaplin is both part of the crowd—like them, a nobody, one of those who have no place or position of their own—and at the same time a star, a center of visibility. Here, homelessness and placelessness represent a new principle of aristocratic distinction and separation. Chaplin is both an aristocrat or well-to-do flâneur, a man of leisure whose time is his own, and a homeless nonentity. This combination expresses his very being as the insistence of an “off ”—a destitute sovereign. Unlike the rest of the crowd, Chaplin turns his placelessness into a new principle, occupying the screen as a new kind of space. The distinction between Chaplin and the crowd (a distinction that is at the source of his constant ambivalence toward the crowd, so important for The Great Dictator: being and not being one of the crowd, loving the crowd and deriding it) emerges in light of the fact that the crowds seem to “know their place,” to dutifully occupy the position assigned to them by the rope that cordons them off. Even if they have no place of their own, this nonplace is created by a frame setting those who belong apart from those who do not. But Chaplin, for his part, seems to understand the screen as an unframing arena (a nonpaternally/­directorially dominated arena he shares here, as he often does, with a placeless dog that is his double) where a star is born. That is, he understands the screen as an arena allowing for the emergence of an immanent source of visibility (­intelligibility)—of something shining out by way of its own, autonomous light instead of depending on an external source of illumination. However, this “light of one’s own” has its source, paradoxically, in what can never be one’s own, nor anybody’s, namely, the off-screen. Its “­autonomy,” the fact that it does not obey any given source of authority or direction, does not signify pure self-sufficiency but rather the activation of a groundless elsewhere (an absolute Other). The self of the star, a self shining by virtue of its own light, activates what is absolutely not itself and not its own: a groundless “off ” to which it stands exposed, a non–place/time, the groundless excess of the world. We can begin to discern the profound difference between the two movie stars, Chaplin and Hitler, in relation to the question of the crowds. Both are exceptional figures whose illumination takes on meaning in relation to the crowds, and in both instances stardom stems from the fact that they always seem to be themselves. In Hitler’s case, as we have seen, always

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being himself means being the only one with a permanent identity, which results from canceling the off-screen and becoming the self-­reflexive grounding element for all others who come to occupy the screen and are hence nobodies. Hitler grants them identity and belonging, makes the screen their territory, by annulling their exposure to the “off ”; that is, he assumes the place of the camera and emerges as the one who is both seeing and seen without a gap: a self-controlling and self-displaying apparatus all at once. Hitler is always himself, since he does not stand exposed to anything external and commands his own appearance fully, and this is what makes him a star, one who shines out of his (self-grounding) self. In contrast, Chaplin is also always himself, yet he is always himself as one who has no place and identity; he always stands exposed, but he makes this exposure a new principle of apparition. In other words, Chaplin is always himself as not-himself, that is, as no one rather than as the One (which Hitler tries to be). What insists and persists in Chaplin is this ever-repeating nonidentity to himself (the state of being inscribed by the off-screen), which occupies the center of his very being. This quality becomes the source of his light and makes him a star. He is self-illuminated (both in the sense that his self is what is illuminated as well as the sense that his self is what illuminates)—indeed, self-showing. It is no accident that Chaplin is the first great actor-director in the history of film, the one who is both on- and off-screen, controlling his own appearance in an unprecedented kind of self-portraiture. That said, his light (his intelligibility, we might say) is not projected onto him by a preexistent authority and place; it is his “own,” “autonomous” light, a light that does not come from eliminating the “off ” (as it does for Hitler) but from activating and accepting groundlessness in a positive way. Chaplin’s light is a light shining out of nothing (of ground), a groundlessness that is the origin of his visibility. Visibility, in this context, means the coming into view of, gaining access to, what makes something what it is, that is, its “self,” “source,” and “origin.” The self of something is by definition beyond this or that momentary actuality, or appearance, of the thing of which it is the self, for it is the “essence” of the thing, what makes it what it is in general, rather than what it is at this or that moment. The star receives himself from himself, that is, makes himself the “origin” of his being; moreover, he is able to show himself, that is, to illuminate himself from himself—to give us access to his self, out of himself, absolutely (though this access is, of course, the paradoxical access to the self qua inaccessible, always

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The Origin of Film

a­ ctivating an enigmatic elsewhere, an “offness”), without reference to any (actual and determined) external source of intelligibility.31 To reiterate: if Hitler’s self-light derives from having managed to cancel all exteriority and become a self-framer and self-grounder of the screen, forming himself as an absolute and selfsame identity (although he has to do it through Riefenstahl’s mediation, which logically undermines the illusion of self-sufficiency), Chaplin’s self-light comes from his activating a new kind of exteriority, the off-screen, which belongs to no one but whose nonbelonging Chaplin paradoxically makes his own. In a sense, both Chaplin and Hitler can be viewed as Antichrists, or reversals of Christ. According to two distinct logics, they express a critical transformation of the Christian logic of incarnation—the appearance of the divine or the beyond—that underlies an understanding of what an image is in Christianity. If Christ—traditionally, the image of the Father, the coming into earthly appearance of a selfsame eternal Origin— expresses a gap between the human and the divine, inasmuch as they are shown to participate in the same essence even though they are not exactly the same, Hitler completely cancels the gap between the eternal and the earthly. Thereby, so far as the question of the image is concerned, he displays a mode of apparition that can no longer be defined as an image at all: the image always denotes a separation, but here we see the thing itself, a selfsame Origin that seems able to appear fully as itself and be an actual part of the world, a divine-human without distinction. Chaplin, on the other hand, is an image—and therefore more like Christ—in that he becomes the “incarnate” appearance of a “beyond” that also preserves the gap of this “off.” At the same time, the origin Chaplin embodies and makes appear (which also makes him appear) is not selfsame like the divine Father, nor is it a framing device understood as a principle of identification; rather, it amounts to absolute nonidentity—not a principle of paternal framing but abandoned unframing.32 Hitler and Chaplin “inhabit” their stardom as two different ways of effecting a transformation of the crowds, which amount to two distinct ways in which the screen becomes the arena for transition between one form of the crowd to another. Chaplin and Hitler stand for different interpretations of what is at stake in the nameless many whose being the screen, as a placeless arena, has exposed. In the Hitlerian scheme, the anonymous multitude has lost a frame, of which its members need to be supplied with a new type. They are thus seen as being in need of being collected under

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the agency of a new type of apparatus, the self-framing/grounding Hitler, in relation to which they receive a new identity and place and become a many-in-One, all equal insofar as they stand under the framing power of the Führer. In contrast, Chaplin sees the many as standing in need of a liberation into the screen and away from a certain logic of the frame, which is also a logic of identity. For Chaplin, the problem of the anonymous, modern masses is not that they lack identity but that they still have too much identity. This is because they still experience their lack of identity and place only negatively, that is, in terms of a missing frame. Therefore, their very being consists in constantly dreaming of a frame that will restore what they have lost, namely, an identity. For Chaplin, however, a very different possibility starts to manifest itself in this loss of paternal frame, in the exposure to the groundless “off ”: the possibility of acquiring a positive sense of missing identity and placelessness that depends on embracing the groundless.33 The groundless, the “off,” is not to be thought of as a lack of frame and experience of lost identity; rather, as Chaplin saw, unframing holds positive potential, a power of origination from what we can call the non-sensical groundlessness of the world. Here, to originate does not mean to control or master one’s origin so much as to be capable of responding to the exposure to groundlessness as an origin, that is, the fact that the world is not given in advance and can therefore always open anew. Chaplin wishes to lead the multitude into this positive experience of lacking identity, away from the paralyzed state of waiting for the frame to return, of dreaming of being included in its protective territory again.34 These modern crowds do not need to be gathered into an identity but to be liberated into their real “crowdness,” so to speak. The true masses—the multitude holding a positive power of nonidentity and ­placelessness—do not yet exist. Chaplin stands as an exemplary exception, an example to follow: one of a crowd that does not yet exist. Becoming one of a crowd, by this logic, does not mean joining a corporate body whose members are equally subject to a self-grounding apparatus; instead, it means joining a multitude whose members stand equally exposed to the groundless world—a groundlessness the screen can activate as a positive power. Chaplin’s relation to the crowd—one of its number yet also exceptional and apart—is therefore like that of a messiah arriving in the new promised land of the screen, a nowhere land where he can show the (non)way and all others (those of us in the crowds of the movie theater, for example, as well as those on-screen) can follow. Such imitatio

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The Origin of Film

Chaplini does not mean becoming like Chaplin in the sense of assuming a similar identity—Chaplin, as we have seen, has no identity of his own and is therefore unlike himself. Rather, becoming Chaplin means activating one’s own “Chaplin-ness,” unlikeness to oneself, an “offness” that is always the “same” since it has no identity. In a sense, then, imitatio Chaplini means the imitation of imitation, provided we understand that what lies at the heart of such imitation is the capacity not to be any specific identity: a capacity to activate the “off ” in oneself, the not-oneself in oneself—through which one can become . . .35 By imitating Chaplin, the crowds become actors and come to occupy, in relation to the screen/off-screen, something like Kafka’s famous Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma: an unframed non–place/time where everybody, the indistinguishable many, the masses, all gather inasmuch as they activate their capacity not to be themselves.36 Chaplin, we can say, the one whom everyone is called upon to imitate, is himself—and this is what lies at the origin of his always being himself qua not-himself—a pure actor, an actor activating nothing but the capacity to not be oneself. He never takes on any specific role (at least not until after The Great Dictator, and even then, not exactly) but is only and always Chaplin / the aristocratic tramp. A role, as stated above, is not itself an identity, and assuming a role does not mean becoming a specific identity so much as activating a specific modality of nonidentity (say, Hamlet as a particular modality of losing identity, the paternal name). Put otherwise, we can say that a role is the showing of the specific way in which a given identity suffers its exposure to the dimension we have been calling the “off.” But Chaplin does not even take on a role—hence his blankness. The tramp is not a role but rather the activation, by someone from the crowd, of pure one-of-the-crowd-ness, so to speak, of being-anyone-whatsoever. The tramp is nothing other than the activation of the exposure to the dis­ identifying, dispossessing, and decontextualizing zone that is the screen/ off-screen, and doing so in a positive manner, that is, by transforming nonbelonging from being a consequence of the relegation to meaninglessness by a frame that excludes into a new expressivity. Even in becoming Hitler—or more precisely, becoming the battlefield of forces embodied by Hynkel—Chaplin does not assume a role but dramatizes the confrontation between two logics of the actor/star in relation to crowds.37 Indeed, Chaplin gives us a new image of the artist: the modern artist is a no one, one of a crowd, thus one of the occupants of nonhierarchical human-

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ity, in many ways completely unexceptional (unlike the romantic understanding of the artist as an exceptional genius). Yet what does make the artist exceptional is that she or he knows how to activate the power of nonbelonging that is the very essence of the crowd, the essence of anyone in the crowd. As such, the modern artist is someone who refuses any attempt to frame and control the crowd, to either make it belong to a new kind of frame or reject it outside the frame. Instead, she or he insists on opening the crowd to its “crowdness,” to make it experience its own nonbelongingness and make it into a new source of creativity. v Before getting to the question of Hynkel, let’s briefly take a look at a couple of earlier Chaplin films in order to get a slightly more concrete sense of Chaplin, his relation to the screen, and the growing complexity of his understanding of his cinematic task in relation to the many abandoned on and in relation to the screen.

the kid : breaking windows The film opens with the story of a woman who has just given birth and been abandoned by the child’s father. Lost and in despair, she decides to abandon the baby. She leaves him in a fancy car, hoping that someone able to provide a better life will adopt him. She promptly regrets her decision, but when she returns she sees the car has been stolen—and her child with it. The thieves quickly decide to abandon the child, too, and leave him at the corner of a deserted house next to some garbage cans, like another piece of trash. Following this series of abandonments—which connect being onscreen with the condition of a husbandless woman and a fatherless child— Charlie appears in the midst of taking his gentlemanly morning promenade. Leisurely strolling toward us in a deserted alley between run-down houses, Charlie seems somewhat unaware of his surroundings, lost in his own world. Soon, trash thrown from the window frame of a house by someone who obviously did not see him lands on his head. Without further ado he brushes off the dirt, undeterred by his encounter with trash, and continues his walk—only to receive another, more substantial heap of garbage on his head from an unknown source located off-screen. This scene shows that being on-screen means being exposed to an off-screen, a disidentifying power marking nonbelonging and placelessness. Such

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The Origin of Film

placelessness, Chaplin allegorically indicates, marks those who occupy the screen as waste or trash, without significance. Chaplin, then, seems to occupy a realm of invisibility that is equivalent to garbage. In this context, invisibility is the nonexistence or nonidentity that characterizes Charlie in relation to those who have a place structured through the framing division between inside and outside, a division signaled to us by the framestructure of the window out of which the garbage has been thrown, which separates what is meaningful and belongs inside and what is meaningless, the trash thrown outside that belongs to no one. The screen as the zone of the placeless can thus be viewed, to begin with, as being occupied by what has been deemed by a framing mechanism, for which the window stands, as meaningless waste. We can thus say that from the perspective of a certain framing mechanism the screen is the meaningless realm that the frame has rejected, an outside to the frame. Yet Charlie does not accept the perspective of the window frame, is not just another useless, invisible piece of trash. Rather, he constitutes a creative relation to trash, that is, someone whose vision we may call poetic, someone who sees in what has been defined as waste and does not belong (relegated to outside the frame) the inscription of that unframing power of the “off ” we have called the groundless, a power of senselessness and dislocation that is at the heart of the capacity to create new meanings and places. Charlie, we can say, comes to occupy a new relation to nonmeaning. Rather than remaining himself a meaningless outsider (someone who becomes insignificant by being expelled from inside the frame of meaningfulness), he discovers in what has been deemed not meaningful by the frame a new kind of power, the power of communication with the unframed dimension that we have been calling non-sensical groundlessness. It’s as if what has been relegated to meaninglessness by being cast out of a frame always also contains an excess over a given frame that opens it to the possibility of communication with and activation of the non-sensical “off.” Let’s recall that the groundless, the “off,” is not to be understood simply as the empty outside of meaning but as the happening of a creative nonmeaning or nonsense, a non–place/time that is at the origin of the creative possibilities of new meanings. Negative nonmeaning is transformed by the poet, the one who know how to transform (“recycle”) trash into creative non-sense, and the screen is transformed from a realm of waste, defined as the abandoned outside of the frame, into a positive and creative arena defined by communication with the originary non-sensical “off.”

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This creative relation to meaningless trash, the discovery of its communication with the groundless “off,” makes Charlie into the one who is able to make waste his habit and thereby make the screen, an abandoned wasteland,38 his habitat. For as we see in a close-up of Charlie, following the waste incident, he is himself composed of waste: his gloves, his clothes, the tin can he uses as a cigarette box, and so forth are all items of waste transformed into gentlemanly attire and thus into the expression of his capacity to be a flâneur and man of leisure whose time and place are his own, not dictated by any pre-given order. It’s as if the trash that has been embraced and adopted poetically transmits to Charlie a capacity for freedom; his aristocratic independence is not opposed to his being a wasted and homeless person but is derived from a transformed relation to waste as communication with the non–place/time of the “off.” Not belonging becomes Charlie’s essence, which he embraces as a new power, a power that is not his own but to which he is exposed and which he learns how to render active. What doesn’t fit—the jacket that is too small, the pants that are too large, and so on—becomes the expression of his power not to fit in any context, to always be “off,” transforming his meaninglessness and not belonging (a negative state, defined in relation to a frame by which it has been rejected), into creative non-sense (a positive power of negation and unframing). The screen, that which activates the noncontextual that is the exposure to the “off,” thus becomes the habitat of the one who doesn’t fit and who embraces this not belonging as his very identity. It is this capacity of Charlie to be a trash collector, to transform the wasteland that is the decontextualized screen into the home of the one who has no home and does not belong,39 which is also at the origin of what we may call Chaplin’s “ear,” his capacity to hear in the inarticulate cries of the abandoned (who can only be inarticulate, only utter cries, as we will soon see) a call and a summons for a new expressivity. Thus, immediately following our view of the trash-constituted Charlie, something from the off-screen draws his attention. As he turns toward it, the crying abandoned child, lying among the garbage cans, is revealed, as if fallen from nowhere, belonging nowhere. Chaplin, indeed, soon raises his head toward the off-screen as if looking for the invisible messenger who has transported this bundle from an incomprehensible beyond, thus opening himself to what comes from the “off.” Chaplin has received the child from the “off,” has responded to its cries, and is starting to acknowledge

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The Origin of Film

that the relation to the “off ” and to those who come from it has become that to which he responds, his responsibility.40 As we saw in the context of M, one of the main modalities of occupying the screen as a realm exposed to the ungrounding off-screen involves the abandoned, fatherless child. Whoever is abandoned does not belong anywhere, has no place in the framed order of meaning; in consequence he or she, allegorically understood, is always an infant (literally, “one without speech”) and can utter only a cry, not meaningful discourse. In this context, the cry holds two opposite significations: either as the waste and failure of speech—the outcome of denying the abandoned any capacity for meaning—or, when understood from the poetic point of view (which Charlie stands for: openness to the dimension of the “off ”), as expressive, at least in a germinal sense. In this scene (and in general), the cry wavers between failed and wasted speech and a new expressivity. To express means to activate the dimension of the “ex,” of what lies outside. It always means being outside of a frame: what is “ex-pressed” is always what is outside the frame. Yet we can distinguish between, on the one hand, what is outside the frame understood as meaningless waste, and thus an outside that is still defined in relation to the frame, evaluated on the basis of the frame’s criteria and decisions, and, on the other hand, what is outside the frame understood as the “off,” a groundless non–place/time before and in excess of any given frame and thus not relative to any frame. To express does not have to do with the first outside, the one relative to the frame, but with the second one. To express means to be able to activate the “off.” To sum up, the poet or artist, which Chaplin stands for here, can see, in what the frame has relegated to an outside relative to its defining judgments and decisions, something that opens onto a more primordial outside: the “off ” as an absolute potentiality for new and unpredictable configurations of meaning.41 The poet is the one who can transform waste into expressivity. We can understand the expressivity thereby disclosed as a dimension in excess of meaning (in this context, the capacity to orient oneself in the world and to articulate the relation between one’s place in the world and everything else), as the activation of the very origin of language as communication. Essentially, the question of communication concerns the being-in-common of everything before any decision is made about how its elements are to be related to each other, that is, prior to any decision

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about orientation. To express, to activate the “off ”—to communicate in the most basic terms, to utter a primordial cry—means, first of all, to expose all given orientations achieved through framing (the operation of deciding what is shared and what is not) to the empty “background” we have been calling the open Whole or the groundless world. The task of such exposure—such unraveling of all given relations—is to create the “space” from which new unpredictable meanings, orientations, and frames can arise. Therefore, the infant’s cry from the off-screen (which stands for the speechlessness and muteness of the abandoned in general) sheds its quality of meaninglessness as the scene progresses and begins to resonate as the expressive activation of the “off.” Charlie experiences this cry as an address, an empty call, that is, as something that establishes communication and reopens the question of shared being (i.e., who he is, who this child is, and what the nature of their relation will be). But for all that, it has no specific content or given direction as yet, and its nature must still be determined, with all the surprises that entails. Charlie is thus the one able to hear the infant’s cry as an expressivity rather than a meaningless waste, as an empty call demanding that his being in common with the infant becomes a question to be determined, and unpredictably so.42 Already in this originary and basic situation of The Kid, the limit we pointed to above between the poetic and the political comes into view: the cry that communicates between the kid and Charlie effects a suspension of the world, stripping away given orientations and meanings and activating a question that we have characterized as political: negotiation about the sharing of the world. Like any prophet worthy of the name, Charlie first tries to refuse the call—to get rid of the abandoned child to whose expressive cry he has been exposed—since he knows that it signifies the suspension and in a way the destruction of his world. The cry to which one is exposed can never be willed but only suffered or witnessed, since it is something by which one is compelled as an originary nonmeaning, a nonmeaning by which we are emptily addressed (address signifying that who we are, our identity, is at stake in it), but which we can never intend. Nevertheless, like any prophet worthy of his name, Charlie cannot avoid responding to the call, accepting his responsibility toward it. Yet unlike traditional prophets, Charlie refuses to appropriate the expressivity of the call to an original structure of paternity, to a divine word; as such, he c­ ommits

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The Origin of Film

to responding to the call in the only manner worthy of its essence, that is, by liberating it from the logic of paternity (i.e., the logic of the frame) and activating it as the problem of the sharing of the world through a radical unframing. Therefore it is crucial that Chaplin refuses the position of the father in relation to the child he “adopts,” that is, the child for whose call he becomes personally responsible. He will be neither father nor brother, son, wife, or daughter, or perhaps he will be all of these simultaneously. What they will be to each other first and foremost are those between whom is communicated the suspension of and the question of the sharing of the world, as an open-ended question, for which the film finds a brilliant conceit, that of establishing communication through the breaking of windows. For as is shown in what is perhaps the most famous scene in The ­ harlie and the child, who is now around five years old, are “business Kid, C partners” in an unframing enterprise, wherein the kid throws stones at windows, breaking them, thus reopening the divisions they tried to establish between inside and outside, the realm of belonging and that of waste. After this demolition work Charlie arrives to replace the windows, as if to restore divisions. However, this “restoration” does not amount to bringing back the frame, the principle of division; rather, it occurs in the context of introducing a new principle, that of the screen, to replace the old framestructure. The principle of the screen involves the breaking of frames (as if the early call of the infant has transformed into tearing down framed divisions), an unframing exposure that opens the question of sharing the world. In negotiating such sharing, some frames might need to be instituted—hence the new windows—but these frames will prove secondary, always open to the possibility of exposure or breakage that is more originary, open to the screen as a broken window, the originary exposure to the groundlessness of the world activated by the kid.

modern times —between strike and dance Chaplin’s task—as articulated in The Kid, his first feature film and the first film in which he perhaps fully comes to understand his cinematic mission—will continue to deepen as he discovers its various dimensions and increasingly meditates on its historical implications together with his calling as a historical witness and agent. As we have seen, Chaplin’s task is to liberate the screen and to liberate those who have been deemed meaningless, to be waste, through an activation of the screen, rendering them

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expressive by establishing a communication with the groundless “off.” The screen is thus to become the home of those who do not belong anywhere. The new, Chaplinian screen is that which opens for the refuse the possibility of belonging—to the world—in the sense that what is now at stake in their utterances—which earlier were relegated to insignificant meaninglessness—is the world itself. In Modern Times Chaplin fully articulates for the first time this general cinematic project in relation to specific historical terms and categories. Chaplin comes to understand his project as a struggle between his own attempt to find a liberatory potential for humanity in the nature of the screen (the screen being the decontextualizing medium of an unprecedented exposure of humanity to the groundless) and particular historical logics that responded to the discovery of the exposing screen by attempting to cancel out the very being of the screen as exposure, to take possession of it, so as to iconoclastically block both its threatening nature and its potentially new expressive powers.43 The two main anti-screen, or more generally, anti-cinematic historical modalities that Chaplin examines—and tries to dismantle—in his two masterpieces of the 1930s (Modern Times and The Great Dictator) are capitalistic production and the fascistic ordering of the masses.44 Both these historical enterprises attempt, albeit through different strategies, to take possession of the screen by eliminating the dimension of the off-screen. Liberating (through) the screen now means, for Chaplin, dismantling these specific historical mechanisms. To do so, he needs to render dysfunctional the logic of capitalistic production and render inoperative fascistic speech and its creation of ordered masses. Modern Times tells the story of an underachieving production worker who loses his job but keeps on trying to reintegrate into the social order through work, only to fail again and again. The film is composed at first of a series of breaks in the smooth functionality of the world; they are breaks (i.e., ceasing to be a part of or belong to) that Charlie embodies. At a later stage, the film consists of various attempts to transform the breaks, through aesthetic or poetic mechanisms suspending the world, into an expressive liberation, that is, to activate the dimension of the “off.” From Charlie’s famous breakdown at the beginning of the movie—where he fails to keep up with the assembly line and is brought to the edge of madness—to the workers’ strike and on to Charlie’s enforced “break” from the world when he is jailed, the movie shifts to examining poetic modes

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The Origin of Film

of suspension: the street dance performed by Charlie’s sweetheart, where various people cease their worldly activities and become an audience; Charlie’s celebrated non-sensical song and dance; and finally, the couple’s poetic departure at the very end of the movie, as if they were leaving behind a world where they could not fit in, to which they failed to belong. The movie begins with a quick Eisenstein-like montage. First, a panicked herd of sheep fills the screen, wholly disconnected from any natural environment or habitat; it is coming from nowhere and going nowhere (a nowhere that is most likely a slaughterhouse), seemingly driven by an invisible force that has taken control of their lostness, a lostness brought about by being on a decontextualizing screen.45 A group of indistinct, virtually faceless people, their heads covered with hats, emerges from the subway onto the street, where many more indistinct people gather from off-frame; they quickly take the shape of an ordered crowd and file in line to enter a factory,46 where their every move is supervised by something that for the moment is not itself on-screen. Thus, the screen becomes a nonplace in which all those who gather from a decontextualized state—all who do not belong, who basically count as waste, who are insignificant—are seized by a commanding mechanism that exploits their exposure and abandonment and appropriates them, turning them into a controlled herd whose only identity is “to be in the service of . . .” What is this appropriating mechanism? What do they stand in the service of? Capitalist, “Fordist” production—the mechanism for always producing more, and faster, in ever-accelerated repetition of the same tasks. This is the significance of the assembly line on which poor Charlie labors.47 It’s as if the loss of identity of the world and for the world that the screen as unframing exposure activates—becoming the arena of the gathering of the crowds, of all those who do not belong— brought forth a control mechanism whose task is to produce things that are exactly identical; their ultimate purpose seems to be nothing other than the production of sameness (whatever form it may take). brief excurses on the loss of the capacity to mean and the loss of identity Being able to mean presupposes a place in meaning. Those who are waste are granted no such franchise. Indeed, in order to have a place in meaning, that is, to be able to have one’s utterances count as meaningful,

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one has to be recognized as a legitimate source and origin of discourse (e.g., a king whose authority and word organizes the field of meaningfulness that is a kingdom), or at very least be recognized as speaking in relation to a sovereign instance (e.g., an official within the bureaucracy of the kingdom). Meaning always stands in relation to an origin; it receives its meaningfulness by drawing on an origin, so to speak. The crucial question, then, is what qualifies as an origin of meaning, as well as the modes in which one relates to it. If, for example, we understand the world as an open Whole— potentiality that is not inherently meaningful but from which meaning can arise—then having a place in the world means, at the most fundamental level, being allowed and able to stand in relation to this origin, the world, that is, to speak and signify on the basis of communication with it. One is able to draw the resources of one’s speech out of this groundless, senseless origin of meaning. Conversely, being deprived of a place in the world means that one’s communication with it is blocked, not allowed to occur. One is not seen as entitled to communicate with the world. We have also seen that to be waste and thus not have a place in meaning depends on a framing operation that separates those who are inside the frame, those we can now understand as being entitled to communicate with the origin of meaning, and those who are outside and are therefore disentitled. We can understand the frame, in relation to such a conception of the origin as the open Whole that is the world, as a mediating mechanism regulating communication between the origin and specific utterances, whose meaningfulness depends on the authority that the frame, as mediator of the origin, grants them. For example, a minimal condition for being able to make utterances that count as meaningful is being a citizen in a democratic state, where ideally each is free to speak in the name of the origin, entitled to mean simply by being one of the inhabitants of the world but as mediated by the frame of the state. Such general entitlement to meaning thus depends on a framing mechanism: the state as conferring citizenship. If one is not a citizen, one is not entitled by the frame (in this case governmental institutions) to speak on the basis of communication with the origin. However, the origin of meaning is not always conceived as an open Whole. In fact, historically speaking, this conception is very late and can be described as postmetaphysical or postreligious. A radical difference holds between metaphysical or religious understandings of the origin of

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The Origin of Film

meaning and postmetaphysical ones. Accordingly, there are radical differences between ways of understanding the task of the frame. M ­ etaphysical/ religious systems understand the origin in terms of intention—say, divine providence, an ideal cosmic natural order, or the eternal realm of Ideas—that itself may never be fully accessible but with which one can nevertheless communicate somehow. The function of the frame (e.g., the priesthood in the Catholic Church or the philosopher-king in Plato’s ideal republic) is to set rules relating to the original intention, thereby serving as the authority regulating communication with the origin. In contrast, from a postmetaphysical perspective, the origin is viewed as the senselessness or groundlessness of the world out of which meanings can arise. Here, the frames instituted to regulate the relation to this groundless origin have a very different configuration, since they are no longer considered to have acquired their authority from the intention of the origin. It might be argued, however, that although to a large extent we are living in a postmetaphysical world, that is, a world no longer seen as regulated by divine intention or some cosmic order, we are not yet living in accordance with any clear way of understanding what a nonmetaphysical origin of meaning is or even if there is any sense in still talking about the concept of an origin of meaning. The transition to a postmetaphysical world thus involves a complex situation in the midst of which we still find ourselves, wherein we experience the disappearance of the relation to an origin understood as an originary meaning/intention together with the disappearance of the frames and institutions that were in charge of mediating and regulating communication with it, such as the Catholic Church or the old systems of sovereignty that were still legitimated by their relation to a divine order. We might say that, as a result of this disappearance of the divine as original intention and of the frames mediating it, humanity has suffered a traumatic unframing and now stands exposed to the groundlessness of the world, which it has largely confronted negatively: as horror in the face of the disappearance, the annihilation, of communication with meaning (as traditionally understood, i.e., as transcendent intention). To an extent, no one in the postmetaphysical world is entitled to meaning; everyone has been relegated to a position outside of the frame. Conversely, everyone is equally entitled to meaning, for there is no (pre-given and divinely sanctioned) frame that counts as having a real legitimacy for determining who is inside or outside. The discovery of such e­ xposure—

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with implications modern humanity is still far from understanding, a process that is likely to continue for a very long time (the last man lives longest, as Nietzsche says)—is a confrontation with the dimension of nonmeaning. That said, there are two main ways to understand this dimension of nonmeaning: either negatively, as a deprivation of meaning and value, or, as described above, positively, as a potentially new relation to the question of meaning, coming to understand it as presupposing an originary and positive nonmeaning, what we have been calling the groundless world, as an openness out of which meanings, never seen in advance and without the guidance of providence, can emerge. In the latter case, humanity becomes a witness to, an addressee of, this originary openness. In this context, the ability to mean would involve establishing a structure or world that enables and recognizes communications with this groundless source. It is clear that we are still living in a state suspended between these two main relations to nonmeaning—or to the nothingness of meaning (“nihilism,” in common parlance). In a way, all the configurations in which humanity is organized in the era we have come to call “modernity” derive from the encounter with this annihilation of the metaphysical relation to meaning (and of the traditional forms of authorization that underlie it). Moreover, each of these configurations can be understood as a particular decision made in relation to nonmeaning. The decisions that interest Chaplin—“Fordist” capitalism and ­Nazism—represent defensive configurations for responding to the demise of metaphysical frames and exposure to the dimension of nonmeaning. The case of Hitler we examined above (Nazism being a phenomenon of the crisis of modernity par excellence) provides an example of such a response to the demise of metaphysical frames. The metaphysical/religious system, we can say, was structured around a constitutive gap between a transcendent, divine origin and frames of entitlement mediating the relation with that origin. Once the transcendent origin disappears, along with its mediating frames, one possible response, the one that characterizes the Hitlerian procedure examined above, is to posit a self-entitled, self-grounding man who becomes both an absolute origin of meaning and intention, thus compensating for the loss of the transcendence that has become wholly inaccessible by instituting a new kind of divinity, a purely actual one, and a frame of entitlement, that is, that which decides who is entitled to communicate with the origin and who is not. According to this response to the disappearance of the Origin, in the traditional

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The Origin of Film

sense of the term, any reminder of its disappearance has to be eliminated and an actual, present, and accessible origin that will make this disappearance disappear must be found. A different logic for dealing with the encounter with nonmeaning is the capitalistic mechanical production presented in Modern Times. As we have seen, the elimination of traditional frames and the activation of exposure to the groundless demote the “many” on-screen to the status of meaningless waste and nonidentity. A response is offered by creating a new type of frame (the industrialist boss in the film) that endeavors to cancel exposure to the screen by replacing the vanished relation to an Origin of meaning with a mechanism that bypasses the question of meaning altogether: the production of more and more, ever faster, with no other purpose. If Hitlerism seeks to institute a new kind of accessible Origin, capitalism bypasses, as it were, the very idea of an origin of meaning, positing in its stead an empty demand for more. Something like the production of the identical replaces the origination of identities. Human identity—who one is, what makes one who one is—is nothing other than the specific relation one establishes with an origin of meaning (whether that origin is conceived of metaphysically or not). Who one is may be understood as the place (as well as the singular way that one becomes the expression of an excess over one’s place48) that one comes to occupy in the world—a general order that depends on the organization and orientation of existence as a whole in communication with the origin.49 As we have seen, with the demise of the metaphysical/religious systems this communication with the Origin has been deeply shaken. In a sense, the loss of originary intention that characterized the metaphysical systems has resulted in a universal loss of identity. No longer having access to an originary intention, one can no longer articulate one’s place, or even have a place (in meaning); consequently, one seems to be haunted by a void (the nihil of nihilism, the ghost of Hamlet), the lack of a relation to meaning, at the core of being. It is in order to replace the disappearing Origin, to erase the horror of the void, that the new frameworks of ­Nazism and capitalism were established. In the case of Nazism, engineering a new origin represents one strategy for enabling comprehensible identities to emerge; now one receives one’s place in relation to an origin that has again become accessible. Capitalism, on the other hand, seems to bypass the question of identity altogether by producing the identical. Why should this strategy solve the problem of the nihil of identity?

