Being Fascinated: Toward Blanchotian Film Theory

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio)

A review of Watt, Calum. Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship. Legenda, 2017.

In The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (2002), Mary Ann Doane not only maps the new technology’s historical context—masterfully analyzing cinema’s place in the constellation of such nineteenth-century discourses as thermodynamics, eugenics, statistic, and psychoanalysis—but also evokes, perhaps unwittingly, a dominant trope that has organized film theory since its beginning. This trope conveys what a psychoanalytically minded reader might call the “ambivalence” that has inflected the reception of cinema. On the one hand, the new technology was welcomed with enthusiasm for various reasons, among them its seeming ability to alleviate the cruelties of human finitude: the promise that, with the new re-presentational capacity, “death will have ceased to be absolute” (qtd. in Doane 62), that those whom we have lost will live on in lifelike simulacra. On the other hand, what Doane calls “this fascination with the technologically supported ability to inscribe time” (63) readily slipped into an anxiety about cinema’s potentially malevolent influence, often informed by the perceived kinship between film spectatorship and the histories of hypnosis and mesmerism. Commentators who made this connection—who saw in cinema dangers that would be allegorized in Robert Weise’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse—introduced a vocabulary to film theory that has remained with us ever since. Doane continues this tradition by tracking the ways in which the unease of early commentators was elicited by “the fascination” of cinema (108), the “pleasure and fascination” of film viewing (107). This infectiously recurrent word, I propose, is important: since the late nineteenth century, observers of the new art have again and again returned to contemplate, in Ackbar Abbas’s phrase, “the fascination of the cinematic” (363).

As Doane’s analysis suggests, the history of film theory is a history of fascination. Following early commentators’ routine references to what Hugo Münsterberg in 1916 called cinema’s “strange fascination” (221), critics of the culture industry in postwar Europe would frequently discern in popular culture the mechanism of ideological enthrallment, a bondage that the word “fascination,” with its long and resonant history in Western discourses, readily suggested. Theodor Adorno spoke of the “programmatic fascination” with which popular culture’s distractions snared individuals into a “bewitched reality” (“On the Fetish-Character” 276; Aesthetic Theory 227). While the Birmingham School would rethink such dynamics by reconsidering cultural contestations beyond the rigorous schemes of classical Marxism, in the film theory of the late twentieth century, particularly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, Raymond Bellour, Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey would go on to analyze spectatorial identification with the cinematic image in terms of the audience’s “imaginary” thrall—frequently, again, “fascination”—with screen images. The tradition of dissecting “the fascination of film” (Mulvey 14) has been more recently continued by Steven Shaviro, Oliver Harris, and Pansy Duncan; in ways that remain to be analyzed, Leo Bersani’s commentary on cinema, spread across his extensive oeuvre, similarly unfolds as a theory of fascination.

In Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship, Calum Watt positions Maurice Blanchot as an important and overlooked thinker in this genealogy. As Watt notes, Blanchot does not immediately come to mind as a theorist of film. His philosophical interests focus almost exclusively on literary texts; only a few oblique references in his work evince any engagement with cinema. Nevertheless, a number of filmmakers—most notably Jean-Luc Godard, to whom the book’s first chapter is devoted—have deployed Blanchot as a point of reference. The task of Blanchot and the Moving Image is to make explicit the relevance of his work to the field of cinema studies. With a thorough knowledge of Blanchot’s work and an exquisite sensitivity to the details of his stylistics, Watt does this by elaborating on the concept of “fascination,” the nodal point at which film theory and Blanchot’s philosophy meet.

Even though it is a central and recurring term in his work, “fascination” has received very little sustained attention from Blanchot’s commentators. Among scholars who have picked up the concept to any extent, Victoria Burke suggests that fascination allows Blanchot to rethink Hegelian “desire” beyond the “work” that dialectics demands: with “fascination,” we move from Hegel’s “labor of the negative” to Blanchot’s “worklessness,” the kind of paralytic receptiveness that the word suggests. Gerald Bruns, too, notes that the term in Blanchot evokes “the concept of passivity that is outside the dialectical alternatives of action and passion—a passivity that is not the mere negation of action” (Bruns 48, see also 59-61, 77). The concept, that is, offers Blanchot a potential escape from the stranglehold that dialectics has had on philosophy. Another term for this radical passivity is “essential solitude,” an idea that Blanchot, in the essay by that name, links persistently to fascination (“The Essential Solitude,” see esp. 25, 30-33). More recently, Brigitte Weingart has situated Blanchot’s evocations of “fascination” in the long history of affect theorists from Plutarch to René Descartes to Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock (Weingart 95-97), and Kevin Hart, reading Blanchotian thought in the context of twentieth-century reconfigurations of theology and mysticism, has suggested that “the sacred” elicits “fascination”: what Blanchot variously calls “il y a” or “the neuter” or “the Outside” or “the other night” “fascinates and frightens” (Hart 57, see also 152-53, 208, and passim).

