Ναυτίλος
ΜΕΓΑΛΗΣ ΔΕΥΤΕΡΑΣ
Ασπίδα εγώ, βαθύ ντεκολτέ εκείνη, έχασα κατά κράτος...
.....................................
Για την Ανοιξη, λέω...
Σαν κρυπτομνησία που κάποτε φανερώνεται, ή σαν μνήμη κρυφή που δεν θέλει να το ρισκάρει και να αναδυθεί,
ψυχανεμίζομαι ότι το Μεγαλοβδόμαδο ανεβαίνει -από τότε που ήμουν παιδάκι το διαισθανόμουν, αλλά έπρεπε να μεγαλώσω σαράντα τραύματα για να το νοιώσω- κάθε
φορά στη σκηνή σαν ζεϊμπέκικο που ρετάρει στο πιάνο του Κραουνάκη. Αμφίθυμο
σαν να μη θέλει να ξέρει πως γνωρίζει τι θα συμβεί, θέλει το Μεγαλοβδόμαδο κι αυτό μια φορά να σταθεί σαν σημαία αγνώστων λοιπών στοιχείων...
Ματαίως, ως γνωστόν. Ο δον Κιχώτης των φτωχών, ανύποπτο αρνί όσον ήταν παιδί, τώρα έχει ενημερωθεί. Κανένας δεν έμεινε ζωντανός στον γάμο της Κανά, έκανε λάθος ο πύραυλος
κι έγιναν οι εορταστές παράπλευρη απώλεια, οι παράνυφοι έγιναν νεκροί. Και της νύφης και του γαμπρού οι σάρκες, πριν ενωθούν εις μίαν, έγιναν κομμάτια που τα χώρισε ο θάνατος...
Δεν είναι συνεπώς πια ανύποπτος ο Αμνός, πάει κι έρχεται, έρχεται και φεύγει αιώνες τώρα• και οι μαθητές των μαθητών του το ίδιο, άλλους τόσους αιώνες τώρα, γεμίζουν τη Γη με σταυρούς.
Πύραυλοι πολλαπλών κεφαλών
Λερναίες Υδρες
και εισέρχεται η άνοιξη στο Μεγαλοβδόμαδο σαν γιασεμάκι που θα κοπεί για τον επιτάφιο.
.................................
Ερχόμενος, λέει, φέτος ο Κύριος συνάντησε στον δρόμο του έναν ραγισμένον γενίτσαρο χτισμένον σε ένα γεφυράκι. Σπασμένες γύρω γύρω οι ημέρες του, σαν τα γυαλικά της μάνας του.
Ταπεινός Αυτός που ήρθε για τους τελώνες, τις πόρνες και τους σαλούς, πήρε απ' του γενίτσαρου την καρδιά όλα τα κρίματα και τους φόνους και τα έκανε βροχούλα
έκλαψε με τα δάκρυά της και ο εξωμότης• λυτρώθηκε• κι ύστερα ξανάγινε γενίτσαρος. Είθισται...
*****
Την τελευταία στιγμή προσπαθούσε να αλλάξει ζώδιο ο Εκτορας, να αποπροδικάσει την τύχη του κι άλλος να πέσει βορά του Αχιλλέα. Δεν γίνονται αυτά παλληκάρι μου, τα επιτόκια αλλάζουν πάντα υπέρ της Τράπεζας.
Αλλωστε τους εμπόρους για μία μόνον ημέρα έδιωξε απ' τον Ναό ο Επαναστάτης, ύστερα ξανάπιασαν βάρδια οι νόμοι και οι προφήτες κι έγινε πάλι το θέλημα των Δυνατών.
................................
Μαγεμένος με τα γράμματα και τις ιστορίες ανησυχούσα έως πρότινος, σαν θρασύ μειράκιο παρ' ότι πλέον μεσήλιξ, μήπως κάποτε γεράσουν τα αγάλματα. Τώρα λυπάμαι που δεν θα γεράσουν ποτέ...
Και οι δύο τρόποι Σου απέτυχαν.
Ο Εκτορας αμύνθηκε, κι έπεσε. Εσύ γύρισες και το άλλο μάγουλο κι αυτοί που Σε σταύρωσαν, σταυρώνουν έκτοτε λαούς και λαούς στο όνομά Σου - μπανάλ διαπίστωση κι όμως φρικτή.
Πύραυλοι ύβρεως-αέρος, πύραυλοι εδάφους-ύβρεως σκάνε και τούτη την άνοιξη πάνω στις Τροίες του κόσμου, όπως τα βεγγαλικά τη νύχτα της Ανάστασης στις ειρηνικές μας πόλεις. Και οι Τροίες πέφτουν. Ολες οι Τροίες πάντα πέφτουν...
ΣΤΑΘΗΣ Σ. 29.ΙΙΙ.2010 stathis@enet.gr
Ναυτίλος
ΜΕΓΑΛΗΣ ΤΡΙΤΗΣ
Στα λυμένα σου μαλλιά
περσικοί κήποι...
Την ημέρα εκείνη, γνωστήν έκτοτε και επαναλαμβανόμενη κατ' έτος ως Μεγάλη Τρίτη, κι έξι αιώνες ύστερα από «τα δραματικά γεγονότα της Μεσοποταμίας»
ο Αίρων τας αμαρτίας του Κόσμου κι ο Προφήτης Μεχμέτ έπαιζαν ζατρίκιο στον Παράδεισο καθισμένοι πάνω σε δύο βασιλικές τίγρεις της Σιβηρίας, κάτω από τη σκιά του Δένδρου της Γνώσης του Καλού και του Κακού.
Ενας είναι ο Θεός, δήλωνε ο Προφήτης Μωάμεθ και ο Αίρων έκανε τρεις κινήσεις σε μία με τον ίππο του - χαμογελούσε ο Προφήτης και ρωτούσε κατόπιν τον χλωμό -σαν τον Αγιο Φραγκίσκο της Ασίζης- Αμνό: «με τα σφαχτάρια του έρωτος τι θα κάνεις;»...
Μια χαρακιά από μαχαιριά ανεπίδοτου έρωτα στην παλάμη του είχε ο κρινόμενος• «μην ανησυχείς» του είπε τρυφερά ο Ιησούς «τα ίχνη απ' τα καρφιά θα την καλύψουν»• και τον έκρινε: ερωτευμένος στον Αιώνα
φως εκ φωτός να κατεβαίνει κάθε φορά στον Αδη ο Ορφέας.
....................................
Την ίδια ώρα τυραγνισμένος, αμφιρρέπων και πυρίμορφος ο Ιούδας οργάνωνε το έργον.