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In order to understand the logic behind the replacement of the anxiety of identity with the production of the identical, another term proves indispensable: desire. Desire expresses distance from the origin marking any and all identity. Identity, that is, is fundamentally marked by desire as a distance from the origin (of meaning), which by definition is not given but is an absence the aspiration toward which forms the trajectory of a life. In terms of metaphysical/religious logic, identity is thought to revolve around a capacity to establish a clear relation to the origin, understood as our source, as what most fundamentally makes us who we are and gives us to ourselves, so to speak. This origin represents the guiding intention with which our life should correspond; our task is to identify with it in order to become one with our source (merging with the divine, for example, or rising up to the realm of Ideas through a trajectory of love, as in Plato’s Symposium) and by this means become the same as ourselves. In this sense, the metaphysical/religious conception of the origin of meaning describes a trajectory of desire whereby the source that makes us who we are is understood as not given initially; our task, even if it is never realized in full, is to self-unify. In this system, the frame serves to regulate desire, to give it a clear form, and therefore also to mark its correct limits by differentiating between the right kind of desire—which brings us to the origin—and the wrong kind—which distances us from it even more. Personal identity, as traditionally understood, is not a given state, then, but a practical task: something “to do” or “achieve,” to answer the call of the origin in order to self-unify. As such, having an identity means having a clear sense of orientation in relation to the origin or a clear sense of the task of one’s desire; accordingly, identity is the regulated movement of desire in r­elation to the origin. When this metaphysical system collapsed, something extremely disturbing happened to the very form of our desire, understood now, more generally, as what expresses our relation to the nongivenness of our origin and thus marks our own distance and separation from ourselves. Desire ceases to be clearly directed, with a recognizable if highly distant goal; it begins to circulate around an abyss, so to speak. The origin (of meaning)—what gives us to ourselves and in relation to which we become who we are—no longer represents an original meaning or intention that, however distant, still proves recognizable. The origin now becomes a constitutive and absolute ungiven—not in the sense of givenness inaccessible to us so much

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The Origin of Film

as a constitutive openness that means that existence, by definition, is not given in advance. Our desire no longer expresses our distance from an original meaning but rather the nonmeaningful nongivenness that is the origin, newly understood as the open Whole that is the world.50 Desire now comes to express a much more troubling distance from ourselves, for this distance is absolute; in other words, we can never become one with our origin or source, never achieve self-unity, since our very self now stands in relation to a “not”—a not-given out of which something unpredictably new can arise. We cannot become one with ourselves, since the source, our origin, is itself not one (in the sense of a unified intention or meaning, or order). Desire in this sense becomes both that which marks our unbridgeable gap from ourselves (or the unbridgeable gap that is our self ) and that which expresses our capacity to bring about the unpredictably new, the original, that which arises out of the origin as the not-given. This eruption of a new configuration of desire—which the screen, as the activation of the dimension of the groundless “off,” a non-sensical and indefinite origin, expresses—provokes horror that needs to be overcome, a distance from ourselves and from the origin that needs to be eliminated.51 Hitler stands for a new kind of origin of meaning—an accessible, present origin produced through symbolizing logic that assumes the character of the All of meaning, the guide and direction of every possible meaning. As such, Hitlerism still marks an essential distinction between, on the one hand, regular, partial, and relative meanings and, on the other hand, the All/origin in relation to which they are to be thought, on whose legitimacy they depend, and with which they seek to merge. Positing a distance and a distinction, a difference, between two “dimensions”—one of which stands for the origin, the other for partial and finite meanings— is essential for all thinking (be it metaphysical, postmetaphysical, or a perverse postmetaphysical metaphysics such as Hitlerism) where the interrelated notions of identity, meaning, and desire-as-distance are still operative. Identity, meaning, and desire all require a distance from an origin in relation to which they come into view. In a sense, the logic of capitalism amounts to an even more radical defense against the loss of metaphysical origin than does Hitlerism, inasmuch as it attempts to replace origination with production, thus eliminating the very idea of origin (i.e., origin at a distance). The notion of production eliminates the very idea of distance and difference, for it implies that the producer and the produced are, in a way, on the same level—that no fundamental distinction

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holds between them. In other words, while the origin is always absolutely more than and different, hence distant, from what is originated (which is always partial), the task of the producer is fully exhausted by production, fully consummated in the product; as such, no fundamental or absolute distance between them exists. Since there is no distance, there is no unsatisfied desire, and therefore, in a sense, no desire at all but, ideally, pure satisfaction. The production of the identical entails a leveling effect (the cancellation of an essential difference between the producer and the produced) that allows for the satisfaction of desire (I say ideally because this is obviously a fantasy that is immediately punctured by the arrival of a new product). Where there is no desire, there is no identity and no meaning, either. Desire makes an appearance only by signifying the failure of the logic of production to overcome the horror of the loss of metaphysical origin and the undirected desire liberated in the wake of this loss. Though supposedly gratifying in immediate terms, the product proves frustrating just as quickly, since the full satisfaction it promised does not come; the emptiness that envelops it—the emptiness opened by the disappearance of the origin—needs to be overcome by a new product, as it were, at an ever-increasing rate. We can get a sense of an important dimension of the distinction between Hitlerism and the logic of production by examining how seriality functions in each. As we have seen, the question of series arises both in Triumph of the Will and in Modern Times, and both in relation to the attempt to eliminate the off-screen. In the former, seriality takes the form of a seemingly endless array of soldiers, coming one after the other from the off-screen; in the second, it appears as an increasingly accelerated assembly line where the workers are forced to produce things that are exactly the same faster and faster. The logic is very different in each case. In Triumph of the Will, the series of soldiers marks the extension into infinity of uniformed individuals who receive exactly the same identity inasmuch as they all fall under the power of the All / Hitler. In Modern Times, the series marks the need to produce the identical, something without distance from itself, and is therefore meant to satisfy desire immediately, precisely because there is no All or Whole in relation to which an identity can emerge and desire-as-distance be directed. In the case of the soldiers, there is no need for an increasing rhythm in their serial appearance from the off-screen because they stand

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The Origin of Film

under the power of the All equally and, in this sense, mark a regulation of desire. But in Modern Times, the increasing rhythm marks the increasing impossibility of satisfying desire; as such, it indicates the increasing disturbance that the off-screen, expressing the loss of metaphysical origin and the emergence of unregulated desire, inflicts.52 It follows that the factory of Modern Times represents a postmetaphysical space for the production of the identical, that is, a realm that responds to the loss of transcendent grounding (divine original intention) by trying to eliminate the very idea of origin, meaning, and identity. What is remarkable about Chaplin’s interpretation of this postmetaphysical space— and what makes it interesting in the broader context of the study at hand—is that he clearly sees how this space revolves around the question of the screen. The screen, or a certain use of the screen, stands at the very heart of the postmetaphysical space of the factory. Chaplin’s task—which we have defined as liberation of/through the screen—is to undermine the capitalistic screen by means of the poetic or artistic screen. The capitalistic screen, which constitutes the very heart of the factory, is an instrument of surveillance, of monitoring, whose task is to transform every threatening exposure to groundless desire (which the nameless crowds, abandoned by the divine/paternal frame, always seem to be on the verge of activating) into the production of the identical. The workers in Chaplin’s factory are always watched and monitored by a boss, the producer, whose office hosts a series of screens connected to cameras all over the factory; he ensures that, ideally, neither a single moment nor a single activity is not fully dedicated to producing identical things faster and faster. The screen of surveillance is both something that is enabled, made possible, by the general logic of the screen qua exposure to the “off ” and a defensive attempt to eliminate the very being of the screen qua exposure. The screen, as we have seen, expresses the fact that the life of those who belong to the crowd—the life of those who have lost their place in relation to an orienting center and grounding divine word—is exposed to a disorienting and groundless no-specific-place/no-specific-time, the “off.” We might understand the orienting and grounding center given by the divine word not only in terms of a guiding meaning but also in terms of an all-encompassing watchfulness. Understood as divine intention, the Origin encompasses the entire order of reality. Thus, the demise of divine origin—which is likewise the demise of this all-seeing watchfulness

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resulting in exposure to the “off ”—can be understood not only in terms of the ungrounding of desire but also as being struck with blindness. To be struck with blindness, in this context, means that one’s life, one’s reality, is no longer organized in relation to a totalizing vision within which one finds one’s place; instead, one lives one’s life in relation to the absence of a totalizing vision and therefore in relation to the ungrounding of any guaranteed total order. The screen can be said to express the ungrounding of desire as well as being struck with blindness. It also expresses, as we have seen, a radical nonbelonging. It is precisely this capacity not to belong anywhere—the screen’s capacity to express exposure to the “off ” qua the absence of a guaranteed order of reality—that is also activated by the surveillance apparatus of the factory, in that it is a technological apparatus that has no proper place but wants to be anywhere and everywhere; such an apparatus is thus characterized by not belonging properly anywhere, but its non­belonging is in the service of an attempt to suppress groundless desire and blindness and transform them into a totalizing, post–theological/­metaphysical vision and production of the identical. The surveillance screen attempts self-suppression: it is a screen aiming to suppress the very being of the screen qua exposure to the blinding, groundless “off.” Indeed, we might even say that the motivation behind the surveillance screen should be understood as iconoclastic, a project for eliminating the dimension of the image as such, of canceling the threat posed by the “off.” Postmetaphysical life may be defined as life lived in relation to the possibility of the screen, or the possibility of its emergence—in other words, the constant possibility of encountering one’s groundlessness; it means that reality is no longer lived in terms of a watchful center/origin in relation to which one finds a place but in relation to an “origin” understood as the open Whole that is the world. Life in relation to the possibility of the screen means that reality is constantly haunted, open to the possibility of being exposed to the groundlessness of the world. To the extent that this is the case, “threats” can emerge anywhere and anytime: there is no place or time that stands closer than any other to an organizing center; every place and time are equally exposed to the world as open Whole. The surveillance camera / screen attempts to block precisely this threat, in the service of the ideal of transforming blindness into total vision. Ideally, the ­camera/ screen surveys all possible places and times and prevents the eruption of groundless desire in any form it may assume. It does so by assuring that

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every activity manifesting the threat of unhinged desire is immediately transformed into production. Even leisurely smoking in the bathroom— as Chaplin does during one of his breaks—counts as illicit activity. As a surveillance mechanism, the camera/screen attempts to compensate for the loss for the metaphysical/theological All-Seeing watchfulness through a new type of totalizing vision. Whereas divine watchfulness consisted in giving meaning to existence (by governing the distance between the Origin/center and the actual world), the postmetaphysical all-­surveying camera/screen seeks to ensure that there is no meaning whatever, that is, no distance, for any post-theological distance marks an unbridgeable horror in relation to an “origin” / open Whole that is no longer orienting. Needless to say, the totalizing vision at which the surveillance camera aims is a delusion, since the one thing it really wants to survey, namely, the “off ”—the groundless exposure of the world—cannot be seen or monitored; it, after all, is nothing, not any actual content but simply the openness marking the fact that the world no longer has an orienting center. As a matter of course, the surveillance camera remains confounded by a haunting, and the more it attempts to eliminate this haunting by increasing its vigilance, the more its failure is manifest. The postmetaphysical space of the factory is essentially organized around the idea of a self-canceling, iconoclastic screen, a surveillance apparatus trying to eliminate the exposure to groundlessness that the screen, as a disconnected zone that does not belong to any pre-given order, has activated. And Chaplin, as a screen figure activating communication with the “off,” takes on the task, in Modern Times, of witnessing/activating the poetic screen in order to liberate all those who do not belong, whose nonbelonging has been co-opted in the service of a postmetaphysical project of production. It merits emphasis that this capitalistic co-option of the factory workers should not be understood as the bringing of the abandoned back into a frame. Rather, the production-of-the-identical workers occupy a strange zone, the factory, that is neither framed nor out of frame nor unframed. The factory is meant to compensate for the loss of the logic of the (metaphysical) frame by establishing a zone that theoretically does not contain any distance. All the same, distance remains inscribed at the very heart of the factory, in a double way involving the two forms of distance discussed above: regulated distance from the Origin and unregulated distance from the “origin”/world as an open Whole. The result is the double affect of

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the factory, which can perhaps be described as melancholic paranoia. The loss of the metaphysical frame is still very present, experienced as a loss of the center and its adjoining frames—a loss to be compensated by producing immediately given centers (products) that are supposed to make us forget, even though they only end up reminding us of the distance that has gone missing. At the same time, the factory involves exposure to the unregulated distance that opened as an abyss with the demise of metaphysical distance; this is the distance the paranoid surveillance camera / screen apparatus is supposed to capture. the screen as a play zone Chaplin seeks to interrupt this melancholic-paranoid zone, and with it the capitalistic takeover of the screen at its heart. He does so by activating a poetic or artistic screen that operates as an unframing device. The aim of such unframing is to enable exposure to the unregulated distance of the “off,” thereby allowing those who live in relation to the capitalistic possession of the screen to be liberated into their desire, that is, into the experience of distance essential for meaningful existence. However, as we have seen, pure exposure to the groundless, that is, a fully unregulated experience of desire, implies the horror of a complete loss of identity. As such, liberation must enable experience of the groundless in such a way as to allow for a certain containment of desire. The task of the artistic screen, for Chaplin, is to enable a restricted encounter with the “off.” This is achieved by making the screen an arena of activity that experiments with the unframing of desire in a pleasurable rather than horrifying way. This activity is creative and expressive play. The task of Chaplin’s liberation of the screen is to allow those captivated by the logic of the factory to start communicating with the “off.” Such communication by those who have been deemed waste and then recycled into production involves an alternative “use” of waste. Waste is no longer to be recycled productively but rather creatively and expressively.53 Nonmeaning, the negative state of being outside the frame, is to become a creative activation of the off-frame. Creativity means here that the dimension of the “off ” is embraced and activated as a capacity to open a world wherein the places and meanings of things are not determined by an Origin/center given in advance but rather come out of something we might call play.54

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Play is the activation of the nongiven, experimentation with an absence, the play of the world as an open Whole. In his famous discussion of the play of his grandson in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud analyzes the relations between the origin of play and loss and absence, examined in the case of the grandson from the point of view of the loss or departure of the mother. As the mother leaves the child alone, Freud notices, he starts— by taking an object that he repeatedly makes disappear and then come back again (the famous fort-da game)—experimenting with absence and

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disappearance, both activating his own disappearance (for the loss of his mother means for him the loss of who he is) as well as his mother’s. This play with absence should not only be understood as a restorative attempt on the child’s part to bring back the absent mother and his absent self, an Orphic endeavor, but also as the very opening of a world—that is, the opening of a realm structured by the relations between an “origin” under­ stood as a groundlessness, an emptiness from any givenness, an emptiness out of which new identities can emerge—through the activation of a distance (from the mother), an undetermined distance that allows for the question of his own identity to arise out of this playing with distance, insofar as identity has to do with the question of determining one’s place in relation to a distant “origin.”55 The interruption of the factory through the activation of the poetic screen therefore represents a moment in which the effort to defend against the collapse of the metaphysical frame and exposure to groundlessness is co-opted neither into production of the same nor, as in the Nazi logic examined in The Great Dictator, into bringing about a new divinity characterized by holding a power to frame the “off ”—a self-grounding, self-enframing agent that turns the screen into a temple. The screen, for Chaplin, should be released from being a surveillance apparatus or a place of worship and become a playground.56 Chaplin, then, through activating a poetic screen as exposure to the “off,” is the one who, in Modern Times, interrupts the factory and its logic of surveillance, eventually causing the whole factory, through the havoc he wreaks, to become paralyzed and to shut down. This interruption is understood by Chaplin in Modern Times, perhaps for the first time in his work in such an explicit manner, as an event from which the question of the political emerges. His interruptive nature seems to turn him into some sort of “political” leader, the leader of a strike, the one who guides all those who have lost their place. between play and politics As Charlie exits the institution where he landed following his breakdown—the break in his functioning productively in the factory—he walks down the street and notices that a passing truck has dropped a flag. Charlie picks up the flag and tries to stop the truck, waving to get its attention, unaware that behind him (and coming from the off-screen) is a

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The Origin of Film

group of strikers following him as if he were their leader. Charlie, that is, takes the place of a leader of those who occupy the screen as exposed to the “off,” all those whose place in the order of things has been lost, or at least suspended. Indeed, he is ultimately arrested as their leader. Yet what kind of leader is he? Where is he taking those who no longer belong? First of all, let’s note that his leadership is blind, without self-awareness, and not a matter of will. In fact, it emerges from Chaplin’s most conspicuous feature: his failure to belong, his blindness to the context in which he finds himself. All the same, it is his particular way of not belonging that turns him into a new kind of guide. We have defined his way of not belonging as poetic trash collecting—the capacity for relating creatively to waste, for finding a power of liberation in it. In the scene in which he picks up the fallen flag, he is figuratively presented as a repurposing, creative trash collector, picking up something that has become waste and making signs with it, thereby turning it into a means of communication. Indeed, when read allegorically this transformation of waste becomes the event around which the many coming from the off-screen—arriving as if out of nowhere, like the abandoned child of The Kid—start to gather. But how, exactly, should we understand Chaplin, the unwitting and blind “leader” of the placeless many, as a political figure here? Or how, exactly, should we understand the relation between his being a creative liberator of the screen/off-screen and the dimension of the political?57 poetic sovereignty In the most general terms, a leader should be understood as someone who speaks in the name of the origin. This holds whether or not the origin is conceptualized according to the metaphysical/theological model as transcendent ground, a divine intention, or according to the postmetaphysical understanding of the origin as groundlessness or the openness of the whole. The origin, in both its metaphysical and its postmetaphysical understanding, can be conceptualized from two perspectives: its function as the origin and possibility of meaning, and the way it marks a withdrawal from meaning. In the first case, the origin represents the center in relation to which the meaning and directionality of everything else is conceptualized, whether we are dealing with a closed, metaphysical system, where the Everything

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is understood as the All (a cosmos), or a postmetaphysical Everything understood as an open Whole (a world). In the closed version of everything (the All), as we have seen, the origin is understood as a certain transcendent meaningful intention, a pre-ordered determination of the whole. In this light, a leader is someone who can communicate with this divine or transcendent ordering and direct everyone and everything according to it. In the open version of the whole, the origin is understood as an empty “background,” meaningless in itself, from which new meanings can arise. The leader, in this instance, does not speak in the name of a transcendent meaning or eternal order; instead, her or his task is to regulate and delimit the capacity for the creation of new, unprecedented meanings—the capacity for the unforeseen organization of and decisions about the meaning of the whole. That is, if the world is most fundamentally an open Whole—its openness marking, as we have seen, that there is a whole precisely because there is no meaning in advance that encompasses everything, that the nature of the communication of everything, the being-in-common in the Whole and in relation to the Whole,58 is constantly at stake—then the leader represents a means for keeping the world open, that is, allowing for debate about the being-in-common. At the same time, according to this logic, the leader also delimits the infinity of possibilities, serving as a framing mechanism for distinguishing between legitimate possibilities of shared existence and illegitimate ones. My aim is to give a conceptual context for the nature of Chaplin’s leadership, the leadership of the trash collector—leadership we can understand as poetic sovereignty. The poetic sovereign, I suggest, does not speak in the name of an origin insofar as origin is understood from the perspective of the establishment of meaning (be it in its metaphysical or postmetaphysical modality). Rather, the poetic leader speaks in the name of the origin insofar as it is understood from the perspective of withdrawal from meaning. This withdrawal itself has two fundamental modalities, a metaphysical one and one involving the groundless world as an open Whole.59 To understand the metaphysical modality of the experience of the origin as a withdrawal from meaning, one can refer to the division articulated in the classical age of Greek thinking between two relations to the origin: the Platonic conception, which considers the origin under the imperative of achieving a philosophical vision of the Ideas, and the tragic conception exemplified by Oedipus Rex, which concerns a blinding by

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The Origin of Film

an enigma—a traumatic event that exposes one to an inscrutable oracular pronouncement signifying that the capacity to communicate with the meaning given by the origin has been interrupted. It is not that the origin no longer means—hence the still-metaphysical quality of this tragic relation to the origin—but rather that the capacity to communicate with it is fundamentally and constitutionally incomplete, a lack of communication that signifies humanity’s tragic destiny.60 The tragic poet has the task of communicating this break in communication with the origin to us. In this light, the poetic is what communicates the very limits of political leadership, the limits of the capacity to communicate with the meaning of the origin.61 The Athenian amphitheater (like and unlike the movie theater, the house of the cinematic screen), in contrast to the agora, is not a political space but a space that marks the outer limit of politics. In this logic, it represents a space where the failure of meaningful communication with the origin appears; here, the political leader stands exposed to and is undermined by the poetic (the tragic, in metaphysical terms). If in fact the leader is one who communicates with and speaks in the name of the origin, then the tragic poet—who also communicates with the origin but from the perspective of the failure to access its meaning—can be understood as someone who leads the multitude gathered in the amphitheater to the limits of the theater, like Moses leading the Israelites into the no-man’s-land of the desert;62 from here, they can return to the city with renewed vigor, having undergone the cathartic experience of surviving an encounter with nonpolitical space, the space of the destruction of the (political) world, that is, the meaningful sharing of existence. In the postmetaphysical logic of the open Whole, the nature of the communication with the origin proves slightly different. Now the withdrawal from meaningfulness of the origin that the poetic leader communicates is no longer to be understood as an enigmatic meaning. That is, it is no longer understood as essentially unavailable and inaccessible to the human—an inaccessibility signifying that human life is characterized by an inescapable blindness and dictated by a meaning, a destiny that can never become available (at least at the right moment). Rather, it stands for the groundlessness that provides the condition for the very question of meaning but is itself neither meaningful nor not meaningful—“simply” non-sense. Non-sense, in this context, refers to a nothingness (of determination in advance) that is the basis for the question of sense or meaning,

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that is, the question of the direction and orientation of things in relation to each other in an open Whole. In this modern constellation, the poetic “leader” does not communicate the inaccessibility of the meaning of the origin but the non-sensical aspect of the origin.63 Indeed, this is what Chaplin, as leader of the strikers, of those who gather on-screen from the “off,” communicates. The space of the screen, of those who do not belong to a meaningfully organized world, is conceived in this scene as a space of transition between the event of the strike—an event we have defined as standing at the limits of the political inasmuch as it suspends the decisions reached about the organization of the world, the organization of being together—and the ­poetic exposure to the origin as non-sense.64 The “space” Chaplin activates is not political so much as it marks the suspension of politics and exposure to a realm of play, where all those gathered by the poetic “leader” are opened to communication with the groundlessness of the open Whole. Out of this exposure they suspend all the political frames / leadership mechanisms that have been instituted and pleasurably occupy a nonplace that opens the possibility of politics, insofar as it gives rise to new frameworks and decisions about the meaning of being-in-common.65 The space of the screen as activated by Riefenstahl/Hitler is not political, either, but in a very different way. Here, the screen opened by the poetic sovereign—which marks the “space” between the limits of politics and experimental play—is co-opted in the name of another sovereign (the Führer), who transforms exposure to non-sense into a transcendent symbolic meaning of which he is the master, over which he triumphs by force of will. In consequence, the Hitlerian screen represents a space that is neither truly political (in the sense of being a space where a decision about being-in-common is sought) nor nonpolitical (i.e., poetic); rather, it stifles both: it is an apolitical, symbolic, mythological space. In sum, it is important to note that Chaplin, in direct opposition to Hitler, does not will his leadership; instead, he stumbles into it accidentally and blindly. What makes him unique is that he knows how to transform blind stumbling—something that happens to him beyond his possibility to will it—into a principle of play and of creative nonbelonging, turning loss into a space of expressive and playful freedom. Perhaps the most beautiful figure in the Chaplin universe, and certainly in ­Modern Times, for this creative transformation is the famous skating scene in the department store. Eyes covered, Chaplin skates to the very

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The Origin of Film

edge of the abyss—but, as if guided by a sixth sense, he knows how not to fall into it and dances at its limits. As a poetic leader, Chaplin comes in the name of no specific agenda or demand, no specific political project. His charismatic leadership, his movie stardom, consists in the creative capacity to blindly open a “space,” the screen, as an arena where the many who come from the “off ”—the many who do not belong to any frame, who have been deemed either meaningless or waste that should be recycled for production—can freely gather and begin to genuinely communicate with their “own” nonbelonging, now embraced as a creative and expressive principle, namely, the principle of play. As opened by Chaplin, the screen is the “space” where the many, ­before settling on any determinate configuration—that is, before politically determining how their world is to be shared—experiment freely with their nonbelonging, that is, the lack of a determined relation vis-à-vis the open Whole that is the world. The space of the strike—the space of the interruption from appropriation by productive work—is transformed, through Chaplin, into a site of free play. The space of the strike and the space of the screen that Chaplin opens, even though they both represent a place of suspension, cannot be fully identified. In consequence, politics should not be understood as merging with art and Chaplin’s poetic leadership should not be confused with political guidance.66 Rather, the strike interrupts politics to an extent; it interrupts agreement about the logic of the sharing of the world. This interruption has the potential to transform, via the work of art as exposure to the groundless “off,” into a nonpolitical activity at the threshold of politics: play. Play, in turn, makes new political organization possible inasmuch as it suspends all standing decisions about the sharing of the world. A leader—one who speaks in the name of the origin—is also someone around whom the many gather. The many can assemble either in a political capacity, that is, as those who, through the mediation of their leader, realize a sharing of the world, an organized form of being together, or in a poetic capacity, gathering around the leader as one who exposes them to the origin’s other side, its opacity to meaning. As a concept, “the many” refers to a plurality that is still empty in a sense, that is, the identities and places in existence of its members have not yet been distributed. Human plurality, then, stands in communication with the origin; it communicates with what poses the question of

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the meaning of the whole and, in the process, the question of its need to organize itself and find what place its life should have within the context of the whole. In other words, human plurality does not receive its organization in a “natural” way, as a determined given; rather, it has to come to it, to figure out its mode of life in relation to existence in its entirety. An empty instance, the many marks the way in which an organized plurality is not a given but has to emerge out of groundlessness. This empty moment in the life of a plurality, the moment of the many, has both a political and a poetic aspect. Politically, the many are all those who do not yet have a place in the context of the whole and need to come together and decide about the organization of their existence, about how they should share the world. Poetically, the dimension of the many opens when political decisions have been suspended and the plurality, having become empty again, starts gathering around the experience (whether playful, pleasurable, or horrifying) of the suspension of its world. At this moment the many start experiencing their manyness as such, so to speak, start experiencing their empty background that is nothing but the fact that their organization is not given to them in advance. The leader, the activator of the origin, is therefore the one in relation to whom the empty many gather either at the political moment of negotiating an organized sharing of the world (in which case we are talking of a political leader) or at the poetic moment when all the decisions about this sharing have been suspended and an experience of emptiness as such comes to the fore (in which case we are talking of a poetical sovereign as activator of a non-sensical groundlessness); in the latter case, the possibility of playing with emptiness for its own sake arises and may be experimented with.

the great dictator —the medium of the many The question arises, then, of the nature of Chaplin’s leadership, which we have called poetic. It surfaces in acute form for the first time in Modern Times but is then tested and explored at greater length and depth in The Great Dictator, by staging a conflict, a confrontation, with another kind of leadership—Hitler’s. It is crucial that Chaplin felt that such an investigation into the nature of his leadership could only occur by opening the question of the relations between poetic leadership and political leadership and, moreover, by

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The Origin of Film

showing that a true understanding of poetic leadership, of the poetic relation to the many, involves dismantling a false interpretation of political leadership, that of Hitler. Hitlerian leadership actually entails the vanishing of the political and, in a sense, the disappearance of the “manyness” of the many, who are transformed into a single entity inasmuch as they come under the power of the One. This dismantling, Chaplin suggests, should liberate both the political and the poetic into their true natures (which are not to be conflated), for a false understanding not only stifles true politics but also co-opts and destroys the poetic, transforming it into a spectacle aimed at canceling the manyness of the many. In fact, it might be that a false understanding of the political is first and foremost motivated by the desire to stifle a threat that the poetic presents: the prospect of the dissolution of frames and structures of belonging. Two essential features distinguish The Great Dictator from previous films: first, for the first time in his cinematic career, Chaplin speaks, or comes to speech; and second, he partially abandons his tramp character and seems to embody a specific character, who is, moreover, an actual historical personage, namely, Hitler.67 This is why the two central scenes in the movie primarily concern the question of speech and the nature of Charlie’s incarnation of Hitler: Chaplin’s first, non-sensical address to the crowd, as Hynkel, and his final—meaningful, messianic—speech as the barber, mistaken for Hynkel, attempting to transform the crowd. What significance does it hold that Chaplin confronts Hitler first and foremost through the question of speech? Why is it that Chaplin has to come to language, as it were, to undermine Hitler? Two things stand out right away. First of all, to a large extent Chaplin’s essence, his cinematic problem par excellence—the cinematic problem of the greatest movie star of the silent era, who beyond all probability extended the silent era up to 1940—concerns speech, or more precisely, the lack of speech: the inability to speak, silence and muteness. In hindsight, we can understand that Chaplin’s silence did not simply result from the technical conditions of film at a certain historical moment; rather, the medium of silent film found its greatest embodiment in Chaplin because it corresponded most profoundly with his own poetic problem: to give expression to the mute.68 Because the problem of muteness is his poetic essence, Chaplin insisted on separating the question of his silence from the technical era and made it last beyond its “natural” end. This is also why, of all the movie stars of the silent era, he managed to extend the conditions of silent film the

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longest and was the one whose transition from silent film to the talkies proved the most successful and most significant. Second, the confrontation at the level of speech between Chaplin and Hitler in The Great Dictator makes it clear that Chaplin regards the question of speech as occupying the very heart of Hitlerism; thus, it is above all Hitler’s speech that he needs to target in order to dismantle Nazi logic. The confrontation raises three questions. The first concerns substance: What does Chaplin take Hitler’s speech to be on its own? The second concerns relations: Why is it that Chaplin feels compelled to enter into what we have called a battle with Hitler/Hynkel at the level of speech? Why, in other words, does Chaplin feel he has to speak—to enter the field of speech himself—only with the appearance of Hitlerian discourse? What exactly is at stake for Chaplin in the hybrid speech of Chaplin/ Hitler, that is, Hynkel? The third question is strategic: What means does Chaplin use to dismantle Hitlerian speech, both for himself and for his audience? Beginning with a quick response to the second question, I want to suggest the following short formula: Chaplin felt compelled to enter into a battle over speech with Hitler, felt compelled to finally speak on film, because Hitler had taken away his muteness. In order to regain his capacity for silence and muteness—a capacity Hitler has threatened to deprive him of—Chaplin must go through speech. We might say that the battle between Chaplin and Hitler, the battle that finds its expression in the force field Hynkel, is the following: Will Hitler manage to deprive Chaplin of his muteness, or will Chaplin manage to dispossess Hitler of his speech? But what in Hitler’s speech has deprived Chaplin of his (poetic) muteness or silence? In order to answer this, we need to examine not only what Chaplin understands Hitlerian speech to be, but also why such a speech seems to threaten Chaplin in particular.69 To begin with, Hitler does not represent only a general principle of silencing muteness for Chaplin (although he does this as well) but also a more specific principle of silencing Chaplin’s muteness. This is the case because Hitler is Chaplin’s double: as a media figure and movie star, as a relation to the many, the crowds, and as a leader activating a relation to the origin of meaning. Most important—and this is the heart of the matter—Hitler is Chaplin’s double because they are rival activators of the relations between, on the one hand, the nonmeaning or non-sense at the heart of speech and, on the other hand, the crowds that admire them and over which they

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The Origin of Film

seem to have a certain charismatic power. While Chaplin’s poetic and cinematic power (his effect on the cinematic crowds, understood as all those disenfranchised by the frame and living in relation to the wasteland of the screen) derives from his becoming the activator of a certain kind of mute nonmeaning, Hitler’s political power, in Chaplin’s analysis, and his effect on the crowds, understood as all those disenfranchised from political expression, derives from his activation of a specific type of non-sense.70 Hitler’s power is the exact opposite and elimination of Chaplin’s power in relation to the crowds. Every leader, we might say, is inhabited by nonmeaning. By definition, someone who speaks in the name of an origin inhabits a realm that does not exactly belong in the meaningful world but rather stands as the point of reference for a meaningful world. As such, the leader is not a part of the meaningful world, which only originates in relation to him or her. Take, for example, a command, one of the main modalities of a leader’s speech. The command derives its power not from being meaningful (i.e., having a recognizable place in an order of things) but from being legitimate; it is recognized as being tied to the origin, which activates the order granting things their meaning. To have power, which is what characterizes the leader, to speak in the name of the origin, is therefore to occupy a realm of nonmeaning. Chaplin’s task, then, is to show that the power he communicates through his muteness, as well as the origin in whose name he speaks (which we have defined as a groundless “off ” that gathers the cinematic multitude), differs from the power Hitler communicates through a certain nonmeaningfulness of speech. As we have seen, Hitler does not speak in the name of the origin but claims to be one. Being the mute expressivity of the “off ” must be distinguished from being the nonmeaningful speech of the selfgrounding All; indeed, the speech of the All aims precisely to suffocate the expressivity of the mute inasmuch as it attempts to eliminate exposure to nonmeaning and achieve total control over meaning. Chaplin seems to have perceived that Hitler’s every utterance can be understood not as meaningful in itself but as pretending to contain the power over all meanings; it seeks to exercise the power around which the world in its entirety configures itself. Accordingly, it is better for Hitler not to make sense in his speech, for it is precisely the nonmeaning­ful element of his discourse that activates the All, resulting in a non-­sensicality that seems surrounded with the sacred aura of the Origin, the secret con-

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duit to power over the whole.71 This sacred aura and the effects of secret communication with a symbolizing All are what Chaplin must interrupt, an interruption through which he aims to liberate both himself, faced by the threat of being swallowed by this power of the All, and the mesmerized crowds assembled around this sacred power that as the power of the All unifies them under itself. Chaplin needs, then, to desacralize Hitler’s speech. His strategy for doing so is highly complex, but it essentially comprises two moves, to which Chaplin’s first, non-sensical speech as Hynkel is dedicated: first, the reduction to non-sense, and second, substituting one type of non-sense for another. The reduction strategy tries to dismantle Hitler’s auratic and sacred non-sense by exposing its lack of meaning as a nonmeaningfulness that does not belong to one communicating with the Origin of (and beyond) all meanings but rather to one who has not even reached the ability to mean (who is before meaning, not beyond it) and therefore cannot occupy a place in a meaningful world. In other words, the point is to show that Hitler is infantile. Hitler’s non-sense is not auratic, Chaplin “argues,” but closer to the frustrated babble of one who has not yet managed to articulate a world and can only express basic desires and dislikes (e.g., wanting “der Wiener schnitzel Mit der sauerkraut!” and disgust at “die Chuten!”). In this light, Hitler appears as a charismatic and angry infant who has managed to convince the crowds that his babble and clumsy inarticulateness is actually a secret communication with an All of meaning (an All around which they gather, for it is that which gives them a commonality, a common world, functioning as it does as that to which every meaning refers, the origin of meaning). Chaplin exposes the infantilism behind the aura. One technique involves making Hynkel’s speech a combination of non-sensical sounds and basic words, principally food items that everybody, even non-Germans, understands, such that, as with an inarticulate child, everyone can understand his basic wants even if he cannot articulate them clearly. By making the understandable words objects of basic desire, the rest of the speech—which otherwise might have seemed to communicate mysteriously with the All—is promptly reduced to something readily understood. The meaning that is clear even to those who do not know German infantilizes what might otherwise have fooled them into mistaking it for something profound. In consequence, we may sum up Hynkel’s speech with one of his clearest utterances: “baloney.”

