Points of Departure
Modern Film Theory and its Postmodern Psychoanalytic Critique
-- with Roland Barthes1
Troels Degn Johansson
Postmodern psychoanalytic theory since Jacques Lacan has been engaged in
founding anew psychoanalysis and its applications in traditional fields of psychoanalytic
interests (studies of culture, literature, etc.). In film studies, this enterprise has
been initiated by the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the so-called Ljubljana
School's extensive "introductions" to Lacanian theory by means of postmodern
popular culture,2 a work that has been highly influential especially in French and
Anglo-Saxon film studies.3 These contributions strongly call for film studies to
reconsider the general possibility of psychoanalysis in modern film theory. Whereas
psychoanalytic notions play a key part in the conceptual foundation of the latter, this
challenge is motivated by the necessity of re-establishing modern film theory as a
firm and fertile ground for what already constitutes a paradigm of interdisciplinary film
studies; a "Grand Theory" that builds on semiotics, gender studies, critical theory,
and classical film theory, and which has been highly relevant also for students of
other visual arts. Still, although it is true that the "new Lacan" has given rise to a
fundamental critique of modern film theory's apprehension of basic psychoanalytic
concepts, no attempt has yet been made to advance a general and systematical refoundation
from the point of view of postmodern psychoanalytic theory. And this is
certainly not the aim of this article either. However, I would like to take this opportunity
to make a contribution to the postmodern critique by having recourse to the
foundation of modern film theory with special reference to some "points" made by
Roland Barthes; points which were made with "discretion", a certain "resistance", and
a great deal of subtleness. Barthes' contribution, "En sortant du cinéma", to French
Communication No. 23, which featured what later became the key articles of modern
1 This article is a revised version of a paper given at the NSU psychoanalytic circle's seminar
Psykoanalytiska Konstruktioner, Stockholm 27-29 January 1995.
2 Cf. Slavoj Žižek's anthology (1992b) featuring e.g. Renata Salecl, Mladen Dolar, Stojan Pelko.
3 -- with the MIT Press, French Ornicar? and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, as its main
"epicentres". In the Nordic countries, Žižek's postmodern psychoanalysis has made its import
especially via Nordic Summer University (forthcoming in Maria Fitger, ed., En liten book om kärlek,
Stockholm: Symposion 1997, a collection of conference papers by Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl
given at the NSU Summer Conference in Nesjavellir, Iceland, August 1995).
film theory, 4 has never been counted among the main contributions to the establishment
of this new paradigm. Today, there is nothing surprising about that, for
Barthes' points are more affiliated with the postmodern critique than with its original
context. In this sense, "En sortant..." points further, not only as to the apprehension of
psychoanalytic concepts but also, in my view, as to its questioning of cinematic
representation, which has given rise to much critique within film studies over the
years. As far as the latter is concerned, Barthes may be taken as a point of departure
for the postmodern critique whose introductory ventures usually reduce cinematic
texts to an exemplarity material for the laying out of exotic Lacanian problematics.
For, by having recourse to Barthes and the original context of film theory, one is
obligated also to question subjectivity and representation with reference to experience
and effect, so important not only to modern film theory but also, of course, to
psychoanalysis. In short, what I see as Barthes' "new" contribution to postmodern
critique here is his problematization of representation with respect of the genealogical
"rooting" of the subject. How are we to account for the possibility of a subject of the
signifier in the cinema, that is, a subject of "cinematography" as it were?5 How are we
to "ontologically" ground a subject on a notion of aesthetic "style"?6 In this article I
would like to discuss this issue by analyzing Barthes' text in connection with modern
film theory and Lacan.
Psychoanalysis and Modern Film Theory
In contemporary film studies, "psychoanalysis" has become the label for the psychological
support of the application of Marxism and linguistics to the classical film
theories. In recent years, this function has been subjected to some unavoidable
objections raised especially by Noël Caroll's and David Bordwell's pragmatical
scepticism, but also by psychoanalysis itself. For postmodern psychoanalytic theory,
the founding "psychoanalytic" substances of contemporary film theory rely on some
crucial misapprehensions of their basic psychoanalytic concepts.
In film studies, the break-through of psychoanalysis is usually identified with
4 Under the heading of Psychanalyse et cinéma, this volume featured e.g. Christian Metz' "Le
signifiant imaginaire," Raymond Bellour's "Le blocage symbolique," Julia Kristeva's "Ellipse sur la
frayeur et la sécuction spéculaire," and caused a break-through for the psychoanalytic semiotics of the
cinema.
5 I have earlier attempted a genealogical "rooting" of a "cinematic subject" on the grounds of a
deconstruction of Christian Metz' linguistic and psychoanalytic foundation of film semiotics (1994).
6 A style whose specificity in this case manifests itself by its effectuation of a distinct category of
experience, i.e., the experience of narrative cinema is that of diegesis.
Jean-Louis Baudry's synthesis of Althusser's epistemological concept of the apparatus
and Lacan's notion of the 'mirror stage as formative of the function of the I'
(1986). Copjec's important article, "The Orthopsychic Subject" (1989), aligns with this
position in asserting that 'it was through the concept of the apparatus -- the economic,
technical, ideological institution - of cinema that the break between
contemporary film theory and its past was effected' (pp. 57). This break brought
about a general abandonment of the realisms of André Bazin and Jean Mitry (which
are still to be traced in Metz' early film semiotics (cf. Toft 1985: 38 ff.), that is
especially in the mediation of Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of art). From then on,
the spectator "subject" and its "impression of reality" in the experience of cinema
were seen merely as imaginary effects of a specific, historically determined social
discourse, i.e., classical "analytic" (Toft 1985), or "Hollywood style" montage (Bordwell
et al. 1988). Paving the way for an interdisciplinary field of semiotics, feminism,
psychoanalysis, and critical theory, the so-called "Althusserian-Lacanian" paradigm
grounds Anglo-Saxon film studies from the mid-Seventies and onwards, and has
been highly influential also in film studies departments in the Nordic countries.
However, as Copjec points out, it is obvious today that the founders of the
Lacanian-Althusserian paradigm did not touch upon the fundamental problematics in
Lacan, and, indeed, that they set off from a misconception of basic Lacanian terms.
Adopted by Baudry to substantiate for the psychical mechanism of the ideological
construction of Althusser's "subject", identification theory is, precisely, a psychological
conception, for it focuses on the "I" and the effective self-presence of its
imaginary identity rather than on the principal matter in Lacan and in psychoanalysis
in general, that is the unconscious subject (not to be confused with Althusserian
subjectivity). For Copjec, the misconception of Lacan is especially clear not only as
concerns the notion of subject but also that of the gaze which is so important to the
apparatus paradigm:
the gaze always retain within film theory the sense of being that point at which sense and being
coincide. The subject comes into being by identifying with the image's signified. Sense founds the
subject -- that is the ultimate point of the film theoretical concept of the gaze. (Copjec 1989: 59)
From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, three issues should be raised in respect to
Copjec's crucial observation:
1. According to Lacan, the subject is founded not by the "image's signified"
nor by any other mode of substantial presence but -- on the contrary -- by the
absence of meaning. The psychoanalytic subject is named the "subject of the
signifier" in accordance with its structural genealogy, for it is constituted b y its subjection
to the referentiality of the signifiers in the so-called chain of signifiers, that is, one
signifier signifying (viz. referring to) another. In this manner, the psychoanalytic notion
of castration is accounted for by formal semiotics as a lack or fault (manque) of the
Symbolic order. The immanent heterogeneity of the semiotic level of the Symbolic is
designated by the concept of the Real order. Mistaking this term for simple "reality"
(e.g. Metz 1982: 57), film theory never fully apprehends the notions of subject and
Real. Come to that, nor does the fierce critique of the "Lacanian-Althusserian"
paradigm advanced by Carroll and Bordwell, which nevertheless addresses the
problem of subjectivity in cinematic identification.
2. Mistaking the philosophical (viz. Althusserian) concept of subject with that
of Lacan, and, consequently, missing the point of the Real, contemporary film
theoretical practice employs what Žižek (1992: 186) sees as an imaginary defence
mechanism (or more correctly, the Versagung) against that void which is the subject.
Žižek suggests the term "sub-jectivization" to designate the process by which the realization
of the subject and the encounter with the Real are reduced to the imaginary
"sense of the gaze" (hence Copjec's observation) or a meaningful narrative. In film
studies, no wonder, the concept of Real has been touched upon almost solely in the
mediation of narratology. For Žižek, therefore, one should first and foremost see the
relationship between the Lacanian subject and subjectivization as an antagonistic
one.
3. Copjec's perhaps most urgent concern in respect to the reception of Lacan
is about the relationship between desire and identification. Contrary to Lacan,
"psychoanalytic film theory" sees identification as preceding desire. In this sense,
primary cinematic identification with the filmic "gaze" (or the "camera", as Metz puts
it) is thought of making possible the practice of fetishistic and sadistic scopophilia by
which the spectator "subject" -- already self-present -- takes his visual and narrative
pleasures. In this conception, Copjec argues, film theory overlooks not only the
function of the subject but also that of the object of phantasy (i.e., the objet petit a in
Lacan), which makes out the causal entity of desire, the manifestation of the Real in
phantasy, and which Lacan himself sees as his greatest contribution to psychoanalysis.
Accordingly, this term plays a key part in postmodern psychoanalytic critique.
