Psychoanalyzing Cinema

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Psychoanalyzing Cinema
A Productive Encounter with
Lacan, Deleuze, and Žižek

Edited by

jan jagodzinski
PSYCHOANALYZING CINEMA
Copyright © jan jagodzinski, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-33855-5
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-34155-9 ISBN 978-1-137-11694-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137116949
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Psychoanalyzing cinema : a productive encounter with Lacan, Deleuze,
and Žižek / [edited by] Jan Jagodzinski.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.

1. Psychoanalysis and motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures—

Psychological aspects. 3. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981—Criticism
and interpretation. 4. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995—Criticism and
interpretation. 5. Žižek, Slavoj—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Jagodzinski, Jan, 1948–
PN1995.9.P783P795 2012
791.43⬘653—dc23 2012013712
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 To
Ian Buchanan
whose collaborative generosity continues to keep critical thought alive
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 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction . . . of Sorts, Sort of 1

jan jagodzinski
Lacan: Master I 1
Žižek: Master II 7
Slave Revolt: Guattari 10
Badiou: Master III 13
Revolt Slave! Deleuze 17
SchizoCrets 19

Part I Encountering Lacan

1 Light, Camera, Action! The Luminous Worlds of Jacques
Lacan and Gilles Deleuze 45
Hanjo Berressem
2 Hearing Voices: Schizoanalysis and the Voice as
Image in the Cinema of David Lynch 71
Frida Beckman
3 Encore: Trauma and Counter-memory in Kim Ki-duk’s Time 89
Meera Lee

Part II Encountering Deleuze

4 Antagonism or Multiplicity: The Struggle between
Psychoanalysis and Deleuze in Godard’s Cinema 111
Todd McGowan
viii CONTENTS

5 Against Limits: Deleuze, Lacan, and the Possibility of Love 129

Sheila Kunkle
6 Occasioning the Real: Lacan, Deleuze, and Cinematic
Structuring of Sense 147
Emanuelle Wessels

Part III Encountering Žižek

7 The Universe as Metacinema 169
Patricia Pisters
8 On the Possibilities of Political Art: How Žižek
Misreads Deleuze and Lacan 205
Robert Samuels
9 The Surplus Gaze of Legibility: Guilt, Ethics, and
Out-of-Field in Deleuze, Lacan, and Žižek 227
A. Kiarina Kordela

Part IV Encountering . . .
01 Living . . . Again: The Revolutionary Cine-Sign of
Zombie-Life 249
Jason Wallin

Notes on Contributors 271

Index 275
 List of Illustrations

1.1 Lacan’s Three Diagrams 54

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

2.1 Aligning the body with an already determined voice 75

2.2 The present becoming thin as a mirror 76
2.3 A song and a tear that already exist 77
From Mulholland Drive (2001) directed by David Lynch,
Universal Pictures

3.1 A path crossing of Se-hŭi (Park Ji-yeon) and

Sae- hŭi (Seong Hyeon-a) in the opening sequence of Time 90
From Time (Shi gan) (2006) directed by Kim Ki-duk,
Happinet Pictures

5.1 Manni and Lola 138

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

6.1 Arial View, Dogville 157

6.2 Grace and Tom 159
From Dogville (2003) directed by Lars von Trier,
Zentropa Entertainments

01.1 Zombie 250

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

T his collection of chapters addresses the productive encounters among

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

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

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

Screen Culture will be released in 2012 by Stanford Press. In this chap-

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

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

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

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

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

Lacan: Master 1

The discrepancies in the way the Real is taken up in their respective sys-
tems foregrounds the ethicopolitical stakes that are at play in the contem-
porary struggle for transformative change of a neoliberal system that is
wedded to global designer capitalism in the twenty-first century, which has
2 JAN JAGODZINSKI

been marked by a decade of ecological worry and terrorist fervor. I hope

to show toward the end of this introduction how this ties up with cinema.
I would like to begin with the paradoxical tension that persists in Lacan’s
conceptualization of the Real that teeters back and forth throughout his
teachings. This is succinctly presented by Bruce Fink’s (1995) discussion
of the Lacanian subject as moving from “Real1,” which is the presym-
bolic Real, to “Real2“, the so-called hard kernel of the Real that remains
once language situates the conscious subject through the signifier. The
Real is then expulsed, what Freud called Bejahung, as an affirmation that
constitutes the subject’s emergence in the symbolic order. Given that the
signifier of language plays such an overwhelming role in Lacan’s system
as a gap between language and subject,1 it seems right to say, in distinc-
tion, R1 characterizes the processes of conceptualization of the embryo in
the Mother’s womb, the chora in Julia Kristeva’s terms, or the “matrixial
borderspace” in Bracha Ettinger’s (2006) terms, which are tied to ‘Nature,’
meaning once conception begins, the ‘natural’ forces at work cannot be
controlled; they may be terminated through abortion or miscarriage, the
fetus influenced by diet and lifestyle, but the ‘switch’ has been thrown and
the development put into motion.2 The presymbolic Real, avant la lettre,
is described by Fink as “without zones, subdivisions, localized highs and
lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the [R]eal is a sort of unrent, undifferenti-
ated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere, there being no
space between the threads that are its ‘stuff’ ” (24). ‘Stuff,’ of course, is a
pedestrian way of referring to materialism, which is ‘itself’ (as we shall
see) immaterial when it comes to the quantum universe and problemat-
ics of chaos. Fink sounds very Deleuzian when he ends his description
with “It is the sort of smooth, seamless surface or space which applies as
much to a child’s body as the whole universe.” R 2, après la lettre, is “best
understood as that which has not been symbolized, remains to be symbol-
ized, or even resists symbolization” (25, emphasis in original). It appears
“after the letter which is characterized by impasses and impossibilities
due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself, that
is, which is generated by the symbolic: “There is thus always a remainder
which persists alongside the symbolic” (27, emphasis in original). Being
arises only with the symbolic. What’s crucial to note here, in the register
of R1, the triumph of showing (eye) and saying (ear) is more dominant
during the holophrastic speech phase of child development than nam-
ing when the signifier ‘drops,’ so to speak, and language becomes more
articulate forming the subject and the residual R 2.
Much can go wrong, of course, from the passage of R1 to R2, technically
speaking from ‘alienation’ to ‘separation,’ as the symbolic order imposes
itself to organize and ‘civilize’ the ‘driven’ (Triebe) body, as each of us must
surrender our particular ‘pound of flesh’ to achieve the pleasure of desire
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 3

in the Lacanian system and suffer the consequences of excess (jouissance).

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

screen that would ensure belonging. Most Outsider artists are recluses;
they keep to themselves, taking on menial jobs that carry no authority,
struggling with their ‘demons’ at home, as it were.8
It is my contention that the psychotic becomes the inspirational fig-
ure for the late Lacan of the Real (1963–1981)9 as a reply to the inspira-
tional figure of the schizophrenic as first developed by Deleuze|Guattari in
Anti-Oedipus and, to a certain extent, the hysterical challenge concerning
sexuation as the denial of feminine jouissance brought into his ranks by
Luce Irigaray (1970–1974) primarily through her habilitation, Specuum, de
l’autre femme. This precipitated a crisis, a subjective destitution, that slowly
began to unfold just after the May 68 Paris uprisings. In Seminar XVII,
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–1970), given just after the Paris
uprising of May 1968 had calmed down, Lacan had already seen through
the Oedipus myth as simply a Freudian fantasy (Grigg, 2006), and thus
began to revise and play with it. As Elizabeth Roudinesco (1997, 347) tells
us, at that time, ca. 1970, his idolatry had already turned into a theoretical
tyranny as “King Ubu.” Seminar XX, Encore (1972–1973), was a response
to Irigaray. In this seminar Lacan introduces the notion of lalangue (trans-
lated into the English as “llanguage” by Bruce Fink) as the Real in language,
which begins to identify the affects of the mother tongue10 through its pho-
netic sounds, rhythms, alliterations, and so on. In general, it addresses a
language’s materiality: Roland Barthes’ ‘grain’ of the voice, for instance,
its sonority, textuality, and ‘litterality.’ The letter, and here we should not
yet think ‘element’ given the priority of alphabetization for Lacan, takes
on the function of the Real, as the Real of the material signifier.11 While
further developed by Kristeva’s “semiotic” it also has direct parallels with
Deleuze’s ‘logique du sens,’ and différence et répétition, his habilitation (sec-
ond or confirming doctorate). Both were published in 1968–1969.12 With
lalangue, jouissance undergoes a change as jouis-sens. The word play refers
to an enjoyment in sense or meaning; or, as “J’ouïs sens” (I hear sense)
that has also a demand about it as “I hear.” The demand of the voice, as
superego, also becomes interesting when thought in relation to Deleuze’s
univocity that emerges in his two immanence books where he refers to
univocity as simply Voice (following Spinoza).13 Jouis-sens is, therefore,
an insistence in language, and within it rather than beyond it, carrying an
affective intensity. The structuralism of “The unconscious structured as
a language” begins to undergo modification with this move. Lalangue is
Lacan’s stepping stone to the “One of jouissance,” toward the sinthome,
which identifies singularity as an enigma of the unconscious Cogito (the
“it thinks”) via the ‘enjoyment’ of letters.14
With the seminars that followed, their trajectory seemed to be in
response to the impact of Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, which was
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 5

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

the sinthome now becomes the fundamental kernel of one’s identity in the
way meaning is ‘enjoyed.’ In Seminar XXII, RIS, Lacan displaces the long-
standing Name-of-the-Father that is to take the place of the lack in the
Other so that the three registers can be knotted enabling jouissance to be
forbidden. He now maintains that any element can become a sinthome and
function in place of Le nom du père.21
Here I think is where we come to a sort of endgame that emerges with
Lacan in his ‘anthropomorphic ‘ passion for parlêtre by naming “Joyce
the symptom,” or “Joyce means symptom|sinthome,” as developed in his
S XXIII Sinthome. Jacques-Alain Miller (2008) charts Lacan’s withdrawal
of the primacy of the (big) Other in what he punningly calls “the Other
side of Lacan.” “His Other thus often seems singularly inflated, a veritable
junk yard, a shambles, and the more the Other grew, the more the subject
shrank, the more it emptied. [. . .] In place of the Other there is a whole
other principle of identity”(62, 63), which Miller, culling from the Sinthome
Seminar names the One-body, from the Other to the One. An encounter
with the sinthome “face-to-face” was for Lacan like “Two times zero makes
[O]ne.”22 It is with the late late Lacan through what might be termed a ‘pro-
ductive psychosis’ that a reply to Deleuze|Guattari’s schizophrenic is finally
achieved. “How do you know if the unconscious is [R]eal or imaginary?”
he says. “It presents an ambiguity between the two” (Lacan, Sinthome, qtd.
in Miller, 65). When a subject identifies totally with his or her sinthome,
then there is no analysis, no opening to insert a question. The Outsider
artist in effect closes him or herself off in her or his own art(ifice) as a One
or ego, the ego no longer referring to that of the Freudian ego of signified
representation, but to an investment in the One-body in relationship to
the (big) Other’s lack, an investment between the Real and the Imaginary,
which itself is ambiguous. The ego here rather than being ‘filled’ with nar-
cissism is emptied. The One becomes ignorant, just the opposite of arro-
gant, ‘filled’ with knowledge.23 It is perhaps no wonder that such Outside
artists, such as Joyce ‘makes a litter of the letter,’ or some like Henry Darger
collects discarded objects picked up daily in and around Lincoln Park,
Chicago, where he lived for 43 years. Outsider artists, in effect, gather up
what is usually considered the abject in the Kristevian sense, that which
the symbolic order discards, sees as ‘trash.’ Joyce’s litter of the letter, the
trash and discards, the waste that society throws away, is picked up and
reassembled to make a new Imaginary order.
A surprise seems to emerge, if I have this right, in the last seminar
before Lacan decides to end his school to start fresh. S XXIV title, L’insu
que sait de l’une bévue s’aileà mourre, is (apparently) a pun where “une-
bévue” means blunder or mistake.24 The title then might be translated as
“The unknown that knows about the one-blunder chances love.” Spoken,
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 7

with puns ignored, it becomes: “L’insuccès de l’une-bévue, c’est l’amour,”

which means “Love is the failure of the one-blunder.” Verhaeghe and
Declercq (2002), drawing from this particular seminar, maintain that
Lacan finally addresses the controversy over the ‘formulae of sexuation’
where woman is given a special relationship to objet a and jouissance due to
her nonexistence in the symbolic order. Quoting Lacan from that seminar,
they write, “On the level of the sinthome . . . there is a rapport . . . there is
only rapport where there is a sinthome” (76). This is rather startling given
the nonrapport that Lacan maintained all those years. Is this his ‘blun-
der’? The sinthome is located on the side of femininity, which has affini-
ties with what Deleuze|Guattari named ‘becoming woman.’25 With the
sinthome, it seems desire is no longer defined by lack. It addresses the lack
in the symbolic that is indicative of the unthought itself, the limit point
of the Symbolic, the Outside. It opens up to all the worries that surround
human beings as ‘divine animals,’ creating and destroying ourselves. How
to go about this task remains perplexing. If there is a Joyce, there is also
a “Fernando Pessoa,” whose patronym in Portuguese means “no one.” As
Soler (2003, 99) points out, Pessoa proliferated his ‘names’ at least as 50
different authors (as critic, writer, philosopher, humorist, and theoreti-
cian). “A man who never was,” Pessoa was so immersed in the Real that he
was “unnameable,” living it seems by generating a continuous variation of
imaginary frames rather than the letter in the Real. The line between ‘mad-
ness’ and artistry is always precarious.

Žižek: Master II

It is, of course, Žižek who has explored the late Lacan’s emphasis on the
Real most thoroughly, stemming from his tutelage with Mladen Dolar
in Ljubljana and Jacques-Alain Miller in Paris. He, Renata Salecl, and
Alenka Zupančič, three of the most notable members of the Slovene
Lacanian School, have all traveled afar since the mid-1980s in Ljubljana.
Adrian Johnston (2008) characterizes Žižek’s ontology as “transcenden-
tal materialism,” claiming it to be a sixth position (274) that can be added
to the five philosophical paradigms that Badiou outlined in his Theory
of the Subject. Basically the German Idealist tradition that problematizes
the constitution of the subject is re-read through a Lacanian lens, with
the key figures of Schelling, Kant, and Hegel doing the heavy lifting, each
having gone through a ‘makeover’ to his liking in postmodernist fashion.
It seems to me that, like Lacan, the psychotic subject continues to play
a key inspirational role given that the primal processes are continually
evoked. In the above section, the interpretative journey I took through
8 JAN JAGODZINSKI

Lacan to the sinthome suggested an identification with one’s sinthome (to

identify with one’s fundamental fantasy in Žižek’s terms26) could be cre-
atively affirming—dangerous—but affirming primarily through art, and
that this has to be addressed to aspects of a failed Symbolic, especially the
barred feminine of the symbolic order.27 Lack could be interpreted not in
negative terms, but as the unthought that is to keep some semblance of
freedom open. This would mean exploring the Real-Imaginary psychic
dimensions in relation to one’s sinthome (fundamental fantasy). Instead
of this ‘creative’ trajectory, Žižek seems to take another tact—one more
in keeping with the death drive and destruction: more accurately I think,
the route of Versagung (refusal) to address this lack in the Real. The sub-
ject sacrifices himself or herself in relation to the lack that is constitutive
of the symbolic order through a symbolic act. It is a refusal of aphanisis,
the passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, to be affirmed by it;
the signifier is refused to speak (sagen) the subject. As a form of (radical)
resistance one is ‘named’ for the sacrifice that can negate the symbolic
order. In many cases Žižek seems to continually confirm or rather dem-
onstrate the obvious point that “Woman does not exist” through various
filmic examples. His is a continuous exploration between the Real and the
Symbolic psychic registers. Most often the only road to freedom seems
to be through the ‘act’ as informed by the death drive, an act of refusal
that easily, in the many examples he gives, slips into a passage a l’acte
that is suicidal. Either way physical death gains meaning as a symbolic
act (“between two death”) that disturbs the symbolic order, or ruptures
it in some way. Žižek evokes, for instance, the neo–noir femme fatale 28
as the figure who destroys the masculine “fundamental fantasy.” Most
clearly the Versagung is discussed in relation to one of Lacan’s key literary
figures, Syne de Coûfontaine who is often compared to Antigone by both
Zupančič (2003) and Žižek (2006).29
Though this ‘act’ has been thoroughly criticized,30 it does not perturb
Žižek at all. There have been plenty of other critiques.31 Alan Johnson
(2010), for example, has presented an extraordinary devastating critique
of Žižek’s political theory of revolutionary change, which he maintains is
explicitly totalitarian, antidemocratic, authoritarian, and even cryptofas-
cist. Paul Bowman (2010), reflecting on Johnson’s essay and Žižek’s dis-
missal of all the authors who addressed his work in The Truth of Žižek
(2007) that he edited with Richard Stamp, concludes that there is plenty
to worry about if Žižek is read seriously as many left leaning academi-
cians do. What to make of this? Žižek appears to be the ‘bulletproof
monk,’ to call on Paul Hunter’s film, the keeper of Lacan’s scroll, holding
onto it in a much different way than J-A. Miller who is the consummate
teacher and articulator of what Lacan ‘meant,’ or Mladen Dolar, for that
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 9

matter, whose philosophical expositions are equally jewels of articulation.

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

Slave Revolt: Guattari

Both Žižek and Badiou are no fans of Deleuze|Guattari, each for a differ-
ent reason. But both assure each other that this particular cancer needs
an operation. In this section I want to rehearse some of their complaints,
point out the difference between the figure of the schizophrenic and
the psychotic, and sprinkle this with my own dissatisfaction with Peter
Hallward’s interventions into this mix. It’s best to begin with Žižek, whose
Organs without Body (2004) has received wide attention as being ‘one of his
worst books.’ 35 Anti-Oedipus, to pick up the story from the Lacan section,
presented Lacan with one of the strongest challenges, which he met with
the development of the fourth ring, the sinthome. Deleuze’s Difference
and Repetition and Logic of Sense36 might be thought as brilliant explo-
rations of what could be taken as laying the foundations for the virtual
Real37 where the event is given priority over substance. Ignoring a nega-
tive destructive creativity, the tact of Žižek, they develop an affirmative
creative potential of the becoming of things. Against the ‘transcendental
materialism’ of Žižek, Deleuze develops a ‘transcendental empiricism,’ a
radical materialism where experience has no foundation outside itself.
Using ‘minor mathematics’38 Deleuze’s early work is already drawing on
General Systems Theory (Gregory Bateson) and the beginnings of what
becomes complexity and chaos theory that were abuzz at the time.39 The
Logic of Sense (better as ‘ontology’ of sense’ or cf. Paul Patton, the logic
of the Event) remains influenced by Lacan and Melanie Klein, and the
final quarter of the book engages with psychoanalysis.40 It is a structur-
alist book based on a tertiary structure (Lacan’s ‘logic of the signifier’),
wherein the relationship of parallel heterogeneous series is theorized via
a ‘differentiator’ that never ceases to circulate between them, linking the
two halves of each series. This differentiator is a paradoxical element with
0 symbolic value, which creates an excess in the signifying series (n+1),
and a lack in the other signified series (as n–1). At their convergence a
singularity is produced, registering an ideal event. So the differentiator
is never where one expects it, and it is never found where it is (following
the exemplar of Lacan’s Purloined Letter). Deriving his theory of language
from Stoic philosophy of propositions, where predicates express attributes
of objects, and infinitives capture the becoming of things, Deleuze works
with two types of becomings:41 the metaphysical surface, abstract and
separate from the body on which language develops—the time of Aion,
and the immaterial field of the sense-event, referring to the physical depth
of the body as organized into a series of erogenous zones by a paradoxical
element, the phallus as borrowed from Lacan—the time of Chronos.42 In
LS, Deleuze deals with the delerium of language (délire) as the paradoxes
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 11

between sense and non-sense,43 the structural relationships between the

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

or the Gaze itself.45 Who covets the Gaze via the eye, to whose authorita-
tive voice do I listen to, and so on. In A-O any possible transcendental-
ism is done away with. The Abyss is now described in machinic terms, an
‘intelligent’ materialism where all levels of existence are given equal weight.
Anthropomorphism drops away. They posit “inorganic life”46 (or aorganic)
that now characterizes ‘univocity.’ God, Voice, One in effect becomes life
transposed simply as “intensity” not requiring organs as such. Univocity
becomes a ‘sphere’ of inorganic life as processes of assembling —perhaps
like our ignorance of dark matter in relation to recognizing that now
something is capable of being faster than the speed of light worrying the
Einsteinian cosmology that is now becoming undermined.47 This creation
is via assemblages, as symbiotic and sympathetic connections, via codings
and decodings, among heterogeneous elements (multiplicities). It is when
assemblages break down that life (intensification) is renewed. So there is
constant pulse, flow, like cell life, terrirtorialization, deteritorialization and
the reterritorialization, and so on—the constant becoming of molecular
desiring machines that produce large molar aggregate formations. The
death drive is thus reconfigured as degree zero of intensities. The creation
of a ‘body without organs’ (BwO) presents the primary repression of this
flux (A-O, 120). The BwO repels partial objects establishing the minimum
gap of paranoia as the drives persecute the body’s depths. This is considered
the first passive synthesis: the “paranoiac machine”; this is then followed by
the second disjunctive synthesis opening up some relief as partial objects
are attracted. The BwO becomes a “miraculating machine.” Comparable to
Lacan’s lalangue, BwO appropriates the partial objects turning them into
‘signifying’ chains that are not at the level of meaning but present a ‘spiri-
tual’ corporeality. In the third synthesis of consumption and consumma-
tion the BwO becomes a field of intensities, gradients of repulsion (the first
synthesis) and attraction (second synthesis) whereby the BwO takes on the
intensity of 0, or pure autoaffection. The BwO as a source of production
now takes on the same function as the “differentiator” in LS (the phallus for
Lacan, and the ‘quasi-cause’ or ‘dark precursor’ in DR). From this last syn-
thesis the acephalic subject (Lacan’s automaton in S XI Four Fundamentals,
53) of the drives (Tiebe) emerges that ‘consumes’ the body’s quantitative
and qualitative intensities or affects as in “I feel.” Hallucinations (I see, I
hear) and delirium (I think . . .) presuppose this deep level of I feel (A-O,
18). “The partial objects [organs without bodies] and the body without
organs are the two material elements of the schizophrenic desiring-ma-
chines: the one as the immobile motor, the other as the working parts; the
one as the giant molecule, the other as micromolecules—the two together
in a relationship of continuity from one end to the other of the molecular
chain of desire” (A-O, 327). There is no ‘organism’ per se. Rather the BwO
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 13

is produced as a whole, “but a whole alongside the parts” (A-O, 326, added
emphasis). The BwO does not unify nor totalize partial objects, but repels
or attracts them. Such is their attempt to overcome the vitalism of life per
se and the formalisms of mechanization. The now well-known vocabulary
(plane of immanence, abstract machine, BwO, virtual, actual, war machine,
and so on) becomes established over the next eight years.

Badiou: Master III

Anti-Oedipus marks an obvious break in Deleuze’s thought, politicized

by both the events of 1968 and his friendship with Guattari. There is no
reconciliation to be had between their position and that of Žižek and
Badiou. For Žižek, A-O is an alibi out of facing the dead lock (as he claims)
that Logic of Sense had established between two logics: the ‘virtual sense-
event’48 and the ‘actual’ becoming where discrete bodies are produced
(OB, 20–22). Žižek maintains that Deleuze fails to adequately address the
“passage” from one to the other. The problem is one of genesis. Given
that affects are immaterial and impersonal (neutral), as expressed in the
‘free-floating’ sense-events, how then is this related to bodies and per-
sons? Time and time again Deleuze is accused of this oppositional dual-
ism put in either/or terms in Žižek’s case: idealism versus materialism;
the idealism of LS is that the virtual sense-event (as an excess) is the effect
of the bodily cause, or the materialism of A-O where it is said that bod-
ies actualize themselves from the field of virtuality— “the logic of sensa-
tion” as the title of Deleuze’s book on Bacon suggests. LS and A-O are
basically inversions of one another: LS being an accusation of tran-
scendental height while A-O being the accusation of ‘material spiritual’
depth. Drawing on his arsenal of Schelling-Hegel-and a version of Spinoza
(OB, 33–34), Žižek then proceeds to “take Deleuze from behind.” Deleuze
is ‘lacanized,’ while the sense-event is co-opted in terms of a more
revolutionary Event (he has Badiou in mind). The politics of A-O are
thus deemed catastrophic. Concentrating mostly on LS, which Deleuze
himself called a “psychoanalytical fiction,” Žižek is mostly in sync with its
structuralist leanings, transposing key concepts (i.e., quasi-cause = objet
a) into the Lacan, but not the Lacan of the sinthome, of the drives (Triebe),
as much as the Lacan of desire, also playing a dualist game that can side
with either R1 (drive) or R 2 (desire) when needed throughout the book.
The dualist accusation against Deleuze is the standard retort made by
Badiou in his Clamour of Being, which Žižek relies on, and most recently
Peter Hallward (2006) wrote, “The crucial point is that all of the produc-
tive, differential or creative force in this dual configuration stems from
14 JAN JAGODZINSKI

the virtual creating alone, and not from the actual creature” (28, added
emphasis). This is just plain wrong.49 The tertiary structure that is found
throughout Deleuze’s work can already be identified in Difference and
Repetition in the way virtual structures produce various actualizations.
The heterogeneous series of differential elements, their relations and sin-
gularities that compose these structures enter into a tripartite process of
“coupling,” “resonance,” and “forced movement” (DR, 117–118) as induced
by a paradoxical element. This ‘differentiator’ (which reappears in LS),
communicates the differences between two heterogeneous series, and by
means of this triple operation a third is produced—the New in difference.
This third realm is “individuation,” the actualized individuated entities
(of the Idea) made possible by intensity, which is the ‘dark precursor’ of
the virtual and actual series. The complex repetition of the dark precursor
(its direction is in both|and directions between the virtual—as differencia-
tion and actual—as differentiation) produces actual differences. By A-O,
the dark precursor (differentiator, or for Žižek it is objet a), undergoes a
‘flat’ change to avoid any implications of transcendence, emerging as an
‘abstract machine,’ where a ‘double articulation’ takes place: the first artic-
ulation draws chaos (BwO) into a plane of consistency, and the second
articulation actualizes this consistency into minimally an identifiable state.
Rather than surface or depth, Deleuze with Guattari in A-O opt for assem-
blages, planes, and surfaces.50 An assemblage51 is a process before it results
in an entity. It is always a duality, a combination, “an unholy mixture of
events and territory . . . a machinic assemblage of desire, and a collective
assemblage of enunciation. [It] combines what one does and what one says,
the objects of the word and their groupings, the utterances in the world
and their enunciation” (Lecercle, 1962, 186, emphasis in original). So, in
this sense, when Žižek disparagingly accuses Deleuze|Guattari of “escap-
ing the full confrontation of a deadlock via a simplified ‘flat’ solution”
(OB, 21, added emphasis), he is right. What is for Žižek an ‘escape’ is their
‘solution’ to this deadlock.
As ‘inheritors’ or ‘bearers’ of the weight of Lacan’s psychoanalytic influ-
ence in France, the political stakes seem to be quite high between Badiou/
Žižek and those who have taken to heart Deleuze|Guattari’s political trajec-
tory52 when it comes to addressing the disarray of|on the left: the question
of “what is to be done?”53 Who betrays the Master the best may be a way
to put it? Which monstrous child to follow? Badiou’s magnum opus Being
and Event (2007) (L’Etre et L’Élévement), eventually followed by Logics of
Worlds (2008) (Logiques des Mondes), of course, presents the full force of
a structuralist system whose debt to Lacan is quite obvious in the way the
Event is theorized. The differences between him and Deleuze could not be
farther apart.54
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 15

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

science, art, politics, and love—but not religion. Given his ontology, he is
a committed atheist. The site of the fantasmic apparition of the Event is at
the edge of the Void, a sublime experience; it hovers between immanence
and transcendence, offering a potential Good that can reconfigure the sit-
uation. The Event is of the order of infinity, immortality, and inhumanity,
rather than finitude, mortality, and humanity: the ‘transhuman body’ over
‘Lacan’s signified body.’
Žižek’s account of the Event (as an encounter with the Real) is con-
sistent with his Real-Symbolic explorations.55 He uses it often to explain
how the arbitrary Law comes into being that separates the before and after
of the symbolic split. This is also how we should understand his reliance
on an act (as mentioned above) that still harnesses the death drive, which
disappears in Badiou’s promise of immortality. Badiou’s subtraction of the
Event from the void is constitutive of the ‘subject’ rather than destructive
of it as in Žižek’s act. Authentic fidelity for Žižek is the fidelity to the void
itself, a fidelity to the object of attachment, which also means a fidelity to
the death drive. Though there is no teleology involved in Badiou’s Event,
it does create a retrospective teleology of the truth that the faithful are to
articulate. (Does this not sound like a possible danger of cult or religion?
One should perhaps scratch Deleuze off the subtitle of Hallward’s book,
Out of this World, and write in Badiou!). The chance ‘call’ of the Event
still comes from the Void. It reintroduces transcendence.56 Further, Badiou
makes the claim that there is a ‘silence’ surrounding the Event when it first
‘happens.’ It exceeds language. “[T]ruth only exists as it is indifferent to
[language], since its procedure is generic inasmuch as it avoids the entire
encyclopaedic grasp of judgments” (BE, 433, emphasis in original). If truth
emerges from the Void, which exists between the gaps of discourse, then
the truth-Event is beyond discourse itself. In the Lacanian event, the signi-
fier and the signified are decoupled, the ‘quilting point’ is ruptured, but this
happens within language. Badiou’s truth-Event is in excess of normative
language. Yet, if the Event is inexpressible in the language of the ‘situa-
tion,’ how then is it to be expressed since there is no language available?
Eventually it must find its ‘text’ and become represented as evental state-
ments since “there can be no ontological remnant of the event” (Badiou in
Hallward, BSA, 124, emphasis in original).
The differences between Badiou and Deleueze’s understanding of event
have been well discussed.57 Perhaps they are indeed inversions of each
other? In the preface to the English edition of DR, Deleuze (xvi) writes:
“We tried to constitute a philosophical concept from the mathematical func-
tion of differentiation and the biological function of differenciation” (added
emphasis). It would almost be a caricature to say that each takes the oppo-
site side of this problematic—now to finish Deleuze’s sentence—“in asking
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 17

whether there was not a stable relation between these two concepts which
could not appear at the level of their respective objects.” Yet the Deleuzian
event seems so ubiquitous and less dramatic.58 With Badiou, Events
take on Names. In some cases the subject disappears into the Other as
in Proletariat, Christian, Revolutionary. In other instances it is the name
itself—Haydn, Schoenberg, Picasso, and so on that is credited with the
Event. “Badiou subjects are always solitary, singular, endangered,” writes
Hallward (BSA, 124). The politics of such developments when it comes
to ‘generic’ change, that is, change that must address the unthought of
humanity, Badiou (2005) now terms “non-expressive dialectics” in distinc-
tion to the old “expressive dialectics” of the vanguard (Leninism, Stalinism,
Trotskyism, Castroism—but Maoism is ‘strangely’ absent!). One wonders
to what extent Deleuze continually haunts his thoughts since “non-expres-
sive dialectics,”59 still ‘explained’ by the mathematics of set theory, now
calls for “a great fiction without proper name” (12, added emphasis).60 It is
again another extraordinary appropriation of Deleuze’s thought, the ‘pow-
ers of the false,’ or fabulation that surrounds the problematic of a “people
yet to come,” which I shall come to.61

Revolt Slave! Deleuze

What Badiou now evokes politically, cast in his own superior system,62
has been the creative ‘playing field’ of Deleuze|Guattari all along: the
question of the Outside, theorized, as I understand it, in another direc-
tion where the now virtual Real and the Imaginary psychic registers are
put to work to keep the future Open; the Symbolic is treated as ‘repre-
sentation’ in the way categorization usurps difference as such, and the
way control society is able to ‘creatively’ manipulate the flows of life for
capitalist ends. In TP authoritarian, socialist, and liberal democratic
states are treated in relation to (global) capitalist markets. Thousand
Plateaus, which expands on the so-called vitalism, offers the tool-kit
for such explorations and experimentation. Inorganic life becomes the
process of assembling in the Void (to paraphrase Badiou). The plane of
consistency (or plane of immanence) now replaces univocity. Haecceities
become the contents on the plane of consistency, whose plane of expres-
sion is then asemiotically informed to break with formal signification.
Assembling becomes a pragmatic program, empirical in its aim to bring
more life into the assembled situations. The single authored books that
followed were Deleuze’s explorations and experimentations for ‘a people
yet to come.’ Against Badiou’s Names, Deleuze favors ‘mediators’ (N, 125)
to help with creative achievement. To be on the ‘left’ for Deleuze meant
18 JAN JAGODZINSKI

forever deterritorializing, eschewing egoism,63 and always taking on the

‘minoritarian’ position, challenging, always challenging existing doxa.
“[Deleuze|Guattari’s micropolitical] aim is a becoming of the world as a
possibility of inventing new forms of life, different modes of existence”
(Marrati, 2001, 214). It is to work with the Imaginary so as to ‘deterritori-
alize’ the world that is always already political. So, the arts do not simply
mediate the reality by way of representation—they intervene in it; they
are ‘real’ to the extent that they participate in the order of things; they
can be involved in the “fabulation” of a “new earth” or a “new people,”64
to create and think new forms of political subjectivity.65 They are events
that have their own force as we encounter them as ‘signs.’
I come now to the question raised in the beginning: Is there an Outside?
Or better, what is the Outside? Can cinema think the Outside?66 Cinema
is an assemblage that directly impinges on our senses, as the direct pres-
ence of moving images. Cinema for Deleuze is sensation, radically prelin-
guistic, an asignifying and asyntaxic material, composed of a system of
images and signs that are independent of language that have direct sensory
affects on the brain,67 rather than on the symbolic imagination.68 Cinema
is a neuropyschological vibration, and, as radically Deleuze develops this
in C2, “the brain is the screen,” meaning that the brain and screen have
a direct relationship; the vibrations ‘touch’ the cortex immediately at an
unconscious level. The screen is where immediate and direct encounters
take place between the past and the future, between the inside and the
outside. Hence, when I talk about the Imaginary psychic register (above),
it has to be qualified in terms of perception in the way Deleuze theorizes
it in DR. There is a debt to paid to Lacan in the sense that the objet a is
reconfigured as the ‘imperceptible.’ As far back in his study of Proust, as
an ‘apprenticeship of signs,’ Deleuze takes the position that only chance
encounters and burning, pressing questions can yield to a necessity or
urgency in production, what in DR he called counteractualization (also
countereffectuation).69 This means only a ‘violent’ encounter, a contingent
event with the Outside, which affects the subject, enables the emergence
of ‘truth’ (insight into life). If there is no ‘connection’ to the Outside there
is no thought or thinking. In this view thought always presupposes a con-
tingent unexpected encounter with an object that forces us to think. ‘Signs’
are the objects that provide the external pressure, the intensity to provoke
thought. The ‘sign’ exceeds recognition. It can’t be categorized, and hence
Deleuze’s debt to Lacan. But misrecognitions (méconnaissance) are affirma-
tive happenings. It’s the chance for thought and learning. When an object
emits a sign, and it is perceived as troubling, confusing, and demanding a
response, Deleuze takes such an experience as being “imperceptible.” What
is perceived has exceeded recognition for it has been the “transcendental”
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 19

or “involuntary” use of the faculty of perception that has penetrated the

limit that has been set empirically or voluntarily.
In this accounting, the sign can only be perceived as an event. Such a
sign can’t be ‘imagined’ or ‘recalled’. It happens. Such a process continues
to keep the thought process open until some sort of conclusive recognition
takes place and the object is ‘exhausted.’70 This encounter of what is imper-
ceptible is an encounter with difference in-and-of-itself. It’s what enables
the ‘becoming’ to take place. Deleuze gives priority to the Outside in such
an encounter. The object (great cinema, art, etc.) makes you ‘think.’ It can’t
be easily digested. It is not the faculty of imagination that is at issue here,
but the psychic Imaginary, though not the psychic Imaginary of gaze the-
ory in the all-encompassing way Lacan presents it. The object does indeed
‘look’ back, but entirely differently. It looks back as ‘difference.’71 In C2
Deleuze theorizes this as an “irrational cut,” which disturbs the image.72
The Bergsonian turn here is that consciousness (perception) is the image
received.73 Light here plays a dominant role.74 Such encounters then reveal
our desire, not as a lack for the object but because of the object. The tran-
scendental occurrence of the event can be quasi-traceable to an unsettling,
violent encounter between us and another ‘body.’ Like Badiou, there is a
fidelity to the event, but as a modest form of counteractualization in the
production of desire, as a response to the event, which is a virtual happen-
ing, never fully graspable in the present.75 Here Badiou and Deleuze are
in agreement. The counteractualization is thinking through the actualiza-
tion of the event that has taken place with the ‘imperceptible’ object. There
may well be different counteractualizations of the event, a series of them
that produce a body of ‘work’ in response to the event: in philosophy this
would be the creation of concepts; in science it is the creation of functions;
in art this is the creation of sensory aggregates through films, installations,
and so on. Such a body of work helps to articulate or grasp the unknown
event, to finally make some ‘sense’ of it. The aim of such production, for
Deleuze|Guattari, is then to actively intervene “in” this world to make a
difference within it.

SchizoCrets

Deleuze’s two cinema books, Cinema 1: The Movement Image and the
Cinema 2: Time Image, present an account of the transition between
roughly the prewar period (early 1940s) and the postwar period—from
the classical to the modern.76 The two volumes vibrate with references
to virtually all of Deleuze’s previous work77 and have been primar-
ily applied to the development of national identities and postcolonial
20 JAN JAGODZINSKI

studies.78 Rancière, who is no fan of Deleuze,79 reads them as a redemp-

tion narrative. For Rancière, they are to be read as a form of continuity.
There is no difference and no critical break.80 A much more Deleuzian
account for the reason underlying the break is provided by Julian Reid
(2010b) who convincingly shows how this ‘break’ between the cinema
books acts as a “war machine.”81 Reid recognizes the schizoanalysis that
Deleuze is engaged in through the interplay between C1 and C2. I shall
return to this, but for now let me give a quick synopsis of the two books.
Deleuze contrasts classical cinema with modern cinema that rose to
meet the crisis and exhaustion of the post–World War period. He con-
trasts two regimes of the image, an organic and a crystalline regime.
The organic regime had a ‘people’ (an audience). It was characterized
by narration, whereas the emerging crystalline image, where the people
were ‘missing’ (there was a search to reestablish an audience) is charac-
terized by story. Narration solidifies the commonsense world by rein-
forcing spatiotemporal structures through nation building. Movement
is subordinated to time, and there are clear boundaries between what
is true and what is false. The crystalline regime through story begins
to worry those movement structures by introducing two kinds of time-
images that put the ‘truth’ of common sense to question—what Deleuze
calls the “powers of the false.” The first sort of time-image structures
the “order of time” in two ways: via “sheets of the past” and “peaks of
the present.” This then is the cinematic exploration of the coexistence
or simultaneity of past (virtual) and present (actual) events internal to
time. In contrast, the second kind of time-image concerns “the series
of time.” This is the paradoxical exploration of the ‘before’ and ‘after’
within complex series of successions. Such image reveals ‘becoming’
as that process of constant change that shakes up any determinate
and fixed notions of true and false. Virtual and actual become ‘indis-
cernible’—a forms a crystal image.82 Cinema’s powers of the false then
are capable of thinking the unthought. This is the power of cinema’s
fabulation—the power to create and invent novel visions, bodies, pure
optical (opsigns) images, and pure audio sounds (sonsigns) cut off from
sensory-motor movement. While it appears that these two regimes are
(again) oppositional dualisms (either/or), subject to the usual critique
levied at Deleuze|Guattari, they remain complexly interrelated. 83 What
is presented as a dualism is separated by Deleuze’s own “irrational cut”
between the time the two books were published, which provides an
exemplary case in the way the Outside had been thought to intervene
into C1 with a new cast of characters. C2 is then a version of thought as a
“war machine.” It allies itself with a “singular race,”84 which is qualified
as being always oppressed and inferior. These characters are “seers”85
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 21

in the sense that they have lost their power to act, are no longer agents,
and yet have gained worldly insight. And that insight has to do with the
fascist tendencies that the movement-image has established.
For many, the potential of the “seer” that Deleuze developed may well
be over in the contemporary global capitalist system. The advent of the
postcinematic forms and the digital age has brought a renewal of specula-
tion86 as to what would be an ‘image of thought’ that enables a way ‘for-
ward’ in this global age of designer capitalism where, it seems, the high
costs of image production ensures that nothing is left to chance when it
comes to consuming films and ensuring profit success. It becomes increas-
ingly impossible to produce a shock to thought. The ability to think the
Outside is becoming to be progressively more difficult as the senses are
being continually colonized by the cinema industries.87 The ‘neuro-image’
as Patricia Pisters is attempting to theorize it, may well offer a renewed
cinema for a ‘people to come.’ Julian Reid (2010b) evokes the late works
of Jean-Luc Godard88 and his thought on love to renew cinema’s capac-
ity to sense, see and think anew. In her conclusion to her cinema book
on Deleuze, Paola Marrati (2008) reminds readers that the two cinema
books are exemplary of what one encounter with cinema might look like,
and, therefore, how to think the unthought of the Outside so as to keep
the future open.89 Theorists like Giuseppina Mecchia90 are attempting
to rethink Deleuze|Guattari’s two key books in terms of a political phi-
losophy, what she calls “anthro-politics.” It may well be that minoritarian
deterritorializations are already underway right ‘under our very noses,’ but
we are not able to ‘see’ them as yet. It is perhaps too early to tell to what
extent the development of object-oriented ontology (OOO), as hetero-
geneously developed by Graham Harman, Levy Bryant, Ian Bogost, Jane
Bennett, Karan Barad, Tim Morton, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier as
well as many others, dovetails with Deleuze|Guattari’s inorganic material-
ism when it comes to the ethicopolitical implications of this development
given that OOO also recognizes ‘passive vitalism’ of ‘things’ as they do (see
Colebrooke, 2010).
There has been a concerted attempt to develop a schizoanalysis of film,91
the key to which, I believe, is to follow what Ian Buchanan (2008) has
pointed out as Deleuze’s failure to examine the “cretinizing schlock” that
makes up for the bulk of contemporary cinema. Patricia MacCormack92
seems to be one of the few who is engaged in this endeavor. It is not ideol-
ogy critique that is required, rather it is engaging in the media of every-
day life where aspects of ‘soft’ fascism are to be found everywhere so as to
expose the cruelty.93 The popularity of Žižek is that he has been able to do
just this through his particular Lacanian stylistics. This seems to be the
22 JAN JAGODZINSKI

task, which is why this particular collection ends with a meditation on the
Zombie as an encounter on its own.94
* * *
The wager of this introduction . . . of sorts has been in effect to struggle
with which politics of the cinema we are to choose for a ‘people yet to
come,’ as those of us who remain committed to a ‘leftist’ orientation, if that
‘direction’ means anything at all anymore? Perhaps this is a ‘false’ choice;
perhaps it’s more of a matter of position or disposition? I am always fas-
cinated by the extraordinary cinematic analysis Todd McGowan makes,
and he is committed to the Lacanian position. Yet, coming from the arts,
I share the rich arsenal of concepts that Deleuze|Guattari offer me, rather
than being confined to representation and discourse. Deleuze|Guattari, it
should be noted, were never contra chipping away at the molar ‘standard’
that is in place through ‘representational struggles,’ which unfortunately
have turned into bitter ‘identity politics.’ As they write, “This is not to say
that the struggle on the levels of axioms is without importance; on the
contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse levels: women’s struggle for
the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of the regions for autonomy;
the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of the oppressed masses and
minorities in the East or West” (TP, 470–471). Nevertheless, they con-
tinue, “But there is also always a sign to indicate that these struggles are
the index of another, coexistent battle.” A point is reached when “the axi-
omatic [emphasis in original] cannot tolerate: when people demand to
formulate their problems themselves . . . hold to the Particular [added
emphasis] as an innovative form.” The molecular and the molar remain
continually entwined. That ends my introduction . . . sort of.