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The Origin of Film

Another mechanism for exposing aura as infantilism is the voice-over translating what Hynkel says into regular English. This translation is highly complex but consists of two main strategies: first, infantilization; and second, the transformation of Hynkel’s potentially sacred non-sensicality into a secret and potentially menacing intention. From the point of view of the first strategy, the interpreter’s slightly condescending yet patient and correct tone gives the impression of a grown-up familiar with the failures of his child’s speech who can therefore read the not fully clear intention behind this speech and explain it to others. This both infantilizes the speech, showing its distance from the meaning it fails to attain, and neutralizes the possible aura by explaining it as an intention that has not yet been articulated successfully. Yet the voice-over translator does not only operate by turning the babble into meaning and intention, thus releasing it from the power of non-sensicality, but also (and hence the second strategy) by himself introducing a certain gap into the meaning of the situation through ellipsis, that is, through the obvious fact of not fully telling us what is being intended by the speech that he has supposedly made fully meaningful to us. This is a particularly sophisticated technique in Chaplin’s dismantling of the auratic dimension of Hitler’s non-sensicality: it is clear, owing to some words we seem to understand from Hynkel’s speech and to the gap in length and emotion between what Hynkel says and what the translator says, that something is missing. However, because the translator’s way of speaking is a fully meaningful one, the ellipsis in his speech, though introducing a gap in meaning, a gap that something in Hynkel’s speech we do not fully understand seems to occupy, has the effect of making this gap the arena of transformation from enigmatic and auratic non-sensicality into a hidden and sinister intention, thus into something that is of the order of meaning, albeit a meaning that, though we do not fully comprehend, surely contains something that is supposed to remain hidden from us, and as such is most likely aimed to harm us. The transformation from enigmatic non-sense to secret intention that occurs elliptically, then, is a liberation from a spell; we now know that the non-sense means something—and something we should worry about. As a first moment of his battle with Hitlerian speech, then, Chaplin turns its sacred oracularity into Hynkelian infantilism and secret and sinister intention, exposing the ersatz divinity of Hitler as an angry, hungry, and inarticulate child’s drive for domination. Yet this desacralization is not enough if Chaplin is to liberate both himself and the crowd/­audience

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from the suffocating effects of Hitlerian speech. To this end, Chaplin must substitute Hitler’s non-sense with his own non-sense. This substitution marks a step beyond the negative dismantling of Hitler’s speech by introducing a positive dimension of freedom. Indeed, the voice-over narrating Hynkel’s rise emphasizes that it is free speech that has been lost. How does Chaplin, the messiah of the mute, introduce freedom into the speech of his evil double, the false messiah? By activating, out of ­Hynkelian infantile nonmeaningfulness, a different non-sensicality and a different infancy, infancy now understood as a nonmeaningful engagement with the groundlessness of meaning itself, the dimension of the “off.” Hitlerian infantilism is thus to be replaced by Chaplinian infancy; and the auratic self-constituting ground that the ersatz divinity Hitler tried to erect is now made to tremble and collapse into the groundless “off,” the world as a meaningless open Whole out of which meanings can emerge. From this perspective, Hynkel’s non-sensical language is a joyful and playful interruption: effacing gestures, gestures eliminating meaning, take it back to infancy, as it were, in order to open it up to the infancy of language, that is, to the non-sensical “off.” Hynkel’s speech marks the battlefield between Hitler and Chaplin, the encounter between pseudo-sacred infantilism and playful infancy. We are invited to gather around this joyous, non-sensical speech through our laughter and to become, each of us, one of the many, that is, a plurality sharing the originary nonmeaningfulness of the open Whole. This nonsensical speech aims to liberate the many from their position as members of a fascistic crowd, standing under the power of a self-grounding All. The field of forces embodied by Hynkel thus involves struggle over speech, silence, and non-sense. Who will swallow whom? Will Hitler’s elimination of muteness by establishing himself as a self-grounding All suffocate Chaplin—deprive of him his poetic, playful capacity for communication of and with muteness and silence? Or will Chaplin’s substitution of one form of non-sense for another manage to dispossess Hitler of his speech—take it away from him, unground, unframe, and expose it to the “off ”? By being forced to speak on film in order not to suffocate (i.e., to keep the screen/off-screen as an arena of possible liberation), however, Chaplin also discovers something completely new to him that transforms his very understanding of the significance of speech. What he discovers is that speech (which he seemed earlier to have associated with order, paternal framing, repression of the many who do not belong) does not stand

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The Origin of Film

o­ pposed to silence or muteness, to the communication with the “off,” but instead that muteness (the “unsaying” of speech, as it were, bringing it back to its non-sensical origin, thus its infancy) is immanent, internal to speech; the poet’s challenge, Chaplin now realizes, is to activate such muteness. To be faithful to the calling of the mute, which Chaplin sees as his task, no longer means opposing speech but rather opening up a new speech in which silence, as the non-sensical origin, is immanent. How can speech mark within itself its own relation to muteness? One way would be—and it is the way Chaplin first took in Modern Times and then perfected in Hynkel’s speech—is to turn it into non-sense, to undermine its meaningfulness, understood at first as a certain operation of ordering and thus implying a logic of exclusion, and expose it through bringing about its collapse into the dimension of the “off,” thereby enabling a liberation from its ordering and opening up a new expressivity, understood as communication with the non-sensical origin of meaning. Yet two problems, I think, started troubling Chaplin in regard to this solution. First, this strategy of undermining speech experienced as a principle of ordering still seems to make too sharp a distinction between meaningful speech and non-sense, as if the one were simply external to the other. Second, through his examination of the logic of production in Modern Times and of fascism in The Great Dictator—two efforts to eliminate the “off ”-(screen)—it seems that Chaplin realized (whether consciously or unconsciously) that the problem of speech in the era of both production and fascism (represented, respectively, by the controlling speech of the factory manager in Modern Times and by Hitler’s speech haunting The Great Dictator) is not that it is meaningful and, as such, suffocates the voiceless, but that it is no longer meaningful. That is, fascistic and capitalistic speech perverts language, no longer allowing it to constitute the arena where meaning happens. The enemy is not speech as such but, at a prior historical moment, a certain metaphysically inflected speech, and worse still, in the age of capitalistic production and fascism, a new kind of speech that is anti-speech. Speech operating according to the logic of the paternal frame involves separating those allowed to communicate with the Origin from those who are not. The latter are excluded from relating to the Origin and therefore do not occupy a position in the world of meaning. All the same—at least for those allowed to occupy the world—there is a genuine experience of meaning or meaningfulness insofar as genuine communica-

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tion occurs with an Origin of meaning, which by definition is not fully accessible. To live in meaning, to achieve a meaningful existence, implies communication with what stands beyond or in excess of m ­ eaning. However, the demise of the metaphysical/sacred model of the Origin as a meaning beyond our reach, by our relation to which we are nevertheless guided and around which we organize our lives, has created a certain horror and brought about defensive attempts to dominate the abyss that now gapes wide. These efforts—be it in the mode of production, wherein the very idea of origin has been eliminated, or the fascistic mode, whereby an earthly figure is supposed to coincide with the origin and eliminate the gap—evacuate the very substance of real meaning, namely, communication with an excessive origin, with what is thus not meaningful (either not fully meaningful, since we cannot reach its transcendent intention, or not at all meaningful, as in the postmetaphysical model of the world as a groundless open Whole out of which meaning can arise). For Chaplin, this implies that what needs to be undermined is not only speech understood on the metaphysical model (i.e., creating frames of exclusion that nevertheless allow for a meaningful existence) but also (and it is no coincidence that he made this discovery in the first film in which he experimented simultaneously with speaking on-screen and with a historical critique, namely, Modern Times) speech that proves even more suffocating because it excludes everyone from meaning by evacuating the world itself of any meaning, that is, from a relation to an excessive origin that cannot itself be part of the meaningful world but out of which the meaningful world arises. The speech that Chaplin craves—which guides his complex experimentation with the talkie—is liberating and poetic speech; it should both disturb and desacralize traditional speech, a speech still guided by a logic of exclusion, circulating around an origin modeled on sacred logic, an origin with which not everyone is entitled to communicate, as well as dismantle and expose the modern anti-speech exemplified, in two different modalities, by capitalism and fascism. Devising new, poetic speech implicitly means realizing, first of all, that every culture or world is inhabited by two levels of speech: that of every­ day meanings, which we use practically, and another, which we may call the speech of the origin, whose task is to activate a relation to the very source of speech (however one understands it). Traditionally, these two levels of speech seemed to be mutually exclusive, sacred and profane. Thus, for example, in an ancient culture there could be a sharp distinc-

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The Origin of Film

tion between regular and sacred speech, the latter of which could belong to a class whose task it was to be responsible for it, to be in charge of the relation to the Origin, understood as a mysterious sacred intention.72 To an extent, everyday speech always carries within itself the way the speech of the origin has been activated; in other words, it bears the trace of the decision regarding the way the origin has been understood. Thus, we might understand Hitler’s speeches as origin speeches, that is, as the activation of language determining the relation to the origin, which in turn defines the terms in which other uses of speech operate. Inasmuch as Hitler, as we have seen, posits himself as the origin—functioning both as divinity and priest, as it were—every other use of language within the Nazi world derives its authority from and is implicitly guided by Hitler as origin. Hence the second implication of Chaplin’s project for poetic cinematic speech: dismantling both modern anti-language or anti-speech (the language and speech of the Nazi and capitalist worlds) and the metaphysical language of exclusionary speech (implicitly reliant on authoritative communication with a sacred origin) requires, first and foremost, a new activation of the relation between speech and the origin. This activation is the task of the poetic, the task Chaplin takes upon himself, and only if it is achieved can a new relation to everyday speech be embraced. In contrast to both traditional (metaphysically conceived) speech, which depends on a transcendent origin, and modern (fascistic and capitalistic) speech, which either immanentizes transcendence (i.e., functions as a governing meaning that is fully immanent and possessed by a worldly enactor), as with Hitler, or completely cancels the idea of origin (as with capitalistic production), the postmetaphysical and postfascistic speech that Chaplin tries to bring about through the achievement of a new kind of poetic speech implies an origin that is nothing other than what we have called the open Whole of the world as such; by poetically communicating with this non-sensical groundlessness (through the activation of the off-screen, in the cinema) an arena is opened in which unforeseen meanings can emerge. Poetic speech keeps the world open in excess of any advance determination; consequently, everyday speech becomes free to engage with new and unpredictable meanings and orientations. The task of poetic speech, then, is to replace the sacred ground (or in a case such as Hitler, self-instituting ground) with the groundlessness of the world. Its discovery means that muteness, silence, or non-sense is not an indicator of some other realm but rather provides a haunting back-

The Actor of the Crowd

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ground of speech. Muteness or silence now becomes a source of freedom that both belongs to this world, since it implies no other realm, and at the same time is not exactly in this world, since it is its (empty) background. It is a sort of externality within the world. In other words, the two levels of speech—the speech of the origin and speech of the world—still need to be differentiated, but they can no longer be seen as external to each other; instead, the one haunts the other, external yet internal to it—they are “extimate,” in Lacanian parlance. The mistake made by some romantic thinkers, for example, aiming to bring about the birth of a new poetic speech, lies in forgetting the essentially dual nature of speech and wanting to reduce all speech to its poetic function, to replace the fallen language of the world with a more authentic one. This leads to suppressing both the poetic and the everyday, inasmuch as the poetic no longer activates an emptying groundlessness that allows new meanings to arise but mistakes itself for speech in its entirety, a new speech that will replace humanity’s fallen language. Both the poetic and the everyday world suffocate in the process. In order to illuminate this co-implication of poetic speech and worldly speech, Chaplin ultimately goes beyond non-sensical speech and shows that his poetic project as the messiah of the mute achieves fulfillment in the coming-to-be of meaningful speech that displays its mute or empty background—a source and origin out of which free speech, the freedom of meaning, can arise. This happens with the barber’s final speech in The Great Dictator. He literally comes to replace Hynkel, to speak in his stead, thereby substituting his own conception of speech (as a new kind of relation between meaningfulness and the origin) for Hynkel’s v­ ariety of non-sense (pseudo-sacred speech eliminating the actual possibility of meaningfulness of everyday speech). This coming-to-speech, when Chaplin finally embraces the talkie, when he speaks on film in such a way that silence is expressed as a haunting immanent to speech, represents the culmination of his cinematic project of becoming a witness to the mute. This meaningful speech is a speech that inscribes muteness within itself, a muteness that is no longer simply external to it, by showing its origin to be not another realm—be it that of a sacred transcendent intention or even of a poetic muteness separated from speech—but freedom understood as the non-givenness in advance of worldly meanings. The empty background of speech, the “off ” to which Chaplin is a witness, is nothing but this freedom, and the activation of the relation to it is the



The Origin of Film

transmission of a newly discovered capacity to speak. Chaplin’s speech is something that he must utter (i.e., it is a result of an imperative to which he is subject), as Colonel Schultz tells the barber, but that the barber initially claims he cannot utter. He nevertheless discovers that in fact he can do so, and this “can” expresses a freedom through which he liberates the crowds gathered to listen. As if struck by Colonel Schultz’s demand, Chaplin sits baffled and speechless for a few seconds, as if trying to understand how his muteness can actually become a source of speech. Then music is heard from offscreen, which carries him to the podium, as it were, from which he will speak. In this beautifully complex and ambivalent moment, it is not clear whether he is hypnotized by this musical apparition—subject to a certain power of expressive nonspeech arising from the groundless “off ”—or chooses to stand up and speak. In this indecisiveness resides the power of his speech: on the one hand, it seems that he is summoned, called, to speak in spite of himself, suffering an exposure to something of which he is not in control; yet, on the other hand, his unique capacity to hear this mute call from elsewhere, the call of the “off,” is at the source of something he can do, that is, speak freely. By becoming a witness to the non-sensicality of the “off ” Chaplin can become one who speaks freely, who can activate a speech not governed by any given meaning, a speech in which muteness is thus immanent. A complex mixture of passivity, that is, being called, and activity, that is, the discovery of “I can speak” (which means being able to speak willingly out of the freedom into which I have been called by that which is beyond me) occurs at this moment: speech is born in him through exposure to the calling of the “off,” yet this speech is also his own free choice, in the sense that he paradoxically learns to “own” that by which he is disowned, the “off.” It bears repeating: this moment is the culmination of Chaplin’s oeuvre as a whole, when he fulfills his calling as the messiah of the mute, of all who do not belong and have been relegated to meaninglessness. After this moment, Chaplin has nothing more to say, as it were, and so The Tramp vanishes forever following this speech, never to make another appearance. The very end of the scene already marks this disappearance: The Tramp fades away into a voice coming from off-screen, an address without origin, the address of the “off.” This first speech on film, which is also The Tramp’s last, is Chaplin’s swan song.

The Actor of the Crowd

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But this might not be the only reason The Tramp disappears. The culmination of Chaplin’s calling also confronts him with the anxious and horrifying possibility of utter failure. For a brief and painful moment in his speech—a moment from which Chaplin perhaps never freed ­himself—it seems he no longer knows (although it is very hard to interpret the opaque and unreadable look on his face) whether he can distinguish between himself, Chaplin, desiring to be a true messiah of the mute crowds, whose task is to liberate them into a new expressivity, and the false messiah Hitler, in battling whom he has risked what is most fundamental to his being. Does his coming-to-speak—with all the complexity it entails—ultimately produce a different effect from the mechanism he has so heroically attacked? It is not clear whether he now faces a liberated crowd, released by the speech into a new expressivity, or a faceless, thoughtless crowd, not unlike the one that cheered Hynkel’s speech. Can it be that Chaplin, the unframing movie star—who sought to be the one through whom all those without a place in the meaningful order of things would find their home on-screen and establish a communication with the dimension of the “off ”—is greeted by a multitude no different from the one that welcomed Hitler? There is no way to guarantee that this is not the case, no way to ensure the response of the crowds. This, perhaps, is what Chaplin’s horrified look expresses as he gazes at the crowds toward the end of his speech. Beyond his success or failure in directing the way in which the many respond to him, however, there is the question of understanding the type of speech Chaplin has activated through the cinematic screen. This speech toward the end of The Great Dictator perhaps marks the apotheosis of Chaplin’s cinema, and of the talkies in general, as a medium through which one can express the muteness in speech: turn speech into the means by which not-belonging opens to new expressivity by communicating with the “off.” In this sense, when The Tramp speaks for the first and last time, speech becomes universal: it no longer marks a division between those who belong inside the frame (and therefore possess the right to mean and speak) and those who are outside the frame (hence mute and without that right). Everyone and anyone, through the mediation of Chaplin, can become a participant in this new form of off-screen speech whose heart is the expression of muteness, in that everyone can come to embody this muteness, this not having a place, as a form of expressivity. Everyone comes together as participants in a speech whose meaningfulness is not dictated

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The Origin of Film

in advance by any given frame. Everyone becomes a member of the screen/ off-screen. The breaking of divisions and barriers (of frames) that ­Chaplin calls for—a call repeating and deepening the breaking of windows in The Kid—is thus indeed performed and activated through this speech, a speech in which silent film and the talkie have finally achieved, for the first and possibly the last time, their ultimate fusion, the advent of a medium whose speech is the expressivity of the silent.

§3 Howard Hawks’s Idea of Genre

It has often been remarked that Howard Hawks, perhaps more than any other director, succeeded in creating classic movies in a remarkable variety of genres. He made screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday), westerns (Red River, Rio Bravo), gangster films (Scarface), musicals (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), war films (Sgt. York), film noirs (The Big Sleep), science fiction films (The Thing from Another World ), and historical epics (Land of the Pharaohs).1 This fact alone suggests that Howard Hawks had a distinct idea, perhaps unique to him, about what relates the art of film to the question of genre. In the following, I would like to test this hypothesis by taking a look at one of Hawks’s most brilliant films, 1952’s Monkey Business. What distinguishes Monkey Business, as well as the film that can be seen as its companion piece, 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is that Hawks is at his most profoundly meta-cinematic here. All of his major movies (like major works in general) are also “about” themselves, that is, they stage scenes allegorizing the emergence of, and encounter with, the work of art. Yet both the films in question take an additional step. In these films, Hawks has hit upon framing devices that allow him to cut the fictional world of the movie in two, so to speak. On the one hand, there is a somewhat “realistically” organized narrative, while on the other hand, dreamlike sections intrude into and puncture this narrative. They function as laboratories (quite literally in Monkey Business) in which the cinematic image’s various modes of being are tested. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Hawks exploits the established logic of the musical—the most “artificial” and therefore meta-cinematic film genre, inasmuch as the subject is always the 173

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On Film Genre

intrusion of song and dance (i.e., art) into reality—in order to investigate the various logics according to which a cinematic image is created. In Monkey Business, Hawks devises an even more ingenious way to investigate the interruption of reality by the filmic image. Monkey Business tells the story of a chemist (Cary Grant) working on a formula to reverse aging. In the laboratory of a large corporation Grant conducts experiments on monkeys to test the effectiveness of his formula. One day, when the scientist is away from the lab, a young monkey, Esther, escapes and starts concocting her own formula; uncannily, she sits at the laboratory table and tastes chemicals in order to get matters just right. Then she drops her formula in the water cooler. Grant returns, intending to test his own formula on himself. Because the concoction is so bitter, he goes to the water cooler and thus ends up drinking the monkey’s formula. Needless to say, the latter works. Miraculously, Grant seems to be restored—in spirit and physical capacities, if not outwardly—to the age of twenty. Later in the chapter we will discuss additional details regarding the film’s narrative, but for now let’s focus specifically on the framing mechanism through which Hawks (who is the monkey) will gleefully conduct his metacinematic experiments, playing like a childish god (perhaps the Hindu Hanuman?) with his unwitting human subjects. Ingesting the monkey’s secret formula—first Grant, then in a later scene his wife (Ginger Rogers), and finally the company’s manager and several executives—opens another, filmic space within the “realistic” narrative frame. Once the concoction is drunk, the drinkers start to behave strangely, in ways that do not suit the situation, until the potion’s effects wear off and they return to their “normal” state. Remarkably, such spells of strange behavior—which, I claim, stage the emergence of the cinematic image—often occur in very different genres: fairy tale, slapstick, screwball comedy, marital melodrama, musical, western, and even brief sequences of horror and suspense. What, then, is the formula (of the monkey)? What is the monkey’s business? And what does the proliferation of filmic genres and the transitions between them tell us about how Hawks conceives the relation between film and genre? Most discussions of genre in literary and film studies try to suggest divisions between genres, look for the defining criteria of specific genres, enumerate the various genres, posit a new genre, or ask whether a coherent concept of genre exists in the first place. What usually goes unexplored is whether the concept of genre we use applies only to artistic works, or whether it is a more general concept, meaning something like a

Howard Hawk’s Idea of Genre

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kind, something with a certain universality, which we then apply to ­poetic works2—in the manner of Aristotle, for example, taking as he did the term “kind” from his studies of natural phenomena and applying it to his categorization of poetic works. I affirm the first possibility, namely, that there is a concept of genre that is poetic, that applies only in the case of poetic works. I also claim that there is something specific to the medium of film that can teach us something new, or at least emphasize something that was always there but less noticeable, about the concept of (poetic) genre in general. v The screen is dark. Slowly, light begins to illuminate it, and the closed door of a house appears from out of the shadows (it is nighttime). What is behind the door? What secret does it prevent us from seeing? It might seem as if we are in a film noir, Hawks’s own The Big Sleep, for example, which this opening scene, with a view of a closed door, evokes—as if we are experiencing a cinematic déjà vu. Is Bogart about to reappear and ring the bell yet again? We almost seem to hear that menacing and forbidding ring echoing, an auditory ghost. But then we hear something quite different: the sweeping sound of an orchestra that seems to ­promise romantic happiness, a feeling of open spaces (probably some lush meadow) with no closed doors blocking our view. The door opens and a somewhat confused-looking Cary Grant appears, evidently deep in thought. What is going on here? Is the opening of the door an entryway to a dark world of mystery and secrets, or a welcoming, an opening, to a sharing in romantic bliss? Perhaps both at once?3 What is the nature and logic of this duality that seems to split our capacity to interpret what we are presented with? Why should the first image in the film, which often stands for an allegory of the image in general, be a closed door that then opens? Why is the cinematic image figured as a door, instead of, say, a window (as in the classical figure for painting since the Renaissance)?4 The fundamental opacity of the cinematic image lies at the source. What is this opacity? It is indicated by the shadows falling on the closed door as the movie opens. What are these shadows, where do they come from? Since we do not see their source on-screen, we might say that they come from the off-screen, as if they were the shadows of an unseen source.

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On Film Genre

In essence, the cinematic image constantly corresponds with and shows the trace of what is off-screen. Yet there are two ways of understanding this dimension of the “off,” which casts shadows. On the one hand, it is a matter of the photographic nature of the filmic image, which records or registers the reality “out there” in a completely passive way; in consequence, we expect what we see on-screen to be simply a slice of a larger reality that continues beyond the limits of the frame. In this sense we can say, “Ah, it’s a tree off-screen casting its shadow.” On the other hand, however, the photographic medium alerts us to something existing beyond what appears on-screen while at the same time depriving us of it. What we see for the moment on-screen is thus only a shadow whose source is indeterminate.5 As a result, another functioning of the off-screen emerges, not as something that is continuous with the on-screen (e.g., a tree) but rather as something indeterminate. In this sense, the shadow is not the projection on-screen of an actual thing existing off-screen but the trace and haunting activation of the indeterminacy of the outside. In such a case, the outside, or off-screen, functions as that which disconnects what we see on-screen from a clearly determinate order and context of things and thus prevents us from fully determining the meaningfulness of what we see. What we perceive on-screen thus forever maintains the status of a fragment, lacking fullness of context and therefore meaningfulness. Cinema is an art of shadows and ghosts because at the heart of the image is traced an indeterminate elsewhere that can never be actualized and that afflicts the image with an enigma or turns the image as such into an enigma. The cinematic image is thus of an irreducibly enigmatic nature: upon seeing it, we are struck by a certain blindness; a dimension of incomprehensibility is introduced into our experience. What does what we see on-screen mean? The haunting of the shadowy off-screen seems to constantly block our capacity to answer this in a satisfactory manner, to prevent us from understanding the context of the situation and thus from understanding what we see. Hence the closed door, a figure for opacity or ­blockage. But even though the closed door seems to express something of the image’s opacity, it also transforms it, as it translates irreducible opacity in the realm of meaning into a problem of perception. The closed door is an image of blockage; but now the question “What is behind it?” replaces the question “What does it mean?” or “What is the sense of what I see?” A subtle yet momentous shift occurs: an enigma turns into a mystery or secret, that is, a supposition that some actual thing is being blocked from

Howard Hawk’s Idea of Genre

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our perception, that something is hidden behind. We might say that hermeneutic, or perhaps existential, blindness has transformed into an epistemic problem; the enigma the image activates has been translated into a logic of hiding and revelation. The closed door hides something we are after, which, if we get hold of it, promises to release us from the opacity with which the image struck us. The door opens, and Cary Grant appears. Coming from behind the closed door, Grant has the aura of someone who has privileged access to what is blocked—in other words, to the outside, the off-screen. Read allegorically, we might say that the one who appears on-screen as if out of an invisibility and a blockage becomes the holder of the power of the outside. Here the off-screen takes two main forms: that of a ghostly or shadowy trace marking the on-screen with enigmatic incomprehensibility, and that which announces a secret of an epistemic nature, a mystery, something hidden behind.6 Whoever holds the power of the off-screen—Cary Grant, in this instance—thus seems to waver between being able to activate a shadowy disturbance (expose a meaningful situation to placeless indeterminacy) and holding a secret, that is, possessing privileged knowledge about what remains inaccessible to us.7 Being in this position, he is also an object of desire, of longing—one who can satisfy incommunicable (inasmuch as they are blocked) desires. Thus we can see how the generic articulation of this opening scene— which even before Grant appears, as we have suggested, is wavering ­between film noir or some kind of dark mystery and a romance (romantic comedy?)—depends on the relations that the on-screen entertains with the off-screen, expressing two different forms in which the experience of opaqueness is interpreted and experienced, namely, as a dark secret or as a romantic promise of desire. We can also see that the relation to the offscreen can assume different modalities, each of which we will call genre, as well as see how various genres can be generated. For example, when the initial opacity transforms into the search for a missing object, the film may be a mystery (or a thriller, a treasure hunt, etc., depending on the relation the film establishes to the missing object).8 When someone (e.g., Grant) appears to be the holder of a secret, the film may be a romance, where the secret becomes the secret of our desires (blocked to ourselves) and the romantic hero is the one who can unblock them; or it may be a film noir, where the holder of the secret may be a femme fatale, and so on. In principle, all genres—and it is clear that their number cannot be limited—are formed in this manner.

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On Film Genre

All this enables us to make an initial approach to defining (film) genre. Genre refers to the modality in which the relation to and interpretation of the off-screen dictate the progression of on-screen events. To see a film as “generic,” or to see it in the light of its (a) genre, fundamentally means seeing it not only according to events on-screen but in the light of the relations between on-screen events and enigmatic opacity of the offscreen. Thus, if Cary Grant appears out of the enigma of the off-screen as the closed door opens, we can imagine various ways—that is, various genres—that will dictate the logic according to which what we see will progress. He may be a romantic hero, in which case he will hold the key to someone’s romantic happiness. Alternately, he may be a dark mystery man, harboring evil plans (as Grant is suspected of doing in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, for example); in this case, what follows will be a succession of on-screen events in which a dark, secret plot—an undermining of someone’s normal course of life—leads to the abyss of destruction. When onscreen events are understood not only according to their narrative order and internal causality but as guided by something that haunts the on-screen but is never actually present, that is, the off-screen, we have entered the realm of the question of genre. Genre is the modality in which the “off ” intervenes and inscribes itself in the events. A given genre is organized around a privileged intrafilmic instance (or several of them), which we can understand as a focal point that, be it an object or a person, “embodies” or “incarnates” the enigma of the off-screen. Thus, for example, a film noir can be organized around the enigma of a femme fatale, a mysterious woman who seems to harbor a deadly secret; around the seductive and deceptive allure she exudes all the other characters and events revolve, as around the eye of a storm. The femme fatale represents just one modality in which the opacity of the off-screen becomes present in the on-screen world.9 In this instance, the mystery woman is an allegorical figure “incarnating”10 the enigma of the medium of film itself as a medium whose on-screen content is enigmatically haunted by an opaque and shadowy inscription of indeterminacy that the off-screen as such introduces.11 When we encounter Cary Grant in Monkey Business, coming as he does from the opacity of the off-screen, we can immediately understand him as well as an allegorical figure, standing for the encounter with the medium of film. Only those figures who serve as focal points, who come into being by inscribing the enigmatic encounter with the off-screen, can be seen as allegorical figures standing for the very being of the medium.