However, as far as film studies are concerned, a central problem in the
accounting for Lacan's objet a in film analysis and theory is that it escapes not only
representation but also any aesthetic notion of cinema. Postmodern critique has dealt
in lenght with the objet a as a sublime object and thus certainly also as an object in
aesthetic experience but still not as an entity which is to be defined in terms of an
aesthetic technique specific to any media. Setting off from a synthesis of, on the one
hand, notions of cinematic desire and identification (cf. Metz and feminist film theory)
and, on the other, theories of cinematic representational systems, modern film theory
is short of a framework in which to define the Lacanian "object" in terms of both libidinal
investment and visual and narrative representation. Herein lies what I see as the
pivot point of the crisis of modern film theory: What is needed in film studies is the
disclosure of a new field of possibilities in which to refound modern film theory in
accordance with its postmodern critique.
Modern Film Theory and Roland Barthes: Realizing the Subject at the Point of
Leaving
A point of departure, as it were, is provided by Roland Barthes whose contribution to
the foundation of modern film theory is somehow ambiguous. Barthes' impact on his
close collaborator, Christian Metz, and film semiotics is indisputable as concerns the
linguistic as well as the psychoanalytic stage. However, the problematics of textuality
and desire advanced in Barthes' own works exceed by far the horizon laid out by
Metz, Baudry, feministic film theories, and other main contributors to modern film
theory. That certainly also goes for "En sortant du cinema", whose approach may be
characterized by a certain "distance" not only towards the theoretical conception
common to his fellow contributors of Communictions 23 but also to cinema itself.
As has been pointed out by Palle Schantz Lauridsen in his exposition of
Barthes' importance to film studies (1990), distance is in fact characteristic of his
general attitude to this media, which became the center of so much scientific
attention among his contemporary semioticians. French film theorist Pascal Bonitzer
(1980: 5) once asked Roland Barthes: 'You don't like [n'aimez pas] the cinema?'
'Please, allow me to modify,' Barthes replied, 'I "resist" [resiste] the cinema.' In
"Leaving the Movie Theatre", Barthes appears to substantiate further this "resistance"
with reference to the psychoanalytic implications of cinematic experience: 'There is
something to confess [Le sujet qui parle ici doit reconnaìtre une chose]: your speaker
likes to leave [aimer à sortir] a movie theatre [cinema].' (1986: 345, my brackets). To
apprehend fully the "point of departure" suggested by Barthes, this statement must
be understood not only in its literal sense (to 'Back out on the more or less empty,
more or less brightly lit sidewalk ...' (pp. 345)). For "resistance" also characterizes the
subject's attitude to cinematic identification ('the image captivates me, captures me I
am glued to the representation' (pp. 348)). In fact, the pleasure of the 'aimer a sortir'
seems to emanate from the very moment of leaving: from the point, as it were, of
one's "being at the point of leaving." Barthes attempts a psychoanalytic account of
this "point":
How to come unglued from the mirror? I'll risk a pun to answer: by taking off [en "décollant"] (in
the aeronautical and narcotic sense7 of the term) ... ; by letting oneself be fascinated twice over,
by the image and by its surroundings -- as if I had two bodies at the same time: a narcissistic
body which gazes, lost, in the engulfing mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not the
image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture [grain] of the sound, the hall, the darkness, the
obscure mass of the other bodies, the rays of light, entering the theatre, leaving the hall; in short,
in order to distance, in order to "take off", I complicate a "relation" by a "situation." (Barthes, 1986:
348-349, my note, my brackets)
The subject here seeks "at the same time" to distance itself from and to take pleasure
in the cinema by means of a double libidinal investment thus "complicating" the
attraction of the image (narcissistic relation) with that which exceeds the image
(fetishistic situation). Barthes suggests the existence of a distinct organization of the
libido with an "object" of its own:
What I use to distance myself from the image -- that, ultimately, is what fascinates me: I am hypnotized
by a distance; and this distance is not critical (intellectual); it is, one might say, an
amorous distance [distance amoureuse]: would there be, in the cinema itself (and taking the word
at its etymological suggestion) a possible bliss [jouissance] of discretion [discrétion]? (Ibid.: 349,
my brackets)
Unfortunately, we are not presented with the particular "etymological suggestion"
hinted at in this passage which, in fact, ends Barthes' article. It is true that discrétion
implies the liberty of deciding as one finds fit (viz. "discretion" in English) ; a liberty
which may oppose the state of imaginary captivation. On the other hand, the
etymology of discrétion8 refers to the separateness, distinction, and discontinuity
(qualities of the formal semiotic material), which characterize the object of distance in
itself and the distancing from the continuity and the coalescence of the image.9 In this
case, "discreteness" would be the proper English translation. A jouissance possible
de la discrétion? Barthes assumes the possibility of not only a jouissance in the
"cinema itself" but also its distance ("amorous", "hypnotic"). As for the psychoanalytic
meaning of distance, Barthes states that
the Real knows only distances, the Symbolic knows only masks; the image alone (the imagerepertoire
[sic!]) [l'Imaginaire]) is close [proche], only the image is "true" ["vraie"] ... (Ibid.: 348, my
brackets)
Whereas the Real is characterized by the void of referentiality in the Symbolic,
Barthes' "distance" and "discreteness" does seem pertinent to a formal semiotic level.
Accordingly, the "point of the leaving" is to be associated with a causal rather than an
7 In this sense, however, "taking off" seems to refer to the experience of intoxication (which, of course,
is that of the aeronaut) rather than of the cure, the décollant, of taking it.
8 Cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English: 'discreet [...] [F. discret f. L DIS(cretus p.p. of
cernere sift) seperate ...]'
9 Cf. Lauridsen (1990: 48).
effective agency. Distance in itself: "is" it not the distance of a split, that is, the split in
itself? Turning towards Barthes' erotico-semiotics of The Pleasure of the Text, we
learn that 'what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation,
the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss [jouissance].' (Barthes,
1975: 7). In Lacan, the "site of loss" must be understood either as the place of the
signifier or in terms of the objet a: the symbol of castration. Like the signifier, objet a
may be said to have the "lack in its place." In fetishism, the object (a) of desire is that
which in a metonymical way stands for the woman's lack of a penis. Still, these
proper forms are not "sites of loss". On the semiotic level, undecidable referentiality
has been pointed out as the "place" of castration. Similarly, distance-in-itself may be
said to "cover" the metonymical referentiality of the fetish object.10 Barthes observes:
Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the
realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression besides); it is
intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin
flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the opennecked
shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging
of an appearance-as-disappearance. (Barthes, 1975: 9-10)
The distance covered by the appearance-as-disappearance of the object doubles the
undecidable difference of the simulacrum in deconstruction: the split in itself. The
"site of loss", then, is not a place proper; it is, as Barthes notes, atopos (pp. 23) not to
be appropriated by philosophy. Intermittence is an atopical "dream of pure difference"
as Derrida has it. So is jouissance; it "vanishes by the daybreak of language." 11
Psychoanalysis observes that when one speaks, one sacrifices his jouissance in
favour of the presence of speech. The choice of jouissance is, on the other hand,
presence's annihilation.12 But to choose it, one has to find the site of loss. This is the
point of departure for any empiricism of the subject -- and, moreover, for its aesthetic
grounding in eroticism and art.
10 Ole Andkjær Olsen (1972: 48-49) demonstrates that the separation constitutive of the (lost) objet a
is to be though of as a given difference (différance).
11 Cf. Derrida (1978: 151, my bracket): 'the true name of ... the a prioris and transcendental horizons of
language, is empiricism. For the latter, at bottom, has ever committed but one fault: the fault of
presenting itself as a philosophy. And the profundity of the empiricist intention must be recognized
beneath the naïvité of certain of its historical expressions. It is the dream of a purely heterological
thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference ... We say the dream because it must vanish at
daybreak , as soon as language awakens.'
12 Barthes (1975a) quotes Serge Leclaire (no reference given): 'whoever experiences bliss causes the
letter [i.e., the signifier] - and all possible speech - to collapse in the absolute degree of the annihilation
he is celebrating' (pp. 21, my bracket) (cf. Leclaire (1992: 32)). For Lacan (1992: 64-65), therefore,
jouissance is what is inter-dit (forbidden to, interdicted for) the speaking subject.
The Point of Disappearance of the objet a in Lacan
The aesthetic account of objet a advanced above accords very well with Lacan's
theory of phantasy. Interestingly, a meditation of the latter leads us further towards a
notion of the temporality of the subjet and objet a in aesthetic experience.
Lacan (1977b: 209 ff) defines phantasy as a peculiar relationship ($ <> a/
"barred S, punch, object small a") between the barred subject ($) and objet a. The
lozenge (<>) symbolizes here the peculiarity of the barred subject being at once
attached to (^) and separated from (v) objet a. In the imaginary experience of
phantasy, this point is supposed to manifest itself in the losing (v) of what has finally
become one's possession (^) (cf. Rasmussen 1994: 76). Thus they say that objet a is
given by being always already lost.
Now, as for the symbolic determination of phantasy, this dictum means that
the objet a "stands for" what is lacking in the Other, that is the lack or fault (manque)
of the signifier. We remember that in Lacan, the signifier does not signify, or refer to
anything (any substance) but just another signifier in the so-called chain of signifiers.
Accordingly, the given of phantasy and the objet a are a lack, which is there a priori
as the very constitution of the subject. The symbolic order determines the object of
phantasy as being irremediably lost. It is said, therefore, to be situated in the Real (or
one may say that the standing-for of the Other's lack takes place in the Real).
Lacan (1977b: 242) names at least four fantasmatic identities of the objet a:
the voice (voix), the gaze (regard), the breast, and the faeces. René Rasmussen
(1994: 76) adds a fifth identity, the penis, corresponding to the five main part drives.13
This point goes very well with the symbolic determination of phantasy, for in
grammatical terms one would have to choose a past participle tense to describe the
time of these identities: they all "have been"; they all belong to History, that is in this
case the history of psychogenesis, which is always over from the outset. This is how
infantile amnesia works: it is always all over.