Σε ένα ρυάκι που δεν έβγαζε πουθενά αποθήκευε τα δάκρυά του. Αυτός ο δυστυχής. Που δεν θα μάθαινε ποτέ τις άγνωστες λέξεις του μέλλοντος. Το μαύρο
αρνί ετοίμαζε τη δική του θυσία, με μαύρο δάκρυ, ο Αγιος Αμνημόνευτος.
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«Κι αυτόν τον αγαπάς!» χαμογέλασε γαλήνιος ο Προφήτης, χαμογέλασε και ο Αίρων...
ΣΤΑΘΗΣ Σ. 30.ΙΙΙ.2010 stathis@enet.gr
Ναυτίλος
ΜΕΓΑΛΗΣ ΤΕΤΑΡΤΗΣ
Την ημέρα εκείνη ζορίσανε τα πράγματα και δεν μπορούσαν πια οι διαφημίσεις να τα κάνουνε ευχάριστα.
Λογικόν.
Ολα εδώ πληρώνονται. Σε αυτούς που για όλα εδώ αμείβονται. Σε αυτούς που πίνουν εμφιαλωμένα λιμνάζοντα ύδατα κι από τους άμβωνες των στρατηγείων
παρουσιάζουν όπλα
διαμοιράζονται ιμάτια
και μοιράζουν μερίσματα.
[Φωνές χωρίς φωνήεντα, αλλά γραμμένες με πεντακάθαρη μεγαλογράμματη γραφή, να διαβάζουν εύκολα και να καταλαβαίνουν οι υπήκοοι και οι πιστοί, τι λένε οι πινακίδες: από πού πάνε στον διάολο και πού οι ναπάλμ ανέβασαν την αξία των μελλοντικών ακινήτων]...
Σήμερα η βιαιότης της Βεβαιότητος στήνει τις αγχόνες της - η παράστασις αρχίζει...
.................................
...πρώτα από τον Ιππόδρομο με τον χορό της Καρμανιόλας. Σήμερα ο ευγενής, αύριο ο επαναστάτης για όλους έχει την καλή της λεπίδα η Τύχη.
Η Τύχη και η Ανάγκη.
Διαλέξτε!
Ο Αμνός διάλεξε την Ανάγκη.
Κι έβαλε τα γέλια η Τύχη...
Ακόμα κι ο Ρωμαίος στενοχωρήθηκε.
Υστερα από χρόνια με τον Βαραββά στα βουνά, τσιγάρα και καλάσνικωφ, μια-δυο φορές το 'φερε η κουβέντα, απ' Αυτόν είχε απομείνει η Μυροφόρα (πουλημένη για πόρνη στις Συρακούσες) και το κλάμα της μάνας Του
...μια εικόνα με μεγάλα μαύρα μάτια που τη βλέπεις πάνω στις κόκκινες σημαίες, αν τις καλοκοιτάξεις.
ΣΤΑΘΗΣ Σ. 31.ΙΙΙ.2010 stathis@enet.gr
Ναυτίλος
ΜΕΓΑΛΗΣ ΠΕΜΠΤΗΣ
Μεγάλη Πέμπτη ανήμερα να θυμόμαστε το Αουσβιτς, το Νταχάου κι όλα τα άλλα στρατόπεδα συγκέντρωσης. Να σκύβουμε το κεφάλι απ' το βάρος της μνήμης
τόσων ανεξιλέωτων νεκρών...
Την ημέρα αυτή, λένε οι γνωρίζοντες, τρίζουν τα ξύλα των καραβιών στα πελάγη και οι ρίμες των παλιών ναυτικών στοιχειώνουν τις γέφυρες.
Δεν εξέλιπαν οι ωμοφάγοι
κι ογδόντα πόλεμοι κάνουν συνεχώς τον γύρο του κόσμου...
...........................
Στη χώρα χωρίς χρόνο.
Σαν να 'ναι όλα σταματημένα στο σύνορο του άνω και του κάτω μιας κλεψύδρας κινείται κάποιες στιγμές ο κόσμος - κι έτσι βγαίνεις από μέσα του
και κοιτάζεις το πρόσωπό σου
μωρό και γέροντα μαζί
ενώπιος ενωπίω, χωρίς να σε βοηθούν οι ελιγμοί των λυγμών - ένας κόκκος στα εκατομμύρια κόκκων δισεκατομμυρίων πλανητών τρισεκατομμυρίων γαλαξιών το πρόσωπό σου, κι όμως εσύ το βλέπεις ολοκάθαρα να βρίζει, να γελά, να αναστενάζει, να χαμουρεύεται, να βογγά και να ουρλιάζει - είναι η κόλαση,
(σου είπαν μια βραδιά τα όνειρά σου), εμείς: Τόποι χωρίς ειρμό, πρόσωπα με πολλαπλές σημασίες, εσύ ο ίδιος ένα πρίσμα. Από μέσα και απ' έξω...
*****
Σήμερον κρεμάται επί ξύλου ο Κοσμοσείστης και γι' αυτό, για σένα το πιο εκπληκτικό, πιο μυστηριακό και το πιο σπουδαίο είναι ένας άνθρωπος που τον εμποδίζουν να βαδίσει, είναι ένας άνθρωπος που τον αλυσοδένουνε...
ΣΤΑΘΗΣ Σ. 1.IV.2010 stathis@enet.gr
Ναυτίλος
ΜΕΓΑΛΗΣ ΠΑΡΑΣΚΕΥΗΣ
Εμφάνιση αναρτήσεων με ετικέτα Cultural Theory. Εμφάνιση όλων των αναρτήσεων
Εμφάνιση αναρτήσεων με ετικέτα Cultural Theory. Εμφάνιση όλων των αναρτήσεων
29/9/09
Lectio Sine Mora – από τη γραφή των εκπαιδευτικών για το έργο τους στην εκπαιδευτική Πράξη των εκπαιδευτικών -- (προδημοσίευση, 29.09.2009)...
Lectio Sine Mora – από τη γραφή των εκπαιδευτικών για το έργο τους στην εκπαιδευτική Πράξη των εκπαιδευτικών
(...one for m.s.)