Howard Hawk’s Idea of Genre

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The other figures populating the filmic world stand in relation to them, inhabiting the on-screen world either nonallegorically or only allegorically by extension.12 We can immediately see that Grant is presented as someone who communicates with the outside, that is, as an intrafilmic element whose very being concerns the off-screen. As he opens the door, deep in thought and about to step out, a voice is suddenly heard from off-screen: “Not yet, Cary.” Without fully acknowledging that he has been addressed, and therefore without showing where or from whom the voice has come, Grant closes the door and again disappears from view. The titles introducing the actors (Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, et al.) appear on-screen for a moment, projected on the closed door, until Grant opens it again and once more seems ready to step out. The voice comes back: “Not yet, Cary.” Grant seems to mumble something, as if he were actually communicating with the voice, only to close the door and vanish again. The titles continue, projected on the closed door, until the final credit appears (“directed by Howard Hawks”). The music stops, the door reopens (though we have a larger view of the room behind the door this time—Ginger Rogers, closing her purse and ready to go out, is in the background), and the film finally seems to start: the threshold of the fictional world, occupied by the “not yet,” and the actual threshold of the house are about to be crossed. What, exactly, is going on in this brilliant threshold scene? Whose voice is it? Why is it heard as a door opens, and why does it say “Not yet”? The simplest answer is that Howard Hawks, the director, is telling his actor—the voice says “Cary” rather than “Barnaby,” Grant’s name in the fiction—that he is not on cue, that it is not yet time. Or it may be that we are somehow privy to Grant’s inner voice—in the manner that Hitchcock will use a few years later in Psycho, in Marion’s first car scene—telling him not to go out the door just yet. There are other possibilities, too, and they are probably quite numerous, since there is no indication how to limit them inasmuch as the source of the voice remains inaccessible to us. This enumeration of possibilities is unnecessary, however: the crucial point is that the voice cannot be identified, and thus the question of its origin has to remain unanswered. What is also crucial is that this indeterminacy is what is responsible for the transition between the extrafictional realm, where Cary Grant the actor is preparing, and the intrafictional realm, where Cary Grant transforms into Barnaby Fulton. In fact, the first words Ginger Rogers (playing

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On Film Genre

his wife) says are “Barnaby, you have the key”—marking the transformation of the extrafictional “Cary” into the intrafictional “Barnaby.” What she also signals is that this move into fiction, the crossing of the threshold of fiction, involves understanding Grant’s character as having the key, that is, being in control of opening and closing, of the inside and the outside.13 The transition into fiction is thus immediately accompanied by a question about who holds the key,14 for which there are two reasons. First of all, since, as we have seen, the opacity that inevitably marks the on-screen space can be transformed into a secret or a mystery held by the one who stands for the encounter with the off-screen; Grant can thus be seen as the one who holds the key to the mystery. Second, the moment of entry into the fiction is a moment of being suspended on a threshold, that is, a moment where the clear divisions between inside and outside, between what belongs to one (one’s home, one’s possessions) and what is outside and does not belong are put in question. This is the case because the opacity that strikes the world, resulting in the loss of a comprehensible context and thus a loss of place in an order of existence, means that one no longer knows what one’s place in an order and a context is—in fact, no ­longer knows who one is, what one’s identity is. Thus this moment represents the loss of and search for a mechanism that can reestablish the division between inside and outside, that is, the loss of and search for a key. No less important, the moment of the threshold is simultaneously a moment of exposure to the indeterminacy of the source of a voice, of who, precisely, is speaking, for as we have seen, it is unclear whether it is the voice of Grant or Hawks or numerous other possibilities that utters the words. The concept of voice, in contrast to speech, concerns this excess of indeterminacy of the source of utterance over the meaning of the utterance. The voice (also the singing voice) is the haunting of meaning qua indeterminacy of the source of utterance. This ghostly nature of the voice is also responsible for a strange indistinguishability between subjectivity and objectivity, or between one’s own inner voice and the voice of another, also characterizing the utterance of the “not yet.” When it comes to the voice, outside is inside and inside outside; our interiority comes to haunt us from an indeterminate externality, as it were, and what is external to us comes to haunt our most intimate relation to ourselves. Thus the realm of fiction is opened by the discovery of the haunting of the voice, and in the case of film the concept of voice is intimately linked to that of the off-screen.

Howard Hawk’s Idea of Genre

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We can now see that the nature of the encounter with the off-screen involves being called (here a calling that says “Cary”), yet by something whose source is unknown, and consequently, the meaning of which is unclear. We can understand this call as an address, that is, as something that implicates one in the question of one’s identity but that, because its source is unknown, opens one’s relation to one’s identity as an experience of loss and confrontation with an unclear task.15 The off-screen thus functions as a call or address from nowhere in particular, whose meaning is indeterminate, that opens the realm of fiction by suspending one’s actual identity. This indeterminate call is the reason for Cary’s losing himself, so to speak, no longer remaining who he is and as a consequence coming to occupy the realm of fiction. The voice without origin or identifiable source that activates the off-screen as indeterminacy transforms Cary Grant into Barnaby Fulton, as if this indeterminacy, this call from nowhere specific, entailed the loss of one’s proper name and the gain of a new, poetic one. This calling, heard at the threshold (and the utterance of a call always occurs at a threshold, the suspension of stable relations between inside and outside), transforms him, as when Saul became Paul. But of course this call does not come from God but from another, no less commanding presence: the movie director. Unlike Saul/Paul, whose calling and conversion meant following divine instruction, a word and a voice providing orientation and meaning, Grant/Barnaby, when he obeys what may or may not be the commanding voice of the director Hawks (and in a way we can say that the voice of the director, or the voice of the artist, is this indeterminacy of the voice and is thus the voice of no one specific), does not seem to have been exposed to an orienting divine word but rather to the disorienting play of a monkey. If the movie director is a nonhuman divinity, she or he is not the source of a transcendent, suprahuman Word so much as that of an infrahuman disorientation. The difference between a religious conversion and assumption of an apostolic name, on the one hand, and a fictional conversion and assumption of a poetic name, on the other hand, is the difference between a divine mission and monkey business. “Monkey business” is the disorienting call of the off-screen, which posits itself as an alternative to understanding the call as divine revelation. Yet again, the relations between monkey and human stand at the source of a debate with theology—not from a Darwinian or scientific perspective, but from a poetic/cinematic one.16

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On Film Genre

The transformative call, the activation of the off-screen as a suspension of identity, opens fiction and the cinematic image, marking a transition from actual life to the poetic realm, the realm of the threshold. Yet the indeterminate call, signaling a moment of threshold, does not only mark the transition into fiction but constitutes the very heart of fiction, remaining inscribed as its abiding concern. For Cary Grant, even after turning into Barnaby, is unable to cross the threshold; somehow, he remains suspended. Having transitioned to the realm of fiction, the viewers get a glimpse of Grant as Barnaby, now with his wife, Edwina (Ginger R ­ ogers), in the background. Edwina exits and instructs Barnaby to turn off the lights, lock the door, and follow her. Barnaby fails to do so, however, remaining distracted and lost in thought; instead, he goes back in and closes the door, leaving Edwina outside. Edwina comes back and gives him the same instructions. He goes into the house and tries to close the door, which she now prevents him from doing; she follows him inside and closes the door behind her. Something prevents both Cary Grant and Barnaby Fulton from crossing the threshold to the outside—something that both opens fiction and evidently constitutes its heart. Accordingly, we might say that the essential question of the being of the image—and the being of fiction in general—is: “What does one do with and at the threshold?” The moment of the threshold, as we have seen, is a moment of suspension (between inside and outside, proper and improper) and hesitation. It is also a moment of loss (of meaning and orientation, of one’s name and home). What does Barnaby do at the threshold—what happens at this moment of loss, the poetic moment? As he tells his wife, he thinks. The moment of the image, the moment of threshold, is a moment of thinking.17 What does Barnaby think about at the threshold? The formula for responding to time, to the problem of aging, that is, to the constant loss that characterizes human existence. Barnaby tells Edwina a bit later on that he finds “the human race as a whole to be a pretty sad group. Through no fault of their own they get older.” The formula he thinks of at the threshold—a moment of loss, of exposure signaling his death and disappearance—is therefore, from Barnaby’s point of view (we will see that the monkey has other plans), a formula to ward off the off-screen. Called by the ghostly call of the off-screen, Barnaby—like Hamlet before him—tries to find a cure for the ghost, to put its haunting to rest. The one who embodies, who “incarnates,” the poetic encounter also, paradoxically, seems to be someone who searches for a

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defense against the poetic. If Grant seems to hold a secret key—a key that will transform our existential blindness into an epistemic ­solution— it involves the attempt to unlock the infliction of the poetic. The formula Barnaby thinks about on the threshold is the key to the defense against the off-screen, a cure for the call of the poetic. The first move in such a defensive attempt is to back away from the threshold, into the interior of the house. Barnaby does so, preventing Edwina (who tries to leave and is therefore an agent of the menacing offscreen) from pulling him along to a party. If exposure to the off-screen is exposure to an indeterminate outside, then the defense against it— and therefore against the poetic or cinematic—involves constructing a hermetically sealed inside, with no exposure whatsoever. The formula Barnaby thinks of at the threshold, a formula to arrest aging, change, and death, is a formula for constructing a totally sealed inside—an on-screen without an off-screen, we might say. Most of Hawks’s films revolve around protagonists/thinkers-at-thethreshold who attempt to construct a sealed interiority of this kind: Scarface’s paranoid gangster; the tyrannical theater director in The Twentieth Century who constructs a theater/trap no one can ever leave; and Cary Grant’s paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby (the most immediate predecessor to Cary Grant’s role in Monkey Business),18 who attempts to assemble all the bones of a dinosaur in order to construct a perfect skeleton entombed in a museum. Finally, and most explicitly, there is the pharaoh of Land of the Pharaohs, who constructs a pyramid that will be completely impenetrable, into which he will bring all the treasures he has assembled and where he will spend the eternal afterlife.19 In order to construct such a pyramid one needs both to have a certain secret know-how, a secret formula, so to speak, for conceiving such a structure, which is possessed by one of the architects hired by the pharaoh, and to have the secret buried inside so that it won’t be exposed, which means the architect has to be buried in the pyramid as well.20 What must be trapped inside are two interrelated things that are often the same: that which exposes and a treasure. Usually the treasure is simply the turning of that which exposes into one’s most prized possession—turning the off-screen, we might say, into the most treasured occupant of a sacred interior space. The formula conceived at the threshold is thus always secret and always has to do with the concept of treasure. The one exposed to the opacity of the ­outside/­­off‑screen incarnates this exposed encounter, holds a secret, which is nothing other

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On Film Genre

than an attempt to block the exposure. Its objective correlative is a treasure: an object experienced as the cause of exposure whose possession and sealing off in a hermetically closed space will assure the elimination of the outside and the attainment of eternity. But the work of art, although inscribing in itself the secret formula as the desire to efface the very encounter with the work of art, always searches for a counterformula as well: the formula of the monkey. This formula, although it also activates the outside/off-screen, does not turn the opacity of encounter with the outside into a secret whose aim is enclosure; rather, it aims for a liberating activation of non-sense, a nonmeaning­ful interruption signifying escape.21 Escape means the dissolution of the secret conceived at the threshold and its transformation into a playful and liberating non-sense. Accordingly, it entails a new relation to the outside/off-screen, allowing one to cross the threshold outside rather than withdrawing from the threshold into the interior. The outside into which one escapes is not defined in relation to an inside, that is, in relation to an interiority signaling a realm of possession and identity based on an opposition between what belongs and what does not, but rather, to use a term of Deleuze’s previously invoked, it is absolute. The absolute outside—interruptive nonmeaningfulness—undermines the opposition between inside and outside and exposes those standing at the threshold to the threshold’s dissolution. Barnaby, whom we have left on the threshold, is withdrawing inside: closing the door, “dragging” Edwina in with him and preventing her from going out. The formula conceived at the threshold, the formula against aging, is this attempt to eliminate the outside/off-screen, to create a hermetic space and have the agent of exposure become a buried treasure guarded inside. But I have said, the work of art always looks for a counterformula. The significance of this counterformula, in terms of the cinematic medium, has to do with establishing a different relation to the off-screen and thus a different relation to that haunting encounter at the very heart of film. If the task of Barnaby’s formula is to eliminate film, understood as an art of the encounter with the off-screen, then the task of the monkey’s formula is to open the cinematic medium to its own powers, to bring the cinematic image as such into expression, by activating the off-screen positively in the form of experimental play with non-sensical interruption. I have been trying thus far to elucidate the general working of the poetics of film art, beyond the more specific question of genre, since I treat genre in

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this chapter, as mentioned above, as a specifically poetic concept; as such, its logic belongs to the way the poetic work functions in general. When theoreticians discuss film genre, they are talking about films rather than natural kinds or character types and so forth, yet they almost always fail to understand the concept of genre in relation to poetic logic; in consequence, they fail to restrict genre to its proper realm, namely, the poetic work. The “realm” of the poetic consists in being arrested on a threshold, responding to a call and registering the inscription of an encounter with exteriority that is absolute, that is to say, not functioning within the opposition inside/outside. To examine a bit more closely how the question of genre relates to the poetic, the monkey will be our guide. The monkey’s formula in the film serves to liberate the cinematic image into its own powers, countering the anti-cinematic attempts at the heart of cinema to turn the image into an enclosure functioning as a secret/sacred space; it does so by establishing a new relation to the outside/off-screen that releases the image from the epistemological logic of the secret by activating the question of film genre according to a complex new logic. The monkey’s formula—an activation of the powers of the off-screen (and the monkey always appears from the off-screen in the film)—wreaks havoc in the lives of those who drink it: first Barnaby, then Edwina, then the executives of the company for which Barnaby works. It unmoors them from their reality and takes over their lives like an alien invasion. Each time someone drinks the potion, he or she stops behaving according to his or her actual age: a younger self seems to take over. Inasmuch as drinking the formula of the monkey amounts to entering the realm of the poetic according to a new logic, the poetic entails growing younger. This transition to a younger age through encounter with the off-screen finds expression in very different genres. Genre, age, and the poetic must be thought together. When Grant first ingests the formula, he starts behaving comically: making puns, hitting on girls like a teenager from a Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland film, falling in a slapstick manner, and so on; at the same time, however, Grant is engaged in moments of recklessness verging on horror. When Edwina takes the formula, she enters the realm of teenage embarrassment and recklessness, too, but she also acts like a character in a musical (starting to sing and dance), screwball comedy (speaking as fast as His Girl Friday’s Rosalind Russell), and marital melodrama (picking increasingly serious fights with Barnaby). The second time they ingest the formula, Edwina and Barnaby consume an

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On Film Genre

even larger quantity and, in consequence, regress to an even younger age, behaving like ten-year-old children in a Disney movie; at the same time, they enter darker territories—in Grant’s case, the western, where he ends up scalping a former boyfriend of Edwina’s in a fit of rage. Part of Hawks’s singularity, I think, stems from his capacity to achieve disjunctions between a seemingly self-evident, even frivolous surface and the extraordinarily intricate and dark logic that commands it. It’s as if the American experience were a matter of darkness hidden in plain view—a cheerful daylight that tries to efface its own burden and mystery.22 As noted, the monkey’s formula stands for encounter with the offscreen, which gives rise to the birth or genesis of genres. The generic represents a specific way of registering the indeterminacy of the off-screen and incorporating it into the on-screen world.23 Inasmuch as age and genre are related, we might speculate that the former provides a specific way of inscribing or registering the encounter with the indeterminacy of the outside. Age—the way we live our relation to time—is not just a matter of chronology, nor is it only something that should be understood philosophically, as the development of maturation and growing self-knowledge. Age can also function as a poetic category, designating a specific way of engaging with the enigmatic meaninglessness of the outside.24 As we will see later, if dying, as the termination point, is the primary term in the chronological conception of age, and if adulthood, the fulfillment of our capacities for reason and meaning, is the primary term in the philosophical conception of age, then infancy is the primary term in the poetic conception of age. In these monkey scenes, the generic inscriptions of the outside are completely unstable and come in multiple forms (as stated above, a scene can move in a matter of moments from the world of slapstick to horror to the musical to melodrama). In the new logic of genres that the monkey’s formula represents, there is an irreducible multiplicity of forms of encounter with and inscription of the anonymous force of the outside that do not relate to each other according to any logical or temporal order; greater and lesser significance are not apparent, nor does there seem to be any way of determining their number in advance. Consequently—and in contrast to the classical theory of genre—one cannot speak of a hierarchy of genres (tragedy is high, comedy is low, farce even lower, etc.). There is no hierarchy, order, or limit to the modes of inscribing the outside. Quite the opposite: an anarchic multiplicity without order or center prevails.25

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For example, examining how genres are constituted in these monkey scenes, we can say that they may come, as in Edwina’s case, as various ways of inscribing the encounter with the indeterminate outside as an interruption of one’s capacity to control the meaningfulness of one’s speech (Hawks is one of the most sensitive directors in regard to speech patterns and rhythms in the history of film, constantly examining the various modes in which meaningful speech registers its interruption). In Edwina’s case, these interruptions may take a form very typical of Hawksian screwball-comedy women, that of extremely fast-paced speech, as if speech were attempting to catch itself, always in excess of its capacity to mean. They may also take the form of song, that is, the exceeding of speech by a voice that is always suspending the arrival of meaning (or exposing speech to the possibility of a complete collapse of meaning). ­Finally, they may take the form of silence, as when Edwina loses her capacity to speak out of shame, or of a melodramatic screaming and crying, her total loss of control of the meaning of her speech and its reduction to a violent, nonsignifying address. These modalities of speech—each inscribing the encounter with the sense-interrupting off-screen in a different way and according to a different logic—open the horizon of a possible genre (melodrama, musical, screwball comedy) around which the world on-screen can be organized. In Barnaby’s case, the encounter with the off-screen is expressed less as a disturbance of speech and more as a series of physical accidents: he constantly falls, slides, loses control of his car, misplaces his glasses (and thus verges on blindness), and so on. The off-screen, then, may intrude as silence, song, dance, error, accident, blindness, or some such. It is too fast, too much. It may take the form of fate, accident, suspension of meaning, horror, pleasure or some such. Each of these possible modes of organization opens the horizon of different genres, nonhierarchically organized and unlimited in number. The significance of introducing such a nonhierarchically organized proliferation of generic possibilities into a single work is double. First and foremost, this anarchic proliferation entails a new experience of an essential multiplicity with no center, that is, a new way of experiencing genre. We no longer experience it in terms of a predetermined hierarchy of existence but rather as the problem of an encounter with the sense-interrupting outside—a dimension of irreducible incomprehensibility one needs to respond to. The problem of the outside, or the outside as a problem for

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On Film Genre

meaning, is not something to be solved, in the sense of finding a meaning that eliminates it, but something that needs to be inscribed as a modality permitting its nonmeaning to inhabit the world of meaning without destruction, as well as allowing for the encounter with nonmeaning to enable the introduction of a dimension of creativity into the everyday world of meaning.26 That said, there are no set adequate responses to such an encounter, hence the unpredictable and incalculable multiplicity of genres, each of them constituting a different solution or response to the encounter. Thus we come to see genre as genre, understand the logic of the generic in its new formation, that is, as the activation of modalities of inscription of the anonymous off-screen, only through the experience of this multiplicity; hence the significance of having one work inscribe the possibility of numerous genres, as Monkey Business does. This brings us to the second significant aspect of the encounter with an unstable multiplication of genres. The effect of this dizzying multiplication is to give us a glimpse of the outside, which we witness, as it were, in between its various inscriptions as an excess over each. In other words, it keeps a nongeneric force open—the force of the outside before its inscription as any specific modality. There is no such thing, Hawks seems to imply, as nongeneric art, that is, art that would give us the relation to an outside in its pure (non)form. Art is, by definition, what activates genre as the inscription of the anonymous outside within this or that modality. At the same time, the outside maintains a certain excess over each of the specific responses to its encounter, an excess that can only be experienced in between heterogeneous solutions. Such an experience of excess is what connects one to the origin of genres, so to speak, enabling one to envision other possible responses to the “off ”: other, perhaps never foreseen genres. One of the most remarkable features of the monkey scenes is how the question of age functions. After drinking the monkey’s formula the protagonists become younger and younger, even though they do not change physically. Thus, a disjunction opens between physical age and “poetic age,” the latter of which concerns the encounter with the off-screen, giving rise to the impression that the latter has taken over the normal world as an alien—or to invoke another Hawks film, a “thing from another world.”27 The invasion of the off-screen and its inscription on-screen find expression not only as the unstable proliferation of generic modalities but also as a disjunction between poetic time or age and physical age / worldly chronological time. The time of fiction, then, is not the chronological

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time of the actual world but a poetic, alien time that goes backward, toward infancy. I say that poetic time goes toward infancy because, in one of the most crucial, strange, ridiculous, disturbing, and beautiful scenes in the movie, Barnaby is thought to have become a complete infant, even in external appearance. What is this poetic time that goes backward and whose final or central term is infancy, and what does it teach us about the question of age as it functions in the movie? Since this is not a treatise about the nature of time, I will not be able to answer these questions in any depth. All the same, it is possible in this context to point out their components. The time of the world is the time in which we are sensitive and open to what we might understand as the “not-yetness” of things, that is, we see things not only as actual but also as what they will be, as well as, in an analogous sense, as what they no longer are. We can understand this perspective as a directional vision. We see things in light of where they have come from and where they are going. Such directional vision also represents the meaning of things, their orientation and reason. We see things in the light of their meaning and orientation, thus in the light of their time understood as the time of the experience of the “not yet.”28 We are capable of such temporal vision, because we ourselves are “not yet” in a different manner: we are “not yet” absolutely, an empty “not yet.” In other words, we are “not yet” not because we are headed in a specific direction but precisely because we do not have any pre-given direction or orientation; as such, we are essentially suspended. We are going nowhere (specific) and coming from nowhere (specific); in this sense we have no meaning. We see the “not-yetness” and the meaning and directionality of things because we ourselves are “not yet” in its pure form. We are pure time, not time progressing toward anywhere specific. Consequently, we have a double relation to the question of meaning and orientation: on the one hand, inasmuch as we are just “not yet,” without a given meaning or orientation, we are able to give this “not-yetness” form—to give ourselves goals and specific meanings, to orient ourselves in ever new ways. On the other hand, we also encounter ourselves as meaningless and empty. We are haunted by an essential non-sensicality at the heart of who we are. This encounter with our own non-sensicality may be understood as an encounter with our infancy. Herein lies the significance of the work of art. A work of art is an encounter with and inscription of our infancy at the heart of a world that has been assigned meanings and orientations. The

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On Film Genre

monkey’s formula, then, afflicts the drinker with an infancy at the same time as it manifests itself in the opening of various genres, each of which inscribes the interruption by the outside / off-screen / senseless infancy in a different way. Accordingly, the question of genre is essentially related to the questions of infancy and poetic time / age. Age, from the poetic perspective, is the way the encounter with infancy, a constitutive condition of human life and its relation to time, becomes inscribed in our meaningful relation to the world, interrupting it. Or perhaps we can say more precisely that the question of age, when opened from the perspective of the poetic, signifies modalities of the intrusion of infancy / ­exposing non-­sensicality into the meaningful, chronologically ordered world. Thus, when Edwina becomes an adolescent who is silenced by shame or when she starts “running off at the mouth,” we can say that these are various ways in which infancy, the dimension of constitutive non-sensicality, inscribes itself in her meaningful speech—interrupting it differently each time. The same holds for Barnaby when he turns into a ten-year-old struck by episodes of speechless rage, grunting, and screaming that express his impotence, his incapacity to mean, in the face of what has overtaken him—an impotence he tries to overcome with a chilling act of violence belonging to the realm of the western (the scalping of Edwina’s former boyfriend). It might seem that one can talk about the various stages of human life—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and so forth—in terms of an increasing distance from infancy. However, the point of the logic of constitutive infancy as the time of the pure “not yet” is that infancy is an essential and irreducible atemporal (in the sense of nonprogressive and nondirectional) haunting at the heart of progressive time that can always be reactivated, at whatever age, inasmuch as its logic is anachronic. Infancy is the anachrony at the heart of human life. As such, childhood, adulthood, and so on do not only mark progressive chronological stages but also seem to imply various modalities in which our relation to infancy is organized. Thus childhood, say, can be seen as the age where one is allowed to be connected to one’s infancy; adolescence can be understood as an age where one transitions away from one’s infancy, even as infancy continues to claim its presence; and adulthood can be seen as the age where the claims of reason might enter into conflict with the call of infancy, a conflict possibly resulting in the forgetting and repression of infancy or even in an attempt to transform infancy’s haunting into the search for a secret formula or some such. The task of the poetic work is to activate this

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anachrony haunting every chronological age differently, to interrupt the meaningful world and its progression and expose it to its fundamental “not-yetness.” Poetic age, or the poetic intrusion of infancy into chronological age, therefore marks the way that one is never (only) in one’s time, the way that one is anachronic to oneself, haunted by the (non)time of infancy, that is, the pure “not yet.” From this point of view genres can be seen as various modalities that the reactivation of infancy can take. We should not of course understand genres as fully synonymous with specific ages, since an age (or more precisely age from the point of view of the modality of the intrusion of infancy into it) can be expressed in several genres. For example, we can think of adolescence as the age of low comedy, as Barnaby says, or we can think of it as the age of the comedy of embarrassment, as in American Pie, or as the age of the horror of sexuality, as in Carrie. However, it is clear that some genres would have a greater affinity with childhood and its modality of the inscription of infancy, others with adolescence, others with adulthood (melodrama of marriage), and so on.29 There are three salient perspectives on age: chronological, philosophical, and poetic. If one takes the philosophical perspective, human life should lead from infancy to adulthood, understanding the latter as the teleological goal and direction of our humanity; attaining it means growing out of one’s infantile condition, progressively erasing its traces and advancing from wordlessness into full, meaningful speech. In this sense, the stages of life are oriented in relation to adulthood as a telos, that toward which one grows and then away from which one slowly recedes, as one ages, sometimes undergoing a decline understood as a second childhood. From such a perspective, Barnaby’s and Edwina’s going back in time amounts to regression. However, the poetic dimension of age makes it clear that human life—and human time—understood in terms of the irreducible and fundamental “not yet,” the time of the threshold, is constituted by an essential nondirection, an original errancy. In this sense, the main term in relation to which the question of age is thought is that of infancy (rather than adulthood). Infancy functions not as a telos and orienting direction but as an original nondirection constantly haunting human life. As such, the effects of the monkey’s formula do not represent regression but poetic (re)activation, repetition, of our original and irreducible infancy that can always return because it is anachronic. In this sense, the relations between monkey and human are reversed

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On Film Genre

in the movie as well. The time of infancy does not lead progressively from monkey to human; rather, it leads in the opposite direction, from human to monkey, or more precisely, from human understood as a rational creature able to direct meaning to something at the heart of the human that is nonhuman in some measure and has not yet assumed a specific human form (or any form at all): the originary formlessness of the “not yet.” In this context one can understand the difference with respect to age between Barnaby’s defensive formula—which I have described as aiming to construct an enclosed “pyramid” into which the source of exposure is introduced as a treasure one can possess and thereby achieve eternal life— and the monkey’s poetic formula. If the monkey’s formula reverses the course of aging, working as a “potion of youth,” it does so not by blocking the source of exposure to the senseless outside, that is, an encounter with the destruction of identity and place, but instead by activating this outside and liberating one into this exposure. It means embracing destructive/creative force, the force of eternal recurrence: the repetition of senseless infancy, of an anachrony that undoes temporal progression, an anachrony that is the source of our life and our death. In this sense, the formula offers no defense against aging; rather, it transforms our relation to the question of age and reveals a poetic age at the heart of our existence. This poetic age, before and outside (linear) time, activated by the indeterminate off-screen haunting the chronological, meaningful world, is our death inasmuch as it takes us from who we are—our “on-screen” identity, so to speak—and exposes us to a formless “not-yetness” signifying our disappearance. Yet it is also the haunting source of our life, in that it constitutes the formless, creative source of our possibility to assign new meaning, reorient ourselves, and engage meaningfully with our world. In this context, we can think of the enigmatic final images of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, another movie that famously revolves around relations between human and ape from the outset. Here, too, time outside time in a place outside place is discovered and activated, a poetic time where age is reversed and the dying old man transforms into a baby. The time of death becomes the time of a new infancy, a rebirth signaling the emergence, in the cinematic image, of a new humanity—or of something beyond humanity, perhaps a humanity that has surpassed the relations between violence and the sacred symbolized by the enigmatic monolith (which seems like a sacred tombstone very much in the spirit of Hawks’s pharaoh trying to erect a secret eternal stone).

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We can say that 2001 also features an opposition similar to the one operating in Monkey Business, between two relations to the image (allegorized in our film as the relations between the two formulas). The formula associated with Barnaby proves analogous, in 2001, to the enigmatic monolith of the opening scene, which we can understand to represent a mode of being of the cinematic image marked by the defensive encounter with the senseless outside. Looming into view from off-screen, toward which a monkey looks in horror, the monolith seems to embody this senselessness of the outside, serving as its focal point on-screen. This focal point takes the form of a kind of secret divinity, through the mediation of which the senselessness of the off-screen from which it has arrived is transformed into a sacred mystery to be worshipped, or alternatively, solved. The attempt at solution drives the film genre as science fiction, that is, a work in which the senselessness of the off-screen represents a technological secret (or a mystery to be solved by technology). The other conception of the off-screen, and thus of the image, the conception that we have called poetic, occurs at the film’s end. Now, in a death/rebirth, the off-screen is discovered to be the activation of a new infancy rather than that which needs to be eliminated by means of a secret tomb(stone).30 As in Monkey Business, one can understand this new relation to the off-screen in the cinematic image to activate a new humanity that has discovered its constitutive infancy. Furthermore, it goes back to something that is both beyond and before humanity, something in the adventure of the monkeys before the interpretation of the arrival of the off-screen as a secret and sacred enigma—an interpretation that initiated a violent or, we might say, metaphysical humanity, trying to solve the problem of its age and of its aging by looking for a technological eternity. In Monkey Business, the question of a new encounter with a constitutive infancy culminates in the astonishingly troubling scene where Edwina comes to mistake a very young infant for Barnaby, thinking he has grown so young that he has finally become a baby. Having turned into the equivalent of ten-year-old children, Edwina and Barnaby start shouting at each other, thereby transforming the affection for each other they do not understand into a mild form of violence. Going back to their house, the tenyear-old Edwina, furious with Barnaby, calls her old flame Hank the lawyer to complain. Hank promises to come over, yet Edwina is already falling asleep—the signal, in the movie, that the formula’s e­ ffect is about to end.