To my knowledge, only Shaviro and Harris have explored the overlap of film theory and Blanchotian fascination, a connection that Watt fleshes out. In this way, Blanchot and the Moving Image should also be read as a contribution to the emergent field of—as we might call it—”Fascination Studies.” As other scholars have indicated, the concept suggests the uncanny underside of modern life; it evokes the enchantments that Enlightenment modernity, for better or worse, is supposed to have defused. The term is derived from the Latin fascināre, whose semantic range moves from “irresistibly attractive influence” and “enchantment” to the obsolete meanings of “witchcraft” and “sorcery” (OED). While modernity is often figured in terms of the eradication of such superstitions as were articulated in ancient or medieval discourses about “fascinating” influences—in terms, that is, of the world’s “disenchantment”—we are by now used to observing the persistence with which various “irrationalities” have continued to inhabit the modern mind.¹

Apart from “fascination,” the history of cinema and its theorization share with Blanchotian philosophy the central concept of “the image”—a point whose obviousness Blanchot and the Moving Image may make one embarrassed to have missed. “Films,” Watt writes, “are made of what are commonly called ‘images,’ and are sometimes said to inspire ‘fascination'” (9-10). Blanchot imbues both terms with idiosyncratic, complicated significance. For him, “the image” suggests a realm in which objects are at once constituted and undone. Taking his cues particularly from Blanchot’s essay “The Two Versions of the Imaginary,” Watt writes that the image not only strips an object of its usability, but also undoes the self-certainty of the seeing subject. In the image, the world is composed and forsaken. Thus, “the image seems to involve a notion of abandonment“: to see the image we must both relinquish the thing seen and surrender ourselves as seeing (Watt 25). “Abandonment” belongs to a series of terms with which Blanchot develops the idea of an ethical passivity, central to his philosophy. The most frequently observed of such terms is that of idleness or worklessness (désœuvrement). With this concept, Blanchot suggests the undoing of what he, echoing Stéphane Mallarmé, calls the Book. The occasioning of literature in “books” or in a “work” constitutes a betrayal of literary specificity, while the literary, as something of an absorptive force, dissipates—one might say, unbinds—the book. Taking an example from Beckett, Blanchot writes that The Unnamable effects “a pure approach of the impulse from which all books come, of that original point where the work [l’œuvre] is lost, which always ruins the work, which restores the endless pointlessness [désœuvrement] in it, but with which it must also maintain a relationship that is always beginning again, under the risk of being nothing” (“‘Where now? Who now?'” 213, “‘Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?'” 290-91). In the texts that Watt analyzes, “the image” names precisely this unraveling; it designates “the intimate relation of the work of art with the fundament of being that is close to nothingness” (26). The wager of Blanchot and the Moving Image is that, as a technology of “the image,” cinema is permeated with the forces that Blanchot addresses in literature.

“The image” precipitates, or is met with, fascination. Like the film theory that Doane continues, Blanchot invests the term itself with a highly ambivalent resonance. As much as there are “two versions of the imaginary,” there are two forms of fascination. It seems that, for Blanchot, both the image and the Book wield the force of fascination, but in crucially different (yet not unrelated) ways. “Blanchot’s concept of the image,” Watt writes, “is … marked by a kind of muted horror” (66)—the posture that we readily recognize as the hypnotic, mortal paralysis that “fascination” has frequently indicated. But if the image paralyzes one with the unbearable nothingness beyond language and individuation, the Book similarly captures the subject in its promise of a totality that would result from the kind of Work that Hegelian dialectics glorifies. As much as Mallarmé never escaped the lure of le Livre, what Blanchot calls the Book fascinates by promising to salvage the subject into coherence, the finished work disconnected from the forces of désœuvrement.