Lectio Sine Mora -- «Γραφή χωρίς καθυστέρηση»… Αλλά για ποιον γράφει ο εκπαιδευτικός όταν παρουσιάζει τη σκέψη ή το έργο του; Ποιος είναι αυτός που γράφει; Για ποιον γράφει;
Ο Ρολάν Μπαρτ διακρίνει εκείνη τη γραφή που γεννιέται μέσα στη γραμματική, το «κείμενο που έρχεται από την κουλτούρα» (Μπαρτ, 1973, σ. 25). Τη γραφή μέσα στο σύστημα του προ-δηλωμένου νοήματος η οποία απευθύνεται, αναζητά, τον αναγνώστη που θα την αναγνωρίσει, κάνοντας χρήση των ίδιων κωδίκων, του ίδιου συντακτικού που γέννησε το συγγραφέα και το κείμενο, σκηνοθετώντας εκ προοιμίου το συμβιβασμό συγγραφέα-κειμένου-αναγνώστη (Μπαρτ, 1973, σσ. 9-13).
Υπάρχει, βέβαια, και η γραφή όπου η «γλώσσα ανακατανέμεται», εκείνη η γραφή που προσπερνάει το «φύλλωμα της σημαινότητας». Η γραφή τότε μετουσιώνει το κείμενο σε ηδονικό κείμενο, σε «κείμενο που ξεβολεύει,…, που κάνει να τρικλίζουν τα ιστορικά, πολιτισμικά, ψυχολογικά βάθρα του αναγνώστη», ώστε η σταθερότητα του γούστου του αναγνώστη, των αξιών και των αναμνήσεών του να οδηγείται σε κρίση στη σχέση με τη γλώσσα (Μπαρτ, 1973, σ. 25). Τότε το κείμενο αναζητάει χώρο ανάμεσα σε συγγραφέα-κείμενο-αναγνώστη, εξαρθρώνεται από τη γλώσσα, από την πολιτική μόνο και μόνο για να αφηγηθεί με όρους πολιτικούς, επιθυμίας, και να αντικρύσει ευθέως τις αρθρώσεις της ιστορίας του/των υποκειμένου/-νων, τότε λοιπόν είναι που «σκηνοθετείται μια εμφάνιση-εξαφάνιση» (Μπαρτ, 1973, σ. 18). Η γραφή αυτή δημιουργείται μέσα στον όγκο των λεγομένων, χαράσσεται στο λόγο και όχι στη γλώσσα, από την αλήθεια μεταβαίνουμε στην έκφραση του συγγραφέα παραμερίζοντας τη συνοχή των εκφραζόμενων (Μπαρτ, 1973, σσ. 19-22). Μου διαβάζει η αγαπημένη μου ένα απόσπασμα ενός μυθιστορήματος, αλλά η αλήθεια του κειμένου μεταφέρεται από τους χαρακτήρες και την πλοκή της ιστορίας που μου διαβάζει, στην επιθυμία μου για εκείνη, ενώ εκείνη διαβάζει λέξη προς λέξη το κείμενο, το κείμενο μου γίνεται κατανοητό στο βαθμό που μεταγγίζει την επιθυμία της για εμένα, την επιθυμία μου για εκείνη(...) --(...προδημοσίευση, 29.09.2009...)._
(...one for m.s.)
Lectio Sine Mora -- «Γραφή χωρίς καθυστέρηση»… Αλλά για ποιον γράφει ο εκπαιδευτικός όταν παρουσιάζει τη σκέψη ή το έργο του; Ποιος είναι αυτός που γράφει; Για ποιον γράφει;
Ο Ρολάν Μπαρτ διακρίνει εκείνη τη γραφή που γεννιέται μέσα στη γραμματική, το «κείμενο που έρχεται από την κουλτούρα» (Μπαρτ, 1973, σ. 25). Τη γραφή μέσα στο σύστημα του προ-δηλωμένου νοήματος η οποία απευθύνεται, αναζητά, τον αναγνώστη που θα την αναγνωρίσει, κάνοντας χρήση των ίδιων κωδίκων, του ίδιου συντακτικού που γέννησε το συγγραφέα και το κείμενο, σκηνοθετώντας εκ προοιμίου το συμβιβασμό συγγραφέα-κειμένου-αναγνώστη (Μπαρτ, 1973, σσ. 9-13).
Υπάρχει, βέβαια, και η γραφή όπου η «γλώσσα ανακατανέμεται», εκείνη η γραφή που προσπερνάει το «φύλλωμα της σημαινότητας». Η γραφή τότε μετουσιώνει το κείμενο σε ηδονικό κείμενο, σε «κείμενο που ξεβολεύει,…, που κάνει να τρικλίζουν τα ιστορικά, πολιτισμικά, ψυχολογικά βάθρα του αναγνώστη», ώστε η σταθερότητα του γούστου του αναγνώστη, των αξιών και των αναμνήσεών του να οδηγείται σε κρίση στη σχέση με τη γλώσσα (Μπαρτ, 1973, σ. 25). Τότε το κείμενο αναζητάει χώρο ανάμεσα σε συγγραφέα-κείμενο-αναγνώστη, εξαρθρώνεται από τη γλώσσα, από την πολιτική μόνο και μόνο για να αφηγηθεί με όρους πολιτικούς, επιθυμίας, και να αντικρύσει ευθέως τις αρθρώσεις της ιστορίας του/των υποκειμένου/-νων, τότε λοιπόν είναι που «σκηνοθετείται μια εμφάνιση-εξαφάνιση» (Μπαρτ, 1973, σ. 18). Η γραφή αυτή δημιουργείται μέσα στον όγκο των λεγομένων, χαράσσεται στο λόγο και όχι στη γλώσσα, από την αλήθεια μεταβαίνουμε στην έκφραση του συγγραφέα παραμερίζοντας τη συνοχή των εκφραζόμενων (Μπαρτ, 1973, σσ. 19-22). Μου διαβάζει η αγαπημένη μου ένα απόσπασμα ενός μυθιστορήματος, αλλά η αλήθεια του κειμένου μεταφέρεται από τους χαρακτήρες και την πλοκή της ιστορίας που μου διαβάζει, στην επιθυμία μου για εκείνη, ενώ εκείνη διαβάζει λέξη προς λέξη το κείμενο, το κείμενο μου γίνεται κατανοητό στο βαθμό που μεταγγίζει την επιθυμία της για εμένα, την επιθυμία μου για εκείνη(...) --(...προδημοσίευση, 29.09.2009...)._
14/3/09
Psykoanalytiska Konstruktioner, Stockholm, 1995.
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
Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang.
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.
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. "The Deaths of Roland Barthes." In Hugh J. Silverman (Ed.)
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.
Olsen, Ole Andkjær. 1972. "Skrift og subjekt." Exil, no. 3, vol. 6, Copenhagen: Vinten.