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On Film Genre

Barnaby, on the other hand, is still wide awake. He overhears her through an open door (always in Hawks a sign of exposure to the off-screen and thus to self-loss), and, his impotent rage mounting, he starts to mumble almost incomprehensibly. He jumps up and down in agitation, resembling, by turns, a screaming monkey,31 a frustrated child, and an escaped lunatic. Suddenly, he hears distant screams and shouts from off-screen and gets an idea. These inarticulate voices coming from the off-screen, though we do not initially see their source, belong to a group of children playing cowboys and Indians. It’s as if Barnaby is called to join their game. The call of the off-screen now takes the form of a call to join the play of children, thus becoming the address of infants. Inspired by this call, Barnaby heads back to his bedroom and creates, as it were, what we can regard as an originary, or “primal,” image: he paints his face in a war mask. Being called by the off-screen, as we have noted, means that one’s identity is suspended by exposure to the disorienting senselessness of the outside; consequently, the originary or first image both inscribes and activates this primary disorientation. The mask inscribes the call of the off-screen, marking the separation and difference between who one (otherwise) is, one’s identity, and the senseless infancy activated by the outside. Barnaby then joins the children, picking up along the way an instrument with which he can “scalp a man,” as he puts it. It’s as if the separation from oneself activated by the off-screen and inscribed in the mask also immediately, in the defensive logic with which we are now familiar, seeks a cure for itself by finding an object that will give it back to itself, restore the loss. Thus the mask, which is activated by a certain realm of play, also brings with it the violent activity of attempting to eliminate itself, to unmask itself: an originary iconoclasm. The image is always accompanied by the iconoclastic desire for the destruction of the image, the aim to restore lost unity with oneself. In this sense, the realm of play, the arena of the image’s activation as senseless infancy, always verges on becoming war. Thus, when Barnaby joins the children and informs them that he wants to scalp a man, they say, “For real?”—and are happy to join in transforming play into a violent reality whose aim is to extinguish play. One of the children authoritatively informs Barnaby (now “Red Eagle”) that he needs to do a war dance first. And so a musical opens at this moment between play and violence, inscribing a specific modality of the interruption of regular, meaningful action and speech. This musical, activating senseless infancy,

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is also a ritual that to an extent invokes the gods of war, as if the mask, the first image, has originated a new mode of communication with the otherworldly, the off-screen’s haunting interpreted as a divinity whose function is also immediately to sanction war. As this musical game verging on war is taking place, another series of events occurs that serves both as a counterpoint to its madness and, I propose, an attempt to activate an alternative image: the image as infancy and rebirth. As Barnaby / Red Eagle grabs the scissors and heads off to join the children and scalp Hank, a woman unexpectedly appears from the off-screen holding a baby. She opens the gate to the yard, thereby signaling the intrusion of the off-screen into the frame as the creation of a blockage or blindness (as in the opening scene). The arrival of this baby activates blockage/blindness according to a new, nonsecretive logic, that is, the logic of infancy. With his characteristically casual and almost unnoticeable meta-­ cinematic sophistication, Hawks stages a very short scene with the simple beauty and perfection of a biblical parable. A maid—to whom the woman gives her baby for safekeeping—is busy hanging laundry (often the indication of the installation of a screen in cinema). Her back is turned to the gate through which the woman enters, so she does not see her at first. It’s as if the installation of the screen indicates the infliction of blindness—the loss of one’s orientation and place in a meaningful order of things—that is, a striking with a shadowy opacity (and Hawks, of course, subtly floods the scene with various shadows). However, the mode that this shadowy infliction assumes does not amount to an inaccessible, secret meaning (as at the beginning of the film, when Barnaby sought a secret formula) but to the gift of infancy, that is, of non-sensicality, enacted when the woman hands the maid her child. This gift of the infant, the one who does not speak—a gift signaling an unexpected, thus unmeant, arrival free of predetermined context—marks the activation of an originary nonmeaning. This nonmeaning is nothing other than a potentiality for the birth of new, unexpected meanings out of the gift of the non-pre-givenness of meaning that the decontextualizing off-screen is. The gift of the infant is therefore the call of the off-screen, an address by nothing specific, signifying that one is responsible for the existence of meaning. The failure to mean is no longer experienced as a secret meaning, to be solved by inventing a secret formula (like the paradigmatic Oedipus,

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On Film Genre

thinking that the enigma of the Sphinx is a secret meaning one finds an answer to), but rather as an originary blindness to be activated as an irreducible nonmeaning: originary non-sense that is nothing but the capacity to mean born out of a constitutive disorientation and errancy. It is because the human is not subject to any pre-given meaning, and therefore fundamentally disoriented, that he or she can give birth to new meanings and constantly reorient and reformulate his or her world. The cinematic image represents the “place” where this constitutive blindness and disorientation of the human is both revealed—we come to “see” our own blindness through the image—and activated, our meaningful world inflicted with blindness and loss. Yet this infliction with blindness, in the form of infancy, becomes a new type of vision (the vision of blind Tiresias rather than the blindness of Oedipus, which was the result of his misinterpreting the enigma) and a new type of watching: a seeing of the anachronic origin of things, a watching beyond perception that the cinematic image activates in us (perception being the orientation toward meaningful things in the world), a watching for which blindness is not experienced as an obstruction to perceptual seeing, understood as openness to the meaningful world, but as the senseless “origin” out of which one sees. So, when the woman gives the maid her infant for watching (“Sure, I’ll watch him,” she says), the infant becomes not an object one needs to watch but the activation of a new kind of watching/seeing in the maid, blinded as she was by the offscreen: “I was blind but now can see.” Let’s continue awhile longer with this beautiful scene (perhaps the most remarkable and central in the movie, its most powerful allegorical moment) and follow the adventure of the infant. Having received him as a gift, the maid brings the child into the yard, “a nice big area for you to play at,” she tells him in less than perfect English. Right away, the baby starts to utter inarticulate noises and point to the off-screen. It seems his inarticulate “speech” is the most primal way in which the trace of the off-screen is inscribed in the world, interrupting meaningful speech by originary babble; equally, it’s as if he has been called by something unseen. Having been left alone on the grass, while the inarticulate cries and shouts of the children at play who are about to commit an act of violence are heard from off-screen, the infant almost miraculously stands up; alone in the frame, he sheds his clothes and, like a new Adam, walks toward the off-screen with unbalanced but sure steps, as if following the call of film to which he has been exposed.32

Howard Hawk’s Idea of Genre

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Through an open door, as a messenger of and from the outside, the infant stumbles toward the bed where Edwina is sleeping off her spell. He climbs up and lies besides her; her back is turned toward him. It’s as if out of her blindness and dreams a call has been transmitted, through the open door to the outside, and an infant messenger has answered this call and came to her from the off-screen (i.e., when we look at the scene from her perspective and not from the child’s). It’s as if Edwina occupies a realm of dreams opened and made possible by her encounter with the monkey’s formula and has managed to communicate with the off-screen and receive the gift of infancy, of the birth of another together with her own rebirth, the gift of a relation with the world as if it were the first day of creation. (Significantly, Edwina and Barnaby have no children, as if the true access to infancy has so far been blocked for them.) This rebirth also belongs to us, the viewers. Remaining alone with the infant on the screen, we likewise become infants and, like Edwina, receive and witness the message of the off-screen. The cinematic image becomes the place called forth from our dreams, bringing rebirth—a new opening of the world, which is no longer an arena of already meaningful relations but one where a call is heard to mean anew. As noted previously, when Edwina wakes up she mistakes the infant for Barnaby—who, she surmises, has drunk too much of the formula. This moment of infancy, then, marks not only Edwina’s rebirth and our own but also that Barnaby has been liberated from the desire for secrecy and “pyramid” building—not to mention violent sacrifice—into a new, nondefensive relation with the off-screen. At its extreme limits, the monkey’s formula—giving rise to the non-sensical, generic modalities without hierarchy and an anachronic poetic age—seems to become an activation of the off-screen as pure infancy. Yet what is the generic modality of this infancy? Does it have a genre at all, or is it something reaching beyond genre, a pure encounter with the off-screen that no longer takes the form of this or that modality of inscription? It’s a difficult question, yet I think we can say that ultimately this inscription of the outside on-screen—that is, an inscription “incarnated” in the babbling baby called, out of a mother’s dream, by the off-screen—activates a specific genre: the fairy tale. At the extreme limit—where the monkey’s formula becomes the transformation of the haunted on-screen into the realm of a babbling baby responding to a dreaming mother’s call—film becomes a fairy tale. In a way, the fairy

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On Film Genre

tale is the most primal genre: a zero-degree genre, the genre of maximum non-sense on the verge of meaning and the purest activation of poetic age as infancy. Yet it is still a genre, that is, an activation of the off-screen as an inscription on-screen that takes a specific modality. This implies another principle at work: as long as the non-sensical haunting of the off-screen is “incarnated” on-screen in any way, that is, as long as there is someone or something standing for the encounter with the off-screen (thereby functioning as an allegory for encounter with the medium of film), we are in the realm of genre. The allegorical incarnation may take the form of simultaneous genres (horror and fairy tale, musical and low comedy, erotic thriller and western, etc.), but it is impossible to speak of something beyond genre in such cases. The only way to have an encounter with a work of art that is not generic in nature, thus a pure encounter with the off-screen beyond this or that modality of inscription, is through the experience of a feeling of disjunction between genres: when the offscreen becomes inscribed in a multiplicity of ways that do not stand in any hierarchical relation and therefore form an irreducible heterogeneity, a heterogeneity with no synthesis. There is one more crucial aspect of this activation of infancy in/as the cinematic image: its relation to temporality. The age or time of infancy is anachronic, a pure “not-yetness” that exceeds every specific event and therefore never coincides with any moment in a temporal order; it is always untimely. If the task of the cinematic image is to activate this infancy, this age that exceeds every age, what is the time of the image? It is the time of the “re”—as in repetition, resurrection, and rebirth. When Barnaby, at the beginning of his experiments, goes to see the manager of the company, the latter is excited by the possibilities of the new formula and shows him a label that the promotional department has been working on: a Phoenix, “rising from the ashes of age.” The scientifically minded Barnaby is upset because he considers this label inaccurate and misleading, but the poetically minded executive (the wonderfully entertaining Charles Coburn, who plays a similar role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)— who remains a child at heart with vigorous libido, even at an advanced age—obviously has a point relevant to the monkey’s formula.33 After all, as the activator of the off-screen as infancy, the formula introduces a disruption through which the world returns to its own “origin,” as it were, repeating and reactivating this origin as the possibility of new configurations of meaning out of the haunting “not-yetness” that constitutes the most origi-

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nary dimension of our being in/as time. To become an infant is thus to resurrect and repeat this haunting dimension that has been forgotten in our everyday existence in time and a meaningful world. The phoenix stands for a resurrection and repetition of poetic infancy, out of the ashes of the ages of the meaningful world.34 Barnaby finally seems to grasp this sense of infancy—the resurrection and the repetition of the original “not yet”—in a second formula he proposes, after having accepted the failure of his first formula, which was guided by the logic of the “pyramid.” As he tells Edwina (in what is perhaps one of the few moments that mark the ending of a Hawks film as happy): “I’ve got a new formula. It doesn’t come in packages or bottles. You’re old only when you forget you are young.” Even if it sounds like a cliché, this is the very insight brought about by the monkey’s formula. It does not mean you are as old as you feel (as conventional wisdom holds); rather, it means that one is always haunted by the disjunction between physical age—perhaps philosophical age, too—and the (non)time of infancy. It is the memory of this infancy, in other words, the active trace of its repetitive and constant disturbance—a poetic memory the cinematic image, as monkey business, has the task of resurrecting and bringing back from the ashes—that should guide a human life.

§4 What Is a Cinema of Jewish Vengeance? Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

In concluding our discussions of the constitutive relation between cinema and the off-screen, we turn to the question of filming the Shoah, that is, the ability the cinematic image has—or perhaps does not have—to show something about or of this historical event. In order to respond to this question we need to be able to answer three further questions. First, what purpose does an artistic image serve in general? What can it—and what, in particular, can a cinematic image—show? Second, what is the relation between what the cinematic image shows and history or a historical event? Finally, what is the particularity of the Shoah as a historical event—and what, more specifically, is the relation between this particularity and the general question of showing? That is, if filming the Shoah holds particular significance, this suggests that the Shoah, as a historical event, is implicated in the question of the image in a unique way. I will focus on Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds. Although it does not rigorously investigate all aspects of these questions, it deals, in a remarkable fashion, with several major ones. I am not particularly interested in the debate that has emerged between the film’s supporters and its critics—Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jonathan Rosenbaum, as well as others—claiming that it is at best irresponsibly oblivious of the Shoah’s historical substance and at worst not only morally objectionable and reprehensible but implicated in Holocaust denial. I will simply demonstrate that the film unquestionably performs some real work and is involved in a genuine attempt to figure out something about the significant lines of inquiry noted above. 200

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Although the baroque plot of Inglourious Basterds is impossible to encapsulate, a brief summary is in order. Like Tarantino’s two previous works, Kill Bill and Death Proof, it is a revenge fantasy structured around somewhat separate story lines. The first follows a unit composed mostly of American Jews led by Lt. Aldo Raine, a part-Apache, Tennessee-born fighter intent on slaughtering and scalping as many Nazis as possible after subjecting them to the inhuman torture he believes they deserve. The second revolves around a young woman, Shosanna, who witnessed the murder of her family at the hands of the SS when their hiding place was discovered by the most interesting and complex character of the film, the Nazi Jew-hunter Col. Hans Landa. Shosanna takes her revenge during the premiere of Joseph Goebbels’s (fictional) cinematic masterpiece, Stolz der Nation (The Pride of the Nation), which celebrates the exploits of the German war hero Fredrick Zoller. Under an assumed name (Emmanuelle Mimieux), she owns and operates the theater where the screening takes place; all the central figures of the Nazi regime, including Hitler and Goering, are in attendance. At the cost of her own life, Shosanna burns down the cinema, killing the Nazi leadership and essentially bringing the war to an end. As in all of Tarantino’s films, every frame and gesture in Inglourious Basterds is marked in one or more of three ways as being part of cinema instead of “natural reality.” (1) Everything is marked as belonging to a specific cinematic genre or several genres simultaneously (the war adventure film, the spaghetti western, exploitation revenge movies, etc.). (2) Practically every scene could plausibly be a quotation from an obscure movie hardly anyone other than Tarantino knows. (3) Characters are clearly acting: everything they say and do is marked as part of a role rather than the expression of an actual or realistic identity. Yet, unlike the director’s previous works, Inglourious Basterds foregrounds its historical quality, the fact that it is set between the years 1941 and 1944. Moreover (and also for the first time, in a way), it is marked as being about cinema: the question of cinema and all its components—acting, editing, celluloid, criticism, and so on—becomes the film’s very subject, the themes structuring the plot itself. As such, the film proves both the most historical and the most meta-cinematic of Tarantino’s films,1 leading us to ask precisely what the relations between these two categories might be. Tarantino seems to suggest that the cinematic image can show this double thing, history and cinema. But how so? And what, precisely, does this mean?

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On Film Genre

Revenge fantasy, the fact that the film is marked as cinema, and history are all three to be thought together. In Tarantino’s general aesthetics of alienation, nothing is ever simply or really what it seems: every gesture signals that it exemplifies a genre, stands as a quotation, or represents the performance of a role. What is the significance of such an aesthetics? We cannot go too deeply into this here, but a short answer would be that in such cases everything seems to belong to a frame, is presented as enframed. Thus, if the on-screen world seems to belong to a specific genre, in effect what we see is presented as framed by this genre (whereas in an actual genre film, the on-screen content is presented as “natural,” not as something framed by the genre and its conventions). When such a frame is suddenly exposed, a split appears—a split occurring in any frame-structure—marking a distinction between an inside and an outside. When we become aware of a frame in such a case, thus of a relation between inside and outside, the inside loses its sense of immediacy, the sense that we are simply faced with a given reality, and begins to seem like a fiction, that is, as an artificial construction, the result of a decision regarding what we are allowed to see and what we are deprived of seeing. The realization that there is an outside (to the frame) changes the status of what we are seeing, now perceived as an inside, and the outside itself starts to loom as what has deprived us of the given reality and transformed it into fiction. We then want to ask, what is this outside to which the discovery of the cinematic frame-structure has exposed us to? The answer is “nothing,” for it seems to be marked only negatively, produced by the frame itself; there does not seem to be a way to go outside the frame to see what is there, for everything in a Tarantino film is marked as framed. Thus, having discovered the frame-structure, we remain with the feeling that there is an outside but that this outside is only present as a nonsubstantial haunting. The Tarantino image, then, manifests a split between an inside and an outside, creating the simultaneous feelings of an artificial fictionality and a haunting that is not given as such. The same logic governs acting in the film: everyone always seems to be rehearsing their roles, as if to highlight the difference between a role and a “real identity.” Yet where is the real identity? The answer is “nowhere”; it too is marked only negatively, by quotation marks one senses behind the actors’ performances. This logic of the frame that produces an outside that is present only negatively admits of two main interpretations. On the one hand, one could say that there

Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

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are only roles, fictional artifices, with no real haunting outside—simply movement between one role and another, one artificial (in the sense of a nonnatural, constructed, or created) situation and the next. On the other hand, one could insist on the existence of this negative outside and affirm that there is something that exceeds the role and marks its limits but does not possess any substantial identity itself; rather, it opens the possibility of enframing as such. Tarantino’s aesthetics in general, particularly as manifested by Inglourious Basterds—and this is perhaps the great intuition that guides it, which resides at its very center and which it explores again and again from many perspectives—espouses this second interpretation, in that it insists precisely on thinking and on showing this nonsubstantial outside that marks the limit, or the other side, of the logic of the role, quotation, and fictional artifice. Thus, for example, the Nazi Jew-hunter Hans Landa is presented as the actor par excellence; with no real identity of his own, he can take on any role. He is not even a real Nazi: as he himself indicates, he is also a Jew, or ultimately, an American dreaming of a house on Nantucket Island. His hunting ability involves taking on any identity, occupying any perspective, and being perfectly at home in any language, for he has none that is his own, and is confined to no specific frame. Yet Landa, though the consummate actor—and an almost omnipotent director, able to control all possible frames—reaches a limit twice in the film. The first is when, in a moment of uncharacteristic rage, he suffocates the actress Bridget von Hammersmark, the German double agent whose treason he has uncovered, with his bare hands. Clearly, the murder is not an act of fanatical identification with the Nazi agenda, for all his previous relations with the enemy were conducted in a calm, professional manner. Rather, something in this encounter involving its erotic dimension and the fact that she is a rival actor marks the limits of his capacity to simply occupy a role and control a frame. However, no so-called real self appears beneath his many roles; there is only rage. Rage, the affect of impotent helplessness, comes to mark the presence of this outside. The second time Landa reaches his limit as an actor and director comes at the very end of the film. Following an agreement with the American government, he plans to switch from hunting Jews for the Nazis to being an American war hero. But something refuses to allow this transition to go unmarked and insists that a trace remain, so that his past cannot be forgotten: Aldo Raine, the force of American Apache-style vengeance,

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On Film Genre

carves a swastika on Landa’s forehead. (This mark is Raine’s signature, the way he brands those who desire to simply abandon their role as Nazis.) Unlike everyone else in the film, Aldo is the ultimate nonactor—always himself, as it were, incapable of transformation. This is because he occupies precisely the space that belongs to the outside of roles, which itself has no identity, no substance; as such, Aldo can always only be the same (almost like Rousseau’s natural man), testifying to the existence of the nonsubstantial outside by leaving an excessive and bloody mark traced by vengeance, indicating a refusal to submit to the logic in which there are only roles, only shifting identities. Something beyond the roles leaves its signature in the flesh, a signature of history, a memory-wound or scar, beyond the exchange of old symbolic roles for new ones as time flows on. The roles carry a remainder, an outside, that should not be f­ orgotten, and Aldo Raine, who carries the trace of the Native American in his blood, occupies the place of memory of this outside (of symbolic roles) and marks with his blade this forgotten excess. The relations among revenge, memory, and history are thus at the center of the film and perhaps at the center of Tarantino’s cinema in general. Revenge, as Tarantino shows both in the animated part of Kill Bill (animation, a neighboring genre to the fairy tale, signals a certain untimely dimension) and in the opening of Inglourious Basterds, is the burning insistence, impermeable to any progression in time, of a traumatic event of helpless passivity—witnessing horror that exceeds one’s existential framework. Its burning persists unceasingly; it is atemporal, possessing an atemporality internal to the progression of historical time, an atemporality that is, paradoxically, nothing but pure time itself. Such passive and helpless witnessing of horror indicates the existence of something in excess of any capacity to inhabit an identity and thus to occupy a specific role in time, something that cannot be appropriated and possessed (the requirement for having an identity and a role). Revenge is that affect and desire that cannot allow this helpless, originary passivity to be forgotten; it insists, in spite of shifting historical or temporal circumstances, on preserving this burning in excess of historical and chronological time, a reminder of an originary injury. This logic of revenge that insists on a certain atemporality internal to time, beyond the shifting of circumstances and roles brought by historical change, is also what structures the double temporality of the opening of Inglourious Basterds, as well as the film as a whole. The beginning declares

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that events occurred “once upon a time” in Nazi-occupied France—more precisely, in 1941. The film thus belongs simultaneously to the ahistorical time of legend or fairy tale and to chronological, historical time; as such, it indicates that this atemporality at the heart of historical time occupies its center. History itself, then, is a relation between a chronological dimension where configurations of meaning are constantly transformed and an atemporal dimension that haunts these historical shifts from ­outside—the resource for their creation and coming into being. The dimension of vengeance points to this other side of history. Vengeance, or at any rate the aspect that interests Tarantino, is violence aimed against violence to the outside, that is, against the attempt to deny and repress the presence of the outside and reduce history to a series of changing symbolic roles. What is specific to a historical era is not just the configuration of roles and constructions of meaning characterizing it but the way in which it relates (a way similar to chronological age’s relation to infancy, which we examined in regard to Hawks) to the atemporal remainder that haunts it. Part of Tarantino’s goal is to reactivate this atemporal burning dimension at the heart of history, which refuses to be quieted down and consumed by the passing of time and the new roles and identities that arise in it. Such reactivation functions as the interruption of shifting identities and can be understood as the becoming expressive of the outside, an outside that is nothing but pure time itself. The most decisive and crucial interruption of this kind occurs at the very end of the film, when Shosanna finally takes revenge for the slaughter of her family. It happens at a movie house and is introduced by a film she herself has made, which interrupts the Nazi propaganda movie produced by Goebbels, The Pride of the Nation. Shosanna’s film, that is to say, allegorically stands for the film we are watching, Inglourious Basterds. The interruption turns into a literal burning that consumes every cinematic figure, every identity and role in the film, as if to return everything to the original fire that is life, the burning of time. This interruption of Nazi propaganda by a different type of film points to how Tarantino wants to distinguish his own filmmaking from fascistic, Nazi cinema. Inglourious Basterds repeatedly refers to a Nazi cinema whose two main representatives are Goebbels and Riefenstahl, underscoring the fact (as has often been stressed) that an essential relation holds between Nazi ideology (and a certain interpretation of visuality in general) and the medium of film

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On Film Genre

in particular. The link between Nazi ideology and modern media is not accidental but essential; if one is interested in the question of filming the Shoah, one must understand precisely how Nazism engages with film. Its ultimate product, its crowning achievement according to Inglourious Basterds, is a work such as The Pride of the Nation, which trumpets the aim of fascistic cinema: to produce national pride through film. It is not fully clear how far Tarantino goes in analyzing this fascistic cinema, which he wishes to interrupt with his own. It is plain, however, that fascistic cinema in his eyes involves a specific experience of woundedness, that is, passivity, helplessness, and exposure to an outside (indicated in the film by the Germans’ growing anxiety about their war losses and by Hitler’s comical, impotent rage), that is compensated for by producing imaginary identification with a heroic figure (Fredrick Zoller) who takes on the task of conquering external threats to ”German identity.” If fascistic cinema’s task is to defend, through the medium of film, the security of identity (e.g., the way that in one scene a heroic portrait of Hitler is being painted at the moment of his childish rage, as if to resolve the crisis in identity that the rage expresses), then, Tarantino suggests, another cinema is needed, a cinema that will interrupt this Nazi cinema and remind viewers of the outside. It is a cinema of Jewish vengeance, in which “Jewishness” does not mark an identity but rather serves as a burning reminder that this dimension outside the role exists. Accordingly, the Jews in the film literally occupy the space outside the frame: they are hidden in an unseen place, under the floor of the house that the Nazi invaders destroy at the beginning of the movie. The question of filming the Shoah, in this case, has a double aspect. On the one hand, filming the Shoah concerns the creation of a wounding and burning memory trace that will activate that which in history is the atemporal outside, an originary helplessness characterizing those whose historical role is to occupy the place of that which is outside any role. On the other hand, filming the Shoah signals a demand for the medium of film to create images of a different nature from those created by fascistic cinema, to forge burning images that interrupt fascistic ones. The Shoah, in this sense, marks not only a specific historical event but a specific ethics of the image. Tarantino is clearly very aware that a certain Hollywood cinema is complicit with fascistic ideology (a complicity famously analyzed, for example, by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in Hitler: A Film from Germany and which Claude Lanzmann hints at in his remarks on Spielberg’s Schindler’s

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List 2). This awareness prompts him to flirt dangerously with fascistic creations of his own—the heroic figure Aldo Raine, for example. It seems to me, however, that such flirtation is essential if one wants both to distance oneself from the fascistic image effectively and to open up a new type of image: a burning cinema of Jewish vengeance that shows and reminds, insists and burns, with the memorious scar of an unforgettable outside— something that can only happen as an image, a filming of a Shoah. v Enigmatically, Tarantino elaborates the question of the image of vengeance—or the excess of the outside—in relation to the question of sexual difference. The film offers not one but two versions of the image of vengeance (and the image as vengeance—of the outside): the vengeful woman and the avenging man. Let’s start with the question of the relation between the woman and the excess of the outside, which in a way frames the film and provides its structure and narrative direction, by taking a look at the opening sequence. After a brief pastoral landscape, a house set among peaceful hills, we are quickly introduced to two figures: a father who is cutting wood and whose cutting is interrupted, and immediately thereafter, a daughter who is hanging out the laundry, specifically a white sheet. As she hangs the sheet (which resembles a movie screen as well as a theatrical curtain) she hears something coming from somewhere unseen—her view is blocked by the screen/­curtain—that arouses her anxiety. The space available to her, framed by the screen, thus is interrupted by a menacing exteriority whose source is as yet unknown; it unsettles her and makes her anxious, disturbing the peaceful world that has hitherto seemed protected by the father’s (wood)cutting.3 Reading this scene allegorically, as signaling the way the film displays its own operations, we can say that the relations between the interruption of the father’s work of cutting and protecting and the opening of the daughter’s anxiety are marked—that is, understood from the point of view of the medium—as occurring at the limit between a framed space and an unavailable outside. The framed space becomes a screen/curtain once its nature as a frame is discovered—in other words, once it becomes clear that it serves as a protection against and thus an erasure of an ­exteriority.4 The interruption of this protective enclosure, revealing the relation between a frame and an uncontrollable, menacing outside, also turns the

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On Film Genre

frame into a screen: the surface onto which anxiety about the discovery and weakening of the frame is projected. The cinematic image, then, is born from the weakening of the enclosing frame, which coincides with the discovery of the frame as such, and the opening of a screen, that is, a framed space onto which the discovery of the relation between the frame and the outside is projected (a projection that can obviously be a phantasmic covering up, through the provision of a specific content, say of evil Nazi invaders, of this anxietyprovoking unavailability of the outside). It is the daughter as such, we might say, the daughter understood as a certain position within the structure of a paternally organized family, who occupies this anxious place of the screen, becoming a witness to the failure of the father to fully frame the outside. From one perspective, the film tells the story of this anxious daughter, the witness to the screen. The father, who wants to hold on to his role as protector from the outside, sends the daughter into another framed space, the home. Before long, this proves a failure: after the father and the Nazi visitor enter the house, the daughter is sent outside again, now abandoned by the father, who remains alone in the house with the intrusive force of the outside (more precisely, a certain projected fantasy of the outside as an evil, omniscient controller of all frames), namely, Landa. While we are no longer occupied with this first, anxious daughter, another daughter figure, hiding underneath the house, comes to occupy the outside: it is the Jewish girl Shosanna, who is introduced as if she embodies the remaining excess of that first daughter, an excess that would not rest, a reminder of the father’s failure. This Jewish woman, who occupies the outside for the rest of the film, proves to be a force of vengeance and the cause of the destruction of Nazism. From the formal/allegorical point of view, the anxious daughter, the witness to the birth of the screen out of the failure of the protective cutting father, has transformed into feminine Jewish vengeance, the avenger who no longer calls for the father’s help to be rescued from the anxiety of the screen (the movie’s first word is “Papa!,” uttered as a call for help by the anxious daughter) but becomes a force of the outside who destroys those seeking to repress it. This force of the outside becomes an all-consuming fire, a real image to interrupt all false images (false in the sense of trying to erase the outside) and all framed figures. The daughter of fairy tale, caught between anxiety and fantasy, crying for father’s help, has been transformed into a burning image.

Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

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Masculine vengeance, embodied in the figure of Aldo Raine, takes a somewhat different route that yields a different type of image, no longer a burning image of all-consuming vengeance but a tattooed inscription, a memorial signature of justice—perhaps a circumcision. In Tarantino’s movie, a burning fire and a memorial circumcision represent the two sides of the image of vengeance (the image as vengeance and as justice), split along the lines of sexual difference. From the point of view of the cinematic medium itself, there is less indication as to how to read the masculine occupier of the force of justice of the outside, Aldo Raine, a part Native American (and thus another outsider figure, in addition to the Jew and the woman). Accordingly, there is less indication as to how to mark, cinematically, exactly how the logic of revenge and the outside is divided in terms of sexual difference. What is clear, however, is the activity involved in his creation of an image of justice as a reminder of the outside: carving an unerasable signature into the flesh. This tattooing or circumcision, brilliantly conceived by Tarantino, may be understood as the transformation of a symbol into an image.5 The symbol of Nazi power—the swastika, which is supposed to stand for the erasure of any contaminating outside—is turned into the signature of the outside itself, an inscription of what is beyond any role or frame, beyond any power trying to control the dimension of excessive exposure through the triumph of its will. The symbol of power turns into an enigmatic circumcision that says nothing but “remember the outside.” Thus speaks divine justice (I am referring to Walter Benjamin’s concept of divine violence). The image of vengeance and justice is divided across the gap of sexual difference in these two forms, two modes of activating an ethics of the image: the burning image of an all-consuming fire and the circumcising memorial signature in the flesh, both of which interrupt the false images of fascistic power.

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Notes

The Unframing Image 1.  Rembrandt also painted more explicit scenes of escape, for example, his Flight into Egypt (1627) and Landscape with a Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1647), as well as prison scenes, such as the early St. Paul in Prison (1627). 2.  Needless to say, it is of extreme interest and importance to reflect more specifically on why such an understanding of painting was elaborated by a ­seventeenth-century Dutch painter inhabiting a realm of conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism—a conflict wherein the question of the artistic image’s legitimacy and significance played a key role—at a certain moment of modern European history and of the rise of capitalism. However, I am limiting myself here to the much broader category of modernity, since it seems to me that, with many internal differences and local inflections, there is something common to the very rise of the question of art (at least within so-called Western culture) in the modern era (or what counts as such), which displays a certain continuity from the Renaissance to our own times. 3.  Seen in this light, Rembrandt’s biblical interpretation may be viewed in parallel to the project of his contemporary and countryman Baruch Spinoza (whom he is rumored to have met), the father of modern scientific biblical interpretation, that is, of nontheological methods of reading sacred scripture. 4.  In this context, it is significant that “Abraham” will be the new name given to Abram, as he was known previous to the divine call. The only difference between the old and new names concerns the introduction of a nothing into who he is—an h, Hebrew ‫ה‬, the letter for God, which, in a sense, is nothing but breath, basically a silence. In a way, the new name only introduces an erasure and emptiness into the old one; it is an unnaming. 5.  Things are of course more complex; one should never be so hasty as to read any of the biblical moves as fully reducible to the issue of the creation of 211

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Notes to The Unframing Image

territory and of delimited identities out of the elimination of the emptying call. Rather, I think, all the gestures keep alive a constitutive tension that is never resolved one way or another, between the pure experience of the call and the territorial assigning of delimited identities. In this sense we can see a constant tension between what we may understand as a territorial logic and what we may call a memorial testimony. Every biblical gesture belongs to both. Thus, for example, the heart of the matter, the circumcision, can be understood on the one hand as an identifying marker, a signature marking the distinction between those who belong to a community, a group identity, a territory, and those who do not belong; but on the other hand as nothing but the memory of a pure cut, a burning in the flesh. In such case the circumcision functions only as a reminder of emptiness, marking a belonging to nothing but the empty call, a belonging to that which, precisely, cancels every other identitarian belonging. In this case the circumcision will only distinguish between those who, paradoxically, belong to nonbelonging and all the others who only possess regular identities without the trace of the dispossessing call. 6.  Equally, Christian tradition holds it to be the hill of Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion; Muslim tradition considers it to be Mecca. Thus, it represents the central sacred place for all monotheistic religions. 7.  At this point I cannot enter into a full discussion of the precise relation this conception of sacrifice—understood as the bringing of an excess under a territorial power—has to Georges Bataille’s famous analyses of sacrifice as what he calls a pure expenditure, the attempt to achieve a completely wasteful dimension, the bringing about of an excess beyond any utilitarian use and identity in a meaningfully organized and ordered world. In other words, Bataille seems to hint that sacrifice—or at least a certain logic of sacrifice, as an attempt to achieve pure waste—is that through which communication with what I call the pure disrupting call can be accomplished. I tend to think, though, that any sort of sacrifice is finally aimed at a territorial ordering and capture of excess, not at pure expenditure. 8.  To use the felicitous formulation of Gilles Deleuze in his books on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 9.  In this context, it is important to try to distinguish between this essential movability of what I am calling modern painting and what might seem to display a similar principle of movability, the Byzantine icon, at least as analyzed by Marie-José Mondzain in her fascinating and helpful book Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). As Mondzain stresses, Byzantine icons were understood as essentially movable; they were not tied—in the manner of, say, an altar—to a particular site endowing them with significance. For this reason, Mondzain can declare that “the icon has no frame” (162), in the sense that it does not belong to any pre-established place or territory. However, as she also shows, the icon is

Notes to The Unframing Image

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always in the service of the principle of what the theoreticians of Christianity have called “economy,” namely, the providential ordering of the world in relation to a transcendence that surveys everything in advance and from beginning to the end. Thus, as the icon is moved from place to place, it serves as a means for territorial expansion: because it “speaks” in the name of an invisible and absent transcendent universal order, it has the power to eliminate every temporary earthly territory and bring into it, or replace it with, the real divine territorial principle gradually revealing itself in the temporal realm. The principle of the icon’s movability, then, essentially functions in the name of transcendent territorialism, whereby economy—the providential plan of the divine—operates as an ever-growing frame that will gradually cover the whole field of existence. Ideally, this operation will come to include everyone in the frame; with no outside, everyone will come to have an identity as foreseen by the divine plan. This iconic territorializing movability is very different from the movability of the modern painting, which functions according to what I call a frame that unframes. The movable icon, I maintain, functions as a complete taking over by the (territorial) frame. The framelessness of the icon functions as a representative of a universal transcendent Frame, a Frame to frame all other frames. In contrast, modern painting unframes this entire operation—it interrupts the theological-political system of territory. The movability of the modern painting does not occur in the name of economy but exposes precisely the fact that there is no economy, no preestablished principle of transcendent territorialization ordering the world. The painting can move, that is, can stand free of any and every specific place, not because any and every specific place has to be brought under an economic principle organizing it differently than its current temporary configuration, but because there is no order given to places in advance, because the world is groundless, non-economical, not subject to any pre-given order. The movability of the painting expresses this groundlessness and thereby activates a logic that undermines divine economy. 10.  It is interesting in this regard to note that Rembrandt’s equally remarkable (and in terms of pictorial logic very similar) Return of the Prodigal Son (1665) also does not place father and son at the center of the painting. It is as if reconciliation and forgiveness do not concern the son’s return to the father as a ­centralizing power; rather, the off-center reconciliation is the Image qua event of the loss of paternal centrality and the concomitant emergence of a new kind of relation (a relation opening through the mediation of the Image/angel). 11.  In this relatively early painting, the angel comes from the outside, from the off-frame—much like the mysterious light in later paintings (e.g., Return of the Prodigal Son, where an actual angel is no longer needed, as it were). Rembrandt is the acknowledged master of such light: it involves a radical way of understanding the pictorial surface, the image, as deriving its power from a new

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Notes to The Unframing Image and Part 1

way of conceiving the source of visibility. The source of the visibility of the Image is no longer a divine light but a more mysterious illumination, discovered once the divine has been replaced. The source of such illumination, which makes the image truly an image, is the invisible “off.” 12.  That said, the figures of the diabolical and of rebellion still belong within the frame of the paternal system; as such, they do not fulfill the radicality that a real angelic dissolution of the divine system implies. 13.  The sign “// ” is be read as that which, by separating, allows for a relation.