Notes

1. “Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the sub-

ject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tor-
tured by language” (224). This is the kernel of Seminar III, The Psychosis
(1955–1956).
2. Ideally such a development should be historically analyzed in terms of the
technologies that become available and influence, what is never strictly
‘natural.’ Crassly put, the Neolithic fecund female body, where grains
become a dietary staple and infant mortality makes bonding with the
child less of an issue when it comes to the productive economy of agricul-
ture, cannot be equated with the contemporary technologies of insemi-
nation in postindustrial societies where women bear children in their
forties, have C-sections to ensure birth, and place a high value on their
offspring. Likewise ‘preemies’ are given as much attention and care as
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 23

possible through artificial womb-technologies to ensure their survival (see

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

voice and the gaze are real ‘objects.’ There is no hiding, only showing. Things
‘look’ at you. Voices ‘speak’ to and at you. The Adam and Eve myth illustrates
all this so well. With the interdiction of God not to eat the fruit off the tree, a
‘cut’ (Law) is established—the apple being the object of excessive jouissance,
which is forbidden. Tasting it causes expulsion from an Ideal symbolic order
(Garden of Heaven where all wants and needs are met). Such a transgression
brings a ‘cover up’ of the genitals (delibidalization as a primary repression)
via a fig leaf, as the pair is expelled from the blissful Garden (womb). Clothes
(from fig leaf to g-strings, thongs) are but a variant of the veil. Exposure of
the [R]eal self, the core objet a, the ‘cause’ of desire, brings shame rather than
guilt, as now an anxious object has come ‘too close’ and is exposed. Guilt, on
the other hand, remains caught in the defiles of the signifier. It’s an excuse for
having been caught. Shame by the analysand was for Lacan the end of therapy
(see Copjec, 2006, 106–110). It is difficult not to equate ‘original sin’ with objet
a in this account.
4. This stance is the radical psychiatry of people such as R. D. Lang and Wilhelm
Reich.
5. Once more, the symbolic should be ideally historicized in such a discussion.
To what extent, for example, were early homo sapiens psychotic as a nor-
mative way of being? Paleontological speculation has it that there was not
much ‘talking’ among early homo sapiens. The mouth is often missing or not
elaborately rendered in the early sculptured artifacts. Further speculation by
such linguists as Julian Jaynes (1976) whose notion of the ‘bicameral mind’
suggests that the physiology of the brain changes with the emerging writing
technologies, which I would support. His claim is that when early ‘writing’
begins to emerge, the (psychotic) voices from the divine gods invested in
leaders (authority) begin to die down as an independent check is introduced
between what is said and what has been written down, establishing a mini-
mal gap between divine ordinance and the priestly class as to the question of
‘reality.’ Eventually the brain physiology also changes for a set niche popula-
tion. The residual of what may have once been widespread psychosis might
be a way to understand why the bizarre theatricality of such rites as exorcism
and voodooism, which try to dispel possession, still persist, since psychotics
‘believe’ in these Real voices. Lacanian system is based on the ‘alphabetiza-
tion of the mind’ (see the many writing of Brian Rotman, especially Timothy
Lenoir’s introduction, 2008), which has held sway in the West, as has the
‘ideographization’ of the mind held sway in the East. Current screen digi-
talized technologies have only just begun on a global scale what might be
called a ‘postalphabetization’ and ‘postideographization’ of the mind, bring-
ing these two systems together, decentering the hold of the ‘word’ and ‘ideo-
graph,’ producing something entirely ‘new.’ We might think ‘attention deficit
disorder’ as a symptom of this change. It is too early to see how the physiol-
ogy of the brain will change through ‘exaptation,’ to use Steven Jay Gould’s
term, with the continued changing technoecologies of sensation (see Parisi,
2009). The strength of Deleuze and Guattari’s account in Anti-Oedipus is to
speculate on the recoding of the symbolic through ‘savagery,’ despotism, and
capitalism, offering a political philosophy that has yet to be taken seriously.
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 25

As far as I know, Ian Buchanan, through a series of lectures in Amsterdam

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

15. For a brilliant analysis of Lacan’s meeting with Deleuze during this incident
see Daniel Smith (2004).
16. The first instance of praise in S XI, Four Fundamentals, comes for Leclaire
isolating “the sequence of the unicorn” as an “irreducible and senseless char-
acter qua chain of signifiers” (212), making it a non-sense assemblage that
is a “pure signifier.” Lacan returns to this example much later in the year.
The non-sense signifier of the unicorn sequence turns out to be Poordjeli,
“which links the two syllables of the word licorne (unicorn)” (250). This non-
sense signifier is said to animate Leclaire’s patient’s desire. It is thus a “desir-
ing machine” in Deleuze|Guattari’s terms.
17. See specifically the explanatory note on Serge Leclaire in A-O (309). They
write: “In desire he sees a multiplicity of prepersonal singularities, or indif-
ferent elements that are defined precisely by the absence of a link.”
18. The translators of A-O provide an explanatory note (309) where they
translate Deleuze|Guattari’s “object partiels” as “partial objects” rather than
“part-objects” that informs Melanie Klein’s work from which they depart.
In Klein, the partial object as “part of” ends up being part of a lost or future
(molar) unity, whereas the molecularity of partial objects are truly dis-
tinct “beings,” invested with intensities that do not lack, but select organs.
“[P]artial objects are the molecular functions of the unconscious” (324, empha-
sis in original).
19. The discussion appears as “Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back. . .” in Desert
Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974).
20. This is other than Jean Laplanche’s (1999) well-known theory of the “enig-
matic signifier,” which is a translation (as inscription and reinscription) of
the enigma of the other’s desire, developing a general theory of seduction.
21. In RSI this is represented by f(x), where ‘f’ refers to the function of jouis-
sance (the Real of lalangue) while ‘x’ can be any element in the unconscious
that is raised to the status of a letter. One gets from this that Lacan never
lets go of the parlêtre; he never sees the unconscious as inhumanly machinic
even though it is the drives (Triebe) that we are to identify with so that a
minimal distance has to be maintained. This is not unlike Deleuze|Guattari’s
warning about tampering with making a BwO when they caution, “You
don’t do with it with a sledgehammer, you can use a very fine file” (TP
1980, 160).
22. This saying by Lacan comes from Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and R. B. Kershner’s
(1988, 124) review of Jacques Aubert’s edited book Joyce Avec Lacan. Oddly,
this ‘formula’ resonates with what quantum physics no longer takes as being
weird: when two single photons are sent down separate noisy optic fibers,
making transmission effectively ‘useless,’ they can nevertheless become ‘use-
ful’ at the other end as information can paradoxically be extracted, the dif-
ference being that representational bits in a digitalized symbolic world are
the combinations of 0s and 1s, while quanta in distinction can exist in an
infinite number of intermediate states between 0 and 1 (Anderson, 2008).
Lacan’s formulation is not as weird as thought. In his final two seminars
(S XXV, S XXVI), before the dissolution of his school to start up The Cause
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 27

freudienne so as to “resume again . . . ,” as Josefina Ayerza, the force behind

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

intellect like Elizabeth Grosz who moves from an acceptance of Lacan with
reservations, through to a rejection of this position, on then to a Derridean
phase of thinking, and now she is a committed Deleuzian, with a queer twist
of course.
28. J-A. Miller (2000) continues to ‘work’ on this problem as well, evoking the act
of the ‘real woman’ or the ‘true woman,’ who is capable of obliterating phallic
jouissance. The primary figure here is Medea. Žižek seems to embrace this
position as well. (See Žižek, 2000a, 11)
29. This is in response to Hoens and Pluth (2002) who seem to equate Versagung
as Lacan’s adumbration and prefigurement of the sinthome.
30. Probably the most thorough attempt is by the veteran Lacanian|Millerian
Russell Grigg’s (2008, 119–131) “Absolute Freedom and Radical Change: On
Žižek.” This is a version of an article that first appeared in Paragraph (Grigg,
2001). Ed Pluth (2007) has also attempted to ‘reform’ Žižek’s act.
31. Aside from those many ‘debates’ that are scattered throughout journals,
which Žižek answers to with equal impunity, there is the nasty spat between
him and Ian Parker’s (2004) concerning his assessment of his politics, and
the equally nasty spat between him and David Bordwell over film theory.
There is also Sharpe and Boucher’s (2010) measured assessment of Žižek’s
oeuvre, and the collection edited by Boucher, Glynos, and Sharpe (2005) that
has Robert Paul Resch’s article—a long-standing critic of Žižek from almost
the inception of Žižek’s career—cheekily entitled, “What If God Was One
of Us—Žižek’s Ontology.” No question mark is found at the end of the title.
Resch calls Žižek’s seduction the “Žižek Effect.” Ian Buchanan (2005) as well
refutes Žižek’s reading of Hitchcock’s Birds. See also Robinson and Torney’s
(2005) analysis of his “ticklish subject” as left activism based on the “One
who Acts.”
32. Which is why I cheekily maintain that Žižek is a ‘disguised Deleuzian in
denial,’ given that Deleuze is pretty much on the side of affirmative creativity
rather than its destructive side. But there is also a delerium (délire) to Žižek’s
quasi-rhizomatic writings that forms his sinthome. His readings of Schelling
and Hegel for his own ends are equally as ‘monstrous’ as Deleuze, except
that Deleuze was meticulous in his care to read philosophy (as was Derrida)
(see jagodzinski, 2010). Žižek’s appropriation of psychoanalysis remains
informed by the master-slave dialectic that Lacan ‘bought’ from Alexander
Kojève lectures on Hegel. He can’t shake it. It informs his death drive.
33. Drawing from the Discourse of the Master (the founding discourse of the
four that Lacan develops in Seminar VXII), Žižek articulates what are the
stakes to be a Master—for instance, Lacan (Žižek, 1998, 75–78). In effect, le
sujet suppose savoir is a master signifier, the doubled S1.
34. Or, perhaps the ‘truth’ Event has already arrived? The primary instance of its
display could be heard and seen at Birkbeck Conference, London, on March
13–15, 2009, called “On the Idea of Communism.” The prestigious gathering
seemed to confirm a new|old white vanguard (Žižek, Badiou, Hardt, Negri,
Vattimo, Rancière, Eagleton) with Žižek maintaining that the time for guilt
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 29

for the past crimes of communism was over, and a new reconciliation was
necessary.
35. To echo Žižek’s (2004) own remark that A-O was Deleuze’s “worst book” (21).
Among some of the better known commentaries are Greg Lambert’s (2006,
81ff.) reply to Žižek’s reading, irreverently calling him a “dummy.” Then
there is Jeremy Valentine’s (2007) response to Žižek, which has the vehe-
ment fervor of Deleuze’s own “Letter to a Harsch Critic” (N, 3–12). Berressem
(2005) and Sinnerbrink (2006) form equally harsh criticisms to Organs with-
out Bodies.
36. It should be noted that Logic of Sense appeared in 1969 while Difference and
Repetition before it in 1968. It is already a ‘mature’ work. Deleuze had by
then already published a book on Hume (Empirisme et Subjectivité, 1953), on
Nietzsche (Nietzsche et la Philosophie, 1962), on Kant (La Philosophie critique
de Kant, 1963), on Bergson (Le Bergsonisme, 1966), on Proust (Marcel Proust
et les Signes, 1964), on Sacher-Masoch (1967), and on Spinoza (Spinoza et le
Problème de l’Expression, 1968)!
37. This is a bit of a misnomer on my part since the virtual is ‘real’ for Deleuze,
but here I think virtual Real holds in the sense that the psychic register that
is ‘beyond’ the Imaginary and the Symbolic is being reconfigured as radical
materialist territory.
38. Here again Daniel Smith’s (2003) extraordinary analysis of how and why
Deleuzian minoritarian mathematics is opposed to Badiou’s axiomatic set
theory is crucial.
39. A number of Lacanians have tried to bring Lacan up to speed with com-
plexity and chaos theory. Harari (2002) tries to move the sinthome in the
direction of turbulence and dissipative structure, while the best-known writ-
ings are by the law professor Dragan Milovanovic where Deleuze|Guattari
finds some slight recognition in his last works that introduce aspects of ‘cha-
otic’ systems. However, in Ragland and Milovanovic’s Lacan: Topologically
Speaking (2004), the exploration is confined to the paradoxes of more ‘axi-
omatic’ geometries via the cross-cap, möbius strip, Borromean knots, and
Klein bottle. Seminar XXVI, Typology and Time, is not mentioned. The
Deleuzians are on top of these developments (see the collections by Bernd
Herzogenrath, 2008, 2009).
40. See Serge Lecercle two excellent studies on notion of sense and event in LS:
Philosophy through the Looking Glass (1985) and Deleuze and Language
(2002).
41. See LS 164 where he elaborates on the “two becomings” (genesis) as time of
Chronos and Aion as two heterogeneous series. The genesis of the body and
the genesis of the noncorporeal sense-event are what are at stake.
42. There is much to explore here, especially with Deleuze’s Kleinian appropria-
tions, which need elaboration (see n18).
43. For instance, the literary or pictorial abyme where it becomes impossible to
fix interpretation as it circulates from one element to the next, proliferat-
ing perspectives. The abyme (Abyss, Sans-fond) (LS, 106) confirms that no
30 JAN JAGODZINSKI

one interpretation can be fixed and there is no sure way of deciding between
sense and non-sense (i.e., Velazquez’s Las Meninas).
44. One exploration of this art brut is by Dan O’hara (2009). L’art brut was
favored by Deleuze|Guattari.
45. Dolar (2006) explores this possibility as is suggested by the very title of his
book, The Voice and Nothing More.
46. For a further grasp of this concept see Claire Colebrook (2010, 99–108).
47. I am thinking of the so-called God-particle (Higgs boson) of quantum phys-
ics that has caused such a stir.
48. In LS sense is theorized as a fourth dimension of propositions that enables
‘meaning’ to take place within linguistic propositions themselves that func-
tion through designation, manifestation, and signification. “Sense is, in the
proposition, that which is expressed, a complex incorporeal entity, on the sur-
face of things, a pure event, which insists or subsists in the proposition” (LS,
19, added emphasis). Sense is informed by non-sense, which produces the
many paradoxes of language Deleuze explores throughout the work.
49. Peter Hallward’s analysis of Deleuze in Out of This World reminds me of a
similar accusation made by the Greek playwright Aristophanes in Clouds,
which lampoons Socrates who is presented as floating in the clouds.
Of course, we have nothing written by Socrates to defend himself, and
Deleuze is long since gone as well.
50. Deleuze (1967) already moves away from ontological issues in his “The
Dramatization of Method,” where he is concerned with the pragmatic ques-
tions that surround any problematic as to how the Idea actualizes itself or
‘differentiates’ itself: The Who? How? How Much? Where? Or When? Here
he famously asserts: “Virtual is not opposed to real; what is opposed to the
real is the possible. Virtual is opposed to actual, and, in this sense, possesses
a full reality” (98–99).
51. Lecercle (2002, 1986) explains that agencement has a geographic connota-
tion: a territorial organization as an arrangement or array of elements as well
as a chart or puzzle, as much as a machine.
52. The qualification is made in this way since Deleuze has also been taken up in
the Academy by dropping his and Guattari’s political agenda. See the authors
of French Theory in America, edited by Lotringer and Cohen (2001), and
more recently Faucher’s (2010) “McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal Than
the Big Mac?”
53. Peter Hallward (2010) (again) in a cherry-picked analysis between Lacan and
Deleuze’s ‘differences’ demonstrates to his satisfaction as to why Lacan’s sys-
tem trumps over the ‘vitalism’ of Deleuze. He has at least the title right: “You
Can’t Have It Both Ways.”
54. One would be hard pressed to find a more vehement critique of A-O than
the one found in “The Flux of the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus”
first published in 1976 (2004), where Badiou defends the need of leaders like
Lenin, Stalin, and Moa (all of whom have their differences and failures) in
relation to The Party that must be ever renewed. These long-standing dif-
ferences are yet again succinctly repeated in LW as “The Event According to
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 31

Deleuze.” What is curious is that Deleuze’s position is presented as “axioms,”

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

58. In LW (374), Badiou tones down the magnitude of the Event, offering three
varieties of evental becomings presented as a chart. This is a typology that
runs from weak to strong singularity in terms of change. Badiou was previ-
ously criticized for his inadequate explanation as to what might be referred to
as the ‘preevental situation’ This is his counter to that worry by maintaining
that not all Events are comparable in terms of outcomes.
59. The neologism is a volley in the way ‘expressive’ has been taken up by
Deleuze as a plane of expression, the assemblage of enunciation. Moreover,
his Birkbeck Institute speech ends with a poem by Wallace Stevens that sums
up his agenda: “It’s possible, possible, possible, it must be possible” (13). Again
a volley against the attack of representation by Deleuze where the ‘possible’
remains caught by the variety of predetermined solutions rather than by the
‘virtual potentialities’ that can be actualized subject to fate and chance. Žižek
(2007, 255, n10), when answering his critics, confirms his distaste for the
nomadology of Deleuze by confirming his stance with Hallward. What is
needed is “well-defined and delineated social spaces in which the reign of the
system is suspended: a religious or artistic community, a political organiza-
tion.” Aren’t these precisely the nomadic spaces existing in smooth spaces as
opposed to striated space of the social majority?
60. This pronouncement should not be understood within the context of
what has been termed “post-political populism,” which refers to the techno-
management of planning by experts, doing away with ideological or dissen-
sual contestation in the name of ‘the people’ (see Swyngedouw, 2010).
61. Gregory Flaxman (2012) notes in his summation of the way Badiou has
dismissed Deleuze: “Never mind, then, that Deleuze explicitly appeals to
subtraction (the foreclosure of the transcendent dimension) as the basis for
writing and the writing of philosophy; never mind that Deleuze explicitly
defines the plane of immanence as both consistent and inconsistent; and
never mind that after the death of God and man, Deleuze will insist that phi-
losophy pass through the death of substance: Badiou makes his arguments in
spite of these points” (n91, 355–356).
62. This is defended in an extended footnote by Hallward (2006, 185, n14) where
he cryptically remarks on a whole host of Deleuzian minoritarian positions
as developed by Nicholas Thorburn, Patton, Read, Protevi, Hardt, Negri,
and others. He opts for his own “politics of prescription” that is aligned with
Badiou, Sartre (whom Deleuze admired), Fanon, and Lenin.
63. In his summation of DR Williams James (2003) says it best, “Do not impose
identity on the other. Do not impose an identity on yourself for the other.
However, by expressing your singularity, by repaying the events that make
and unmake you, prompt the other individual to express what sets it in
motion and makes it significant” (210).
64. For another view of this see Jason Wallin (chapter 01, this volume) on
how the Zombie vivifies the implications of the phrase ‘a people yet to
come.’
65. Kathrin Thiele (2008, 2010) presents a sustained meditation on Deleuze|Guattari’s
demand “to believe in this world” by adding “as it is” in answer to Badiou and
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 33

Hallward’s damning accusations. Rather than maintaining that Deleuze|Guattari

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

73. The other figure in the cinema books is Charles Sanders Peirce who is
overshadowed by the Bergsonian account of the cinema books (see Robert
Samuels chapter 8 in this collection). Bergson sees the material universe
as an aggregate of images. However, Deleuze is interested in the ‘image of
thought’ via the unthought. Not all images apply, although we are bathed
in their swarm through movement and time (duration). Many images are
simply consumed and categorized, registered as ‘common sense,’ confirming
the way things are. There is no ‘shock to thought’ to call on Brian Massumi
(2002) here. In C2, he calls it the rule of the cliché, which the time-image
overcomes. The elaborate typology of images that he offers in the two books
(perception image, affection image, action image, crystal image) that are
complexly related to each other through editing intervals present the becom-
ing of the image between objective and subjective poles, moving with differ-
ent speeds and intensities, and endowed with different attributes.
74. In C1 he says: “In short, it is not consciousness which is light, it is the set
of images, or the light, which is consciousness, immanent to matter” (61).
Again, brain and image form a materialist identity. See the first chapter by
Berressem in this collection regarding light.
75. The Deleuzian event is placed in the virtual time of Aion (as opposed to
Chronos) where it alludes the present: either it has happened or about to hap-
pen. When we watch a film, the affects that the film have on us is always felt
‘after’ (so to speak) we have watched it. The happening is during the ‘unfold-
ing’ time when the film does its work (its affects or forces) on us as our bodies
undergo conscious and unconscious contortions.
76. The key early work here is that of R. N. Rodowick (1997, 158–160) who identi-
fies their application to postcolonial idea of nationhood and the development
of nations.
77. Mullarkey (2009, 81) presents a list of his books that influenced the various
developments in C1 and C2.
78. The key work on national identity is by David Martin-Jones (2006), and for
postcolonial studies Laura Marks (2000) has been given credit for her early
work here.
79. A primary example can be found in his dismissal of Deleuzian aesthetics (see
Rancière, 2004).
80. In his particular vicious review of Deleuzian cinema, Rancière (2006) pres-
ents it as a classical narrative, a “history of redemption” and “some sort of
philosophy of nature.” “In short,” he says, “we pass from images as elements
in a philosophy of nature to images as elements in a philosophy of spirit”
(113). The ‘brain as a screen’ is given a bad rap, reduced to a kind of narcis-
sistic superego. “The brain confiscated the interval between action and reac-
tion for its own benefit and proceeded from this interval to place itself at the
center of the world” (111). Mullarkey (2009) surfs on Rancière’s analysis: C1
begins with a state of nature, followed by its fall and subsequent redemption.
“There was once a cinematic image adequate for expression (movements that
mattered), that then fell into crisis (the shattering of the movement-image),
 INTRODUCTION . . . OF SORTS, SORT OF 35

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

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

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Trevathan, Wenda (1987). Human Birth: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York:
Aldine De Gruyter.
Valentine, Jeremy (2007). “Denial, Anger and Resentment.” In The Truth of Žižek.
Ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (177–196). London: Continuum.
Verhaeghe, P. and F. Declercq (2002). “Lacan’s Analytical Goal: ‘Le Sinthome or
the Feminine Way.’” In Essays on the Final Lacan. Re-inventing the Symptom.
Ed. Luke Thurston (59–83). New York: Other Press.
Williams, James (2003). Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical
Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
——— (2008). Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York:
Verso.
——— Ed. (1998). “ Four Discoures, Four Subjects.” In Cogito and the Unconscious.
Ed. Slavoj Žižek (74–113). Durham and London: Duke University Press.
42 JAN JAGODZINSKI

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

Encountering Lacan
 1

Light, Camera, Action!

The Luminous Worlds of
Jacques Lacan and
Gilles Deleuze
Hanjo Berressem

[R]elations of light
(Deleuze, Bacon 94)

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

Luminous Thought Luminous Desire Luminous Worlds

G illes Deleuze’s complementary books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image

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

the cinematographic apparatus. Even when the movie industry offered

him massive amounts of money for his collaboration, Freud refused to
have anything to do with the movies, and although the proliferation
of moving images around him made a comparison of dreams to mov-
ies seem almost inevitable, he preferred almost stubbornly to define the
dream in terms of the still image. Symptomatically, the one reference to
the cinema in Freud’s work stresses its superficiality and the fact that it
disseminates clichés: “The uninstructed relatives of our patients, who are
only impressed by visible and tangible things—preferably by actions of
the sort that are to be witnessed at the cinema—never fail to express their
doubts whether ‘anything can be done about the illness by mere talk-
ing,’” Freud notes somewhat despairingly in the Introductory Lectures to
Psycho-Analysis (17).
Despite the absence of cinema in psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis has
become extremely present in film studies, which have, from the moment of
their conception, literally soaked up psychoanalytic concepts. In the long and
illustrious list of film scholars whose work is driven by psychoanalysis, Slavoj
Žižek is the most psychoanalytically informed. In fact, Žižek’s work is so
saturated with filmic references and it moves at such a conceptual speed that
it might be said to be itself eminently cinematic: 24 concepts per second.
Most of the cinematic references and implications in the works of Lacan
and Deleuze are well-rehearsed. This said, there is as yet little research into
the possible relations between a Lacanian and a Deleuzian film studies.
One reason is the often deep ideological faultlines that run between the
Lacanian and the Deleuzian camps. A more important reason, however,
lies in the ‘real’ difficulty of aligning their conceptual a priori.
Where there were encounters between Lacan and Deleuze in film
studies, these tended to revolve around the differences between Oedipal
and anti-Oedipal movies, or, more generally, between psychoanalysis
and schizoanalysis. While it is important to address these clear and pres-
ent differences, such inherently agonistic encounters could not develop a
common cinematic platform for Lacan and Deleuze. To develop such a
platform, perhaps one needs to go beyond an engagement with specific
movies and|or genres and beyond a thematic and|or formal focus; that is,
beyond character constellations and|or structural characteristics of specific
movies and|or genres. Maybe the cinematic similarities between Deleuze
and Lacan lie on a more fundamental level. What, for instance, about their
respective attitudes toward the optical universe? What do they say about
the notion of light as the most fundamental cinematic medium and the
prerequisite for any form of the image and of the cinema? In surrealist
terms: could the concept of light become the medium for a meeting of
Lacan and Deleuze on the operating table of the cinema?
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 47

Light1 | Heider

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

In addressing the similarities between Lacan and Deleuze in the light of

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

and this refers directly to the visual perception of movie images, ‘a photon’
is the unit of retinal illumination and as such a measure of the empirical
perception of light. In this double definition of the photon, science brings
into play both ontological and epistemological registers.
In the cinematic field, then, light is commonly treated as either a tech-
nological and|or as a perceptual medium, in philosophy and psychoanaly-
sis as a conceptual medium and in science as a material medium. Often,
however, conceptualizations of light combine these fields. In his essay
“Object and Medium” (1923), for instance, the Viennese psychologist Fritz
Heider stresses the scientific character of light as a material medium within
which images are actualized. As a psychologist, however, he is interested
specifically in the relations that pertain to light as a material and as a per-
ceptual medium; in the “perception of far-away objects that is mediated by
waves” (wellenvermittelte Fernwahrnehmung) (Heider 322).1 In his article,
which has become a founding text for media studies, Heider develops, if
only implicitly, an ontology and an epistemology of the cinema.
As Heider notes, the overall medium of visual perception is the atmo-
sphere, such as the air in a room in which a movie is being projected. As
Heider notes, while “the objects of perception are the solid and half-solid
objects of our environment [. . .] the transmitter is the space that is filled
with air, the medium that surrounds the objects” (322).2 The photonic
medium within which images of objects are incarnated is a secondary
medium; the “multiplicity of light-waves” (Lichtwellenmannigfaltigkeit)
(323) that travel through this atmosphere. In mediological terms, the
loosely coupled multiplicity of photons moves within the loosely coupled
multiplicity of the molecules that makes up the atmosphere. In cinematic
terms, the photonic medium is made up of the beams of light that travel,
through the air, from the movie projector to the movie screen.
Optical aggregates are formed within the photonic medium by way of
the refraction, diffusion, scattering, absorption, and dispersion of light.3
The complete darkness of outer space, in fact, results from the fact that
it is a vacuum in which the photons that are emitted by the sun never
enter material media or hit material forms, which means that they are not
refracted, diffused, scattered, absorbed, or dispersed. The glitter of the
motes of dust that reflect the light in the beam of the movie projector, how-
ever, is paralleled in outer space by the sparkling of abandoned satellites. It
is only when they enter the earth’s—or any other planet’s—atmosphere that
photons bloom into the spectral milieus of ‘visible light.’
To say ‘visible light,’ however, is somewhat misleading, because although
the photonic medium forms the ontological ground|cause of the optical
world, it is itself curiously invisible because in terms of epistemology, we
do not experience light directly as something that touches our eyes and
‘points’ to something else. Rather, we see the lighted object. In terms of
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 49

visual perception, in fact, light is always already incarnated or refracted.

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

Light2 | Lacan

Eyes so long untortured by light. (Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee 153)

As a psychologist, Heider is interested in the function of light as a material

and a perceptual medium because it helps to explain the visual perception
50 HANJO BERRESSEM

of objects, and although he conceptualizes light as the optical carrier of

forms, he ultimately considers these forms as the most important ele-
ments of visual perception.

The light waves proceed from the object, the effect disseminates into
details, which contain something of the unity of the object, but which are
themselves not a unity. The organism takes in these singular effects, it gath-
ers them and they become effective in the field of the large objects [. . .] the
effect of the object glided latently within the medium, physically unreal, in
order to resurface and become actual. In this way something related to the
object and something physically unified comes to exist again. (332)5

Heider provides an important reference for theories of light as a mate-

rial medium and, implicitly, for theories of cinematic perception. While
this would suffice to draw attention to his work, a more specific reason
is that Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of light, which he develops in the
chapter “The Line and Light” of The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, shares many of Heider’s assumptions about light as both
a material and a perceptual medium:6 For Lacan, light is the medium of
optical desire. This specifically psychoanalytic light might allow film
studies to go beyond their common psychoanalytics toward a more gen-
eral cinematic theory of luminous desire.
The chapter’s conceptual frame is the scopic drive and the way it defines
the optical field as a libidinous field in which the gaze functions as the
object of desire or, in Lacan’s terminology, as the object a. Early on, this
frame has been taken up by film scholars such as Laura Mulvey as the way
people—and in extension the camera—look at other people.7 Lacan’s ‘libid-
inous optics,’ however, go deeper than that. To recapitulate: Lacan develops
his libidinous optics through the juxtaposition of the symbolic structure
of geometral space and the imaginary structure of the visual perception of
space; or, as he calls it, ‘the subject of the eye’ and ‘the subject of the gaze.’
As Lacan notes about the logic of the eye, “[w]hat is at issue in geometral
perspective is simply the mapping of space, not sight” (Fundamental 86).
What is constructed on this level is an optical Symbolic that is governed
by the laws of the central perspective that Leon Battista Alberti introduced
into visual representation during the Renaissance. As the symbolic sub-
ject of the eye relies in its constitution on the mathematical and geometric
laws of this perspective, Lacan models it as a geometrical abstraction; as an
a-corporeal, geometral point without extension. It designates “that punc-
tiform being located at the geometral point from which the perspective is
grasped” (96).
Philosophically, this subject is analogous to the Cartesian “subject of
the representation” (105) to which Lacan refers in directly optical terms as
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 51

precisely “a sort of geometral point” (86).8 In this purely geometral field,

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

in fact, it hurts the body, which has built-in filters and protective proce-
dures against its white intensity: “Light may travel in a straight line,” Lacan
notes, “but it is refracted, diffused, it floods, it fills—the eye is a sort of
bowl—it flows over, too, it necessitates, around the ocular bowl, a whole
series of organs, mechanisms, defences” (94). One of these defenses is to
squint when the ambient light becomes too strong, or to wear ‘Ray Bans.’
As Lacan notes in a 1974 press conference,

Human beings demand only that light should be tempered. Light as such
is absolutely unbearable. Moreover, one has never talked of light, of the age
of Lights, one talked of the Enlightenment [d’Aufklärung]. “Please bring a
small lamp,” that is already a lot. Actually that is already more than we can
bear. (Lacan “Conférence” 19)9

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

That which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depths of
my eye, something is painted—something that is not simply a constructed
relation, the object on which the philosopher lingers—but something that
is an impression, the shimmering of a surface. (Fundamental 96)

While it would be inviting to think that symbolic images are objective and
unambiguous while imaginary ones are subjective and ambiguous, it is
important to realize that both fields are potentially ambiguous, although
imaginary images are differently ambiguous than symbolic ones. While
the symbolic can be anamorphotically and thus geometrically distorted—
Lacan’s virtuoso reading of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors
attests to the conceptual complexity of these distortions—the ambiguity
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 53

of the imaginary lies in the subject’s immersion in a ‘deep-focus’ optical

milieu that it can never fully comprehend:

[T]he depth of field, with all its ambiguity and variability [. . .] is in no way
mastered by me. It is rather it that grasps me, solicits me at every moment,
and makes of the landscape something other than a landscape, something
other than what I have called the picture. (96)

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

Object image Geometral point

Point of light screen Picture

image
The gaze The subject of representation
screen

Figure 1.1 Lacan’s Three Diagrams

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

Lacan’s superimposition shows that the virtual, symbolic “immanence of

our thought” (Žižek 53) and of our consciousness is always filled up—in
Deleuzian terms, is actualized—by the optical immanence of our desire:
“In the subject’s relation to the image, the geometral logic is quite literally
filled up with the optical atmosphere of the ego’s phantasmatic landscapes
and its densely luminous desire. The point of perspective is surrounded
by the play of light” (96). The libidinous gaze refracts the rational light of
thought that supposedly fully penetrates the darkness of a meaningless
and thoughtless world: philosophical chiaroscuro and spectral psycho-
analysis. Whereas film studies have read suture mainly in terms of the
affective and cognitive insertion of the spectator into the diegetic space
of the movie through its double capture by the affective plane of identifi-
cation and the logical plane of the narrative, in Lacan suture goes much
deeper: it defines the world as cinema and the cinema as the world; a
claim to which I will return.
Lacan’s photonics of desire and his descriptions of the field of the gaze
and of the subject “of desire” (89) are pervaded by a luminist lyricism
that is quite exceptional in his work. They cover precisely the conceptual
parameters that allow to cinematically relate Lacan’s psychoanalytic light
and Deleuze’s philosophical light: the immanence of luminous desire in a
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 55

photonic medium and the description of the “spectacle of the world” (75)
as a multiplicity of human and nonhuman gazes in which scopic desire dif-
fracts. Lacan’s world of desire is a fully cinematic, luminescent world that
gives itself as the optical milieu in which living systems—what Deleuze
and Guattari call “desiring machines”—live and move. It is a medium that
stretches from the glitter of surface refractions to the deep shadows of
almost complete, cold darkness.

Light3 | Deleuze:

Fundamentally, I am a matter of Light. (Cy Twombly: Gaeta, 1993)11

Poetry, fiction, drama—I am interested in the arts of incident only so far as
fiction touches life; oh, no, not in any vulgar, autobiographical sense, rather
at the level of the most crystalline correspondence. (Delany, Dhalgren 360,
emphasis in original)

Deleuze’s notion of a philosophical light is arguably one of his most semi-

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

of all movement-images; “a homogeneous continuity, a universe or a

plane [. . .] of genuinely unlimited content” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 16). In per-
ceptual terms, finally, it is the overall field of optical disparity that is defined
by “universal variation, total, objective and diffuse perception” (64).
Within the photonic plane, a living being creates a cohesive milieu
that defines it as systems against an outside environment. In that porcess,
it becomes what other living beings perceive as an ‘image,’ or, to use a
German term used by Lacan in “The Mirror-Stage,” a “Gestalt.” On this
conceptual background, a living system can be defined as a ‘moving image,’
or, in Deleuze’s terminology, a ‘movement-image’: a ‘figure’ that moves.
The conceit that defines both Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, in fact, is the
equation of cinematographic images with these movement-images
because “each one of us,” as Deleuze notes, “is nothing but an assemblage
[agencement] of three images, a consolidate [consolidé] of perception-
images, action-images and affection images” (66). Within this conceit
the books recapitulate, in cinematographic registers and terminology, the
genesis of ‘desiring machines’—a term that, like ‘centers of indetermina-
tion,’ denotes living systems—within the photonic plane. “It is an opera-
tion which is exactly described as a framing: certain actions undergone are
isolated by the frame, [. . .] [the] executed actions are no longer
immediately linked with the action which is undergone” (62). On the
perceptual level, such framings happen, among others, through the filters
of the senses, which register only certain spectra of photonic intensity.
On the cognitive level, such framings happen through specific decisions
and cognitive bifurcations. On the biomaterial level, finally, they happen
through the construction of material borders and membranes such as
the skin.
For these movement-images, the optical milieu forms the “plane of con-
sistency” on which

a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the

sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations
of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of
the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential
(latitude). Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds.
(Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 287)13

A first resonance between Lacan’s and Deleuze’s respective relation to the

luminous world is that Deleuze’s loving, graceful slow-motion account
of how singular movement-images emerge autopoietically within the
multiplicitous plane of pure light recalls Lacan’s luminous and libidinous
lyricism.
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 57

Conceptually, the Deleuzian challenge is to imagine a cinematic world

that is made up purely of “[l]ight” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 60). As a “machine
assemblage of movement-images” (59), this world is a “collection of lines
or figures of light; a series of blocs of space-time” (61).14 The composition
of movement-images is immanent to this dynamic field, which is in turn
modified and qualified by local movements in complicated sets of feed-
back loops. In fact, the field is made up of always already nothing but the
multiplicity of local movements.
In optical terms, systems subtract light from the fundamental multi-
plicity of the optical plane through the development of spatio-temporal
frames. Deleuze notes, however, that all sets retain a direct, structural rela-
tion to the outside of the frame; the cinematic ‘off ’: “A closed system is
never absolutely closed; but on the one hand it is connected in space to
other systems by a more or less ‘fine’ thread, and on the other hand it is
integrated or reintegrated into a whole which transmits a duration to it
along this thread [. . .] a duration which is immanent to the whole uni-
verse“ (17). In fact, “everything which is closed is artificially closed” (10).
For Deleuze, this open optical multiplicity forms the conceptual ground of
his cinematographic philosophy. It is

a state of things which would constantly change, a flowing-matter in

which no point of anchorage nor centre of reference would be assignable.
On the basis of this state of things it would be necessary to show how, at
any point, centres can be formed which would impose fixed instantaneous
views. It would therefore be a question of ‘deducing’ conscious, natural or
cinematographic perception. (57–58, my emphasis)15

While systems are defined as material and perceptual reductions of this

field’s complexity, Deleuze stresses that these reductions do not originate
in the system. Rather, the system is itself the result of its specific percep-
tual and material reductions:

We perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a function
of our needs [. . .]. Which is a way of defining the first material moment
of subjectivity: it is subtractive [. . .]. An atom, for example, perceives infi-
nitely more than we do and, at the limit perceives the whole universe.
(63–64)

In luminous terms, these reductions are obscurations, which means that

living systems obscure the plane of a pure, white light—the total|ideal
luminosity of the optical plane of immanence—by contracting elements
of the overall optical set into singular color spectra. This is why the cinema
58 HANJO BERRESSEM

of the human world is an art of obscuration and of deceleration: “In short,

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

And is this ambiguity not homologous to the ontological paradox of quan-

tum physics? The very ‘hard reality’ that emerges out of the fluctuation
through the collapse of the wave-function is the outcome of observation,
that is, of the intervention of consciousness. Consciousness is thus not the
domain of potentiality, multiple options, and so on, as opposed to hard
single reality—reality previous to its perception is fluid-multiple-open,
and conscious perception reduces this spectral, preontological, multiplic-
ity to one ontologically fully constituted reality (4 fn2, emphasis added).

What Žižek fails to note, however, is that within the quantum paradigm
the presence of the observer is a material, actual presence rather than an
immaterial, virtual one. In Lacanian terms, the presence of the observer in
the experiment is that of the embodied ‘gaze’ rather than that of the abstract
‘eye’ of the observer. It is as an embodied consciousness that the observer is
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 59

immanent to the observed milieu; a fact that reinforces Deleuzian imma-

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

In developing his theory of voyure, Lacan draws, as he does quite often

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

In what is presented to me as space of light, that which is gaze is always a

play of light and opacity. It is always that gleam of light [. . .] it is always this
which prevents me, at each point, from being a screen, from making the
light appear as an iridescence that overflows it. In short, the point of gaze
always participates in the ambiguity of the jewel. (96, emphasis added)

Maybe the deepest resonances between Lacan and Deleuze reverberate

through this terminology: the ambiguity of jewels and the ambiguity of
crystal-images.

Camera

The light and the shot, that is the philosophy of the director. (Douglas Sirk,
cited in Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 11)18
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 61

Douglas Sirk’s statement recapitulates precisely the two registers in which

Lacan and Deleuze converge: the luminous intensity of embodied light and
the geometrical position of the camera. Ultimately, all cinema is about light,
and the camera is the apparatus that captures light by registering photons
on a sensitive medium|surface. In fact, Deleuze goes so far as to talk about
a “camera-consciousness” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 74) because he considers
the emergence of “centers of indetermination” (65)—yet another name
forlivingbeings—incinematographictermsasthe‘comingalive’ofthecamera
at the moment when it starts to move. When the static montage of shots
that are in themselves static is taken over by the animated montage of
inherently moving and moved shots, the technological apparatus of visual
perception quite literally comes alive. The cinematographic reference is
Griffith versus Welles, the static optical collage of The Birth of a Nation
versus the optical fluidity of the opening shots of The Lady from Shanghai.
With a moving, animated camera the cinema begins to truly resonate
with the concept of a moving, animated world; of an intelligent matter and
a living phylum on which perception operates and to which it remains
immanent. Both the camera, as the perceptual relay between the world and
the cinematic image, as well as the material world come alive: the camera
gains an inherent appetitus, conatus, or élan vital. When the cinema comes
alive, life becomes cinematic.19

Action

All that is left now is to animate the scene that is later related to other
scenes in a complex montage; a scene that is immanent to a luminous
field that is everywhere already active and alive. Ultimately, all that is
needed to create a cinematic world is: Light, Camera, Action!
To conclude: Can one—and if one can, should one—reconcile Lacan and
Deleuze? Yes and no. While the conceptual and rhetorical similarities of
what they individually develop as optical media allow for a reapproachment
that is grounded on a comparable ‘photonic poetics,’ these poetics do not
level out important conceptual differences: in Lacan, the projective movie
screen superimposes the desires and phantasms of the ego and the logic of
the subject. In other words, it aligns the Symbolic and the Imaginary, with
the Real functioning, famously, as the twist or fold needed to construct a
projective reality. The Real, therefore, is not ‘on’ the plane. Rather, it is what
defines its topology as ‘moebial.’ There is no place for materiality on the
Lacanian plane other than for the materiality of language; of the material
signifier. In Deleuze, the distribution of desire is different and it is a dif-
ferent form of desire. Deleuze’s projective plane aligns on its ‘two sides’ the
series of materiality and that of immateriality; in Deleuze’s terminology,
62 HANJO BERRESSEM

the actual and the virtual. In the Deleuzian topology, the notion of the
complementarity of the two series—particle and wave—takes over the
function of the twist or fold. Deleuze’s plane aligns matter and mind while
Lacan’s aligns logics and phantasmatics: ego and subject. If one were to
describe Deleuze’s plane in Freudian terms, it would align, on the one side,
the subject and the ego, and on the other, the id. If one were to describe
Lacan’s plane in Freudian terms, it would align, on its ‘two sides,’ the ego
and the subject. The id would be the twist or fold.
Outside of his development of an optical physics, this difference can
be seen in that Lacan is more interested in psychic reality than in physi-
cal reality. The latter is important only in its symptomatics and, more
generally, as the ‘excluded’ field of pure materiality that is designated as
the vacuum of the Real. In opposition, Deleuzian philosophy cannot be
thought without the full implication of the ‘actual’ machinics of physical
reality in the virtuality of thought. While Lacan’s optical milieu refers to
an individual scopic desire and to a human subject’s entanglement in the
asymmetrical sexual field and its vicissitudes, Deleuze’s optics concern a
human subject that attempts to resonate with its nonhuman environment
and to both extract from and implement into that environment appropri-
ate concepts and conceptualizations. To forget these differences between
Lacan and Deleuze would be counterproductive.
Despite these obvious differences, however, Lacan’s and Deleuze’s cel-
ebration of the body of light provides a platform on which they can be
aligned. In fact, even if for Lacan desire is by default human desire, while
Deleuzian desire is a more general élan vital that permeates the world,
Lacan comes close to such an élan vital in a crucial passage that describes
the libido as an “extra-flat [. . .] lamella” (Lacan, Fundamental 197), which
denotes “the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or
irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructable
life” (198). Although Lacan conceives of this lamella as an organ, it is almost
as if he were conceptualizing a ‘body without organs.’ As with Deleuze, the
genesis of refracted desire is when the subject emerges as a subtraction
from the pure life of the lamella—at the moment when through the fissures
of the egg the lamella escapes and becomes that elusive thing the subject
will not stop hoping to find back, for instance, in the gaze of the other. The
lamella “is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of
the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this
that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representa-
tives” (198). Even though Lacan tends to stress the detours of the signifier
and of the object a, the concept of the lamella implies that beyond human
desire lies an anonymous, amoeba-like life; a libidinous, nonhuman ‘plane
of immanence.’
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 63

The resonances between Lacan and Deleuze, then, lie in that both
base their notion of light on the anonymous luminescence of the world
as an optical media milieu.20 Both stress the importance of light as
a natural and as a perceptual medium; as the electromagnetic field
as ‘given to itself ’ and, at the same time, as ‘given to perception.’ In
physical terms, as an anonymous photonic reality and as an individual
visual reality. In optical terms, as image and as gaze. From “objective
perception which is indistinguishable from the thing, to a subjective
perception which is distinguished from it by simple elimination or sub-
traction” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 64). As Niklas Luhmann argues, percep-
tual processes

imply specific perceptual media such as light, air or electromagnetic fields,

which are bound into forms by the perceptual organism [. . .] In the cathe-
drals, light is allowed, it becomes form in order to play with the columns
and arches. The physical structure of the world must allow, but the differ-
ence between medium and form is an accomplishment [Eigenleistung] of
the perceptual organism. (Luhmann 197)

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

Madness, Deleuze proposes

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

Within this classification, every movie is a singular luminous event, an

optical milieu that contracts the world’s photonic field onto the ‘projec-
tive’ movie screen.
Symptomatically, both Lacan and Deleuze relate the optics of the cinema
to the optics of life and vice versa. This relation is shown, quite touchingly, by
none other than Freud. Although, as I noted, his work contains only one refer-
ence to the cinema, in a letter he wrote to his family from Italy, he describes an
autobiographical experience of ‘cinematic life’ when, in 1907, he attended an
open-air screening of silent movies in the Piazza Colonna in Rome. The event
consisted of an assemblage of advertisements, musical performances, slide-
shows, short documentaries, and short slapstick movies. In his letter, Freud
notes the “free-floating attentiveness” (freischwebende Aufmerksamkeit) with
which he watches the “cinematographic screenings, which are the reason why
the big children and your father patiently put up with the advertisements
and the boring photographs” (Freud, “Rom” 224).21 During the breaks and
the advertisements, Freud strolls around the piazza until he sees, reflected
in the expressions of the other people, that their attention has been captured
by a new film: “When I turn around, a kind of tension in the crowd makes
turn to watch again, and indeed, a new performance has begun, for which I
remain” (224).22 For Freud, there is a magic to the event, but also a lingering
melancholia, because he feels alone and isolated: “The magic tends to work
until 9 o’clock, but after that I do feel too lonely in the crowd [. . .]” (224–
225).23 At home, he remembers, slightly sadly, the erotic tensions that played
themselves out on the piazza; “the people who walk around undici, dodici[24]
[. . .] as long as the music and the images continue” (225).25 When he leaves,
the last thing he sees is “in a corner of the piazza one of the torturing trans-
parencies that flash periodically and vanish again” (225).26
Freud experiences the cinematic event as part of the larger optical milieu
he lives and moves in; a milieu that he experiences as eminently erotic and
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 65

libidinous but also as melancholic. He is immersed in a play of gazes that

includes his gazes—both those directed at the screen and those directed at
his fellow spectators—other people’s gazes, as well as the many anonymous
gazes of the world in general. The mesh of gazes shows Freud that, some-
how, he does not quite belong into this milieu, similar to the way that the
gaze of the can of sardines had shown Lacan that he does not belong on a
fishing boat. As a movement-image, Freud wanders through a milieu filled
with optical affects; with memories and an almost palpable loneliness and
isolation. Life as affect. Light as affect. Cinema as affect.