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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5/3/09
CONTEXT no. 14 , Reading Pierre Klossowski by John Taylor
CONTEXT, no. 14
Reading Pierre Klossowski
John Taylor
Let’s take Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) at his word, and read him with his favorite word. He claimed to “fabricate simulacra.” What exactly did the French writer mean? The word “simulacrum” is restricted by English usage to “a representation of something (image, effigy),” to “something having the form but not the substance of a material object (imitation, sham),” and to “a superficial likeness (appearance, semblance).” Contemporary French understands the term similarly, while maintaining traces of more concrete Latin meanings: “statue (of a pagan god),” even “phantom.” Interestingly, French adds “a simulated act” to these semantic possibilities, as in Raymond Queneau’s amusing description in Zazie in the Metro: “He took his head in his hands and performed the futile simulacrum (fit le futile simulacre) of tearing it off.” For Roman writers, a simulacrum could also be “a material representation of ideas” (and not just that of a deity), as well as “a moral portrait.”
One must think in Latin when reading Klossowski. All of the above meanings inform the strange and disturbing erotic fiction of this writer who not only produced The Baphomet (1965) and the trilogy Les lois de l’hospitalité (The Laws of Hospitality) (1954-1965), but also translated Suetonius, Virgil, and Saint Augustine (alongside Kafka, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Hölderlin, and Heidegger). The author’s intimacy with Latin, and with Latin literature, cannot be overemphasized. So strong was his attachment that it clearly affected his French syntax and diction, as if the dead language had somehow survived in him—a second mother tongue, both nourishing and competing with a first one. Possessing an antiquarian atmosphere all its own (especially in The Baphomet), Klossowski’s style disorients readers unaware of this linguistic background (which includes, moreover, his consorting with liturgical and biblical Latin during his World War II years spent as a Dominican novitiate). May it be said that Klossowski’s meticulously quaint style is itself a simulacrum of sorts, a conscious transposition into French of the spirit of Latin, a modern-day linguistic specter of a once-vital source that has been lost and in this way “recovered”?
The notion of “simulacrum” especially informs the mystical poetics that Klossowski associates with an unusual and not uncontroversial form of erotic behavior, as depicted above all in the three novels making up the trilogy: Roberte Ce Soir (1954), The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1959), and Le Souffleur (1965). (In the definitive structuring of the trilogy, Klossowski left Le Souffleur at the end, but reversed the order of the two other volumes.) Briefly stated, in those three novels (which return thrice to the same plot, though from different narrative angles and with different literary techniques), a main character named Octave (who sometimes tells the story, sometimes is “morally” portrayed) applies what he terms “the laws of hospitality” and thereby shares his wife, Roberte, with sundry guests and visitors. In Roberte Ce Soir, the codified detail of these laws appear as a manuscript framed and hung in the visitor’s bedroom.
147;Hospitality” of this kind posits, to say the least, a provocative conception of marriage, not to mention love. If Klossowski had contented himself with staging the social consequences of such a practice, his erotic writings would have remained shallow, however scandalous and (more often than critics have noticed) comical. Yet as in other examples of that quintessentially French literary tradition going back at least as far as the Marquis de Sade (the pertinence of whom Klossowski himself rehabilitates in Sade My Neighbor, 1947), explicitly sexual, even blatantly pornographic, writings sometimes aim well beyond their immediate subject matter. Paradoxically, such fiction can wax philosophical.
The French propensity to incarnate ideas in depictions of the carnal reaches a high point in Klossowski’s fiction, which indeed resembles Sade’s in a few ways. As graphic as his erotic scenes are, they are hardly intended to titillate; instead, they generally consist of stark, emotionally neutral descriptions. Moreover, in Klossowski, the sustained quasi-theatrical poses making up the sexual scenes do not particularly create the illusion of continuous sexual movement. Another key concept for Klossowski is that of the tableau vivant, a static dramatic scene forming, literally, a “picture made up of living characters.” His sexual scenes form intricate, puzzling tableaux-signs. But signs indicating what?
Metaerotic in this sense, Klossowski’s writing tends to direct the reader “beyond” the immediate textual (that is, sexual) detail. Perhaps some readers will engage their own sexual fantasies, as narrative “filler,” and thereby add fluid movements to these set pieces, but more often than not they will ponder a perplexing abstract question: To what ends have been arranged these sordid tableaux vivants, and what motivates them? The reader moves constantly from concrete sexual detail to questions and ideas, and this effect partly results from the various narrative forms employed (straightforward storytelling, diaristic notes, dialogues) and from unexpected shifts in narrative viewpoint. The importance lies in how the tableaux vivants are perceived and experienced—personally or vicariously, bodily or mentally.
As the first volume of the trilogy progresses, Roberte comments on her husband as a character, then as a character-author of a book—in fact, the second volume, Roberte Ce Soir—that he has written about her. In this first book, which alternates passages from Roberte’s and Octave’s diaries, Octave also reflects on himself as a character, then as a character-author. In other words, passages that have recently been written (as it were) become objects of commentary in other, not necessarily later, passages. When Octave describes his art collection, he self-analyzes his writings about Roberte as well. And the paintings that he details (sometimes rather painstakingly) also bear on the story. Adding to the multiple ironies is that Roberte is a radical deputy who is a member of a Governmental Educational Committee that must decide whether to ban Octave’s writings about her. An additional spoof on censorship (and self-censorship) can be found in Klossowski’s little-known “divertimento,” Roberte et Gulliver, published in 1987.
Given this multilayered narrative approach, it is not always easy to establish what levels of “reality” or phantasm are being dealt with at a given point in the tripartite narrative. Klossowski approved of the critic Jean Roudaud’s remark that he had set to work narratively Giordano Bruno’s definition of thinking as “speculating with images.” Increasingly, the story seems less one of real than of speculative events.
The second version of the same story, Roberte Ce Soir, renders even more intricate these intertwined speculative narratives spinning off from what is Octave’s single persistent obsession: how to love Roberte. This second volume is actually narrated not by Octave, but rather by Antoine, Octave’s nephew (who ends up having a sexual relationship with his aunt); and Antoine discusses, too, how Roberte is represented in Octave’s writings. Crowning the complexity is a puzzling sentence discreetly slipped in at the onset of Roberte Ce Soir. Antoine, the narrator, observes: “I was thirteen years old when I was adopted by the Octaves.” Does this strange use of a first name in the plural imply that Roberte is actually one with Octave, and even that Klossowski is one with Antoine (as well as with Octave and Roberte), rather as in Flaubert’s quip that “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”?