Now, in effect, that is in the Imaginary, it seems as though one may take the
dictum quite "literally". The objet a is given by being already lost; it does in a certain
sense appear only for it to disappear. For what qualifies the object of phantasy, notes
Rasmussen (1994: 77), is exactly the fact that it appears in order to disappear. When
one opens one's mouth to talk, the sound of the voice (the vocal object) will
disappear in space. The erection of a penis (^) takes place only in order for it to
disappear (v), say into a vagina, or simply to vanish (v). From this point of view, one
may perhaps use a present participle: "that is disappearing". The peculiar order of
13 Lacan (1977b) distinguishes between five part drives: the scopic drive, the invocatory drive, the oral
drive, the anal drive, and the genital drive.
appearance and disappearance seems to constitute another principle of the object of
phantasy, and in fact of the part drives (in Lacan, phantasy and the drives share the
same object). No wonder games of showing and hiding lead to erotic excitation in
children.
It seems as though the temporal confusion of the objet a amounts to whether
or not one actually takes part in phantasy. Now, for Lacan this is what perversion is
all about, that is, to take part in phantasy as the objet a. Lacan (1966: 775) tells us
that the perverse character does so in order to approach the Other in phantasy ($ <>
a <=> A). The order here is that of jouissance and the lack, that is the Real. By
playing the part as objet a in the Real, the perverse character seeks to supplement
the capitalized Other as for its lack, and to share its infinite capital of jouissance (in
Sade, the jouissance of God). This approach may manifest itself in the male
homosexual's relationship to the so-called "fag hag", a less flattering expression for a
woman who plays the one who lacks, that is the Other. It goes for perversion in
general that the character's supplementary function in relation to the Other is
confirmed by the imaginary phallus. The unconscious determination of whatever the
imaginary phallus may be, characterizes, on the other hand, the specific perversion
and, subsequently, the sexual identity of its executant.
The partners in perversion are the barred subjects, which in phantasy make
out the gate to the capitalized Other. According to Rasmussen, the victims in Sade's
fictions (say Justine) serve as a kind of medium by means of which the sadist
approaches the Other. Marked by death by the signifier, and the additional bruises
made by the sadist, the subject victim screams the bliss of God. The jouissance all
depends on the signal of death. Just think of the execution of Marietta's poor lover in
David Lynch's Wild at Heart. Tied to a pole in phantasy, his death is anticipated in a
count-down from ten.
So, perversion implies a certain kind of semiotics in which the signs, as in
Hippocrates, indicate to the Other the dying of a subject. Perverts also attract their
gods by means of sacrifice. Not only jouissance, but phantasy as such depends on
whether the Other is there to take part. The perverse scenario implies an agency
which observes and directs the course of action.14
14 By means of example, René Rasmussen refers to French author Marc Chodolenko's erotic novel
Histoire de Vivant Lanon (1985), which frames a 17-year-old boy, Vivant, in the perverse spectacle of
mature woman porn photographer Frédérique: 'At a certain stage, Vivant has been locked up together
with a girl who has been given to him for his pleasure. Still he feels disinclined and is stricken with
impotence because She (Frédérique) is neither physically nor psychically present. Suddenly, however,
he hears her voice from the outside: "I'm here ... are you listening ... may I come in? Are you through?
Suddenly desire overwhelmed me again in such a way that I felt my blood rushing to my head.
Quickly, without realizing what I was doing, I found her [the girl's] hand, bent my knees and forced it
down into my trunks. I did not even get a snatch at my organ. ... I saw her ... her naked breast in my
palms, her hand in my trunks, but also her [Frédérique] standing in the doorway watching us."'
(Rasmussen, 1994: 80, my translation).
Now, as for taking part in phantasy as the objet a, what is there for the
pervert to lose except for himself? For the perverse character does not concern
himself with the passing-away of the partner subject. What is important, rather, is the
subject's "arrival" in the Other. One may say that the "coming" (in French: j'arrive) of
the subject is necessary for the pervert to "take off". So, always notice whether your
partner is coming or leaving. It might tell you a lot about your position in the sexual
relationship.
Following Lacan, it is true that playing the objet a can be no more than an
attempt. Obviously, one cannot be the objet a for real, for that is where it is: in the
Real. Unless of course one has already lost oneself, that is if one is psychotic.
So, to be a pervert is to take part in phantasy as the objet a , but to do so only
partly. Who plays the Other part? Well, if phantasy and perversion is realized only by
the evocation of the gaze, i.e., the objet a, the Other should be regarded as playing
that part. Although nothing but oneself is to be lost in perversion, it does imply
another vanishing point, that is, the one at which the gaze makes its discrete
appearances before the world. The Real world, one might say, for the Other is really
there "for Real", or in the Real, for less than a moment. The peculiar order of
appearance-disappearance, by which the objet a points itself in the Imaginary, is that
of the Real. To designate the "taking-off" in phantasy, that is, partly playing the objet
a, one may use the term "departure".
Now, what does it mean to depart by playing only partly the part as the objet
a in the Real? What does it mean to share this part with the Other? As mentioned,
one may take the part played by the perverse character as a supplement to the
Other. In perversion, the pervert and the Other seek to establish a relationship of
supplementarity. In the Real order of phantasy, the entire part as the objet a may be
seen as supplementarity, irrespective of the imaginary identities actually chosen by
the perverse character and the Other. In this sense, objet a may be conceived of as
the very distension of phantasy, that is, the function which separates the perverse
character from the Other while still maintaining the relationship. In the Real world, the
world of the Real, this is how the objet a stands for the lack of the Other. To "stand
for" here means to distance the pervert from his God. Objet a is in phantasy a
distancing function. This is the Real "nature" of the object a.
Objet a distends phantasy; it makes it break loose. In a sense, phantasy "is"
the objet a when phantasy breaks loose. As in obsessional neurosis when the
"repressed returns". What returns here is phantasy. In a neurotic's world, the objet a
manifests itself as a Real bad experience, namely as the phobic agent of the
Freudian Unheimlische who returns in order to perform castration. The obsessional
neurotic secretly knows that the monstrous castrator will be back. In terms of
grammar, phantasy and the objet a belong for him to a future tense.15 Apparently, the
continuance of certain visual media functions here as a kind of window towards the
Real world; a window always available for the monstrous agent to enter. Notice how
Bob from Twin Peaks usually makes his uncanny appearances from surveillance
cameras, windows, picture frames,16 and similar devices. And as if touched by some
magic wand, this sneaking in of his suddenly turns the filmic universe into phantasy.
Interestingly, it is the very same field of framing and marginality that allows
the perverse subject to realize itself when it seeks to supplement the Other. In
"Leaving the Movie Theatre" Barthes takes his pleasures by fetishizing the open set
of marginality that is "precisely what exceeds" the image % from the "grain of the
voice" to the "sideway" outside the theatre. Frames and margins, i.e. the aesthetic
grounding of the subject, make out the gateway for the it to "take off". What is
important, moreover, is that it is the very same field of framings which make out what
Christian Metz sees as the relays of cinematic identification. This set of relays, which
Metz (1982) designates as cinematic "fictivity" vanishes in the self-presence of the I
by the identification with the "camera" or a narrative subject's viewpoint. Thus, what
"exceeds the image" supports at the same time the identification which constitutes
the cinematic image, i.e., the filmic text. This is the point of departure not only for a
theory of identification but also for a geneaology of a specific cinematic subjectivity.
Vanishing Points in Cinematographic Fictivity
So, in "Leaving the Movie Theatre", Barthes realizes subjectivity by being himself at
the point of leaving. Now, is such a "point" to be found in the "cinema itself", as
Barthes has it? In respect to the idea evoked above a relevant point of departure is
Camera Lucida as for its study in subjectivity, desire, and representation in photography
and cinema. One cannot help thinking of the Roland Barthes who signs
Camera Lucida as a person who is ultimately at his point of leaving; 'Camera Lucida,
whose time and tempo accompanied his [Barthes'] death as no other book, I [Derrida]
believe, has ever kept vigil over its author.' (Derrida, 1988: 261, my brackets). Still,
this is irrespective of the fact that Barthes accidentally died some months after having
finished this work. The presence of death is rather due to the object studied, Photo-
15 "VJ Ingo" from the MTV has just informed me that what is "coming up next in a cinema near me" is
Freddy Krueger and another Nightmare on Elm Street -- Freddy whose fingers are made out of knives.
The obsessional neurotic secretly knows that Freddy will be back . In terms of grammar, phantasy and
the objet a belong for him to a future tense.
16 In Lynch' Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk with Me (1993) Bob shows up in the picture of an open door
which is given to Laura Palmer by two of the ghostly lodge appearances: the old lady and the boy.
graphy, % or rather, photographic representation in a general sense % which is disclosed
as a gate of vanishing, as it were; a gate by which loss takes place: a makingpresent
of what has ultimately disappeared.
Contrary to the notion of the cinematic referent in Metz' psychoanalytic
account (1982), the photographic referent is distinguished by a necessary
uniqueness (Metz does not concern himself with the problem of the unique). Barthes
holds that
Photography's Referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call
"photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the
necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no
photograph. (Ibid.: 76)
Led by an '"ontological" desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was
"in itself"' (pp. 3), Barthes capitalizes "Photography" in accordance with its peculiar
"evidential force" of time and authenticity:
in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here:
of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider
it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography. What I intentionalize in a
photograph ... is Reference, which is the founding order of Photography.