Notes

1. All translations from Heider are mine.

2. “[D]ie Objekte der Wahrnehmung [sind] die festen und halbfesten Dinge
unserer Umgebung, und Vermittlung ist der lufterfüllte Raum, das Medium,
das die Dinge umgibt” (322).
3. The refractive index of the material is the factor by which the speed of light
is decreased in a material.
4. As with Heider, all translations from Luhmann are mine: “Man sieht nicht
das Licht, sondern die Dinge, und wenn man Licht sieht, dann an der Form
der Dinge.”
5. “Vom Dinge gehen die Lichtstrahlen aus, die Wirkung zerspellt sich in
Einzelheiten, in denen wohl etwas der Einheit des Dinges Zugeordnetes, aber
nicht selbst eine Einheit vorhanden ist. Der Organismus fängt diese einzel-
nen Wirkungen auf, in ihm sammeln sie sich wieder und werden im Bereich
der großen Dinge wirksam [. . .]. Die Wirkung des Dinges glitt im Medium
latent, physikalisch unwirklich dahin, um im Organismus wieder emporzu-
tauchen und aktuell zu werden. So gibt es in meinem Hirn wieder etwas dem
Dinge Zugeordnetes und physikalisch Einheitliches” (332).
6. While Lacan’s references to philosophical light in his descriptions of how
the spirit illuminates the hermetic chiaroscuro of the dream can help situate
him within the field of philosophy, they do not add anything to the notion of
‘luminous thought.’
7. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18.
8. Lacan calls this subject the subject of “the reflexive consciousness” (Lacan,
Fundamental, 89) See also Lacan’s reference to Raymond Ruyer when he
describes this subject as “the subject in an absolute overview” (98).
9. The original: “Les êtres humains ne demandent que ça, que les lumières soient
tempérées. La Lumière en soi, c’est absolument insupportable. D’ailleurs on
n’a jamais parlé de lumière, au siècle des Lumières, on a parlé d’Aufklärung.
‘Apportez une petite lampe, je vous en prie.’ C’est déjà beaucoup. C’est même
déjà plus que nous ne pouvons en supporter” (19).
10. In his lectures on Spinoza, Deleuze develops a philosophy of light from such a
bodily immersion in light, as when the body lies in the ‘actual sun’: “[i]n that
66 HANJO BERRESSEM

sense these are particles that act on my particles and the effect of one on
the other is a pleasure or a joy. That’s the sun of the first kind of knowl-
edge, which I translate under the naïve formula ‘oh the sun, I love that.’ In
fact, these are extrinsic mechanisms of my body that play, and the relations
between parts, parts of the sun and parts of my body” (Deleuze, “Lecture”).
For Deleuze, however, this actual experience needs to be virtualized and it
needs to be inserted into a logic of immanence; a movement he relates to the
work of D. H. Lawrence. While the first is a purely actual sun, the second sun
is virtual. “I am no longer in the effect of particles of sun on my body, I am in
another domain, in compositions of relation. And at this very moment [. . .]
I am not far from being able to say, ‘the sun, I am something of it.’ I have
a relation of affinity with the sun. This is the second kind of knowledge”
(ibid.). The third sun, finally, is a truly immanent sun; “a mystical union”
in which “the rays by which the sun affects me are the rays by which I affect
myself, and the rays by which I affect myself are the rays of the sun that affect
me. It’s solar auto-affection” (ibid.). Symptomatically, in his philosophy of
the three suns, Deleuze starts, like Lacan, with the notion that pure light is
destructive. Deleuze notes that “an intensity which exceeds your power of
being affected is bad [. . .] a blue that is too intense for my eyes will not make
me say it’s beautiful, it will perhaps be beautiful for someone else” (ibid.).
11. Quoted from Giorgos Seferis’ poem “On a Ray of Winter Light.”
12. While Deleuze refers to the atomic plane mostly in the context of the realm
of physics, as well as filtered through various forms of atomist philosophies,
of ontology, the molecular medium concerns mostly the sociopolitical, eco-
nomic, and psychoanalytical dimensions of his philosophy. From within the
molecular, Deleuze develops a comprehensive theory of the various modes of
molecular bonding, of the complex dynamics between the molecular and the
molar, of the political spectrum from the politics of molecules to the poli-
tics of global capitalism, of the bureaucracies and protocols of consolidation,
but also of the possibilities of undocking and of becoming other. In gen-
eral, of the dynamics between territorializations, deterritorializations, and
reterritorializations.
13. If a perceptual system is completely molecularized and deterritorialized, it
dissolves into this photonic plane, becoming once more anonymous: “In the
final analysis, we would have to speak of a perception which was no longer
liquid but gaseous. For, if we start from a solid state, where molecules are not
free to move about (molar or human perception), we move next to a liquid
state, where the molecules move about and merge into one another, but we
finally reach a gaseous state, defined by the free movement of each molecule”
(Deleuze, Cinema 1, 84).
14. In these terms, the question about the genesis of living systems is that of
the difference between an ‘image in movement’ and a “movement-image”
(Deleuze, Cinema 1, 2).
15. Like the single photon, this open multiplicity runs ‘at the speed of light’
through any seemingly closed and organized system. “It is rather a gas-
eous state. Me, my body, are rather a set of molecules and atoms which are
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 67

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

21. The original: “[. . .] kinematographische Vorführungen [. . .], wegen welcher

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

References

Baudrillard, Jean. America, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2000.

———. Fatal Strategies. London: Pluto, 1999.
Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996
[1974].
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
New York: Zone Books, 1990.
———. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003.
———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
———. Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
———. “Lecture on Spinoza, (24/03/1981),” trans. Timothy S. Murphy. Available
at http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=114&groupe=Spinoza&la
ngue=2; last time consulted: January 30, 2012.
———. Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. Ames
Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004 [1980].
———. What Is Philosophy ? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell.
New York: Columbia University, 1994.
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. “Imitations of Life. Über die Filme von Douglas Sirk.”
Filme befreien den Kopf. Ed. Michael Töteberg. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
1984. 11–24.
Freud, Sigmund. “Brief aus Rom an die Familie. 22. September 1907.” Unser Herz
zeigt nach dem Süden. Reisebriefe 1885–1923. Ed. Sierek, Karl and Christfried
Tögel. Berlin: Aufbau, 2002. 224–227.
 LIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION! 69

———. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. New York: W. W. Norton,

1977.
Heider, Fritz. “Ding und Medium.” Kursbuch Medienkultur. Die maßgeblichen
Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard. Ed. Claus Pias, Joseph Vogl, Lorenz
Engell, Oliver Fahle, and Britta Neitzel. Stuttgart: DVA, 2000 [1921].
Lacan, Jacques. “Conférence de presse du docteur Jacques Lacan au Centre cultu-
rel français, Rome, le 29 octobre 1974.” Lettres de l’École freudienne 16 (1975):
6–26.
———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998 [1973].
Luhmann, Niklas. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1998.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975):
6–18.
Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1889.
Žižek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences. New York and
London: Routledge, 2004.
 2

Hearing Voices: Schizoanalysis

and the Voice as Image in the
Cinema of David Lynch
Frida Beckman

It is, nevertheless, very important that the pure image insert itself into
language, into names and voices.
(Deleuze, 1995, 9)

What I need is someone like you.

(Lacan to Deleuze, in Smith 635–636)

Introduction

T he voice brings us straight into the core of schizoanalysis.1 To begin

with, both Lacan and Deleuze follow a general as well as long-standing
philosophical interest in the nature of the voice and its relation to issues
of self-presence and interiority, or of the Other and inaccessible exteri-
ority. Indeed, Mladen Dolar (2006) notes, the voice is “inherently and
necessarily linked with all major metaphysical preoccupations” (42).
From Emperor Chun in the 2200 BC through Plato to St. Augustine,
from Freud through Lacan to Derrida, Dolar shows how the tensions
between presence and absence and between the sound of the voice versus
the logos of meaning have haunted both religious and philosophical dis-
courses. Also, an ostensible friction emerges between, on the one hand,
Lacan’s promotion of the voice to the status of petit objet a and thus to an
object of perceived absence and, on the other, Deleuze’s positioning of the
72 FRIDA BECKMAN

voice as indicative of full presence; as an expression of possible worlds.

The voice of interdiction (the voice of the father) and of fantasy (the voice
of the mother) are thus contrasted with the voice as conferring a variable
and plural reality. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari do not reject Lacan’s theory
but rather decide “to give him some schizophrenic help” (Smith, 2004,
647) and affirm the petit objet a as part of real production. What are the
implications of this “help” on how we may understand the voice and the
way in which it links the absent and the present?
At the same time, cinema offers its own configuration of voice in terms
of absence and presence. As Mary Ann Doane (1980) notes, the relation-
ship between voice and body in cinema is in itself capable of suggesting
different conceptions of the body. Whereas the classical mise-en-scène
typically synchronizes sound and image so as to represent a coherent body-
subject unity, the way in which, for example, Godard uses voice-off rather
resists imaginary cohesion in favor of a body of dispersal and fragmenta-
tion (47–48). Still, and despite the crucial issues of physicality and meta-
physics that the question of the voice raises, Kaja Silverman argues that
while the feminist critique of cinema has appropriated Lacan’s emphasis
on the gaze and thereby focused heavily on the visual regime, the politics
of the voice and the sound regime have been given considerably less atten-
tion (Silverman, 1988, viii). This neglect of the politics of the voice, which
Silverman since then has taken a crucial part in amending, exists also out-
side feminist film criticism. In fact, if Plato posited a danger of the voice in
its capacity to disassociate itself from the word—“the voice beyond logos,
the lawless voice” (Dolar, 2006, 45), the development of Western cinema
and cinema theory would have offered him some reassurance. As Michel
Chion (1999) notes, we often conflate voice with speech and thereby forget
the materiality of the voice itself (1). Apart from being assumed by speech
acts, the voice in film is also readily subsumed under the general notion of
the soundtrack—a “deceptive and sloppy notion” (3), Chion suggests, that
subsumes all audio elements into one bloc.
The cinema of David Lynch provides a good example of the singular
significance of the voice. In most of his audiovisual work we find complex
expressions of voice and intriguing employment of the sound regime. His
collaborative practices that, as Annette Davison (2004) points out, are quite
contrary to the compartmentalized and standardized production of sound
and music in Hollywood (170), and not the least his longtime collabora-
tion with composer Angelo Badalamenti, positions his works as a network
of sound as much as of images. Extradiegetic sounds such as, for example,
what Martha Nochimson (1997) describes as “hums, rumbles, throbs,
pulsations” (36), and what Davison calls “aural close-ups” (172) produce
affective expression that often seem to be without signifying function.
 HEARING VOICES 73

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

Patricia Pisters, and Anna Powell all tend to devote at least a little space
to Lynch in their work, there is nothing like the sustained production of
Lacanian-inspired readings of Lynch.
The second and presently more important reason why the predomi-
nance of Lacanian readings of Lynch is problematic is that if the Žižekian/
Lacanian dominance engulfs the possibilities that would emerge with a
Lynch/Deleuze relation, Žižek’s dominance also casts a shadow over the
potential of a Deleuze/Lacan relation. The relation between Deleuze and
Lacan is complex and as Daniel W. Smith notes, Žižek typically does not
make this relation any clearer. In his review of Žižek’s Organs without Bodies:
Deleuze and Consequences (2004), Smith points out that Žižek ignores the
specificities of Deleuze’s understanding of Lacan. Centrally, he notes that
Žižek fails to recognize Deleuze’s crucial separation of the Lacanian phallic
signifier from the objet petit a (638). This is related, Smith points out, to
Žižek’s own distinction between the “good” Deleuze (of Logic of Sense and
sense as effect) and the bad Deleuze (of what he sees as the un-Lacanian
Anti-Oedipus) (638). But is there not, Smith asks, a sense in which Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus has a more profound fidelity to Lacan’s thought
than does the more easily recognized version in Logic of Sense? (639). By
reading Lynch through Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s Lacan (and
this is an important distinction as I am interested here in Deleuze and
Guattari’s understanding of Lacan more than in Lacan’s own work), this
chapter juxtaposes the voice image with the voice as objet petit a and works
to address more directly this very specific connection between Deleuze
and Lacan. As we will see, reading voice through Deleuze’s Lacan enables
an alternative reading of voice as figure. At the same time, Lynch’s work is
revisited as what Deleuze (1989) calls a “truly audiovisual” cinema (243):
a cinema with the capacity not only to make visible links between philoso-
phers but also to relink visual images by means of the sound-images or,
more specifically, through voice.

The Hinge: Absence Revisited

Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is very much a film about film. Not only is it
set in Hollywood and features the making of a film, Lynch overtly plays
with a number of the most typical clichés of mainstream Hollywood
cinema.2 The film brims over with characters such as the perky blonde,
the dark, voluptuous brunette, the espresso sipping Italian Mafioso, the
paper-mug-coffee-drinking cops, and even the pool man. Furthermore,
the script is full of unconvincing and clichéd lines that the characters, as
Heather K. Love (2004) puts it, are forced to “mouth” (128). This blatant
 HEARING VOICES 75

Figure 2.1 Aligning the body with an already determined voice.

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

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

Figure 2.2 The present becoming thin as a mirror.

 HEARING VOICES 77

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

Figure 2.3 A song and a tear that already exist.

78 FRIDA BECKMAN

Next on stage is Rebekah del Rio. Appearing as “La Llorona de Los

Angeles”—the weeping woman—Rebekah sings “Llorando,” the old Roy
Orbison classic “Crying” in Spanish. Her made up face seems like a thick
mask almost as if the face is lifting from itself. In addition, there is a small
artificial tear attached to the corner of her eye. The highly emphatic face of
Rebekah expresses a complete involvement in the singing that is so emo-
tionally charged that it makes both Rita and Betty cry. But despite this
seeming commitment to the emotion of the song, the song does not ema-
nate from Rebekah’s body but, rather, it exists outside it. She is only mim-
ing. This becomes clear as she collapses on the stage while the voice, now
coming from the past in relation to Rebekah, continues to fill the theater.
Even as two men enter the stage and drag her apparently lifeless body out,
the highly emotional voice endures. As many readings of this scene have
suggested, the foregrounding of eye as well as voice in this scene, and of the
uncanny relation between subjective presence and absence, clearly antici-
pates a Lacanian analysis. The voice of Rebekah that is left in the air with-
out a body, Allister Mactaggart (2010) argues, for example, points to the
Lacanian positioning of the voice as the objet petit a, and as feminine jou-
issance, the lack particular to woman within the symbolic (63). Similarly,
Todd McGowan (2004, 82) positions this scene as the inevitable rupture of
Diane’s fantasy (in which she is recast as the successful Betty and her rival
and her lost lover Camilla is recast as the helpless and loving Rita). The
scene, he argues, exposes the rift between the realm of fantasy that we have
witnessed previous to it and the realm of impossible desire that succeeds
it. Rebekah’s voice has become an object, an objet petit a, that signifies this
loss. Rita’s and Betty’s affective response is such in lieu of the fact that they
know that the voice is not “real”; their response is one of jouissance, they
weep for that which is inevitably lost. Diane’s fantasy, McGowan suggests,
has allowed her to mourn the objet petit a but when Rebekah falls to the
floor at Club Silencio this objet petit a is exposed in all its emptiness and
the fantasy collapses (83). After this, she, and the viewer, has to return to
the reality of the world of desire.
According to Lacan, the voice endows the subject with a place in rela-
tion to the signifying chain. At the same time, its position as a petit objet a
indicates that it is simultaneously a cause of anxiety and loss as well as “the
cause of desire” (Lacan and Mehlman, 1987, 82). Miller (2007) notes how
Lacan’s understanding of the voice as petit objet a is influenced by the way
in which Ferdinand de Saussure understands the structure of language. As
the subject is constituted by, rather than being the constituting entity of
the signifying chain, the voice assigns the subject a place in relation to the
structure of signification (140). In the indirect and citational nature of lan-
guage, the subject “takes a step back” to determine its position in relation
 HEARING VOICES 79

to the words that are already out there and the voice determines that posi-
tion. In this light, Rebekah’s voice could be seen as an extreme instantia-
tion of the inherent emptiness of the subject position itself. Deleuze and
Guattari argue, however, that Lacan’s linguistic revision of psychoanalysis
is not as structural as it may seem.
Although their most directly formulated claim to this effect is hidden in
a footnote, one of Deleuze and Guattari’s central purposes when rescuing
Lacan from the Lacanians is to differentiate between the parts of Lacan’s
theory of desire relating to the objet petit a and those relating to the Other
as signifier.3 This delineation saves the objet petit a from its position in
Lacan as “a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such,
but in so far as it is lacking” (Lacan, 1981, 103). Lacan, they admit, does
seem to reintroduce lack into desire through a “despotic signifier,” which
many of his disciples has picked up on in order to re-Oedipalize his theory
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 83). The objet petit a, however, is, somewhat
surprisingly, not suggestive of such a lack in Deleuze and Guattari’s reading
and is, therefore, claimed as part of their theory of partial objects. Instead of
forever turning like an “analytic squirrel, inside the wheel of the Imaginary
and the Symbolic,” Lacan, they suggest, opens for an understanding of a
reverse structure of partial objects that allows us to understand them as
transverse intensities rather than extensive parts of an imagined whole
(308–309). At heart, here, is the difference between the structural and the
machinic. As long as the object is understood as part of a structural unity
determined by a “despotic symbol,” it can be represented only in terms
of lack and absence—the signifier that necessarily points toward absence
(310). However, and despite Lacan’s insistence on the petit objet a as signal-
ing lack throughout The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,
Deleuze and Guattari find, on the Lacanian reverse side of such structures,
objects that are not representative but rather part of a structure relying
on—“a positive principle of nonconsistency that dissolves it: where desire
is shifted into the order of production, related to its molecular elements,
and where it lacks nothing” (311).
If Žižek obscures the usefulness of a Deleuze/Lacan encounter, other
readings of Mulholland Drive, such as McGowan’s and MacTaggart’s, are
not based on such misunderstanding but rather excludes Deleuze alto-
gether. While this is obviously not a problem in itself, such readings none-
theless make apparent the added value a Deleuzian inclusion would entail.
One might say that they reveal the missing link between Lacanian (not
Žižekian) readings and Deleuze. From a Deleuzian perspective, it becomes
clear that such readings could use some further “schizophrenic help” if we
want to take Lacan and Deleuze on this joint trip. “Put crudely,” Smith
(2004) remarks, “psychoanalysis begins with the symbolic and seeks out
80 FRIDA BECKMAN

the ‘gaps’ that mark the irruption of an ‘impossible’ Real; whereas schizo-
analysis starts with the Real as the immanent process of desire and seeks
to mark both the interruptions of this process (reterritorializations)
and its continuations and transformations (becomings, intensities . . .)”
(645–646). What a Deleuzian reading could add, in other words, and that
many Lacanian-readings to some extent lack is the exploration of the pro-
ductive possibilities of their own analysis, not the suturing but the making
vibrant of the images themselves.
In the case of the readings of voice and the objet petit a in Lynch, this
difference in strategy between seeking the gaps and seeking ways in which
such irruptions cause transformations becomes particularly clear. From
a Deleuzian perspective, identifying the different parts of fantasy and
desire leaves half the job to be done. When Deleuze and Guattari claim
Lacan, they claim the part of his theory that lends itself to a construc-
tive understanding of desire, and part of this strategy is to affirm the objet
petit a while rejecting the phallic signifier. There is “no question,” Deleuze
explains, “that we’re all the more indebted to Lacan, once we’ve dropped
notions like structure, the symbolic, or the signifier, which are thoroughly
misguided [mauvaises], and which Lacan himself has always managed to
turn on their head in order to show their inverse side” (Smith, 647–648).
Lynch’s cinema, one might argue, is a master of the inverse. It begs the
question whether the connective, disjunctive employment of voices,
images, sounds, and colors does not also open for something more than
an illustration of the absent and the impossible. Is there not an inverse
side, where structures and signifiers are replaced with what Deleuze and
Guattari (1983) call Lacan’s strange domain of multiplicity, “a multiplicity
so complex that we can scarcely speak of one chain or even of one code of
desire,” but of signs that are not in themselves signifying but are part of a
polyvocal connectivity (38).
Taking a close look at Mulholland Drive and the events at Club Silencio
from a Deleuzian perspective yields an expanded understanding of these
tears in time and body-voice coherence. We may begin by noting how the
separation of body and voice is not just one of space but also one of time.
There is a clear temporal disjunction, for example, in the fact that Rita,
while still in bed, has uttered words the status of which would have to be
something like a repetition of what has not yet taken place. At least if we
assume a linear temporality, she inhabits neither the place nor the body
to which these words belong. The blank expression on her face when pro-
nouncing these words further suggests her detachment from them. Giving
the impression of an automaton, she is not expressing the words so much
as echoing their future expression. By echoing what is to come, her pro-
nunciation pulls her into the future while her body remains in a present
 HEARING VOICES 81

that is emptied of her subjectivity. Rather than a linear temporality, this

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

and Guattari to see lack as “a secondary after-effect of the illusions of ego

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

The Grain: Presence Revisited

In a playful staging of fictional encounters between philosophers from

Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin through Rousseau to Barthes, Kristeva,
Derrida, and Deleuze, to mention a few, Jean-Luc Nancy (2006) brings
out overlaps and tensions between different understandings of the rela-
tion between the voice and the subject and “the voice before speech” (38).
 HEARING VOICES 83

The “voiceness” of the voice, Nancy’s essay shows, is associated with

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

develops his interest in the role of the voice in audiovisual work that he
discusses in his cinema books. In order to capture the pure image of the
voice that is unchained to the subject, he distinguishes between three dif-
ferent languages. The first two may be said to correspond roughly to the
Saussurian langue and parole, for whereas the first (langue I) is about the
naming of objects and the presumed correlation between objects and their
words upon which language systems are built, the second one (langue II)
adds the dimension of enunciation as voices produce “waves or flows that
direct and distribute linguistic corpuscles” (Deleuze, 1995, 7). In order to
account for dimensions of expression that the first two languages do not
cover, Deleuze proposes a Langue III, a language that is no longer “chained”
to object or to transmitting voices but is rather about visual or aural images.
Instead of imagining language as a “whole” series, or as “making invento-
ries of memories,” this third language captures the impersonal by means
of a pure image (8–9). This image is not of words and voices but has to
insert itself into them as to smash the chains of words and memories. This
image

doesn’t define itself through the sublimeness of its content, but through
its form-its “internal tension”-or through the force it gathers to make the
void or to bore holes, to loosen the grip of words, to dry up the oozing of
voices, so as to disengage itself from memory and reason: little alogical
image, am-nesic, almost aphasic, now standing in the void, now shivering
in the open. (9)

Released from the economy of the subject, on the one hand, and from the
economy of logos, on the other, the voice refers back neither to a lost object
nor to the production of rational meaning. If we add to this theory of the
voice as pure image Deleuze’s theory of sound in cinema, we could argue
that what is at stake in Mulholland Drive, in fact, has little to do with the
subject and its past at all. What is at stake is rather the potential of film to
mean beyond both representation and signification. Having mapped the
history of cinema and sound through the added music of the silent film
that carried an obligation to complement the visual image descriptively
and illustratively, through the direct enunciations of the talkies, Deleuze
(1989) identifies a modern cinema where the sensory-motor schema col-
lapses as “the speech-act is no longer inserted in the linkage of actions and
reactions” (238–243). Here emerges the sound image, a truly independent
image that finally makes cinema “truly audiovisual” (243). This break
with the continuity of movement and independence of sound makes the
speech-act turn back on itself with the result that the voice “refers only
to itself and to other voices” (243). Through such connectivity, the voice
is no longer connected with a subjective position. In Mulholland Drive,
 HEARING VOICES 85

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

to Wild at Heart, the characters as well as the audience are haunted by a

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

Notes

1. I would like to thank Ron Broglio and David Martin-Jones for their generous
feedback on this chapter.
 HEARING VOICES 87

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

References

Barthes, Roland (1991). “The Grain of the Voice.” The Responsibility of Forms.
Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 267–277.
Chion, Michel (1999). The Voice in Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Davison, Annette (2004). Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema
Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s. Aldershot, VT: Ashgate.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— (1995). “The Exhausted.” Trans. Anthony Uhlmann. SubStance 24 (3):
3–28.
——— (2004). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. London
and New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Doane, Mary Ann (1980). “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and
Space.” Yale French Studies 60: 33–50.
Dolar, Mladen (2006). Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hayles, Katherine N. and Nicholas Gessler (2004). “The Slipstream of Mixed
Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers.” In The Thirteenth Floor,
Dark City and Mulholland Drive.” PMLA 119 (3): 482–499.
Holland, Eugene (1999). Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to
Schizoanalysis, London: Routledge.
Kay, Sarah (2003). Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity.
Lacan, Jacques (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans.
Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, Jacques and Jeffrey Mehlman (1987). “Introduction to the Names-of-the-
Father Seminar.” October 40: 81–95.
Lentzner, Jay R. and Donald R. Ross (2005). “The Dreams that Blister Sleep:
Latent Content and Cinematic Form in Mulholland Drive.” American Imago
62 (1): 101–123.
Love, Heather K. (2004). “Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in
Mulholland Drive.” New Literary History 35 (1): 117–132.
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Mactaggart, Allister (2010). The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film
Theory, Bristol, UK, and Chicago: Intellect.
McGowan, Todd (2004). “Lost on Mulholland Drive: David Lynch’s Panegyric to
Hollywood.” Cinema Journal 43 (2): 67–89.
Miller, Jacques-Alain (2007). “Jacques Lacan and the Voice.” In The Later Lacan:
An Introduction. Ed. Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf. New York: State
University of New York Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2006). Multiple Arts: The Muses II. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Nochimson, Martha. P. (1997). The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in
Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Rodley, Chris. Ed. (2005). Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber and Faber.
Silverman, Kaja (1984). “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice.” In Re-Vision: Essays
in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and
Linda Williams. Frederick, MD: America and the American Film Institute.
——— (1988). The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
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Causality. London: Verso.
 3

Encore: Trauma and

Counter-memory in Kim
Ki-duk’s Time
Meera Lee

A n unidentified woman in a white mask and dark sunglasses is walking

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

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

may wonder why Kim chose to portray love as failed and time as revers-
ing or revolving; more specifically, why did he present an image of failure
rather than success and of regression rather than progression? Does the
film carry a political message about South Korean society?
One might say that Time belongs squarely in the category of clichéd
psychodrama insofar as it portrays the madness of a woman driven by
jealousy and the deprivation of love, or that it simply depicts an instance
of female hysteria. Further, it might be argued that for this reason, the
film does not present a political stance, nor can it be read as a political
allegory representing South Korean society.1 It is indeed true that Time is
completely devoid of any social or political references or national events
that mirror late-modern South Korea. Rather, it focuses on an individual
history and psychic trauma, both of which are important subjects in the
fields of South Korean literature, cinema, and arts. The film’s focus on
an individual history and individual perception of time evokes Benedict
Anderson’s genealogical account of nations as imagined communities.
Anderson attributes the simultaneity of the past and the future that solidi-
fies in the present moment, along with the temporal coincidence of indi-
vidual and national histories, to national identity.2 It may be the psyche of
some South Korean intellectuals, writers, or artists who attempt ceaselessly
to revisit historical events and render individual memories and psychic
wounds, but South Korea as a nation does not conceive its identity in the
way that Anderson describes. The nation-state is rather more concerned
with the future than the past, ironically displaying a melancholic desire
for the premodern Confucian order and sovereignty. Using the Confucian
patriarchal structure as an instrument to continue its persistent pursuit
 ENCORE 91

of capitalist democracy, as Tod McGowan notes, the nation-state will not

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

Trauma as the Line of Memory

I will begin this section with a brief discussion of a relatively recent event
in South Korea—individual South Korean citizens’ public mourning
92 MEERA LEE

for their former president Roh Moo-hyun—that may serve to illustrate

Anderson’s account of nationalism as the convergence of national imag-
inings and individual memories, contrasting with the Korean neoliberal-
ists’ dissociation between South Korea’s national identity and individual
identity. Roh committed suicide on May 23, 2009, not long after resigning
his presidency. The neoliberals’ rebuking moralist rhetoric, based on the
Confucian superego, characterizes Roh’s suicide as a psychic withdrawal
from society and an act of self-destruction, concluding that the grief that
the masses felt for Roh was a collective hysteria of individuals in reac-
tion to Roh’s self-destruction. They say that his death should not serve
to inspire national love since it was a result of his personal distress rather
than a concern for public affairs, and hence has had no impact on South
Korean society. However, Roh was known to many South Korean citizens
as a national icon of righteousness, and, for that reason, the day of his
suicide remains one of the nation’s most distressing historical moments.5
The public mourning by the masses in the wake of Roh’s ‘self-destruction’
was a token of their personal love for the South Korean nation, as well
as for him. Of course, the love that individual citizens felt for the nation
contrasts strongly with the institutionalized nationalism that the South
Korean nation-state imposes on the Korean people through repression
of the past and its trauma and by promoting Confucian affiliations and
hierarchy in their old boys’ networks in order to maintain their economic
and political powers. The public mourning ritual suggests a desire on the
part of the younger or progressive-leftist people to return to the past, with
the trauma or melancholia serving as a rebellion against South Korea’s
national identity. This communal grief generates a passive temporality,
the temporality that is not forward-moving. Hence, the passive temporal-
ity of the masses’ recollection of the trauma stands in stark contrast to
the active temporality of the nation-state’s moving forward with capitalist
democracy and the national Confucian repression of the past.
At first glance, Time, as briefly summarized in the previous section, pro-
vides us with a bold image of the passive temporality of individual identity
that surrounds Roh’s death, especially in terms of the representations of
trauma and love. In fact, some major Korean films prior to Time such as
Peppermint Candy (1999) by Lee Chang-dong and Virgin Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors (2000) by Hong Sang-soo portrayed the national and per-
sonal traumas and their histories, as well as the national unconsciousness
in reverse chronology. Similar to the representations of trauma and time
in these films, depicting love as destructive failure through the rotating
cycle of the female protagonist Se-hŭi’s obsession and her love object Ji-u’s
subsequent trauma in turn, the director Kim delves into the phenomenon
of the love relationship vis-à-vis the notion of nonchronological time as
 ENCORE 93

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

disturbing process of plastic surgery as the camera captures in detail the

doctor’s incisions and subsequent suturing of the patient’s mouth, nose and
more. The opening sequence described earlier follows this scene, and then
there is a sequence showing the second woman (who ran into the patient-
woman) entering a café—which will be a primary setting for the film—with
a broken frame. She is here to meet her boyfriend Ji-u, the photographer/
video artist. In this scene, the viewers learn that her name is ‘Se-hŭi.’ As
Se-hŭi watches Ji-u casually interacting with a female customer who is ask-
ing Ji-u to move his car outside the café, Se-hŭi suddenly becomes extremely
jealous and then doubtful of his love for her. Furious about his interaction
with another woman, Se-hŭi argues with Ji-u and leaves the café. The cam-
era zooms in on the broken picture frame that has been left behind. In mor-
tification, Se-hŭi constructs a collage of a face from eyes, a nose, and lips
that she randomly chose from magazines. She goes to the aesthetic clinic
(presumably the same one described earlier) and presents the collage to the
doctor as a rendition of the face she wants. Despite the doctor’s concern, she
is determined to change her face; she believes that Ji-u will once again desire
her if she has a new face. After the surgery, the doctor tells her that it will
take six months for her face to feel normal and pain-free.
Meanwhile, Ji-u believes that his girlfriend Se-hŭi has disappeared for
those six months. Melancholic because he misses her, and also confused,
Ji-u encounters a series of mysterious and uncanny incidents. As this part
of the narrative develops, the camera angle is changed, so that now it fol-
lows him from behind and creates a sense that he is being watched and
menaced. One of the first mysterious incidents happens on his way to the
seaside sculpture park on an island that he used to visit with Se-hŭi. Ji-u sees
a strange woman on a boat, wearing a mask of a female face and appearing
to gaze at him; later he sees her again in the park. In another incident, he is
walking along a street and a little girl in the costume of an angel suddenly
appears with a letter for him. The letter seems to be undecipherable since
the phrases are overlapped, all in red ink, and it is signed ‘Se-hŭi’ ( ).
As Ji-u tries to decipher this letter at the café, the waitress casually remarks
that it looks like the words “I love you” overlapping in repetition. At this
point, the viewer might speculate that the letter was written and sent by
the waitress since a previous sequence had just shown her scribbling the
words “I love you” on a piece of white paper in red ink. As she looks at the
name signed on the letter, she tells Ji-u that her name is also ‘Se-hŭi,’ which,
of course, surprises him. The waitress then immediately changes the char-
acter ‘ ’ (Se) to ‘ ’ (Sae) to indicate that the first syllable of her name is
spelled differently and that she is a different Se-hŭi, that is, Sae-hŭi ( ).
This unexpected action upsets Ji-u, and he later corrects the spelling of the
name on the letter.
 ENCORE 95

Eventually, Ji-u becomes attracted to the waitress Sae-hŭi ( ). They

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

park (and even these are enclosed or isolated locations). In the cinema’s
context, time exists only in the cycle of the lovers’ personal memories and
trauma. The film’s spatio-temporal presentation is thus situated in the
cycle of the protagonists’ personal lives rather than dominated by social
or national memories. As in many of Kim’s other films, Time’s intimacy of
focusing on the personal does not evoke the intimacy of Confucian affilia-
tion or national kinship that South Korea as a nation imagines. Rather, it
reveals only masks, alienation, and the void of human connections that
individual people sense in contemporary South Korean society. This image
of fracture or disconnect in human relationships contrasts strongly with
the nation-state’s unified and utopian vision of its national history and its
citizenship. The South Korean nation-state refuses to acknowledge the fact
that late-modern national identity must encompass the multiple facets of
social and individual memories and history. Viewed in this context, the
love that cycles through a repetition of failure or trauma in Kim’s film para-
doxically serves to underscore the nation-state’s disavowal of both national
and individual trauma, if not their utilization of it, to mobilize the capital-
ist spirit through a proclaimed unified identity, and also, as a consequence,
of the melancholy experienced by individual South Korean citizens—thus
pointing to the dichotomy between individual identity and national iden-
tity in South Korean society.
Since the repetitive failure indicates a passive temporality as implied
above, the love portrayed in Kim’s film meshes with Lacan’s notion of love
as the impossible that once again returns (encore): the love relationship
between the two protagonists or the two lovers is placed in a perpetual cycle
of failure and uncanny horror. Se-hŭi, the original I, perpetually demands
Ji-u’s love while he fails to present an image that she desires as her love
object. Ironically, she creates a new image of herself by replicating herself in
the body of the other (Sae-hŭi), namely Se´-hŭi, the modified I, so that she
can perceive Ji-u as the image that she demands.9 However, the modified
Se-hŭi ‘still’ mourns the original Se-hŭi ’s lost love with Ji-u as she inhabits
the body of her double, and eventually her success in having him fall in love
with her evolves into a failure as she reveals her true identity. Ji-u also expe-
riences failure, first because he was unable to recognize the original Se-hŭi,
despite the uncanny events that she had staged, and then because he could
not accept the new body of the original Se-hŭi. His failures lead him to
repeat the same trauma that Se-hŭi went through, that is, creating a double
of himself, and this eventually leads her to undergo yet another traumatic
transformation of her face. It is precisely this perpetual cycle of incomplete
love, this line of fracture, that enables the two to continue to meet as lovers,
thus prolonging their love relationship and intensifying their love interests;
consequently, their individual subjectivities multiply. As our more detailed
 ENCORE 97

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

can still identify herself with the original ‘I’ through the window of the
flipped symbol ‘–’ (converting to ) in the vowel where Se´-hŭi ’s imago
is created. As a result, the more Se´-hŭi feels loved by Ji-u, the more this
modified ‘I’ desires to return to the body of the original ‘I.’ Her split-self is
recalling the trauma of her past love. If the pictographic difference in the
letter ‘ ’ made Ji-u fall in love with the new Sae-hŭi ( ), the return of
the symbol ‘–‘ to the original location in her name traumatically terrifies
Ji-u, like the ghost that returns to haunt. Viewed this way, Se- hŭi’s imago
‘Se´’ ( ) is not a symbol of deception but is rather a mask, representing
the immaterial face that brings the trauma and multiple-memories of
the past into the realm of the present, reevoking the melancholy for the
impossible love.
Now we can perhaps better understand why Se´-hŭi chose to reveal her
identity, even though she could have successfully carried out her new love
with Ji-u. Her love for Ji-u would not be possible with Ji-u’s love alone
but also required her to double her memory and trauma associated with
the old love in her new body. The lost love can return once again (encore)
only if, and when, Ji-u affirms the spirit of the original Se-hŭi, namely, her
split-self or trauma, in the body of the modified Se-hŭi. Her masquerade,
in which the modified face serves as the external manifestation of narcis-
sism, is the key to hiding the truth and her love and lies beyond the realm
of the Symbolic languages or apparatuses that produce phallic jouissance.
Through this masquerading of an “[re]appearing” that substitutes “hav-
ing,” Se-hŭi embodies herself as a schizo who ‘enjoys’ suspension between
fear and thrill or the past and the present.11 It is through this repeated
tension or trauma between the subject (Se-hŭi) and the uncanny ghost
(Se´-hŭi) that her subjectivity multiplies. At this point, it is no longer pos-
sible to tell which self marks the real and which the delirium, or which
holds the eye and which the gaze. That is to say, the Imaginary is in flux
as a schizoid persona between the mask (the modified I) and the haunt
of the mask (imago) paradoxically designating the original I. The imago’s
transformation into the Real, which itself is impossible, suggests the power
of the Imaginary in relation to the subject-formation. To echo Deleuze’s
concept of desire, there is no such thing as the social production of Se´-hŭi
as reality and that of Se-hŭi as “psychic reality” in her narcissistic (mis)
identification.12 Rather, the two poles swing back and forth in the realm of
personal psychosis in orchestration with the social assemblage of voices,
actions, passion, crying, and so on. And so, Se-hŭi is not the subject of
hysteria as there is no Oedipal symbolic to ‘play’ with; she is bipolar mov-
ing between two differently constructed assemblages. Her psychosis (not
paranoia) manifests differently as to what assemblage is formulated in a
particular social setting. Therefore, Se-hŭi’s bipolar characteristics indicate
 ENCORE 99

the multiple points of memory of the split-self, serving to multiply the

viewpoints of national history.
Split-self or the return of trauma is, however, precisely what the South
Korean nation-state denies as it manifests its capitalist-democratic national
identity. Contrasting with the South Korean nation-state’s visions of its
citizens as victors and the consequent expression of nationalism as thor-
oughly rejoicing, the love in Kim’s Time forever engenders the image of the
defeated and a sense of melancholia that is to be avoided in the national
consciousness. In effect, Se-hŭi’s heightened schizoid performance and
her memory’s unceasing interplay between personal and public in the
love trauma render the simultaneity of the past and the present and the
coexistence of individual memory and collective memory. Such temporal
effects of Se-hŭi’s bipolar workings eventually suggest also the merging of
individual citizens’ imagos and the national imago. Hence, this active pas-
sive temporality of the Lacanian interrelation stands in great contrast to
the progressive self-image of South Korean national identity that returns
to neither the past nor trauma. Paradoxically, the film serves to magnify
the South Korean nation-state’s disavowal of individual history and mem-
ories of traumatic events, as well as its Confucian Oedipal hegemony of
homogeneity.

The Schizoid as Against Time

The passive temporality of Lacan’s intersubjectivity is in certain respects

correlated with the bipolar temporality of Deleuze’s theorization of schiz-
oid. The characteristics of schizoid, for example, the confusion between
past and present or reality and fiction, mirror the two faces of Lacan’s
split-self as described earlier. As the split-self travels freely between the
Real and the Imaginary or thrill and fear, the two poles in schizoid do
not diverge but rather oscillate between the Real and the Symbolic or the
Imaginary and the Real. As the subject continues to move back and forth
across the borderline of the opposing psyches, the body becomes schiz-
oid. Here, the borderline functions as the mirror itself that projects the
subject’s unconscious. This correlation between two thinkers gives rise to
the premise that Deleuze’s schizo-body resonates with Lacan’s concept of
the split-body (or face) as the immaterial. Deleuze’s bipolar body may at
first appear to be physical or material since it refers to the real body. But
what constitutes this body is not the corporeal elements of the abnormal
but the noncorporeal elements of the anomalous, hence it is immaterial.
To be the immaterial body to Deleuze is to be the impersonal body as well.
In terms of Deleuze’s theorization of the subject and society, subjectivity
100 MEERA LEE

is (re)formed according to the accumulation of social assemblages, and

therefore, the body accordingly projects the subject’s reshaping uncon-
scious or desire. Through the process of such (de)subjectification, what
forms the subject is not the material/personal body but the immaterial/
impersonal body that multiplies (via facial masks in the case of Kim’s
film), in order to be liberated from the familiar, and from social law as
well. While Deleuze’s joy in the body is distinguished from Lacan’s jouis-
sance through the process of love crafting, especially in the context of
Kim’s film, it is in this multiplicity that the Lacanian love subjects in
encore overlap with the Deleuzian bipolar love subjects. Put another way,
each encore, that is, love trauma, is part of multiplicities where Oedipal
relationships are escaped as the dizzy line, designating the Deleuzian
schizoid.
In Deleuzian thinking, needless to say, the schizo-body in multiplicity
involves a unique notion of time, a bipolar swing as opposed to the strictly
progressive path of social or national time. Deleuze describes this bipolar
temporality of time as “crystalline time.”13 Using an analogy from cinema,
he explains that time is structured with an amalgamation of the past and
the present in the same manner that the memory of a moving image is the
product of an actual image and a virtual image, the real and the illusory,
and the present and the nonpresent. Each half reflects the other to create
what we habitually conceive of as time. Our concept of time is thus nei-
ther opaque nor constrained in one direction, but rather, as the productive
element in the construction of personhood and society, it takes a trans-
lucent free form like a crystal. Mirroring this crystal image, time in Time
“simultaneously makes the present past and preserves the past in itself.”14
The film, therefore, manifests “two possible time-images, one grounded in
the past, the other in the present . . . as a whole” against (i.e., as opposed to)
the temporality of (nation’s) forwarding time, thereby producing the ‘schizo-
phrenic’ view of society contained in the subject’s unconscious.15 This man-
ifestation serves to intensify both individual and national subjectivities.
Time poignantly depicts this Deleuzian schizoid face that exists in South
Korean society, nonetheless, that is to be repressed; Kim reminds us of
‘the people’ who are ‘missing’ in the national imaginings. Se-hŭi’s schizo-
phrenic attempts to change her body to gain a new life (or love), her subse-
quent bipolar desire to return to the past, and Ji-u’s subsequent retaliation
through physical transformation, all suggest a flight from the familial or
national law. Stressing these manifold caesura of the individual persons’
unconscious via bipolar time, Kim conveys Deleuze’s vision of schizoid as
an alternative system for the Oedipal society. Deleuze claims that schizoid
may be the potential for revolution in a society that is fixated on the com-
pulsive panoptic orderings of the moral and unity in the familial, social,
 ENCORE 101

and national realms through a repressive singularity of subject and time.16

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

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

Revolving Chronology as Hetero-Memory

This paradoxical image of time that Kim portrays is embodied more con-
cretely in the lovers’ faces. They are bipolar faces, in that both Se-hŭi’s
 ENCORE 103

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

As the story unfolds, the bipolar face appears once more, although this
time in the body of Ji-u. Se-hŭi meets the strange man again, taking pho-
tographs in the park. It is the same man who had appeared with his face
covered with a mask and sunglasses about six months earlier, but this time
he returns with an uncovered face. The rendezvous leads Se-hŭi, and per-
haps the audience as well, to presume that the strange man is the real Ji-u—
although the film never makes this clear. The strange man’s plastic surgery
and physical masquerade uncannily mirror those of Se-hŭi’s double, which
is a secret between Ji-u and herself (along with the doctor). To the viewer,
the parallel between this man and Se-hŭi’s own double may be evidence
enough to identify him as the real Ji-u. The convincing moment for Se-hŭi
is when she unexpectedly finds the pictures of herself in the man’s studio.
She fearfully and yet excitedly asks whether he is Ji-u, but the man responds
that his name is “Jung-u.” Looking at Se-hŭi in despair, he shrouds his head
with a duvet cover, the same action that Se-hŭi had mournfully performed
earlier in the film. Ji/Jung-u’s actions are a replication of Se-hŭi’s manifesta-
tion of her double, the narcissistic action that generated her schizophrenic
unconscious and consequently gave rise to Ji-u’s trauma. In the same way,
the man’s double is the external manifestation of his schizophrenic subjec-
tivity and causal responsibility for Se-hŭi’s trauma. Perhaps the two poles
of his face express his posttraumatic love that repeats Se-hŭi’s failure and
that haunts the secrecy between Se-hŭi and Ji-u about her double. In this
sense, Ji/Jung-u is not only an incarnation of himself but is also an image
of Se-hŭi, thus denoting his recollection-image of the love between them.
It is in this bipolar face or recollection-image that his memory of love (or
trauma) returns against the progression of national time. “He assumes his
responsibility for this [failed love] by means of a suicidal gesture by decid-
ing not to escape [not the same as Deleuze’s escape] and to attend the duel
he is certain to lose.”23 In this apparition of his face, love (re-)appears—
that is, encore love—as the impossible goal in the perpetual cycle of failure
and trauma. Paradoxically, by virtue of revolving or forking time, which is
in contrast with national time, Se-hŭi and Ji-u (re-)vitalize their love and
thereby their personal subjectivities multiply.
In this revolving chronology, Kim portrays the subject as not merely a
product of memory but also as a bearer of memory. Se-hŭi’s memory of her
past thus cannot be reduced to a personal memory of her failed love. Her
memory is bound also to encompass a social memory or a world mem-
ory, yet in a pure form devoid of historical references, especially when she
returns in the body of the Other—in the so-to-speak ghost-body. Perhaps
it is not accidental that most of the background in the film consists of a
single group of individuals or couples who seem to repeat the memories of
Se-hŭi and Ji-u—for example, the random men whom Se-hŭi encounters
 ENCORE 105

as misrecognized doubles of Ji-u and a nondescript couple who argue at

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

therefore, intensify nationality. Essentially, Se-hŭi’s and Ji-u’s melanchol-

ies are an allegory for individual South Korean citizens’ temporal pause
with the purpose of rewitnessing the nation’s tragic events in contrast to
the nation-state’s melancholy for Confucianism and forward-moving with
late-modern capitalist democracy, void of memory or trauma. By focusing
on individual memory and trauma, Kim’s film Time proves to be a quiet
and subtle critique of the South Korean hegemony of homogeneity and
unity. The lessons that Kim’s film evokes can also be applied beyond South
Korean society, as Kim suggests a world other than this hegemony, the
world of a countermemory, multiple-memories or heterotopia, namely,
the world of counteractualization.

Notes

The Romanization of all of the Korean names follows the original forms, except
for those of the film’s characters that follow McCune–Reischauer. I would like
to express my deepest appreciation to my colleague M. Gail Hamner from
Religion Department at Syracuse University, who has essentially inspired me
to reshape this chapter with her profound and pivotal comments. Finally, I am
dedicating this piece to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who had given me her most
wonderful and encouraging words on this chapter just five months before she
passed away.
1. Kim is typically criticized by many (Korean) film critics and scholars on the
ground that his films present nothing more than auteurism without political
consciousness. In light of a more positive reception of his films in Europe
than in South Korea and his personal history in France, it seems inappro-
priate to evaluate Kim’s work within the indigenous framework of cinema
studies. In fact, Kim has openly said that he is no longer making his films for
the South Korean audience, a statement that may indicate his strong political
convictions about South Korean society.
2. Anderson (1991, 24).
3. For the description of South Korea’s national consciousness, see McGowan
(2007).
4. The Korean term han is understood to be the particular Korean sentiment,
alluding to the complex feelings of grudge, resentment, grief, lament, or even
love.
5. The Korean people’s anguish on the occasion of the death of former president
Roh emerged from the belief that the current regime led by President Lee
Myung-bak caused Roh’s suicide through the government’s severe interroga-
tion of his alleged political corruption.
6. Lacan (1999b).
7. Ibid., 4.
8. Ibid., 6.
 ENCORE 107

9. Hereafter, I use ‘Se´-hŭi’ or the ‘modified’ Se-hŭi to refer to , in order to

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

References

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community. New York: Verso, 1991.

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

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

Encountering Deleuze
 4

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

The Break of 1968

A radical change occurs in the aesthetic of Jean-Luc Godard toward the

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

and Gilles Deleuze in their approach to the cinema. While a psychoana-

lytic approach to cinema emphasizes the gaze as the point where antago-
nism manifests itself in the image, Deleuze’s theory of cinema stresses
film’s capacity for displaying the movement and temporality inherent in
the multiplicity of being.2 In a word, the difference concerns antagonism
on the one hand and multiplicity on the other.
In 1967, Godard did not covert from being a psychoanalytic filmmaker
to being a Deleuzean filmmaker. He never had an overt or conscious invest-
ment in psychoanalysis, and the communism he adopted in 1967 was closer
to Mao than to Deleuze. Nonetheless, the dramatic change in his aesthetic
reflects a shift from a psychoanalytic approach to a Deleuzean one. Until
Week-end, Godard’s films still have some investment in narrative structure,
but this investment in narrative structure accompanies a focus on sexual
antagonism—that is, on the point at which romantic unions fail not because
of contingent or empirical causes but because of the opposing structural
logics of those involved. All of Godard’s early films stress the failure of the
sexual complementarity and thus militate against one of the ideological pil-
lars of traditional cinema—the concluding romantic union. Godard’s early
films make evident Jacques Lacan’s famous dictum that “the sexual relation-
ship doesn’t exist.”3 The political force of Godard’s films in this period stems
not so much from their disruption of narrative as from their use of narra-
tive to depict sexual antagonism. The narrative structure enacts a struggle
between two different logics associated with male and female characters, but
rather than concluding with their reconciliation, Godard always illustrates
their fundamental incompatibility. This is what places his filmmaking from
this period firmly within a psychoanalytic understanding of the cinema and
of society. But this focus does not survive his personal revolution in 1967.
What drops out in Godard’s films from the 1970s onward is not just nar-
rative structure but also the focus on sexual antagonism that typifies his
earlier films. In the later films, sexual antagonism is replaced with a mul-
tiplicity of loosely related images that flow together outside the constraints
of narrative. But this abandonment of narrative, far from radicalizing his
cinema, effectuates a depoliticization because it forges a wholeness that cor-
responds to multiplicity, and this wholeness replaces antagonism.4 We can
identify a similar effect of multiplicity generating wholeness in the thought
of Deleuze. The move from antagonism to multiplicity—from Lacan to
Deleuze—strips Godard’s cinema not only of its watchability but also of
its political edge. In other words, when Godard becomes a more explicitly
political filmmaker, he inadvertently loses the key to his political radicality.
Though narrative most often works to ideological ends and to depoliti-
cize the spectator with an image of social harmony, narrative is also requi-
site for making evident the antagonism that undermines the functioning
 ANTAGONISM OR MULTIPLICITY 113

of ideology.5 Political awakening doesn’t occur in spite of narrative but

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

itself can work out and that there is no space for politics founded on its
failure to work out.

The Psychoanalytic Godard

Certainly the most conspicuous dimension of Jean-Luc Godard’s refusal

of the Hollywood aesthetic in his early films is his departure from tra-
ditional narrative structure. Godard does not begin with exposition
and then proceed to lay down a straightforward narrative arc. Instead,
the exposition often lasts throughout the film, and the narrative circles
back on itself rather than moving forward toward a clear resolution. As
David Bordwell puts it in his analysis of Godard’s deployment of narra-
tive, “Godard delays and distributes his exposition more than any other
director.”7 For Bordwell, Godard is a representative figure of art-film
narration, a narration that he contrasts with the classical Hollywood
type. But Godard’s distance from Hollywood should not be measured
primarily by his attitude toward narrative. It is instead his insistence on
depicting sexual antagonism in his early films that separates him not
only from the Hollywood aesthetic but from most auteurs outside of
Hollywood as well.
The fundamental form that contemporary ideology takes is the idea that
the romantic union has the ability to resolve antagonism. Even as belief
in social authorities wanes, the belief in the complementary partner who
would resolve the subject’s lack in a romantic union remains almost per-
fectly unassailed and provides subjects with a sense that lack is not insur-
mountable. As psychoanalytic film theorist Hilary Neroni puts it, “much
more is at stake in the idea of complementarity between male and female
than just an individual sense of completion. The coherence of the social
order as a whole rests on this idea.”8 The idea of the soulmate penetrates
the most cynical veneer, and Hollywood plays an essential role in sustain-
ing this idea. More than providing spectators with a sense of social stability
and meaning through narrative, Hollywood cinema supplies them with
the ideology of romance. Godard’s early films represent a response to the
predominance of this ideology.
Godard’s critique of the complementary romantic union manifests itself
in every film before Week-end, from À bout de souffle and Une Femme
est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961) to Bande à part (Band of
Outsiders, 1964) and Masculin féminin (1966), among many others. In his
films, desires never match up no matter how ideal a couple may seem,
but perhaps the definitive instance of the sexual antagonism appears in
Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), which shows this disjunction of desire through
 ANTAGONISM OR MULTIPLICITY 115

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

is the irreducibility of desire to the signifier. Camille wants something

more than what she seems to be asking for. She herself doesn’t know what
she wants, but it is clear that she doesn’t simply desire the affirmation that
Paul gives. She wants Paul to desire the something extra in her that cannot
be located in any particular body part (or in all of them added together).9
Because Paul reduces the objet a to a series of empirical objects, he is
able to view Camille as a whole, a being without any gaps that would resist
this totalizing procedure. He thus relates to Camille narcissistically, never
acknowledging that there is a part of her that resists his image of her. This
narcissism allows Paul to avoid confronting Camille’s desire and to avoid
enduring the fundamental deadlock of desire itself. In his description
of the objet a from his Seminar X on anxiety, Lacan underlines precisely
its irreducibility to the specular image.10 He notes that the object “is this
remainder, this residue, of which the status escapes from the status of the
object derived from the specular image, that is to say, from the laws of the
transcendental aesthetic. Its status is so difficult to articulate that it is in
this way that all the confusions have entered into analytic theory.”11 For
Paul in this scene, there is only the specular image, but Camille desires
something more. In this sense, rather than marking an ideal that is later
lost, this opening scene sets the tone for the entire film: all of the later dis-
junctions between Paul and Camille’s desire are prefigured in this scene.
Here, Godard shows the inability of the romantic union to overcome the
deadlock of desire and deliver any degree of respite from it.
This scene also enacts this revelation on the audience. It is well known
that Godard added this scene under pressure from his producers for nude
shots of Brigitte Bardot. In delivering what the producers (and undoubt-
edly many audience members) want, however, Godard actually reveals the
inability of the filmic image to deliver this object. This becomes evident
through the way in which Godard constructs this scene. He shoots Camille
lying on her stomach on a bed with Paul sitting on the bed next to her. The
scene begins with the image tinted red, which has the effect of partially
obscuring Bardot’s body. The red color suggests eroticism and, at the same
time, produces a sense of anticipation for what will be revealed. As the
camera pans down Bardot’s body in order to focus on her butt, the red tint
disappears, and we see her body in natural light. After the pan concludes,
the camera returns back up her body, the light again shifts, this time from
natural light to a blue tint.
In this scene, Godard foregrounds the naked backside of Bardot as the
object that arouses desire, but he also constitutes this object as impossible.
One can view it only indirectly, through a tinted lens or through a pan-
ning camera. The use of color and the pan highlights the failure of the
image to capture the object. Or, in the terms of Catherine Russell, “the
 ANTAGONISM OR MULTIPLICITY 117

subsequent breakdown in communication is already ironically alluded to

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

Mépris,” as Wheeler Winston Dixon does.14 Lang expresses a classical ideal

that stands against Jerry’s vulgarity and commercialization. But the prob-
lem with this idea of Lang as an ideal is that, unlike Camille and Paul, he
does not experience the traumatic impossibility of an intractable desire. He
suffers from no uncertainty about what he wants but must simply navigate
an external barrier—the American producer Jerry—to the realization of
his aims. In this sense, though they occupy opposed positions ethically,
there is a kind of similarity between Lang and Jerry. Neither Lang nor
Jerry experiences the deadlock of desire or makes evident the gaze—Lang
because he exists nostalgically in a tragic universe in which one can recon-
cile oneself to absence rather than struggling against it, and Jerry because
he refuses to acknowledge absence as such and instead treats is as a merely
empirical obstacle. Both Lang and Jerry know precisely what they want.
They have clear visions about what they want in the film: Lang wants to
create a film that captures the grandeur of the Greeks and the heroic strug-
gle of Odysseus, and Jerry wants a film that titillates the audience.15
Despite Lang’s heroic insistence on his vision in the face of Jerry’s pres-
sure, the film depicts Lang as an ethical but ultimately ineffectual character.
His ethical position is no longer tenable. The shots that we see from Lang’s
film within the film reveal the problems with Lang’s aesthetic sensibility
and ethical position in the film. The shots depict immobile statues of Greek
gods and heroes and, alternately, highly stylized actors enacting the char-
acters from The Odyssey. Unlike Godard’s film itself (in which Lang’s film
exists), Lang’s film is completely uncinematic. The scenes are static, and
when we do see the characters acting, they lack the heroic grandeur that
the majestic statues suggest. Through this juxtaposition, Godard stresses
the anachronistic quality of Lang’s vision. One can no longer make this
type of film—if one ever could—because it tries to sustain a static world
rather than acceding to a world of desire, but it tries to do so within the
world of desire (using actors and sets from that world). Like Jerry’s vision
of the perfect fantasmatic film, Lang’s film attempts to avoid confronting
the problems wrought by desire. This has the effect of undermining the
ethical status that Lang seems to hold in the film.
Lang’s ethical position is further undermined by the manner in which
he opposes himself to Jerry. Jerry represents the ideological force that
commands subjects to compromise their desire, and while Lang does resist
Jerry, he does not do so effectively. When Lang ironically undermines
Jerry, he either does so in a language Jerry doesn’t understand (most often
French) or through an allusion that Jerry misses. As a result, Jerry never
directly experiences Lang’s critique of him, nor does it have any effect on
him. While this represents, on the one hand, a clear indictment of Jerry (as
when, for instance, Lang associates what Jerry says with what the fascists
 ANTAGONISM OR MULTIPLICITY 119

used to say), on the other hand, it reveals Lang’s ultimate fecklessness in

the face of Jerry. Lang puts up the show of resistance to Jerry, but in the
end he capitulates not only in allowing Jerry to change his film but also in
never directly confronting him. This failure emphasizes the problems with
Lang’s position in the contemporary world. Even though Paul and Camille
fail to sustain the position of the desiring subject, they do remain closer to
this ideal than Lang.
Despite its show of appreciation for the position that Lang represents,
Le Mépris reveals the limitation inherent in it. By refusing to confront the
impossibility of desire, Lang removes himself from the struggle of sexu-
ality itself. In the opposite manner than that of Jerry, he retreats from a
sexualized world. Though Lang as a character and as a filmmaker acknowl-
edges absence, he does not allow it to animate him as a desiring subject.
He wants to mark the presence of absence without allowing it to disturb
the field of vision within his film. As a result, the sympathy of Le Mépris
lies with Paul and Camille, even as it depicts their respective failures and
the undoing of their relationship. Their failed union is the form in which
romance must work itself out if it is not to fall into the ideological image
of complementarity.
The critique of romantic love put forth in Le Mépris in no way invali-
dates romance itself as a project. Instead, it resists the image of romance as
an arena in which one can overcome the impossibility constitutive of desire.
Romance does not provide a ground on which the subject can discover a
fantasmatic reconciliation, but it does offer a place where the subject can
experience the failure of any fantasy to capture the objet a. Like the other
early films of Godard, Le Mépris exposes the impossibility of the object
within the romantic relationship, which is precisely where contemporary
ideology—and Hollywood cinema—locates the object as a possibility. In
this sense, Godard’s early cinema has at its foundation a profoundly politi-
cal project. This cinema asks the spectator to resist accepting a resolution
of desire and to insist on embracing the troubled position of the desiring
subject. In so doing, spectators sustain their freedom.

The Deleuzean Godard

The notion of freedom through the confrontation with antagonism and

the impossibility of the object disappears in Godard’s cinema after Week-
end. What emerges in its stead is a series of films in which sexual antago-
nism no longer plays any role at all. It is thus one of the most violent
and astounding shifts in the history of cinema. Godard’s fundamental
preoccupation and the essence of his political vision give way before a
120 TODD MCGOWAN

completely different conception of filmmaking and politics. This shift

is more significant than his turn away from narrative, but the two are
linked. Without a narrative structure, Godard loses the ability to depict
the sexual antagonism that occurs at the moment where narrative fails.
The later nonnarrative films confront the spectator with significance
through the juxtaposition of images.
The denunciation of American imperialism, global capitalism, and
universal commodification become more evident in the later films, and
Godard turns away from narrative in order to avoid producing a work
easily assimilable by commodity relations. A film like Le Gai savoir sim-
ply depicts two militants discussing contemporary political events on a
soundstage without any narrative structure at all, while Passion (1982) and
Prénom Carmen (1983) focus primarily on the making of a film rather than
on what that film narrates. The move away from narration and toward the
juxtaposition of images becomes even more exaggerated in Godard’s more
recent films, such as Éloge de l’amour (2001), Notre musique (2004), and
Film socialisme (2010).16 In these films, antagonism, which uses a binary
logic to evince its breakdown, gives way to an attempt to convey the mul-
tiplicity of being. The disconnection within scenes or between scenes sug-
gests an escape from the binary antagonistic logic of the early films. Here,
Godard shows that no possible binary can contain the infinite diffusion
of being.
In order to evoke the diffusion or multiplicity of being, one must avoid
narrative as much as possible. The films that Deleuze celebrates as exem-
plary expressions of the time-image, like those from the Italian Neorealists,
almost always minimize the effects of narrative in order to immerse spec-
tators in the untrammeled temporality of events. Narrative is a way of
rendering multiplicity invisible and locking spectators into patterns of
perception or clichés. Deleuze views the cinema as a struggle not so much
against the ideological form of the romantic union but against the cliché,
which obscures multiplicity. The point of the cinema, for Delueze, is “tear-
ing a real image from clichés.”17 The cinematic cliché becomes a barrier
to perception itself, and this form of cliché reinforces those that predomi-
nate outside the cinema as well. As Paola Marrati puts it in a discussion of
Deleuze and the cinema, the great danger is that of “a system of values that
sticks to the very perception of things and risks always making thought
slide into the conformism of the doxa and the affects into preestablished
schemas.”18 Traditional narrative structure, even when a filmmaker uses it
to emphasize antagonism within the narrative, necessarily falls into “the
conformism of the doxa.” In order to avoid this, one must attempt to leave
narrative behind altogether, which is the aim of Godard’s later—and thus
vehemently Deleuzean—cinema.
 ANTAGONISM OR MULTIPLICITY 121

What replaces narrative, for Godard, is description. This is why the

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

manifesting itself, though this power doesn’t infiltrate their relationship.

The couple and the film comment on politics without showing how the
relationship itself bespeaks the politics of sexual antagonism.
Like many of Godard’s later films, Éloge de l’amour is a film about a
filmmaker making a film. The film proclaims that the film within the film
will concern the four moments of love—the encounter, physical passion,
separation, and rediscovery. When the filmmaker Edgar (Bruno Putzulu)
announces this at the beginning of Godard’s film, it becomes clear that the
understanding of love here will be different from what it is in Le mépris,
where there is no possibility of rediscovery. Éloge de l’amour reveals the
separation that occurs in the romantic union, but it also reflects a belief
in reconciliation that never appears in Godard’s early films. In order
to emphasize the possibility of rediscovery, the film moves backward
in time.
Godard shoots the first part of Éloge de l’amour in black and white, and
it depicts Edgar making his film on love and, while doing so, interview-
ing people. We also see his relationship with his girlfriend (Cécile Camp),
which often involves political discussion or interaction with political
events. The second part of the film is in color and occurs two years ear-
lier. In this part, Godard shows the relationship between Edgar and his
girlfriend beginning as he witnesses agents from Steven Spielberg buying
the story of his girlfriend’s parents’ involvement in the French Resistance
in order to make a film about them. Here, the political critique of the film
becomes apparent, but Godard makes no clear connection between the
critique of American imperialism and the relationship between Edgar and
his girlfriend.
When a Hollywood agent comes to buy the rights, he proclaims him-
self to be “American.” But this prompts Edgar’s girlfriend to ask which
American he is. She points out that Mexicans, Brazilians, and Canadians
are also Americans, and when the man tries to identify himself with the
United States, she points out that other nations in the Americas are also
united states. This is one of the most Deleuzean moments of the film
because it calls into question identity in the name of multiplicity. American
imperialism doesn’t simply function through the imposition of economic
and military might but also through establishing a stable identity that
obscures the multiplicity of America itself. America is a multiplicity, as
the film shows, but this multiplicity becomes just the USA. Godard’s work
resists this congealing identity by revealing its tenuousness and the inabil-
ity of the agent from Hollywood to answer the questions concerning his
identity. But this political critique of identity comes at the expense of any
depiction of sexual antagonism. This becomes evident in a moment of love
in the first part of the film.
 ANTAGONISM OR MULTIPLICITY 123

In one particularly evocative shot, a couple appears together beneath

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

in conveying this multiplicity, not in depicting antagonism, which was the

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

Notes

1. Week-end marks not only the end of Godard’s narrative filmmaking, but also
the end of his relationship with commercial cinema production in France.
As Colin MacCabe tells it in his biography of Godard: “Godard has always
claimed that he was absolutely prepared for the revolutionary break of 1968,
 ANTAGONISM OR MULTIPLICITY 125

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

painting in order to look askew. (I am indebted to Jan Jagodzinski, University

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

References

Badiou, Alain (2000). Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Trans. Louise Burchill.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bordwell, David (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston (1997). The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: SUNY
Press.
Flaxman, Gregory (2011). Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy: Powers
of the False, Volume 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 ANTAGONISM OR MULTIPLICITY 127

Jacques Lacan (2004). Le Séminaire, livre X: L’angoisse, 1962–1963. Ed. Jacques-

Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, Jacques (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 1972–1973.
Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
MacCabe, Colin (2003). Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
McGowan, Todd (2007). The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. Albany: SUNY
Press.
Marrati, Paola (2003). Gilles Deleuze: cinema et philosophie. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Neroni, Hilary (2005). The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence
in Contemporary American Cinema. Albany: SUNY Press.
Russell, Catherine (1995). Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Sterritt, David (1999). The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Žižek, Slavoj (2003). Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences.
New York: Routledge.
 5

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

I n his “encounter” with Deleuze’s philosophy in Organs without Bodies,

Slavoj Žižek (2004) pinpoints the essential difference between Hegel
and Deleuze, as follows: “The difference is not between immanence and
transcendence but between flux and gap. The ‘ultimate fact’ of Deleuze’s
transcendental empiricism is the absolute immanence of the continuous
flux of pure becoming, while the ‘ultimate fact’ of Hegel is the irreduc-
ible rupture of/in immanence” (60). It is indeed the crucial and incom-
mensurable difference between the notion of a gap, which is constitutive
of the Lacanian subject, and Deleuze’s concept of continuous flux, that
distinguishes two very different philosophies, and ultimately, two very
different openings for possibilities of love. For Deleuze, love emerges
through nomadic movement, chance, and novelty in repetition, while for
Lacan, the love relation manifests through a supplementary nonrelation,
and contingent choice (as distinct from chance) is open to the subject as
one pathway, along with necessity, to experience the love relation. And
while Deleuze sees repetition of difference as the opening to new ways of
being, with Lacan we can distinguish between modes of repetition in the
Symbolic, Imaginary, and the Real. Further, as Alenka Zupančič (2008)
relates, if Deleuze is interested in the failure of repetition, Lacan is more
interested in what “disturbs the failure of repetition,” or in “what hap-
pens in the intervals between” (162, 172). This chapter traces these two
distinct ways of conceiving the love relation through the metaphysics of
the constitutive gap and immanent flux, and illustrates these differences
130 SHEILA KUNKLE

in an analysis of Tom Tykwer’s 1998 film Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt in
German). Both in form and narrative, this film allows us to explore how
difference, repetition, contingency, and chance all bear on the possibility
of a love relation from both a Deleuzian and Lacanian perspective.
Essentially, to be “against limits” has a different meaning for each line
of thought. For Deleuze it is associated with boundless freedom. As he
writes in Difference and Repetition (1994), “every time we find ourselves
confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what
such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a
pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences; a properly differential and
original space and time; all of which persist alongside the simplification
of limitation and opposition” (50). In contrast, from a Lacanian perspec-
tive, limits are configured within the logic of the signifier, where an alien-
ated subject must choose between Being and Meaning, existing in the gap
of nonmeaning between the two. In Seminar XI (1981), Lacan presents
the forced choice that the symbolic order imposes on the subject: she can
choose either being or meaning, but never both. “If we choose being, the
subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into non-meaning. If we choose
meaning, the meaning survives only deprived of that part of non-meaning
that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realization of the
subject, the unconscious” (211).
For Deleuze, there is no similar subject of language or of the uncon-
scious that is primary, but rather a world of continuous flux. Life, to
Deleuze, is a swarm of affects and encounters, where machinic connections
and interactions take place. His conception is configured within his idio-
syncratic treatment of chance. In Difference and Repetition (1994) he writes
that each throw of the dice is distinctive and not determined by a series of
throws or what came before. “The different outcomes are no longer sep-
arated according to the distribution of the hypotheses which they carry
out, but distribute themselves in the open space of the unique and non-
shared throw.” Further, these different throws “invent their own rules and
compose the unique throw with multiple forms by a single response which
leaves them open and never closes them” (283). Conceiving chance in this
way, Deleuze (2000) replaces the hypothetical and categorical with differ-
ence and repetition. And in terms of love, difference and repetition are
articulated through the interplay of the particular and the general, series
and group, and “extrinsic conditions and subjective contingencies” (75).
In Proust & Signs (2000), Deleuze writes: “The beloved appears as a
sign, a ‘soul’; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, imply-
ing, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is,
interpreted” (7). Difference and repetition, according to Deleuze, are two
elements of “essence,” which is located both in the series of successive loves
 AGAINST LIMITS 131

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

new conceptions of man, culture, and nature, offered new ways of think-
ing, and even created an original language, according to Deleuze. Whereas
Sade employed an institutionalized possession and Masoch a contractual
alliance, it was the mechanical repetitions of the latter that brought some-
thing entirely new, for they proceeded through dialectical reversals, dis-
guises, and displacements, and thus, according to Deleuze, it was Masoch
who used reason against itself. The freedom Deleuze (1991) attributes to
Masoch opens up into a world of repetition that transcends Masoch him-
self in that he “has a particular way of ‘desexualizing’ love and at the same
time sexualizing the entire history of humanity”(12).
Perhaps one of the most “Deleuzian” characters in Western history is
that of Don Juan, who according to Francois Rachline in Don Juan’s Wager
(2001), appears as a figure who exists between an Idea and a real person
throughout his many incarnations in music, culture, and literature. In all of
his relations he takes what he desires without making good on any prom-
ises he makes, and in doing so he rejects the idea that human relations
should be conducted through a necessary compensation. Don Juan is a
figure whose actions parallel those of Masoch in terms of freedom and
repetition, for in a Deleuzian way, and according to Rachline, “sex is in
no way sufficient to describe Don Juan’s behavior, and his temperament
is not limited to an erotics that is restricted to sex, but opens out onto a
general erotics of life” (134). Don Juan lives in the moment by enjoying
each woman he desires and makes love to; and ultimately, according to
Rachline, he is a figure who creates ruptures at every turn for his actions go
against all of society, not only its sexual norms, but its economic relations
and ethics as well. Don Juan is a lover who engages both in serial love and
sexual relations that extend to “all humanity”; a figure who goes beyond
“worldly signs,” such as “vacuity, stupidity, forgetfulness,” to incarnate love
through an endless series of women, who also brings out the Idea of love as
artistic encounter (Deleuze, 2000, 81–82).
An interesting parallel character to Don Juan in film is that of Howard
Roark (Gary Cooper) in King Vidor’s 1944 film The Fountainhead, based on
Ayn Rand’s novel of a driven architect who opts out of both the symmetri-
cal relations of capitalist exchange and the symbolic dimension of success,
for he neither asks for nor accepts charity, and refuses to alter his creations
for the sake of either status or gain. Roark’s love relation with Dominique
Francon (Patricia Neal) is conducted under the same ethic, for he neither
actively courts her nor anxiously waits for her to come to him; rather, he
remains true to his desire to create and allows her to enter his life only
after she accepts that she cannot expect to redirect his passion. Whereas
the figure of Don Juan found an alternative to death by embracing the
state of being perpetually in debt, Roark rises to the top of his profession,
 AGAINST LIMITS 133

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

consider certain probabilities; instead she either constructs a fantasy that

keeps desire at play and ensures a distance from the object of desire, or
she tries to inscribe a necessity between demand and its satisfaction, or
desire and jouissance. As many Lacanian analysts relate, in terms of the
love relation, the latter move can lead to a kind of nostalgia that is stuck in
an eternal past; it creates the conditions for an impossible love where lovers
forever “miss” each other, for whatever reasons: they are with other part-
ners, it’s the wrong place or the wrong time, or one lover tragically dies.
Thus a final yet crucial difference between Deleuze and Lacan exists
in their treatment of temporality and repetition, which arises from the
founding metaphysical difference between gap and flux. Deleuze’s concep-
tualization of time is bound to repetition and the eternal return. As Žižek
writes in Organs without Bodies (2004), “perhaps the core of Deleuze’s
concept of repetition is the idea that, in contrast to the mechanical (not
machinic!) repetition of linear causality, in a proper instance of repetition,
the repeated event is re-created in a radical sense: it (re) emerges every
time as New” (15). But Alenka Zupančič (2008) goes deeper here to find
a more serious difference between Deleuze and Lacan in terms of their
conceptualizations of repetition. According to her, for Lacan “the failure
of repetition itself fails at some point, or, something disturbs the pure fail-
ure of repetition: something fleeting, elusive, something perceptible at one
moment and gone the next” (173). What is fleeting is the object a, and it is
precisely this object that allows the subject to experience its semblance in
the dimension of the Real, or as Zupančič (2008) puts it, it is “the object via
which, for a moment, the subject sees herself on the outside,” and which
offers “a radical diversity that belongs to a different order than variety and
novelty” (173), as found in Deleuze.
For both Deleuze and Lacan, repetition is not caused by a failure to
accurately represent reality or identity, but rather, repetition itself consti-
tutes a radical diversity. But whereas for Deleuze something radically new
can arise through a selective process of an eternal return, for Lacan, as
Zupančič shows, the failure of repetition produces something itself, and it
is the Thing (the object a in the Real). She writes (2008), quoting Mladan
Dolar (2005, 200), “In the tiny gap between one occurrence and the next
one, a bit of real is produced. In every repetition there is already, in a mini-
mal way, the emergence of that which escapes symbolization, the haphaz-
ard contingent object appears which spoils the mere repeating of the same,
so the same which returns is never the same, although we couldn’t tell it
apart from its previous occurrence by any of the he positive features or
distinguishing marks ” (164).
Turning now to Tykwer’s Run Lola Run, we can analyze the film in
two distinct ways, according to Lacan’s constitutive gap and Deleuze’s
 AGAINST LIMITS 135

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

her father has already left and she cannot demand money or rob the bank,
but instead keeps on running. However, this film clearly delineates chance
from contingency in Lola’s final run, where she makes the split-second
decision (choice, made under conditions of contingency) to enter a casino
and play the roulette wheel (a game of probability and chance).
A Deleuzian encounter with Run Lola Run proceeds from vastly
different coordinates than a Lacanian analysis. Such an encounter would
follow his consideration of director Josheph Mankiewicz’s use of flashback
and “forking” in the third chapter of Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989).
What interests Deleuze here is Mankiewicz’s fragmentation of all linear-
ity, and his “perpetual forks like so many breaks in causality.” “At each
point where time forks the multiplicity of circuits thus finds a new
meaning.” In films such as The Barefoot Contessa, or A Letter to Three
Wives, Deleuze finds that, similar to his take on the writings of Masoch,
repetitions lead to something new. He writes: “In The Barefoot Contessa,
its repetitions are not accumulations, its manifestations refuse to be
aligned, or to reconstitute a destiny, but constantly split up any state of
equilibrium and each time impose a new ‘meander,’ a new break in causal-
ity, which itself forks from the previous one, in a collection of non-linear
relations” (49).
What Deleuze (1989) finds in Mankiewicz’s use of the flashback and
forking is a kind of bestowal of something necessary (in a world of con-
tingent encounters). “Time’s forks thus provide flashback with a necessity,
and recollection of images with an authenticity, a weight of past without
which they would remain conventional,” and this is so because “the forking
points are very often so imperceptible that they cannot be revealed until
after their occurrence . . . it is a story that can be told only in the past” (50).
In that difference inhabits repetition, by extension the flash-forward can
take on the same function as the flashback. In Run Lola Run there are very
fast-paced montage “snapshots” that flash on the screen of several minor
figures’ lives who in one way or another come into contact with Lola while
she is running (a woman with a baby carriage, a bank attendant, a man
on a bicycle, and a homeless man). And in each run’s circuit we find that
Lola’s encounters with these figures suggests a different unfolding of a life
(in retrospect, projected from the future of a life having been lived). For
example, a woman with a baby carriage in Lola’s path has three different
lives in montage snapshot in each of the three runs: as an unfit mother
whose child is taken away; as a woman who wins the lottery in the second;
as having a religious conversion in the third. The mind can barely register
what the eye is seeing during these split-second stills, but what is being
registered is that indeed our lives are filled with contingent encounters that
 AGAINST LIMITS 137

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

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

Figure 5.1 Manni and Lola.

 AGAINST LIMITS 139

Lola: Do you love me?

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

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

When Manni lies dying in the street and experiences his red scene, his
line of questioning takes a slightly different turn as follows:

Manni: Lola, what would you do if I died?

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

Manni’s questions and his “inner dialogue” project a future world in his
absence, a world where he mourns himself as the lost object before he is
lost. Like Lola, he secretly wants assurance from her that he is the irre-
placeable One. At the end of his red scene, he responds to Lola’s “You
haven’t died yet,” with a questioning “No?” And in the next second we are
returned to the beginning of Lola’s third and final run.
From a Lacanian perspective each red scene acts as an interval between
the repetitions of the runs, and tells us the way each lover “ex-ists” in the
love relation—in terms of being the subject of the other’s desire and of the
impossibility of the two sexes ever becoming one. Lola wants to be assured
that she’s the “One,” above all others; with her questions she wants assur-
ance of her partner’s love, and Manni constructs a fantasy of how he will be
replaced after he’s gone, seeking assurance that he’s really irreplaceable in
Lola’s life. The monologues masquerading as dialogues outside of space and
time reveal not only that love is inherently narcissistic, but also that it hap-
pens in an impossible place, in the gap between Being and Meaning where
the subject confronts the Real (the nonexistence) of the sexual relation. For
Deleuze (1989), in distinct contrast to Lacan, the “red scenes” can be regis-
tered as “crystal of time,” when the actual and virtual are indistinguishable;
what cracks the crystal both times is the desire/drive to experience another
 AGAINST LIMITS 141

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

in the air and thinks of her opening move, just before she launches her
run. The second scream comes when she is at the bank begging her father
for 100,000 deutschmarks to save Manni. When her father asks, “Who’s
Manni?” Lola screams that Manni has been her boyfriend for over a year,
and when her father refuses her the money, telling her that he is leaving
the family to be with his lover, Lola screams and breaks the glass clock on
the wall. The third scream occurs in the final run at the casino where she
has placed her bet just before the marble rolls into its slot in the roulette
wheel before it stops spinning. Everything bears on her winning this game
of chance and the scream she lets out, which forces people around her to
cover their ears, signals that something impossible is about to happen—
her number wins, not just once, but twice, giving her the money she needs
to save Manni. For Deleuze, Lola’s screams might be the essence of the
subject’s pure affect or intensity outside of rationality and words; but for
Lacan what is repeated in Lola’s screams is the subject’s presence in the
Real, a dimension where she is able to break the logic of probability (the
impasse of the Symbolic) itself.
The screams signal that the repetition of the subject in the Symbolic and
Imaginary is different from the repetition that occurs in the gap of non-
meaning of the Real where the impossible becomes possible. This “impos-
sible possible” is precisely what takes place in love. As Zupančič (2002)
reveals, the other that we love is neither the banal nor the sublime object,
but “neither can she be separated from them, since she is nothing else but
that what results from successful (or lucky) montage of the two. In other
words, what we are in love with is the other as this minimal difference of
the same” (73). Love, as it emerges in terms of a repetitive drive, as a non-
sexual relation that lasts, is found in the “transcendent accessibility of the
other,” because the banal object and the object of desire are semblances,
neither one being more real than the other. Zupančič (2008) locates here
another crucial difference between Lacan and Deleuze, for while the latter
treats the Real as a “cosmic whole, an inherently productive self-differen-
tiating substance,” Lacan treats the Real as an impasse, as something that
interrupts a process, or an impossibility in the structure of the field of real-
ity, caused by the split at the very heart of the Symbolic itself (161–162).
From both a Deleuzian and Lacanian perspective, the cinematic experi-
ence is transformative, but in very different ways. Deleuze’s attention to the
details of the formal elements of film analysis, for example, his discussion
of Welles’s depth-of-field, Resnais’s tracking shots, the repetitive “dream-
like” sequences of Bunuel, all work to change our experience of time and
space through the image. But what Lacan offers us is a way to see how film
allows us to play with the gaze; how the gaze itself is inherent in the filmic
image. As Todd McGowan (2007) writes, “the gaze is a blank point—a point
 AGAINST LIMITS 143

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

in repetition, and a future game that makes up its own rules, while Lacan
would have us see how the object compels our fascination again and
again.
The movement in the Deleuzian universe repeats either in a way that
becomes stagnant in its accumulations (Sade), or in a way that approaches
a frozen moment, a moment of suspense, before the new bursts forth to
start again (Masoch). In contrast, Lacan’s subject can experience some-
thing impossible in between the repetitions themselves. As Zupančič
(2008) writes, what’s at stake in repetition “is the fact that we can tell some-
thing a hundred different ways and the fact that we cannot, absolutely not
(not even by literally repeating it) tell something in only one way” (172).
Lacan would have us see how the object a compels our fascination, and
how we demand, like a child, to see or hear it again and again, because the
movement of the “object” in love is precisely the same movement of the
subject as it hovers and goes back and forth between Being and Meaning
in the gap of nonmeaning. This movement, as Zupančič illustrates in her
comparison of love and comedy, brings with it the stumbling, the interrup-
tions, the impasses, and “all kinds of fixations and passionate attachments”
that subjects find in their search for meaning (8). What we get in love is
something that is not lost, but rather something supplementary emerg-
ing in an unexpected place, something very akin to comedy, because the
repetitions in both allow the subject to repeat the Real (the gap) of its exis-
tence. If Deleuze would have us exchange one mask for another in love,
to creatively and repetitively exchange roles, Lacan would have us experi-
ence the Real that exists between the changing of masks, to experience the
Thing that exasperate, lures, and even repulses us in love.

Notes

1. Lola Rennt has many parallels to Kristoff Keizlowski’s 1981 film Blind
Chance, which was said to influence Tykwar’s narrative despite the vast dif-
ference in style, technique, and sound between the two films. See Jonahtan
Hedernson’s featured review at Jonathan Henderson // © 2010 Cinelogue.
com.
2. “Mankiewicz’s characters never develop in a linear evolution: but each
time [they] constitute a deviation which makes a circuit, allowing a secret
to inhere in the whole, and serve as a point of departure for other forks”
(Deleuze, 1989, 49).
3. Zupančič (2002) puts it most articulately when she states: “What is involved
in the drive is not so much a ‘time difference’ as the ‘time warp’—the con-
cept that the SF literature uses precisely to explain (scientifically) the impos-
sible that happens. Time warp essentially refers to the fact that a piece of
 AGAINST LIMITS 145

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

References

Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
——— (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— (1991). Masochism Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York:
Zone Books.
——— (1994). Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia
University Press.
——— (2000). Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Trans. Robert Howard.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dolar, Mladen (2005). “Comedy and Its Double.” In Schluss mit der Komödie!
[Stop That Comedy!]. Ed. Robert Pfaller. Vienna: Sonderzahl.
Lacan, Jacques (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton.
——— (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits
of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore 1972–73. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
McGowan, Todd (2007). The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. New York:
SUNY Press.
Rachline, Francois (2001). Don Juan’s Wager. Trans. Susan Fairfiled. New York:
Other Press.
Run Lola Run (original: Lola rennt) (1998). Film. Directed by Tom Tykwer.
German, X-Filme Creative Pool.
Ẑiẑek, Slavoj (2004). Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences.
New York: Routledge.
——— (2006). The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ẑiẑek, Slavoj and Mladen Dolar (2002). Opera’s Second Death. New York:
Routledge.
Zupančič, Alenka (2002). “On Love as Comedy.” Lacanian ink 20: 62–79.
——— (2008). The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 6

Occasioning the Real: Lacan,

Deleuze, and Cinematic
Structuring of Sense
Emanuelle Wessels

T his chapter explores the extent to which contemporary revisions

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

film. For early Lacanian film theorists working in the Imaginary, such as
Christian Metz, Jacques Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” essay was paramount, and
“the reception of film was an imaginary experience that had the effect of
binding the subject to its interpellation in the symbolic order” (McGowan
2004, xiii). This imaginary process of identification was used to argue that
cinema, essentially, functions as an auxiliary mechanism constituting and
hailing subjects-in-ideology, by way of their misrecognition in film. Louis
Althusser (1971), whose thoughts on ideology largely inform these proj-
ects, states that “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as
concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject” (173).
Thus, according to early Lacanian film theorists utilizing the role of the
Imaginary, film creates ideological subject positions, and subsequently
hails spectators as subjects-in-ideology through misrecognition.
Film, then, becomes ideology’s accomplice, deceiving subjects into
identifying with various subject positions. The problem with this approach
is that it leaves no room for resistance, and construes film as a wholly ideo-
logical machine, completely implicated and flawlessly functioning, in the
perpetuation of dominant culture. Attempts to revive Lacanian film theory
hinge on moving beyond the hegemonic focus on an overdetermined imag-
inary register, and returning to the Real as the Lacanian order offering pos-
sible resistant potential, or at least an alternative to the notion of ideology
as a completely closed loop. Further, this approach enables the constitution
of subjects more radical than those invested deeply in the imaginary, who
are allegedly duped by the forces of ideology. For Lacan, the Real repre-
sents a point of intrusion or disruption in the symbolic order, an interven-
tion that cannot be made sense of with the preexisting symbolic codes.
“The Real,” he explains, “can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse
in formalization” (Lacan, 1998, 93). Todd McGowan understands this
Radical Real to involve terror and ecstasy, fundamental challenges to the
subject in ideology. Ultimately, he posits, confronting this “ecstatic, often
horrific Real” may supply “new coordinates for the subject” that challenge
current ideological subjectivities in the symbolic order (McGowan, 2004,
xxvii–xxviii). The Real, a gap in the symbolic order, is thus a void that is
paradoxically rich with constitutive power, having the ability to reform and
disrupt existing ideology. Thus, confronting and acknowledging the Real
has the potential to form new subjects, which McGowan argues is a truly
radical move.
Locating the Real, and thus the ability to utilize it constitutively, involves,
for new Lacanian film theorists, identifying it as a gap within the ideological
subject. The Real is, then, the void or lack within the subject that ideology
cannot fill, the space that ideology cannot touch. This is the space that must
be accessed. Slavoj Žižek explains that the “subject is the void, the hole in
 OCCASIONING THE REAL 149

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

lies outside of denotation and the represented. “To pass to the other side of
the mirror,” Deleuze explains,

is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression . . . it

is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which
it expresses, that is, to sense. (25)

Further, Deleuze understands this excess to be related to an outside. For

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

[U]tterances and narrations are not a given of visible images, but a con-
sequence which flows from this reaction. Narration is grounded in the
image itself, but it is not a given. (29)

The flow of narration, distinct from an utterance or enunciation, belongs

to the order of sense, or interpretation, in that it constitutes an effect
 OCCASIONING THE REAL 151

produced and occasioned by the structuring system. Cinematic sense,

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

the illusory delimitation of a central location-whether this be that of a

god or any other substitute. It is an apparatus destined to obtain a precise
ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology creating a phantas-
matization of the subject, it collaborates with marked efficacy in the main-
tenance of idealism. (Baudry, 1986, 295)

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

stable, transparent reality conveyable through representations, as well as a

stable, rational subject capable of transparently, unambiguously under-
standing it (305).
The camera, moreover, perpetuates “the dominant ideology” by equat-
ing “the real with the visible,” thus establishing hegemony of sight and
transparent meaning of images. Further, this structured way of looking
allegedly produces “a blind confidence in the visible, the hegemony, gradu-
ally acquired, of the eye over the other senses, the taste and need society
has to put itself in spectacle” (Comolli, 1980, 126). What Comolli’s analysis
makes apparent is that his conception of the cinematic apparatus’ ability to
structure a spectatorial experience is limited to the realm of the imaginary
or the function of images in and of themselves. No space is left for theoriz-
ing an excess of the image, an affect or experience of viewing-as-event that
escapes representation.
The move to locating breaks in the ideological narrative of filmic struc-
ture can be more cogently made by returning to apparatus theory through
Lacan’s notion of the Real and Deleuze’s concept of sense. This formula-
tion, rather than ignoring the ideological implications of the structuring
apparatus and attempting to locate breaks in the ideological narrative via
images, focuses on the excess of the represented that is carried or transmit-
ted by a symbolic, structuring system. Thus, rather than operating on the
level of the imaginary, this engagement with apparatus theory functions on
the level of the Real, as read through Deleuze’s notion of sense, in order to
analyze what is carried by the cinematic language. Hence, this theoretical
supposition also entails a return to conceiving of the cinematic structure as
something akin to a language system.
Christian Metz’s analysis of cinematic language fundamentally under-
stood the signifying semiotic system, which he conceived of as a unique
sort of language, as patently ideological. Represented images in film, he
explains, do not transparently reflect a stable reality. Rather, they construct
a new state of affairs infused with an ideological dimension, as a result of
being filtered through the structural apparatus. Even the most “realistic”
cinema, he argues, does not show spectators real events, but rather those
“refracted through an ideological point of view, entirely thought out, signi-
fying from beginning to end. Meaning is not sufficient; there must also be
signification” (Metz, 1974, 37). Metz’s analysis raises two important issues.
First, he implies that meaning is not transferable on its own. It must attach
itself to an inherently ideological, signifying system. Second, although the
vehicle is necessary, the meaning nonetheless remains a separate entity.
This mode of conceptualizing film as a language system is conducive to
both Lacan’s notion of the (failure of the) signifier in the Real, as well as
Deleuze’s formulation of sense. In an early formulation of the notion of
 OCCASIONING THE REAL 153

the Real, which he names “the peace of the evening,” Lacan forwards the
idea that this moment of “the limit of the phenomenon’s grip on us” can be
construed as an instant where a radical break in discourse, an unsignifiable
moment, is occasioned by language itself.

We have come to the limit at which discourse, if it opens to anything

beyond meaning, opens to the signifier in the real. We shall never know,
in the perfect ambiguity in which it dwells, what it owes to this marriage
with discourse. (Lacan, 1993, 139)

In this passage, Lacan appears puzzled and unsure as to why these gaps
and breaks in discourse must be necessarily occasioned by a discursive
system. Metz seems to grapple with a similar predicament when trying
to locate the exact relationship between meaning and signification vis-à-
vis film. “A sequence of film,” he explains, “like a spectacle from life, car-
ries meaning within itself. The signifier is not easily distinguished from
the significate” (Metz, 1974, 43). Most of Metz’s project on cinema as a
language system struggles to pinpoint understanding of how exactly to
conceive of cinematic meaning as something separate from the significa-
tion system. Especially considering what he understands to be a relatively
short distance, to the point of being nearly (but, importantly, not entirely)
collapsed, between signifier and signified. The unique aspects of this
particular semiotic language system, which Metz calls “image discourse,”
create a “specific vehicle” in which “it is impossible to break up the sig-
nifier without getting isomorphic elements of the signified” (58, 63).
However, even within this nearly collapsed representational system, Metz
grants much importance to an excess of signification, an element that
escapes the image, and is in turn highly constitutive of the entire order.

The language is enriched by whatever is lost to system. The two phe-

nomena are one. It is as if the code’s signifying abundance were linked
to that of the message in the cinema—or rather separated from it—by an
obscurely rigorous relationship of inverse proportions . . . the message, as
it becomes refined, circumvents the code. At any given moment, the code
could change or disappear entirely, whereas the message will simply find
the means to express itself differently. (49)

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

possible. Ergo, in Deleuzian terms, we have entered the realm of sense,

moving past denotation, signification, and the image. Understanding
cinema as a language system, through Metz, facilitates this connection
with Deleuze’s sense, who conceptualizes this excess as occasioned by the
structural system it travels with. The next step, then, is to link up this
notion of cinematic sense with Lacan’s understanding of the Real gaze,
in order to begin to understand how film, as a structural and signifying
apparatus, can be understood as quasi-causing the Real gaze.

The Eye, the Look, and the Gaze

In Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Žižek argues that the kernel of
meaning that supposedly lies beyond representation is, paradoxically,
always occasioned by the symbolic structure; it cannot exist without it.
Moments of the Real occur in the context of ideological structures; they
never exist independently of them. “This is what Lacan means,” Žižek
explains, “when he says that the traumatic Real is encountered in dreams,
this is the way ideology structures our experience of reality” (Žižek,
1993, 63). This notion of the Real manifesting in a dream-text is akin to
Lacan’s notion of the signifier in the Real. Advancing this theory, more-
over, entails reconfiguring the relationship between the eye and the gaze.
The original Lacanian film theorists and proponents of apparatus theory
understood the gaze as an extension of the eye, with the camera serving
as a cyborg-type prosthetic extending its scope of power. However, align-
ing the gaze on the side of the Real involves separating it from the eye,
thus creating a split subject, fracturing of the look, and removing the gaze
from the domain of the sight organ. This figuration is, according to Lacan
(1988), constitutive of subjectivity. “The split that occurs in relation to an
encounter with the Real,” he explains, “enables us to understand the real,
in its dialectical effects, as originally unwelcome” (69). The gaze, Lacan
explains, constitutes the subject around a lack. “The gaze is presented
to us only in the form of a strange contingency . . . as the thrust of our
experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety” (73). The
gaze, which Lacan understands as a form of the object a, comes to “sym-
bolize this central lack” (77). Thus, according to Lacan, the gaze is best
located on the register of the Real, and an encounter with it involves not a
moment of mastery, but a profoundly traumatic, self-abnegating encoun-
ter with the Other. Further, Lacan explains, an encounter with the gaze
cannot simultaneously involve a sense of oneself as a subject; the gaze is
ego-negating, and thus the two experiences are mutually exclusive. The
gaze, as initially conceived of by Jean-Paul Sartre, is
 OCCASIONING THE REAL 155

the gaze by which I am surprised-surprised insofar as it changes all the

perspectives, the lines of my world, orders it, from the point of nothing-
ness where I am . . . insofar as I am under the gaze . . . I no longer see the eye
that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears. (84)

In Deleuzian terms, this gaze more closely resembles the ‘body without
organs’ (1990), or ‘full speech,’1 than the phallic, castrated organ without
a body implied by the ideological eye-gaze attempting visual apprehen-
sion and mastery over the visual field. This process of removal involves a
sense of separation, the feeling that “we are not immediately identi-
fied with our look, but stand somewhere ‘behind’ it” (Žižek, 1993, 64).
Through this splitting event, the spectators’ illusions of mastery are dis-
avowed, and

we become aware that there is actually somebody hidden behind the eye
and observing what is going on. The paradox here is that the gaze is con-
cealed by an eye, i.e. by its very organ. (64, emphasis in original)

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

Contemporary Application of Gaze Theory and Lacan:

An Intervention

Contemporary film theorists revisiting Lacan through film are beginning

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

the erotic eye of masculine desire towards the feminine drive of an Other
jouissance: From Imaginary visions and Symbolic rites towards Real mor-
talities. (88)

This is accomplished in Eyes, he argues, by the fact that the protago-

nist’s gaze is never allowed to assert total mastery and control; it is vari-
ously challenged by humiliation, danger, and the threat of destruction.
Although the women in the film seem to fill the hollow gap in the gazing
male’s ego, challenges to said ego reveal that very gap, a gap indicating
incompletion, vulnerability, and lack of mastery. The gaze, as instanti-
ated in Eyes, exemplifies a lack that desires the Other-as-woman for its
fulfillment. However, rather than demonstrating mastery and control,
Pizzato posits that this process exemplifies the gap itself, and its potential
for ideological disruption.

[T]he film presents the arousal, yet insecurity, of the male gaze-in its
dependence on the erotic beauty and symbolic knowledge of the woman to
bolster the hollow ego and repair its loss of identity. (89)

This hollowness or lack is exactly what, according to Žižek, constitutes

the subject itself. What the Real reveals in this particular case is the death
 OCCASIONING THE REAL 157

drive and masochistic fear and desire of feminine jouissance. Through

his commingled fear, titillation, and curiosity when faced with the ritu-
als of the sexualized death cult, Eyes’ male protagonist reveals this hol-
low kernel in his subject. The spectator of Eyes, according to Pizzato, can
choose “looking beyond the beautiful illusions of the screen Sacrifice
towards the Real-the gaze of mortality and lack of being in the apparatus
and its audience” (108).
Locating the radical potential of neo-Lacanian film theory involves
reading and dealing with more than the images themselves. Although the
above-discussed example breaks ground in its reformulation of gaze the-
ory, it nonetheless remains on the level of the filmic narrative, and does not
investigate the ways in which the apparatus itself can structure a moment
of the Real-qua spectatorship. Thus, ironically, this study and others like
it ultimately limit themselves to the register of the imaginary, analyzing
the ways in which the films’ storylines contain moments of Real eruptions
for their various characters. The next step of neo-Lacanian film theory
involves investigating how the cinematic apparatus, when conceived of as
a language system in the Deleuzian sense, can carry or structure a moment
of the Real. The following discussion of Lars van Trier’s film Dogville will
posit a theory of Real spectatorship through apparatus theory and the
understanding of film as a language.

Dogville’s Virtu(Re)al Moments: A Case Study

Dogville tells the story of Grace, a trusting and naive young woman flee-
ing her mob-affiliated family. While on the run, she discovers the small
mountain town of Dogville. The residents agree to hide her in exchange
for manual labor and other miscellaneous services. The situation seems
tolerable at first, although the longer Grace stays and the better she

Figure 6.1 Arial View, Dogville.

158 EMANUELLE WESSELS

treats the residents, the crueler, more abusive, and more exploitive they
become. The film utilizes a minimalist set, relying only on a few props
and chalk etchings on the ground. This particular aesthetic choice allows
for more focus on dialogue, shot composition, and camera work to build
the story. From the opening shots of the film, the spectator is positioned
as omniscient, able to see the entire town from above. A deductive shot
sequence, moving from wide angle to close-up, carries the spectator into
various homes. Further, a narrator walks spectators through the story and
explains characters as camera follows them, ostensibly supplying absolute
knowledge of their inner states. Early moments of contrast between shots
and narration structure sense, allowing spectators to make meaning from
the film through extrasemiotic events. For example, Tom—a “young phi-
losopher” and important figure in the town—visits a young woman, Liz,
with whom he is obsessed. Liz is described by the narrator as a “horizon,
bound by luscious curls,” and a “seductive; a sweet, painful abyss.” The
role of the narrator, revealing Tom’s perception of Liz, structures an ideo-
logical read of her, framing her image as the sort of construct described
by Mulvey and Rose: woman as the limit, the erotic break in the narra-
tive. However, the introductory shot of Liz belies this construction. She
is performing manual labor, and behaves in an irreverent and familiar
manner, greeting Tom with a sarcastic, not remotely flirtatious tone, and
mockingly cocking her head to one side. She notices his infatuation and
dryly comments that she’s moving away, and thus he will have to find
“some other girl’s skirt to peek up.” This incongruity between the narra-
tion and the shot composition is an element that will constitute the sense
as structured by the film. Gaps appear in Dogville’s narrative throughout:
the spectator is invited to realize this obvious incongruity and question
the narrator’s reliability. This moment establishes an instance of sense-
making: the language of the text has framed a meaning beyond the image,
has occasioned a moment of sense in the spectatorial perception.
As the film progresses, and the insidious characters of the townsfolk are
revealed, these gaps become larger, more pronounced, and more shock-
ing. Immediately before Grace is introduced, the narrator remarks that “it
hasn’t exactly rained gifts on this particular township,” gesturing to the dis-
advantaged status of Dogville, a moment that ultimately foreshadows the
ethical issues important to Dogville’s story. Upon hearing the gunshots of
the mobsters pursuing Grace, the narrator walks spectators through Tom’s
thought process and reactions, informing that he wanted to “hang onto
the feeling of danger.” Tom then begins to contemplate his self-appointed
depth and acumen as a writer, as close-ups capture his wistful and smug
expression, while long shots frame him lounging pensively on the bench.
Again, like the scene with Liz, the meaning of this sequence lies not in
 OCCASIONING THE REAL 159

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

Figure 6.2 Grace and Tom.

160 EMANUELLE WESSELS

Thus, the cinematic structure, through occasioning an excess of imag-

ery, also establishes the dialogue of both the narrator and film characters
as incomplete and lacking full meaning. Through this excess, the reliability
of discourse as able to supply complete access to meaning is questioned.
Dogville then revolves around the incompleteness and unreliability of the
signifier; the majority of the film’s meaning occurs not on the level of the
image/imaginary, but the moments of the Real gaze, manifesting within
the spectator’s perception and body. Grace is allowed to stay, and increas-
ingly more taxing amounts of unpaid physical labor are demanded from
her in exchange for boarding. Shots of Grace offering her help as repayment
are followed by close-ups of the faces of Dogville residents; unexpressive,
blank, ranging on suspicious and hostile. These montage sequences further
establish the radical disconnect between Grace’s worldview and her hosts’.
By the third chapter of the film, the involvement of the narrator has
tapered off, supplying an initial set up, but leaving spectators to their
own devices after informing them that “[Grace] had shown the town
of Dogville her true face.” At this point in the film, the structural work
focuses primarily on character dialogue and shot composition. At the next
town meeting, Tom frames Grace’s openness as “weakness.” “Grace had
borne her throat to the town and it had responded with great gifts, with
friends,” the narrator offers, framing Grace’s reaction to the discovery of
small gifts in her clothing hamper as her face beams in a warm smile. Over
the course of her labor tenure, the narrator informs, she serves as “brains
for Ben, hands for Martha, and eyes for McKay.” Grace’s labor power is
fragmented and objectified, construed as discrete parts serving a specific
and disjointed role. Although relatively innocuous at this point, the sense
is that, given the layout of the previous chapters, the situation will become
more exploitive and unethical. The camera oscillates between a more natu-
ral, organic mode of looking that evokes a spectator present in the narra-
tive, and an omniscient, bird’s eye gaze capable of viewing the entire town
from above. The look afforded to the eye, when combined with narration
informing of character’s inner states, ostensibly constructs a spectator that
is all knowing, fully informed, and privy to every detail of outward and
inner occurrences. However, the excess emerges through the unreliabil-
ity and lack of transparency provided by this very illusion of full access.
Although, on the one hand, spectators have access to every detail of the
characters’ inner states, incongruities establish the insincerities and limits
of this very information. Discourse is unreliable and lacking, and the full-
ness is punctured by moments of the Real, occasioned by the revelation of
something existing beyond the level of speech. Full access to information
within the text, then, indicates the very lack at the level of the signifier, the
inability of signification to convey full meaning. The meaning comes from
 OCCASIONING THE REAL 161

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

abstract, universal principles such as “education” and “justice,” without any

clue of how to ethically implement these principles in complex, contingent
situations. Similarly, the film text, through various framings of spectator
positions, establishes the fragility and inability of code-structures to fully
convey “true” meaning. Discourse is always unreliable in the same way that
Tom’s moral mandates are. Moments of understanding are not conveyed
by the eye, regardless of how much power it claims, but by the revelations
of the Real gaze.
Grace finally experiences a wake up call, a moment of the Real that
radically alters her worldview and understanding of Dogville’s residents.
While changing a resident’s sheets one day, she mutters that “nobody is
gonna sleep here,” a revelation that initially shocks and disorients her, and
is perceived as, the narrator informs, a “startling utterance” from “out-
side.” Grace’s first moment of understanding that she is being abused and
exploited is experienced as a powerful, shifting event. In a conversation
with her mobster father, who has tracked her down, Grace acknowledges
that justification of one’s actions in Dogville is interpreted as weakness.
When read against her prior realization, spectators are moved to the
understanding that a moment of the Real has dramatically reconstituted
Grace’s outlook. In Deleuzian terms, a potential affect—an instance of the
virtual—has become real, has actualized. Regardless of its point of origin
outside, inside, from deep in the unconscious or upon a smooth plane, the
material effects of the eruption are palpable. Although she is beginning to
accept what has happened, Grace still defends the residents of the town. “I
call them dogs,” her father responds, unsympathetic. “Dogs only obey their
nature, why shouldn’t we forgive them?” Grace implores. Grace’s father
accuses her of condoning unredeemable subjects by overdetermining the
role of circumstance. Dogs, according to the father, obey only the lash.
He then discusses penalties, accountabilities, and accuses Grace of being
“arrogant” for having excessively “high ethical standards” that prompt her
to exonerate those who are allegedly beneath her cultivated sensibilities.
As with Tom, Grace’s father represents the Law, the symbolic order, a man-
ifestation of faith in abstracted code-structures and rules. Shot-reverse-
shot sequence features her confusion and frustration, and her father’s
smug self-assuredness in his own position; another impasse. “The people
who live here are doing their best under very hard circumstances,” Grace
explains, arguing that material circumstances such as abject poverty may
not be the best ground for cultivating a sense of other-centered ethics.
Grace initially empathized with the townspeople, assuming that, given
the circumstances, she could have easily engaged in similar behavior.
However, suddenly, Grace sees all of their flaws and experiences another
moment of the Real. She finally understands their worldview, accepts it,
 OCCASIONING THE REAL 163

and realizes that she has failed to change the world through her benevo-
lence and kindness. Deciding that the world would be better off without
the town, Grace succumbs to the symbolic order and aligns herself with it,
ordering her father to shoot all of the residents, starting with the children, to
teach the mother a lesson about stoicism. “I owe her that,” she muses, now
completely assimilated into the interpretive framework of Dogville. Grace’s
worldview has shifted; she has been changed and reconstituted by her Real
experiences, or, for Deleuze, her Events, in Dogville. Similarly, based on
the constructions within the film’s signifying system, the spectator is also
reconfigured by being moved to an understanding of the flaws of Dogville,
its obsession with unreliable code structures and universal standards of
judgment, fidelities that led to a fundamental inability to understand ethi-
cal conduct. The film concludes by denying an answer, as the narrator hails
the spectator with the call “some things you have to do yourself.”

Conclusions

Given the ideological nature of the imaginary, politicized Lacanian film

theory must move beyond analysis of the images themselves, especially
the notion that they possess a plentitude of meaning, and read the gaps,
The Real, the sites where excess meaning beyond the images emerges.
Cinema, as a language and semiotic system, occasions these moments in
a manner analogous to the way in which language, for Deleuze, brings
forth sense. Dogville, by repeatedly moving spectators toward moments of
realization through gaps between visual images and dialogue, structures
this mode of understanding. Indirect discourse is a predominant mode of
storytelling. This process can allow for the introduction of new subjectivi-
ties outside of and not determined by ideology. Hence, the politics of Neo-
Lacanian film theory is one of individual resistance through moments
of awareness, one that empowers the viewing subject to break ideology’s
hold on him/her. The fundamental site allowing for this process of resub-
jectification to occur is the Gaze. Specifically, a political Lacanian film
theory rooted in The Real involves removing the Gaze from its privileged
seat as an ideological handmaiden producing mastery and control, and
refiguring it as an object revealing the very lack in ideological subjectivity
that new subjects can embrace.
The stakes of film and spectatorship involve dramatically reversing and
reformulating the nature of the gaze. Far from constituting a tool achieving
hegemonic mastery, the gaze is quite the opposite: the object petit a itself, a
fetish pursued to complete the gap in one’s ego. Gazing indicates a neces-
sity, the need for the subject to include the other, and unite with the other,
164 EMANUELLE WESSELS

in order to achieve completion. Approaching film from the perspective

of the Real, then, drastically changes the process of spectatorship. As
McGowan (2007) explains, “[t]he gaze is a blank point-a point that disrupts
the flow and sense of the experience . . . As the indication of the spectator’s
dissolution, the gaze cannot offer anything resembling mastery” (8).
Radical subjectivity, thus, requires a return to The Real and facing the
lack present in the self, as opposed to internalizing the ideological promise
that this lack can be completely filled by promises of commodified, ego-
centric total enjoyment. Real enjoyment is, like masochism, the giving of
oneself to the event, letting go of the ego, not attempting to control, pos-
sess, and master enjoyment-in-objects. The first step toward breaking the
ideological stranglehold is noticing its grip on oneself, a process that can
be occasioned through cinematic spectatorship. The politics of the mas-
ochistic gaze, thus, involves its ability to empower individual spectators
to “wake up” and realize their subjective presence in symbolic authority
and discursive code structures. As the film Dogville demonstrates, another
important aspect of realizing and eschewing subjectivity in ideology
involves a subject’s recognition of the inherent limitations of semiotic and
linguistic structures to convey full meaning.
A thorough understanding of how cinematic spectatorship can func-
tion in this process of Real resubjectification is crucial for developing and
advancing a theory of the subject around Lacan’s notion of the Real gaze.
In a sense, this intervention reverses the conclusions reached by early
Lacanian theorists of film and ideology. Whereas in these phases of the
theory, film was situated as an ideological apparatus hailing subjects on the
level of the imaginary, this reformulation situates it as a mechanism with
potential to construct and bring about those definitive Real moments able
to radically change selves and worlds. By moving the gaze to the register of
the Real and examining how the cinema can, in a Deleuzian sense, carry
the Real gaze in the manner of a language, I hope to have shown how film,
through a revised understanding of apparatus theory and spectatorship,
contains potential to serve as a reconstitutive, even revolutionary, device.

Note

1. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘Body without Organs’ is a virtual

dimension of the body that is defined by a collection of potentials and not
yet actualized affects. The BwO is permeated by unformed matters, “flows in
all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transi-
tory particles” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 40). Lacan (1987) understands
“full speech” as speech that emanates from the big Other itself, not a sub-
ject, and thus is able to supply a plentitude or fullness of meaning. Without
 OCCASIONING THE REAL 165

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

References

Althusser, Louis (1971). “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin

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

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

Filmography

Kubrick, Stanley (1999). Eyes Wide Shut. USA.

Von Trier, Lars (2003). Dogville. USA.
 Part III

Encountering Žižek
 7

The Universe as Metacinema

Patricia Pisters

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

H itchcock’s fantasy about directly entering people’s brains seemed

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

does? What if we consider him to be a visionary, anticipating contempo-

rary scientific and cinematographic preoccupations, as would a rhizom-
atic model of thinking, according to which the brain is literally the screen?
Would Hitchcock’s fantasy then not be a very Bergsonian statement about
the immanence of body, brain and images? For, as Deleuze argues in The
Movement-Image, Bergson was ‘startlingly ahead of his time: it is the uni-
verse as cinema in itself, a metacinema.’2 After all, Hitchcock’s wish seems
to entail a revolutionary conception of images that are not representations
of something else, but exist in themselves. In The Time-Image Deleuze
attributes to Hitchcock explicitly anticipatory insights in respect of the
nature of images in contemporary society. When he discusses the develop-
ments of the image (cinematographic or ‘real’) he argues: ‘Hitchock’s pre-
monition will come true: a camera-consciousness which would no longer
be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental
connections it is able to enter into.’3
However, if Hitchcock is not only a visionary and the first of the modern
filmmakers, but is indeed also the ultimate classic director, who completes
the classic action-images, his fantasy would after all be a symptomatic fan-
tasy.4 In any case his work is a very rich source for tracking down some of
the assumptions of the different images of thought that are presupposed
by a classic psychoanalytic and a rhizomatic view of the subject, the world
and cinema. In order to bring to the surface some of these presuppositions
and implications, I will first give a comparative reading of Hitchcock’s uni-
verse, concentrating on the concept of the subject that is defined by desire.
Then I will focus on the status of cinema and the cinematographic appara-
tus by looking at Rear Window and especially two other metafilms: Michael
Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Strange Days. Although Strange Days has
a lot in common with Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), it has more often been
compared to Peeping Tom. Both Peeping Tom and Strange Days deal with
the (darker) implications of our cinematographic voyeurism. Nevertheless
I will argue that in comparing Strange Days to Peeping Tom one misses some
essential differences between the two films, especially the way in which a
new kind of camera consciousness has entered our perception, our experi-
ence of the world and ourselves. I will therefore return to Hitchcock, espe-
cially to Vertigo, and look at the ambiguous status of this film: at once a
classical picture of an obsessive love affair (a movement-image) and a very
modern film about the confusing experience of time and virtuality (a time-
image) that anticipates Strange Days. Contemporary cinema, for which
Strange Days is paradigmatic, demonstrates that both Bergson’s futuris-
tic insights and Hitchcock’s premonition have indeed come true: we now
live in a metacinematic universe that calls for an immanent conception of
audiovisuality, and in which a new camera consciousness has entered our
perception. In this chapter I will explore various implications and effects of
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 171

the ‘universe as metacinema’ and the new camera consciousness by consid-

ering Peeping Tom, Strange Days and Hitchcock’s universe as philosophical
pamphlets.

Hitchcock’s Universe: Žižek and Deleuze

Representations of Guilty Subjects or a Logic of Relations

I will begin this exploration by looking again at Hitchcock’s work using

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

of Hitchcock gives an ultimate representation of how subjects outside cin-

ema experience the world: the represented subjects are under the same
constraints as the spectators in their own lives. Deleuze, however, sees the
tapestry as a network of relations, carefully set up by Hitchcock to impli-
cate the viewer in the (mental) actions. It is not a matter of the look and
the eye. At the very most we can speak of a mind’s eye. The spectator is not
looking for representations of his own life, but is participating in the game
of relations set up by Hitchcock.
A third and final difference in approach between Žižek and Deleuze
concerns Hitchcock’s above-quoted remark about directly influencing the
brain. In his expressed wish to reach spectators directly, without media-
tion, Žižek emphasizes the symptomatic aspect of Hitchcock’s fantasy:
according to Žižek it is this urge to function without representation that
constitutes the psychotic core in Hitchcock’s universe. In ‘reality’ there is
always representation as a kind of ‘umbilical cord’ between Hitchcock and
the public, between the subjects on-screen and the subjects off-screen.9
In representation, subjects off-screen constitute their identity by identify-
ing with subjects on-screen, taking these subjects as models. Again it is
obvious that Deleuze has a completely different philosophy. Going back
to Spinoza and Bergson, Deleuze does not believe in the all-encompassing
force of the concept of representation, and hence the concept of identifica-
tion as a means of modeling subjectivity. According to Deleuze the brain,
which is both an intellectual and an emotional entity and functions paral-
lel (not hierarchically) to the body, can give more insights about how we
perceive ourselves as subject. So for Deleuze, Hitchcock’s remark about the
electrodes in the brain is not symptomatic in leaving out the most impor-
tant thing, but is a philosophical reflection about how images work, about
the direct effects of images in themselves. Therefore, even without taking
the electrodes in the brain literally, it indicates that it might be useful to
think about images in terms of effects and affects that are set in motion by
a complex interplay between body and brain, perception and memory.

Transcendental or Immanent Desire

Having established these basic presuppositions of the psychoanalytic and

rhizomatic models concerning the relationship between the (cinemato-
graphic) image, the subject and the world, it is now necessary to look more
closely at the subject and one of the most important aspects that consti-
tute the subject: desire. Therefore, before returning to Hitchcock, let me
briefly recall the concept of the subject in relation to desire in both mod-
els. First the psychoanalytic subject: in early psychoanalysis, according to
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 173

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

by Northwest is, according to Žižek, not perceived simply as part of diegetic

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

The Spinozistic self is both the idea of an actually existing body, moving
into a future, and the idea of all that has been retained of that body’s past.
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 175

The mind struggles to make itself a unity – a well-functioning temporal

as well as spatial whole. In the context of this view of the self as a constant
effort to articulate itself, and to maintain itself in being amidst the wider
wholes on which it depends, borders become unstable.15

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

Bergsonian/(Nietzschean) tradition, which is elaborated by Deleuze. As

I explained in the introduction, in the transcendental tradition the eye is
important because it collects all the impressions that are necessarily unified
by an a-priori ‘I’: ‘I see, I think, I feel’ is what synthesizes all “my” experi-
ences, hence the subject finds itself before and beyond perception and expe-
rience; it is a transcendental subject.16 In an immanent tradition, the subject
is not a-priori given, but perception and experience form it. It is by the
multiplicity of perceptions that the ‘I’ is formed, the brain being the nervous
center of all connections and constructive subject formations. Desire, as
one of the most constituting elements according to both psychoanalysis and
rhizomatics, is equally conceived as either a transcendental imposing cate-
gory or an immanent constructing force. From the Žižekian and Deleuzian
analyses of Hitchcock’s work, it now becomes clear what the implications
for the subject are if we conceive images, subjects and the world accord-
ing to these different traditions. A transcendental philosophy gives a sta-
ble concept of the world, the subject and images: although there is always
something unknown haunting the subject, it is also the only thing that gives
our experiences a solid basis from which we can compare and identify our-
selves. In an immanent philosophy, the subject is in constant formation,
always changing through multiple encounters. It is a concept of the subject
that is much less sure, which can create unwanted uncertainties, but per-
haps also unexpected possibilities. In subsequent chapters the implications
of such an immanent model for truth, ethics and politics will be elaborated
more extensively in relation to specific audiovisual encounters. Here I want
to focus on the metalevel of the audiovisual universe, on the status of the
cinematographic apparatus and the (cinematographic) image.

Metacinema and the Cinematographic Apparatus:

Peeping Tom and Strange Days

Opening Sequences: Displaying the Cinematographic Apparatus

In the fifties the critics of Cahiers du Cinema considered Hitchock’s Rear

Window as the prototype of a film about film: James Stuart’s immobile
position, voyeuristically directed toward the scenes in front of him, spy-
ing on his neighbors, was considered as the position of the film viewer.17
When Strange Days, a modern or even futuristic metafilm, came out, it
was not so much compared to Rear Window. Bigelow’s film was more
often compared to yet another metafilm, Peeping Tom. More explicitly
than Rear Window, and like Strange Days, Peeping Tom shows the nega-
tive implications of (cinematographic) voyeurism. Before returning to
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 177

Hitchcock and some more aspects of transcendental and immanent con-

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

Peeping Tom differs from Strange Days: Peeping Tom follows a much more
chronological and spatially coherent logic than the out of jointness of the
world of Strange Days.
However, if one compares the opening sequences of the two films, some
striking similarities can indeed be observed. In both films the very first
image is an extreme close-up of an eye: clearly an indication of the voy-
euristic inclinations of the protagonists. This close-up is then followed,
in both films, by subjective camera images, presumably from the point
of view of the beholder of the eye in close-up, who at that point is still
unknown to the audience. In Peeping Tom we follow a prostitute through
the viewfinder of a film camera, until she gets a scared expression on her
face, stares in agony into the camera and we understand that she is being
murdered by the man who was filming her. We know it is a film camera
that has been recording the images because, in a short sequence between
the close-up of the eye and the subjective camera-images, we have seen in a
more ‘objective’ establishing shot the street in which the woman is waiting
for a client, the person who is filming seen from behind, and a close-up of
the camera-eye; we also see a hand throwing away a Kodak film box, and
we constantly see the hair cross of the viewfinder in front of the images.
After this scene ends with the scared face of the woman, we see a projector
that projects the same images onto a screen while somebody (the man with
the camera, protagonist Mark Lewis, as we will understand later) watches
them. And then the credits come up. So in this way the whole cinematic
apparatus is staged before the actual film starts: from the very beginning it
is clear that Peeping Tom is a film about film.
In the opening sequence of Strange Days the only clue we get that the
images following the close-up of the eye are technically mediated is the
fact that the first image after this close-up is obviously digitized (it takes
some time before the pixels constitute a sharp, clear image). But then we
are immediately, again via subjective camera movement, in the middle of a
robbery; the robbery goes wrong, there is a flight to a roof top in order to
escape from the police, and finally we experience that the person via whose
senses we have lived through all the previous events, falls from the roof: ‘we’
fall from the rooftop. With a little nausea we then discover that this was a
virtual-reality experience of the film’s main character, Lenny Nero. He had
his brain connected to a squid (Superconducting Quantum Interference
Device), a futuristic device that can record experiences and play them back
immediately (other people’s experiences or personal experiences from the
past).21 Lenny buys and sells these digital drugs, but he is infuriated by this
tape: it is a ‘blackjack’, a recording of death. When he pulls the playback rig
from his head he exclaims to his dealer that he does not deal in snuff. In
contrast to Peeping Tom, the opening sequence of Strange Days makes clear
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 179

that there is no longer the distance of the camera and the projector, but a
direct physical involvement of body and brain.
How can we account for this difference on a theoretical level? Peeping
Tom seems to be paradigmatic for the so-called apparatus theory, devel-
oped in the seventies by Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Commoli and
Christian Metz.22 The film can also be read as a commentary on psycho-
analytic interpretations and feminist gender implications of the apparatus
theory. Baudry saw the cinematic apparatus as similar to Plato’s cave: the
cinematic apparatus ‘offers the subject perceptions which are really rep-
resentations mistaken for perceptions’.23 Peeping Tom, because it displays
the cinematic apparatus, demonstrates how the representation model con-
ceives the world and by extension art: the image that we eventually see is a
re-presentation, a copy of the original reality. Philosophy of representation
is based on the idea of a model and a copy (the original and the image, the
essence and its reflection). Furthermore Peeping Tom demonstrates that
in representation there is also a clear distinction between the one who is
looking (the subject, Mark, the photographer, the peeping Tom) and that
which is being looked at (the object, the prostitute, the object of desire).
Related to the mobility of the camera, the subject in the cinematographic
apparatus is conceived as a transcendental subject:

[The] eye-subject, the invisible base of artificial perspective (which in fact

only represents a larger effort to produce an ordering, a regulated tran-
scendence) becomes absorbed in, ‘elevated’ to a vaster function, propor-
tional to the movement which it can perform. (…) The mobility of the
camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation
of the ‘transcendental subject’.24

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

are always aware of the distance between the model (that which is filmed)
and the copy (the represented image). We also notice a distance between
the subject who perceives and the object that is perceived.
On the laserdisc edition of Peeping Tom Laura Mulvey, who gave her
comments on the film on a separate sound track, demonstrates how Peeping
Tom not only is a film about film and filmic representation, but also refers
to the history of the cinematic apparatus (at least to the origins of the
cinematic apparatus as it has been conceived traditionally). At the end of
the film we see that Mark Lewis has rebuilt a sort of Muybridgean instal-
lation of photo cameras that, in quick succession, take pictures of him
while he commits suicide by throwing himself onto a spear that is hidden
in the tripod of his camera. According to Mulvey, by relating the tragic
end of the film’s hero to the origins of the cinematic apparatus, Peeping
Tom also makes a statement about the death of this apparatus. Therefore
it is not surprising that in Strange Days we do not find the same kind of
apparatus: we find ourselves drawn into a frantic world of images and
sounds where there is no self/other boundary. There is also no longer a
distance between perceiver and perceived (there is no distancing cam-
era). The virtual experience is a real experience: body and mind receive
intensive energy at the same time. It is through diminished distance
between who is seeing and what is seen, through the physical and inten-
sive implication of the spectator, that we have an encounter with another
world that at the same time forces us to think differently about images that
are no longer representation. The cinematographic apparatus that is dis-
played in Strange Days is a Bergsonian one, where matter, body and brain
are the image:

An atom is an image, which extends to the point to which its actions and
reactions extend. My body is an image, hence a set of actions and reactions.
My eyes, my brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain con-
tain images since it is one image amongst others? External images act on
me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images
be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement? (…)
This infinite set of images constitutes a kind of plane of immanence. The
image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter: not
something behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of
the image and movement. (…) [A]ll consciousness is something, it is indis-
tinguishable from the thing, that is from the image of light.”26

We see here a very different kind of cinematographic apparatus than in

traditional philosophy and film theory. It is a cinematographic apparatus
in which the brain is the screen and in which ‘subjects’ are formed by act-
ing and reacting to various images on a plane of immanence.
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 181

Gender Implications: Differently Voyeuristic

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

on the film is certainly defendable, I would argue that things are in fact
more complicated. Already in the opening sequence it is clear that we are
dealing with a similar yet also very different scopic regime, and perhaps
even a different philosophical model. During the film, gender relations
are equally presented differently. Although the hero of the film is rather
‘weak’ and the main female characters are strong women, it is not a mat-
ter of a simple role reversal (the woman having the look and the man
the to-be-looked-at-ness), which would keep us in the same paradigm. The
difference is also not due solely to the fact that in Strange Days there are
no more oedipal families, although that certainly has some significance.
More importantly, in this film the look is connected to all other senses and
is completely embodied. There is no longer a clearly defined subject film-
ing, watching and appropriating an image / filmed object. A real virtual
experience is presented, involving the protagonist and the spectator both
physically and mentally. The relation between subject and object becomes
a two-way process, an encounter between different forces (different in all
its variations, not only in terms of opposition). On the basis of this idea of
encounters, the nature of desire also needs to be redefined. Here we can see
a more Deleuzian conception of desire. For Deleuze and Guattari desire
is just as unconscious and just as important as in psychoanalysis, but as
indicated in the previous section, it is conceived positively, as a connection
with something or somebody else. This positive definition of desire, then,
again has great implications for gender theory. We can no longer speak of
a (male) subject desiring / filming a (female) object.
In Strange Days Lenny considers himself as a ‘shrink’, somebody who
helps people to fulfill their desires. But his version of a shrink is related
to his capability of connecting (wiring) people to all kinds of experiences
(as a ‘switchboard of the soul’), which makes him quite the opposite of
traditional psychoanalysts, whose task is to eliminate all desire that goes
beyond the oedipal norm. In the beginning of the film he says to a client:
‘What would you like to experience? Would you like to make love with a
girl, with two girls maybe? Would you like to do it with a boy? Or, would
you like to be a girl maybe?’ Of course there is a utopian element in this
presentation of sexual relationships, but nevertheless it indicates a differ-
ent and positive attitude toward gender relations: one of multiplicities and
becoming (a becoming other, instead of having and possessing the other),
one of unstable identities and changing relations, in short one of differ-
ences and repetitions in many encounters.
Unfortunately this does not mean that all the abuses have disappeared.
Like in Peeping Tom, one of the central scenes in Strange Days is a rape/
murder scene of a hooker, which is absolutely unpleasant to watch. This is
the scene that the male critics of Late Review were indignantly referring
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 183

to. However, there is a difference between the rape/murder scenes in the

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

feel the killer’s excitement and the woman’s terror: “Lenny is feeling the
stalker’s exhilaration, pounding heart, flushed skin, panting breath, over-
laid with her own senses … so the excitement and terror merge into one
thing, one overwhelming wave of dread sensation.” Lenny goes to pieces as
the tape rolls.’29 It is the worst thing he has ever experienced; to make this
clear, unlike in Peeping Tom, close-ups of Lenny’s horrified face frequently
interrupt the rape scene. He literally gets sick and throws up. This immedi-
ate physical reaction ‘contaminates’ the spectator as well, without leaving
any room for safe distance.
Joan Smith also refers to the violent reactions of mainly male critics to
this film, and explains why they are so furious. After explaining that pros-
titutes in cinema are often coded in a very stereotypical way and seldom
become ‘real’ persons because we know through the codes that they will
die soon, Smith continues: ‘What is different about Strange Days is that Iris,
although her character is coded in exactly this way – tight, low-cut dresses,
wildly unstable behavior – becomes a real person for Lenny Nero, and for
the audience, at the moment of her death. Male viewers are not permit-
ted to maintain the customary safe distance from which they observe the
process, which turns these women into corpses: instead, they are forced
through Lenny’s reaction to realize what Iris is suffering. … It is hardly a
coincidence that [the film] has prompted furious reactions, specifically the
accusation that women should not be dirtying their hands like this. There
is something illogical about this response, for it is precisely these women –
the victims of serial rapists and killers – whose voices are silenced first in
real life and second by the authors and directors who find their attackers
endlessly fascinating. Men, it seems, can bump off as many women as they
like in novels and on screen. What will not be tolerated is women speaking
up for corpses.’30 The violent reactions of the male critics on BBC’s Late
Review seem to be related to the shock of the experience of female terror
for male viewers (which by the same token is no longer female terror) and
to the fact that women ‘speak up for corpses’ (‘You would have been furi-
ous if a man had made this picture’, one critic told his female colleague –
‘but men wouldn’t’, seems to be the tacit implication).
One could of course also argue that it is again the Lacanian Real that
enters the picture here. This could indeed be one explanation of the rape/
murder scene in Strange Days (the hooker becomes a subject only at the
moment of her death). However, whereas the subject in Peeping Tom seems
to tell us (like psychoanalysis) that actually men are just as much tragic
victims as women, and cannot help being sadistic voyeurs, the message in
Strange Days seems to be different. In creating an experience of becoming
both rapist and victim, a critique is given on the whole traditional subject-
object opposition. Strange Days does not say: ‘men can’t help it, we are all
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 185

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

‘a free indirect discourse’. In his exposition of the perception-image, a type

of image that is ‘presupposed’ by all other images, Deleuze argues that a
camera consciousness as free indirect discourse is the essence of cinema:

We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images; we are caught

between a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-con-
sciousness which transforms it.32

Although Deleuze recognizes the possibility of subjectively and objectively

attributed images, he claims that the mobile camera has ultimately led to
‘the emancipation of the viewpoint (…) The shot would then stop being
a spatial category and has become a temporal one’.33 Since Hitchcock is
the director who, according to Deleuze, ultimately introduced this type of
camera-consciousness into the image and into perception both of which
are becoming more temporal, I will turn once more to his work, before
finally returning to Strange Days.

Camera Consciousness and Temporal Confusion:

Strange Days and Vertigo

Indiscernibility of Subjective and Objective, Virtual and Actual

Vertigo is the film of Hitchcock that most clearly permits both a transcen-
dental and an immanent reading of the subject. Let me elaborate on this
a little. Vertigo’s story is well known: the film is situated in San Francisco,
where John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson leaves the police force because of his fear
of heights. When an old friend asks him to shadow his wife, Madeleine,
Scottie follows her, saves her from drowning, and falls in love with her.
Nevertheless Scottie cannot prevent her from committing suicide. Believing
Madeleine is dead, he meets Judy, the living image of Madeleine, and he
becomes obsessed by the idea of recreating the image of the dead woman.
If we look at Vertigo in a psychoanalytic way, obviously a lot of feminist
criticism comes to mind. In early psychoanalytic critiques Hitchcock’s male
protagonists are seen as sadistic bearers of the gaze, trying to appropriate
their object of desire, the woman. Clearly, the scene in Ernie’s Restaurant, in
which Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time, could be read in this way: he
(the male subject) looks at his object of desire (the woman). During the first
half of the film he tries to save her from a strange possession (she thinks she
is her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes) and tries to make her his (‘I have
you, I have you,’ Scottie exclaims at some point). When he does not succeed
in this, he becomes obsessed by bringing his ideal object back to life, at the
cost of female subjectivity: Judy first becomes Madeleine again and then
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 187

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

Though Stewart isn’t aware of it yet, the viewers already know that Judy is
not just a girl who looks like Madeleine, but that she is Madeleine! Everyone
188 PATRICIA PISTERS

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

Modleski reads this quote as indicative of the power of the mother/

woman and the female point of view that undermines the male posi-
tions in Hitchcock even though she is always punished for that. I
would say that Hitchcock’s strategy undermines processes of iden-
tification: the viewer does not identify with Stewart/Scottie because
he/she knows more. Instead, Hitchcock gives the spectator a spe-
cial place. Knowing more than the protagonist, a different kind of
relation and subjectivity is aimed at. As I will try to demonstrate,
this is entirely because of the experience of time. As Deleuze has
made clear in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, cinema is
Bergsonian in its conceptualization of time. Bergson’s major thesis
about time is known:

The past co-exists with the present that it has been; the past is pre-served
in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits
itself into present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved.
(…) The only subjectivity is in time grasped in its foundation, and it is we
who are internal to time, not the other way around. That we are in time
looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the
interior in us, but just the opposite, [time is] the interiority in which we
are, in which we move, live, and change.36

As one of the films that show how we inhabit time, Deleuze men-
tions Vertigo. In his film Sunless (1982) Chris Marker emphasizes the
complex layers of time in Vertigo. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi in his work
Une idée du cinéma elaborates this point in a Deleuzian perspective. 37
According to Esquenazi, the scene in Ernie’s restaurant is a scene that
contains everything that will follow. In Vertigo there are three women:
Carlotta, Madeleine and Judy. These three women are the same, but
they do not inhabit the same time. It is up to Scottie to distinguish
between the different levels of time, which is sometimes impossible
because they conflate. Scottie is confused by experiencing several
layers of time (the virtuality of the past, the actuality of the present)
at the same moment. In a detailed and beautiful analysis Esquenazi
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 189

demonstrates how Madeleine’s face in profile in the restaurant scene is

a crystal-image: it is at the same time in the past and the present, vir-
tual and actual. It is quite possible to relate Scottie’s look to Madeleine’s
profile, and hence to identify with Scottie, as psychoanalytic readings
have done. But in doing so one fails to notice that the relation between
the two looks is not a classic shot/counter-shot, imposing a look from a
subject to an object. Then before Madeleine enters the bar, Scottie has
turned his back; he even looks in the same direction as Madeleine and
therefore cannot see her in the same way as we, the spectators, see her
breathtaking profile. Which means we have to conclude that the image
of Madeleine is a virtual image actually presented. 38
In this first profile the different layers of time germinate; also the dou-
bling of Madeleine in the mirror, when she leaves the restaurant, is an
indication of the temporal doubling that will follow. Because it is some-
times unclear whether what the spectator sees is an actual or virtual image
(Madeleine’s profile could be actual to the spectator but virtual to Scottie)
the question of the point of view is raised: from which point of view is the
story told? The confusion, and at the same time beauty of this scene, is due
to the fact that this question becomes difficult to answer. We can under-
stand now when Deleuze says that a camera-consciousness starts to make
mental connections in time:

The camera is no longer content sometimes to follow the character’s move-

ment, sometimes itself to undertake movements of which they are merely
the object, but in every case it subordinates descriptions of a space to the
functions of thought. This is not a simple distinction between the subjec-
tive and the objective, the real and the imaginary, it is on the contrary their
indiscernibility which will endow the camera with a rich array of func-
tions (…) Hitchcock’s premonition will come true: a camera-consciousness
which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or
make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into.39

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

performing actors, characters become more like seers and wanderers, con-
fused by the experience of time. In Vertigo both Scottie and Madeleine
are wanderers. In that capacity they become visionary, capable of seeing
the crystals of time. They even decide to wander off together in the forest.
In this scene we can see how Scottie is fascinated by the virtuality of
Carlotta in Madeleine, just as later he will be absorbed by the virtuality of
Madeleine in Judy.
Jean-Pierre Esquenazi gives a much more elaborate analysis of the
crystal-image in Vertigo. I will here try to draw some conclusions for the
concept of the subject in such an image. As I said earlier, the concept of
time makes the notion of selfhood and the subject unstable: one could say,
like Tania Modleski, that all identification boils down to the woman, which
makes the male subject position unstable. But in a Spinozian/Deleuzian
perspective of time, there is not so much to identify with: both Scottie and
Madeleine lose their identity, are confused about their identity; they live
in the past and the present at the same time. The notion of the subject is
obscured by a desire to connect with virtual worlds of the past. And the
spectator is a third term, sometimes consciously addressed by the camera,
sometimes presented with a point of view of one of the protagonists, but
clearly part of the network of relations, more than just by identification.
The spectator starts wondering and wandering on his or her own terms.
To conclude about Hitchcock, one can say that his work demonstrates,
as Žižek has shown, that the subject can be seen as a concept that depends
on the transcendental notion of the Real. The subject’s fundamental desire
is ultimately based on this nothingness of the impossible Real. When
Scottie sees his own decapitated head in his dream, he has a maddening
encounter with the Real. The spectator constitutes him or herself as a sub-
ject by identifying with the character(s) on the screen, feeling the same
constraints (of the Real or otherwise) as the protagonists. However, like the
protagonist, the subject off-screen can never identify with the Gaze of the
Real, which is unrepresentable. The Eye and the unrepresentable Gaze are
important models for understanding subjectivity.
According to Deleuze, however, Hitchcock saturates the representing
movement-image by introducing mental-relations into the image. The
spectator is no longer invited to identify, but to think and make connec-
tions between the different images. It is now the model of the brain, the
rhizomatic mental connections that it can make and the way it conceives
time, that are important. The sense of self is still important, but is con-
fused, loosened and made more flexible. Because Scottie literally loses the
ground under his feet, the space of the look (his vertigo), he opens up to
time and to the confusion between virtual and actual. One can even won-
der if the second part of the movie, after Scottie’s nightmare and mental
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 191

breakdown, is not completely taking place in his mind (we never actu-
ally see him leaving the hospital, nor do we see his loyal girlfriend Midge
again). In any case, Hitchock’s Vertigo displays certainly a new kind of
camera consciousness.

Brainwaves and Time: Strange Days’ ‘Vertigo’

Comparing now the opening scene of Vertigo with the opening scene of
Strange Days, we notice another striking case of repetition and difference.
In terms of form of content, in both films the first image of the eye is fol-
lowed by a chase sequence on a rooftop, ending in a vertiginous image of
a dissipating deep space. In Vertigo it is still up to the viewer to relate the
eye of the opening sequence to the mind’s eye: one can easily forget this
because the film’s opening is very classic. Scottie/Stewart is following a
thief on a rooftop and the spectator is in the first instance invited to iden-
tify with him. He is first represented objectively: we see Scottie climbing
up some stairs to a roof) later followed by a subjective point of view: we
see his vertigo when he looks down. Stylistically (form of expression) sub-
jective and objective points of view are carefully displayed to make sure
with whom the spectator should identify. Only gradually does the prob-
lem of time emerge in the image, and subjectivity and objectivity become
more and more blurred. The ambiguity of the film lies in the fact that the
time layers are centered on a psychoanalytic theme of sexual difference.
Hence the two possible readings of the film as demonstrated above.
Strange Days has a different form of expression: in this film the specta-
tor is immediately confronted with what seems to be a subjective point of
view. The only problem is that we don’t know who is the subject in this
scene: there is nobody to identify with (in Peeping Tom, there was still an
indication of the subject holding the camera through which the images
are recorded), so, as was remarked before, the spectator is immediately
drawn into the image without any distance. What is also implied is that
this could be anyone’s brainwave. Immediately this raises the question
‘What happens then to the sense of self if we can connect to anyone’s
memory or experience?’40 In a futuristic context Strange Days plays with
the idea of direct brain stimulation and what this could mean for human
beings.41 If direct brain stimulation became possible (as is clear by now, a
philosophical basis for this is not new and scientifically it is becoming ever
more plausible), the question of time and memory would become increas-
ingly relevant. And in contemporary cinema time and memory in rela-
tion to subjectivity and selfhood is indeed already a frequent theme. Not
only in the time-image as it has been described by Deleuze, but even in
192 PATRICIA PISTERS

the Hollywood action-image, time has made its dazzling entrance, which
apparently was set off by Vertigo. Time and memory is a central preoccupa-
tion in films like Blade Runner, Total Recall and Twelve Monkeys.42 In Blade
Runner memories are no longer conditions of authentic selfhood because
they can be implanted.43 In Total Recall the past is equally not guaranteed
to be personal. And in Twelve Monkeys the hero lives at the same time
in the past, present and future. Is it possible to become more Bergsonian
in thinking time? In Twelve Monkeys there is even a reference to Vertigo
(the film is being shown in a theater where the protagonists of the film
are hiding), and when the heroine Kathryn dyes her hair blond, how can
we not think of Madeleine, the woman from the past in the present?44 It is
striking though that all these contemporary films that deal explicitly with
time are set in the future (one can add to this list the Back to the Future
and Terminator films and as the non-science-fiction film Peggy Sue Got
Married). Maybe this is to keep the problem of time at a distance, as if it
does not really concern us now and is only an entertaining fantasy. But at
the same time the preoccupation with time and memory indicates that it
concerns us now more than ever, and that in the future it will become an
even bigger preoccupation; it clearly indicates that time and the world are
‘out of joint’. These films, like Strange Days, present themselves as classical
movement-images in terms of their form of content. But in their form of
expression (albeit through excessive spatiality or through time-travel nar-
ratives) they cannot escape Vertigo-like confusions of the subjective and
objective, the virtual and the actual.45
Although Strange Days is also presented as science fiction, it speaks
about what is already the past, the last day of the second millennium. And
the scientific tool that it presents is not so far-fetched either. Neuroscientists
work with squids and brain stimulations to induce memories or at least
neurological actions and feelings. It is inconceivable only on one crucial
point; namely that it is still very improbable to recall other people’s memo-
ries. This indicates again the importance of time for the concept of self-
hood. In Face Off the two protagonists (John Travolta and Nicolas Cage)
literally swap faces, so that the face, the look and the visible appearance
are no longer the guarantee of identity and selfhood. The only way that
Travolta’s wife recognizes her husband is through a blood tissue type (a
code) and a personal memory. So before tackling the question of whose
memory or brain this is, let me look at the way Strange Days plays with
personal memories.
Like Scottie, Lenny Nero in Strange Days is an ex-police officer who,
after quitting his job, becomes obsessed with a woman from the past: by
replaying the tapes of his experiences in the past with his girlfriend at that
time, Faith, he keeps on going back to the past. What was virtual (enclosed
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 193

in the actual image) in Vertigo is made actual, presented as a memory-

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

the mind’s eye brings in time: when the boy was little, how one day he will
be big .… And the only occasion when Mace consents to playing back a
squid is when she realizes that Iris has given Lenny a very crucial playback
tape, which holds evidence of the brutal murder of the black singer Jerrico
One and some friends. Although these images resemble the Rodney King
beatings, which did not really change the world, Strange Days expresses
the hope that through an opening up of the mind, there will eventually
be some kind of tolerance. In spite of the film’s high degree of action-im-
ages, in terms of the role of memories Strange Days presents us with a
Bergsonian ethics of time.48
New images like digital images and contemporary high tech cinema
are said by Deleuze to present chaotic spatial relations without beginning
or end, going in all directions.49 The spaces in Strange Days are like that:
no room seems to end, there is always an opening to another connecting
space and the characters always find themselves in the middle of all this
spatial abundance. Because of this, Strange Days opens up to time. As the
brain experiments with memories and different time layers also indicate,
time and memory do not need to be personal. Related to this, the film also
asks questions about the sense of self. As I already indicated, the fact that
the squid experiences seem te be subjective points of view means that the
spectator is not given many assurances about whose point of view it is.
Moreover, it has been demonstrated (for instance by Robert Montgomery’s
subjective camera experiment Lady in the Lake) that a subjective point of
view alone does not increase the experience of identification in the spec-
tator.50 What Strange Days adds to this is not only that identification does
not work by purely subjective camera movement, but also that the sense
of self becomes very unstable when we can experience anybody’s memory.
This can provide new possibilities, once the concept of desire is seen as a
Spinozian/Deleuzian wish to make multiple connections (creating Bodies
without Organs, as Deleuze would say), but it also has its dangerous sides.
We have already seen this in Lenny presenting himself as a new kind of
psychiatrist: ‘I am your shrink, your priest, I am the magic man, the Santa
Claus of the soul.’ The combination of shrink/priest and magic man/Santa
Claus of the soul is interesting in the sense that again a transition is indi-
cated. The shrink/priest seen as the traditional psychoanalyst, forgiving
the subject its guilty enjoyment, has become the magic man/Santa Claus of
the soul, who has a very different way to ‘cure’, namely by stimulating new
connections without being afraid to lose the self-same, knowing that desire
is an affirmative and creative element in order to construct the subject. But
if one thinks of the horrible rape scene analyzed above, or the racial mur-
ders, there is still enough to feel guilty about (the danger of micro-fascism,
internal in ourselves, is always present, according to Deleuze).
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 195

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

of ‘cinemance’52 where it is necessary to have immanent conceptual tools

for looking at images in themselves and for understanding the ethical and
political implications of such a philosophy. Moving from the metalevel of
the cinematographic apparatus, in the next chapter I will work with some
of the conceptual tools that Deleuze presented in his cinema books and
elsewhere, to see in what ways aspects of subjectivity can be constructed
on the plane of images.

Notes

1. Hitchcock during the shooting of North by Northwest, quoted in Donald

Spoto. The Dark Side of the Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. New York:
Ballantine 1984: p. 440.
2. The Movement-Image, p. 59.
3. The Time-Image, p. 23.
4. The Movement-Image, p. 205.
5. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. Hitchcock – The First Forty-Four Films.
New York: Frederick Ungar 1979.
6. Slavoj Žižek (ed.). Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan…
but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London and New York: Verso, 1992:
pp. 212/213.
7. The Movement-Image, p. 202.
8. Everything You Always Wanted to Know, p. 254. The Gaze, in contrast to
the eye, is related to this impossible realm of the Real. In ‘The Ideological
Sinthome’ in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
Culture (Massachusetts, Cambridge and London: MIT, 1991). Žižek explains
the difference between the eye and the gaze. The latter marks ‘the point in the
picture from which the subject viewing is already gazed at. Far from assuring
the self-presence of the subject (i.e. the gaze as instrument of mastery and
control), the gaze introduces an irreducible split: I can never see the picture at
the point from which it is gazing at me.’ (p. 125). See also note 11.
9. Everything you Always Wanted to Know, p. 241.
10. See Joan Copjec (ed.). Shades of Noir. New York and London: Verso 1993;
Supposing the Subject. New York and London, Verso 1994; Joan Copjec. Read
my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge and Massachusetts:
MIT, 1994.
11. Žižek refers to Racine’s Phaedre, who misreads her lover’s expression and
thus brings about her own downfall. ‘In his Bold Gaze my Ruin is Writ Large’
are Phaedre’s words and these are borrowed by Žižek as the title of his main
article in Everything You Always Wanted to Know; the title reflects Lacan’s
idea that the gaze we encounter is not the gaze of the other, but the gaze as we
imagine it ‘in the field of the Other’ (p. 258). In other words, our desire is
constituted by what we think the other desires: ‘desire is the desire of the other’,
according to Lacan. Žižek calls this form of desire ‘intersubjective’: it is only
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 197

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

of moving the subject toward creating a common sense. See also Deleuze, La
Philosophie Critique de Kant. Paris: PUF, 1963.
17. See, for instance, François Truffaut. Hitchcock/Truffaut. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1967: p. 160.
18. The Movement-Image, pp. 141–196.
19. When the third dimension of spatial depth and coherence is abandoned,
we open up to other dimensions. In his discussion of the affection-image
and Dryer’s use of the close-up, Deleuze states: ‘Flattening the third dimen-
sion, he puts two-dimensional space into immediate relation with the affect,
with a fourth and fifth dimension: Time and Spirit’ (The Movement-Image,
p. 107).
20. Late Review, BBC television. The critics were Mark Lawson (presentation),
Tom Paulin, Tony Parsons and Suzanne Moore. The most striking masculine
objection to the film was (I quote all three critics addressing their female col-
league): ‘If this film had been made by a man, for instance Brian de Palma,
you would have been disgusted’ (it sounded almost as if they were jealous).
In a similar way at the conference Tender Bodies, Twisted Minds (University
of Amsterdam, depart ment of Film and Television Studies), where this film
was discussed, whenever anyt hing positive was said about the film, it was no
longer a Katherine Bigelow film, but a James Cameron script. In any case one
could say that in its initial reception Strange Days shared a fate similar to that
of Peeping Tom and Vertigo.
21. Squids, although not as sophisticated as presented in Bigelow’s film, are
actually used in neurological research. See for instance Louis Bec, ‘Squids,
Elements of Technozoosemiotics – a lesson in fabulatory epistemology of
the scientific institute for paranatural research’ in Joke Brouwer and Carla
Hoekendijk (eds.). Technomorphica. Amsterdam: De Balie and Idea Books,
1997: pp. 279–314. In the television documentary on Strange Days (VPRO-
laat, October 1995), neuroscientist Michael Persinger talks about the scien-
tific research on direct brain stimulation.
22. See Jean-Louis Baudry. ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus’ (first published 1970) and ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological
Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema’ (first published 1975).
Both articles reprinted in Philip Rosen (ed.). Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 (references hereafter are to
this edition, pp. 286–298 and 299–318); Jean-Louis Commoli, ‘Machines of
the Visible’, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds.). The Cinematic
Apparatus. Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Columbia University
Press, 1986: pp. 121–142; Christian Metz, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’ in Screen,
vol. 16, no. 2, 1975: pp. 14–76. See also Robert Stam et al. New Vocabularies of
Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. London and
New York: Routledge, 1992.
23. ‘The Apparatus’ , p. 315.
24. ‘Ideological Effects’, p. 292.
25. ‘Ideological Effects’, p. 292.
26. The Movement-Image, pp. 58–59 and 60–61.
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 199

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

my chest I can also feel her breast. An intimacy through interface, an inti-
macy without proximity’ (Stellarc in ‘Parasite Visions – Alternate, Intimate
and Involuntary Experiences’ in Technomorphica, p. 23). See also his website:
http://www.merlin.com.au/stellarc.
41. Many consider one of the first films to play with the idea of brain stimula-
tion, Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1987) to be more successful in show-
ing the possible consequences of such experiments. I don’t agree with that.
The film does indeed demonstrate the dangers of overdose, but so too does
Strange Days. The difference lies in the context. In Brainstorm the experi-
ments take place in a laboratory, scientific context, whereas in Strange Days
squids have become a more common (though illegal) use.
42. See also Anke Burger. ‘Strange Memories – Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days
und “Erinnerung” in Science-Fiction-Film’ in Blimp – Film Magazine, no. 34,
Summer 1996.
43. In his book Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science
Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) Scott Bukatman
emphasizes the spatial dimensions of the cinematic dimension of Blade
Runner: ‘the specificity of cinema lies, not in the emphatic dramaturgy of
narrative temporality, but rather in a spatial exploration that complexly binds
multiple perspectives and scalar shifts’ (p. 137). Bukatman adds that the
effectiveness of Blade Runner lies in the fact that this space finally becomes
terminal. See also his monograph on Blade Runner in the BFI series Modern
Classics. London: BFI, 1997. In this essay he does in fact briefly refer to time
as constructed memory (p. 80), which could be seen as an immanent way of
constructing subjectivity. In Screening Space: The American Science Fiction
Film (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press,
1987) Vivian Sobchack discusses the problem of time in Blade Runner more
elaborately. According to Sobchack the temporal gets lost in the spatiality of
the film; at least the kind of classical chronological kind of temporality: ‘The
New SF tends to conflate past, present, and future – in décor constructed
as temporal pastiche and/or in narratives that either temporally turn back
on themselves to conflate past, present, and future, or are schizophrenically
constituted as a “series of pure and unrelated presents in time”’ (pp. 273/274;
Sobchack quotes here from Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism’). With this observation she actually describes a
Bergsonian conception of time that has entered American Science Fiction
cinema. For an elaborated applied Deleuzian analysis of Blade Runner see
Ian Buchanan. Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000: pp. 127–140. Buchanan is not satisfied with the
many psychoanalytic interpretations of Blade Runner (such as the ones from
Slavoj Žižek and Kaja Silverman) and argues for an analysis of assemblages,
abstract-machines and ‘schizzes’ or breakflows, intertextuality and finally
the plane of composion of the film, where he uses specific concepts from
Deleuze’s film books.
44. Twelve Monkeys is based on Chris Marker’s film La Jetée. However, the script-
writers of the film, David and Janet Peoples must have been influenced by
 THE UNIVERSE AS METACINEMA 201

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

References

Baudry, Jean-Louis (1986). Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic

Apparatus [1970]. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Philip Rosen. Ed.
(286–298). New York: Columbia University Press.
Baudry, Jean-Louis (1986). The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in Cinema [1975]. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology.
Philip Rosen. Ed. (299–318). New York: Columbia University Press.
Bergson, Henri (1939). Matière et Mémoire. Paris: Les Presses Universitaires.
Brouwer, Joke and Hoekendijk, Carla. Eds. (1997). Technomorphica. Amsterdam:
De Balie and Idea books.
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Buchanan. Ian (2000). Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.
Bukatman, Scott (1993). Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern
Science Fiction. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bukatman, Scott (1997). Blade Runner. London: BFI, 1997.
Burger, Anke (1966). Strange Memories – Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days und
“Erinnerung” in Science-Fiction-Film,” Blimp – Film Magazine, 34, Summer.
Caldwell, John (1995). Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American
Television. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Canning, Peter (2000). The Imagination of Immanence: An Ethics of Cinema.
In The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of the Cinema. Gregory
Flaxman. Ed. (327–362). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Commoli, Jean-Louis (1986). Machines of the Visible. In The Cinematic
Apparatus. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. Eds. (121–142). Houndmills,
Basingstoke and London: Columbia University Press.
Copjec, Joan Ed. (1993). Shades of Noir. New York and London: Verso.
Copjec, Joan (1994). Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge
and Massachusetts: MIT.
Copjec, Joan (1994). Supposing the Subject. New York and London: Verso.
Deleuze, Gilles (1963). La Philosophie Critique de Kant. Paris: PUF.
Deleuze, Gilles (1966). Le Bergsonisme. Paris: PUF
Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
(designated as C1)
Deleuze, Gilles (1989). Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Esquenazi, Jean-Pierre. (1994) Film, perception et mémoire. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Hofstadter, Douglar R. and Daniel C. Dennett (1981). The Mind’s I: Fantasies and
Reflections on Self and Soul. London and New York: Penguin.
Lloyd, Genevieve (1996). Spinoza and the Ethics. London and New York:
Routledge.
Metz, Christian (1975). ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, Screen, 16(2): 14–76.
Modleski, Tania (1988). Femininity by Design. In The Woman who Knew Too
Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. (87–100). New York and London:
Methuen.
Mulvey, Laura (1986). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ [1975]. In Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology. Philip Rosen. Ed. (198–209). New York: Columbia
University Press.
Pisters, Patricia (2000). The War of Images: Appropriation and Fabulation of
Missing People. In ASCA Yearbook (69–81). Amsterdam: ASCA Press.
Rascaroli, Laura (1998). Strange Visions: Kathryn Bigelow’s MetaFiction,”
Enculturation, 2(1): http://enculturation.gmu.edu/2_1/rascaroli.html
Rohmer, Eric and Chabrol, Claude (1979). Hitchcock – The First Forty-Four Films.
New York: Frederick Ungar.
Shapiro, Michael (1999). Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation
and Gender. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Shaviro, Steven (1993). The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press.
Smith, Joan (1996). Speaking Up For Corpses. In Screen Violence. Karl French.
Ed. (196–204). London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Sobchack, Vivian (1987). Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film.
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press.
Spoto, Donald (1984). The Dark Side of the Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.
New York: Ballantine.
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Vocabularies of Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond.
London and New York: Routledge.
Stelarc (1999). “Parasite Visions – Alternate, Intimate and Involuntary
Experiences,” Body& Society, 5(2–3): 117–127.
Tasker, Yvonne (1993) Spectacular Bodies – Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema.
London and New York: Rout ledge.
Truffaut, François (1967). Hitchcock/Truffaut. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Vojkovic, Sasha (2001). Subjectivity in New Hollywood Cinema: Fathers, Sons and
Other Ghosts. Amsterdam: PhD University of Amsterdam.
Žižek, Slavoj (1991). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture. Massachusetts, Cambridge and London: MIT.
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but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London and New York: Verso.
 8

On the Possibilities of Political

Art: How Žižek Misreads
Deleuze and Lacan
Robert Samuels

R eading Savoj Žižek’s Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and

Consequences, we gain insight on why and how so many scholars
have misread Deleuze’s film theory. I will argue that there is an inherent
logic and system to Deleuze’s theory, and this logic is Lacanian. Moreover,
contemporary readers, like Žižek, continue to ignore Deleuze’s system,
and instead, they simply sample and remix fragments of his work in
order to locate predetermined ideologies. Furthermore, I read Žižek’s
misreading of Deleuze as paradigmatic of the post-postmodern backlash
against progressive social movements, social construction, and minor-
ity discourses. In turn, by illustrating Žižek’s repression of the politi-
cal aspects of Deleuze’s film theory, I will elaborate a theory of political
cinema. Thus, I will use Žižek’s misreading of Deleuze and Lacan to
show how contemporary film theory is dominated by the desire to turn
to the socio-symbolic order only to repress the significance of social
mediation.

Strategies of Misreading

To see how Žižek misreads Deleuze, we can look at Žižek’s discussion of

Robert Altman, which not only ignores the fact that Deleuze has ana-
lyzed the director in question, but also that Žižek’s analysis is in com-
plete opposition to Deleuze’s own commentary. For example, near the
start of his book, Žižek posits that Altman is one of the contemporary
206 ROBERT SAMUELS

filmmakers “who lends himself ideally to a Deleuzian reading” because

films like Short Cuts and Nashville reveal how contingent encounters
produce “meaningless machanic shocks, encounters, and impersonal
intensities that precede the level of social meaning” (6). This stress on the
lack of social meaning in Altman’s films is followed by an examination
of Nashville, where Žižek refers to Brian Massumi’s argument that songs
in the film display the autonomy of affect, and that “we totally misread
Nashville if we locate the songs within the global horizon of the ironico-
critical description of the vacuity and ritualized commercial alienation
of the universe of American country music” (6). In other words, Žižek
turns to another critic’s work (Massumi) in order to imagine how Deleuze
would read this particular film, and it just so happens that the imagined
Deluzian interpretation matches Žižek’s own theory stressing emotion
and enjoyment over social signification.
What Žižek’s analysis does not mention is that in his book Cinema 1:
The Movement-Image, Deleuze writes about Nashville in the following
manner: “Altman’s film Nashville fully grasps this operation which doubles
the city with all the clichés it produces and divides in two the clichés them-
selves” (210). In other words, instead of arguing that Altman’s films repre-
sent the dominance of affect over social meaning, Deleuze posits that the
city Nashville circulates and critiques symbolic clichés. Moreover, Deleuze
continues by arguing that this depiction of clichés in Altman’s films is a
central aspect of the transition from the classical films based on the move-
ment-image to the new form of film introduced after World War II. In
other words, Nashville is used to examine the central thesis of Deleuze’s
first book on film, which is that the transition away from the movement-
image was caused in part by the downfall of the “American Dream”; how-
ever, to understand this idea, one has to first understand Deleuze’s notion
of the movement-image and his particular way of examining film. Yet,
Žižek appears to be either uninterested or unaware of Deleuze’s actual texts
and theories, and so he can write several pages on Deleuze’s film theory
without counsulting Deleuze’s actual texts. While one could argue that this
is only a minor problem, I posit that this form of secondary misreading
represents a very revealing aspect of contemporary culture and scholar-
ship. Furthermore, while Deleuze himself developed a theory of interpre-
tation that tried to go behind the back of authors in order to give birth
to a new creature, Deleuze’s own writings on philosophers like Bergson
and Nietzsche spend a great deal of time repeating and acknowledging the
arguments of the original text.
To restate my case against Žižek’s reading of Deleuze’s film theory, I
am arguing that Žižek simply ignores Deleuze’s own theory and system
in order to refind his own theory, and this secondary reading involves the
 ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL ART 207

emptying out of content from cultural analysis so that one can concen-
trate on the pure form and experience of nonsignifying elements. In my
book New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernity
(2010), I argued that Žižek’s general interpretative strategy is to reduce
most matters to an opposition between social signification and real enjoy-
ment, and in this binary, meaningless enjoyment is privileged over social
meaning. For example, Žižek divides Lacan’s work into the bad Early Lacan
of the Symbolic and the good Late Lacan of the Real. Not only does this
division leave out the importance of the Imaginary, but it imposes a linear
and progressive reading onto a system that is synchronic and intercon-
nected. Moreover, Žižek often confuses the pre-Symbolic and the post-
Symbolic Real, and the result of this confusion is that the original Real,
which is defined by its resistance to symbolization becomes the effect of
the Symbolic order. For example, nature as part of the Real is turned into
a product that is determined by the Symbolic social order as an internal
limit. Thus, we see nature as something that society cannot completely
colonize; yet, this resistant aspect of nature is itself a result of a symbolic
definition. To be precise, societies produce their own outsides and limits as
an element of social control.
One way of thinking about Lacan’s conception of the pre-Symbolic Real
is through his use of Sartre’s claim in Being and Nothingness that the real is
always where it is, and, therefore, it is never missing or out of place. In his
early works, Lacan refers to Sartre’s in order to argue that loss and absence
are introduced into the Real only through the Symbolic order of language
and symbolization. Thus, a book is missing from its place in a library only
because its symbolic place has been marked and catalogued; however, the
book in the Real is wherever it currently resides. In Lacan’s temporal logic,
this natural Real has to be distinguished from the Real that is produced
from within the socio-Symbolic order, but Žižek often fails to make this
distinction.

Understanding Deleuze’s System

The reason why Žižek’s confusion of these categories is so important to

our understanding of a Deleuzean film theory is that Deleuze himself
relies on a careful distinction among several layers of reality and experi-
ence. For instance, his concept of the movement-image is based on the
distinctions among affects, actions, and mental relations. In this struc-
ture, affects belong to what the American philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce called Firstness, and they are equivalent to Lacan’s notion of the
Real, while action or Secondness relates to the Imaginary duality of an
208 ROBERT SAMUELS

object and a reaction to an object. This combination of Lacan and Peirce

is articulated in Cinema 1 by Deleuze in the following manner: “After
distinguishing between affection and action, which he calls Firstness and
Secondness, Peirce added a third kind of image: the ‘mental’ or Thirdness.
The point of Thirdness was a term that referred to a second term through
the intermediary of another term or terms. The third instance appears in
signification, law or relation” (197). This use of Peirce to define the basic
concepts of cinema reveals how at the foundation of Deleuzian film the-
ory, we find a coherent and consistent system, and if one simply chooses to
ignore this system, one is no longer really reading Deleuze. Furthermore,
there can be no Deleuzian film theory without an active engagement with
the system that Deleuze carefully constructs.
While Žižek ignores Deleuze’s logic, it is important for us to first under-
stand the basic foundations of Deleuze’s theory of cinema, and it is also
essential to note the Lacanian nature of the Deleuze’s conceptual architec-
ture. For example, in defining the relations among Firstness, Secondness,
and Thirdness, Deleuze turns to the Marx Brothers to posit that the silent
Harpo represents Firstness because he is determined by his affects, and
he presents the pure affect-image (199). Likewise, Chico represents the
Secondness of the action-image since “it is he who takes on action, the ini-
tiative, the duel with the milieu, the strategy of effort and resistance” (199).
Finally, Deleuze ties Groucho to the presence of Thirdness: “Groucho
is the three, the man of interpretations, of symbolic acts and abstract rela-
tions” (199). This move from affect to action to mental relation determines
the unfolding of Deleuze’s first film book, which also traces the history of
Western cinema from its inception to late Hitchcock. Moreover, following
Lacan’s temporarl logic, Firstness represents the pre-Symbolic Real, while
Secondness constitutes the duality of the Imaginary, and Thirdness stands
for the ternary nature of the Symbolic order.
There is thus a certain logical temporality to Deleuze’s basic film catego-
ries, and this logic is articulated clearly in Deleuze’s “How Do We Recognize
Structuralism.” In this text from 1967, Deleuze shows himself at his most
Lacanian and Peircian: “We can enumerate the real, the imaginary, and the
symbolic: 1, 2, 3 . . . For the real in itself is not separable from a certain
ideal of unification or of totalization: the real tends toward one, it is one
in its ‘truth.’ As soon as we see two in ‘one,’ as soon as we start to dupli-
cate, the imaginary appears in person” (260–261). While Peirce is not men-
tioned in this analysis, it is clear that Deleuze is combining Lacan with Peirce
in order to determine a temporal logical pointing to the symbolic nature of
social relations: “The first discovery of structuralism, however, is the discov-
ery and recognition of a third order, a third reign: that of the symbolic. The
refusal to confuse the symbolic with the imaginary, as much as with the real,
 ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL ART 209

constitutes the first dimension of structuralism” (260). According to Deleuze,

there is a logical movement from the Real to the Imaginary and to the
Symbolic, and this movement is understood through Peirce’s categories and
Lacan’s central concepts.
By the time Deleuze publishes Cinema 1 in 1983, he has purged his work
of most references to Lacan, but it is clear that he maintains Lacan’s tempo-
ral logic. Moreover, while Žižek would like to divide Deleuze into the good
Deleuze of The Logic of Sense versus the bad Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus (xi), it
is clear that Deleuze maintains a consistent system that Žižek simply ignores
or represses. In contrast to Žižek’s mis-appropriations, I argue that if we do
want to stay faithful to Deleuze’s logic, then, it is necessary to employ his cen-
tral concepts and to understand how they fit into his more general system.

The Logic of the Movement-Image

Returning to the differentiations among affect-images, action-images,

and mental-images, we not only understand how perception works in
film production and consumption, but also gain a better sense of the
logical history of cinema. In fact, Deleuze’s central historical claim is
that the movement-image dominated film until World War II, and as a
result of the war and the crisis in modernity, the movement-image was
undermined and replaced by the time-image in the works of directors like
Rossillini, Fellini, Godard, and Antonioni. Moreover, his second cinema
book, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, continues Deleuze’s analysis of what
happens after the movement-image, and it is essential to understand that
Deleuze combines philosophy with social history in order to develop a
temporal logic for the cinema.
In his Preface to the English edition of Cinema 1, Deleuze states:
“Everything perhaps suddenly appears in a shattering of the sensory-
motor schema: this schema, which had linked perceptions, affections, and
actions, does not enter into a profound crisis without the general regime of
the image being changed” (ix). According to Deleuze’s logic, World War II
caused such a profound crisis in modernity that the relations among per-
ceptions, actions, and affects were seriously rearranged, and time became
a new variable that replaced space with a fourth dimension. Not only does
this concern for time make Deleuze consider Einstein’s theory of relativity,
but the issue of temporality is a major emphasis for his whole philosophi-
cal project, and the central thinker of time for Deleuze is Henri Bergson.
Once again while Žižek seems to either ignore or repress Bergson’s influ-
ence on Deleuze, we will see that one can understand little of Deleuze’s
work if one does not follow how he reads Bergson.
210 ROBERT SAMUELS

Bergsonian Time

Throughout his work, Deleuze returns to Bergson’s notion that the past
coexists with the present and that we are affected by virtual representa-
tions that have yet to be actualized. In fact, Cinema 1 opens with a chap-
ter called “Theses on Movement: First Commentary on Bergson” where
Deleuze argues that film combines instantaneous sections or images with
the impersonal movement of images in time (1). This dialectic between
the frame and the perception of movement is resolved by Deleuze through
his conception of the movement-image. From this perspective, the Real or
Firstness of film is determined by the material reality of the image: “This
in-itself of the image is matter: not something behind the image, but on
the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement” (59). Since
the Real is whatever it is and knows no sense of lack or loss, we see that
on a primary level, film presents the Realness of the image and the fact
that filmic images are always moving. Moreover, for Deleuze, the basic
property of cinema is light, and it is the diffusion of light that combines
movement and images (60).
In drawing from Bergson’s notion that light is propagated without loss
or resistance, Deleuze is able to combine materialism with idealism and
argue that with the movement-image, “there are not yet bodies or rigid
lines, but only lines or figures of light” (60). Cinema on its most funda-
mental level allows for a pure perception of space and time, and instead
of seeing light as coming from consciousness, cinema sees light as some-
thing already present in things themselves (60). Moreover, for Deleuze,
the Real is defined by a plane of immanence where a “collection of lines
or figures of light” produces a “series of blocs of space-time” (61). In other
words, Deleuze wants to start his film theory by beginning with a notion
of the pure materiality of the image and movement before consciousness
or action interrupts the primal flow of light.
What then blocks the flow of light in a second logical time is an interval
separating actions and reactions (61). In his book on Bergson, Deleuze
stresses how this interval defines the human subject and allows for a selec-
tion of perceptions; in fact, Deleuze calls this gap between reality and con-
sciousness the “cerebral interval,” and in Cinema 1, the process of framing
is equated with the interval since film allows one to select and isolate par-
ticular actions (62). According to Deleuze, in film, all actions become reac-
tions, and the initial sensation is separated from a delayed action. In turn,
instead of light being propagated in all directions, it comes up against an
obstacle (the screen), which in turn constitutes an Imaginary dual relation
of Secondness (62). In fact, Deleuze posits that “an image reflected by a
living image is precisely what we call perception” (62). Since there is always
 ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL ART 211

delay between a perception and our awareness of a perception, and this

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

How Films Perceive

After establishing how natural perception works, Deleuze makes a sur-

prising turn and argues that cinema does not follow natural perceptions
because the mobility of the camera and the variability of its framings
212 ROBERT SAMUELS

allow “it to restore vast acentered and deframed zones” (64). Film is then
revolutionary because it gives us access to the primal regime of the move-
ment-image and allows us to experience pure sensations before subjec-
tive reduction and selection. At the same time, cinema also exposes how
this acentered perceptual universe (the Firstness of the Real) is converted
by consciousness (Secondness) and selective framing. Through the use
of editing and montage, cinema reveals the selective nature of subjective
framing, while it depicts the intervals between actions and reactions.
In another surprising move, Deleuze posits that between the Firstness
of the sensation and the Secondness of the action-image, we find affection:
“Affection is what occupies the interval, what occupies it without filling it
in or filling it up. It surges in the center of indetermination, that is to say
in the subject, between a perception which is troubling in certain respects
and a hesitant action” (65). For example, a close-up of a face, what is often
called the emotion shot, represents the gap between action and reaction.
From this perspective, affect is the proof of the subjective and the cerebral,
and the affection-image reveals that we have selected some of our organs
to receive perceptions from a point of immobility, while other organs are
liberated for action (65). Humans are in this sense divided between recep-
tion and reaction, and the subject is the split between these two primary
activities.
Deleuze affirms that for Bergson, an affection is a motor effort placed
on an immobilized receptive organ (66). In other terms, affect represents a
reversal of the normal movement from reception to action, and it is in the
face, where we find the immobilized organs registering the movements of
the affections (66). However, before Deleuze elaborates on the role of affect
in cinema and subjectivity, he argues that some filmmakers have been able
to remove subjectivity by presenting a pure acentered universe. In look-
ing at Beckett’s Film with Buster Keaton, Deleuze asks how “we can rid
ourselves of ourselves, and demolish ourselves” so that we can enter the
“primary regime of variation” where an acentered purity is “untroubled by
any centre of indetermination” (66). What Deleuze seeks in certain films
is the absence of a privileged image or subjectivity and the presence of a
purely objective perception of images as they exist in relation to each other
in all of their facets and parts (76). It is in what he calls liquid percep-
tion or the “cine-eye” that he first locates the possibility of a cinema where
subjective subtraction is itself subtracted (80). What cinema can do, and
what the human eye cannot accomplish, is to rid itself from a central point
of view. Here the mobility of the camera is opposed to the immobility of
the human eye, and it is this mobility that opens up the possibility to be
liberated from a privileged image (81). From this perspective, montage and
film editing allow cinema to transcend the limitations of the human eye
 ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL ART 213

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

pointing to the pure perception of affects divorced from individuals and

the effort to communicate. Furthermore, the Firstness of the Real of cin-
ema appears in what Deleuze calls the “any-space-whatever” (109), which
is a singular space that has lost its homogeneity and can be defined as “a
space of virtual conjunctions” (109).

The End of the Movement-Image and the American Dream

To understand this notion of the virtual, we can return to Žižek’s reading

of the songs within Altman’s Nashville. On the one hand, the film does
isolate the Firstness of pure affect and a resistance to communication
through the repetition of meaningless songs, and yet, this pure affect is
placed within a defined historical and social context. Nashville then con-
stitutes a constant dual between the affection-image and the action-image,
and this duality is itself placed in a series of mental relations that medi-
ate the affects and actions. To understand this third level of movement-
images (mental-images), we need to turn to Deleuze’s analysis of Peirce’s
Thirdness: “[T]hirdness gives birth not to actions but to ‘acts’ which
necessarily contain the symbolic element of law (giving, exchanging);
not to perception, but to interpretations” (197). This stress on symbolic
mediation and social relations pushes Deleuze to say that in Hitchcock,
actions are always done for someone else, and so every action is always
an exchange and an interpretation (200–201). Furthermore, Deleuze adds
that Hitchcock usually considers three parties, the director, the film, and
the public (202). It is then the spectator who always knows the relations
in the film, and in this way, the spectator’s expectations and interpreta-
tion are an essential part of the film itself.
While Hitchcock represents the actualization of the movement-image
and the introduction of the mental-image as the third term completing the
classic film sign, for Deleuze, Hitchcock’s work also signals the undoing of
the movement-image and the fragmentation of Western culture after World
War II. In fact, after discussing Hitchcock’s work as the transitional point
between the movement-image and the time-image, he asks what maintains
a world after it loses totality and linkage, and his answer is clichés (208).
To explain this fourth dimension of film after affects, actions, and rela-
tions, Deleuze turns to Nashville: “[T]he city locations are redoubled by
the images to which they give rise—photos, recordings, television—and it
is in an old song that the characters are finally brought together. The power
of a sound cliché, a little song, is asserted in Altman’s A Perfect Couple”
(209). Instead of, as Žižek argues, songs playing the role of pure affect or
meaningless enjoyment, Deleuze shows how, they within the context of
 ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL ART 215

Nashville present a reflection on clichés and the failure of social cohesion:

“It is a crisis of both the action-image and the American Dream” (210). By
linking the crisis of the action-image to the fall of the American dream,
Deleuze combines a concern with social history with an emphasis on sub-
jectivity and perception. In this historical version of phenomenology, our
perceptual processes are tied to social conditions, and film becomes a place
where the dialectic between the Real and the Symbolic is presented.
Deleuze adds that while film is itself a producer of clichés, certain direc-
tors are able to use clichés to explore other clichés, and yet he is also aware
that “the rage against clichés does not lead to much if it is content only
to parody them; maltreated, mutilated, destroyed, a cliché is not slow to
reborn from its ashes” (211). The dead end of what is often called post-
modern culture is that it is condemned to only parody the clichés that it
recirculates; thus media about media and consciousness about conscious-
ness can never escape from the trap of reflexivity. Still, Deleuze posits that
this post-Hichtcockian reflection on clichés is not the only alternative,
and that after World War II, we find in Germany, France, and Italy an
attempt to start cinema again outside of the American tradition (211–212).
In the development of a new type of filmmaking, the elliptical and the dis-
organized were affirmed in order to call into question the dominance of the
action-image. For example, in Fellini we begin to lose track of how events
are related and why particular actions are significant (212). Likewise, in
Antonioni, film locations start to lose their specific significance as they
enter into the anyplace whatsoever.

The New Wave against the Action-Image

In the case of the New Wave in France, Deleuze emphasizes the role of
meaningless journeys where “the voyage is freed from the spaciotempo-
ral coordinates” (213). In this depiction of a transitional society, we see
the emergence of a “new pure present” where characters seem unaffected
by what happens to them (213). Deleuze also stresses that in these French
films, there is a proliferation of sensory-motor disturbances and a slow-
ing down of time (213). As a direct attack on the American action-image,
Eurpean “art” films reveal that “Under this power of the false all images
become clichés, sometimes because their clumsiness is shown, some-
times because their apparent perfection is attacked” (214). Deleuze reveals
here the true political character of what we can call postmodern or Late
Modernist cinema, which took on the growing dominance of American
cultural capitalism by deconstructing the foundations of the action-image.
Thus, near the end of his first cinema book, Deleuze asks what an image
216 ROBERT SAMUELS

can be that would not be a cliché (214). For him, this is clearly a political
and philosophical question that needs to be answered. It is then the task of
the second cinema book to answer this question and provide the grounds
for a truly political cinema.

On the Possibility of a Political Cinema

The preface to Cinema 2 begins by tracing two historical movements; the

first describes the philosophical revolution of reversing the subordination
of time to movement, while the second concerns the transition from the
classical cinema’s stress on the movement-image to the post–World War II
emphasis on the time-image (xi). In making this correlation between the
history of philosophy and the history of film, Deleuze is able to equate the
temporal logic of cinema with that of philosophy. From this perspective,
there is little difference between film theory and philosophical analysis,
and both areas of culture are tasked with combining historical analysis,
scientific understanding, and aesthetic categorization. This interdisci-
plinary approach to film can be quite taxing for the reader who is used to
the Kantian distinction among foundational philosophy, aesthetics, and
ethics. Moreover, while a contemporary thinker like Žižek appears to fol-
low this interdisciplinary approach, it is clear that he does not derive his
analysis from an integrated system or philosophy. In other words, con-
temporary thinkers often suffer from a lack of systematic thinking, and
the result is often a fragmentary form of analysis that does not hold onto
any sense of philosophical and historical consistency.
One reason why Žižek misreads Deleuze, then, is that Žižek does not
understand or value Deleuze’s systematic approach, and once a reader lets
go of the author’s system, one can make an author say almost anything.
However, before we get back to the consequences of Žižek’s misread-
ings, we should first turn to the logic of Cinema 2 that follows the logic
of Cinema 1 and begins with an analysis of what happens after the fall of
the American movement-image. Deleuze’s first observation on this point is
that after World War II, Europe becomes dominated by “situations which
we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know
how to describe” (xi). We can call this failure of knowledge “postmodern”
because it represents a countermovement to the modern stress on knowl-
edge and the mapping of space.
Deleuze’s postmodernity, then, is not the consumption and parodying
of clichés; rather, before the dominance of a self-reflexive media culture,
we find the emergence of a political cinema dedicated to showing the dis-
continuities of perception and social relations. Deleuze’s central argument
 ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL ART 217

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

Deleuze posits that these experiments in form result in an aesthetic

and politics where traditional cultural and philosophical oppositions are
undermined: “We run in fact into a principle of indetermination, of indis-
cernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or men-
tal, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not
have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask” (7).
In this passage, Deleuze points to the central political problem facing post-
modern art: while art after modernity opens up possibilities and liberates
us from modern restrictions, it can also undermine our ability to take on a
stable perspective with certainty and predictability. Furthermore, in post-
postmodern culture and politics, this merging of the real and the imagi-
nary will be used to promote imaginary solutions to real social problems.
As Deleuze posits, already with Fellini, the formation of a spectacle cul-
ture is developed, and yet Fellini’s spectacles are disruptive, while contem-
porary pos-postmodern productions represent seamless combinations of
fact and fiction. This difference between disruptive and nondisruptive aes-
thetics can be best understood by looking at the work of Jean-Luc Godard
and his ability to isolate sounds and images from their functional roles in
plot and character development. For instance, in the summary of Godard’s
Made in USA, we are introduced to “a witness providing us with a series
of reports with neither a conclusion nor logical connection . . . without
really effective reactions” (9–10). It is hard to image a mass audience sitting
through this type of structure, and yet, postmodern filmmakers in Europe
did present a disruptive art form for a nonelite audience.
As Deleuze highlights, Godard’s disruptive art not only presented itself
through stuttering speakers, coughing protagonists, and inhibited actions,
but this aesthetic and political cinema sought to decompose and not com-
pose fantasies and realities (10). By isolating sounds and images from the
plot, Godard was able to attack the action-image and the ideology of clo-
sure that maintained the classical American film. As Deleuze insists, the
mutations in Godard’s films represent the mutation of European culture
after World War II, and this matching of form and content makes cinema
political (19). By presenting the intolerable and the unpleasant, postmod-
ern film tried to disrupt our normal way of turning away from negative
stimuli: “We have schemata for turning away when it is too unpleasant, for
prompting resignation when it is terrible and for assimilating when it is
too beautiful” (20). Deleuze continues his text by insisting that clichés play
the central role of allowing us to use our sensory-motor system to deny
the unpleasant and disruptive: “We perceive only what we are interested
in perceiving, or rather what is in our interests to perceive, by virtue of
our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands. We
therefore normally only perceive clichés” (20). Since film produces and
 ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL ART 219

circulates clichés, it tends to reinforce our economic, ideological, and psy-

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

static representations. From this perspective, Deleuze goes against Žižek’s

desire to oppose the good Deleuze of pure philosophy to the bad Deleuze
of political, antipsychoanalytic Anti-Oedipus. It is clear that Deleuze’s
philosophical work is political and psychoanalytic, but Deleuze’s version
of psychoanalysis is highly critical of the imposition of set structures like
the Oedipus complex.

Deleuze’s Virtual Realities

Not only does Deleuze differentiate himself from classical psychoanalysis

by rejecting any set interpretation of dream images, but he also adds a
Marxism component to film theory and philosophy by identifying time
with money. From this perspective, since cinema must always pay for its
time with money, and time has been equated with money in modern cul-
ture, the central drama of the time-image is the battle between images
and money (78). Deleuze posits that cinema gives images for money
and gives time for images, and in this structure an endless circuit is gen-
erated out of an impossible exchange. This dissymmetry between images
and money (time) is doubled by the coexistence of real and virtual images
since the virtual images represent the presence of the past in the pres-
ent (79). In using Bergson’s theory of the deja-vu, Deleuze posits that
this perceptual distortion actually provides the truth of our relation to
time, which is that as we remember the present, we also coexist with the
past. To prove this point, he cites the following passage from Bergson:
“Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and vir-
tual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other” (79). This
conception of the virtual is at odds with Žižek’s pithy summarization of
Deleuze’s theory: “What matters to Deleuze is not virtual reality but the
reality of the virtual (which, in Lacanian terms, is the Real)” (3). If for
Lacan, the Real means that which is impossible to symbolize, then clearly
what Deleuze is describing as the virtual has no relation to the Lacanian
Real. In contrast to Žižek, Deleuze turns to the virtual and the uncon-
scious in order to locate memory systems represented through a network
of images, and while these images may not be actualized or conscious,
they act as a symbolic structure of mental associations.
To understand the virtual in Deleuze, it is important to comprehend
his view of structuralism and the Symbolic order. For example, in his text
on structuralism, he posits that symbolic structures have no relation with
a sensible form or an intelligible essence; instead, structural elements are
differential relations determined by topological locations (261). From this
perspective, the Symbolic order is virtual, and it is actualized only when
 ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL ART 221

particular people or objects fill predetermined positions and functions. As

Lacan argues, we are born into a world that is already structured by sym-
bolic relations and differences, and so the subject affirms his or her position
by being subjected to a place within the predetermined social structure. In
fact, it is Lacan’s structuralism that Žižek rejects when he opposes the bad
Early Lacan of the Symbolic to the good Late Lacan of the Real. In turn,
Žižek’s desire to equate Deleuze’s notion of the virtual with the Lacanian
Real can be seen as the result of his dismissal of Deleuze’s understanding
of the Symbolic order.

Lacan’s and Deleuze’s Conceptual Structuralism

If we do grasp that for Deleuze the virtual is the Symbolic, and the
Symbolic represents the Thirdness of social structures, we can also affirm
that Deleuze’s film theory is Lacanian because both theories share the
same structuralist understanding of the Symbolic. This closeness between
Lacan and Deleuze can be located at the end of Cinema 2, where Deleuze
posits that “a theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the con-
cepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other
concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in gen-
eral having no privilege over others” (3). Just as Deleuze sees Hitchcock
as presenting mental relations as the culmination of the action-image, he
posits that the virtual network of interdisciplinary concepts determines
the role of film theory. Like Lacan, Deleuze asks what the fundamental
concepts are that determine a domain and how these concepts relate to
other conceptual areas. In turn, each concept must be placed within a dif-
ferential network, and thus, a concept means nothing in itself and can be
understood only through its relation to other concepts.
The question then of what a Deleuzian or Lacanian film theory would
look like must be understood by the interaction between each thinker’s
central concepts and the conceptual relations that are generated out of indi-
vidual films and film history. While Lacan and Deleuze often share a simi-
lar conceptual framework, a secondary interpreter like Žižek can impose
his own meanings because he simply rejects or neglects the predetermined
conceptual system. Moreover, this rejection of the symbolic structure is
symptomatic of our post-postmodern culture where automation leads to
a heightened sense of individual autonomy. I have called this new cultural
period “automodernity” not only to distinguish it from postmodernity, but
also to show how the seemingly seamless combination of automation and
autonomy represses social and symbolic mediation as it hides the disrup-
tive aspects of postmodern culture.
222 ROBERT SAMUELS

Žižek’s Automodernism versus Deleuze’s Postmodern Politics

In seeing Žižek as an automodern philosopher, I posit that his rejection of

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

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

the mental-image and the idea that for Hitchcock, everything has be read
on the level of a symbolic exchange. For example, the detective played by
Jimmy Stewart desires a woman after he has been hired by another man to
investigate that man’s wife. In this structure, the detective desires through
the desire of another, and his actions must be read as a social exchange.
However, when Žižek reads this same film, he does not stress the social
mediation of individual desire; instead, he emphasizes how many of the
images in the film represent a subjectivity without a subject or an organ
without a body (153). In other terms, Žižek replaces the Symbolic realm of
the mental-image with the acentered return to the presubjective Real.
In stressing the Real over the Symbolic, Žižek is able to argue that what
Deleuze locates in Hitchcock is the disruption of the Real disconnected
from any type of social history or social context. Furthermore, Žižek pos-
its that what political films should do is to present this return to the Real
through the presence of a cinema-eye no longer tied to any subject: “This,
precisely, is what revolutionary cinema should be doing: using the cam-
era as a partial object, as an ‘eye’ torn from the subject and freely thrown
around” (154). This theory of political cinema ignores Deleuze’s careful
distinction between how classical film used a subtractive method to return
to a presubjective vision, and how postmodern cinema uses disruptive
techniques to denaturalize the Symbolic and open a space to articulate new
collective speech-acts.
Instead of locating political cinema in the social and Symbolic order of
exchanges and mental relations, Žižek confuses the Real and the Imaginary
as he excludes the Symbolic. For example, in another passage discussing
Vertigo, he displaces Deleuze’s understanding of the social exchange with
his own interpretation of the self-oriented gaze: “In Vertigo also Scottie has
to accept that the fascinating spectacle of Madeleine, which he was secretly
following, was staged for his gaze only” (158). This idea that the image of
the woman was designed for only the main character’s gaze can serve as an
example of how contemporary global consumer capitalism has been able to
convince subjects that mass produced objects respond to individual desires.
In other words, instead of seeing Hitchcock as an example of disruptive
cinema, Žižek reads Vertigo as a metaphor for how ideology works today.
As Althusser posited, ideology represents the imaginary resolution of social
conflicts, and what we find in Žižek’s description of Vertigo is that even in
the face of the decentering gaze placed in the field of the Other, the subject
is able to personalize and internalize the potentially disruptive image.
While Žižek is fond of locating the present of the traumatic Real in
our lives, what his automodern texts actually do is to show how our con-
temporary culture is able to translate all disruptive social tensions into
Imaginary structures where real sensations are subjected to individualizing
 ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL ART 225

perceptions. In fact, in the concluding sections of Cinema 2, Deleuze

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

References

Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement–Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson

and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— (1988). Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Thomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
New York: Zone Books.
——— (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— (1998). “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” In The Two Fold Thought
of Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Guildford Press.
Samuels, Robert (2010). New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after
Postmoderntiy: Automodernity from Žižek to Laclau. New York and London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
 9

The Surplus Gaze of Legibility:

Guilt, Ethics, and
Out-of-Field in Deleuze,
Lacan, and Žižek
A. Kiarina Kordela

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

Overture

We often hear today that the central difference between Lacanian psy-
choanalysis—which is all-too easily equated with Slavoj Žižek’s work—
and Gilles Deleuze’s theory lies in their respective conceptions of lack and
guilt.1 Patricia Pisters illustrates this difference by comparing Žižek’s and
Deleuze’s readings of Hitchcock’s films:

According to Žižek, the Lacanian/Hitchcockian subject is a guilty sub-

ject, always already guilty of wanting enjoyment, jouissance, which has its
228 A. KIARINA KORDELA

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

By contrast,

Deleuze sees the Hitchcock universe as a network of relations (the tapes-

try). There is no a priori guilt (no Catholicism or Jansenism); there is only
an attempt to reason and to establish adequate relations that could improve
life and increase the power to act. The subject’s desire is not based on nega-
tivity and lack . . . but it is a positive desire to make connections. (21)

Adopting as her premise that “the Lacanian subject . . . according to

Žižek is the Hitchcockian subject” as read by Žižek, Pisters treats the
Žižekian Hitchcockian subject as emblematic of Lacanian psychoanalysis
(19). While “in early psychoanalysis, according to both Freud and Lacan,
desire is based on lack, the absence of an original and imaginary whole-
ness, which is lost as soon as the subject enters society . . . the imaginary
and the longing for the object of desire no longer haunt the late-Laca-
nian subject; instead it is haunted by the Real.” In late psychoanalysis,
the subject’s “guilty (Jansenist) desire is based on a fundamental,” as well
as “a-historical” and “transcendental . . . lack related not so much to the
Imaginary but to the impossible and horrible Real, which imposes its
gaze like a dangerous imprisoning web (the tapestry, according to Žižek)”
(18–19). In Pisters’s account, the psychoanalytic subject of imaginary lack
finds its destiny in the guilty “late-Lacanian” and Žižekian Hitchcockian
subject. This reduction of the psychoanalytic subject to guilt is not unre-
lated to Pisters’s disregard of another and, I would argue, corollary cen-
tral motif in Žižek’s approach to cinema. This concerns not guilt but what
Žižek claims to represent the ethical position. As we shall see, the psycho-
analytic subject is neither Pisters’s Žižekian subject of guilt nor Žižek’s
own ethical subject.
Nevertheless, Pisters’s account perspicaciously indicates that the decisive
criterion in the constitution of any film theory is its conception of the ulti-
mate cinematic gaze. Being organized around the opposition between two
gazes—one imprisoning the subject in a web of guilt and another enabling
liberating relations—Pisters’s account invites the question whether, in
order to obtain insight into the cinematic gaze, it suffices to affirm that
cinema establishes connections that rouse guilt or the power to act, and,
further, whether the assumption that guilt is necessarily imprisoning while
the power to act is always liberating, is justified. These questions, in turn,
point to the overarching issue: What kind of connections does the cin-
ematic gaze establish? I shall pursue this line of inquiry by engaging in a
 THE SURPLUS GAZE OF LEGIBILITY 229

dialogue with Deleuze, Lacan, and Žižek, within which the two Žižekian
approaches to cinema—the narrative of guilt and the claim to ethics—will
serve as a foil for both the gaze and the relation between psychoanalysis
and Deleuze.

Hitchcockian Guilt, or, Relation

As Žižek (1991) reminds us, “Rohmer and Chabrol” were the first to suggest
that “the ‘transference of guilt’” is “the central motif of the Hitchcockian
universe” (74; referring to Rohmer and Chabrol, 1979). The key term here
is “transference,” that is, the dependence of Hitchcockian guilt on a net-
work of relations in order to circulate. As Žižek (1991) writes,

In Hitchcock’s films, murder is never simply an affair between a murderer

and his victim; murder always implies a third party, a reference to a third
person—the murderer kills for this third person, his act is inscribed in the
framework of a symbolic exchange with him. (74)

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

in all three films, murder functions as a stake in an intersubjective logic

of exchange, i.e., the murderer expects from the third party something in
return for his act—recognition (in Rope), another murder (in Strangers on
a Train), silence before the court of law (in I confess).
230 A. KIARINA KORDELA

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

This is why, as Deleuze (1991) writes, “it is therefore not sufficient to

define Hitchcock’s schema by saying that an innocent man is accused of
a crime that he has not committed (201),” for this statement misses that
the essence in these themes is the problem of relation. If “Rohmer and
Chabrol have analysed Hitchcock’s schema perfectly” it is because

the criminal has always done his crime for another, the true criminal has
done his crime for the innocent man who, whether we like it or not, is
innocent no longer. In short the crime is inseparable from the operation
by which the criminal has “exchanged” his crime, as in Strangers on a
Train, or even “given” and “delivered up” his crime to the innocent, as in
I Confess. One does not commit a crime in Hitchcock, one delivers it up,
one gives it or one exchanges it . . . . The relation (the exchange, the gift, the
rendering . . .) does not simply surround action, it penetrates it in advance
and in all its parts, and transforms it into a necessarily symbolic act. (201)

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

The Symbolic, or, Structure

In “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” Deleuze (2004) writes that,

while “classical philosophy” had “conditioned” thought to a “distinction
 THE SURPLUS GAZE OF LEGIBILITY 231

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

Inside the series, each term has sense only by virtue of its position relative
to every other term. But this relative position itself depends on the absolute
position of each term relative to the instance=x. The latter is determined as
nonsense and circulates endlessly throughout the series . . . . In short, sense
is always an effect . . . produced by the circulation of the element=x in the
series of terms which it traverses. (70)

When the structure in question is cinema, the “instance=x” is the cam-

era’s gaze, insofar as it is not revealed or justified (as a character’s gaze),
but rather constitutes that unseen thread that traverses the seen images,
232 A. KIARINA KORDELA

allowing them to make sense as a coherent ensemble. But before we go

there, I would like, first, to clarify a possible confusion regarding the
terms “real” and “symbolic” in Lacan and Deleuze, and, second, to exam-
ine further the “third” that structures the series while preventing their
collapse into an imaginary mirroring.
As is evident from the above, Deleuze employs the term “real” unambig-
uously in the sense of the undifferentiated one, or, in Hegelian or Sartrean
terms, in the sense of an in-itself prior to the existence of a for-itself
(consciousness), as, for instance, matter is conceived in traditional thought.
In Lacan, on the other hand, the real, as many other concepts, is employed,
depending on the context (i.e., on the structure at hand), in different
senses.2 As Žižek (2002) observes, “there are three modalities of the Real”:

the “real Real” (the horrifying Thing, the primordial object . . .); the “sym-
bolic Real” (. . . the signifier reduced to a senseless formula, like quantum
physics formulas which can no longer be translated back into . . . every-
day experience . . .); and the “imaginary Real” (the mysterious je ne sais
quoi . . . on account of which the sublime dimension shines through an
ordinary object). (xii)

Evidently, by “symbolic” Deleuze refers to what Žižek calls the “symbolic

Real” in Lacan, that is, the aspect of the structure as a “senseless” and
meaningless formula, as the nonsense that circulates endlessly through-
out the series so as to allow their terms to obtain sense.
Turning now to the function of the “third” or “symbolic real,” the
best source for grasping it is a philosophical text from the Romanticist
era, which, as I argue elsewhere, paved the way for both structuralist and
psychoanalytic thought (Kordela, 2013). In his System of Transcendental
Idealism, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1976) intuits the sym-
bolic real by first noting that in the endless sequence of reflective acts—in
which the subject becomes the object each time it becomes self-conscious
of its own act of consciousness or intuition—“self-intuition could potenti-
ate itself . . . to infinity,” whereby “the series of products in nature [objects]
would merely be increased, but consciousness would never arrive” (376).
Therefore, there must be an “intuitive activity . . . to the second power . . .
a purposive activity, which is, however, unconsciously purposive,” that is,
capable of intuiting all preceding intuitions, but incapable of intuiting its
own act of intuiting—because, if it did, it would objectify it, the series of
obectifications would commence again, and consciousness would never
arrive (376). This “ground . . . can only lie outside the ego,” as “another
rational being” unconscious of its own reflective activity—an unconscious
thinker that is no ego but a thing that thinks, and which, without belonging
 THE SURPLUS GAZE OF LEGIBILITY 233

to any of the series of objects and subjects constituted throughout the

reflective acts, is present in both, for, without presupposing it, the two
series would perpetually collapse on one another, without consciousness
ever emerging (376–377).
The paradox of consciousness lies in the fact that it is grounded on its
incommensurable other, the unconscious or the thinking object. This is
possible only because the object itself, albeit unconscious, thinks—not
unlike, as we shall see, the case of cinema, in which, as Deleuze shows us,
the visible and its incommensurable other, the invisible, are both perme-
ated by thought.

Absolute Out-Of-Field, or, Surplus Gaze

Cinema poses exactly the same problem as consciousness. For every time
the camera is revealed to have assumed the point of view of a specific
character, its gaze represents that character’s consciousness, which, in
turn, becomes objectified the moment this character is shot from the
point of view of another character, and if this continued infinitely, the
film would consist only of objects and no consciousness would emerge.
This means that beyond all gazes of the camera that are retroactively jus-
tified as belonging to diegetic characters (conscious gazes) there must
remain some unjustifiable (unconscious) gaze. A justified gaze pertains
to what Deleuze (1991) calls the “relative aspect” of “the out-of-field: when
a set is framed, therefore seen, there is always a larger set, or another set
with which the first forms a larger one, and which can in turn be seen”
(16–17). But, Deleuze adds, this is possible only “on condition that it gives
rise to a new out-of-field, etc.”—and this “to infinity” (16–17). The char-
acter whose gaze is embodied by the camera in a given image can become
visible only under a new gaze, which, in turn, must also be justified as
someone’s gaze, and this ad infinitum, which is why “the set of all these
sets” that constitutes a film may form “a homogeneous continuity” but “is
certainly not a ‘whole’” (16).
This expansion to infinity points to an absolute gaze that is impossible
to be presented within the shot field. By this absolute gaze, “the closed sys-
tem [shot] opens on to a duration which is immanent to the whole uni-
verse [film], which is no longer a [closed] set and does not belong to the
order of the visible” (17). In other words, we must “confirm that the visual
image has a legible function beyond its visible function,” or, in Lacan’s own
words, that “if beyond appearance there is nothing in itself, there is the
gaze,” in its absolute, non-justifiable sense (Deleuze, 1991, 15; Lacan, 1981,
103). We must recall, of course, that Lacan (1981) situates the gaze beyond
234 A. KIARINA KORDELA

the realm of the visible and sharply differentiates it from “the place of the
geometral point defined by geometric optics” (95). Rather, the gaze—in its
absolute aspect—is the “light . . . which is something that introduces what
was elided in the geometral relation” that constitutes the optical matrix of
the visible, and this is “the depth of field, with all its ambiguity and vari-
ability, which is in no way mastered by me.” Rather, it is the gaze or the
“light [that] looks at me, and [that] by means of that light in the depths of
my eye, something is painted” (96).
This means that the absolute gaze of legibility “testifies to a more dis-
turbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to
‘insist’ or ‘subsist,’” or, if you prefer Lacan’s term, to “ex-sist” (Deleuze,
1991, 17; Lacan, 1977, 264). All these terms are meant to indicate that the
source of this gaze subsists in both the interiority and the exteriority of the
film, so that the film as a “whole is . . . like thread which traverses sets . . .
to infinity,” so that “the whole is the Open, and relates back to time or even
to spirit rather than to content and to space” (Deleuze, 1991, 16–17). By
“time” Deleuze means not the empirical time in which we perceive change
but “time as open and changing totality,” which “goes beyond all the move-
ments, even the personal changes, of the soul or affective movements, even
though it cannot do without them” (Deleuze, 1995, 238). By involving a
time that goes “beyond all relative movements,” cinema as the “indirect
representation of time as changing whole,” has the effect of “forcing us to
think an absolute,” while this “absolute, or the changing whole, does not
merge with its direct presentation” (238 and 240). This thinkable or leg-
ible, yet invisible mental/spiritual absolute testifies to the “intercommuni-
cation” of “the visual image . . . with something that goes beyond it, without
being able to do without it” (237). In short, the film as the set of all gazes
is an open whole, a not-all set, which, as such, is inhered by the incom-
mensurables of the relative visible and the absolute invisible, not unlike the
incommensurables of consciousness and the unconscious.
This internal incommensurability of cinema explains why Deleuze
locates in music, as used in sound cinema, the direct presentation of the
absolute or of the “living concept, which goes beyond the visual image,”
and its indirect presentation of the absolute: “sound cinema adds a direct,
but musical and only musical, non-corresponding presentation to the [visual]
indirect presentation of time and changing whole” (Deleuze, 1995, 240,
emphasis in original). Music as accompaniment to the visual in silent
cinema could not do this because there “music found itself subject to a certain
obligation to correspond to the visual image, or to serve descriptive, illustra-
tive and narrative ends, acting as a form of intertitle” and, thus, remain-
ing fully subservient to the “principle of correspondence” (238 and 241).
By contrast, sound cinema enacts “a reaction between the musical foreign
 THE SURPLUS GAZE OF LEGIBILITY 235

body and the completely different visual images,” so that the “achievement
of sound consisted . . . in expressing the whole in two incommensurable,
non-corresponding ways,” the indirect (visual) and the direct (invisible)
(239). Thus, “in the case of cinema, which is first of all a visual art, it will be
music which will be thought to add the immediate image to mediate images
which represent the whole indirectly” (239). With its use of music, sound
cinema redoubles the presentation of the internal incommensurability of
the changing whole or the not-all, which “already applied to silent cinema,”
“by imposing,” beyond the incommensurable noncorrespondence between
the visible and the legible, the further “dissociation between [music] and
the visual image, a disjunction which must not be surmounted,” so that “the
irrational cut between the two . . . forms the non-totalizable relation, the
broken ring of their junction” (238 and 279).

Nonsense, or, the Unconscious of Sense and Cinema

In Schelling’s account of the unconscious or the symbolic real as the pre-

condition of the structure of consciousness we see already the distinction,
eventually sanctified by psychoanalysis, between thought and conscious-
ness. Not all thought is consciousness—just as not all image is visible—
there is also unconscious thought—just as there is invisible, legible
thought-image; and this latter thought, which is as much the unconscious
of thought as of cinema (its absolute out-of-field), is a nonsensical formula
or code. For, as Lacan put it, “the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the
subject a kernel, a Kern, to use Freud’s own term” for the unconscious, “of
non-sense”; the statement that, as is often said, ‘psychoanalytic interpreta-
tion aims at unearthing the unconscious’ makes sense only if it is meant
to be interpreted as “to bring out irreducible non-sensical—composed of
non-meanings—signifying elements” (Lacan, 1981, 250). It follows that,
as Deleuze (1990) puts it, “sense and nonsense have a specific relation
which can not copy that of the true and the false, that is, which can not be
conceived on the basis of a relation of exclusion” (68). Rather, since non-
sense is the precondition of sense, nonsense must encompass in itself the
potentiality of all sense that it can possibly enable, whether this sense will
eventually be perceived by consciousness as true or false. To paraphrase
Schelling, nonsense is sense to the second power, a nonsensical sense that
is the sole absolute truth, insofar as it is the standard of both true and
false senses, according to Spinoza’s conception—“truth is the standard
both of itself and of the false” (Spinoza, 1985, 479; Ethics, part II, prop. 43,
schol., emphasis in original). Therefore, the formula of the unconscious,
nonsense, or the third symbolic real is always antinomic.
236 A. KIARINA KORDELA

In order to exemplify nonsense and its relation to sense Deleuze (1990)

turned to Lewis Carroll and to paradoxes. Right after posing the ques-
tion “what would be the purpose of rising from the domain of truth to
the domain of sense, if it were only to find between sense and nonsense a
relation analogous to that of the true and the false?” insofar as the latter is
taken to be a relation of exclusion (68), which expresses “the most general
problem of the logic of sense,” Deleuze writes:

An element cannot be part of the sub-sets which it determines, nor a part

of the set whose existence it presupposes. Thus, two forms of the absurd
correspond to the two figures of nonsense, and these forms are defined
as “stripped of signification” and as constituting paradoxes: a set which
is included in itself as a member; the member dividing the set which it
presupposes—the set of all sets, and the “barber of the regiment.” (69)

The two figures of nonsense are expressed through the two forms of the
paradoxes of set theory: the set of all sets, which should include itself in
order to be indeed the set of all sets, yet by including itself within itself
it ceases to be a closed set; and the “barber of the regiment,” who is sup-
posed to shave only those men who do not shave themselves, so that if he
is among those who shave themselves he must not shave himself, and if
he is among those who do not shave themselves he must shave himself.
The crucial point about nonsense or the unconscious is that it retains the
contradiction unresolved: both the thesis and the antithesis—the set of
all sets is and is not a member of itself; the barber belongs and does not
belong to those whom he must shave—are equally true, or, for that matter,
equally untrue; but they cannot relate in terms of exclusion, the one being
true and the other untrue. As Freud (1963) put it, the elements consti-
tuting the unconscious “are coordinate with one another, exist indepen-
dently side by side, and are exempt from mutual contradiction” (134).
Consciousness is predicated on the unconscious, just as cinema is pred-
icated on the absolute out-of-field, that is, on the nonsense of antinomic
statements that cohabit side by side, without mutual contradiction. The
logic of sense is the logic of cinema, as Walter Benjamin (2008) was the
first to discern: “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does
psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (337).

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

In his eleventh seminar, when Lacan (1981) states that “the status of the
unconscious is ethical,” he encapsulates in one brief statement his thesis
on ethics, which he had developed in his seventh seminar (34). Namely,
that the ethical act can advance only under an antinomic gaze. Relevant
 THE SURPLUS GAZE OF LEGIBILITY 237

to Lacan’s thesis on ethics is his other, notorious, thesis that “the uncon-
scious is structured like a language,” which anticipates that the ethi-
cal act, too, will also be predicated on the structure of language (149).
In his extensive reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, Lacan takes recourse to
the distinction between discourse and language in order to differentiate
King Creon’s (and the city’s) position from that of Antigone, who per-
sists, against Creon’s decree, on burying her brother, Polynices, regard-
less of the fact that he has committed treason and fratricide. Already in
his third seminar, Lacan (1993) had differentiated discourse from lan-
guage as follows: “Firstly, there is a synchronic whole, which is language
as a simultaneous system of structured groups of opposition, then there
is what occurs diachronically, over time, and which is discourse” (54).
In his seminar on ethics, Lacan (1992) positions Creon in the realm of
discourse, in whose diachrony Polynices cannot be detached from his
past acts, for there “the being of him who has lived cannot be detached
from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny,
of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself.” By contrast, the
“unique value involved” in Antigone’s ethical stance “is essentially that of
language,” that is, “that purity, that separation of being from the charac-
teristics of the historical drama he [Polynices] has lived through” (279).
The ethical act presupposes a detachment from discourse: the “histori-
cal drama” and its “consequences,” as determined by the historical moral
values that define “good and evil” and reward the former while punishing
the latter. As opposed to established morality, the ethical act involves “an
horizon determined by a structural relation; it only exists on the basis of
the language of words,” which is why

Antigone invokes no other right than that one, a right that emerges in the
language of the ineffaceable character of what is—ineffaceable, that is,
from the moment when the emergent signifier freezes it like a fixed object
in spite of the flood of possible transformation. What is is, and it is to this,
to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is
fixed. (Lacan, 1992, 278–279)

To invoke the right of language is to persist on the ineffaceable fixation of

the signifier in spite of the flood of the possible transformations that the
signifier might undergo in its historical drama. This is why Antigone’s
plea does not attempt to exculpate her brother; rather, her entreaty
opposes Creon’s and the city’s position by fully embracing his guilt. Lacan
echoes her voice as follows:

My brother may be whatever you say he is, a criminal. He wanted to destroy

the walls of the city, lead his compatriots away in slavery. He led our enemies
238 A. KIARINA KORDELA

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

In short, my brother is my enemy and is my brother.

Ethics and Psychosis

Now we can return to Žižek and the other motif in his analysis of cinema,
the claim to ethics. Central in this narrative features what we could call
Rossellini’s ‘great trilogy of ethics’: Germany, Year Zero (1948), Stromboli
(1950), and Europa ’51 (1952)—all of which exemplify “the assumption of
a distance from the symbolic universe,” which for Žižek (1992a) encap-
sulates the ethical act (42). Undoubtedly, Antigone’s defiance of the city’s
laws and Creon’s decree, not to mention her eventual literal entombment,
amply demonstrate a distance, in this case both voluntary and enforced,
from the symbolic order, as a result of the ethical requirement to ignore
established morality, norms, and values. Yet, not any distance from the
symbolic order qualifies as an ethical act. To explain, let us examine
Žižek’s reading of Edmund, the protagonist of Germany, Year Zero,

a boy of ten living with his elder sister and sickly father in the ruins of
occupied Berlin in the summer of 1945 . . . . He falls more and more under
the influence of his homosexual Nazi teacher, Henning, who fills him
with lessons on how life is a cruel struggle for survival where one must
deal mercilessly with the weaklings who are just a burden to us. Edmund
decides to apply this lesson to his father who constantly moans and groans
that he will never recover his health and that he wants to die, since he is
only a burden to his family. (34–35)

Edmund poisons his father, thereby “granting his request,” and in the
remaining of the film we see him “wander[ing] around aimlessly among
the ruins of the Berlin streets,” being “unable to let himself go in the
game” when he runs into other kids, and when “his sister calls him” he
“can no longer accept her solace, so he hides from her in an abandoned,
half-ruined apartment house, walks to the second floor, closes his eyes and
jumps” (35). As Žižek comments, one could argue that Edmund’s act was
“caused by the teacher’s word” as much as that his act “at the same time
meets his father’s explicit will to die” (35). Thus, his act is “at the same
 THE SURPLUS GAZE OF LEGIBILITY 239

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

a ceaseless “cascade of reshapings of the signifier from which the increas-

ing disaster of the imaginary proceeds” until “the level is reached at which
signifier and signified are stabilized in the delusional metaphor” (217) and
the “disorders at the level of language” (Lacan, 1993, 92) necessary for the
constitution of psychosis to begin.

The Surplus Gaze of Cinema

If brought together, Žižek’s two motifs, the narratives of ethics and guilt,
can shed further light on the question of the absolute out-of-field or
gaze in cinema. To follow up on the argument presented above, Žižek’s
scheme is predicated on the opposition between presence and absence of
meaningful (ideological) mandates, without considering the difference
between meaning (ideology/discourse/symbolic order) and signification
(language/code/nonsense). As a result, the Žižekian universe consists of
two worlds: the one is dominated by meaning and invariably enthralls
subjects in a network of exchange of guilt; in the other, meaning is voided,
enabling subjects to attain absolute freedom. What is elided in this
scheme is that absence of meaning does not amount to absence of struc-
ture—signification as a purely machinic network of abstract relations,
without or outside of which there can be no subjects and, for that matter,
moles, molecules, or particles in quantum physics. This disregard entails
the collapse of the symbolic Other—where a subject may be interpellated
by this or the other message, or (imagine that s/he is interpellated) by no
message—and the real Other—that is, the nonsense of the pure structure
itself, which coincides with the compossibility of all possible messages
that could occupy the empty places of the structure. In this regard, one is
tempted to see in Žižek’s work an allegory of the current relation between
so-called Deleuzeans and so-called Lacanians. It is as if Žižek’s work had
internalized within itself the external opposition between the two camps:
on the one hand, the “Deleuzean” rhizomatic scheme which, pace Deleuze
himself, is supposed to know nothing of guilt and, through its disregard
for meaning and predilection toward affect, to offer a liberating network
of relations apparently dominated by a remarkable equilibrium, in which
no position is ever in debt; on the other hand, “Lacanian” psychoanalysis,
which, pace Lacan himself, persists on its “umbilical cord” to “represen-
tations” and their meaning, its fixation on the father and the law, and its
ubiquitous guilt (Pisters, 2003, 19). What is being missed in this debate—
both the internal and the external—is, first, that whether we like it or not,
there is no equilibrium, and, second, that submission to the law is caused
not by the law itself but by (specific types of) desire.
 THE SURPLUS GAZE OF LEGIBILITY 241

Regarding the first point—there is no equilibrium—here again we have

something to learn from Hitchcock’s films, about which Deleuze (1991)
writes:

The innocent-guilty equilibrium, the restitution to each of his role, the

retribution upon each for his action, will be achieved, but at the price of a
limit which risks corroding and even effacing the whole—like the indiffer-
ent face of the wife who has gone crazy in The Wrong Man. (203)

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

Brandon: What are you doing?

Rupert: It’s not what I am going to do, Brandon. It’s what society is going to
do. I don’t know what that’ll be, but I can guess. And I can help. You are
going to die, Brandon. Both of you. You are going to die.

Ironically, or rather quite Hitchcockianly, Rupert utters these words right

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

But the cherry on the top of the cake—which can also teach us some-
thing about the desire entailed in the psychoanalytic ethics of the uncon-
scious—is I Confess. As Žižek (1991) observes, this film presents “a
significant exception” to the films of the trilogy of guilt, insofar as “Father
Logan recognizes himself from the very beginning as the addressee of the
murderous act,” something that is facilitated by his “position as confessor”
(78). Thus, Žižek concludes, “the film makes visible the hysterical, ‘scan-
dalous’ kernel of Christianity,” namely, that

the suffering of Father Logan consists in the fact that he accepts the trans-
ference of guilt, i.e., that he recognizes the desires of the other (the mur-
derer) as his own. From this perspective, Jesus Christ . . . appears in a new
light: insofar as he assumes the guilt of sinners and pays the price for it, he
recognizes the sinners’ desire as his own. Christ desires from the place of
the other (the sinner) . . . . Christ is clearly a hysteric. For hysteric desire is
the desire of the other. (78–79)

This reading is only partly true, for both Father Logan and Jesus iden-
tify with the desire of the other/sinner and that of a position incapable
of sinning—otherwise, they themselves would simply become sinners,
instead of risking or giving up their lives for the sinners. It is because
Father Logan’s position is not just that of the hysteric—a disposition that
invites identification—that identification with him is undermined, as
one’s indignation can only exasperate in the face of his persistent deter-
mination to submit himself defenselessly to the murderer’s exploitation.
The truly Christian motto, “obscured by its institutionalization” (Žižek,
1991, 78), is not ‘I am hysteric,’ but ‘I am and am not a sinner.’
Not unlike Germany, Year Zero, it is from the gaze of this nonsense
that I Confess is shot. Under this gaze, the meanings of all ideologies con-
verge to and performatively entice the ethical desire and act that define the
psychoanalytic subject. This nonsensical gaze is the absolute out-of-field,
the filmic unconscious, or surplus gaze of legibility. At stake in conceiv-
ing the gaze of legibility is neither the opposition between absence and
presence of meaning nor that between guilt and empowering relations, but
the intrinsic relation between meaning and meaningless formula, as the for-
mer’s precondition, or, the relation of the “more radical Elsewhere, outside
homogenous space and time,” as the precondition for homogeneous space
and time (Deleuze, 1991, 17).
Yet, between Hitchcock’s and Rossellini’s films there persists an impor-
tant cinematographic difference. As Deleuze (1991) writes, although “the
two aspects of the out-of-field,” the relative and the absolute, “intermingle
 THE SURPLUS GAZE OF LEGIBILITY 243

constantly,” generally “one aspect prevails over the other, depending on the
nature of the ‘thread’” (17). That is,

the thicker the thread which links the seen set to other unseen sets the bet-
ter the out-of-field fulfills its first [relative] function, which is the adding of
space to space . . . . But the finer it is . . . the more effectively the out-of-field
fulfills its other [absolute] function which is that of introducing the trans-
spatial and the spiritual into the system which is never perfectly closed. (17)

The thicker the thread, as is the case of Hitchcock’s films, the more closed
appears the image as the presentation of homogeneous space and time;
the finer the thread, as in, among others, Dreyer, Antonioni, Godard,
and, of course, Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero, the more open the image
becomes, allowing its relation to the heterogeneity of the absolute, legible
and thinkable (hence, spiritual), yet invisible whole to transpire through
it. However, this does not mean that a thick thread and a closed image
must necessarily impend the indication of the absolute and “most myste-
rious” aspect of the absolute out-of-field. For instance,

Hitchcock’s frames are not content to neutralize the environment, to push

the closed system as far as possible and to enclose the maximum number
of components in the image; at the same time they make the image into a
mental image, open . . . on to a play of relations which are purely thought
and which weave a whole. This is why we said that there is always out-of-
field, even in the most closed image. And that there are always simulta-
neously the two aspects of the out-of-field: the actualisable relation with
other sets, and the virtual relation with the whole. (Deleuze, 1991, 18)

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

far from inconceivable. Depending on its indirectness or directness, the

surplus gaze of legibility can be more or less explicit, that is, the unfolding
of its thread may or may not be overlooked. But, in either case, it always
reveals the relation of the visible to the legible, to the nonsense of the con-
tradictory ideological gazes.
For, as Žižek (1992a) puts it, referring to René Girard’s (1987) commen-
tary on Job, the biblical character “who resists assuming the role of a scape-
goat/victim” and instead “continues to raise the question of the meaning of
it all, of what God wants from him”:

What is here so subversive and pathbreaking, what confers upon the story
of Job its dramatic tension and at the same time its truth, is the very con-
frontation of the two aspects . . . . The effect of truth proceeds solely from
the confrontation of the two perspectives. (56)

May we always keep them both in sight.

Notes

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

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Papers of Metapsychology. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books,
116–150.
Girard, René (1987). Job, the Victim of His People. Trans. Yvonne Freccero.
London: Athlone Press.
Jameson, Fredric (2006). Lacan: The Silent Partners. Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London:
Verso, 365–397.
Karatani, Kojin (1995). Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money. Ed.
Michael Speaks. Trans. Sabu Kohso. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kordela, A. Kiarina (2013). “Value.” In Keywords in German Aesthetics. Ed. J. D.
Mininger and Jason M. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lacan, Jacques (1977). Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:
W. W. Norton.
——— (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton.
——— (1992). Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton.
——— (1993). Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–56. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans.
Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton.
Pisters, Patricia (2003). The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in
Film Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rohmer, Eric and Claude Chabrol (1979). Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films.
Trans. Stanley Hochman. New York: Ungar.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1976). System of Transcendental
Idealism. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. In Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected
Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. Ed. Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns (347–377). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [System
des transzendentalen Idealismus, in Schellings Sämtliche Werke: Ausgewählte
Schriften in sechs Bänden, Bd. I, Frankfurt/Main, 1985, 395–702].
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and Trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj (1991). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
——— (1992a). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New
York: Routledge.
——— (1992b). Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan . . . But Were
Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London: Verso.
——— (2002). For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor.
2nd edition. London: Verso.
 Part IV

Encountering . . .
 01

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

If we revel in Apocalypse, it is . . . because it inspires each of us with

ways of living, surviving and assessing. [The Book of Revelations is
for] everyone who thinks of themselves as survivors. It’s the book of
Zombies.
(Deleuze, 2002, 8)

I f the pedagogical import of zombie-cinema can be linked to a ques-

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

Figure 01.1 Zombie.

Source: Retrieved from amctv.com.

a manner antithetical to the representational image of the equilibrated,

autopoietic, or homeostatic body, zombie-cinema posits a malevolent life
poised to betray the image of the human organism in preparation for a
perverse people yet to come.

What Is a Zombie-Life?

If zombie-cinema questions how a life might become, it does so by palpat-

ing the problem of representation. Embodying the disjunctive synthesis
of both life and death, the zombie’s ‘undeath’ short-circuits the normative
image of human vitality. It is precisely this unresolved disjunction that
underscores the psychoanalytic theorization of the monster as a return
of repressed infantile beliefs (Gabbard and Gabbard, 1987; Clover, 1987).
Following this theoretical trajectory, the zombie is made to represent the
‘full’ presymbolic milieu of the unalientated and undifferentiated body
of the infant prior to Oedipal castration. “All abjection,” Kristeva (1982)
writes in Powers of Horror, “is in fact recognition of the want on which
any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (5). The ‘bodily
wastes’ that populate the zombie’s milieu ostensibly palpate the uncon-
scious wish to re-create the ‘full’ body prior to its separation and dis-
tinction from a ‘chaosmos of orgonal’ energy (Creed, 1986). Here, the
zombie figures as the nondifferentiated, nonnormative body prior to its
social-symbolic distribution. Formulated thus, the pleasure of zombie-
cinema insists through its mis-en-scène of mastery over the traumatic
 LIVING . . . AGAIN 251

passage from undifferentiated wholeness through to the formation of sus-

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

palpates something of this ‘dispersed organism’ in his study of animal-

environment assemblages. As Caillois detects, the affective organ-ization
of life need not proceed via a marriage of self-resemblant forms. That is,
the camouflaged insect does not assume its own image, but more radically,
becomes resonant with the ‘organs’ of its environment. Put differently, ani-
mals do not simply adapt. Their becomings are linked to their potential to
affect and be affected by the virtual organs of their milieu. Such an insight
is already tacitly assumed in Lacan’s (1987) analysis of the mirror phase
wherein nascent egoic organization always-already proceeds by inexact
recognition. That is, the image of the human organism upon which the
gestalt actuality of the body is mapped functions to cover over an inhuman
virtuality teeming with affective potential. To contort Lacan, the mistake
of the mirror phase is not simply an effect of misrecognizing oneself in
the image of the Other, but rather, of occluding the virtuality of potential
arrangements through which different modes of living might be opera-
tionalized. In place of this virtuality, the mirror stage marks a historical
phase in the organization of the human organism born of a fundamental if
not productive tyranny. Specifically, where mirror representation provides
the human imago its gestalt actuality, this process is exacted in opposi-
tion to the larval inhuman affects of the body. Herein, the kind of motile
alien organs harnessed by insect and microbial life are excised as potential
resources for difference.

Infected-Lacan

The problem of representation fulminated in this bastard reading of

Lacan (1987) produces an alternative trajectory to the theorization of
zombie-cinema as the mis-en-scène of human desire and psychical devel-
opment. To take seriously the inexact recognition operative in Lacan’s
mirror stage reintroduces the problem of representation into the reflec-
tive circuit that has been established between human and zombie-life.
Simply put, the theorization of zombie-cinema as a mode of unconscious
representation and catharsis fails to comprehend what is key to Lacan’s
mirror stage: The image of the body must first be made. To produce a cor-
ollary between human and zombie-life, function(s) of desire and image(s)
of ontological development must first be presupposed. It is on this point
that we might ask how the representational correlation of human and
zombie-life is founded in the first place. Put differently, where Lacan’s
mirror stage supposes a more profound ontological difference inhering
between zombie and human life, their theoretical correlation must first
be explained. Such an explanation might begin through the detection of
 LIVING . . . AGAIN 253

another name for the dystopic battleground palpated in zombie-cinema,

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

‘human society’ and the image of human life itself. In particular ways,
zombie-life constitutes an anti-oedipal ontology insofar as it is malevo-
lently antiego and antihomogenesis.
It is this radical counterontology that is covered over via the theoriza-
tion of zombie-life as a representation of both human desire and the statis-
tical life of human being. Where the zombie might otherwise fulminate an
ontological survey of the “obsolete organism,” or rather, the radical muta-
tion of the human as a necessity of its becoming, the representational link
between human and zombie-life already presupposes the immutability of
anthropocentric life inhering beneath difference. Here, a particular rep-
resentational impasse insists insofar as becoming is reduced to “one com-
plex, the complex of molar determination” (Ansell-Pearson, 1999, 182).
Against Lacan’s insight on the inhuman forces teeming beneath self-reflec-
tion then, the representational correlation of zombie and human life insists
upon rehabilitating the ontological primacy of the human. From this per-
spective, the zombie is easily reduced to a representational metaphor of
molar social order (marginalized social and racial classes) or otherwise
a psychical taxonomy particular to human development (the investment
of desire in regimes of social organization). Such anthropocentrism effec-
tively annihilates the virtual by presupposing the actuality of human life
as a horizon of thought. Herein, zombie-life can only be thought as a sub-
standard ontological image to the oedipal territories upon which ontology
is ostensibly founded. This is to say that the inhuman life Lacan detects at
the periphery of the mirror stage becomes fully recaptured in the image
of human life, or rather, the image of human life cut from the chaosmos
of the virtual. Here, what is reflected is an image of desiring-production
reduced to the representation of the given. Put differently, in order for
representation to function in the first place, a particular territory or bor-
der must be drawn. In part, this territory can be thought as an extension
of Oedipus, which functions as a refrain against the threat of organismic
obsolescence or rather, the necessity that a species survives “by not being
itself ” (Colebrook, 2011, 18).

Zombie-Problems

The mode of oedipal territorialization informing upon the analysis of

zombie-life produces three distinct problems. First, it becomes incapa-
ble of thinking zombie-becomings as anything but what Foucault dubs
a “category of the negative.” In this mode, the zombie is rendered into a
figure of lack devoid of both law and limit (Foucault, 1983, xiii). Rather
than detecting the expressive potential of the zombie as a means upon
 LIVING . . . AGAIN 255

which to rethink social and biological limits, zombie-life is made to rep-

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

the image of the human body given in advance, or rather, the image of the
human sedimented within an oedipal stratum. Such an approach would
entail thinking zombie-life in a manner delinked from its conceptualization
as an ontological regression or otherwise, as a corollary to molar catego-
ries of race and class along which its significance has been distributed (see
Giroux, 2010). In this vein, the cinematic zombie might be thought as a sign
for assessing life at the horizon of human survival, where the sustainable
and homeostatic image of the human organism is drawn into assemblage
with problematics of viral contagion, nonrepresentational thought, and the
radical decoding of the social sphere under capitalism. It is along the lines
of this experiment in rethinking both organismic and social organization
that the zombie palpates a malevolent form of life for thinking “inhuman
futures” (Colebrook, 2011, 24).

Infected-Deleuze

The ‘malevolent life’ of the zombie palpates a radical rethinking of the

‘bounded’ human organism. In this manner, the zombie is not simply
a sign of the body’s termination, but instead, of a desiring-production
aimed at overcoming a particular image of the body. It is here that Artaud’s
(1976) critique of the “strongly patterned body” and the overdetermina-
tion of bodily drives via the orthodox arrangement of organs and their
flows functions to give the body back to a ‘malevolent art’ of deterritori-
alization (Alliez, 2006, 158). “The body . . . [has] . . . no need of organs,”
Artaud (1976) writes, “[o]rganisms are the enemies of the body” (17).
Recapitulated in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987),
Artaud’s attack on the overdetermined image of the body seeks to liberate
its affective potentials from neurotic forms of territorialization. Artaud’s
challenge commences a way of thinking the body as actual-virtual, or
rather, as an assemblage of desiring-circuits and part-relations that could
and must be made differently. The modern illness of man, Artaud claims,
is an effect of his botched construction. Hence, to liberate the affective
potentials of the body requires that the anatomy of man be remade in a
manner no longer betroved to an image of life derived from either nature
or morality emanated from the transcendent judgment of God (Artaud,
1976). It is here that the Deleuzian provocation that film become ade-
quate to the creation of new signs for thinking that Artaud’s project is
rejoined. That is, the ‘malevolent life’ of the zombie palpated in cinema
becomes a way of thinking beyond the neurotic territories of the human.
‘Zombie-cinema’ creates an experimental plateau upon which the body
might be re-created, or rather, reconnected with larval affects subtending
 LIVING . . . AGAIN 257

the orthodox “image of the [human] body” (Deleuze, 2003a). Minimally,

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

genealogical relation, the zombie outmodes taxonomies of anthropologi-

cal capture. Escaping molar categories of gender, class, and race through
the malevolent corruption of both biological and cultural orders, the zom-
bie posits the necessity to relaunch the question of how a life might go.
In this vein, the zombie becomes probe-head for commencing the radical
corruption of ‘nature,’ cultivating an unnatural nuptials that overspills the
anthropological strata in all directions (Ansell-Pearson, 1997; Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987).

Zombie Ethologies

In Deleuzeguattarian (1994) terms, mimicry is a poorly made concept

insofar as it reduces difference to patterns of imitation and resemblance.
While the zombies of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) maintain the
motor-habits of human obsession, their difference from humans and line
of flight from the molar edicts of humanity suggest the becoming of a
radically different ‘people.’ Filmically, this difference has been amplified
in such films as Land of the Dead and 28 Days Later, where the image of
zombie-life is increasingly drawn away from its correspondence to the
human. Hence, to link the analysis of zombie-life to a representation of the
human fails to explain what is new to such a malevolent force of becoming.
The necessity for a new trajectory of thought no longer linked to mim-
icry is already at work in Lacanian psychoanalysis, whose extension of
Caillois’ (2003) Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia anticipates a way
of thinking life without reducing it to a matter of ‘direct’ correspondence.
That is, Caillois argues that organisms do not assume the characteristics
of their environment as a function of survival but rather, as an effect of
being captivated by their surroundings. Building upon Caillois’ premise,
Lacan’s theorization of the mirror stage launches a psychological concep-
tualization of why organisms come to morphologically mimic the images
of their surroundings. As Lacan implies, it is via the inexact correspon-
dence of an ‘obsessed’ organism and its surroundings that the derealized
imago or ideal ego is produced. This posed, the radicality of Lacan’s con-
ceptualization is not to be located in the image of the mirror whereupon
the human organism is territorialized according to the general typology
of oedipal or rational man. Rather, it is in Lacan’s conceptualization of the
mirror’s outside that a more radical difference might be detected. “In our
opinion,” Lacan (1934) writes in his review of Minkowski’s Le Temps vécu,
“the most original form of intuition . . . [is] that of another space besides
geometrical space, namely, the dark space of groping, hallucination and
music, which is the opposite of clear space” (cited in Caillois, 2003, 90).
 LIVING . . . AGAIN 259

Here, Lacan points to a zone of indiscernibility or outside thought where

one might begin to think the dissolution of form that no longer seeks
its definition in a body, bodily zones, or subdivisions. In other words,
Lacan mobilizes a trajectory of thought upon which life might be drawn
into experimental relation with the forces of the ‘Real’ through which the
body might be hollowed out and dilated upon the inhuman affects and
rhythms of its milieu. In a trajectory minimally inhering both the think-
ing of Caillois and Lacan, the organism is no longer definable in terms
of either the function of its organs or its representational correlation to a
specific genus or species (Ansell-Pearson, 1999). Rather, it is here that we
might begin to understand the manner in which zombie-life relaunches
new potentials for ethological thinking.

Inhuman Potentials

Zombie-life counteractualizes an ontology limited to resemblance and

imitation. Ultimately, the zombie is no longer definable in terms of molar
resemblances to the human, but might more adequately be thought in
terms of speeds, slowness, and potentials of relations. Occupying a dark
space of comatose hallucination and viroid rhythms, zombie-life becomes
an experiment in affect, or rather, a question of what the body can do
and undergo (Spinoza, 1985). As Mohammad (2006) elides, the cinematic
shift delinking the zombie from voodoo wielding ‘master manipulators’
palpates the idea of another kind of life inhering beneath the anthropolog-
ical perspective. That is, opposed to the manipulation of Madge Bellamy
in Victor Haperin’s (1932) White Zombie, Romero’s image of the undead
inhere an inhuman force delinked from transcendent control. It is this
inhuman force, or what might be dubbed the affective potential of the
body, that has become intimate to thinking zombie-life in contemporary
cinema. Where the shambling zombies of Romero’s (1968) Night of the
Living Dead are drained of affect, the undead of 28 Days Later (2002) and
House of the Dead (2003) refigure the zombie as an organism capable of
vigorous speed and agility. Similarly, where the ‘psychically manipulated’
Madge Bellamy or Christine Gordon of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with
A Zombie demonstrate a limited ability to affect others, contemporary
cinematic zombies affect easily through bites, viral transmission, and
chemical contagion at molecular levels. What differs across these altered
manifestations is less the image of zombie ‘identity’ or its metaphorical
representation of the social. Rather, insofar as the zombie can be thought
as a cinematic sign for remaking the body, it might be said that it has
transpired new filmic involutions for thinking affect. It is here that a
260 JASON WALLIN

Spinozist approach to thinking zombie-life begins to survey the radical-

ity of inhuman forces for commencing an antihumanist ethology.
In Ethics (1985), Spinoza contends that “the human Body can . . . be
changed into another nature entirely different from its own” (39). Where
Artaud’s permutation of Spinoza’s challenge addresses the need to remake
the arrangement of organs and flows of bodily energy, Spinoza’s remarks
on the becoming of the body entail in addition the reconfiguration of
physical and mental states. As Spinoza elides, the affective potential of
the body is augmented through processes of composition and recompo-
sition in which machinic relations to other bodies and forces might be
composed. Zombie-films palpate the event of this recomposition by sur-
veying the machinic potential of the body, its affective decomposition, and
subsequent recomposition as another life-form. Simply put, zombie-films
might be thought in terms of the body’s capacity to enter into affective
relation with the bodies of others. Here, the zombie commences a modal
ontological thinking via its radical decomposition of the body and, further,
its recomposition along inhuman vectors of speed.
In Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, “rage”-infected zombies assume the
inhuman rhythms of an accelerated viroid life, moving and reproducing
at a virtually unabatable rate. This assemblage of body and viroid malevo-
lency figures in the hyperactive and frenetic use of rapid cuts to produce
a cinematic “strobe-effect” for accelerating zombie-movement along inhu-
man trajectories. A similar recomposition inheres Zach Snyder’s (2004)
remake of Dawn of the Dead, where zombie-life is thought through the
affective force of malevolent viral life. This malevolent sign is filmically
constituted through the removal of shots from motion sequences, produc-
ing a life born of alien rhythms that accentuate affective speed and nearly
instantaneous parasitic assemblage over narrative pacing and continuity
(Fhlainn, 2011). Such filmic techniques not only palpate the inhuman
affects of zombie-life, but further, diagram the malevolency of conta-
gion by transposing its circuit-breaking rhythm into the visual register.
Here, the movement-image undergoes a schizoid intervention where what
is produced is less a coherent representational image than fragments of
filmic code composing and decomposing along an alien chronometrics.
In this vein, Snyder’s Dawn and Boyle’s 28 Days Later modulate the affec-
tive composition of the zombie-body by producing a filmic diagram of the
malevolent decomposition of the anthropocentric perspective.
Short-circuiting the ‘human time’ of the film, the zombie mobilizes a
schizoid temporality that palpates molecular speeds of transmission, conta-
gion, and reproduction. Further, the human face, its performative gestures,
and surface signification of class, race, and gender are radically decom-
posed in both 28 Days Later and Dawn, where life is recast upon a line of
 LIVING . . . AGAIN 261

flight poised to betray the image of human faciality that informs upon the
subject a single-point, anthropocentric perspective (MacCormack, 2011).
While such forces of inhuman decomposition pose a malevolent destiny
for the human, it is one that nevertheless functions to “dismantle the face
and facializations” that overcode the body as a screen of signification
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 60). Akin to the schizoid decompositions
composed by Francis Bacon, the zombie rediscovers a decoded meat-head
beneath the face, or rather, a zone of confused sensations not yet governed
by spatial organization or the orthodox face of humanity: Jesus Christ
Superstar (Deleuze, 2009). Where faciliality functions to assimilate non-
conformist traits by emitting “waves of sameness,” the zombie palpates the
virtual potential of bodies to vary, metamorphose, and enter into relation
with other species (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 178). It is here that the
inhuman life and becoming-molecular of the zombie ‘begins’ to function
as a “tool for blazing life lines . . . toward the realms of the asignifying,
asubjective, and faceless” (187). A similar trajectory inheres the concep-
tualization of zombie-life in Bruce McDonald’s (2009) Pontypool, where
the unique ontology of the zombie produces a mode of expression likened
to the chattering and swarming properties of insect life. Herein, the very
terms of ‘common sense’ upon which meaning relies are radically disman-
tled through the projection of a contagious minoritarian language.

The ‘Agit’ Kingdom: Zombieland

Beyond its composition as a cinematic sign for breaking normative pat-

terns of representation, the temporal continuity of character develop-
ment, and tropes of signification, the zombie marks the introduction of a
new kind of life recalcitrant to the human perspective and the presump-
tion that the future will be a human one. Herein, the cinematic sign of
the zombie works to expand a field of potential expressions that eclipse
the capture of unnamed connections in the image of a prior semiotic
possibility. Herein, the continual reconfiguration of the zombie marks
an escape velocity toward the production of a body without image anti-
thetical to the ideal ego born through mirror correspondence and rep-
resentational self-reflection. This is to say that the zombie diagrams a
zone of indiscernibility between the homeostatic organism and the mul-
tiplicity of molecular life (viroid, chemical, radioactive) transversally
informing upon it (Agamben, 2004). Despite the composition of the
body’s image from the formlessness of the Lacanian Real, what insists
nevertheless is an indistinct life through which new life-forms might be
thought.
262 JASON WALLIN

To operationalize indistinction as an ontological trajectory is already to

think beyond the limitations of the anthropological stratum toward a “rad-
ical dehumanization . . . of nature” (Agamben, 2004, 39). Here, Uexküll’s
(2010) ethology of the sea urchin, the dragonfly, and tick suggest that there
is not one unified world, but rather, a multiplicity of overlapping perceptual
worlds. The creation or territorialization of a world, Uexküll demonstrates,
is produced via the organisms’ ability to affect and be affected. It is in this
manner that a world can be minute, as in the case of the tick (Ixodes rini-
cus), whose world is produced of only three affects: sensitivity to light, the
smell of mammals, and of burrowing at the point of easiest access to the
blood supply of its host (Deleuze and Parnet, 2008). Populated by unique
diagrams that imagine the human world according to the affective powers
and percepts of bees, flies, and hedgehogs, Uexküll’s work functions to not
only disorient the perspective of the reader but also to insist that a world
must first be made (Agamben, 2004). Drawing from Uexküll, the question
might be posed as to what, if anything, composes a zombie-world, for what
characterizes the zombie across a myriad of filmic iterations is less its com-
position of a territory than a disregard for the territorializations of human
life. Breaking patterns of territory at varying scales, from the nucleated
organization of the body through the disruption of geopolitical boundar-
ies (Resident Evil, 28 Weeks Later), the zombie might more adequately be
thought in terms of its deterritorializing power.
The zombie functions to compose a ‘malevolent rhizome’ growing into
every corridor of intensive and extensive space (Deleuze and Guattari,
1987). Intensively, zombie-life creates lines of assemblage into the molecu-
lar archi-tecture of the human. With the inhuman contagion in Dawn of the
Dead and 28 Days Later, a rhizome in which entry and exit points are always
motile and open to further outgrowths is produced. Opposed to progres-
sive accumulation, zombie-life is born in the middle of things, in the zone
of human and inhuman and, further, as an immanent event nonreliant
upon transcendent dimensions of overarching morality, images of organ-
ismic life, or the psychical dimensions of imaginary or symbolic registers.
Extensively, the zombie violates all demarcations of sociocultural bound-
ary, regulations of public space and privatization of property. Developing
rhizomatically, the zombie hordes of Walking Dead, Zombieland, and Diary
of the Dead extend in all directions as a mass capture apparatus. Where one
is deanimated, another takes its place. Where a line of movement is barred,
zombie-life masses and overflows as an amoebic superorganism, or in the
case of the ‘intelligent’ zombies in 28 Days Later, sets off in another direc-
tion altogether. Where the zombie meets human life, it forms a connection
and produces a new trajectory of malevolent life. Weed-like in its prolifer-
ating force, the zombie-life spreads horizontally, continually escaping the
 LIVING . . . AGAIN 263

attempt to capture or otherwise terminate its malevolent powers of con-

nection and production.

Every(bodies) Working for the Weekend?

Where Halperin’s White Zombie or Bellamy’s I Walked With a Zombie

might function as an allegory for the exploitation of labor and the alien-
ation of the laborer within deadening institutional systems, the postmod-
ern zombie is said to produce an alternative metaphor. Where early and
retro (Fido) conceptualizations of the zombie imagined an organism per-
fectly adapted to the banality of factory routine and the will of an authori-
tarian master, the prevailing analysis of Romero’s iteration of zombie-life
recast it as the burnt-out shell of modern consumerism. Here, Romero’s
Dawn of the Dead figures as a diagram for the bankrupt state of modern
consumption in which the zombie functions to satirize the consumer as an
unthinking, co-opted, and insatiable ‘thing’ driven by a monological will
to consume (Walker, 2006). Uncoupled from the representational analy-
sis that has dominated zombie-film studies, however, Romero’s diagram
of contemporary consumption might be taken further still. Specifically,
where the ‘malevolent rhizome’ produced by zombie-life can be delinked
from its representation of ‘consumers,’ it might be taken as an inexact dia-
gram for the function of capitalism itself. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987)
write, capitalism is born from a radical deterritorialization of the indus-
trial social milieu and its regulation of the socius by way of strict regula-
tory codes. It is in this sense that capitalism is fulminated upon a line of
revolutionary decoding in which social norms, circuits of exchange, and
the overdetermination of desire are rendered fluid. Schizzing the social
terrain, capitalism ‘frees’ social desire to enter into new forms of link-
age and assemblage largely irrespective of geopolitical borderlines, pub-
lic institutions, and property rights. Piercing the body of the organism,
capitalism remakes life according to its potential to keep (capital) flows
in circulation. Herein, the schizo-impulse of capitalism functions virally
in its ‘liberation’ and subsequent capture of the organisms’ desire, instan-
tiating a radical disequilibrium capable of maintaining the very forms of
crisis and contradiction it requires to fuel its powers of proliferation and
potential to produce the new.
While the apocalyptic augury of the zombie-film might be thought
as a way of imaging life at the end of capitalism, it might concomitantly
become a means to rethink the problem of capitalism itself. Herein, zom-
bie-life might be thought as an image of life swept along by the powers
of deterritorialization intimate to the schizophrenic impulse of capitalism
264 JASON WALLIN

(Larsen, 2010). To return to the question of what kind of world the zombie
produces is to detect a transversal relationship between the viral prolif-
eration of the zombie, its rhizomatic outgrowth, unleashed desires, and
the schizophrenic impulse of capitalism itself. It is here that the zombie
functions as a malevolent force proliferating their deterritorialized affects
through the unceasing surplus production. Zombies always produce an
overabundance of zombies. Toward the absolute deterritorialization of all
planetary life (Resident Evil), the zombie restlessly multiplies its particular
form of virulent becoming, producing a disequilibrium that continually
seeks out new vital forces with which to contract itself. In this vein, the
filmic zombie functions as something of a noology (an image of thought)
into which much of its cinematic world is inexactly actualized. In the
course of such films as Dawn, 28 Days Later, and Resident Evil, the world
undergoes a schizophrenic deterritorialization populated by the perverse
affects of zombie-life. Cities hunch with radically recirculated flows (Land
of the Dead), altered temporalities, and sufficiently malformed utility.
Living inhabitants in this deterritorializing world are left to form neot-
erritorialities around the State military (28 Days Later), religious convic-
tions (The Walking Dead), and the nostalgic relaunch of life as wilderness
survivalists.

Zombie Revolution

Thought as an inexact image of life caught within the milieu of neoliberal

capitalism, the zombie becomes a probe-head for the absolute deterrito-
rialized exhaustion of the world. This posed, such a conceptualization
of zombie-life overlooks the Deleuzeguattarian proposition that while
capitalism dispenses with external social limits, it must retain an internal
limit upon which life can be made equivalent to the abstract body of capi-
tal itself. Hence, while capitalism produces revolutionary lines of flight
that liberate thought and action from prior circuits of regulation, its revo-
lutionary impulse maintains a limit attractor informing upon the poten-
tial of revolutionary becomings. As Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007)
write, “[i]n the process of multiplying flows of decoded desire, [capital-
ism] cannot help but also produce flows of desire that escape; flows which,
instead of moving in line with capitalism, go against it, or run off in other
direction” (15). While the zombie begins to diagram the deterritorializ-
ing impulse of neoliberal capitalism, it concomitantly escapes reterrito-
rializing on the body of capital. For example, where the last remnants of
human civilization in Romero’s Land of the Dead vie for a position within
the flagging refuges of capitalist society, the zombie figures in absolute
 LIVING . . . AGAIN 265

contradistinction as a schizo-revolutionary force or war-machine for

deposing capital accumulation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Zombie-life
rides the unleashed flows of capitalism (revolutionary movements, mad-
ness, and terrorism) to fulminate a schizophrenic deterritorialization of
the capitalist machine’s internal limit. In this vein, zombie-life becomes
a probe-head for detecting how the deterritorializing desire of capitalism
(scientific expansion, finer controls over molecular life, and the insertion
of life within the axiomatics of capital profit-motives) is also the potential
of its undoing.

The (Un)dead Don’t Shop

Along these renewed lines of revolutionary potential, the filmic zombie

might be rethought as an instantiation of a people yet to come. As such
cinematic carryovers as public zombie-walks increase in popularity and
participation, it is crucial to remark that people are not simply ‘overcom-
ing’ zombies, but rather, forming connections with particular practices
specific to the revolutionary impulse of zombie-life. Constituting a war-
machine from the outside thought of capitalism and State power, zombies
work through occupation. Producing a nomadic smooth space, zombies
‘hold the street’ by arraying themselves within the striated space of the
city (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Opposed to entrenching themselves
within fortifications or amassing into nodes of power, zombies utilize
their potentials of mass, movement (swarming), and speed (acceleration
or waiting with infinite patience) to occupy and retard the mobilization of
State control. Functioning rhizomatically, zombie-life produces an ‘inverse
geometry’ or ‘countercartography’ that remaps the striated routes of city
corridors by punching holes through buildings, occupying subterranean
space, and distributing themselves fractally throughout the milieu. While
Romero’s Land of the Dead begins to suggest the emergence of leadership
qualities among zombies, zombie-life is typically smooth (nonhierarchi-
cal) and devoid of leadership. Postinfestation, zombies become schizoid-
anybodies recalcitrant to modes of contemporary control that necessitate
the constancy of identity or the continual registration of identificatory
passwords. Occupying by alternative means, zombie-life produces a
malevolent line of becoming-imperceptible, revolutionizing their deterri-
torialized milieu in a manner wherein the zombie no longer ‘stands out,’
but rather, is an expected motile feature of the surroundings (ibid.). Such
imperceptibility is palpated in 28 Days Later, where it is ultimately the
human, or an encounter with humans, that becomes most incongruous.
In this revolution from the periphery, the zombie palpates a malevolent art
266 JASON WALLIN

through which the habits of humans and the anthropocentric judgment of

life are radically recast. Put differently, the cinematic sign of the zombie
is not simply that which reifies the necessity of what is, but produces a
line for thinking what is not yet. In this vein, the zombie becomes a spiri-
tual automaton for revolutionary action capable of taking life beyond the
human, or rather, beyond the humanisms that capital manipulates in its
production of new markets, tastes, and orthodoxies of enjoyment.
Where zombie-life escapes enslavement (Fido) as a ‘standing’ labor
force, it fulminates a slow-motion (or accelerated) general strike, breaking
the circuit of capitalist production, corporate use-value, and the designer
lifestyles of the bourgeoisie (Holland, 2012). Herein, the zombie might be
thought as the screen of the event, or rather, as the actualization that some-
thing has both happened and is happening (Deleuze, 1992). Where the
event is born of a chaotic and incorporeal multiplicity (something has hap-
pened), the zombie becomes a cine-sign or screen for thinking molecular
or larval desire oriented to the revolution of the public sphere (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987). Herein, the zombie palpates a malevolent revolution-
ary line intimate to molecular revolutions being prepared throughout the
contemporary world. Zombies become a power of the false for overturning
the already deadly trajectory along which life is oriented (Deleuze, 2003a).
In this vein, zombies might be thought as a screen for molecular (non-
identitarian, nonhierarchical) potentials of connection, occupation, and
affectations capable of undergoing a radical revolution of the socius. When
the zombies Romero’s Dawn of the Dead Zombies return to the mall, this
repetition must be understood as a repetition with difference. Zombie-life
does not shop. It occupies and perverts. Ultimately, zombies are not us,
but rather, an inhuman impulse of what we are not yet. As Larsen (2010)
writes, “[t]he issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the [zom-
bie hunting] ‘heroes’ . . . if they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a
future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future” (p. 4).

No Future

If zombie-life can be thought as a screen for a people yet to come, or

rather, for a revolutionary people in the process of becoming, the zombie
composes a ‘malevolent art’ for the deterritorialization of what is. This
malevolent line of flight produced by zombie-life fulminates upon an
empty body without organs, or rather, a completely deterritorialized and
catatonic affect that might reach a limit point of productive potential.
This posed, the empty BwO of the zombie creates its own form of dis-
sonance as a noncommunicative, unproductive, and autistic life-form,
functioning as a “refusal to be born [into the symbolic order], connecting
 LIVING . . . AGAIN 267

with death before its patriachalized ascent into the symbolic” (Land,
2011, 399). Here, zombie-life resists the very prospect of a future or rather,
a future continually reterritorialized in a mirror image of what is. Apart
from what is, the zombie continues to function as a unique cine-sign for
surveying and assessing a life-form born of the deprogramed body, its
savage metronomic pulsations, and the extreme revolutionary deterrito-
rializations of capitalism (ibid.).

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270 JASON WALLIN

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

Frida Beckman is a postdoctoral researcher at Linköping University, Sweden.

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

Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (SUNY Press, forthcoming, 2013), and (coed-
ited) Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages (Palgrave Macmillan,
2011). Her articles have been published in the collections European Film Theory
(Routledge, 2008), Keywords in German Aesthetics (Harvard University Press,
forthcoming), Literary Paternity—Literary Friendship (University of North
Carolina Press), Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (SUNY Press, forth-
coming), Spinoza Now (University of Minnesota), The Dreams of Interpretation
(University of Minnesota), and journals such as Angelaki, Cultural Critique,
Hihuo kukan [Critical Space] (in Japanese translation), Modern Language Studies,
Monokl (in Turkish translation), Parallax, Political Theory, Radical Musicology,
Rethinking Marxism, and Umbr(a).
Sheila Kunkle is Assistant Professor of Individualized Studies at Metropolitan
State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She has published various articles on
psychoanalysis, film, and culture in journals such as Paraoxa: Studies in World
Literary Genres, American Imago, Journal of Lacanian Studies, International
Journal of Žižek Studies, and Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society,
as well as coedited a collection along with Todd McGowan, entitled Lacan &
Contemporary Film (Other Press, 2004).
Meera Lee is Humanities Faculty Fellow at Syracuse University where she
researches and teaches Korean cinema and literature, trauma, psychoanalysis,
and postcolonial criticism. She has written articles on Korean cinema, gender,
and subaltern in both English and Korean, as well as a book on psychoanalysis in
Korean. She is currently working on a book manuscript, titled In Search of Han:
Trauma, Haunting and Identity.
Todd McGowan teaches cultural theory and film at the University of Vermont.
He is the author of Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (SUNY Press,
2007), and other books. He is also the coauthor (with Paul Eisenstein) of Rupture:
On the Emergence of the Political (Northwestern University Press, 2012).
Patricia Pisters is Professor of Media Culture and Film Studies and Chair of the
Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She has published
on film-philosophical questions on the nature of perception, the ontology of the
image, and on politics of contemporary screen culture and the idea of the “brain
as screen” in connection to neuroscience. Her publications include The Matrix of
Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press,
2003), Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values (ed.
with Wim Staat; Amsterdam University Press, 2005) and Mind the Screen (ed.
with Jaap Kooijman and Wanda Strauven, Amsterdam University Press, 2008).
Her latest book is The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen
Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012). See also www.patriciapisters.com
Robert Samuels is President of the University Council—AFT (American
Federation of Teachers) and he teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.
 CONTRIBUTORS 273

He is the author of the popular blog “Changing Universities” and several books,
including New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernity.
Jason Wallin is an Assistant Professor of Media and Youth Culture Studies in
Curriculum in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of
Alberta, where he teaches courses in visual art, media studies, and curriculum
theory. Jason’s most recent book, A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on
a Pedagogical Life, is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Jason is reviews editor
for Deleuze Studies.
Emanuelle Wessels is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at
Augsburg College. Her work focuses on Media Convergence and New Media
Storytelling, the Ethics and Politics of Viewing and Interactivity, Media
Technologies, and Affect. She can be reached at wessels@augsburg.edu.
 Index
abject, 250, 257
abyme, 23n3, 29n43
abyss, 11, 12
action-image, 56, 170, 177, 192,
213–215, 217, 219, 221, 222–223
actual|virtual (actualization), 13, 14,
19, 20, 23n3, 30n50, 48, 49, 50, 54,
55, 58, 59, 62, 66n10, 67n16, 81, 100,
103, 140, 143, 162, 164n1, 186, 189,
190, 192–193, 195, 220–221, 239, 243
affect, 252, 255–256, 259–260, 262,
264, 266
affection-image, 103, 198n19, 209,
212–214
Alberti, L B: and central
perspective, 50
Altman, Robert, 205–206, 214; Nashville,
206, 214–215; Shortcuts, 206
anthropocentrism, 261–262, 266
Antigone, 237–238
antinomy, 233, 235, 236, 239
Anti-Oedipus (A-O), 4, 10, 12, 24n5,
26n17, 26n18, 74, 209, 220
Antonioni, M., 209, 215, 217
Artaud, A., 256–257, 260
asignification, 18, 25n14
assemblage, 5, 12, 14; between voice
and body, 83
automodernity, 221–225
autopoiesis, 250, 257, 268
Badalamenti, A., 72
Badiou, A., 13–17; on A-O, 30–31n54;
against Deleuze, 31n57, 32n59,
32n58; Event, 15–16
Barthes, R., 83
Beckett, S., 212
becoming-imperceptible
(imperceptible), 11, 18, 19, 33n71,
60, 136, 265
becoming-woman, 7, 27n25
Bejahung, 2, 3
Benjamin, W., 236
Bergman, I., 213
Bergson, H., 19, 170, 172, 175, 180, 188;
memory-image, 193, 194, 199n38,
209–210, 212, 219; on time
biopolar, 89, 95, 99, 103; face, 104; love,
100; temporality, 100; time, 89
Blade Runner (film, Ridley Scott),
200n43
body, 99; bipolar-, 99; immaterial,
99; immaterial/impersonal, 100;
impersonal, 99; material/personal,
100; public bodies, 105; schizoid-,
100; split-, 99; see also bipolar and
schizoid
Body without Organs (BwO), 12, 194,
266
Borges, J.L., 201n47
brain: Bergson, 180, 190;
brainwaves-191–196, 200n41,
201n47; is the screen, 18, 23n3, 169,
170, 172
Buchanan, I, 21, 25n5, 28n31
Caillois, R., 251–252, 258–259
camera, 230–231, 233, 236
capitalism: consumer, 224, 256, 263–
267; cultural, 215; designer, 1, 21,
24; global, 66n12, 120, 222; late, 200
Carroll, L., 236
Chabrol, C., 229–230
chance, 130, 133, 136, 137, 141, 142
276 INDEX
Chion, M., 25n14, 72, 85, 86
Chronos|Aion, 10, 29n41, 34n75
cine-sign, 266–267
Cinema 1 and 2, 19–20, 34n73, 34n74;
Cinema 1, 206, 208, 209–211;
Cinema 2, 209, 216, 220, 225
(cinema of) relations, 228–230, 240,
242–244
cinematographic apparatus, 46, 61,
147; classical and conventional,
151–152, 154, 156, 157, 164, 176,
177, 179–180, 181; Peeping Tom and
Strange Days compared, 185–186,
195
cliché, 74–75, 82
communism, 28n34
consciousness, 232–236
contingency, 130, 133, 136, 137, 141, 143
Copjec, J., 24n3, 149, 173
counteractualization, 18, 19, 106
Creed, B., 250
crystal-image, 20, 35n82, 59, 60; in
Strange Days, 193; in Vertigo, 189–190
crystalline time, 91, 100, 101; see also
crystal-image
death drive, 8, 12, 16
Deleuze, G., 10–11; affection-image,
103; audiovisual cinema, 74; avec
Lacan, 86, 91, 99, 100, 101, 104,
129, 133, 140, 143; and Beckett,
83–84; on Bergson, 199n38;
bipolar-temporality, 99; brain is
the screen, 18, 23n3; on camera-
consciousness, 189; compared to
Žižek, 171–175; crystalline time,
100, 101; desire, 62, 80; difference
and repetition, 130–131, 134, 137,
138, 144; eternal return, 134; event-
16–17, 19, 18, 23n3; flux of “line of
flight,” 93; How Do We Recognize
Structuralism, 208–209, 227–236,
240–243; irrational cuts, 141;
Lacan, 18, 19; Mankiewicz and, 136;
Masoch/masochism and, 131, 132,
144; Proust and, 18, 130, 131; and
pure image, 85; recollection-image,
103, 104; Sade/Sadism and, 131,132,
144; schizoid-face, 100; temporality,
134; the Real, 142; voice, 86; world-
memory, 103, 104; see also body
Deleuze|Guattari, 5, 6, 10, 11; sign,
21, 22
diagram, 53, 211, 260–264
dialectic, 11, 17, 23, 27n26, 28n32, 132,
154, 210, 211, 215, 255
diegetic reality, 174
Difference and Repetition (DR), 11, 12,
14, 16, 18, 31n57, 33n71, 179
desire, 2, 5, 7, 9; assemblages of, 14,
19; ‘cause’ of, 23, 24, 25n12, 26n16,
26n17, 26n20; and Deleuze, 62, 80;
fundamental, 190, 195; impossible,
78; Luis Buñuel and, 197n13, 227–
228, 230, 240–242; luminous, 45, 50,
54; and objet a, 79; optical, 50, 54,
60; of the Other, 11, 12, 13, 27n26; in
Peeping Tom, 181; scopic, 55, 61, 62;
in Strange Days, 182; subject of, 172–
176; transcendental or immanent,
172–176; visual, 51
desiring machine, 5, 12, 26n16
differentiator, 10, 12, 13
Doane, M.A., 72
Dogville (film, Lars von Trier), 147,
156, 161, 163
Dolar, M., 8, 25n14, 71, 72, 134
Don Juan, 132
drives (Triebe), 2, 11, 12, 26n21
ego, 6, 11, 232
Elliot, T.S., 137
encore, 91, 93, 96, 98, 100, 105; gap, 93,
97, 102; love, 104; once again, 98;
still, 93
enjoyment, 227
ethics, 228–229, 236–240, 242
Ettinger, B., 2, 27n25
Event (also event), 9, 10; becoming-
visceral of- 8, 260, 262–263, 266;
cinematic, 64, 76; as evental
sublime, 31n54, 32n58, 33n72,

34n75; sense-,13, 14, 15–19, 20,
32n3, 25n8, 28n34, 29n40, 30n48,
30n54
excess, 150, 152, 155, 160, 164
fabulation, 18, 20
faciality, 261
failure, 91; destructive, 92, 93; love as,
97; of love, 101; repetition of, 101;
repetitive, 96
fantasy, 4; between –and desire, 77,
80, 85, 119, 134, 140; fundamental,
8, 23, 27n26, 72, 78, 81, 87;
Hitchcock’s, 169–170
fascism: micro-, 194; soft, 21
Fellini, F., 209, 215, 217, 218
flashback, 136, 193–194, 219
Flaxman, G., 32n61, 33n67, 35n87
Fink, B., 2, 3
Foucault, M., 35n87, 241
Freud, S., 2, 4, 6, 173; -ian discourse,
181; -ian framework in Vertigo, 187,
228, 235–236
fundamental fantasy, 8, 27n26
gaze (Lacan), 3, 11, 19, 24n3, 50–55,
58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 72, 75, 94,
98, 112, 113, 118, 125n2, 125n6,
142–143, 147, 150, 151, 154, 157, 160,
164, 171, 173; in Vertigo, 187, 196n8,
196n11, 228–229, 231, 233–234, 236,
240, 242, 244
Girard, R., 244
Godard, J-L., 21, 35n88, 72, 218
Guattari, F., 1, 11, 13, 227
guilt, 227–230, 237, 240–242
haecciety, 17
Hallward, P., 13, 30n49, 30n53, 32n62
han, 91; bodies of 105
Hegel, G. W. F., 129, 143, 222
Heider, F: and light, 48–50, 63
Hitchcock, A., 169–170; I Confess,
229–230, 242; Rope, 229, 241, 243;
Sabotage, 230; Shadow of a Doubt,
241; Strangers on a Train, 229–230;
on Vertigo, 187–188, 208, 214, 221,
INDEX 277
223–224, 227–230, 241–243; The
Wrong Man, 241; universe, 171–176
Holbein, H: The Ambassadors, 52,
53, 125
Holland, E., 81
image: action-, 170; aural-, 82;
imaginary- 52,53, 54; moving-, 18,
21, 23n3, 45, 46, 56, 57, 60, 63, 65,
66n14, 67n17, 67n19, 170; neuro-21,
33n67, 34n74, 34n80; pure-, 83, 84,
85; relation-, 175; sound -, 72, 73,
74, 76, 84; still, 23n3, 19, 20, 46,
48, 49; symbolic-51; of thought-21,
34n73, 169, 170; time-20, 34n73,
34n80, 85; voice-74
imaginary, 228, 231–232, 239–240
imago, 97, 99; the mask, 98
impossible, 93, 96; impossibility of
love, 93
indiscernibility, 23n3; of subject and
object, 186–191; of virtual and
actual, 59, 103
inhuman, 249, 251–252, 254, 257–262,
266
instance=x, 231; see also object=x
inorganic, 12, 17
intersubjectivity, 93, 97, 99
invisible, 233–235, 243
Irigaray, L., 4
irrational cut, 19, 20, 33n72
James, W., 32n63
Jameson, F., 200, 244n2
Jansenism, 171, 173, 175, 228
Job (biblical character), 244
Johnson, A., 8
Johnston, A., 7
jouissance, 3, 4; feminine, 4, 78, 93;
jouis-sans, 27n25; jouis-sens, 4, 5;
phallic, 98
Kafka, F., 213
Kant, I., 197n16, 216, 239
Karatani, K., 239
Kordela, A. K., 33, 232
Kristeva, J., 2; semiotic, 4, 250
278 INDEX
Lacan, J., 1–7; assemblage, 5; desire,
133, 140, 144; drive, 133, 141; forced
choice, 130; Imaginary, 207–211,
213, 224–225; intersubjectivity,
99; love, 129, 133, 137, 140, 141,
143, 144; love subjects, 100, 129,
134, 141, 143, 144; mirror-phase,
251–254, 258; object a, 133, 144;
Real, 2–7, 129, 133, 134, 141, 142,
144, 207–209, 210–214, 215, 220,
223–224; repetition, 129, 134, 137;
S III, Psychosis, 22n1; S XI, Four
Fundamentals, 5, 23n3, 26n16, 79,
211; S XX, Encore, 4,5, 27n25; S
XXII, RIS, 6; S XXIII, Sinthome,
6; S XXIV, 6–7; subject, 129, 130,
133, 140, 141, 143–144; Symboic,
207–209, 215, 220–224, 227–237,
239–240, 244; temporality of
intersubjectivity, 99; and theory,
29n39; and voice, 71–72, 78, 91, 93;
also see encore, imago, jouissance
lack (manque), 5, 8, 19, 79–80, 81, 82,
83, 173–174, 227–228
lalangue (llanguage), 4,5
Laplanche, J., 26n20
larval, 252, 256, 266
law, 16, 23n3; city, 238, 251, 253, 254,
257; of the Father, 195, 240; -less,
72, 73; national, 100; of perspective,
50–51; of transcendental aesthetic,
116, 162
Lecercle, S., 11, 14, 29n40, 30n51
Leclaire, S., 5, 26n16, 26n17
legible/legibility (as opposed to
visible), 233–235, 242–244
light, 12, 19, 23, 34n74, 45–68
Lloyd, G., 174–175
Logic of Sense (LS), 10–11, 25n6,
29n36, 30n48, 209
logic of the signifier, 10, 25n12
Luhmann, N: and light, 49, 63
Lynch, D., 71–87
MacCormack, P., 21, 35n92
malevolent art, 265
malevolent-life, 250, 256–257,
260–261, 264
Marrati, P., 21
Martin-Jones, D., 34n78
Marx Brothers, 208
materialism: intelligent, 12, 25n11
Massumi, B., 34n74, 206
McGowan, T., 22, 77; Mulholand
Drive, 78, 81, 142
McLuhan, M: and perceptual media, 49
Mecchia, G., 21
méconaissance (misrecognition), 3, 18,
23n, 97
mediators, 17
melancholy, 91, 96, 98, 105; individual
and national, 91; melancholia, 92,
97, 99; melancholic desire, 90
memory-image, 193
Miller, J-A., 6, 28n28; and voice, 78
mirror: effects in Vertigo, 189–190;
imago, 97, 99, 104, 135, 141, 149,
150, 159, 181, 183; Lacan and
Deleuze, 23n3; stage, 56, 63, 81, 148,
251–254, 258
mis-en-scene, 250, 252, 255
Modleski, T., 187; on Vertigo, 188, 190
molar|molecular, 12, 79, 255–259;
becoming-molecular, 257–260;
molar, 255–259; molecular-life,
265–266
movement-image, 18, 21, 23n3,
45, 46, 56, 57, 60, 63, 65, 66n14,
67n17, 67n19, 170, 177, 190, 192;
actualizing the past, 193, 206, 209–
212, 216–217, 219, 223, 229
Mulholland Drive (film, David Lynch),
74–76, 77–83, 84
Mullarkey, J., 33n65, 34n77, 34n80
multiplicity, 15, 26n17, 48, 49, 55, 57,
58, 59, 60, 66n15, 80, 82
Mulvey, L., 50, 156, 158, 180, 187
Nancy, J-L., 82
narration vs. story, 20
necessity, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 143
Nietzsche, F., 31n57, 176, 206

nonsense|sense, 25n6, 85, 137, 231–
232, 235–236, 239–240, 242–244
not-all set, 234–235
object=x, 231; see also instance=x
object-oriented ontology (OOO), 21
objet a, 3, 23–24n3, 71, 72; and phallic
signifier, 74; in relation to Deleuze,
Guattari and Lacan, 78, 80; as
voice, 74
Oedipus (also, oedipal), 46, 53, 79,
91, 97, 98, 99, 100, 181, 182, 227,
250–258, 261, 267–268
Organs without Bodies (Žižek); 10, 12,
29n35, 32n59, 58, 74, 129, 134, 205
out-of-field, 230, 233, 235–236, 240,
242–243
Outside, 1, 5, 7, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23,
33n66, 33n71, 35n87
Outside artist, 3–4, 6
paradox, 3, 10, 14, 20, 23n3, 29n39,
30n48, 58, 91, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103,
104, 105, 133, 143, 148, 154, 155,
188, 233, 236, 239, 243; see also
antinomy
partial objects, 5, 12, 13, 26n18,
79, 82
Pasolini, P: free indirect discourse, 186
Peeping Tom (film, Michael Powell),
170, 176, 177, 180
Peirce, C.S., 34n73, 207–210, 214
people yet to come, 17, 18; missing, 20,
21, 22, 32n64
perception, 18, 19; transcendental, 176
perception-image, 186, 213
perspective, 29n43; Deleuzian, 79, 80;
geometrical, 50, 51, 53, 54
Pisters, P: neuro-image, 21,
227–228, 240
postalphabetiztion|postideogrphizat
ion, 24n5
postmodernity, 216–219, 221–223
powers of the false, 11, 17, 20, 266
progression, 89, 90; against the, 104;
capitalist, 102; temporal, 91, 93
INDEX 279
psychoanalysis, 4, 10, 11, 22n1, 23n32,
31n54, 45; and schizoanalysis, 46,
47, 48, 50, 54, 73, 79, 111, 112, 113,
123, 124, 172, 174, 176, 181, 227–
229, 231, 235–236, 240
psychoanalytic subject, 228, 242;
see also subject
psychosis, psychotic, 3, 4, 6, 7, 23n3,
238–240
pure image, 83–85; see also image
quantum physics, 26n22
race and ethnicity: in Strange
Days, 185
Rachline, F., 132
Rancière, J., 20, 33n72, 34n80
Rand, A., 132
rape: scene in Strange Days, 183–185
recollection-image, 103, 104, 107n20,
193, 219
rhizome (rhizomatic), 9, 28n32, 170,
171, 172
Real (Lacan), 1–7, 8–11, 15, 16, 17,
24n5, 25n7, 25n11, 26n21, 27n26;
occasion the 147–165, 171; in
Strange Days, 184; in Vertigo, 187,
189, 190, 207–209, 210–214, 215, 220,
223–224, 228–229, 231–232, 235,
239–240; virtual, 10, 17, 29n3, 61, 62,
73, 80, 85, 97, 98, 99, 129, 133, 134,
137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145; and
Žižek, 173–174; see also R1 and R 2
Real (R1 and R 2), 2, 5, 6–9, 13; R1, 11,
15, 23–24n3; as virtual, 10, 17
regression, 89, 90; love progresses in,
93, 102; temporal, 91
Reid, J., 20; Godard, 21, 35n88, 35n89
relation-image, 175
repetition, 89; endless, 97; of failed
love, 89, 102; of failure, 96,101
representation: beyond, 149, 150, 152
reverse chronology, 89, 92, 101, 102
revolving chronology, 89, 101, 104;
loop, 105
rhizome, 185, 262–265
280 INDEX
Rodowick, R.N., 34n76
Rohmer, E., 229–230
Romanticism, 232
Romero, G. A., 251, 255, 258–259,
264–266
Rossellini, R., 209, 238, 242–243;
Europa ’51, 238; Germany, Year Zero,
238–239, 242–243; Stromboli, 238
Roudinesco, E., 4,5
Sartre, J-P., 32n62, 154, 207, 232
Schelling, F.W., 7, 11, 13, 28n32, 82,
211, 232–233, 235
schizoanalysis, 20, 21, 71, 80, 85
schizoid, 93, 98, 99, 103; -body, 99,
100; face, 100; see also body
schizophrenia, schizophrenic, 4, 6, 11;
schizoCrets, 19–21, 35n91
schizophrenic, 91, 100, 103, 104;
schizo, 251, 260, 263–265
self-reflection, 253, 261
seers, 21; in Rear Window, 175, 190
sense, 147, 150, 151, 154, 157, 160, 164,
231–233, 235–236, 239
senseless, see nonsense|sense, sense
shot|montage couplet, 23n3
sign: in Deleuze, 18, 33n69
signifer: despotic, 79; as S and S1 , 9,
28n33
Silverman, K., 25n10, 72, 75,76; voice
and body, 83, 85
sinthome, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 27n25
Smith, D., 26n15, 29n38; Lacan and
Deeuze, 72, 79, 85
Soler, C., 7, 27n25
Sophocles, see Antigone
smooth space, 32n59, 162, 265
spectator (spectatorship), 49, 54, 60, 63,
65, 102; Godard and, 112, 113, 114,
115, 117, 119, 120, 147, 148, 149, 151,
152, 155–164, 169, 171, 172, 174, 180,
182, 184, 185, 187; in Strange Days,
191, 195; in Vertigo, 188, 190
Spinoza, B., 4, 11, 13, 31n57, 65n10,
172, 174–175, 197n14, 235, 257,
259–260, 269
structuralism, 4, 208–209, 221–222,
230–232, 235, 237, 240, 244
surplus, 227, 233, 240–244
symbolic, 229–232, 235, 238–240, 244
Stelarc, 199n40
Strange Days (film, Katherine Bigelow),
169, 170, 176, 177, 182–185
subject: of desire, 172–176; in Peeping
Tom, 183; transcendental, 179
sujet suppose savoir, 28n33
symbolic act, 8
temporality, 91; active temporality,
92, 93, 99; bipolar, 100; of
interruption, 93; no temporality,
91; non-chronological 91; passive
temporality,92, 96, 99, 105;
revolving or forking, 102; see also
movement-image, time-image
Thiele, K., 32n65
Thousand Plateaus (TP), 5, 17, 22
time: ethics of, 194, 195, 234, 237,
242–243; and memory, 86; in Time,
89–106, 174, 191–193
Time (film, Kim Ki-duk), 89–106
time-image (C2), 19, 20, 34n73, 34n80,
35n82, 67n17; image of, 76, 85, 86,
170; in Strange Days, 191, 209, 216,
219, 220, 223, 229; in Vertigo, 189
totality, see not-all set
trauma, 89, 91, 92, 93, 98, 104;
individual personal, 105; love,
100; love as, 95, 97; national and
personal traumas, 92; psychic, 90,
92; return of , 89, 97, 99
Twelve Monkeys (film, Terry Gilliam),
192, 200n44
Tykwer, T., 130, 134, 137
unconscious, 4, 5, 6, 26n18, 26n21,
47, 91; national, 92, 99, 100, 103,
104, 130, 131, 162, 165, 182; of
patriarchy, 187, 211, 219, 220,
232–237, 242, 250, 251, 252
universe: as metacinema, 169–201
univocity, 4, 11, 12, 17

Versagung (refusal), 8, 28n29
Vertigo (film, Alfred Hitchcock), 170,
186–191
Verwerfung (foreclosure), 3
virtual|actual, 20, 30n50
virtual Real, 10
visible, 233–235, 244
voice, 71–87; and Deleuze, 84; and
female subject, 75–76; grain of the-,
83; with image and sound, 72–73;
J-L Nancy on -, 82–83; as miming,
75–76, 78; and Rebekah del Rio,
78–79, 81, 83; recorded -, 77, 81–83;
and time, 80; voice image, 74, 84
von Trier, L., 147, 157
voodoo, 24n5, 259
voyeurism, 176; gender, 181–186; in
Strange Days and Peeping Tom,
177–178
war machine, 20, 265
whodunit, 229
INDEX 281
whole, 228, 231, 233, 235, 237, 241,
243; see also not-all set
Žižek, S., 3, 7–9; concerns with,
28n31; against Deleuze, Organs
without Bodies, 10, 12, 29n35,
32n59, 205; and Deleuze, 171–176,
205–209, 211, 214–215, 216,
220–225, 226, 227–229, 232,
238–242, 244; disguised Deleuzian,
28n32; dominance over Deleuze,
74; on Event, 16; German Idealism,
7; and Hitchcock, 171–176; and
Lynch, 73, 129, 135, 143;
Schelling, 11, 13; symbolic act, 8, 16
Zombie, 22, 32n64; -life, 249–267
Zupančič, A., 129, 144n3; comedy, 137,
138, 144; on Deleuze, 129, 134, 138,
142; Lacan and, 129, 133, 134, 142,
144; love, 133, 137, 138, 142, 144;
object a, 134,137, 138, 144; Real,
142; repetition, 134, 144