More generally, the “host,” Octave, wants to experience the risk of losing Roberte so that he can love her all the more strongly. For him, voyeuristic tension engenders an amorous exaltation restoring, for him, the initial purity of his love. But experiencing once again original, quasi-sacred amorous feelings demands transgressing conventional marital behavior and shrewdly manipulating others, including his wife (as well as Antoine and various “guests”). Such are the questionable Manichaean (not to say Machiavellian) ethics at play here. Similar manipulations are staged in the Templar tale, The Baphomet, and its theatrical counterpart, L’Adolescent immortel (2001), though in these books Klossowski stresses more the idea of an initiation or a moral “itinerary.”
Searching for the sacred via transgression brings to mind the French philosopher Georges Bataille, about whom Klossowski wrote an important essay: “La Messe de Georges Bataille.” Sinning and sacredness also blend in the hauntingly beautiful poems and novels of Pierre Jean Jouve, whom Klossowski praises in another essay for preserving “a qualitative notion of the human soul as being made up of contests between the body and the mind.” Klossowski admires the latter’s novels as exegeses “of an absolutely unique kind, of the soul’s itinerary as it is dominated by sin.” Although Klossowski eventually modified his critical vocabulary (eschewing terms that derived from his midlife religious crisis), these remarks about Jouve elucidate his own fiction. Just replace “sin” with “phantasm” or “obsession.”
How does “simulacrum” relate to all this? In the self-elucidating fourth section of Tableaux vivants: essais critiques 1936-1983 (2001), Klossowski recalls that in antique statuary, because it was considered impossible to create a soul to animate the simulacra of gods, the souls of intermediaries—that is, demons and angels—would be invoked and locked inside holy or sacred images so that these “idols” would thereafter have the power to perform good or evil deeds. Klossowski infers a psycholiterary theory from this ancient custom: the emotion contained in a work of art—and thus provoked in the spectator or reader—is correlative to a “demonic movement.” Klossowski’s characters are “idols” in this literal, as well as ancient, sense.
Pursuing this same idea in his book-length essay, Diana at Her Bath (1956), Klossowski explains how the goddess Diana makes a pact with an “intermediary demon” so as to appear before Acteon, a human being. “The demon simulates Diana in a theophany,” comments Klossowski, “and creates in Acteon the desire and the hope of possessing the goddess.” Klossowski adds that the demon thereby “becomes Acteon’s imagination as well as a mirror-image of Diana.” This double effect of the simulacrum is essential. The demon inhabits not only what it reveals (the goddess Diana), but also the spectator (Acteon) to whom the image of the goddess is revealed. In both his painting and writing, Klossowski aimed to create simulacra that affected the “contemplator” (the spectator, the reader) in the same way that an “invisible model” had affected him.
The “demonic” aspects of Klossowski’s artistic philosophy, in its later stages, perhaps seem closer to the psychoanalytical paradigms of obsession and phantasm than to Christian concerns with evil and the Devil. Still, it remains difficult to read his works without recalling his long training for the Catholic priesthood. Beset with “pathophania,” as he put it, Klossowski believed that obsessional negative visions should be exorcized. For him, writing was no rhetorical game, but rather the very act by which imaginative subject matter is dealt with, then exorcized. In Tableaux vivants, he writes of “simulacrum” as the “realization of something that is incommunicable in itself or unrepresentable: literally the phantasm in its obsessional constraint.” The function of the simulacrum is “at first to exorcize,” he adds, “but in order to exorcize the obsession, the simulacrum imitates what it fears in the phantasm.” Klossowski’s images—both artistic and literary—are always tantalizing and often cumulatively harrowing because of this conscientious, indeed courageous, mimesis.
The crucial difference between Klossowski and Sade is that the former’s explorations of fear and phantasm are aimed at very special forms of mystical purity. In his essay on Bataille, Klossowski argues that “the soul must expel all that it silently imagines: only through impure speech (une parole impure) can a soul hope to [ultimately] rest in its silence, in the silence through which it exists, no longer being anything but that silence.” The remark is hermetic, but it seems that the pursuit of love (in Klossowski’s sense) could be added to this yearning for silence and that what he longed for could likewise result only from a long process of purification: the continual expression of, and subsequent exorcism of, troubling mental images.
Nearly all of Klossowski’s fiction was written during a fifteen-year period, ranging from the quasi-autobiographical La vocation suspendue (1950), concerning his religious crisis during the Second World War (when he studied theology in Saint-Maximin, Lyons, and Paris), to the intentionally anachronistic tale, Le Baphomet. Before this period, Klossowski had translated and penned essays (some of which are collected in Écrits d’un monomane: essais 1933-1939, 2001, and Un si funeste désir, 1963), though he later rejected some of this earlier work, remarking (in a letter cited in the critical collection Pierre Klossowski, 1985) that he considered Roberte Ce Soir as the “decisive rupture,” after which he understood that “thought could only be interpreted by means of the imagination, not the contrary.”
Toward the end of the 1960s, he stopped writing almost completely. As he evolved from the art of aligning words to the studied use of line and color, his career paralleled that of Louis-René des Forêts (1918-2000), whose haunting story Le Malheur au Lido, written in homage to Klossowski (it bears the dedication “for Octave”), offers an oblique introduction to the latter’s sensibility. Both writers moved from storytelling to an increasing use of dialogue (a literary form that, compared to description, they considered nearer reality), and from dialogue to what Klossowski called the “mute gestures” of drawing. In other words, both writers eventually adopted an almost permanent writerly silence during their last years, seeking out a more direct means of reproducing mental images. Des Forêts did eventually work on a final prose masterwork, Ostinato.
In Klossowski, this evolution does not really derive from an admission of creative impossibility (coupled with the Beckettian necessity of continuing to create, of “going on”), but rather from an all-exclusive drive to get as close as possible to the most basic phenomena of life, to the most potent gestures of aliveness. It is arresting that his quest entails not a solitary individual casting a hard eye at his existence, but rather an individual intimately linked to one or more other individuals. As Klossowski contemplated human beings together, the notion of “gestures” that would be suggestive of countless, perhaps mutually contradictory consequences came to fascinate him. Such primordial gestures or poses could not honestly be described: they were necessarily pre- or nonverbal. At this point in the man’s creative soul-searching (he was in his late sixties), literature was sacrificed for art. As for the writings that appeared before this radical turn, they are not meant to “please” or “amuse” (though they are not without humor); and some long passages try the reader’s patience. But what remains admirable is this intent author’s relentless urge to go ever further upstream, to get behind discourse and conceptualization, to stalk desire and movement as they manifest themselves in all their multivarious potential. And then to craft fitting simulacra of what he has glimpsed; that is, disquieting representations of something still further upstream, at a mysterious fountainhead that cannot truly be described, or fully seen, or touched.