The name of Photography's noeme will therefore be: "That-has-been", or again: the
Intractable. ... what I see has been there, in this place which extends between infinity and the
subject (operator or spectator); it has been there, and yet immediately separated; it has been
absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred. (Ibid.: 76-77)
Photography is the noematically unique disappearance of the unique. In Barthes'
phenomenology, such noeme is determined by subjective, or, rather, pre-subjective
intention, and is accounted for in terms of psychoanalysis:
the Photograph ... is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow
stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the
Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression. (Ibid.: 4)
In this sense, the noematic determination of Photography is made out by the
infrastructural heterology of separation, i.e., that the singular objet a is given by being
always already separated from the subject. "Intention", then, must not be identified
with the phenomenological concept of intention, for the "intention" of separation is
pre-subjective (in the peculiar sense of time implied in the "always already"). Barthes:
'I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already
occurred. ... every photograph is this catastrophe.' (pp. 96; DT.: 117).17 The disaster
of separation is the impossible "object" of anxiety (anxiety of castration) ;18 impossible
17 For Barthes, the catastrophe of separation is re-actualized by the fact that the person he loved most
(and lived together with), his mother, died shortly before he started to write Camera Lucida.
18 One recognizes here the affinity of Lacanian and Kleinian theory with respect of the notion of
since it cannot be appropriated by presence (no object proper, that is). Barthes notes
that 'Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always
invisible: it is not it that we see. [/] In short, the referent adheres. And this singular
adherence makes it very difficult to focus on Photography.' (pp. 6; DT.: 15, paragraphical
break suspended). The "ontological" desire is suspended, therefore, by the
difficulties of establishing an ontology proper of Photography with respect to the
problem of reference.
In Barthes' empiricism of subjectivity, the catastrophic site of loss
rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to
designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the point suits me all
the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am
speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points;
precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This ... element ... I shall therefore call
punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole % and also a cast of the dice. A
photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, poignants me).
(Ibid.: 26-27)
The punctum of Photography, then, is the unique affect of the unique disappearance
of the unique. How does this seemingly general order of singularity conform with the
quasi-essential duplicity of the infrastructures? In "The Deaths of Roland Barthes",
Derrida observes a paradox of the punctum; the point of singularity, as it were:
As the place of the irreplacable singularity and the unique referential, the punctum irradiates and,
what is most surprising, lends itself to metonymy. As soon as it allows itself to be drawn into a
system of substitutions, it can invade everything, objects as well as affects. This singularity which
is nowhere in the field mobilizes everything everywhere; it pluralizes itself.(Derrida, 1988a: 285)
The "power of authentication" is due, of course, not to singularity as such, but to the
"invisibility" of Photography's reference from the unique referent to its analogical
representation. This "place" of the irreplacable, it is true, is to be pointed out on the
Photograph (the "sensitive points"); yet such localization implies itself a reference, i.e,
a "that" of pointing; a "that" which is implicated in the peculiar structure of the
Photograph.
I said that the punctum allows itself to be drawn into metony my. Actually, it induces it, and this is
its force, or rather than its force (since it exercises no actual constraint and exists completely in
reserve), its dynamis, in other words, its power, potentiality, and even its dissimulation, its latency.
(Ibid.)
In this general system of reference, punctum disseminates the "natural" relations
between affect, representation and referent. The quasi-essence "is" that of any
psychic object and its pre-symbolic determination: an affinity which leads us to apprehend the
heterological infrastructure as a psychotic one.
infrastructural duplicity:
The metonymic force divides the referential line [trait], suspends the referent and leaves it to be
desired, while still maintaining the reference. (Ibid.: 290)
The reference of that punctum "is" the double which doubles no simple. The
metonymic doubling of the unique trait is given by structural necessity. For Derrida,
this is not a character specific to Photography:
By taking a thousand differential precautions, one must be able to speak of a punctum in all signs
(and the repetition and iterability structures it already), in any discourse, whether it be literary or
not. (Ibid.: 289)
Therefore, Photography (Barthes' term) should be dissociated from any ontologically
proper definition of photography; definitions which are only always already subjected
to the disseminating dynamis of Barthesian Photography -- they are photographed --
as is, ultimately, anything proper.
The question remains how to apprehend a punctum in the fictivity of
cinematography. Although the fictivity of the cinema is said to be a photographic one,
Barthes finds that
the Photograph's noeme deteriorates when this Photograph is animated and becomes cinema: in
the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever
(that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose
is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images: it is a different phenomenology,
and therefore a different art which begins here, though derivated from the first one. (Barthes,
1984: 78; DT.: 96)
Since Barthes' notion of pose is based on that of intention ('the pose ... is not the
attitude of the target or even a technique of the Operator, but the term of an
"intention" of reading...' (ibid.)), one may say that there is no intention in Barthes to
think of the cinema as a mode of pose:
the photograph, taken in its flux, is impelled, ceaselessly drawn toward other views; in the
cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not
make a claim in favor of its reality, it does not protest its former existence; it does not cling to me:
it is not a specter. (Ibid. 89; DT.: 109)
Resistance to Barthes' notion of cinema: recognizing the infinity of the punctum's
system of reference in accordance with Derrida's hermeneutical empiricism, one
would have to dissociate this notion from a real subjective empiricism of the cinema
(a mode of discourse in which the punctum is still to be disclosed, perhaps even to be
felt):19 to observe that Barthes' empirical approach still has its limits and that it must
19 In this context, one would have to repeat Susan Sontag's request from Against Interpretation: 'What
is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.'
(1983: 104). Yet her opposition of erotics and hermenutics ('In place of a hermeneutics we need an
be determined by something else. His "cinema" is a categorical concept covering the
experimental observation of the moving photographic fictivity's conviction to the
horizon of language, for he rejects categorically the idea that the cinema has a
punctum; a strategy which, perhaps, serves only to negatively define the photograph,
or perhaps rather, to distinguish Photography from the apparata of metaphysics
(Speech, Cinema). The question still remain, then, whether there is in the "cinema
itself" a punctuating distance of reference. On Photography and cinema, Barthes
adds,
Photography's inimitable feature (its noeme) is that someone has seen the referent (even if it is a
matter of objects) in flesh and blood, or again in person. ... Here again, from a phenomenological
viewpoint, the cinema begins to differ from the Photograph; for the (fictional) cinema combines
two poses: the actor's "this-has-been" and the role's, so that ... I can never see or see again in a
film certain actors whom I know to be dead without a kind of melancholy: the melancoly of Photography
itself ...(Ibid.: 79)
With respect to the necessary uniqueness of the cinematographic referent, the
singularities of a given actor or actress, the cinema does lend itself to the metonymy
of the punctum although this "place of the irreplacable" seems to appear only in order
to disappear in the continuous presence of the technico-semantic imaginary. Thus at
the same time, Barthes states, 'the cinema is protensive, hence in to way
melancholic...' (pp. 90). Certainly, the point of singularity manifests itself in another
way in the cinema than in Photography, namely, as a point of leaving.
Thus recognizing the combination of the pose of the unique (the actor) and of
the common (the role -- which is not a pose in the sense suggested above, but the
effacement of pose), one grasps the heterology of the conceptual opposition of
cinema and cinematography, for the point of combination cannot be reduced to either
the positive presence of the cinema or the negative one of cinematography. It is at
this point that this opposition, which is fundamental to the linguistic semiotics of the
cinema, is being photographed; it is here that the subject of cinematography is
realized by the becoming-absent of the referential simulacrum. In fact, this point goes
for the photograph as well to the extent that it is being described or narrativized,
'engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the
punctum. ... the punctum could accomodate a certain latency (but never any
scrutiny).' (pp. 53; DT.: 69). In speech, it is true , the punctum is always already
missed. The affective impact of the punctum is determined by the hedonist's choice
of silence, the choice of jouissance.20
erotics of art' (ibid.)) seems less pertinent to deconstruction, for the material, pure difference, remains
ultimately the same.
20 In his reading of Camera Lucida, Bent Fausing (1988: 302; 1991: 173) suggests the term "turning
point" ("vendepunkt") to designate this point of choice: to speak away or not to speak away the magic
The investigation of the aesthetic, viz. cinematographic, grounding of subjectivity
presupposes the radical empiricism of hedonism. One has to point one's "resistance"
to the cinema (in experience, that is, as well as in theory) and the atopical "existence"
of a discrete, yet necessary referent. Such "pointing", such "pointing out" is bound to
the temporality of the cinematographic simulacrum itself in relation to presence: this
is disappearing:21 this is at its point of disappearance. This is the point of departure
for a theory of a subject of cinematography.
Bibliography
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Barthes, Roland. 1984. Camera Lucida. London: Fontana.
Barthes, Roland. 1986. "Leaving the Movie Theatre." In The Rustle of Language.
New York: Hill and Wang. Original French version: "En sortant du cinéma".
Communications 23. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1986 [1970]. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus." In Philip Rosen (Ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Bonitzer, Pascal. 1980. "Le hors champ subtil." Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 311. Paris.
Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin. 1988 [1985]. The Classical
Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge.
Copjec, Joan. 1989. "The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of
Lacan." October 49. MIT-Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978 [1967]. "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought
of Emmanuel Levinas." In Writing and Difference. London: Routledge.
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Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge.
Johansson, Troels Degn. 1991. ”Mise en Obscene.” Sekvens 91 - Lars von Trier,
Department of Film & Media Studies, University of Copenhagen.
Johansson, Troels Degn. 1994. The Subject of Cinematography. On the General
and the trauma of the punctum.
21 I have demonstrated the temporality of the referent and its simulacrum in my analysis, "Mise en
Obscène," (1991) of director Lars von Trier's feature film Epidemic (Denmark, 1987).