Part 1: The Off-Screen 1.  This is different from the famous Althusserian example of a person interpellated by a cop shouting “Hey, you there!”—a shout not necessarily meant for that person in particular but that she or he assumes as her or his own (thereby constituting that person as an ideological subject). In contrast, the indeterminate call with which the work of art is concerned leaves it open whether we are addressed or not. Consequently, those who are addressed are addressed in a new way, as having no specific identity; because they are called into question themselves, they pose questions in turn, thereby coming to occupy a moment in excess of ideology, the moment of freedom. The work of art turns the cop into a ghost. 2.  From “Mnemosyne”: “Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast / Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren.” 3.  I am limiting myself to the history of Western theater as a very specific type of institution; the fascinating and larger question of dramatic performance in other cultures exceeds the compass of this book. 4.  An important historical question would be why, at this particular time and place, Renaissance England—and in this particular political context, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I—this universal dimension of the modern stage was revealed in its full complexity (to a particular person, Shakespeare). 5.  The center is no longer a center, then, since it is no longer a privileged place of communication. The stage becomes the means for dissolving the logic of a center (of meaning) and activating the absolute equality between all places (in principle). To a certain extent, this was already true for the Greek amphitheater. The stage is the exact opposite of the temple (i.e., a sacred place of privileged communication with the divine that orients every aspect of human life); but this opposition might not have been fully established within the Greek context, where the two could live together in peace, so to speak. 6.  This is why Shakespeare, who activated the abstract power of the “any,” is truly a figure of “world literature”—the literature in which the world, the realm of the “any,” is at stake. I will return to the concept of “world.”

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7.  For a helpful discussion of this aspect of Shakespeare’s works, see Stephen Ratcliffe, Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Denver: Counterpath, 2010), which deals exhaustively with the many gestures through which onstage action refers to something that is absent or not concretely given. 8.  While the etymology of the word obscene is debated, it seems to be accepted that that Greeks relegated what they considered too violent for the audience to the off-stage. 9.  I will return to this question. Suspense—the affect associated with a state of suspension—constitutes a fundamental affect of the Shakespearean stage; indeed, it opens a direct line of British dramatic thinking from Shakespeare to Hitchcock. 10.  We might relate this splitting between identity and a ghostly “any” activated by the Shakespearean stage to two equally famous abstracting gestures of modern thought: the Cartesian cogito, an abstract “I think” achieved through the elimination of any empirical content belonging to the life of a subject, and the Kantian transcendental subject, an abstract and empty power of subjectivity as such, free from empirical contingency. Needless to say, the precise relations between these three abstracting gestures exceed the scope of the present work. 11.  Even though the painting’s attribution to Bruegel has been contested, it seems clear it was conceived by him. It is of course not a question of Bruegel’s actually being guided by Hamlet, since historically Bruegel belongs to an age prior to Shakespeare’s. 12.  Here, I am alluding to the typology of cinematic images developed by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-­Image. The history of film, Deleuze argues, can be read in terms of the gradual dissolution of the regime he calls the “movement-image” in favor of the “time-image” (which largely characterizes cinema after the Second World War). The regime of the movement-image comprises three main types: action-images, perceptionimages, and affection-images. While Deleuze’s discussion is paradigmatic and ­essential—and also points to a historical shift that is to some extent intuitive— I never­theless think that alterations need to be introduced into his scheme from both a conceptual point of view and a historical one. At least where works of art are concerned, there is no such thing as a perception-action image. The work of art, or the artistic image, emerges when perception and action are suspended and paralyzed, and when an exposure to the dimension that I have called “ghostly” is activated. Art activates the watching of ghosts at the moment action is suspended. The artistic image, at least in modernity, is only interested in the inscription of “ghostly” nonexistence, which can assume many forms (the stage, the canvas, the movie screen, etc.). At least since the birth of art in ancient Greece out of the critique of the logic governing the sacred (a critique that reaches full force in modernity, where the image is perhaps most fully liberated from the

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Notes to Part 1

logic of the sacred), every work of art has attempted to attain the status of an Image, of an actuality in which nonexistence is inscribed, and it has organized itself around privileged moments when such a paradox has been achieved. Thus, moments of worldly perception can only be shown within a work of art if they circle around a privileged moment of their failure and collapse—their encounter with the disinheriting ghost—which may be understood as the event of the real Image. While it is true to some extent that Deleuze is uninterested in the distinction I am making between artistic images and worldly perceptions—­seeking instead to follow Bergson and subsume everything under the term “image,” which may in turn be divided into various types—I think that this conceptual move fails to give art, or the dimension of the poetic in general, its “proper,” albeit strange, place within the general economy of our existence: the place of creating images as moments of suspending and paralyzing the actual world, exposing us to an emptying and ghostly disorientation. Consequently, I would like to take some distance from Deleuze’s historical account. If what I say about Hamlet and Bruegel is true, then the mutual collapse of perception and action does not characterize post–Second World War film specifically; rather, it is the event that has fascinated the modern work of art from its inception. In a way, to employ Deleuze’s terminology, all works of art in the modern period (roughly, from the Renaissance to our own day) attempt to create a time-image, or what I am simply calling an image, a ghostly actual nonexistence paradox. It might be that the art of film entertains a new relation to this general modern logic of the image; nevertheless, it is only an inflection, even if it represents its most successful fulfillment. 13.  My disagreement with Koerner’s understanding of Bruegel’s relation to the question of the frame extends to his understanding of Bruegel’s relation to what he calls the “ground of the painting”; indeed, the two points of dispute are related. Koerner wishes to see Bruegel as an exponent of the humanist project of his age—by which he means the discovery of a world not governed by the divine but whose historicity and culture can be attributed to human endeavors. He astutely observes, as the quote above implies, that, in contrast to Bosch’s attempts to ground the painting in a world order, a cosmos, Bruegel’s paintings do not relate to an external, eternal ground. This means, for Koerner, that paintings now have to produce their own ground (which is also implied by Koerner’s claim that they envelop us in their frame). If the painting is no longer grounded in an external cosmic order, its frame is not something that disconnects us from the actual world (since every artistic frame is such a disconnection, owing to its decontextualizing power) in order to open us to a cosmic, hierarchical organization. Rather, the frame is understood as what enables the construction of an immanent realm that fully envelops us, the creation of a contingent ­human ground that is ever-shifting, changing with history, and so on. That said, if Bruegel indeed connects the question of the modern, framed image to the loss of di-

Notes to Part 1

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vine ground, this does not occur humanistically, that is, to show that the only grounds are human grounds; instead, it demonstrates that the human is now to be understood as a witness to a fundamental ungrounding, to a world understood as a groundless exposure. The world is not, to begin with, something of human making but rather a groundless openness, and witnessing it constitutes human being in a new way. Here the human does not will the world; it does not make the world. It is defined as being-in-the-world: being as the one whose life is exposure to a principle of nonground. Thus the artistic image—and the modern decontextualizing frame—does not (or at least does not primarily) allow us to become participants in a contingent ground of human making so much as it permits us to become witnesses, through the frame’s power to disconnect from any order, of our being qua those exposed to a fundamental ungrounding. Thus, both the frame of the religious painting as well as the Bruegelian frame disconnect us from a worldly context, but the religious frame does so in order to open us to an invisible cosmic order or to the invisible divine, while the Bruegelian frame does so in order to expose us to the groundlessness of the world. 14.  In a later chapter, we will encounter another architect of a labyrinth, in Howard Hawks’s Land of the Pharaohs. 15.  Indeed, Bruegel is so absent from this famous painting that, as noted, scholars are not certain whether he can even be identified as its painter! This amounts to yet another relation to the ghostly Shakespeare. Manfred Sellink has written, “The painting has always looked ‘off ’ to me. While it was the first Bruegel picture that captured my attention as a 17-year-old student all those years ago, each subsequent viewing of the painting indicated that something was not quite right about it. The most problematic aspect of the painting for me rests in the depiction of the peasant and his horse. The figures do not have the typical heft of Bruegel’s figures. Something about the man and the horse give the impression that they could almost lift off the painting and float into the sky” (Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints [New York: Abrams, 2007], 112; emphasis mine). Sellink’s impression seems to point to a truth he cannot a­ rticulate, for isn’t the “offness” of the painting precisely Bruegel’s signature, the disturbance that makes things “not quite right”? Isn’t the lightness of the man with the horse, a figure often associated with the artist, precisely the lightness of the artist, who can always take flight into the dimension of the “off ” and leave the ground behind? 16.  In his allegorical brilliance, Bruegel shows the opening of a landscape to be a call to freedom in his small, enigmatic painting Two Chained Monkeys. ­Sitting on a window sill in the painting’s foreground, almost dominating our view at first, the monkeys give way to a vision of a landscape behind them. It’s as if the very activity of our eyes, moving from the enchained monkeys to an examination of the landscape behind them, performs the act of becoming free,

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Notes to Part 1

that is, answers an empty call detaching us from any given order and meaning, calling us to activate an emptiness out of which new meanings may come about. The painting, as an arena of transition from determined perception to the ghostly call of the landscape, becomes the performance of liberation. This transition from entrapment to standing exposed to an empty call is conceived as a relation between two frames: the first (the external frame of the window holding the monkeys) imprisons, while the second (the internal part of the window) forms a painterly frame through which the landscape comes into view, decontextualizing and liberating. The medium of painting allows us to experience the transition from the first to the second frame. We can understand the first frame as an activity in the world that attempts to assign strict divisions and meanings, determining what belongs and what does not, what counts as inside or outside in a given situation—thereby shackling the range and capacity of our possible movements (which we can relate to the traditional structure of paternal law and authority). The second frame can be understood as cutting the shackles, deframing or unframing the first (paternal) frame, canceling its divisions; it unmoors both the image and observer from given meanings, orientations, and commands, activating the decontexualized call that Bruegel associates with the vision of the landscape. 17.  This origination on the modern, decontextualized canvas of a multitude of nameless people in a disoriented landscape, liberated from any identitarian principle, finding themselves in a fallen world (though the fallen world is no longer a Christian one but an arena of falling, in the sense of belonging to a groundless world with no pre-given paternal orientation) that can nevertheless be the arena of a new principle of happiness in the freedom of the world, is perhaps most powerfully expressed in Bruegel’s great The Harvesters, his vision of an earthly paradise, the achievement of happiness in a falling world. What is perhaps most remarkable in this painting for our context is that, as in the fall of Icarus but much more elaborately, the canvas opens a relation between a disorienting landscape and the emergence of a nameless multitude of people taking over the front and center of the painting, thus becoming its most prominent subject. As has often been noticed, the church and castle in this painting occupy a fairly unnoticeable place, in the distance, and we can thus say that these two interlinked principles of identitarian appropriation, the one to this world, the other to the next, have receded to the background, bringing into the foreground the main new entity of modernity, the nameless people occupying a landscape. The framed canvas becomes the place of the emergence of the people and of the demise of the castle and the church. Quite remarkably and mysteriously, Bruegel manages to make the figures populating the canvas (like most of his figures in general) both blank—thus not really having a specific identity, almost empty in their capacity to receive the world as landscape—and at the same time un-

Notes to Part 1

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mistakably individual or singular, not a sketch or a general type but this or that specific person, though with no determined identity. 18.  Bruegel’s paintings are noticeably filled with knives, daggers, and other cutting instruments. 19.  This coming together on canvas in mutual exposure is both like and unlike the result of the herding shown. It is like herding in that it results from a cut that suspends, detaching those who occupy the newly opened realm from their given context. It is unlike herding in that those subject to the suspending cut are not cut in order to be governed and reoriented by a shepherd, a meaning-giving authority; rather, they remain in a state of disorienting suspension. The artist is not a shepherd: he or she does not have the task of governing and reorienting but simply that of of cutting and exposing. In fact, our painting shows the transition between the position of the shepherd and that of the artist: as we have seen, the shepherd himself has been suspended, becoming a watcher of the off-frame; in turn, the sheep seem to be suspended in a strange zone where they are no longer their “natural” selves but also no longer, or not yet, oriented by the shepherd. To a certain extent, everything on the canvas, the landscape and its occupants, shares this suspended state of the sheep, neither herded nor unherded. The artist is a suspended shepherd who has become a watcher of the off-frame. 20.  Bruegel shows that this desire for the beyond, which motivates the sailors to explore the sea, an elsewhere, has to do with the cut the off-frame activates. The wind, whose power blows through the sails, comes from the right-hand side of the painting, that is, from beyond the frame. The “off,” so to speak, is the wind (the “off ” is equally the source of illumination—the sun at the limits of the frame—of the painting, that which opens the kind of vision the painting provides). 21.  In Bruegel, it is not only the figures who are masked and defaced but the landscape itself. What are all the great snow scenes if not defacements of the landscape, its haunting erasure, a resonating emptiness opened at its heart? The snow in Bruegel operates like a mask, communicating with the activity of the frame as exposure to the “off.” 22.  The question of the water here, and in Solaris in general, is complex. As in Christian baptism, the water is not to be understood altogether literally, since it stands for something else; at the same time, it is not to be understood only metaphorically (i.e., becoming spiritually cleansed is like becoming physically clean). 23. In Stalker, Tarkovsky famously calls the mysterious realm, a decontextualized anytime/anywhere into which the movie’s “protagonist” leads an expedition, “the Zone.” As such, the journey in Stalker is also to be understood as an expedition into the decontextualized zone of film. 24.  For some of the more influential discussions of the question of the off-

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Notes to Part 1

screen, see Jacques Aumont, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie, and Marc Vernet, Aesthetics of Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Pascal ­Bonitzer, Le champ aveugle: Essais sur le réalisme au cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma Livres, 1999), and his essay “Hors-champ (un espace en défaut),” Cahiers du cinéma, nos. 234–235 (December 1971–January/February 1972); Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 25.  The photographic image, a product of the camera, is also a product of passivity; as such it shows a slice of an actual reality continuing beyond the edges of its frame. A relation between the discontinuity of the frame and the continuity of the world exists in photography in a way that does not hold for theater or painting. However, because there is no ongoing communication between the off-photograph and what we see—no constant back-and-forth between the “on” and the “off ”—the mysterious dynamism between the anytime/anyplace and the actual that film effects does not really occur in photography. 26.  Recall, in this context, the well-known words of André Bazin in “Painting and Cinema”: “A painting is separated off not only from reality as such but, even more so, from the reality that is represented in it. Indeed it is a mistake to see a picture frame as having merely a decorative or rhetorical function. The fact that it emphasizes the compositional quality of the painting is of secondary importance. The essential role of the frame is, if not to create at least to emphasize the difference between the microcosm of the picture and the macrocosm of the natural world in which the painting has come to take its place. This explains the baroque complexity of the traditional frame whose job it is to establish something that cannot be geometrically established—namely the discontinuity between the painting and the wall, that is to say between the painting and reality. Whence derives, as Ortega y Gasset has well stated, the prevalence everywhere of the gilded frame, because it is a material that gives the maximum of reflection, reflection being that quality of color, of light, having of itself no form, that is to say pure formless color. In other words the frame of a painting encloses a space that is oriented so to speak in a different direction. In contrast to natural space, the space in which our active experience occurs and bordering its outer limits, it offers a space the orientation of which is inwards, a contemplative area opening solely onto the interior of the painting. The outer edges of the screen are not, as the technical jargon would seem to imply, the frame of the film ­image. They are the edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality. The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into

Notes to Part 1

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the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal” (What Is Cinema? 1:164–165). I largely agree with these observations but would point out that, on the one hand, the screen, in contrast to Bazin’s fully realist interpretation, does not only indicate a continuity of reality beyond its edges; precisely because it is nevertheless a frame-structure, it also involves a radical discontinuity from its surrounding, which opens it to the mysterious dimension of the “off.” On the other hand, as we have seen in our earlier discussion of Rembrandt, the pictorial frame itself, though indeed enclosing and cutting itself off from actuality, does so in order to open to a mysterious outside. As a result, it does not open solely an interiority but a strange exteriority, and in this sense the pictorial frame is not only centripetal but has a centrifugal dimension as well. In short, Bazin seems to largely miss the extimate dimension we are calling the “off ” and its undermining of the spatial division between inside and outside. 27.  For an influential discussion of the gift in such terms, see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 28. In Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), Robert Bird has also suggested this connection between the ontology of the screen and what Tarkovsky calls “the Zone” in Stalker—a mysterious, completely disorienting realm out of time and place where the protagonist, a medium to another realm (cinema), guides others. 29.  I will discuss why déjà vu stands at the heart of the question of the image in general later in this chapter. 30.  The essence of the close-up in general is vertigo. Hitchcock’s Vertigo clearly offers a major reference point for Solaris; indeed, with its repetitive and ghostly returns of the dead “love object”—a return amounting to the very essence of the image as a ghostly double, déjà vu, and resurrection that highlights the tie between eroticism and loss—the latter film can be seen as a complex reading of the former. 31.  From the point of view of psychoanalysis, the problematic of the artistic image (i.e., the problem of the cut) opens when the symbolic frame fails. Paradoxically, the artistic frame unframes the symbolic frame, exposing it to groundlessness and activating the power of disidentification for which the symbolic frame tried to offer a solution. As we have seen, however, the artistic frame is not only an exposure but also a kind of delimitation. Such delimitation contains the groundless, in a way, yet it does so without eliminating its excessive infinity; it makes it accessible as infinity. As such, the artistic frame is to be understood as a supplemental mechanism allowing us to occupy a zone that, on the one hand, marks the failure of the symbolic frame but, on the other hand, does not entail drowning and disappearing in its collapse. The image stands between the failure of symbolic castration and death, offering the promise of a life/death as escape from both.

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Notes to Part 1

32.  The name of the protagonist—as we will soon find out when his father calls to him from a distance—is Kris, that is, Christ. This appellation already points to the problematic relations between the image and the father that Solaris will activate, using Christian logic, but also undermine it through the cinematic image. Starting with St. Paul, Christ has traditionally been understood as the image of the Father: the mimetic incarnation and radiance qua revelation of the paternal principle, that is, a repetition functioning as the inheritance of the origin. It is through Christ that the Father gives himself to us, that we are appropriated to his calling. In the film, however, Kris’s adventure opens the question of the image as signifying the failure of the father to give himself, that is, to be a father himself. As in Hamlet, the image, the work of art, marks the event of a failed paternal inheritance and perpetuation. The image, rather than the unificatory incarnation of the paternal principle, signifies the father’s failure and disappearance. The entire film is structured such that Kris, separated from his father, embarks on a voyage that will eventually bring him, like the prodigal son, back to the father (a coming back that Hamlet, had he succeeded in avenging the death of the father, would also have achieved, in the sense of coming back to his rightful inheritance). The final image of the film seems to show that this return has been achieved; indeed, it even employs Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son as its iconographic model. However, a mere second after this supposed unification, we realize that the reference to Rembrandt does not mark a repetition of the paradigmatic scene of return and unification. Instead, it shows that we are dealing with an image of return rather than an actual return; an actual return (at least to the father) is impossible, for there is no father (understood as an all-guiding, transcendent origin) and there never has been. Kris has not come back to the father, and it is this that has produced an image. The promise of the father the film briefly provided immediately betrays itself, proving to be only an image. It is the father’s failure to perpetuate himself as a mimetic inheritance that is now understood to be the origin of the image. I will discuss this complex logic further as we continue, but we can already see that this is precisely the logic that the opening image activates for us (and indeed it is the logic of the whole film). The image marks the failure of the father to be himself and signals the emergence of his ghost at the place of this failure. 33.  The director’s father, interestingly enough, was an important poet, Arseni Tarkovsky. His poems populate Tarkovsky’s films, most notably The Mirror. A poetic father, by definition, betrays his role as a father, and one of Tarkovsky’s great questions is how this non-father nevertheless leaves an inheritance that repeats itself in the poetic non-son. This is not the Oedipal logic of the anxiety of influence, but of the repetition of the image as a (non)inheritance. What the poetic non-father leaves is not a home (as territory) or a kingdom but an image. Such imagery may offer a home all the same: the home of the ghost. In

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­ ruegelian terms, we might say that Tarkovsky’s poetic problem, the poetic probB lem of the son of a poet, is how to have Daedalus, a poet/architect as a father, yet not become an Icarus. 34.  To be precise, when the box is opened at the end of the film, what it literally reveals is a piece of ground that Kris has seemingly collected as he was walking along the river, to take with him on his space voyage, as if to remind himself of the homely earth that he has left behind. Out of this boxed piece of ground, we realize when the box is opened, a plant has grown, as if signifying an organic connection to the paternal land he has left, the original home. The discovery of the plant allows Kris, as it were, to return home, to become, as mentioned above, the prodigal son, for it is immediately following the opening of the box and showing of the earthly plant that we transition to Kris’s homecoming. Yet only a second later we realize that there was no such homecoming, and the supposed return to the father and the fatherland is proven to be an image. The return at the end is not to a paternal home but to an image and the secret that the box contained is thus not some meaning that will allow us to gain the ground we have lost through being afflicted with the opacity introduced by the off-screen, but is rather the very fact of the image as an originary opacity that is irreducible. If we understand the box correctly, seeing in it not the container of a secret meaning that allows us to return to the paternal home but an opacity that allows us to open up to the dimension of the image, we will have resolved its enigma in the right way. We might say that the challenge of the film is how to respond to the enigma of the box. Those who take the box to contain a secret meaning will have failed the challenge, while those who see in it a figure for the image as the inscription of fundamental groundlessness will have passed the challenge. For in fact, the “secret” revealed to us by the box is not a paternal meaning that we have lost and to which we long to return, but that what we have really lost and long to return to is the image as such, an originary infliction of groundlessness. 35.  The origin, the first haunting scar that every other cut repeats, is the first encounter with what actually has no origin, if we understand origin as a locatable beginning in relation to which everything that follows can be understood. Here the origin marks the fact that there is no such orienting beginning, thus no origin as traditionally understood; there is only an exposure to a no-specific-place/ ­no-specific-time, a realm with no pre-given orientation. This exposure is the origin of the image as well as the original image: the image that one always returns to and that keeps coming back as a ghostly resurrection, as does Kris’s dead wife in Solaris. 36.  Unlike Plato’s philosopher, another famous traveler toward the solar or the sun, Kris will not return to the cave and try to liberate its inhabitants from their life of false images; rather, he will end up discovering the image as the

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Notes to Part 1

i­nscription of a beyond, thereby making us, the inhabitants of the new cave (i.e., cinema), witnesses to a new kind of truth, that of an originary image. Kris’s task will be to liberate us into the image rather than away from false images. Our problem, as Kris’s adventure will show, is not (or not only) that we mistake images for the truth but that we are blind to the real image and to the truth it brings, that of an originary groundlessness. 37.  Another point in favor of understanding the ghostly image as being the primary term and the actual house as the secondary one is that the house we see has a large yellow balloon attached to it, already announcing, of course, the space travel to come. It’s as if what stands at the origin of the voyage Kris soon undertakes is an insufficiency of the actual home—a restlessness at its heart, a desire to catch up with something that exceeds it (i.e., the reflection of the empty beyond the screen). The balloon, then, would seem to indicate that the actual home is already haunted by an excess with which it tries to catch up, thereby signifying the actual home’s secondariness. 38.  A similarly ambivalent ending, wavering enigmatically between travel to a beyond, journey home, and dying, occurs in another great (though maligned and underappreciated) science fiction movie, quite similar to Solaris in many ways: Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars. A probable source for both these films in their circular voyage toward death and the image is Chris Marker’s seminal La jetée. Apart from the fact that both films deal with the relationship between mourning for a dead wife and space travel, the scene in Mission to Mars indicating that De Palma might have had Solaris in mind features a child’s treehouse; a treehouse is prominent in the opening sequence of Solaris, too. In both films, the treehouse encapsulates the problematic relations between the paternal, earthly home and an image that constitutes an inscription of and desire for the beyond. The question arises as to why there is a need for the doubling of home in immediate proximity to the actual home itself (an enigma that of course parallels that of the need for the image as the double of a supposedly actual model). This seems to indicate that the paternal home is always already not really home—not itself, or in excess of itself. The other home, the double, is associated with the child, who refuses, as it were, to be satisfied with the paternal home and tries to capture this excess. At the same time, this doubling repeats the belonging inherent in the original home—which, paradoxically, is not belonging to the paternal but to the excess the home already contains. Thus, the treehouse, on the one hand, tries to be a home, recognizing the lack in or failure of the “original” one. On the other hand, it amounts to a repetition of an original, uncanny excess, an excess that also marks to an extent a belonging, that is, a “home,” if by this we understand that to which one belongs—a belonging, however, to what cannot be appropriated but can only be repeated, the originary empty call. In a way, each paternal home seems already to be such a treehouse, that is, a doubling of a home

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that failed to be a home because it was not itself, a doubling that both attempts to finally create a home that will make the original correspond with itself (a project doomed to failure), but also, at the same time, that tries to re­activate the excess—an excess that haunts the home as a beyond-the-home. As the opening scene of Solaris continues, the father addresses his friend: “This house reminds me of my grandfather’s house; I really liked it, so we decided to build one just like it. I don’t like innovation.” As he speaks these words, he is standing outside the house, already in exile from it: this duplication has already failed to establish a paternal home. As the father speaks, he raises his head and looks toward the off-screen, from where rain starts to fall. As we see again and again in Solaris, water marks the being of the image, what inscribes the dimension of the “off ” on the screen. (The rain seems to come from nowhere.) At the moment he speaks about the attempt to re-create a paternal home, the father is cut, exposed to the off-screen and the being of the image. The rain/image that cuts the father, then, indicates his failure to establish a paternal home; at the same time, it constitutes a call, the call of the off-screen in excess of the paternal, that is, the call for travel to Solaris. This journey may therefore be understood, like the treehouse, as a way to finally reach the home that the father failed to give. Moreover, it is also a voyage that will enable one to finally discover the being of the image. 39.  The paradigmatic cinematic exploration of this question is Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Chapter 1: On the Origin of Film 1.  Gunning sees Griffith at the origin of what he calls a cinema of narrative integration. See Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 2.  “This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s ill will against time and its ‘it was’” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [New York: Penguin, 1954], 140). 3.  Even at the lowest, most deluded point—the infamous sequence in Birth of a Nation where the riders of the Ku Klux Klan gallop to the cabin under attack to save the white family trapped inside—Griffith understands that the riders’ task is not to restore a lost organic unity but to be agents of the cinematic image and rescue us from anti-cinematic intolerance. In Griffith’s blinded imagination, the white sheets of the Klan are so many movie screens or frames, whose movement (much like the drifting sheets of ice on the flowing river of Way Down East, another allegory of the succession of frames between which there are cuts) announces a new activation of the groundless, a new ethics of the image. How such a profound allegory of the cinema as a redemptive force could be implicated in so mistaken a historical interpretation is a mystery I cannot claim to have figured out.

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Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

4.  Miriam Hansen, in her well-known essay “Babel in Babylon: D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916)” (Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994]), examines Griffith’s attempts to think film as a universal language; she suggests that “Griffith wanted to make a name for himself as the father of American cinema, but he wanted to do so by making a new name, by founding a new language of images that would recover a prelapsarian transparency and univocity” (185). I agree that Griffith thought of film in relation to the question of universality, and that what he understands by “the people”—and by the cinematic audience’s becoming a ­people—concerns opening isolated members of the audience to a universal sharing. However, this universal sharing does not depend on some transparent and univocal universal language but on the groundless cut, the encounter with an empty moment of nonmeaning. What brings the audience together and what they share is nothing but the empty cut, and not a transparent language of images. In this sense, I also disagree with Hansen’s interpretation of the relation between the modern story (which, as we have seen, allows for redemption from the history of intolerance) and the three historical narratives. Thus, apropos of the enigmatic image of the cradle, Hansen writes: “On a larger structural level, the three-versus-one figure could be said to telescope the opposition between the three historical narratives, with their well-known fatal outcomes and their pronounced stylistic particularity, and the ostensibly neutral, realistic, and ‘universal’ idiom of the modern narrative, with its fictional characters and classical suspense strategies. It is this effect of homogeneity, identity, and presence that enables the modern narrative (an American film, a Griffith film) to prevail over the fatal script of History” (209). I agree that Griffith wants the modern story to represent what prevails against the fatal script of history, but its capacity to prevail is not due to its homogenizing methods, its effects of identity; on the contrary, it stems from the fact that the modern story belongs to the era of film, an era that allows for the groundless cut—the universal dispossession of identity that the cinematic image activates— to be expressed for the first time. This expression of the cut originates a new type of audience, liberated by the ethics of the cinematic image from the intolerant iconoclasm of history.

Chapter 2: The Actor of the Crowd 1.  When it comes to the TV screen, the computer monitor, the touch screen, and so on, the question of the actor might have a variety of slightly differing logics. 2.  The question of the relationship between crowds and a newly emergent poetic or artistic problem is most famously intuited in Walter Benjamin’s writings, notably in “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” While inspired by Benjamin’s discussions, I will

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not engage with them directly, since my underlying motivations are different from his. The most helpful discussions of these questions in the critical literature on Benjamin are Miriam Hansen’s various essays on Benjamin. For a recent engagement, see John Plotz’s The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics. 3.  For a more elaborate analysis of the relations between the opening of a film and a children’s game as a game of chance, see my discussion of the opening scene in Brian De Palma’s Carrie, which in many ways can be seen as a reworking and elaboration of M’s great opening (in Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008], 25–30). 4.  This invisibility should not be understood as something relative to what we see on screen, capable of becoming visible but not yet or no longer so, for example, something beyond the screen to which the camera can turn and show. Rather, it should be understood as absolute, that is, it can never become visible, since in a way it is nothing, just the negative force of a cinematic frame that disconnects it from a worldly context and opens a dimension of an “otherworldly” haunting emptiness. 5.  Film can be said to make an affective modality visible inasmuch as it shows the logic guiding the communication between the actual world and the ghostly dimension that we have been calling the “off.” Thus, the cinematic screen makes visible the logic and modality of communication that remains unconscious in the everyday world. We might say that reality itself can come to have the paranoid, murderous logic that film has made visible and organize itself around a particular affect. (At the same time, film can examine numerous modalities of communication with the “off ” that have never been realized.) Indeed, the historical point of our analysis here is that the 1930s, with its crowded cities, political crises, and so forth, came to be organized around this affective interpretation of the “off.” 6.  I am intentionally leaving the dimension of the “off ” slightly vague, since it allows me not to commit to the precise aspect of the “off ” at issue in a given instance. In general, the “off ” is an extremely complex implication of the dimensions we call objective and subjective, though it is neither. It belongs to two principal domains, the “world” and the “subject.” However, inasmuch as the subject is always subject to the world, the complications are evident; to this extent, the concepts are not fully adequate. Since this is not a book of straightforward philosophical analyses of concepts, I cannot really give a fully responsible and rigorous account of the entire conceptual system within which the dimension I have been calling the “off ” finds its place. In the most general way, though, the dimension of the “off ” has a double aspect: in relation to the world the “off ” refers to what I have also called the groundlessness of the world, that is, to the fact that the world, at its most fundamental, refers to nothing but an openness, the fact that no ready-made teleology dictates the place and order and

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Notes to Chapter 2

nature of what comes to be. The world is, to employ the term I used in a previous chapter, nothing but an empty call to be, a call that has no other content and order. In relation to the subject, the “off ” can be understood as what characterizes the human as being nothing but the addressee of this empty call of the world. The concept that is usually invoked for the way in which this emptiness remains inscribed as such in the life of the subject is desire, desire being an emptiness that is always in relation to a call to be fulfilled but that in itself can never be fulfilled (for important elaboration of the notion of desire in this context, see the recent work of Renaud Barbaras in such books as La vie lacunaire and Le désir et la distance). From the point of view of the life of the subject as inscribed by the emptiness of the call, the “off ” then marks a dimension of an excessive desire beyond any framed distribution and management of this desire that the paternal instance is charged with producing. Thus, the dimension of the “off ” may be said to have a double axis: it involves an examination, on the one hand, of the opening of the world to its own groundlessness, and of the opening of the subject to its desire, on the other. 7.  In contrast to Platonism, the cave here is not the realm of images (the forgetting of the sun) but the realm of defense against the image (violence against the sky). In this sense, it is highly significant that The Great Dictator ends with a close-up of Hannah’s face against the background of a cloudy sky, as if she were infused with this originary visionary moment of humanity that Riefenstahl chose to forgo in order to create a fascist cathedral. It is also significant that Chaplin begins his film with a sky-less shot of the cave-like trenches of World War I and that the camera pans away from the trenches toward a vision of the sky blocked by the missile (which is itself directed a moment later against planes shown against the background of the sky). The trajectory of Chaplin’s film is thus the exact opposite of Riefenstahl’s. 8.  Charisma is the power conferred by the sky as screen. Originally used mainly to describe celestial or divine beings, the term was famously revived and transposed into the political realm to characterize a specific type of leader by Max Weber: Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader. (On Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977], 48)

For the purposes at hand, charisma can be said to refer to the way that the dimension of the “off ”—a haunting groundlessness and a power of being apart, of not being made subject to or belonging to any given order and context, but as such having the capacity to initiate a new context, giving new directions, out

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of nowhere pre-given—is inscribed in and conferred upon one who comes to inhabit the screen. As we have seen, the inscription of the “off ” on-screen comes first of all as a shadow, an empty nonplace coming to haunt a framed (paternal) context. As such, the charismatic being occupying the screen always and above all has the consistency of a shadow, a blank nothing (a blankness at the source of the actor’s capacity not to be anyone specific, to take on any role). In fact, the charismatic actor can be said both to activate the shadow and to respond to it. This response can assume many forms, a defensive posture, for example, as in the case of a fascistic charismatic being whose paradoxical task is to be a shadow who eliminates shadows. It is always someone who knows himself to be a shadow who attempts to ground himself by dispelling other supposed shadows. When Benjamin writes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Illuminations [New York: Schocken Books, 1969]) that “the cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity” (231), he at least partially misses the point of the film star as the charismatic being in whom is embodied the power of the screen to activate an essential nonbelonging, the aura (to repurpose this Benjaminian concept and show that it indeed does belong to some extent to the screen) of being separate and distant, incapable of being fully assimilated to the context of ordered everyday life. It is true, as Benjamin observes, that anyone can lay claim to being filmed, since the screen is the realm of the “any”: anyone who belongs to it is automatically deprived of her or his place in an order and exposed to the disidentifying and de-hierarchizing shadow. Yet this does not invalidate the fact that the logic of the screen has a fundamental place for a privileged occupier, the star; although any particular one who comes on-screen becomes an anyone in consequence of exposure to the dimension of the “off,” the star embodies or incarnates the very power of the “off ”; she or he can somehow be said to possess the “off,” to receive something of its enigmatic force rather than simply being subject to it. 9.  In one of Riefenstahl’s most remarkable compositions, Hitler appears against the background of the sky standing firmly on top of a stone—already a monumental statue. This pyramidal tomb signifies the desire both to use the power of the sky and to erase it. In this sense, Hitler functions as an exact parallel to the eagle that has been grounded and turned into a monumental frozenness occupying the right-hand side of the frame. The fascistic star desires to turn the sky into an entombing stone, thus creating a ground. In between the two airy/stony figures are those occupying the tomb created for them by the star who “protects” them from the sky/screen and its disorienting and haunting, shadowy powers: the many who have been exposed to the screen, gathered and unified by a stone frame. (Although they are still exposed on the right-hand side of the

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Notes to Chapter 2

frame of the image, the soldiers—those who occupy the screen qua having been unified and uniformed by the star who desires to eliminate the sky—are otherwise fully framed by the monumental stone. Hitler himself, whom we can understand as the originator of the stone, the one enabling its coming into being, is himself both celestially apart from it (i.e., he still belongs to the sky) as well as stonily a part of it (i.e., he is himself now a stone, or the paradoxical someone who can bridge between sky and stone). The swastika itself can be seen as symbolizing the attempt to turn the sky into a grounding and enframing stone, functioning as a structure composed of multiple enclosing frames, very similar to the stony frame in which the soldiers find themselves in this image (unlike the Christian cross that is an unframing structure in a way that creates an openness to the “off ”—see my discussion of the relations between the cross and the shadow in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance in Chapter 1). 10.  It is interesting to notice how Riefenstahl activates almost identically the same logic between the apparatus, the question of flight, and the capacity to frame the sky in the most famous sequence of her Olympia, that of the divers with their apparatus of flight, the diving board, both showing on-screen but also indicating the off-screen.