Selected Works by Pierre Klossowski in Translation
The Baphomet. Trans. Sophie Hawes and Stephen Sartarelli. Marsilio Publishers.
Diana at Her Bath/The Women of Rome. Trans. Sophie Hawes and Stephen Sartarelli. Marsilio Publishers.
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. University of Chicago Press.
Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. Dalkey Archive Press
Sade My Neighbor. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press,
Selected Untranslated Works
L’Adolescent immortel. Éditions GallimardÉcrits d’un monomane: essais 1933-1939. Éditions Gallimard
Les lois de l’hospitalité. Out of Print.
Le mage du nord. Out of Print.
La Monnaie vivante. Joelle Losfeld
Origines culturelles et mythiques d’un certain comportement des dames romaines. Out of Print.
Pierre Klossowski. Ludion.
Roberte et Gulliver. Fata Morgana
Un si funeste désir. Éditions Gallimard
Tableaux vivants: essais critiques 1936-1983. Éditions Gallimard
La vocation suspendue. Éditions Gallimard.
1/3/09
Ο Ρολάν Μπαρτ από το Ρολάν Μπαρτ, ΡΟΛΑΝ ΜΠΑΡΤ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΡΟΛΑΝ ΜΠΑΡΤ, εκδόσεις ΡΑΠΠΑ.
Roland Barthes
It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work which owes at least its phenomenal existence to this same language. The change is clearly connected with the current development of (amongst other disciplines) linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis (the term 'connection' is used here in a deliberately neutral way: one does not decide a determination, be it multiple and dialectical). What is new and which affects the idea of the work comes not necessarily from the internal recasting of each of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in relation to an object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held up as a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down -- perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion -- in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. The mutation in which the idea of the work seems to be gripped must not, however, be over-estimated: it is more in the nature of an epistemological slide than of a real break. The break, as is frequently stressed, is seen to have taken place in the last century with the appearance of Marxism and Freudianism; since then there has been no further break, so that in a way it can be said that for the last hundred years we have been living in repetition. What History, our History, allows us today is merely to slide, to vary, to exceed, to repudiate. Just as Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the frames of reference be included in the object studied, so the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer (critic). Over against the traditional notion of the work, for long -- and still -- conceived of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the requirement of a new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That object is the Text. I know the word is fashionable (I am myself often led to use it) and therefore regarded by some with suspicion, but that is exactly why I should like to remind myself of the principal propositions at the intersection of which I see the Text as standing. The word 'proposition' is to be understood more in a grammatical than in a logical sense: the following are not argumentations but enunciations, 'touches', approaches that consent to remain metaphorical. Here then are these propositions; they concern method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure.
1. The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts. In particular, the tendency must be avoided to say that the work is classic, the text avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude honours list in the name of modernity and declaring certain literary productions 'in' and others 'out' by virtue of their chronological situation: there may be 'text' in a very ancient work, while many products of contemporary literature are in no way texts. The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (without at all reproducing term for term) Lacan's distinction between 'reality' and 'the real': the one is displayed, the other demonstrated; likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example on a library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works).
2. In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications. How do you classify a writer like Georges Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic? The answer is so difficult that the literary manuals generally prefer to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote texts, perhaps continuously one single text. If the Text poses problems of classification (which is furthermore one of its 'social functions), this is because it always involves a certain experience of limits (to take up an expression from Philippe Sollers). Thibaudet used already to talk -- but in a very restricted sense -- of limit-works (such as Chateaubriand's Vie de Rancé, which does indeed come through to us today as a 'text'); the Text is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc.). Nor is this a rhetorical idea, resorted to for some 'heroic' effect: the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa (is not general opinion -- constitutive of our democratic societies and powerfully aided by mass communications -- defined by its limits, the energy with which it excludes, its censorship?). Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical.
3. The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a signified. There are two modes of signification which can be attributed to this signified: either it is claimed to be evident and the work is then the object of a literal science, of philology, or else it is considered to be secret, ultimate, something to be sought out, and the work then falls under the scope of a hermeneutics, of an interpretation (Marxist, psychoanalytic, thematic, etc.); in short, the work itself functions as a general sign and it is normal that it should represent an institutional category of the civilization of the Sign. The Text, on the contrary, practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived of as 'the first stage of meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action. Similarly, the infinity of the signifier refers not to some idea of the ineffable (the unnameable signified) but to that of a playing; the generation of the perpetual signifier (after the fashion of a perpetual calendar) in the field of the text (better, of which the text is the field) is realized not according to an organic progress of maturation or a hermeneutic course of deepening investigation, but, rather, according to a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations. The logic regulating the Text is not comprehensive (define 'what the work means') but metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy (lacking it, man would die); the work in the best of cases -- is moderately symbolic (its symbolic runs out, comes to a halt); the Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text. Thus is the Text restored to language; like language, it is structured but off-centred, without closure (note, in reply to the contemptuous suspicion of the 'fashionable' sometimes directed at structuralism, that the epistemological privilege currently accorded to language stems precisely from the discovery there of a paradoxical idea of structure: a system with neither close nor centre).
4. The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it .has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end (someone slackened off from any imaginary); this passably empty subject strolls -- it is what happened to the author of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of the Text -- on the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below (oued is there to bear witness to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children's voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference. So the Text: it can be it only in its difference (which does not mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive (this rendering illusory any inductive-deductive science of texts -- no 'grammar' of the text) and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the 'sources', the 'influences' of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas. The work has nothing disturbing for any monistic philosophy (we know that there are opposing examples of these); for such a philosophy, plural is the Evil. Against the work, therefore, the text could well take as its motto the words of the man possessed by demons (Mark 5: 9): 'My name is Legion: for we are many.' The plural of demoniacal texture which opposes text to work can bring with it fundamental changes in reading, and precisely in areas where monologism appears to be the Law: certain of the 'texts' of Holy Scripture traditionally recuperated by theological monism (historical or anagogical) will perhaps offer themselves to a diffraction of meanings (finally, that is to say, to a materialist reading), while the Marxist interpretation of works, so far resolutely monistic, will be able to materialize itself more by pluralizing itself (if, however, the Marxist 'institutions' allow it).
5. The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are postulated: a determination of the work by the world (by race, then by History), a consecution of works amongst themselves, and a conformity of the work to the author. The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work: literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author's declared intentions, while society asserts the legality of the relation of author to work (the 'droit d'auteur' or 'copyright', in fact of recent date since it was only really legalized at the time of the French Revolution). As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father. Here again, the metaphor of the Text separates from that of the work: the latter refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by 'development' (a word which is significantly ambiguous, at once biological and rhetorical); the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic (an image, moreover, close to current biological conceptions of the living being). Hence no vital 'respect' is due to the Text: it can be broken (which is just what the Middle Ages did with two nevertheless authoritative texts -- Holy Scripture and Aristotle); it can be read without the guarantee of its father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy. It is not that the Author may not 'come back' in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a 'guest'. If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription is ludic. He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of the work on to the life (and no longer the contrary); it is the work of Proust, of Genet which allows their lives to be read as a text. The word 'bio-graphy' re-acquires a strong, etymological sense, at the same time as the sincerity of the enunciation -- veritable 'cross" borne by literary morality -- becomes a false problem: the I which writes the text, it too, is never more than a paper-I.
6. The work is normally the object of a consumption; no demagogy is intended here in referring to the so-called consumer culture but it has to be recognized that today it is the 'quality' of the work (which supposes finally an appreciation of 'taste') and not the operation of" reading itself which can differentiate between books: structurally, there is no difference between 'cultured reading and casual reading in trains. The Text (if only by its frequent 'unreadability) decants the work (the work permitting) from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a single signifying practice. The distance separating reading from writing is historical. In the times of the greatest social division (before the setting up of democratic cultures), reading and writing were equally privileges of class. Rhetoric, the great literary code of those times, taught one to write (even if what was then normally produced were speeches, not texts). Significantly, the coming of democracy reversed the word of command: what the (secondary) School prides itself on is teaching to read (well) and no longer to write (consciousness of the deficiency is becoming fashionable again today: the teacher is called upon to teach pupils to express themselves', which is a little like replacing a form of repression by a misconception). In fact, reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the text. 'Playing' must be understood here in all its polysemy: the text itself plays (like a door, like a machine with 'play') and the reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one plays a game, looking for a practice which re-produces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive, inner mimesis (the Text is precisely that which resists such a reduction), also playing the Text in the musical sense of the term. The history of music (as a practice, not as an 'art') does indeed parallel that of the Text fairly closely: there was a period when practising amateurs were numerous (at least within the confines of a certain class) and 'playing' and 'listening' formed a scarcely differentiated activity; then two roles appeared in succession, first that of the performer, the interpreter to whom the bourgeois public (though still itself able to play a little -- the whole history of ) the piano) delegated its playing, then that of the (passive) amateur, who listens to music without being able to play (the gramophone record takes the place of the piano). We know that today post-serial music has radically altered the role of the 'interpreter', who is called on to be in some sort the co-author of the score, completing it rather than giving it 'expression'. The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration. Which is an important change, for who executes the work? (Mallarmé posed the question, wanting the audience to produce the book). Nowadays only the critic executes the work (accepting the play on words). The reduction of reading to a consumption is clearly responsible for the Boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern ('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going.
7. This leads us to pose (to propose) a final approach to the Text, that of pleasure. I do not know whether there has ever been a hedonistic aesthetics (eudaemonist philosophies are themselves rare). Certainly there exists a pleasure of the work (of certain works); I can delight in reading and re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, even -- why not? -- Alexandre Dumas. But this pleasure, no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them (that it is impossible today to write 'like that') and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works, in the very moment their remoteness establishes my modernity (is not to be modern to know clearly what cannot be started over again?) As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation. Order of the signifier, the Text participates in its own way in a social utopia; before History (supposing the latter does not opt for barbarism), the Text achieves, if not the transparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the term).
These few propositions, inevitably, do not constitute the articulations of a Theory of the Text and this is not simply the result of the failings of the person here presenting them (who in many respects has anyway done no more than pick up what is being developed round about him). It stems from the fact that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied by a metalinguistic exposition: the destruction of meta-language, or at least (since it may be necessary provisionally to resort to meta-language) its calling into doubt, is part of the theory itself: the discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
1971
It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work which owes at least its phenomenal existence to this same language. The change is clearly connected with the current development of (amongst other disciplines) linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis (the term 'connection' is used here in a deliberately neutral way: one does not decide a determination, be it multiple and dialectical). What is new and which affects the idea of the work comes not necessarily from the internal recasting of each of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in relation to an object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held up as a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down -- perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion -- in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. The mutation in which the idea of the work seems to be gripped must not, however, be over-estimated: it is more in the nature of an epistemological slide than of a real break. The break, as is frequently stressed, is seen to have taken place in the last century with the appearance of Marxism and Freudianism; since then there has been no further break, so that in a way it can be said that for the last hundred years we have been living in repetition. What History, our History, allows us today is merely to slide, to vary, to exceed, to repudiate. Just as Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the frames of reference be included in the object studied, so the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer (critic). Over against the traditional notion of the work, for long -- and still -- conceived of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the requirement of a new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That object is the Text. I know the word is fashionable (I am myself often led to use it) and therefore regarded by some with suspicion, but that is exactly why I should like to remind myself of the principal propositions at the intersection of which I see the Text as standing. The word 'proposition' is to be understood more in a grammatical than in a logical sense: the following are not argumentations but enunciations, 'touches', approaches that consent to remain metaphorical. Here then are these propositions; they concern method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure.
1. The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts. In particular, the tendency must be avoided to say that the work is classic, the text avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude honours list in the name of modernity and declaring certain literary productions 'in' and others 'out' by virtue of their chronological situation: there may be 'text' in a very ancient work, while many products of contemporary literature are in no way texts. The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (without at all reproducing term for term) Lacan's distinction between 'reality' and 'the real': the one is displayed, the other demonstrated; likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example on a library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works).
2. In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications. How do you classify a writer like Georges Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic? The answer is so difficult that the literary manuals generally prefer to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote texts, perhaps continuously one single text. If the Text poses problems of classification (which is furthermore one of its 'social functions), this is because it always involves a certain experience of limits (to take up an expression from Philippe Sollers). Thibaudet used already to talk -- but in a very restricted sense -- of limit-works (such as Chateaubriand's Vie de Rancé, which does indeed come through to us today as a 'text'); the Text is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc.). Nor is this a rhetorical idea, resorted to for some 'heroic' effect: the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa (is not general opinion -- constitutive of our democratic societies and powerfully aided by mass communications -- defined by its limits, the energy with which it excludes, its censorship?). Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical.
3. The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a signified. There are two modes of signification which can be attributed to this signified: either it is claimed to be evident and the work is then the object of a literal science, of philology, or else it is considered to be secret, ultimate, something to be sought out, and the work then falls under the scope of a hermeneutics, of an interpretation (Marxist, psychoanalytic, thematic, etc.); in short, the work itself functions as a general sign and it is normal that it should represent an institutional category of the civilization of the Sign. The Text, on the contrary, practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived of as 'the first stage of meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action. Similarly, the infinity of the signifier refers not to some idea of the ineffable (the unnameable signified) but to that of a playing; the generation of the perpetual signifier (after the fashion of a perpetual calendar) in the field of the text (better, of which the text is the field) is realized not according to an organic progress of maturation or a hermeneutic course of deepening investigation, but, rather, according to a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations. The logic regulating the Text is not comprehensive (define 'what the work means') but metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy (lacking it, man would die); the work in the best of cases -- is moderately symbolic (its symbolic runs out, comes to a halt); the Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text. Thus is the Text restored to language; like language, it is structured but off-centred, without closure (note, in reply to the contemptuous suspicion of the 'fashionable' sometimes directed at structuralism, that the epistemological privilege currently accorded to language stems precisely from the discovery there of a paradoxical idea of structure: a system with neither close nor centre).
4. The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it .has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end (someone slackened off from any imaginary); this passably empty subject strolls -- it is what happened to the author of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of the Text -- on the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below (oued is there to bear witness to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children's voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference. So the Text: it can be it only in its difference (which does not mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive (this rendering illusory any inductive-deductive science of texts -- no 'grammar' of the text) and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the 'sources', the 'influences' of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas. The work has nothing disturbing for any monistic philosophy (we know that there are opposing examples of these); for such a philosophy, plural is the Evil. Against the work, therefore, the text could well take as its motto the words of the man possessed by demons (Mark 5: 9): 'My name is Legion: for we are many.' The plural of demoniacal texture which opposes text to work can bring with it fundamental changes in reading, and precisely in areas where monologism appears to be the Law: certain of the 'texts' of Holy Scripture traditionally recuperated by theological monism (historical or anagogical) will perhaps offer themselves to a diffraction of meanings (finally, that is to say, to a materialist reading), while the Marxist interpretation of works, so far resolutely monistic, will be able to materialize itself more by pluralizing itself (if, however, the Marxist 'institutions' allow it).
5. The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are postulated: a determination of the work by the world (by race, then by History), a consecution of works amongst themselves, and a conformity of the work to the author. The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work: literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author's declared intentions, while society asserts the legality of the relation of author to work (the 'droit d'auteur' or 'copyright', in fact of recent date since it was only really legalized at the time of the French Revolution). As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father. Here again, the metaphor of the Text separates from that of the work: the latter refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by 'development' (a word which is significantly ambiguous, at once biological and rhetorical); the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic (an image, moreover, close to current biological conceptions of the living being). Hence no vital 'respect' is due to the Text: it can be broken (which is just what the Middle Ages did with two nevertheless authoritative texts -- Holy Scripture and Aristotle); it can be read without the guarantee of its father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy. It is not that the Author may not 'come back' in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a 'guest'. If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription is ludic. He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of the work on to the life (and no longer the contrary); it is the work of Proust, of Genet which allows their lives to be read as a text. The word 'bio-graphy' re-acquires a strong, etymological sense, at the same time as the sincerity of the enunciation -- veritable 'cross" borne by literary morality -- becomes a false problem: the I which writes the text, it too, is never more than a paper-I.
6. The work is normally the object of a consumption; no demagogy is intended here in referring to the so-called consumer culture but it has to be recognized that today it is the 'quality' of the work (which supposes finally an appreciation of 'taste') and not the operation of" reading itself which can differentiate between books: structurally, there is no difference between 'cultured reading and casual reading in trains. The Text (if only by its frequent 'unreadability) decants the work (the work permitting) from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a single signifying practice. The distance separating reading from writing is historical. In the times of the greatest social division (before the setting up of democratic cultures), reading and writing were equally privileges of class. Rhetoric, the great literary code of those times, taught one to write (even if what was then normally produced were speeches, not texts). Significantly, the coming of democracy reversed the word of command: what the (secondary) School prides itself on is teaching to read (well) and no longer to write (consciousness of the deficiency is becoming fashionable again today: the teacher is called upon to teach pupils to express themselves', which is a little like replacing a form of repression by a misconception). In fact, reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the text. 'Playing' must be understood here in all its polysemy: the text itself plays (like a door, like a machine with 'play') and the reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one plays a game, looking for a practice which re-produces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive, inner mimesis (the Text is precisely that which resists such a reduction), also playing the Text in the musical sense of the term. The history of music (as a practice, not as an 'art') does indeed parallel that of the Text fairly closely: there was a period when practising amateurs were numerous (at least within the confines of a certain class) and 'playing' and 'listening' formed a scarcely differentiated activity; then two roles appeared in succession, first that of the performer, the interpreter to whom the bourgeois public (though still itself able to play a little -- the whole history of ) the piano) delegated its playing, then that of the (passive) amateur, who listens to music without being able to play (the gramophone record takes the place of the piano). We know that today post-serial music has radically altered the role of the 'interpreter', who is called on to be in some sort the co-author of the score, completing it rather than giving it 'expression'. The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration. Which is an important change, for who executes the work? (Mallarmé posed the question, wanting the audience to produce the book). Nowadays only the critic executes the work (accepting the play on words). The reduction of reading to a consumption is clearly responsible for the Boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern ('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going.
7. This leads us to pose (to propose) a final approach to the Text, that of pleasure. I do not know whether there has ever been a hedonistic aesthetics (eudaemonist philosophies are themselves rare). Certainly there exists a pleasure of the work (of certain works); I can delight in reading and re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, even -- why not? -- Alexandre Dumas. But this pleasure, no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them (that it is impossible today to write 'like that') and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works, in the very moment their remoteness establishes my modernity (is not to be modern to know clearly what cannot be started over again?) As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation. Order of the signifier, the Text participates in its own way in a social utopia; before History (supposing the latter does not opt for barbarism), the Text achieves, if not the transparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the term).
These few propositions, inevitably, do not constitute the articulations of a Theory of the Text and this is not simply the result of the failings of the person here presenting them (who in many respects has anyway done no more than pick up what is being developed round about him). It stems from the fact that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied by a metalinguistic exposition: the destruction of meta-language, or at least (since it may be necessary provisionally to resort to meta-language) its calling into doubt, is part of the theory itself: the discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
1971
Translation Copyright 1977, Stephen Heath
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