Possibility of Deconstruction in the Linguistic Semiotics of the Cinema (unpublished
thesis). Department of Film & Media Studies, University of Copenhagen.
Lacan, Jacques. 1977a [1966]. Écrits. A Selection. London: Routledge.
Lacan, Jacques. 1977b. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. London:
The Hogarth Press.
Lauridsen, Palle Schantz. 1990. Barthes og filmen. Sekvens Særrække. Department
of Film & Media Studies, University of Copenhagen.
Leclaire, Serge. 1992. "Det reelle i teksten." Translated from the French (Littérature,
3, 1971) by René Rasmussen. Tid Skrift, 14, Copenhagen.
Metz, Christian. 1974. Film Language. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press.
Metz, Christian. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
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Rasmussen, René. 1994. Lacans psykoanalyse. En Indføring. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1992a [Ed.]. Enjoy Your Synthom! Lacan in Hollywood and Out.
London and New York: Routledge.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1992b. Everything You always Wanted to Know about Lacan (but Were
Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). London and New York: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1995. "The Dialectics of the Voice and the Gaze." Paper for Nordic
Summer University's Summer Conference, August, 1995, i Nesjavellir, Iceland.
Modern Film Theory and its Postmodern Psychoanalytic Critique
-- with Roland Barthes1
Troels Degn Johansson
Postmodern psychoanalytic theory since Jacques Lacan has been engaged in
founding anew psychoanalysis and its applications in traditional fields of psychoanalytic
interests (studies of culture, literature, etc.). In film studies, this enterprise has
been initiated by the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the so-called Ljubljana
School's extensive "introductions" to Lacanian theory by means of postmodern
popular culture,2 a work that has been highly influential especially in French and
Anglo-Saxon film studies.3 These contributions strongly call for film studies to
reconsider the general possibility of psychoanalysis in modern film theory. Whereas
psychoanalytic notions play a key part in the conceptual foundation of the latter, this
challenge is motivated by the necessity of re-establishing modern film theory as a
firm and fertile ground for what already constitutes a paradigm of interdisciplinary film
studies; a "Grand Theory" that builds on semiotics, gender studies, critical theory,
and classical film theory, and which has been highly relevant also for students of
other visual arts. Still, although it is true that the "new Lacan" has given rise to a
fundamental critique of modern film theory's apprehension of basic psychoanalytic
concepts, no attempt has yet been made to advance a general and systematical refoundation
from the point of view of postmodern psychoanalytic theory. And this is
certainly not the aim of this article either. However, I would like to take this opportunity
to make a contribution to the postmodern critique by having recourse to the
foundation of modern film theory with special reference to some "points" made by
Roland Barthes; points which were made with "discretion", a certain "resistance", and
a great deal of subtleness. Barthes' contribution, "En sortant du cinéma", to French
Communication No. 23, which featured what later became the key articles of modern
1 This article is a revised version of a paper given at the NSU psychoanalytic circle's seminar
Psykoanalytiska Konstruktioner, Stockholm 27-29 January 1995.
2 Cf. Slavoj Žižek's anthology (1992b) featuring e.g. Renata Salecl, Mladen Dolar, Stojan Pelko.
3 -- with the MIT Press, French Ornicar? and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, as its main
"epicentres". In the Nordic countries, Žižek's postmodern psychoanalysis has made its import
especially via Nordic Summer University (forthcoming in Maria Fitger, ed., En liten book om kärlek,
Stockholm: Symposion 1997, a collection of conference papers by Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl
given at the NSU Summer Conference in Nesjavellir, Iceland, August 1995).
film theory, 4 has never been counted among the main contributions to the establishment
of this new paradigm. Today, there is nothing surprising about that, for
Barthes' points are more affiliated with the postmodern critique than with its original
context. In this sense, "En sortant..." points further, not only as to the apprehension of
psychoanalytic concepts but also, in my view, as to its questioning of cinematic
representation, which has given rise to much critique within film studies over the
years. As far as the latter is concerned, Barthes may be taken as a point of departure
for the postmodern critique whose introductory ventures usually reduce cinematic
texts to an exemplarity material for the laying out of exotic Lacanian problematics.
For, by having recourse to Barthes and the original context of film theory, one is
obligated also to question subjectivity and representation with reference to experience
and effect, so important not only to modern film theory but also, of course, to
psychoanalysis. In short, what I see as Barthes' "new" contribution to postmodern
critique here is his problematization of representation with respect of the genealogical
"rooting" of the subject. How are we to account for the possibility of a subject of the
signifier in the cinema, that is, a subject of "cinematography" as it were?5 How are we
to "ontologically" ground a subject on a notion of aesthetic "style"?6 In this article I
would like to discuss this issue by analyzing Barthes' text in connection with modern
film theory and Lacan.
Psychoanalysis and Modern Film Theory
In contemporary film studies, "psychoanalysis" has become the label for the psychological
support of the application of Marxism and linguistics to the classical film
theories. In recent years, this function has been subjected to some unavoidable
objections raised especially by Noël Caroll's and David Bordwell's pragmatical
scepticism, but also by psychoanalysis itself. For postmodern psychoanalytic theory,
the founding "psychoanalytic" substances of contemporary film theory rely on some
crucial misapprehensions of their basic psychoanalytic concepts.
In film studies, the break-through of psychoanalysis is usually identified with
4 Under the heading of Psychanalyse et cinéma, this volume featured e.g. Christian Metz' "Le
signifiant imaginaire," Raymond Bellour's "Le blocage symbolique," Julia Kristeva's "Ellipse sur la
frayeur et la sécuction spéculaire," and caused a break-through for the psychoanalytic semiotics of the
cinema.
5 I have earlier attempted a genealogical "rooting" of a "cinematic subject" on the grounds of a
deconstruction of Christian Metz' linguistic and psychoanalytic foundation of film semiotics (1994).
6 A style whose specificity in this case manifests itself by its effectuation of a distinct category of
experience, i.e., the experience of narrative cinema is that of diegesis.
Jean-Louis Baudry's synthesis of Althusser's epistemological concept of the apparatus
and Lacan's notion of the 'mirror stage as formative of the function of the I'
(1986). Copjec's important article, "The Orthopsychic Subject" (1989), aligns with this
position in asserting that 'it was through the concept of the apparatus -- the economic,
technical, ideological institution - of cinema that the break between
contemporary film theory and its past was effected' (pp. 57). This break brought
about a general abandonment of the realisms of André Bazin and Jean Mitry (which
are still to be traced in Metz' early film semiotics (cf. Toft 1985: 38 ff.), that is
especially in the mediation of Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of art). From then on,
the spectator "subject" and its "impression of reality" in the experience of cinema
were seen merely as imaginary effects of a specific, historically determined social
discourse, i.e., classical "analytic" (Toft 1985), or "Hollywood style" montage (Bordwell
et al. 1988). Paving the way for an interdisciplinary field of semiotics, feminism,
psychoanalysis, and critical theory, the so-called "Althusserian-Lacanian" paradigm
grounds Anglo-Saxon film studies from the mid-Seventies and onwards, and has
been highly influential also in film studies departments in the Nordic countries.
However, as Copjec points out, it is obvious today that the founders of the
Lacanian-Althusserian paradigm did not touch upon the fundamental problematics in
Lacan, and, indeed, that they set off from a misconception of basic Lacanian terms.
Adopted by Baudry to substantiate for the psychical mechanism of the ideological
construction of Althusser's "subject", identification theory is, precisely, a psychological
conception, for it focuses on the "I" and the effective self-presence of its
imaginary identity rather than on the principal matter in Lacan and in psychoanalysis
in general, that is the unconscious subject (not to be confused with Althusserian
subjectivity). For Copjec, the misconception of Lacan is especially clear not only as
concerns the notion of subject but also that of the gaze which is so important to the
apparatus paradigm:
the gaze always retain within film theory the sense of being that point at which sense and being
coincide. The subject comes into being by identifying with the image's signified. Sense founds the
subject -- that is the ultimate point of the film theoretical concept of the gaze. (Copjec 1989: 59)
From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, three issues should be raised in respect to
Copjec's crucial observation:
1. According to Lacan, the subject is founded not by the "image's signified"
nor by any other mode of substantial presence but -- on the contrary -- by the
absence of meaning. The psychoanalytic subject is named the "subject of the
signifier" in accordance with its structural genealogy, for it is constituted b y its subjection
to the referentiality of the signifiers in the so-called chain of signifiers, that is, one
signifier signifying (viz. referring to) another. In this manner, the psychoanalytic notion
of castration is accounted for by formal semiotics as a lack or fault (manque) of the
Symbolic order. The immanent heterogeneity of the semiotic level of the Symbolic is
designated by the concept of the Real order. Mistaking this term for simple "reality"
(e.g. Metz 1982: 57), film theory never fully apprehends the notions of subject and
Real. Come to that, nor does the fierce critique of the "Lacanian-Althusserian"
paradigm advanced by Carroll and Bordwell, which nevertheless addresses the
problem of subjectivity in cinematic identification.
2. Mistaking the philosophical (viz. Althusserian) concept of subject with that
of Lacan, and, consequently, missing the point of the Real, contemporary film
theoretical practice employs what Žižek (1992: 186) sees as an imaginary defence
mechanism (or more correctly, the Versagung) against that void which is the subject.
Žižek suggests the term "sub-jectivization" to designate the process by which the realization
of the subject and the encounter with the Real are reduced to the imaginary
"sense of the gaze" (hence Copjec's observation) or a meaningful narrative. In film
studies, no wonder, the concept of Real has been touched upon almost solely in the
mediation of narratology. For Žižek, therefore, one should first and foremost see the
relationship between the Lacanian subject and subjectivization as an antagonistic
one.
3. Copjec's perhaps most urgent concern in respect to the reception of Lacan
is about the relationship between desire and identification. Contrary to Lacan,
"psychoanalytic film theory" sees identification as preceding desire. In this sense,
primary cinematic identification with the filmic "gaze" (or the "camera", as Metz puts
it) is thought of making possible the practice of fetishistic and sadistic scopophilia by
which the spectator "subject" -- already self-present -- takes his visual and narrative
pleasures. In this conception, Copjec argues, film theory overlooks not only the
function of the subject but also that of the object of phantasy (i.e., the objet petit a in
Lacan), which makes out the causal entity of desire, the manifestation of the Real in
phantasy, and which Lacan himself sees as his greatest contribution to psychoanalysis.
Accordingly, this term plays a key part in postmodern psychoanalytic critique.
However, as far as film studies are concerned, a central problem in the
accounting for Lacan's objet a in film analysis and theory is that it escapes not only
representation but also any aesthetic notion of cinema. Postmodern critique has dealt
in lenght with the objet a as a sublime object and thus certainly also as an object in
aesthetic experience but still not as an entity which is to be defined in terms of an
aesthetic technique specific to any media. Setting off from a synthesis of, on the one
hand, notions of cinematic desire and identification (cf. Metz and feminist film theory)
and, on the other, theories of cinematic representational systems, modern film theory
is short of a framework in which to define the Lacanian "object" in terms of both libidinal
investment and visual and narrative representation. Herein lies what I see as the
pivot point of the crisis of modern film theory: What is needed in film studies is the
disclosure of a new field of possibilities in which to refound modern film theory in
accordance with its postmodern critique.
Modern Film Theory and Roland Barthes: Realizing the Subject at the Point of
Leaving
A point of departure, as it were, is provided by Roland Barthes whose contribution to
the foundation of modern film theory is somehow ambiguous. Barthes' impact on his
close collaborator, Christian Metz, and film semiotics is indisputable as concerns the
linguistic as well as the psychoanalytic stage. However, the problematics of textuality
and desire advanced in Barthes' own works exceed by far the horizon laid out by
Metz, Baudry, feministic film theories, and other main contributors to modern film
theory. That certainly also goes for "En sortant du cinema", whose approach may be
characterized by a certain "distance" not only towards the theoretical conception
common to his fellow contributors of Communictions 23 but also to cinema itself.
As has been pointed out by Palle Schantz Lauridsen in his exposition of
Barthes' importance to film studies (1990), distance is in fact characteristic of his
general attitude to this media, which became the center of so much scientific
attention among his contemporary semioticians. French film theorist Pascal Bonitzer
(1980: 5) once asked Roland Barthes: 'You don't like [n'aimez pas] the cinema?'
'Please, allow me to modify,' Barthes replied, 'I "resist" [resiste] the cinema.' In
"Leaving the Movie Theatre", Barthes appears to substantiate further this "resistance"
with reference to the psychoanalytic implications of cinematic experience: 'There is
something to confess [Le sujet qui parle ici doit reconnaìtre une chose]: your speaker
likes to leave [aimer à sortir] a movie theatre [cinema].' (1986: 345, my brackets). To
apprehend fully the "point of departure" suggested by Barthes, this statement must
be understood not only in its literal sense (to 'Back out on the more or less empty,
more or less brightly lit sidewalk ...' (pp. 345)). For "resistance" also characterizes the
subject's attitude to cinematic identification ('the image captivates me, captures me I
am glued to the representation' (pp. 348)). In fact, the pleasure of the 'aimer a sortir'
seems to emanate from the very moment of leaving: from the point, as it were, of
one's "being at the point of leaving." Barthes attempts a psychoanalytic account of
this "point":
How to come unglued from the mirror? I'll risk a pun to answer: by taking off [en "décollant"] (in
the aeronautical and narcotic sense7 of the term) ... ; by letting oneself be fascinated twice over,
by the image and by its surroundings -- as if I had two bodies at the same time: a narcissistic
body which gazes, lost, in the engulfing mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not the
image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture [grain] of the sound, the hall, the darkness, the
obscure mass of the other bodies, the rays of light, entering the theatre, leaving the hall; in short,
in order to distance, in order to "take off", I complicate a "relation" by a "situation." (Barthes, 1986:
348-349, my note, my brackets)
The subject here seeks "at the same time" to distance itself from and to take pleasure
in the cinema by means of a double libidinal investment thus "complicating" the
attraction of the image (narcissistic relation) with that which exceeds the image
(fetishistic situation). Barthes suggests the existence of a distinct organization of the
libido with an "object" of its own:
What I use to distance myself from the image -- that, ultimately, is what fascinates me: I am hypnotized
by a distance; and this distance is not critical (intellectual); it is, one might say, an
amorous distance [distance amoureuse]: would there be, in the cinema itself (and taking the word
at its etymological suggestion) a possible bliss [jouissance] of discretion [discrétion]? (Ibid.: 349,
my brackets)
Unfortunately, we are not presented with the particular "etymological suggestion"
hinted at in this passage which, in fact, ends Barthes' article. It is true that discrétion
implies the liberty of deciding as one finds fit (viz. "discretion" in English) ; a liberty
which may oppose the state of imaginary captivation. On the other hand, the
etymology of discrétion8 refers to the separateness, distinction, and discontinuity
(qualities of the formal semiotic material), which characterize the object of distance in
itself and the distancing from the continuity and the coalescence of the image.9 In this
case, "discreteness" would be the proper English translation. A jouissance possible
de la discrétion? Barthes assumes the possibility of not only a jouissance in the
"cinema itself" but also its distance ("amorous", "hypnotic"). As for the psychoanalytic
meaning of distance, Barthes states that
the Real knows only distances, the Symbolic knows only masks; the image alone (the imagerepertoire
[sic!]) [l'Imaginaire]) is close [proche], only the image is "true" ["vraie"] ... (Ibid.: 348, my
brackets)
Whereas the Real is characterized by the void of referentiality in the Symbolic,
Barthes' "distance" and "discreteness" does seem pertinent to a formal semiotic level.
Accordingly, the "point of the leaving" is to be associated with a causal rather than an
7 In this sense, however, "taking off" seems to refer to the experience of intoxication (which, of course,
is that of the aeronaut) rather than of the cure, the décollant, of taking it.
8 Cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English: 'discreet [...] [F. discret f. L DIS(cretus p.p. of
cernere sift) seperate ...]'
9 Cf. Lauridsen (1990: 48).
effective agency. Distance in itself: "is" it not the distance of a split, that is, the split in
itself? Turning towards Barthes' erotico-semiotics of The Pleasure of the Text, we
learn that 'what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation,
the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss [jouissance].' (Barthes,
1975: 7). In Lacan, the "site of loss" must be understood either as the place of the
signifier or in terms of the objet a: the symbol of castration. Like the signifier, objet a
may be said to have the "lack in its place." In fetishism, the object (a) of desire is that
which in a metonymical way stands for the woman's lack of a penis. Still, these
proper forms are not "sites of loss". On the semiotic level, undecidable referentiality
has been pointed out as the "place" of castration. Similarly, distance-in-itself may be
said to "cover" the metonymical referentiality of the fetish object.10 Barthes observes:
Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the
realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression besides); it is
intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin
flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the opennecked
shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging
of an appearance-as-disappearance. (Barthes, 1975: 9-10)
The distance covered by the appearance-as-disappearance of the object doubles the
undecidable difference of the simulacrum in deconstruction: the split in itself. The
"site of loss", then, is not a place proper; it is, as Barthes notes, atopos (pp. 23) not to
be appropriated by philosophy. Intermittence is an atopical "dream of pure difference"
as Derrida has it. So is jouissance; it "vanishes by the daybreak of language." 11
Psychoanalysis observes that when one speaks, one sacrifices his jouissance in
favour of the presence of speech. The choice of jouissance is, on the other hand,
presence's annihilation.12 But to choose it, one has to find the site of loss. This is the
point of departure for any empiricism of the subject -- and, moreover, for its aesthetic
grounding in eroticism and art.
10 Ole Andkjær Olsen (1972: 48-49) demonstrates that the separation constitutive of the (lost) objet a
is to be though of as a given difference (différance).
11 Cf. Derrida (1978: 151, my bracket): 'the true name of ... the a prioris and transcendental horizons of
language, is empiricism. For the latter, at bottom, has ever committed but one fault: the fault of
presenting itself as a philosophy. And the profundity of the empiricist intention must be recognized
beneath the naïvité of certain of its historical expressions. It is the dream of a purely heterological
thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference ... We say the dream because it must vanish at
daybreak , as soon as language awakens.'
12 Barthes (1975a) quotes Serge Leclaire (no reference given): 'whoever experiences bliss causes the
letter [i.e., the signifier] - and all possible speech - to collapse in the absolute degree of the annihilation
he is celebrating' (pp. 21, my bracket) (cf. Leclaire (1992: 32)). For Lacan (1992: 64-65), therefore,
jouissance is what is inter-dit (forbidden to, interdicted for) the speaking subject.
The Point of Disappearance of the objet a in Lacan
The aesthetic account of objet a advanced above accords very well with Lacan's
theory of phantasy. Interestingly, a meditation of the latter leads us further towards a
notion of the temporality of the subjet and objet a in aesthetic experience.
Lacan (1977b: 209 ff) defines phantasy as a peculiar relationship ($ <> a/
"barred S, punch, object small a") between the barred subject ($) and objet a. The
lozenge (<>) symbolizes here the peculiarity of the barred subject being at once
attached to (^) and separated from (v) objet a. In the imaginary experience of
phantasy, this point is supposed to manifest itself in the losing (v) of what has finally
become one's possession (^) (cf. Rasmussen 1994: 76). Thus they say that objet a is
given by being always already lost.
Now, as for the symbolic determination of phantasy, this dictum means that
the objet a "stands for" what is lacking in the Other, that is the lack or fault (manque)
of the signifier. We remember that in Lacan, the signifier does not signify, or refer to
anything (any substance) but just another signifier in the so-called chain of signifiers.
Accordingly, the given of phantasy and the objet a are a lack, which is there a priori
as the very constitution of the subject. The symbolic order determines the object of
phantasy as being irremediably lost. It is said, therefore, to be situated in the Real (or
one may say that the standing-for of the Other's lack takes place in the Real).
Lacan (1977b: 242) names at least four fantasmatic identities of the objet a:
the voice (voix), the gaze (regard), the breast, and the faeces. René Rasmussen
(1994: 76) adds a fifth identity, the penis, corresponding to the five main part drives.13
This point goes very well with the symbolic determination of phantasy, for in
grammatical terms one would have to choose a past participle tense to describe the
time of these identities: they all "have been"; they all belong to History, that is in this
case the history of psychogenesis, which is always over from the outset. This is how
infantile amnesia works: it is always all over.
Now, in effect, that is in the Imaginary, it seems as though one may take the
dictum quite "literally". The objet a is given by being already lost; it does in a certain
sense appear only for it to disappear. For what qualifies the object of phantasy, notes
Rasmussen (1994: 77), is exactly the fact that it appears in order to disappear. When
one opens one's mouth to talk, the sound of the voice (the vocal object) will
disappear in space. The erection of a penis (^) takes place only in order for it to
disappear (v), say into a vagina, or simply to vanish (v). From this point of view, one
may perhaps use a present participle: "that is disappearing". The peculiar order of
13 Lacan (1977b) distinguishes between five part drives: the scopic drive, the invocatory drive, the oral
drive, the anal drive, and the genital drive.
appearance and disappearance seems to constitute another principle of the object of
phantasy, and in fact of the part drives (in Lacan, phantasy and the drives share the
same object). No wonder games of showing and hiding lead to erotic excitation in
children.
It seems as though the temporal confusion of the objet a amounts to whether
or not one actually takes part in phantasy. Now, for Lacan this is what perversion is
all about, that is, to take part in phantasy as the objet a. Lacan (1966: 775) tells us
that the perverse character does so in order to approach the Other in phantasy ($ <>
a <=> A). The order here is that of jouissance and the lack, that is the Real. By
playing the part as objet a in the Real, the perverse character seeks to supplement
the capitalized Other as for its lack, and to share its infinite capital of jouissance (in
Sade, the jouissance of God). This approach may manifest itself in the male
homosexual's relationship to the so-called "fag hag", a less flattering expression for a
woman who plays the one who lacks, that is the Other. It goes for perversion in
general that the character's supplementary function in relation to the Other is
confirmed by the imaginary phallus. The unconscious determination of whatever the
imaginary phallus may be, characterizes, on the other hand, the specific perversion
and, subsequently, the sexual identity of its executant.
The partners in perversion are the barred subjects, which in phantasy make
out the gate to the capitalized Other. According to Rasmussen, the victims in Sade's
fictions (say Justine) serve as a kind of medium by means of which the sadist
approaches the Other. Marked by death by the signifier, and the additional bruises
made by the sadist, the subject victim screams the bliss of God. The jouissance all
depends on the signal of death. Just think of the execution of Marietta's poor lover in
David Lynch's Wild at Heart. Tied to a pole in phantasy, his death is anticipated in a
count-down from ten.
So, perversion implies a certain kind of semiotics in which the signs, as in
Hippocrates, indicate to the Other the dying of a subject. Perverts also attract their
gods by means of sacrifice. Not only jouissance, but phantasy as such depends on
whether the Other is there to take part. The perverse scenario implies an agency
which observes and directs the course of action.14
14 By means of example, René Rasmussen refers to French author Marc Chodolenko's erotic novel
Histoire de Vivant Lanon (1985), which frames a 17-year-old boy, Vivant, in the perverse spectacle of
mature woman porn photographer Frédérique: 'At a certain stage, Vivant has been locked up together
with a girl who has been given to him for his pleasure. Still he feels disinclined and is stricken with
impotence because She (Frédérique) is neither physically nor psychically present. Suddenly, however,
he hears her voice from the outside: "I'm here ... are you listening ... may I come in? Are you through?
Suddenly desire overwhelmed me again in such a way that I felt my blood rushing to my head.
Quickly, without realizing what I was doing, I found her [the girl's] hand, bent my knees and forced it
down into my trunks. I did not even get a snatch at my organ. ... I saw her ... her naked breast in my
palms, her hand in my trunks, but also her [Frédérique] standing in the doorway watching us."'
(Rasmussen, 1994: 80, my translation).
Now, as for taking part in phantasy as the objet a, what is there for the
pervert to lose except for himself? For the perverse character does not concern
himself with the passing-away of the partner subject. What is important, rather, is the
subject's "arrival" in the Other. One may say that the "coming" (in French: j'arrive) of
the subject is necessary for the pervert to "take off". So, always notice whether your
partner is coming or leaving. It might tell you a lot about your position in the sexual
relationship.
Following Lacan, it is true that playing the objet a can be no more than an
attempt. Obviously, one cannot be the objet a for real, for that is where it is: in the
Real. Unless of course one has already lost oneself, that is if one is psychotic.
So, to be a pervert is to take part in phantasy as the objet a , but to do so only
partly. Who plays the Other part? Well, if phantasy and perversion is realized only by
the evocation of the gaze, i.e., the objet a, the Other should be regarded as playing
that part. Although nothing but oneself is to be lost in perversion, it does imply
another vanishing point, that is, the one at which the gaze makes its discrete
appearances before the world. The Real world, one might say, for the Other is really
there "for Real", or in the Real, for less than a moment. The peculiar order of
appearance-disappearance, by which the objet a points itself in the Imaginary, is that
of the Real. To designate the "taking-off" in phantasy, that is, partly playing the objet
a, one may use the term "departure".
Now, what does it mean to depart by playing only partly the part as the objet
a in the Real? What does it mean to share this part with the Other? As mentioned,
one may take the part played by the perverse character as a supplement to the
Other. In perversion, the pervert and the Other seek to establish a relationship of
supplementarity. In the Real order of phantasy, the entire part as the objet a may be
seen as supplementarity, irrespective of the imaginary identities actually chosen by
the perverse character and the Other. In this sense, objet a may be conceived of as
the very distension of phantasy, that is, the function which separates the perverse
character from the Other while still maintaining the relationship. In the Real world, the
world of the Real, this is how the objet a stands for the lack of the Other. To "stand
for" here means to distance the pervert from his God. Objet a is in phantasy a
distancing function. This is the Real "nature" of the object a.
Objet a distends phantasy; it makes it break loose. In a sense, phantasy "is"
the objet a when phantasy breaks loose. As in obsessional neurosis when the
"repressed returns". What returns here is phantasy. In a neurotic's world, the objet a
manifests itself as a Real bad experience, namely as the phobic agent of the
Freudian Unheimlische who returns in order to perform castration. The obsessional
neurotic secretly knows that the monstrous castrator will be back. In terms of
grammar, phantasy and the objet a belong for him to a future tense.15 Apparently, the
continuance of certain visual media functions here as a kind of window towards the
Real world; a window always available for the monstrous agent to enter. Notice how
Bob from Twin Peaks usually makes his uncanny appearances from surveillance
cameras, windows, picture frames,16 and similar devices. And as if touched by some
magic wand, this sneaking in of his suddenly turns the filmic universe into phantasy.
Interestingly, it is the very same field of framing and marginality that allows
the perverse subject to realize itself when it seeks to supplement the Other. In
"Leaving the Movie Theatre" Barthes takes his pleasures by fetishizing the open set
of marginality that is "precisely what exceeds" the image % from the "grain of the
voice" to the "sideway" outside the theatre. Frames and margins, i.e. the aesthetic
grounding of the subject, make out the gateway for the it to "take off". What is
important, moreover, is that it is the very same field of framings which make out what
Christian Metz sees as the relays of cinematic identification. This set of relays, which
Metz (1982) designates as cinematic "fictivity" vanishes in the self-presence of the I
by the identification with the "camera" or a narrative subject's viewpoint. Thus, what
"exceeds the image" supports at the same time the identification which constitutes
the cinematic image, i.e., the filmic text. This is the point of departure not only for a
theory of identification but also for a geneaology of a specific cinematic subjectivity.
Vanishing Points in Cinematographic Fictivity
So, in "Leaving the Movie Theatre", Barthes realizes subjectivity by being himself at
the point of leaving. Now, is such a "point" to be found in the "cinema itself", as
Barthes has it? In respect to the idea evoked above a relevant point of departure is
Camera Lucida as for its study in subjectivity, desire, and representation in photography
and cinema. One cannot help thinking of the Roland Barthes who signs
Camera Lucida as a person who is ultimately at his point of leaving; 'Camera Lucida,
whose time and tempo accompanied his [Barthes'] death as no other book, I [Derrida]
believe, has ever kept vigil over its author.' (Derrida, 1988: 261, my brackets). Still,
this is irrespective of the fact that Barthes accidentally died some months after having
finished this work. The presence of death is rather due to the object studied, Photo-
15 "VJ Ingo" from the MTV has just informed me that what is "coming up next in a cinema near me" is
Freddy Krueger and another Nightmare on Elm Street -- Freddy whose fingers are made out of knives.
The obsessional neurotic secretly knows that Freddy will be back . In terms of grammar, phantasy and
the objet a belong for him to a future tense.
16 In Lynch' Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk with Me (1993) Bob shows up in the picture of an open door
which is given to Laura Palmer by two of the ghostly lodge appearances: the old lady and the boy.
graphy, % or rather, photographic representation in a general sense % which is disclosed
as a gate of vanishing, as it were; a gate by which loss takes place: a makingpresent
of what has ultimately disappeared.
Contrary to the notion of the cinematic referent in Metz' psychoanalytic
account (1982), the photographic referent is distinguished by a necessary
uniqueness (Metz does not concern himself with the problem of the unique). Barthes
holds that
Photography's Referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call
"photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the
necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no
photograph. (Ibid.: 76)
Led by an '"ontological" desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was
"in itself"' (pp. 3), Barthes capitalizes "Photography" in accordance with its peculiar
"evidential force" of time and authenticity:
in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here:
of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider
it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography. What I intentionalize in a
photograph ... is Reference, which is the founding order of Photography.
The name of Photography's noeme will therefore be: "That-has-been", or again: the
Intractable. ... what I see has been there, in this place which extends between infinity and the
subject (operator or spectator); it has been there, and yet immediately separated; it has been
absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred. (Ibid.: 76-77)
Photography is the noematically unique disappearance of the unique. In Barthes'
phenomenology, such noeme is determined by subjective, or, rather, pre-subjective
intention, and is accounted for in terms of psychoanalysis:
the Photograph ... is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow
stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the
Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression. (Ibid.: 4)
In this sense, the noematic determination of Photography is made out by the
infrastructural heterology of separation, i.e., that the singular objet a is given by being
always already separated from the subject. "Intention", then, must not be identified
with the phenomenological concept of intention, for the "intention" of separation is
pre-subjective (in the peculiar sense of time implied in the "always already"). Barthes:
'I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already
occurred. ... every photograph is this catastrophe.' (pp. 96; DT.: 117).17 The disaster
of separation is the impossible "object" of anxiety (anxiety of castration) ;18 impossible
17 For Barthes, the catastrophe of separation is re-actualized by the fact that the person he loved most
(and lived together with), his mother, died shortly before he started to write Camera Lucida.
18 One recognizes here the affinity of Lacanian and Kleinian theory with respect of the notion of
since it cannot be appropriated by presence (no object proper, that is). Barthes notes
that 'Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always
invisible: it is not it that we see. [/] In short, the referent adheres. And this singular
adherence makes it very difficult to focus on Photography.' (pp. 6; DT.: 15, paragraphical
break suspended). The "ontological" desire is suspended, therefore, by the
difficulties of establishing an ontology proper of Photography with respect to the
problem of reference.
In Barthes' empiricism of subjectivity, the catastrophic site of loss
rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to
designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the point suits me all
the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am
speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points;
precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This ... element ... I shall therefore call
punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole % and also a cast of the dice. A
photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, poignants me).
(Ibid.: 26-27)
The punctum of Photography, then, is the unique affect of the unique disappearance
of the unique. How does this seemingly general order of singularity conform with the
quasi-essential duplicity of the infrastructures? In "The Deaths of Roland Barthes",
Derrida observes a paradox of the punctum; the point of singularity, as it were:
As the place of the irreplacable singularity and the unique referential, the punctum irradiates and,
what is most surprising, lends itself to metonymy. As soon as it allows itself to be drawn into a
system of substitutions, it can invade everything, objects as well as affects. This singularity which
is nowhere in the field mobilizes everything everywhere; it pluralizes itself.(Derrida, 1988a: 285)
The "power of authentication" is due, of course, not to singularity as such, but to the
"invisibility" of Photography's reference from the unique referent to its analogical
representation. This "place" of the irreplacable, it is true, is to be pointed out on the
Photograph (the "sensitive points"); yet such localization implies itself a reference, i.e,
a "that" of pointing; a "that" which is implicated in the peculiar structure of the
Photograph.
I said that the punctum allows itself to be drawn into metony my. Actually, it induces it, and this is
its force, or rather than its force (since it exercises no actual constraint and exists completely in
reserve), its dynamis, in other words, its power, potentiality, and even its dissimulation, its latency.
(Ibid.)
In this general system of reference, punctum disseminates the "natural" relations
between affect, representation and referent. The quasi-essence "is" that of any
psychic object and its pre-symbolic determination: an affinity which leads us to apprehend the
heterological infrastructure as a psychotic one.
infrastructural duplicity:
The metonymic force divides the referential line [trait], suspends the referent and leaves it to be
desired, while still maintaining the reference. (Ibid.: 290)
The reference of that punctum "is" the double which doubles no simple. The
metonymic doubling of the unique trait is given by structural necessity. For Derrida,
this is not a character specific to Photography:
By taking a thousand differential precautions, one must be able to speak of a punctum in all signs
(and the repetition and iterability structures it already), in any discourse, whether it be literary or
not. (Ibid.: 289)
Therefore, Photography (Barthes' term) should be dissociated from any ontologically
proper definition of photography; definitions which are only always already subjected
to the disseminating dynamis of Barthesian Photography -- they are photographed --
as is, ultimately, anything proper.
The question remains how to apprehend a punctum in the fictivity of
cinematography. Although the fictivity of the cinema is said to be a photographic one,
Barthes finds that
the Photograph's noeme deteriorates when this Photograph is animated and becomes cinema: in
the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever
(that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose
is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images: it is a different phenomenology,
and therefore a different art which begins here, though derivated from the first one. (Barthes,
1984: 78; DT.: 96)
Since Barthes' notion of pose is based on that of intention ('the pose ... is not the
attitude of the target or even a technique of the Operator, but the term of an
"intention" of reading...' (ibid.)), one may say that there is no intention in Barthes to
think of the cinema as a mode of pose:
the photograph, taken in its flux, is impelled, ceaselessly drawn toward other views; in the
cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not
make a claim in favor of its reality, it does not protest its former existence; it does not cling to me:
it is not a specter. (Ibid. 89; DT.: 109)
Resistance to Barthes' notion of cinema: recognizing the infinity of the punctum's
system of reference in accordance with Derrida's hermeneutical empiricism, one
would have to dissociate this notion from a real subjective empiricism of the cinema
(a mode of discourse in which the punctum is still to be disclosed, perhaps even to be
felt):19 to observe that Barthes' empirical approach still has its limits and that it must
19 In this context, one would have to repeat Susan Sontag's request from Against Interpretation: 'What
is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.'
(1983: 104). Yet her opposition of erotics and hermenutics ('In place of a hermeneutics we need an
be determined by something else. His "cinema" is a categorical concept covering the
experimental observation of the moving photographic fictivity's conviction to the
horizon of language, for he rejects categorically the idea that the cinema has a
punctum; a strategy which, perhaps, serves only to negatively define the photograph,
or perhaps rather, to distinguish Photography from the apparata of metaphysics
(Speech, Cinema). The question still remain, then, whether there is in the "cinema
itself" a punctuating distance of reference. On Photography and cinema, Barthes
adds,
Photography's inimitable feature (its noeme) is that someone has seen the referent (even if it is a
matter of objects) in flesh and blood, or again in person. ... Here again, from a phenomenological
viewpoint, the cinema begins to differ from the Photograph; for the (fictional) cinema combines
two poses: the actor's "this-has-been" and the role's, so that ... I can never see or see again in a
film certain actors whom I know to be dead without a kind of melancholy: the melancoly of Photography
itself ...(Ibid.: 79)
With respect to the necessary uniqueness of the cinematographic referent, the
singularities of a given actor or actress, the cinema does lend itself to the metonymy
of the punctum although this "place of the irreplacable" seems to appear only in order
to disappear in the continuous presence of the technico-semantic imaginary. Thus at
the same time, Barthes states, 'the cinema is protensive, hence in to way
melancholic...' (pp. 90). Certainly, the point of singularity manifests itself in another
way in the cinema than in Photography, namely, as a point of leaving.
Thus recognizing the combination of the pose of the unique (the actor) and of
the common (the role -- which is not a pose in the sense suggested above, but the
effacement of pose), one grasps the heterology of the conceptual opposition of
cinema and cinematography, for the point of combination cannot be reduced to either
the positive presence of the cinema or the negative one of cinematography. It is at
this point that this opposition, which is fundamental to the linguistic semiotics of the
cinema, is being photographed; it is here that the subject of cinematography is
realized by the becoming-absent of the referential simulacrum. In fact, this point goes
for the photograph as well to the extent that it is being described or narrativized,
'engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the
punctum. ... the punctum could accomodate a certain latency (but never any
scrutiny).' (pp. 53; DT.: 69). In speech, it is true , the punctum is always already
missed. The affective impact of the punctum is determined by the hedonist's choice
of silence, the choice of jouissance.20
erotics of art' (ibid.)) seems less pertinent to deconstruction, for the material, pure difference, remains
ultimately the same.
20 In his reading of Camera Lucida, Bent Fausing (1988: 302; 1991: 173) suggests the term "turning
point" ("vendepunkt") to designate this point of choice: to speak away or not to speak away the magic
The investigation of the aesthetic, viz. cinematographic, grounding of subjectivity
presupposes the radical empiricism of hedonism. One has to point one's "resistance"
to the cinema (in experience, that is, as well as in theory) and the atopical "existence"
of a discrete, yet necessary referent. Such "pointing", such "pointing out" is bound to
the temporality of the cinematographic simulacrum itself in relation to presence: this
is disappearing:21 this is at its point of disappearance. This is the point of departure
for a theory of a subject of cinematography.
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