Even as he dreams of a Work of encyclopediac coverage, Mallarmé nevertheless opts for the distractive pleasures of minor projects. Blanchot similarly suggests that any oeuvre will in turn force the artist and audience into a realm of a stranger fascination. His alternative to the seriousness of the Book is more ominous than the funny trifles Mallarmé wrote in order to escape from the Work (his fashion pieces, his Easter egg inscriptions, doggerel on outhouse walls): when the Book turns into the image, we feel “the regard of nothingness on us” (Watt 63). Watt proposes the doubleness of Blanchotian fascination by way of Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Benommenheit: “although he does not phrase it as such, there is for Blanchot something akin to two versions of fascination: on the one hand, the inauthentic absorption in idle talk … that Heidegger [or, rather, Being and Time’s first English translation] designates as fascination; and, on the other hand, the anxious experience of the abandonment of the world in the image which is for Blanchot, unlike Heidegger, still not something that can be called ‘authentic'” (30). An analogous doubleness is arguably at stake in film theory. As Doane notes, if early film promised to transcend mortality, it also, and at the same time, lured spectators with a “fascination with death,” evident in the eager consumption of early documentary footage of executions of animals and humans (Doane 164).

Watt proposes that, given the onto-ethical valence of “the image,” cinema should be understood as a site of the kind of intensity that Blanchot assigns to literature; by highlighting the concept of “the image,” Blanchot allows us to develop an account of the cinematic art as a site where being (dis)appears. Taking up this task, Watt turns to three filmmakers as representatives of the “cinema of fascination” (111): Godard, Béla Tarr, and Gaspar Noé. In each chapter, the discussion of Blanchot and the filmmaker is inflected by an engagement with another major theorist. Chapter one tracks Blanchot’s influence not only on Godard’s films—particularly Histoire(s) du cinema—but also on Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume study of cinema, in whose mapping of the emergence of “time-image” in postwar European cinema both Blanchot and Godard figure centrally. The discussion of Tarr in chapter two in turn engages the work of Jacques Rancière, who has written extensively on the Hungarian filmmaker. As is appropriate for the lingering visuals of Tarr’s “slow cinema,” the chapter addresses a recurrent concern in twentieth-century film theory: the role of montage, and particularly the long take. The central thinker with whom Watt approaches Irréversible, Noé’s controversial exemplar of New French Extremism, is Emmanuel Lévinas, Blanchot’s frequent interlocutor. The juxtaposition of Noé and Lévinas is as productive as it is provocative: the suggestion is that Noé’s film is engaged in thinking the kind of demanding ethicality that Lévinas is known for.

Moving from Godardian avant-garde to Tarr’s “slow” images to the gut-punching extremism of Noé’s films, Watt engages fully with scholarship on each filmmaker. Professing a familiarity with French-language scholarship, Watt gnaws at the monolingual hegemony of the Anglo-American academic market. One of his achievements is to bring to the English-speaking audience’s attention the work of Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, who, more than any other scholar, has explored the connections between Blanchot and film theory. At the same time, he reminds us of the importance of Raymond Bellour’s extensive body of work, only some of which has been translated into English.

In its grounding gesture of cross-fertilization, Blanchot and the Moving Image enables the expansion of both Blanchot scholarship and film theory. The book gives us a far from complete mapping of the emergent field; for example, the centrality of the concept of “fascination” to the larger history of film theory is only partially explored. In outlining the impact of Blanchot’s philosophy, the author’s references range generously from Lévinas to Derrida to Kant to Deleuze to Rancière to Agamben to unpublished dissertations, but these also have the effect of dissipating the focus on Blanchot as a thinker of cinema. Among the tasks for the book project’s final revisions might have been an effort to draw the argument into a punchier synthesis, perhaps cutting out some of the more tangential discussions and utilizing them as starting points for stand-alone articles.