Notes to Chapter 2

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11.  But since, by definition, the gap with the camera can never be really closed and exposure cannot be possessed, a stain always remains that must be eliminated in order to become the “camera” fully. This stain will be the Jew. 12.  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, to whose analyses of what they call the “Nazi myth” I am indebted, identify this self-grounding moment as originating in the Cartesian creation of the Subject; accordingly, they see ­Nazism as an extreme consequence of this modern idea. 13.  One of the fundamental theses of this chapter is that the question of the modern screen and thus of film is not only one question among others that can be examined from the perspective of the more general question of Nazism, but is fundamental and constitutive for it. Fascination with the modern screen and the attempt to take possession of its ungrounding powers represent an essential aspect of both Hitler and Nazism. Hitler is in essence a screen star of a particular kind—the star that aims to take over the abandoned sky out of which it fell. 14.  This moment probably started to gather speed at the end of the eighteenth century with the triple occurrence of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of the modern city. 15.  We can see the continuation of the problem of the screen beyond cinema in such technological apparatuses as the touch screen, windows for computers, and so on. 16.  This geometrized crowd harks back to the crowds of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis that Lotte Eisner famously characterized as an architecturalized crowd (The Haunted Screen [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974], 225). 17.  It is in relation to this that we can also understand the (at least partial) Nazi aversion to the very existence of the movie star: “Not the single person— whose egotism is elevated to the level of delusional grandiosity—can, may, should, and will be the hero of the future, but only the genuine and honest artist, who integrates himself into the community and becomes a useful member of the ensemble, of its collective labor. Maybe some members of the public will mourn when one of their favorites disappear. But the majority will surely join our desire to end the star disease in film: The star must die, so that film can live!” (Erik Krunes, “Das Star-Unwesen Im Film,” qtd. in Antje Ascheid, Hitler’s Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003], 33). Hitler is the only star allowed, and all others are “anyones” belonging to the collective populating the screen. 18.  Perhaps this is close to another Lacanian expression, which defines love as the giving of what one does not have. 19.  To use an expression made famous by Gilles Deleuze. 20. Etymologically, flag comes from the Anglo-Saxon Fflaken, meaning “to fly or float in the air.”

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Notes to Chapter 2

21.  The first full day of the Nuremberg Party congress was devoted to “the Worker.” 22.  Just prior to this statement, the soldiers—who have been lowering their flags to the ground—dramatically lift the flags back up in the air, as if to confirm that the very activity of the flag as the symbolic mediator between the framed sky (Führer/All) and the ground allows for the dead to be resurrected and made part of the eternal life of the community. 23.  In the chapter dealing with Griffith’s Intolerance, I discuss his understanding of the medium of film and use of montage. In Griffith’s case, however, fragments are shown to be precisely “fragments,” with no whole guiding their interconnection. The fragments in Intolerance communicate between themselves precisely because there is no whole, only communication of the groundless through the groundless. Thus, though Griffith has often been accused of practicing an organic, fascistic cinema, precisely the opposite is true. He is perhaps the first director who rigorously tried to articulate the radical and innovative nature of the medium of film as communication of and through newly discovered groundlessness. The Hitlerization of film enacted by Riefenstahl is the exact opposite and in fact can be understood as a systematic attempt to eliminate the threat expressed by Griffith’s cinema. What Griffith calls “intolerance” is also to be understood as a fundamental iconoclastic desire, the desire to suppress the threat of the image, which images have provoked throughout history. In this sense, we can say that Riefenstahl’s “cinema” is a work of intolerance against the cinematic image. What Griffith understands as “the people” is the exact opposite of the creation of the German Volk as Riefenstahl/Hitler practice it here. The people are all those without identity who gather on-screen, an exposed realm. Such gathering opens them to communication with each other without pre-given identificatory places, communication through the groundlessness of the off-screen that Griffithian montage exposes and activates. The Volk of R ­ iefenstahl/Hitler are the anti-people; they gather on-screen and receive a symbolic identity through which they communicate with each other, a symbolic identity achieved through the Riefenstahlian montage that allows for the appearance of the All/Hitler. Thus, while the Volk is the project of a symbolic montage, “the people” is the expression of what we might call an allegorical montage (see Chapter 1), that is, exposure to an Other (to the meaningful world); this Other (allos—etymologically, the Greek term from which allegory derives) is nothing but the very groundlessness and meaninglessness out of which the meaningful world can constantly arise and reconfigure, without an pre-given direction. 24.  For a classic investigation of the question of the voice in film, see Michel Chion’s The Voice in Cinema. I explore the haunting disjunction between voice and visual image in my discussion of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, in Becoming Visionary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 133–139).

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25.  Brian Winston, “Triumph of the Will,” History Today 47, no. 1 (1997): 28. 26.  The destruction of aura is, of course, for Benjamin, a very ambivalent phenomenon in that it seems to mark simultaneously a negative aspect, a certain destruction of art, but also a positive aspect, signaling the birth of a new understanding of art, or a liberation of art from what he calls its cult or ritual function. Both the negative and positive aspects of the destruction of aura are tied to the new emerging relation between art and the masses, and what we need to do, which Benjamin perhaps does not develop fully, is try to see in what way the emergence of the masses is at the source of a new iconoclastic effort to destroy art at the same time as it marks the possibility of a new birth of art liberated from the sacred. If Triumph of the Will stands for the first aspect, Chaplin’s work stands for the second. 27.  We might say that the artistic screen, or the artistic use of the screen, aims to interrogate and activate a decontextualizing surface on which an actual slice of the world starts to communicate with the dimension of the “off,” or the “background” of the world as such, in excess of every actuality and decision. Not every use of the screen is dedicated to exploring this communication with the “off,” and thus not every use of the screen is artistic or poetic. 28.  Though very admiring of the film—indeed, the first to stress the immense significance of the Chaplin/Hitler struggle it stages (famously identifying the origin of this struggle in Hitler’s impertinent theft of Chaplin’s moustache), which he terms metaphysical—Bazin seems to feel that much of the film does not really work. He singles out the episode where Hitler is playing with the earth balloon as the only truly successful scene in the movie. 29.  Perhaps the most strangely memorable and moving moment in The Great Dictator occurs when Chaplin / the Jewish barber sits on a roof, having escaped from the Nazis, and watches his home go up in flames. Might one of the main definitions for the (failed) work of art of the type examined here involve turning one into a watcher of, a witness to, the burning of one’s house, that is, one’s property, identity, and place? In a famous letter to Jacques Rivière from May 25, 1924, Artaud wrote the following haunting line: “Dear Sir, Why lie, why try to put on a literary level something which is the cry of life itself, why give an appearance of fiction to that which is made of the ineradicable substance of the soul, which is like the wail of reality?” (Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 43). 30.  In the works of these artists—all fascinated by images of fire, it seems— something in excess of the capacity to frame and form artistically seems to take over: Van Gogh’s overflowing, fiery yellow, Melville’s all-consuming whiteness, Celan’s blackness, Griffith’s excessive cutting, and Chaplin’s horror at being swallowed alive (most explicitly when he turns into a chicken in The Gold Rush, but also his mimetic devouring by Hitler). For Chaplin, being-on-screen always o­ ccurs

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Notes to Chapter 2

at the limit between satisfying one’s own hunger and being eaten by another. The screen offers his sustenance, yet he is also food for the screen/off-screen; the screen is essentially related to the mouth for Chaplin, hence his immensely complex relation with the question of speech, which we will soon discuss. 31.  Such dedication of the star to the self as an “autonomous” and nongiven origin of visibility can also be understood in terms of narcissism. Here, however, narcissism does not mean fascination with oneself as a privileged and treasured object of desire but the self ’s insistence on its originality, that is, on its not being subject to any given and external source of visibility. Of course, and as we have seen, the self ’s originality is not its own and cannot be owned, because it activates and communicates with the groundless “off.” 32.  Chaplin refuses to be a father—or a son—on-screen. Even in a film that takes this refusal to the limit, The Kid, where Chaplin becomes the paternal figure to an abandoned child, the situation is much more complex, since Chaplin is also simultaneously the child’s kid, or the brother, husband, or wife to, the child (indeed, to whom the title refers is not clear), eluding all stable familial relations. 33.  Elsewhere, I have tried to show that the possibility of embracing the groundless, what I call “positive alienation,” lies at the heart of the conceptual revolution Diderot tries to bring about. See my Dramatic Experiments: Life According to Diderot (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013). 34.  Being relegated to outside the frame—becoming deprived of identity— does not necessarily result from active expulsion from an existing frame. It can also be the product of the dissolution of a framing mechanism, as in the case of modernity’s increasing abandonment of and by the theological organization of the world; such dissolution leaves an abandoned realm defined only negatively. In consequence, the abandoned realm has no positive identity of its own; it is a meaninglessness created by being abandoned by a frame, being outside a frame. In this context, Chaplin’s task—a task that can be said to belong to an influential strand in modern thought most famously associated with the Nietzschean project of overcoming nihilism—is to give a positive sense to the abandoned realm composed of the crowds qua those who have no frame. Through his attempt to activate the screen as a new kind of unframing power, that is, a power beyond and in excess of every frame, Chaplin tries to give a positive sense to nonidentity: a positive sense of being nothing and no one that confers a new way of being on the crowds. 35.  See the important work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the question of mimesis, e.g., Typography, as well as Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay “On the Mimetic Faculty.” 36.  “Personnel is being hired for the Theatre in Oklahoma! The Great Nature Theatre of Oklahoma is calling you! It’s calling you only today!! If you miss this opportunity, there will never be another! Anyone thinking of his future, your

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place is with us! All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward! We are the theatre that has a place for everyone, everyone in his place! If you decide to join us, we congratulate you here and now! But hurry, be sure not to miss the midnight deadline! We shut down at midnight, never to reopen! Accursed be anyone who doesn’t believe us!” (Franz Kafka, Amerika, trans. Michael Hofmann [London: Penguin, 2007], 366). 37.  Chaplin had a project in which he would play Napoleon, but, I submit, this likewise would not have meant taking on a role but would have confronted the two logics of the star of the crowds. 38.  It might be interesting to note that T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland was published in 1922, while Chaplin’s The Kid is from 1921. 39.  The home that Charlie later comes to occupy with the kid is a marvelous construction of repurposed (“recycled”) things taken from the trash. The poet is a trash recycler, transforming wasted nonbelonging into a new kind of home. 40.  A responsibility that he is not eager to accept at first; initially he tries to get rid of this burdensome task, that is, the child. 41.  The study at hand seeks to develop the famous distinction, proposed in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, between what Deleuze calls a relative outside to the cinematic frame, which he understands as a spatiotemporal continuity beyond what the cinematic frame shows, and an absolute outside signifying complete discontinuity between what is on-screen and what is off-screen. ­Deleuze mainly discusses the relative outside in terms of spatial and temporal continuity; I am trying to extend this logic and discuss the relative outside as part of the dimension of meaning—the construction of meaning I have been calling the paternal frame. 42.  The cry may also be heard as a call for a frame. While Charlie indeed adopts the kid in a sense, he does not do so by becoming a father, by providing a frame to the cry; rather, he establishes a new kind of expressive community with the kid: the community of those who share a dimension in excess of the frame. 43.  This is perhaps truer, or at least more explicit, in Modern Times (a more meta-cinematic, formal film) than in The Great Dictator, which seems to operate less meta-cinematically; nevertheless, I think the point holds for both. 44.  Though widely revered as his greatest film and undoubtedly containing one of Chaplin’s most beautiful poetic conceits—the love story with the blind flower girl—Chaplin’s other great movie from the 1930s, City Lights, ultimately strikes me as less fascinating and rich than either Modern Times or The Great Dictator. 45.  This montage is probably meant to immediately open a conversation between Modern Times and Eisenstein’s Strike. 46.  The scene is clearly indebted to Griffith’s staging of the workers entering the factory in Intolerance. 47.  Famously, the factory director in Modern Times is based on Henry Ford.

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48.  This qualification characterizes the question of identity in postmetaphysical systems. 49.  For example, a specific worker in a village occupies a specific position within the hierarchy of the village organized around the local church, which in turn occupies a position in relation to the Catholic Church as a whole, which in turn has a place in a mediation between the earthly and the divine, and so on. 50.  We might understand this postmetaphysical transformation of the nature of desire in conjunction with a transformation of our understanding of the concept of origin. There are two main ways to understand the concept of origin (i.e., that which makes something what it is): the first we may call causal, the second formal. In causal terms, the origin is an external agent with respect to what it originates (say, the carpenter in relation to a table or the divine in relation to earthly creatures). In formal terms, the origin may be understood as the “nature” of a thing, its form of life, what lies at the source of the possibilities animating that which is characterized by this form. For example, if we define the human as life with or in meaning, we can show how all the major aspects of existence (e.g., cooking, writing, burial rites, etc.) derive from this form, that is, have their origin in it. We might say that metaphysical/religious systems understand our relation to an origin according to the causal model; as such, the origin is an external instance representing an object toward which life strives, and theoretically, once this object is finally achieved desire would be eliminated. The postmetaphysical understanding views our relation to the origin according to the formal model: the origin is still not given, but nongivenness is our very form of life. The not-given is not a cause but our very form. Human life is always oriented toward the future: to be . . . to become . . . That is, we always exist in relation to groundlessness, a non-sensicality out of which meanings can arise. This implies a radical transformation in our understanding and experience of desire. Our desire does not guide us toward our cause; rather, it is our very form—the expression of our form of life qua nongivenness. In other words, desire is who we are, and it is absolute: the constant expression of our groundlessness and nongivenness. 51.  We will not explore the question that inevitably arises in this context: the psychoanalytic elaboration of the question of desire. All I can say in this context is that a full postmetaphysical understanding of human life requires the elaboration of the way these two aspects of desire—as the general form of our life in the world and as what psychoanalysis understands in terms of the unconscious–are related and imply each other. 52.  Seriality in Nazi logic and in capitalistic production have occasionally been conflated. For example, Siegfried Kracauer’s famous concept of mass ornament, which refers to human bodies functioning like identical products on an assembly line, as in a Busby Berkeley movie—has been used to describe the

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multitudes as they appear in the Nazi regime (especially the soldiers in Triumph of the Will ). However, as I’ve been trying to show, this amounts to migrating (mistakenly) from one logic of seriality to another. The Nazi multitudes should not be understood as mass ornaments but as uniformed crowds gathered under the symbolizing power of the All, stretching into infinity, an infinity liberated from the horror of expressing the groundless world as an open Whole. 53.  Two marvelous examples for such expressive use of waste are Chaplin’s home in The Kid, a home wholly composed of wasted things that have been transformed, as well as the home Chaplin briefly inhabits with Paulette Goddard in Modern Times. 54.  That said, this capacity is paradoxical, because it emerges from an exposure one cannot control or will: the groundlessness of the world, which the “off ” expresses and is nothing in a way—the nothing-given, the fact that the world is not given in advance. In this sense, we can say that the poetic creator transforms the exposure she or he suffers (which is not in her or his control) into a power, an ability to activate. But what is activated is nothing, the “nothing-given,” a pure power of suspending the actual world and exposing it to an emptiness that leaves its trace as freedom for another world to emerge. The poetic creator does not determine what the world to emerge will be; this is the task of the political work of those who have the world in common. The artist opens the gap in the given that allows for the possibility of politics. 55.  The child’s relation to the mother has, through this world-opening play with distance, become mediated. We can say that upon her return there is a third that has intervened between them, a third that is nothing but the world. Until the intervention of this mediating third between the child and the mother there was no world at all, if by having a world we understand inhabiting a realm in which there is an essential distance between one’s actual place/identity and an “origin.” The mother-child relationship is initially without distance and thus without world. This lack of distance does not indicate, as is often presumed, a state of supposedly full presence and completion but rather is the result of an initial desire for total possession, that is, desire for the cancellation of distance, i.e., of the world. The mother desires to have an object from which there is no distance precisely because she is haunted by her own desire, desire being an inscription of distance that, out of its horror of itself, might desire to cancel itself. The child, we can say, is simultaneously inscribed with infinite desire (thus with the pure possibility of the world) that the mother communicates to it and with a suffocating attempt to cancel desire and the world through absolute possession. The play with absence that allows for the opening of the world is what introduces a gap between the mother’s desire and her possession, allowing for the possibility of identity to emerge. Identity is understood as being crossed by

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Notes to Chapter 2

­ esire precisely because it is marked by distance and thus by a freedom from d possession. Play is the activation of desire qua distance. The question of the paternal also arises in this context, a context famously associated within this psychoanalytic scenario with the Oedipus complex and the question of castration. The paternal as understood within this logic can be said to function as the framing regulation of distance and the stabilization of desire, by forbidding (castrating) the double aspect of the maternal, infinite desire and absolute possession. We might speak in this context of a metaphysical frame / metaphysical father, which we might want to distinguish from the at least thinkable possibility of a nonmetaphysical frame / father. No less than the mother’s desire, the metaphysical/paternal frame is equally an attempt at a defensive possessiveness (the defense against the world as groundlessness and open Whole). Unlike the maternal defense, the paternal defense does not consist in attempting to possess absolutely an object that will satisfy the infinity of the desire by which the mother is haunted, canceling as a result the distance inscribed in her desire. Rather, it consists in the attempt not to cancel distance altogether but to cancel the infinity of distance. This will therefore be attempted not by finding an absolute object one can possess but by positing an absolutely stable ground in relation to which one can articulate a determinable distance. The metaphysical frame will be this positing of ground that allows for the elimination of infinity and for the positing of totally governable identities, each having a fully determined place in relation to an Origin. Going back to Chaplin and to the question of the creative artist/forger of a cinematic image, we can say that the play of the world / creative artistic image emerges as the capacity to avoid a triple possession: maternal possessive desire; paternal metaphysical framing; and the postmetaphysical capitalistic, fascistic, and other modalities of attempting to compensate for the collapse of metaphysical framing and exposure to the infinity of desire. Chaplin’s creative play is thus an attempt to open a space in between and beyond all these various defensive ­logics, to open a crack or a gap between them through which can be glimpsed the possibility of a postmetaphysical as well as a postcapitalistic and postfascistic existence. 56.  This is also why Chaplin’s films often seem to begin realistically (e.g., the vision of the placeless many marching through the snow in The Gold Rush; the crowd rushing into the factory in Modern Times; the soldiers occupying a disorienting and foggy landscape, blindly fighting in the trenches of the First World War in The Great Dictator), only to shift quickly to something that seems detached from the world, a playground with gigantic toys (e.g., the encounter with the bear in The Gold Rush; the giant, unrealistic factory tools and machines of Modern Times; the gigantic cannon that also looks like an enormous toy camera in The Great Dictator).

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57.  Chaplin’s art was not easily separated from the question of politics; famously, he was driven out of the United States on charges of being a communist. 58.  To say that the world is a world of meaning where everything is constantly at stake amounts to saying that the question of being-in-common in relation to a whole is at issue. 59.  The modalities I posit here are more theoretical and for heuristic clarity. In actuality, there are only various “mixtures” of metaphysical thinking and thinking the world as an open Whole. 60.  And to an extent, because the origin is still conceptualized by the Greek tragedians as meaning (however enigmatic and unknowable to mortals), the tragic relation to the origin cannot be conceived as fully poetic in the modern sense, that is, as an encounter with a dimension of non-sense. 61.  The situation of the crisis in communication with the origin is even more complex in Oedipus Rex, of course. It marks a break not only between the political and the poetic but within two forms of the political, signaling the possibility of transition between, on the one hand, a political regime wherein the sovereign (Oedipus) is understood to have a privileged relation to the origin and, on the other hand, democracy, in which everyone is equally entitled to communicate with the origin through debate and discussion in an endeavor to access the truth. 62.  This is a problematic, albeit relevant, analogy, since Moses himself seems to mark a fundamental and unresolvable tension at the heart of the biblical logic of communicating with the origin: between what we may call a prophetic, desert logic—where the desert is the place of exile from a political organization, a place where a new type of communication with the origin takes place—and a political relation to the origin that is announced by the prophetic Moses but that he is forbidden from accessing, since it is his fate to die in the desert and not reach the political-entity-to-be of Israel. The biblical place of gathering of the many at the limit of the political is the exilic desert, which is thus the amphitheater of the Jews, marking the limits of the city and the opening of a communication with the origin that is not fully political (perhaps understood as ethical rather than, as in the Greek mode, poetic). For this reason the prophet will always speak to some extent against the political leader (except for Samuel, who occupies the paradoxical position—fatefully doomed to failure—of a transition between prophetic and political logic) and will announce the exile from the city. What exactly constitutes the distinction between the prophetic and the tragic poetic as marking the limits of the political and what constitutes the distinction between the logic of the Greek city and that of the land of the Jews are huge questions that we cannot address here. 63.  The term “leader” can be applied to the poet or artist insofar as she or he can speak in the name of the origin. However, the nature of such leadership does not consist in controlling or willing or in assigning meaning. Rather, it

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Notes to Chapter 2

consists in the paradoxical ability to voice the being dispossessed of speech, lacking authority over oneself or others, that is, the being deprived of the capacity to mean. There is an active power in the artist to the extent that she or he can do something most others cannot; but what the artist does is to transform her or his own “cannot” into open communication with the groundless world, turning the loss (of place, of identity, of power) into a space of freedom. 64.  This is also why Chaplin transitions in Modern Times from being the blind leader of a strike into being an entertainer, thereby becoming one who no longer relates to the many as strikers but as the audience of a poetic event (of song, in the case of Modern Times). We might say that the moment of the strike is the moment of Chaplin’s transition from being one of a crowd who suffers a break, thereby discovering his essential nonbelongingness, his constitutive one-of-the-crowdness, into being an artist, that is, someone who learns to activate the absolute nonbelongingness of the crowd, to turn it into a new power of expressivity. Chaplin, on his way to becoming an artist, both belongs and does not belong to the strikers (hence the genius of this scene): he belongs to them as one who occupies the limit of the political, having lost a place in the sharing of the world, but at the same time does not belong to them, inasmuch as he is already engaged in a slightly different enterprise, an artistic one, whose task is to activate his blindness, understood as his essential nonbelongingness, as a new power of expressivity. This power does not belong to the political, marking as it does an internal excess over the political; but it is nevertheless the condition for a true opening of the political as a negotiation over the sharing of the world with no preconditions. 65.  This distinction between the poetic leader and the political leader implies that postmetaphysical thought actually demands that we distinguish between three types of sovereignty, between three aspects of communicating with the origin: the political, the poetic, and the philosophical. This categorization of three types of sovereignty contrasts with that of two types that seems to characterize the metaphysical/Greek way of thinking. In Greek thought, the origin was either a transcendent meaning or else an enigmatic opacity of meaning that was nonetheless transcendent. If the origin has two aspects, then there are only two kinds of sovereignty, two modalities to speak for it: philosophical/political and poetic/ tragic. According to the first, the sovereign’s task is to communicate with transcendent meaning, transmit it to the world, and organize the world around it. In this case there is no difference between grasping the original meaning philosophically and organizing the world politically on the basis of this meaning as envisaged. Thus Plato came up with the idea of the philosopher king, the philosopher who beholds the Ideas and by extension has the task of ordering the world politically. The other kind of sovereignty, which Plato famously tried to exile from his ideal Republic—is embodied in the tragic sovereign, for whom the origin con-

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tains an enigmatic, blinding moment. The modern reconceptualization of the origin as an open Whole introduces a radical split into the figure of the sovereign, dividing the philosophical vision from the political one. We might say that it was an error in the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger to try to fuse the philosophical relation to the origin with the political one, to think that philosophical vision could be directly continuous with the political organization of the world. When we conceive of the origin as an open Whole rather than a transcendent ordering meaning, it is clear that this continuity between the philosophical and the political breaks down. Although the philosopher now has the task, as it were, to see the origin as open Whole—and therefore to articulate the unity of existence, its universality, in relation to an open Whole—this philosophical vision cannot furnish the basis for an organizing principle. The open Whole is a groundlessness from which many possible ways of ordering can emerge. As such, the political realm—which depends on the emergence of a frame, a regulation of communication with the origin—cannot draw its organizing power from the dictates of the origin; the political realm proves fundamentally arbitrary. Consequently, political sovereignty has its own autonomous form that is not grounded in a philosophical vision of the whole, or at least cannot be understood as a direct extension of such a vision. We might say that modern poetic sovereignty comes to inhabit the realm between the philosophical and the political inasmuch as it is dedicated to the experience of the encounter with the non-sensical aspect of the open Whole; by transmitting this non-sensicality, it suspends any and every political frame, any and every regulation of the sharing of the world, and exposes us to the possibility of reframing, reopening, our decisions about sharing the world. The major modern disasters associated with fascism have arisen from a desire to fuse the levels of sovereignty, for example, when Heidegger (even though he was the greatest philosophical articulator of the new configuration of the origin as open Whole) sought to fuse the political and the philosophical, or when the Nazis tried to fuse the political and the poetic (which Benjamin called the aestheticization of the political). 66.  Chaplin’s project should not be confused with the so-called aestheticization of politics, the attempt to merge the political and the artistic, that Benjamin has famously analyzed as characterizing the fascistic taking over of politics. I’m not sure that Benjamin’s famous counterterm, the politicization of aesthetics, which is supposed to describe the reversal of fascistic logic, is a felicitous one for characterizing Chaplin’s antifascistic project. An optimal term would articulate the logic whereby the poetic or aesthetic can neither frame nor be framed by the political; instead, it functions in connective disjunction, as a threshold that has its own unique arena in excess of politics yet provides the condition for the possibility of the opening of politics. The reversal of fascism is not the politicization of aesthetics so much as the aesthetic extimacy of the political, following Lacan’s

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Notes to Chapter 2

logic of an intimate alien, an uncanny excess both exterior and interior at once. The aesthetic is both an excess that suspends the political and is in a way exterior to it, as well as something intimate to the political inasmuch as it is the excess that is the very condition for the opening of the political. 67.  If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time that Chaplin takes on a proper name rather than a generic one; as such, this scene also announces Monsieur Verdoux, as well as Calvero the clown in Limelight. 68.  In a discussion of Chaplin’s reluctance to move from silent film to the talkies (or what Chaplin himself called “a rejection of the talkies” in a piece he published in 1931), Slavoj Žižek suggests that Chaplin sensed the traumatic nature of the voice as a foreign object that punctures the paradisiacal and innocent universe of burlesque—a world “bursting with non-sublime vitality and ­vulgarity” (Enjoy Your Symptom [New York: Routledge, 1992], 1). This strikes me as mistaken. The world of burlesque, for all I know, may have been an innocent, paradisiacal world, but this was never Chaplin’s world, or at least never the world of The Tramp. While the voice itself indeed occasions trauma, Chaplin’s problem does not stem from the nature of the voice as carrier of traumatic dislocation but from the question of speech, which he initially associates with repressive violence, that is, what is at the heart of mechanisms of exclusion responsible for silencing those assigned to nonbelonging. Chaplin’s problem, then—what makes him reluctant to speak on film—is how not to betray muteness, how not to betray his cinematic mission of being the one who comes in the name of all those who have been disenfranchised. Speech is not painful for Chaplin because it stands for the intrusion of a traumatic Real into the paradisiacal world of the silent movie but rather because he associates it with a certain social ordering, a manner of framing and separation (what belongs to meaning and what does not belong) that dispossesses (some) people, exiling them from the world, depriving them of their capacity to mean. Moreover, for Chaplin, speech initially had the quality of a subjugating command. (This is why the first speech ever uttered in a Chaplin film, at the opening of The Great Dictator, is a military order directed at the lowly soldier/barber played by Chaplin.) Accordingly, we might understand Chaplin’s resistance to the talkies as a “Bartlebyan” gesture. Chaplin would prefer not to speak, for speaking first struck him as belonging to the realm of law, property, and exclusion. Through The Great Dictator, Chaplin figures out that the cinema can make possible speech that does not mark exclusion from meaning and the world or signal subjugation but rather is characterized by a capacity to liberate the many into a new expressivity. Chaplin’s poetic task, that of giving expression to the mute, is not, I suggest, a matter of bringing those who were excluded from meaning, who were deprived of a capacity to mean by a frame that relegated them to the outside, back into meaning, as if extending the frame that excluded them to include everyone. Rather, it means transforming muteness, the relega-

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tion to nonmeaningfulness, into a new kind of communication: communication with the non-sensical “off ” and thus with a new power of expression (understood now as the activation of a groundlessness in excess of the principle of framing meaning). Rather than simply extending the realm of meaning to include those who did not have a share in it, our understanding of the relations between speech and meaning has to be transformed. It is by opening up to a dimension of nonmeaning internal to speech that such a transformation can occur. For this reason I think we must reject an argument made by Adrian Daub in “‘Hannah, Can You Hear Me?’—Chaplin’s Great Dictator, ‘Schtonk,’ and the Vicissitudes of Voice” (Criticism 51, no. 3 [Summer 2009]), who unfortunately is deaf to Chaplin’s poetry inasmuch as he thinks that Chaplin’s main problem involves achieving a universal transparent meaning that he claims Chaplin thought silent film could provide. According to Daub, the reason for the lack of universality of meaning in the talkie, is that a speaking voice—with its accents, inflections, particular idiom, and so forth—is always limited to this or that linguistic community and therefore fails to fulfill the conditions of true universality. It is only when Chaplin (mistakenly, according to Daub) conceives a way of achieving a speech that is fully transparent and universally meaningful (the second speech, when the barber speaks instead of Hynkel) that he makes, to his more or less anxious satisfaction, a successful transition to the talkies. I claim, however, that inasmuch as Chaplin is a poet rather than a metaphysical philosopher (Daub seems to think that Chaplin, in this desire for transparent meaning, becomes part of a long metaphysical tradition seeing the bodily voice as a hindrance to the achievement of universal transparency of meaning) he does not seek to achieve meaning but, like every poet, to activate expressivity. What at first bothered Chaplin about speech, I think, is that it was too meaningful—too orderly, wrapped up in a logic of inclusion/exclusion, social ordering, and hierarchical commands. Only when he figured out a way to make cinematic speech expressive rather than meaningful, first through the introduction of disruptive non-sense (exemplarily, the song in Modern Times) and then by activating silence (silence being understood here as the capacity not to belong to an order of meaning but to communicate with the non-sensical, the not-yet-meaningful “off ”), does he prove more or less capable of transitioning to the talkies (some anxiety about the success of this project seems to have always remained with him). Chaplin’s heart is silence and music rather than meaningful speech. 69.  Chaplin seems to experience the Hitlerian threat as a certain form of suffocation, even a horror of being swallowed—a horror that is perhaps his most powerful phantasmic fear. Paradigmatically, it is imagined in The Gold Rush, where his deliriously starving cabin mate sees him as a large and juicy chicken. In a way, Chaplin feels like the chicken to his double, Hitler: Hynkel’s speech, as we will see, largely consists of naming foods, some of which he seems hungry

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Notes to Chapters 2 and 3

for, some of which disgust him—hence his title, “The Phooey,” which functions like a child’s rejection of a bad food, instead of “The Führer.” (As a side note that merits more attention than can be given here, Chaplin is dominated by the oral drive; the question of speech/silence and the question of food are his two main preoccupations.) 70.  From this point of view, the crowds do not cheer Hynkel despite his actually talking non-sense, as if they were blind to it, but because he is talking nonsense: his power lies in this non-sense. 71.  Hitler was famous for his charismatic voice, that is, for a dimension that exceeds any meaningful utterance. 72.  See, for example, Sheldon Pollock’s fascinating discussion regarding Sanskrit. According to Pollock: “One key characteristic of Sanskrit in the precosmopolitan period, explicit in the texts themselves whenever the problem of language and culture is raised, is that it was a code of communication not everyone was entitled to use, and fewer still were able to use. It is not just that some people did and some did not employ Sanskrit, but rather that some were permitted to do so and some—the majority, who otherwise might have been able to do so—were prohibited. Given the nature of the primary sphere for the application of Sanskrit, it is not surprising that this constraint was formulated as a restriction on participation in the rituals and liturgical practices of the Sanskrit speech community, whose members called themselves Āryas” (The Language of the Gods in the World of Men—Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009], 40).