The reader is indeed left waiting for such future essays, for Blanchot and the Moving Image seems like an opening salvo in a larger intellectual project, one that will track the ways in which—as one of the study’s most exciting claims has it—”cinema’s contribution to thought is fascination” (96). From the perspective that Watt gives us—the viewpoint of a retrospective clarity—we can discern that other contemporary thinkers have already begun some of this work. That is, if film actualizes the absorbed passivity that Blanchot and film theory call “fascination,” Watt is not alone in making a claim for the cinema spectator’s dangerous yet ethical enjoyment. Already in the early 1980s, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, in their analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, noted “film’s potential for a vertiginous passivity (its eagerness merely to register)” (31), calling this vertigo, precisely, a “fascination.” Their arguments concerning the sadomasochistic dynamics of Sade and Pasolini evoke the kind of undoing, not unlike Blanchotian worklessness, that Bersani has elsewhere theorized as the subject’s shattering in ébranlement. Moreover, the devastation of this undoing is inextricable from a centrifugal expansion. As Blanchot writes, désœuvrement is at once the object’s “impoverishment” and “enrichment” (“The Two Versions of the Imaginary” 256). In becoming less, the object—but also the subject—becomes more; it is potentialized as the image. We should hear in Watt’s claim that cinematic fascination produces “a shorn and passive subject” (150) echoes of Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics, increasingly, in his later work, developed in the context of film analysis. Such overlaps testify to the productivity of the problematic that Watt has initiated in his study.

Footnotes

1. Recent contributions to the study of fascination include Baumbach; Degen; Hahnemann and Weyand; Seeber; Thys; and Weingart. See also encyclopedic articles on fascination by Beth; Desprats-Péquignot; Lotter; and Türcke.

Works Cited

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• Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. 1970. Edited and translated by Robert HullotKentor, U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• —. “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” 1938. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, Continuum, 1982, pp. 270-99.
• Baumbach, Sibylle. Literature and Fascination. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. “Merde Alors.” October, vol. 13, Summer 1980, pp. 22-35. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/3397699.
• Beth, Karl. “Faszination.” Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, edited by Eduard Hoffman-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, vol. 2, de Guyter, 1987, pp. 1263-65.
• Blanchot, Maurice. “The Essential Solitude.” The Space of Literature, edited by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1992, pp. 19-34.
• —. “‘Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?'” Le Livre à venir, Gallimard, 1959, pp. 286-95.
• —. The Space of Literature. 1955. Translated by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1982.
• —. “The Two Versions of the Imaginary.” The Space of Literature, edited by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1992, pp. 254-63.
• —. “‘Where now? Who now?'” The Book to Come. 1959. Translated by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford UP, 2003, pp. 210-17.
• Bruns, Gerald L. Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy. 1997. Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.
• Burke, Victoria I. “From Desire to Fascination: Hegel and Blanchot on Negativity.” MLN, vol. 114, no. 4, Sept. 1999, pp. 848-56. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3251365.
• Degen, Andreas. Ästhetische Faszination: Die Geschichte einer Denkfigur vor ihrem Begriff. Walter de Gruyter, 2017.
• Desprats-Péquignot, Catherine. “Fascination.” International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. 2002. Edited by Alain de Mijolla, and translated by Philip Beitchman, et al., vol. 1, Thomson Gale, 2005, pp. 555-56.
• Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Harvard UP, 2002.
• Duncan, Pansy. “Fascination: Between the Rough and the Glossy.” The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film: Affect Theory’s Other, Routledge, 2015, pp. 77-107.
• Hahnemann, Andy, and Björn Weyand, editors. Faszination: Historische Konjunkturen und heuristische Tragweite eines Begriffs. Peter Lang, 2009.
• Harris, Oliver. “Film Noir Fascination: Outside History, but Historically So.” Cinema Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, 2003, pp. 3-24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1225928.
• Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. U of Chicago P, 2004.
• Lotter, Konrad. “Faszination.” Lexikon der Ästhetik, edited by Wolfhart Henckmann and Konrad Lotter, C. H. Beck, 1992, pp. 60-61.
• Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 1975 (1973). Visual and Other Pleasures, Macmillan, 1989, pp.14-26.
• Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. 1916. Arno Press, 1970.
• Seeber, Hans Ulrich. Literarische Faszination in England um 1900. Heidelberg: Universitätverlag, Winter, 2012.
• Shaviro, Steven. “Film Theory and Visual Fascination.” The Cinematic Body, U of Minnesota P, 1993, pp. 1-65.
• Thys, Michel. Fascinatie: Een fenomenologisch-psychoanalytische verkenning van het onmenselijke. Amsterdam: Boom, 2006.
• Türcke, Christoph. “Faszination.” Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, edited by Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Frigga Haug, Peter Jehle, and Wolfgang Küttler, vol. 4, Berlin Institute of Critical Theory, 1999, pp. 186-94.
• Weingart, Brigitte. “Contact at a Distance: The Topology of Fascination.” Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought, edited by Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber, De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 72-100.