Chapter 3: Howard Hawks’s Idea of Genre 1.  Some might contest the classic status of this latter film and Hawks himself partially disowned it, but to my mind it is a profound movie—perhaps the culmination of his more formally abstract and allegorical films of the 1950s. 2.  Perhaps with the exception of Derrida’s famous discussion of “The Law of Genre.” 3.  Isn’t this duality the very essence of Grant, which directors such as Hawks and Hitchcock knew how to exploit so well? 4.  Or a gate and a fence, behind which a mystery lies, as in the famous opening of Citizen Kane. 5.  Even if the camera shows us the supposed source of the shadow later on, it will never be able to erase the unseen indeterminability at the heart of the image. 6.  It may be a secret behind a door or a secret behind a curtain or screen. Thus, in Gentleman Prefer Blondes (the film Hawks made just following Monkey Business), the opening scene presents us with curtains and screens, from which Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell emerge as the bearers of power.

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7.  Later on, Grant is indeed thought to possess the secret formula for youth (for which, as we’ve seen, the monkey is actually responsible), and desperate attempts are made to get him to surrender it. This gives us a glimpse of one aspect of the significance of the formula’s function in the film: it is the secret object in the possession of the one holding the power of the off-screen. 8.  This embodiment of the essential opacity of the off-screen in an on-screen object underlies the logic famously developed by Hitchcock in terms of the so-called MacGuffin, that is, a mysterious object that is nothing particular in itself—simply an opacity believed to hide a secret—but that serves as the animating focus of the entire plot. 9.  For example, in a western such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the enigma of the off-screen, as well as its disorienting effects on on-screen space, is what undermines the realm of meaning and order of the law (which the framed on-screen represents). Jimmy Stewart, who is attacked by a criminal (Lee Marvin) whose gun appears from an off-screen space, becomes the focal point; his adventure stands for the struggle between off-screen lawlessness and the effort to institute a frame that will organize the on-screen world. We see this film in the light of genre—in this instance, the western—once we understand that its fundamental drama, the struggle between the lawless desert and the attempt to found a lawful political realm, is one possible embodiment of the formal problem of the relations between on-screen and off-screen. 10.  In a way, the logic here stands opposed to that of incarnation, if we understand the latter, as in the case of Christ, as an earthly embodiment of a divine word or transcendent meaning. It is not a question of embodying a transcendent meaning but rather of inscribing an encounter with what interrupts, or ungrounds, meaning, exposing it to fundamental indeterminacy and disorientation. The cinematic image as inscription of the off-screen undermines the classical logic of incarnation. 11.  We can understand the concept of medium here in four interrelated ways. First of all, we can understand it as the apparatus, or the technical or technological support/condition of possibility, for creating a specific type of content. Thus we need the invention of the camera, celluloid, the projector, the screen, editing machine, and so forth to be able to produce a cinematic image. Second, we can understand it as the way we learn to use in a meaningful way the type of content the technological apparatus makes possible. Thus we can use the projected image to bring people news about places they haven’t been to, show them things that are too fast for natural perception to grasp in slow motion, and so on. Third, we can detect in every meaningful use of the medium the way in which meaning emerges in relation to the ghostly background that haunts it. This domain between the meaningful and the disturbingly haunting is what interests the artistically or poetically minded. When we speak of filmic medium

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Notes to Chapter 3

in this sense, we speak of it as a poetic medium, that is, a medium investigating the relations between meaning and nonmeaning. Not every projected filmic content is interested in investigating the relations between the meaningful and the haunting, and thus not every use of film is poetic. It is crucial, I think, when speaking about medium and media always to bear the distinctions between these three levels in mind: the technological apparatus, its meaningful use, and the poetic exploration of the shadowy and nonmeaningful indeterminacy by which its meaningful use is haunted. Every technological apparatus comes with its own specific ways of generating meanings, as well as the specific way in which it generates ghostly disturbances of meaning. It is in these ghostly disturbances that the poetic use of the medium is interested. The fourth meaning of “medium” concerns the specific modality in which the haunting dimension is inscribed within the world of content or meaning that the technological medium has enabled. Thus, if a femme fatale comes to incarnate the dimension of an enigmatic disturbance of meaning, we might understand her as a medium—that is, a generative power—mediating between the “otherworldly” and the worldly, a force field for the organization of the (poetic) world. In this sense, the medium is not a vehicle of meaning but a vehicle of nonmeaning, a specific modality in which the nonmeaningful ghost comes to disturb the meaningful world. The dimension of genre belongs to this part of the poetic investigation of the ghosts of a technological apparatus and concerns the specific modalities of the incarnation of the ghostly, which produce and drive the events of the poetic world. 12.  Melville’s famous definition in The Confidence-Man of what he calls the original (fictional or literary) character, in contrast to the nonoriginal, is relevant here: “Furthermore, if we consider, what is popularly held to entitle characters in fiction to being deemed original, is but something personal—confined to itself. The character sheds not its characteristic on its surroundings, whereas, the original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things” (emphasis mine). The original character, then, is a focal point, whose adventure can serve as the allegory of the medium. The character’s inscription or “incarnation” of the off-screen stands as the genetic/generic origin of the progress of intraworldly (or on-screen) events. Thus in Melville’s case, we can see Moby-Dick, or the whale, as a blank element inscribing a certain power of non-sensicality at the heart of the novel, around which the novel is organized. There are two characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who themselves can be seen as original inasmuch as each of them inscribes, in a different modality, the encounter with the blank

Notes to Chapter 3

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“off-screen” that is the whale; as such, they can be read allegorically, that is, as standing for the encounter with the literary and poetic work insofar as their adventure embodies the encounter with a haunting, blank senselessness afflicting the meaningful world, unmooring and wounding it. (See in relation to this my discussion of the relations between Ishmael, Ahab, and the whale, in my Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of Moby-Dick). The same can be said of that enigmatic character Bartleby, whose “incarnation” of blank muteness (which introduces a dimension of disorienting disturbance into the meaningful and ordered world—unmooring all those who encounter it, not unlike all those who will encounter the monkey’s formula in Hawks) turns him into a figure that can be read allegorically as the encounter with the literary medium as such. 13.  In fact, the question of the key is more complex than that: even though Barnaby is supposed to have the key, he is not sure that he has it, and he needs to look in his pocket. The question whether Barnaby/Grant has the key (to the film) or not recurs throughout the movie. 14.  This issue comes up later in the film when the holder of the keys to the monkeys’ cages forgets to lock them—which results in one of them escaping and concocting the formula. Read allegorically, this loss of key, of the mechanism controlling the separation between inside and outside—of what belongs to a domain and what does not—results in the monkey’s formula. That is, the monkey’s formula is what undermines the logic of the key, the key being both what is possessed by the master of a secret, the holder of the key (to the enigma of the outside), and the mechanism that controls divisions and borders, inside and outside. The secret (formula) will become not what one possesses but what dispossesses one, not what allows for a division between those who are inside and those outside but what eliminates such a clear division. 15.  I develop more rigorously the question of such address in my discussion of Hamlet in Part 1. 16.  The poetic conception of relations between monkey and human is no less anti-Darwinian/anti-scientific than anti-theological, since humans do not count as a more evolved and complex form of life responding to evolutionary pressures; instead, the human is seen as a creature that stands exposed to a disruptive, non-sensical principle that undermines any clear directionality, namely, the principle of “monkeying.” 17.  Thinking is an essential concern of all of Hawks’s main characters, stuck as they are at a threshold and trying to figure out how to respond to the situation. Thinking is what happens at the poetic moment of the call—when one’s identity is suspended, together with one’s capacity to identify, recognize, and know, as well. Thinking occurs when one cannot understand the meaningful orientation of one’s reality. In cinematic terms, it represents the first engagement



Notes to Chapter 3

with the inscription of the haunting off-screen at the heart of the on-screen. Therefore, first and foremost, the image is always a thinking image. 18.  And Grant is presented at the movie’s opening in the position of The Thinker, à la Rodin! 19.  In a way, Monkey Business is a repetition of Bringing Up Baby (where the leopard, Baby, occupies the same position as the monkey: an off-screen force wreaking havoc, exposing characters to the indeterminacy of the outside). The task of this repetition, however, is to liberate both of Monkey Business’s protagonists from the entombment that seemed to be the lot of the protagonists of Bringing Up Baby, with which the film concluded (although the love of Grant and Hepburn seems fulfilled at the end of the film, they end up in a museum/ cave with the dinosaur’s bones, as if entrapped there for eternity). It has often been observed that the word “bone” is used in the movie both for significance, that is, the matter composing the skeleton, and for its sexual connotation. However, in Bringing Up Baby Grant manages to bring back the agent of his ­exposure—the sexual bone—into the closed space of the skeleton, thus canceling its exposing danger. For an illuminating discussion of the disturbing nature of the ending of Bringing Up Baby, see Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness. 20.  Another great Hawksian figure for such an enclosure is the prison of Rio Bravo. It would seem that it is mostly men in Hawks’s movies who attempt to construct such protective, entombing and imprisoning spaces, yet in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Hawks conducts an investigation into the feminine form of the production of such a space. In a brilliant figurative move, Hawks makes Marilyn Monroe into a Medusa-like figure who turns the men who stare at her and at whom she stares into diamonds, or rocks (almost literally, in the famous scene with Lord Bickham, aka Piggy). Not unlike the pharaoh, Marilyn turns the men surrounding her into a heap of lifeless stones that will be her best friends, a treasure that will protect her from aging, dying, and exposure to the outside. As mentioned above, Monroe, at the beginning of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, exits from behind a curtain, thus becoming the one in whom the power of the offscreen is inscribed, which turns into a secret, the mystery of her seduction—a femme fatale in pink feathers and song. With the aid of this secret power, she turns men into a pyramidal treasure, a collection of rocks in which she can spend an eternal afterlife. The great question of the film’s ending is whether she has managed to transform her Medusa-like power into a capacity to love. Most signs seem to indicate that, like Grant in Bringing Up Baby, she has carried the treasure into the tomb, with no way out. At the same time, perhaps there is a way out for Monroe: it is fairly clear that her marriage to her rich suitor is insignificant, but it might be that she does in essence marry Dorothy (Jane Russell), inasmuch as the film ends with both of them in white dresses on-screen, while their husbands are cut out of the frame. It’s as if she has given up on her

Notes to Chapter 3



attempt to transform her mystery, her inscription of off-screen opacity, into turning men into stone, where Dorothy, whom she never seems to try to seduce, is concerned. 21.  The monkey is able to concoct her formula because she escapes her cage; the monkey’s formula is always a formula for escape. The formula as escape versus the formula as the secret construction of a pyramid is the struggle at the heart of the work of art, and therefore at the heart of Hawks’s oeuvre as well. Accordingly, the failure of the project of the pyramid allows for the escape or liberation of the imprisoned in Land of the Pharaohs. All of Hawks’s movies are basically constructed as prison-escape movies. Only rarely does escape succeed in his mysteriously dark universe (whose surface, paradoxically, is often so light and luminous—colorful, even—as in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). It more often ends in (either literal or figural) death (as in the death of the death-sentenced prisoner of His Girl Friday) or in a return to the closed space (as in Bringing Up Baby). 22.  Perhaps this is a way that the pharaoh Hawks (or Hawks, the pharaoh’s architect) learned to hide his secrets: not with an imposing pyramid whose conspicuousness tempts others to discover its sacred interior, but with an airy transparency that tempts relatively few, thereby keeping its secrets all the safer. It is no wonder that Hawks, a no less profound an auteur than Hitchcock or Welles, Bresson or Godard, has managed—while not fully avoiding serious commentary, of course, and receiving also the honor due to a great director, to remain quite safe in his glass pyramid from the type of attention that these heavier auteurs provoked, perhaps all the better to achieve immortality. Indeed, the history of his reception testifies to Hawks’s success in keeping his secret safe; even in the case of important admirers such as Andrew Sarris and Robin Wood, a certain image of Hawks as a no-nonsense professional, an intuitive, nonintellectual filmmaker avoiding excessive superfluity, has been propagated. Thus Sarris can describe Hawks’s cinema as “good, clean, direct, functional cinema, perhaps the most distinctly American cinema of all” (The American Cinema [New York: Da Capo Press, 1996], 55) and the typical Hawksian hero not as a pharaoh building a secret tomb, as I’ve tried to show, but as someone “upheld by instinctive professionalism” (53). The same goes for Hawks’s famously, and deceptively, nonconspicuous technique, which Sarris understands not, as I’m trying to demonstrate, as a way to hide a secret in plain sight but as an expression of Hawks’s pragmatism: “If Hawks does not choose to use technique as reflective commentary on action, it is because his personality expresses a pragmatic intelligence rather than a philosophical wisdom” (54). Given such readings, Hawks’s secret seems to be safe, the formula well protected! 23.  In this context, we can also see why the concept of the generic can refer to nonindividual blandness or blankness. After all, encounter with the off-screen



Notes to Chapter 3

involves a de-individualizing force, an encounter with nothing specific, which effaces the identity of those exposed, striking them with anonymity. 24.  Making a clear connection between age and genre, Barnaby describes youth as the time of low-comedy disasters. 25.  In this context, we can see how Hawks’s project—where an irreducible multiplicity of genres anarchically undermines the desire for a center—differs in execution from another fundamentally modern aesthetic project, the Wagnerian musical drama, or Gesamtkunstwerk. In “Art and Revolution,” Wagner clearly states that the future work of art aims for the dissolution of classical genres, whose organization and division imply two main things: splintering the wholeness of humanity’s capacities into parts (music, painting, dance, etc.) and the hierarchical division of humanity into social classes (tragedy relating to the upper classes, comedy to the lower, etc.). Both imply a betrayal of the oneness of humanity and detach it from the full expression of its powers. Hawks’s project is also concerned with dissolving the hierarchical division of genres, with their rigid ties to social class, and he also conceives of film as an art where the various aspects of human expression share the same artistic space. For Hawks, however, this sharing does not come as unification into a whole, nor does it come as a cancellation of the irreducible multiplicity of genres. The genres and the arts are not considered as parts of a whole that has to be unified but as irreducibly multiple “fragments” (incomplete, yet not part of a totality) that coexist precisely because there is no whole. Accordingly, the work of art becomes an anarchic and disjunctive communication between fragments: the monkey takes the place of Parsifal. 26.  More precisely, (poetic) genre does not just mean the various ways in which the outside is inscribed without hierarchical order, in principle extending infinitely. Rather, it starts with the various ways in which the outside haunts every­day life as the interruption of its meaning—in accidents, screams, stuttering, and so on—and then attempts to liberate their creative potential; such creative use of this interruptive force is no longer experienced as a failure to mean but as the place from which one can begin to mean in ever new ways. From this perspective, the poetic genre can be defined as the attempt to bring the dimension of the outside into view and make it heard as such, in its pure non-sensicality rather than as an interruption of meaning; equally, however, it attempts to liberate symptoms, accidents, and paralyses into their creative potential, precisely because the outside, as such, is now manifest. 27.  Famously, Hawks is not credited as the director of The Thing from Another World (more commonly known as The Thing)—as if he has given up his actual name and taken on the poetic identity of the anonymous off-screen that invades the on-screen world. Just as Hawks is clearly the monkey in our film, he is The Thing in The Thing. Indeed, several of Hawks’s titles simply name the power that stands for the off-screen: in Monkey Business it’s the monkey; in

Notes to Chapter 3



Bringing Up Baby it’s the leopard Baby; in The Thing from Another World it’s The Thing. 28.  Let’s remember that the film opened with the off-screen voice uttering “Not yet, Cary,” marking the film as a space of reflection on this temporal suspension we call the “not yet.” To an extent, the time of the off-screen is the time of the pure “not yet.” 29.  We might want to be more precise and say that not only does an age, when examined from the perspective of the question of the poetic, mark the modality of the inscription of infancy as an interruption of the meaningful world, but that age can also be understood as a defense against this inscription, or encounter with infancy. As such, the task of the work of art might be to liberate an age from the defensive mode against infancy around which it organized itself. Thus a reactivation of adolescence as in Monkey Business, where Edwina is made to relive again a moment of shame, silence, and excitement, as a repetition of a dormant trauma, can have as its task to liberate her from her defensive adolescence and to open her up to her constitutive infancy in a new, creative way. 30.  The same opposition between two relations to the image structures Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, where the rituals of a secret society are replaced by the image of daylight and the advent of a new (acceptance of ) sexuality—a different relation to the haunting of the night/off-screen, an enlightened acceptance with which the film ends. 31.  Grant’s being made to look like a monkey calls to mind François Truffaut’s famous words about Scarface: Hawks “deliberately directed Paul Muni to make him look like a monkey, his arms hanging loosely and slightly curved, his face caught in a perpetual grimace” (The Films of My Life [New York: Da Capo Press, 1994], 70). 32.  These cries of the children playing war games have something in common with the infant: both express the inscription of the senseless off-screen. At the same time, the infant also serves as a counterpoint to them, expressing an attempt to activate something, an infant address, prior to (and an alternative to) the transformation of the suffering of non-sensicality into an act of violence that targets an enemy. 33.  Often in Hawks’s movies, infantile old men (or sometimes, slightly loony old men, e.g., the religious nut played by Etienne Girardot in Twentieth Century) are the ones who manage to escape the hermetic “pyramids” that the protagonists are attempting to build. Thus, the loony old man stands closest to the child of the fairy tale in activating the infancy of the image. 34.  Another dimension of repetition the monkey’s formula activates can be called “traumatic.” When Barnaby and Edwina drink the formula, scenes from their past—their wedding night, past disagreements, and so on—come back to haunt them, like wounds that have never healed. This traumatic dimension is an



Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

encounter with infancy: afflictions of death and nonidentity, excess one cannot face. It is the task of the image—a repetition of infancy—to achieve release from this traumatic repetition by providing a way to experience the traumatic outside not as a haunting interruption one cannot overcome but as the possibility for (re)imagining a new life.

Chapter 4: What Is a Cinema of Jewish Vengeance? 1.  This piece was written soon after Inglourious Basterds was released. Tarantino’s following films, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, are (to a greater or lesser extent) historical in nature as well. 2.  Most notably, in his famous article “Holocauste, la représentation impossible” (Le Monde, March 3, 1994). 3.  That is, read psychoanalytically, protected by his power to castrate, which means to create a protective frame that eliminates exposure to an indeterminate and excessive outside. 4.  It is important to distinguish here, as I have done throughout the book, between what I have discussed earlier in the chapter as the frame-structure that any Tarantino image exposes and that marks a division between what we see on-screen and an indeterminate outside, and what I’m referring to here as the paternal frame, which is a power to clearly divide between an inside and outside, eliminating the threat of an indeterminate outside. The frame-structure that the artistic screen activates, that exposes one to an indeterminate outside, emerges precisely out of the collapse or the failure of paternal framing and its attempt to eliminate the indeterminate outside. 5.  To distinguish more precisely between the logic of the tattoo and that of the burning circumcision: the tattoo is the attempt to inscribe, in the flesh, the dimension of the frame, which we have also associated with paternity; in contrast, the image/circumcision, at least in the way Tarantino conceives it, is not the inscription of the frame in the flesh but rather the inscription of the excessive outside in the flesh as a reminder that it can never be fully integrated into the dimension of the frame. In a way, the function of circumcision is to undermine the tattoo.

Index

Abraham, 4–12, 211, 257 actor, the, 19, 33, 78–80, 90–92, 101, 123, 126, 127, 130, 138, 202–4, 226, 229 address, to, 17, 18, 25, 35, 50, 51, 73, 78, 83, 92, 112, 135, 141, 158, 168, 179, 181, 187, 194, 195, 214, 225, 228, 239, 247, 251, 255. See also Call allegory, 3–11, 18, 19, 25, 28, 29, 35, 47, 61, 65–9, 73, 83, 85, 91, 132, 134, 152, 173, 177–9, 193,196, 198, 205–8, 217, 225, 232, 244–7 Althusser, Louis, 214 Anachrony, 45, 75, 190–92, 196–98 angel, 3–12, 24, 174, 213, 214, 233 Artaud, Antonin, 123, 233 Ascheid, Antje, 231 Auden, W. H., 24 Aumont, Jacques, 220 Barbaras, Renaud, 228 Bataille, Georges, 212 Bazin, André, 122, 220, 221, 233 Beckett, Samuel, 20 Benjamin, Walter, 114–117, 209, 226, 227, 229, 233, 234, 241 Bergala, Alain, 220 Bergson, Henri, 216 Bird, Robert, 221 Birth of a Nation (Griffith), 62–4, 225

Bonitzer, Pascal, 220 Bosch, Hieronymus, 26, 27, 216 Breton, André, 37 Bringing Up Baby (Hawks), 173, 183, 248, 249, 251 Bruegel, Pieter, 15, 23–34, 42, 46, 215–219, 223 Burch, Noel, 220 call, 6–13, 17–19, 22, 25, 29–32,35, 39, 40, 42, 45, 49–56, 68, 71–4, 76, 88, 92, 97, 135, 136, 143, 168, 169, 181–3, 185, 194–7, 212, 218, 224, 225, 228, 247. See also address camera, the, 35–39, 66, 82, 86, 87, 94–96, 98–100, 104, 110, 122, 127, 146–149, 220, 227, 231, 238, 244, 245 Caravaggio, 11 castration, 42, 53, 221, 238 Cavell, Stanley, 248 Celan, Paul, 122, 233 Chaplin, Charles, 62, 78, 79, 89, 90, 101, 102, 106, 113, 118–170, 228, 233–244 Chion, Michel, 220, 232 Christ (and the image), 52, 62–5, 71–6, 105, 128, 222 circumcision, 7, 209, 212, 252 Clausewitz, Carl Von, 121 close-up, the, 44–46, 55, 70, 71, 108, 221

253



Index

community, 7–9, 13, 29, 75, 78, 89, 107, 108, 212, 231–5, 243, 244 crowd, the, 78–80, 84, 86, 89, 90, 97–102, 110, 111, 114, 117, 118, 126, 128–131, 138, 146, 158–163, 168, 169, 226, 227, 231, 234–240 cut, the, 4, 5, 10, 19, 26–32, 36–48, 52–56, 63–76, 91, 102, 108–10, 157, 173, 174, 185, 198, 207, 208, 212, 218–226, 233, 248, 250 Daub, Adrian, 243 De Palma, Brian, 224, 227, 232 déjà vu (the image as), 46, 48, 175, 221 Deleuze, Gilles, 41, 71, 88, 119, 184, 212, 215, 216, 220, 231, 235 Derrida, Jacques, 221, 244 Diderot, Denis, 33, 36, 234 Eisenstein, Sergei, 62, 71, 138, 235 Eisner, Lotte, 231 excess, 8, 11–13, 27, 42, 49–56, 73, 75, 91, 96–101, 105, 119–126, 132, 134, 142, 165, 166, 180, 187, 188, 204, 207–9, 212, 214, 221, 225, 228, 233–35, 240–43, 249, 252 Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick), 251 factory, the, 69–72, 138, 146–51, 235, 238 father, the, 4 -12, 18, 19, 22, 24, 25, 27, 42–44, 47, 49–54, 69–73, 87, 91, 128, 131, 134, 136, 207, 208, 213, 222, 223, 225, 234, 235, 238, fiction, 4, 5, 11, 13, 20, 21, 26, 36–8, 42, 46, 82, 91, 173, 179–182, 188, 193, 201–3, 224, 226, 233, 246, 256 Freud, Sigmund, 42, 45, 150, 254, 257 Genesis, book of, 5, 6 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks), 173, 198, 248, 249 ghost, ghostly, 5, 9, 17–56, 83, 87, 91, 95, 96, 116, 142, 175–182, 214–227, 245, 246 gift, the, 33, 38–40, 195–197, 221

Gish, Lillian, 62 Grant, Cary, 123, 174, 175, 177–186, 244–251 Griffith, D.W., 41, 63–76, 122, 225, 226, 230, 232, 233, 235 Gunning, Tom, 62, 225 Hamlet, 17–25, 34, 51, 52, 91, 130, 142, 182, 215, 216, 222, 246, 247 Hansen, Miriam, 226 haunting, 5, 17, 19, 22, 27, 28, 32, 36, 39, 40, 43–49, 56, 64, 67, 73–86, 90, 91, 94, 98–101, 105, 110–12, 120, 148, 164–67, 176, 189, 182, 184, 190–92, 195, 198–203, 218, 219, 223, 227–233, 245–252 Hawks, Howard, 173–199, 205, 217, 244, 247–251 Heraclitus, 40 Hitchcock, Alfred, 62, 178, 179, 215, 221, 225, 244, 245, 249 Hitler, Adolph, 78–80, 89–113, 118–130, 141–145, 155–166, 169, 201, 206, 229–233, 243, 244 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 18 infancy, 164, 186, 189–99, 205, 251, 252 Inglorious Basterds (Tarantino), 200–209 Intolerance (Griffith), 60–77 Isaac, 3–11 Kafka, Franz, 5, 130 Kierkegaard, Søren, 5 Koerner, Joseph, 26, 27, 216 Kracauer, Siegfried, 89, 236 Krunes, Erik, 231 Kubrick, Stanley, 192 Kurosawa, Akira, 116 Lacan, Jacques, 18, 42, 102, 167, 231, 241 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 231, 234 Land of the Pharaohs (Hawks), 173, 183, 217, 249 landscape, 23, 28–32, 46, 47, 98, 207, 211, 217–19, 238

Index Lang, Fritz, 79–91, 111, 231 Lanzmann, Claude, 207 Lincoln, Abraham, 62, 63, 72 Lorre, Peter, 86 M (Lang), 79–91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100 Marie, Michel, 220 Marker, Chris, 224 mask, 33, 34, 91, 194, 195, 219, 220 Melville, Herman, 122, 233, 246 Michelet, Jules, 61 Modern Times (Chaplin), 136–157 modernity, 3, 17, 19, 22, 23, 64, 92, 113, 114, 115 ,141, 211, 215, 218, 234 Mondzain, Marie-José, 212 Monkey Business (Hawks), 173–199 monotheism, 6, 212 montage, 41, 64, 71, 75, 110–113, 138, 232, 235 Moriah, Mount, 7 movie star, 92, 93, 96, 101, 102, 106, 113, 114, 126–128, 130, 156, 158, 159, 169, 229, 231, 234, 235 muteness, 82, 135, 158–169, 242, 247. See also silence Nancy, Jean-Luc, 78, 231 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 38, 117, 141, 225, 234 Oedipus, 21, 96, 153, 195, 196, 238, 239 offstage, 21, 22, 215 Orpheus, 55, 57, 151 people, the, 7, 29, 39, 33, 61, 63, 65, 70–76, 96, 98, 107, 110, 118, 138, 218, 226, 22 photography, 36, 81, 176, 220 Plato, 48, 49, 140, 143, 153, 223, 228, 240, 241 play, to, 20, 33–36, 123, 149–151, 155–157, 163, 174, 181, 184, 194, 196, 237, 238, 251, pleasure, 11–13, 45, 150, 187 Plotz, John, 227 Pollock, Sheldon, 244



Ratcliffe, Stephen, 215 ready-made, the, 37 Rembrandt, 3–11, 35, 51, 52, 211, 213, 221, 222 Renaissance, 3, 19, 23, 27, 116, 175, 211, 214, 216 Rentschler, Eric, 114 repetition, 9, 34, 45, 46, 55, 60, 116, 138, 191, 192, 198, 199, 222, 224, 248, 251, 252 resurrection, 19, 45, 47, 56, 61, 76, 198, 199, 221, 223 Riefenstahl, Leni, 79, 91–118, 121, 128, 155, 205, 228–232 sacred, 7, 13, 20, 21, 23, 26, 52, 66, 96–8, 114–18, 160–167, 183, 185, 192, 193, 212, sacrifice, 3–13, 197, 212–16, 233, 249 Sarris, Andrew, 249 Schiller, Friedrich, 63 Schindler’s List (Spielberg), 207 Schulte-Sasse, Linda, 114 shadow, 74, 75, 80, 84–91, 95–101, 123, 175–178, 195, 229, 230, 244, 246 Shakespeare, William, 19–25, 116, 214, 215 Sellink, Manfred, 217 silence (and the silent film), 78, 87, 158, 159, 163, 164, 166, 167, 170, 187, 190, 211, 242–244, 252 Smithson, Robert, 31 Solaris (Tarkovsky), 34–57 Spielberg, Steven, 207 stage, the, 19–26, 33, 36–8, 66, 82, 116, 214, 215 Stalker (Tarkovsky), 219, 221 surveillance, 146–151 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 206 symbol, symbolic, 8, 9, 11, 42, 102, 102–113, 144, 155, 161, 192, 204, 205, 209, 221, 230, 232, 237 Tarantino, Quentin, 200–209, 252 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 34–57 territory, 7–13, 29, 42, 53, 75, 91, 106, 107, 111, 127, 129, 212, 213, 222



Index

The Great Dictator (Chaplin), 157–170 The Kid (Chaplin), 131–136 theological, 147, 147, 152, 211, 213, 234, 247, 253 theological-political, 7–9, 13 Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl), 91–118, 145 Truffaut, François, 251 2001 A Space Odyssey (Kubrick), 192, 193

Vernet, Marc, 220 Vertigo (Hitchcock), 221, 225 virtual, the, 5 Volk, the, 98–100, 107, 110, 232

Van Gogh, Vincent, 122, 233

Žižek, Slavoj, 242

Wagner, Richard, 63, 64, 250 Weber, Max, 228 Whitman, Walt, 61 Winston, Brian, 113, 233 Wood, Robin, 249

MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm Paul North, The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation Giorgio Agamben, Pilate and Jesus Kevin McLaughlin, Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant Barbara Johnson, A Life with Mary Shelley Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government Paul Celan, The Meridian Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time Giorgio Agamben, Nudities Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations Ruth Stein, For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism

Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out Susan Bernstein, Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology Jean-Luc Nancy, Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus Carol Jacobs, Skirting the Ethical: Sophocles, Plato, Hamann, Sebald, Campion Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 2 volumes, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Literature and Law in the Time of a Truth Commission Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, edited by Thomas Albrecht, with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb Alan Bass, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say… Ernst Bloch, Traces Elizabeth Rottenberg, Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert David Wills, Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason

Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness: (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis) Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages Peter Szondi, Celan Studies Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited by Peggy Kamuf Cornelius Castoriadis, On Plato’s ‘Statesman’ Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1 Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic Peter Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin Jill Robbins, ed. Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas Louis Marin, Of Representation J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas

Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural Maurice Blanchot / Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System Emmanual Levinas, God, Death, and Time Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy Ellen S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal: Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book Deborah Esch, In the Event: Reading Journalism, Reading Theory Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics Francis Ponge, Soap Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus Werner Hamacher, Pleroma—Reading in Hegel Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus Maurice Blanchot, Friendship Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion Hans-Jost Frey, Studies in Poetic Discourse: Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hölderlin Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field Nicolas Abraham, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis Jacques Derrida, On the Name David Wills, Prosthesis Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994

J. Hillis Miller, Topographies Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner) Jacques Derrida, Aporias Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime Peter Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence