Accompanying Images:Leo Bersani and Cinematic Fascination

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio)

Abstract

During the half century of his writing, Leo Bersani has worked toward an onto-ethics/aesthetics of fascination in which cinema plays an important part. With the help of Proust, Sade, Caravaggio, Pasolini, and others, he outlines two modes of fascination: the spectator’s active exploration and evisceration of an enigmatic world, and his passive receptiveness to the world’s nonsignifying forms. Bersani proposes that these modes of cinematic fascination exemplify regimes of modern subjectivation, the ways in which we are taught to become who we are in our encounters with the world.

Our concern with history … is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (72)

… there is almost always something else going on.eLeo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “Merde Alors” (29)

In a recent recontextualization of the French philosopher’s work, Calum Watt suggests that we read Maurice Blanchot as a thinker of cinema. While Blanchot’s oeuvre includes only a few oblique references to films, Watt argues that his philosophy overlaps with film theory at the site of two concepts: the image and fascination. With Blanchot, these recurrent film-theoretical concepts undergo a productive estrangement. We can approach this estrangement by observing what Blanchot, in “The Two Versions of the Imaginary,” a central source for Watt in his effort to outline Blanchotian film theory, suggests is the undoing of Platonism in his concept of the image.¹ In the Platonic tradition, the image comes after eidos, a copy of an anterior ideality; the second-order realm of images gives us a world of shadows, a distorted and depleted version of the real. While for Blanchot, too, the image coincides with something like the thing’s impoverishment, the implications of this relation differ from those organizing the Platonist schema. “The image, present behind each thing,” he writes, reversing the Platonic assumption that the real resides “behind” the image, “is like the dissolution of the thing and its subsistence in its dissolution” (“Two” 255). A “thing” unravels into its image, an unspooling in which a figure nevertheless “subsists.” The image endows the object with “a luminous formal aura,” but this luminosity is, as it were, blinding, for it pushes the thing toward formlessness, toward a “fundamental materiality” or “substance” bereft of any form (255). If the image stands “behind each thing,” there is in it a force that causes the thing’s undoing: what Blanchot calls, evoking Hamlet, “that heavy sleep of death in which dreams threaten” (255). In this sense, the corpse is a privileged exemplar of the image: “Something is there before us which is not really the living person, nor is it any reality at all. It is neither the same as the person who was alive, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else” (256). The corpse is the person’s impoverishment into image, his or her withdrawal toward pure materiality, the extensive network of being; it is “the absolute calm of something that has found its place” (256). But this doesn’t mean that the corpse resembles anything. The corpse is “absolutely himself,” “he resembles himself. The cadaver is its own image. … But what is it like? Nothing” (258). In this withdrawal into impersonality or anonymity, it becomes incomparable; the corpse, as image, coincides with the appearance of what Blanchot sometimes calls Quelqu’un, Someone.

This capacity to evoke an anonymous singularity endows the image, whether as the “cadaverous resemblance” (259) or the work of art, with the force of fascination. Fascination, as Blanchot writes elsewhere, “is passion for the image [la passion de l’image],” in which the process of “seeing” undergoes a change: “Seeing presupposes distance, decisiveness which separates, the power to stay out of contact and in contact avoid confusion. … But what happens when what you see, although at a distance, seems to touch you with a gripping contact, when the manner of seeing is a kind of touch, when seeing is contact at a distance?” (“Essential” 32; “Solitude” 25). With the phrase “contact at a distance,” Blanchot evokes philosophy’s recurrent debate concerning “action at a distance,” the idea of influences that operate without apparent contact. This problematic is addressed by ancient and medieval commentators as fascination, a tradition that is extended in Francis Bacon’s philosophy and then in the popular arts to which Franz Anton Mesmer lends his name.² Blanchot continues: “What happens [in fascination] is not an active contact, not the initiative and action which there still is in real touching. Rather, the gaze gets taken in [le regard est entraîné], absorbed by an immobile movement and a depthless deep” (“Essential” 32; “Solitude” 25). Fascinated subjects are idle, workless; theirs is the passivity that Blanchot calls désœuvrement.

When Blanchot writes that “fascination is passion for the image,” he summarizes what many commentators have had to say about cinema. Since the earliest admonitions concerning the new technology’s dangerously hypnotic influence, the history of film theorizing has been a history of fascination. Apart from contributing to this tradition, Blanchot anticipates—in some cases, prompts—the emergent interest in the history of fascination in the work of such scholars as Sibylle Baumbach, Andreas Degen, Hans Ulrich Seeber, Michel Thys, and Brigitte Weingart. In what follows, I propose that Leo Bersani continues the practice of depicting film as one of modernity’s fascinating technologies; he does this, moreover, in ways that are in deep sympathy with Blanchot’s thought. Like Blanchot’s, his oeuvre is a fecund archive for scholars interested in the persistent discourse of fascination.

While Watt points out the relevance of Blanchot’s work to theorizing film, Bersani is more obviously a thinker of cinema.³ Since his first sustained discussion of the artform, an analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) in “Merde Alors” (1980; cowritten with Ulysse Dutoit), he has turned to film with increasing frequency to elaborate his onto-ethics and aesthetics.⁴ To outline this elaboration, I offer a comparative gloss of “Merde Alors” and the recent essay “Staring,” a reading of Bruno Dumont’s Humanité (1999). The two pieces, written some forty years apart, open and close Bersani’s most recent book, Receptive Bodies (2018). Bookending the study, they allow us to observe the movement of Bersani’s film-theoretical thought, the way he returns, and returns again, to a set of questions across the decades. One of the questions that persistently appears there concerns fascination. Cinematic fascination exemplifies an enthrallment that, despite all avowals about modernity’s disenchantment, infects how we encounter the world.

The term is used in “Merde Alors” and “Staring” but in seemingly contradictory senses. As Bersani writes in the introduction to Receptive Bodies, cinema prompts an investigative attitude from the spectator: the screen spectacle provokes “looking, probing, and detecting” (xi). Cinema evokes our will to know: we are invited to plunge the subjective depths of our others so that we can discover what resides in us, the strangeness of our own pleasures. Yet this mode of interrogative spectatorship carries within it a potentiality for another way of relating to the image, one that Bersani, in his commentary on Humanité, calls “staring.” The protagonist of Dumont’s film suggests a connectivity beyond modernity’s emphasis on interrogating the other’s enjoyment. In this way, cinema can model, perhaps precipitate, “modes of intimacy no longer centered on sex and on an obsessive, invasive curiosity about the other’s personality, and, more pointedly, about the secrets of the other’s desires” (Receptive 25). Yet if it gives us another form of capture apart from the “paranoid fascination” with which we approach the other in modernity, the new mode of relatedness—our “staring”—remains a “fascination.”

This essay makes an argument for Bersani as a theorist of cinematic fascination. Like Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema, Bersani’s writings on film elaborate the concerns evident in his other, non-film-theoretical texts. To make the connection, I propose that “the Proustian subject” is an important precursor to the cinematic subject in Bersani. If Marcel, in his “anxiously strained attention to the world,” becomes a passive recipient of the world’s otherness, this “passivity both exacerbates the distinction between subject and object and positions the subject for a more or less secretly wished-for relation of mastery to the object. The subject’s illusion of contributing nothing to the encounter [between him and the world] promotes the further illusion of his being able to ‘know’ the world, to penetrate and appropriate otherness” (Bersani and Dutoit, “Critical” 124). In his fascinated capture by an alien world that he strains to appropriate through knowledge, Marcel is the modern subject par excellence, the Cartesian being who, as Charles Taylor writes, “gains control through disengagement” (160). But the question of passivity or disengagement is more complicated than the above quotation from Bersani and Dutoit would suggest. To outline the concept’s intrication in Bersani’s thinking, I make occasional recourse to the clinical work of Michel Thys. If Marcel’s fascinated passivity exemplifies the dualisms whose hegemony in modernity Bersani traces to Cartesian philosophy, Thys tells us that fascination is in fact the frightening experience of the self’s disappearance in—merging with—the other. As he writes, fascination constitutes “a paralysing state of loss of self, where the subject is radically captured by an object from which it is hardly separate”; it “can … be understood as a kind of congealing confusion between self and the object” (Thys, “On Fascination” 633, 634). Read jointly, Bersani and Dutoit’s argument about Marcel and Thys’s clinical observations suggest that fascination names the subject’s cleaving, that is, at once an adhesion to and a separation from the other; it indicates the radicalization and the undoing of the subject/object dichotomy. Bersani observes this contradiction, albeit implicitly, nowhere more clearly than in his commentary on cinema in “Merde Alors” and “Staring.”

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Two apparently contradictory assumptions, then, organize Bersani’s film theorizing in “Merde Alors” and “Staring.” In the latter piece, Bersani suggests that cinema seduces the spectator into Cartesian modernity’s hegemonic mode of relationality, one premised, first, on the division between the subject and the object and, second, on knowledge as that which bridges the gap between the cogito and the world. The medium of film assumes a world in which the knower and the known—in Cartesian language, res cogitans and res extensa—are willed into being by a constitutive gap. Bersani writes in the concluding chapter of Receptive Bodies: “Film … constitutively privileges sight and sound as conducive to knowledge” insofar as the medium relies on “a frequently intricate play between showing and hiding, exposure and concealment” (112). Cinema invites the spectator onto a path of investigative desire, one where they seek the knowledge apparently secreted by the images on the screen. This entails a doubled gesture: the world enthralls the subject by at once offering and withholding its purported secrets.

Bersani’s description of cinematic subjectivation—the spectator’s seduction into an interrogative mindset by a rhythmic “showing and hiding, exposure and concealment”—strikes a familiar theme in his oeuvre. In his earlier work, he repeatedly described the Proustian subject in an analogous way. A representative of the modern subject in his determination to penetrate the secrets of the world, Marcel is solicited by various love objects, which seem to tantalize him with a knowledge he yearns to possess: they seductively offer themselves as carriers of his being, yet also turn away from him, refusing to disclose their mysteries. Such objects, as Proust’s narrator observes, “appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover” (Remembrance 1.182). “Marcel is tempted to see things and people as puzzles to be solved,” Bersani writes in A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976). “He stares at [worldly objects] in order to force them to reveal a truth they seem to be both proposing and concealing” (87). Suggesting a secret, and then refusing access to it, the objects capture the subject, who now assumes that what is being withheld from him is nothing less than the truth of his being: “In Proust, it is precisely at the moment when the loved one turns away from her lover—becomes most mysterious, most inaccessible—that she (or he) is rediscovered within the lover—as if that essential secret being pursued by the lover were the lover’s own secret, his own otherness” (Bersani, “Death” 864).

Marcel is thus called onto his search by an enigmatic world: “The address excites him, and he strains to penetrate the secret being simultaneously offered and withheld” (Caravaggio’s 66). In this description, which comes from Bersani and Dutoit’s study of Caravaggio, at stake is, again, the doubled gesture of suggesting and withdrawing, offering and withholding. This twofold address is similarly evident in the seductiveness of Caravaggio’s models. Analyzing paintings such as Bacchino Malato and The Fruit Vendor, Bersani and Dutoit note that the models at once offer their bodies to and turn away from the viewer: “the soliciting move toward the viewer, and the self-concealing move away from the viewer” constitute a “double movement” that should be “qualif[ied] as erotic. … It is … the movement away that fascinates, indeed that eroticizes the body’s apparent (and deceptive) availability” (Caravaggio’s 3). As Bersani puts it elsewhere, “the seductive young boys … freeze the viewer in an imaginary relation of erotic, paranoid fascination, in the Lacanian sense”; Caravaggio’s “enigmatic boy[s]” produce, or solicit into existence, “the fascinated viewer” (“Secrets” 59). Captured by the objects’ fascination (a relational mode that, as Bersani implies, one finds theorized in Lacanian psychoanalysis, too), the subject/viewer wants to solve—to (dis)solve or digest, we might say, heeding Proust’s tropes of appetition—the other who embodies the enigma. In this way, Caravaggio’s paintings position the viewer in what will be Marcel’s “most characteristic relation to the external world, … a devouring one; [Proust’s] metaphors generally function as sublimated incorporations. They ‘solve’ the mystery of otherness by digesting it” (Caravaggio’s 68). The teasing performance of an enigmatic world solicits the subject into being, not only flaunting the world’s otherness but also implanting a mysterious interiority in him. This interiority is called “the erotic” or “sexuality,” a mode of being-in-the-world that entails, as its desiring aim, the worldly objects’ liquidation.

Echoing phrases he used to characterize Proust and Caravaggio, Bersani proposes in “Staring” that cinema constitutes—is constituted as—a vehicle for the dynamic of desire that he has identified in Proust’s narrator and the viewer are captured by Caravaggio’s sexy models. The Proustian subject is endowed with the two major characteristics that Bersani frequently attaches to Cartesian modernity: the subject’s separation from the world and the subject’s mode of negotiating this separation by approaching the other via knowledge. Scholars have frequently characterized fascination as an affective reaction to incomprehension: one is arrested by a teasing enigma, just out of reach. Fascination, as Ackbar Abbas writes, constitutes “any experience that captures our attention without at the same time submitting entirely to our understanding” (348); “ignorance,” Roland Barthes says, “is the very nature of fascination” (Roland 3). In Blanchot, too, a fascinated relation is figured as “essentially opposed to comprehension” (Watt 28).⁵ The fundamental separation of the self from the other elicits the kind of epistemic appetite that organizes Marcel’s relation to objects: he is paralyzed in his hunger for—his hunger to know—the other.

In this, the modern subject is constituted as a fascinated being. The importance of this mode of encountering the world is indicated by its inscription in some of the most familiar documents of European modernity. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), the otherness that is Africa calls Marlow with the force of a fascinating enigma: “Watching a coast as it slips by the ships is like thinking about an enigma,” the narrator muses. “There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering—Come and find out” (16). The continent fascinates because it flaunts, and then conceals, mysteries that, as it turns out, must be about the inquisitive spectator himself. Represented by the river that stretches out like a serpent, this world is “irresistibly fascinating” in that it “whisper[s] to [us] things about [ourselves] which [we do] not know” (57).⁶ In Receptive Bodies, Bersani suggests that the cinematic spectator, like the Proustian (and, we add, the Conradian) subject, is an epistemophilic being, caught by an obsession to make the world’s enigmas transparent. The cinematic medium invites an investigative zeal from the spectator: in Bersani’s reading, this constitutes what Laura Mulvey calls “the fascination of film” (“Visual” 14)—or “the fascination of cinema” (Fetishism 56)—and Abbas “the fascination of the cinematic” (363). Soliciting this mode of spectatorial attention and pleasure, cinema orients the spectator to the world in a typically modern attitude: by rendering what is out there at once enigmatic and knowable.

However, if Bersani sees in cinematic spectatorship the construction of the fascination typical to the modern episteme’s imperialist volonté de savoir, another potentiality subsists in the cinematic address. Writing with Dutoit, he briefly alludes to this possibility in “Merde Alors,” the opening chapter of Receptive Bodies. In the essay, Bersani and Dutoit speak of “film’s potential for a vertiginous passivity (its eagerness merely to register)” (“Merde” 31; Receptive 13). If cinema calls forth an epistemophilic ardor in the spectator, it also has the capacity to reduce the spectator to a passive recipient of the image. This immobility is different from—yet, again, not unrelated to—the ravenous passivity that Bersani and Dutoit assign to Marcel (“Critical” 124). While the Proustian narrator’s passivity both separates him from the world and orients him to its otherness through knowledge, the vertigo promoted by cinema can neutralize the subject’s epistemological ambition. The spectator can receive the visible without the sense-making impulse that drives Marcel’s apprehension of the world’s signs. Rather than speculation about the psychological motivation of filmic characters, such receiving is, as Bersani and Dutoit write elsewhere, “our only legitimate activity [as spectators]: the activity of looking and of registering what we see. To explore [characters’] psychology is to play the game of the enigmatic signifier—that is, to be complicit with the anti-cinematic visuality it embodies” (Forms of Being 51). The psychoanalysis that conceptualizes anthropobecoming as a process in which the subject is called into existence by an other’s enigmatic address is an exemplar of modernity’s epistemodisciplinary schematizations. In this role, psychoanalysis betrays the potential that cinema at best evokes. Rather than “knowing” the world, the cinematic subject, in contrast to the psychoanalytic one, seeks “merely to register” what is made available, what there is to see, of the world. In this, cinema solicits “a promiscuous mobility” unconstrained by efforts to make sense of—to know and understand—the world’s spectacles (“Merde” 31; Receptive 14).

Bersani’s two contrasting statements, about the cinematic will to knowledge and about the spectator’s “vertiginous” passivity, seem to have been inserted into the wrong essays. I say this because if “Merde Alors” is about anything, it is about the sadistic zeal to know—and, in the process, to eviscerate—the other, a procedure that, according to Bersani and Dutoit, Pasolini’s film investigates by transposing Sade’s narrative to fascist Italy; and because Bersani reads Humanité, on the other hand, as a case study in the mode of passive, contemplative, non-curious “staring” that cinema can offer the spectator as an alternative to modern culture’s volonté de savoir. Yet the apparent miscontextualization indicates the co-implication of the two modes of looking; the forms of spectatorship subsist as each other’s potentialities. That both orientations are, as Bersani implies in the two essays, forms of fascination suggests their intimate, dangerous proximity.

Bersani and Dutoit argue that Salò is an experiment with the subjective mode of encountering otherness whose purified form one finds outlined in Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. Here, the other appears as the source of jouissance insofar as the world’s suffering recalls the subject’s constitutive ébranlement. According to Bersani and Dutoit, the excitement of Sade’s executioners at the sight of their victims anticipates Freud’s argument according to which the pain inflicted on the victim can be “enjoyed masochistically by the [sadist] through his identification of himself with the suffering object” (Freud 126, qtd. in “Merde” 24; Receptive 3-4). What makes this identification peculiarly seductive is that such moments recall the human subject’s early experiences of helplessness, the Hilflosigkeit engendered by the human organism’s catastrophically premature individuation. Following Freud, Jean Laplanche speculates that the infant survives his early life by turning the world’s deadly assault—deadly because the speechless being lacks all capacity to bind the overwhelming stimuli—into masochistic ecstasy, an experience that, as Freud seems to infer from his clinical observations, is constitutive of consciousness. Freud begins to suspect that, rather than outlining a minor variant of sexual life, in theorizing masochism he is in fact sketching an account of hominization. On this account, sexuality—the psychoanalytic name for the human condition—becomes “a tautology for masochism” (“Merde” 25; Receptive 5), an idea whose importance for Bersani is indicated by the frequent repetition of the phrase in his subsequent texts.⁷

In some of his best-known texts—most notably, in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987)—Bersani proposes that this “shattering” can counteract or neutralize the paranoid imperative that he sees driving Marcel, the modern epistemophilic subject par excellence. It can, as he writes, be cultivated into “our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence” (Is 30) insofar as its ecstasy implicates us in—scatters us into—the world that we otherwise try to appropriate and master. In a 1997 interview, Bersani claims that by theorizing ébranlement, he aims “to move to a different relation to otherness, not one based in paranoid fascination but one that might use the masochistic element in the confrontation productively” (Is 177). Yet a crucial problem—one that sounds in easily missed minor chords in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” but occupies center stage in “Merde Alors”—is illustrated by Sade’s libertines and Pasolini’s fascists. They seek shattering by compulsively staging the world’s suffering. If our constitutive enjoyment—”sexuality as a tautology for masochism”—is vicariously accessed through identification with an other’s pain, its repetition is dependent on the continued witnessing of such torture. Hence, the subject of “derived sadism” precipitates scenes through which he can relive his originary trembling. “If erotic stimulation depends on the perceived or fantasized commotion of others,” Bersani and Dutoit write, “it becomes reasonable to put others into a state of maximal commotion” (“Merde” 24; Receptive 3). It is particularly the narrativization of historical violence—the compelling stories of past atrocities—that facilitates this form of “mimetic sexuality.” We often hear that, in order to avoid repeating the past, we must keep recalling history’s outrages, a remembering that takes place mostly in the stories we tell of our devastating errors. “A major trouble with this,” Bersani and Dutoit propose, “is that the immobilization of a violent event invites a pleasurable identification with its enactment. … Centrality, the privileged foreground, and the suspenseful expectation of climaxes contributes to a fascination with violent events on the part of readers and spectators” (“Merde” 28; Receptive 10). In this way, the subject of ébranlement is not clearly distinguished from the one whose embodiment Bersani finds in Marcel and, more disturbingly, in the Italian fascists of Salò. Both seek their selves by pulling the world apart, by enjoying their others in dismembering them. Similarly, when Bersani writes in Homos (1995) that “AIDS has made us fascinating” (19, emphasis in original), he means that the spectacle of dying young men solicits the kind of projected masochism that Freud theorizes.

But there are various ways to sink into fascinated passivity. If “narrativity sustains the glamour of historical violence” (“Merde” 28; Receptive 9), Dumont’s Humanité models another mode of fascination for Bersani. Like À la recherche du temps perdu, Dumont’s film details its protagonist’s “search” (Receptive 109), his attempt to solve a mystery. It narrates a criminal investigation, led by the protagonist Pharaon de Winter, into the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. The film opens with Pharaon’s inspection of the murder scene, a sight (given in detail by the camera) that, as Bersani writes, leaves him gazing in stunned blankness at a world “uninhabitable” for its incomprehensible violence (Receptive 107). His looking is marked by a “fixed, perhaps fascinated but affectless gaze,” a “wide-eyed stare” with which he takes in his surroundings; his is “a strangely neutral fascination with an alien world” (Receptive 111, 110). Fascination is, indeed, the appropriate orientation for Pharaon: as a detective facing a crime scene, we expect him to attend to and to “fill in” what Roland Barthes calls, in his analysis of the structure of detective stories, “the fascinating and unendurable interval separating the event from its cause” (“Structure” 189). A crime occurs, pulling causality out of joint; the detective’s task is to reveal the secrets that have motivated the rupture and, by bringing the perpetrators to justice, to restore order. Suturing the fascinating wound that the crime has opened in a community, “the detective,” as Barthes continues, “becomes the modern figure of the ancient solver of riddles (Oedipus), who puts an end to the terrible why of things” (189). In this account, detective stories narrate the return to an originary balance by neutralizing the disequilibrium that the crime has introduced.

As much as Proust’s novel follows Marcel’s efforts to penetrate the enigmas with which the world taunts him—this is why Bersani calls it an “epistemological detective story” (Death 41; Culture 114)—the narrative in Humanité concerns the detective’s attempt to make sense of the brutal killing. Both Marcel and Pharaon are spellbound by the mysteries that the world has staged for them. Yet while the fascinated gaze suggests his epistemophilic capture by the enigma of the crime—a fascination that seeks its own undoing in the solving of the murder—Dumont’s detective simultaneously embodies another mode of looking. Bersani notes Pharaon’s impassive staring at various, and often bewilderingly trivial, details in his surroundings. As much as he looks for clues that would help him reveal the criminal and explain the crime, the camera also registers his fixed gazing at material objects around him: the sweaty neck of his superior, the swollen belly of a sow, the sliver of blue sky in a painting. In them, the film medium’s seduction of its viewers by Proustian enigmatics is complicated by the protagonist’s capture by a series of “unsignifying yet absorbing objects” (Receptive 110). While they “absorb” the detective like the signs and signifiers that fascinate the Proustian/Laplanchean subject, the objects at which the detective stares in fascination imply no revelatory knowledge. Rather than luring the detective with the promise of repressed truths, they offer more of the world in its dumb materiality. In this way, the objects of Pharaon’s affectless fascination should be compared to what Bersani and Dutoit, in their analysis of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), call “interestingly insignificant images” (Forms of Being 175), images that, as they frequently put it, “absorb” the spectator.

The capture of Dumont’s protagonist is, in other words, of a peculiar kind. Rather than the penetrative eye that guides Marcel’s recherche, Pharaon’s is an “empty, monotonous, yet intense staring at the world in which such acts [as the girl’s rape and murder] can take place” (Receptive 109). In this, Pharaon exemplifies the affective paralysis that Michel Thys observes in his patients. As Thys writes, the overbearing proximity of the object arrests the subject in his tracks while simultaneously depleting him of affect: “Fascination neutralizes all affect,” producing a state of “sterile attention” (“On Fascination” 638, 636). He describes this affectlessness as a “freezing of feeling” (638): one hits fascination at the “affective freezing point” (639); it is “a frozen confusion in relation to an exclusive object” (643). Bersani similarly draws our attention to “the frozen state of [Pharaon’s] negotiations with the world” (Receptive 116). He also says that Caravaggio’s beautiful boys, offering and withholding their gifts, “freeze the viewer” into a “fascinated” posture (“Secrets” 59). Such frozenness indicates the immobility associated with fascination, the dangerous paralysis in front of the deadly object, presently opening its maw to accommodate the victim. Yet the contrastive coordinating conjunction in Bersani’s characterization of the detective’s stunned look as “fascinated but affectless” (Receptive 111) also implies that the more familiar modes of fascination are in fact anything but “affectless.” The contrast is intended to remind us of the fascination exemplified by Marcel, Pasolini’s fascists, and the homophobes celebrating the ravages of AIDS, all intensively shaken—most certainly not “affectively frozen”—in their search for the secrets of enigmatic objects. What Thys calls “the frozen state of fascination” (“On Fascination” 647) is, in the Bersanian context, but one style of fascinated attention. Moreover, this style—even in its precipitation of “the fear of annihilation” (641ff.)—offers an alternative to the one where the subject is goaded by the enigmatic signifier into a search whose goal is the world’s devastation.

Pharaon’s “frozen” staring constitutes an “epistemologically useless” (Receptive 112) taking-in of the world. Bersani suggests that, even though Dumont’s protagonist is a detective, he does not primarily seek to neutralize the violence that immobilizes him into paralytic receptivity by rendering it comprehensible (identifying the perpetrator); unlike Marcel, he does not attempt to solve the world’s enigmas with the intention of understanding his own place in the once-again familiar, mappable world. In contrast with Marcel’s epistemophilic orientation, “Pharaon’s stare reads nothing” (Receptive 109). It refuses to, or cannot, metabolize the devastating violence of the crime by resolving it into an “epistemological detective story.” At the same time, his gaze does not bespeak the thrill of derived sadism, the ethically dubious and often unacknowledged pleasure—also a fascination—that motivates our eager viewing of representations of historical atrocities. Consequently, his movements in the world have a pace different from Marcel’s swerving from one object to another in his search for the key to his being, and different as well from the intense rhythms of narrative violence Bersani and Dutoit point to in Sade and Assyrian art in The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (1985). Rather than the eye that eagerly follows the storyline to its climax, the detective story in Humanité evokes a different kind of captivation.

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The passivity that Bersani attaches to fascination in Humanité, and that he suggests it is our ethical imperative to develop in Cartesian modernity, bucks the trend of conceptualizing spectatorship in contemporary, post-1968 film theory. At the intersection of Brechtian alienation techniques, Althusserian ideology critique, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the strands of film theorizing known as “apparatus theory” and “Screen theory” sought to break the thrall that cinema was thought to wield over the spectator. As Bertolt Brecht writes, the illusionist aesthetics typical to the tradition of the “total work of art” renders “the spectator … a passive (suffering) part of the Gesamtkunstwerk. This sort of magic must of course be contested. Everything that aims to produce hypnosis, or is bound to produce undignified intoxication, or makes people befuddled, must be abandoned” (75). With the force of “magic” and “hypnosis,” bourgeois theater continues, unbeknownst to us, the dark arts (religion and other forms of superstitious thought) that Enlightenment rationality was supposed to have deactivated so that we could face our lives “with sober senses [mit nüchternen Augen]” (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 476; Manifest 465). Instead, we remain, as Brecht writes, “intoxicated,” our eyes clouded over by a spell that makes us misrecognize the world and our place in it. To overcome such bewitchment, political art must make its strategies of enchantment explicit, must reveal to the spectator how the trick of representation is pulled off.

Post-1968 film theory similarly argues that cinema functions ideologically as long as it covers over the constructedness of its representations; echoing not only Brecht but also early commentators on cinema, its representatives frequently suggest that film exerts its influence with a thrall akin to hypnosis, a tendency that Jacques Derrida evokes as he attributes to cinema “a kind of hypnotic fascination” (23).⁸ The task of avant-garde cinema was to denaturalize representation and thereby strip ideology of its deceptive devices, as much as the ideology critique formulated most influentially by Louis Althusser sought to disable bourgeois glamor. If, in covering over the processes by which its realistic illusions were produced, cinema was “an ideological machine” (Baudry 44), an analytic approach to film sought “a disentangling of the fascination” that cinema exerts (Bellour 97). Psychoanalytically oriented film theorists proposed that cinema’s peculiar enchantment resided in its ability to repeat or echo the construction of subjectivity. For this argument—that the experience at the movie theater replicated subjectivation—they turned to Jacques Lacan’s account of the imaginary ego’s emergence in the mirror stage. For these commentators, the movie screen functioned much like the mirror in which the infant mis(re)cognizes herself, a miscognition brought about by—as Lacan writes, borrowing the term from Henri Wallon and surrealism—”the fascinating image” (Lacan and Cénac 122). In this model, the ethical ambition of film theorizing consists of “an attempt to disengage the cinema-object from the imaginary and to win it for the symbolic” (Metz 14).

The Brechtian theory of spectatorship was thus reformulated with Althusserian ideology critique and the Lacanian account of subject constitution in film theory that emerged after 1968. Citing Brecht’s analysis of the legerdemain typical of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Colin MacCabe paraphrases the argument in 1975: “What is important … is that in the separation of the elements [of the total work of art] the spectator gets separated out of this unity and homogeneity—this passivity—in order to enter into an active appropriation of the scenes presented to him” (“Politics” 48). The activity in which the spectator engages is conducive to “the production of knowledge”: “Rather than the text compact with its own meaning, a text which confers a unity and gives a position to the subject, we want a text whose fissures and differences constantly demand an activity of articulation from the subject”; this work of articulation renders explicit “the contradictions of the reader’s position within and without the cinema” (“Politics” 48). Exploiting the energies inherent in the contradictions that infest ideological representations, such consciousness-raising counteracts the subject’s suture by the artwork: when the wound of antagonism is torn open, the subject morphs from a “passive consumer” (“Politics” 54) to a “reader as producer” (MacCabe, “Realism” 25), an active, knowledgeable coworker in the world’s (re)construction. This program is informed by what Althusser calls the Brechtian effort to establish “a critical and active relation” between the audience and theater (Althusser, “‘Piccolo” 146).

Bersani never explicitly refers to this genealogy of film theorizing. Yet something of a nod to the tradition is perhaps discernable in his and Dutoit’s observation that in Salò one finds “no Brechtian distancing from Sade” (“Merde” 30; Receptive 12). Pasolini does not approach Sade the way that the cinematic subject is supposed to approach film, according to apparatus theory (by distancing himself from its ideological illusions in order to neutralize their interpellative power). Indeed, Sade seems more Brechtian than Pasolini: the latter strips the story of its most grotesque, and hence alienating, aspects, thereby denying the spectator the consolation of a distance from Sade’s intense (and, at the same time, reassuringly absurd) violence (“Merde” 27; Receptive 7-8). Instead of an ideology critique—demonstrating, say, how we can disentangle ourselves from the sadism that the bourgeois or fascist state formations have produced—Pasolini assumes the rhythms of the Sadean world, passively replicating the forms, and carrying on the movements, inherent in its narratives. As Bersani and Dutoit write, “Pasolini’s most original strategy in Salò is to distance himself from his Sadean protagonists by going along with them. He duplicates that from which he wants to separate himself” (“Merde” 30; Receptive 12). This “going-along-with” allows something like the distancing that Brechtian/Althusserian film theory sees as art’s ethico-political duty. Distancing is not the result of ideology critique, not the “articulation” of the “contradictions” that riddle social formations, not an against-the-grain reading that, exposing all sorts of logical gaps, would deprive the carefully constructed text of its fascinating appeal. Rather, Pasolini models for us a way of moving with the world, a passivity that may nevertheless distract one from the violence that calls us by our name. “It is as if a fascinated adherence,” Bersani and Dutoit write, “were, finally, identical to a certain detachment” (“Merde” 31; Receptive 13).

The privileged figure of such dismissive synchrony in Salò is the pianist who, with very little diegetic function, appears in numerous scenes. She can be seen in the background as the libertines tell their narratives of torture; once she takes the center stage to reenact, with comically exaggerated gestures, a story; and then, toward the end of the film, she leaps to her death from a window. No psychological explanations are offered for either her presence or ultimate self-absenting. As Bersani and Dutoit write, she is at once “enigmatic” (“Merde” 32, 33; Receptive 15, 16) and “unsignifying” (“Merde” 34; Receptive 17). She can be aligned with the enigmas that evoke the Laplanchean-Proustian subject’s work of translating the world’s dispatches into one’s native idiom; yet she also reminds us of the objects that compel Pharaon’s fascination beyond the clues that, suturing the disruption caused by criminal breach with an explanatory narrative, would bring the world back to equilibrium. Her presence is “a portentous but impenetrable blankness”; her face “tells us nothing”; she “simply goes along with things” (“Merde” 32; Receptive 15, 16). A pianist, she is, as we say, an accompanist: in her, “what we recognize is nothing more than our pleasure at being carried along as spectators. It is as if the ease with which we ‘go along’ with Salò‘s sadists includes a folding movement of cognition—a repliage which constitutes our simply recognizing that ease. Thus the distance Pasolini takes from his subject consists in an excessive indulgence toward his subject; he moves away from images and styles by duplicating them rather than ‘criticizing’ or ‘opposing’ them” (“Merde” 31; Receptive 13). Unlike the methods of ideology critique or resisting reading, Pasolini offers in the pianist a way of “going along” with the world, a passive “registering” that may derail or diminish—never negate, never eradicate—the world’s violence by locating enjoyments other than the intensive pleasures of derived sadism, the ecstasies of shattered egos. In her passivity, she models for us “non-imitative recognition,” in opposition to the “mimetic sexuality” with which Sade’s stories enthrall their listeners (“Merde” 31; Receptive 13).

If film theorizing in the 1970s followed Brecht’s call for a participatory art by modeling a spectator able to dissect the images that solicited identification (what MacCabe calls the “active[ly] appropriati[ve]” as opposed to “passive[ly] consum[ing]” viewer [“Politics” 48, 54]), Bersani’s refusal to privilege the activity of “critique” or “opposition” can be understood as an effort to avoid one’s capture within the strictures of an epistemophilially organized world. The consciousness-raising that is the traditional method of ideology critique assumes both the separation of the subject from the world—indeed, their potential, salubrious opposition—and the efficacy of knowledge in negotiating this gap. As MacCabe writes, the “active” subject espoused by ideology critique enables “the production of knowledge,” a production that, typically to representatives of apparatus theory and Screen theory, he illustrates by turning to psychoanalysis. He gives us an account of early infant development, which privileges the subject’s constitution via its separation from the object as it appears in various developmental stages (the breast, the feces, and the phallus). The separation of the subject from the object is the condition for the emergence of language insofar as it is the object’s withdrawal that produces the protolanguage gesture of the cry; in their “perpetual play of presence and absence,” such objects turn the infant into a being of language (“Politics” 48). MacCabe suggests that we read what psychoanalysis theorizes as separation—the achievement of an object-world—as analogous to the effort, in Brechtian theater, of disentangling the elements that go into constructing the illusions of the Gesamtkunstwerk. If the infant is embedded in language—a moment of hominization—through its separation from objects, ideology critique constitutes the work of (re)subjectivation: it awakens the subject into self-determining activity from slumberous suspension in ideological illusions. As Thys too suggests, the failure of separation is symptomized in the subject’s entrapment in fascination, his monopolization by an other that, deploying cinematic idiom, he describes as “an exclusive object, a colossal close-up” (“On Fascination” 635). Often drawing from psychoanalytic schemas, ideology critique analogously proposes that the inadequately individuated subject is susceptible to—or perpetuated by—the kind of ideological enthrallment that cinema, as part of the “culture industry,” is supposed to wield.

MacCabe’s Brechtian/psychoanalytic account of separation demonstrates the adoption of the epistemic assumptions whose hegemony in modernity Bersani has spent his oeuvre elucidating and subverting. Criticism relies on the critic’s separation from the object of critique, as much as language cleaves the infant at the moment of the breast’s withdrawal. In executing this separation, moreover, the critic, like the newly speaking being, emerges in his fidelity to the epistemophilic world, where lack—the radical gap between the ipse and the other—precipitates the production of knowledge about the absented object. In order for us to “criticize” anything, we must apprehend or grasp the object, that is, arrest its movement through understanding. In the process, we bolster the subject/object dichotomy and prioritize knowledge as the technique of de-alienating the enigmatic world.

If ideology critique is but part of modernity’s dialectic, Bersani proposes that, instead of the activity that film theory inherited from Brecht, art can gift us a “subversive passivity” (“Merde” 30; Receptive 30).⁹ In her non-oppositionality, her readiness to “go along with” the fascists’ stories, Pasolini’s pianist figures the rethinking of the separation that inflects the modern regime of subjectivation. Her mode of relatedness is that of accompaniment, of “being-With.” I take this phrase from a later chapter in Receptive Bodies where Bersani turns to the effort by Peter Sloterdijk, particularly in Bubbles (1998), the first volume of his Spheres trilogy, to conceptualize worldly orientations that are not premised on the assumption of primal separations. One of Sloterdijk’s targets is precisely the developmental schema that MacCabe evokes in his psychoanalytic transcription of Brecht. Sloterdijk proposes that psychoanalysis, with its “fixation on thinking in object relationships” (293), has been unable to hypothesize forms of relatedness—of “closeness,” a concept that he unfolds in Spheres—beyond the oppositionality of the self and the other. He suggests that we supplement the objects posited by developmental theory with “at least three pre-oral stages and forms of condition [that exist] before the supposedly primary oral phase” (293). These pre-oral entities—blood, voice, breath—”are not objects because they have no subject-like counterpart”; they are, in the phrase Sloterdijk borrows from Thomas Macho, “nobjects” (294).

The move from objects to nobjects—deprivileging “the inherently confrontational nature of subject-object relations” that has occupied the modern imagination—may allow us to imagine what Bersani calls, evoking his favorite Foucauldian phrase, “new relational modes” (Receptive 97). We may do this by replacing our thinking of object relations—whose dualism, Bersani argues, psychoanalysis has inherited from Descartes—with “a less differential otherness that can be corporeally remembered as not yet objectified self-extensions” (Receptive 102). Rather than an ethical orientation toward radical unknowability (the apophatic God, the inscrutable Face of the Other, the enigmatic signifier, the ever-slippery différance, pointing to ideals always to-come), we can cultivate epistemically neutral relationships of being-with. Nobjectual relations can push us beyond the “old Western grammar” that has imprisoned psychoanalytic thinking (Sloterdijk 298).

Apart from the accompanist to Pasolini’s libertines, Dumont’s protagonist is a figure of such being-with. Pharaon’s fascinated gaze at the world’s colorful flesh, much like the distractive actions of the pianist, exemplifies the “lateral divertissements” (“Merde” 29; Receptive 10) that may save the spectator from an obsessive fascination with either film’s stories of unfathomable suffering. If ours is, as Bersani and Dutoit write elsewhere, a “relational system limited by an obsession with knowledge” (Caravaggio’s 73), Pharaon’s fascination is of a different order, one attracted by nonenigmatic sameness. No decree of knowledge inflects the ethical stance of the spectator. Like the pianist, Pharaon suggests to us that “there is nothing ‘to know,’ only the consciousness of the movement in which we participate” (72). At such moments, Bersani offers a tentatively affirmative answer to his recurrent query whether we can even conceptualize “a nonsadistic type of movement” (Bersani and Dutoit, Arts 147), “a non sadistic relation to external reality” (Caravaggio’s 69). If this is possible—if we can cultivate interest in meeting our others beyond murderous jouissance—its potential is in a fascinated reading of the world. Yet the fact that the nonpenetrative and the epistemophilic gazes are embodied in the same character in Dumont’s film suggests that the two modes of fascination are not clearly separated but positioned on the continuum of a Möbius strip. They are each other’s dangerous supplements.

Across “Merde Alors” and “Staring,” Bersani complicates the pleasures of witnessing sadistic tortures with Pharaon’s specular capture by an incomprehensibly beautiful and violent world. The lexical coincidence implies that Sadean desire cannot be conclusively neutralized by cultivating our participation in nonenigmatic concealment. Analogously, cinema’s ability to render the spectator a passive recipient of aesthetic play does not diminish its capacity to construct the spectator as an avid consumer of violent narratives. Bersani and Dutoit come to this conclusion in Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998). While they propose that Caravaggio’s paintings suggest how “the human fascination with the spectacle of violence [can be], as it were, deprogrammed,” they nevertheless add: “It could probably never be a question of eliminating the obscene fixation with the mechanics of violence … inasmuch as that fixation is, we believe, grounded in the excited but anguished interrogation of an originary enigmatic and invasive soliciting of our very being. If being human depends to a significant degree on that soliciting, then the paranoid aggression that is its consequence cannot be wholly erased” (Caravaggio’s 94). Bersani and Dutoit find in Caravaggio’s work a demonstration of “the impossibility of our ever detaching ourselves entirely from both imaginary and real sources of violence. We can never be entirely freed from our fascination with lack, with what is missing from our being and what we imagine as hidden in the other’s head” (Caravaggio’s 98). We will never have transcended our originary calling into paranoid relationality, a calling that initiates hominization; in this, we remain irredeemable.

________

The film theory that unfolded in France and England after 1968 placed an ethico-political urgency on the spectator’s de-fascination or—if we heed Althusser’s insistence on ideology’s inescapability (“Marxism” 232-32)—re-fascination: defying our reflex to respond to authority’s call, resisting the lure of the image/imaginary, we would be able to see through the trick of representation. Conceptualized thus, ethical cinema requires that one engage representation actively, that one “work at it” (MacCabe, “Politics” 52), engage in the “work of decipherment, reading, elaboration of signs” (Comolli 140). In contrast, Blanchot’s account of cinema, as excavated by Calum Watt, suggests that the spectator’s fascinated relation to the image is necessarily one of worklessness. The Blanchotian spectator is captured by an object that sheds its “value” and “meaning”: “In the image, the object again grazes something which it had dominated in order to be an object. Now that its value, its meaning is suspended, now that the world abandons it to idleness [le monde l’abandonne au désœuvrement] and lays it aside, the truth in it ebbs, and materiality, the elemental, reclaims it. This impoverishment, or enrichment, consecrates it as image” (“Two” 256; “Deux” 347-48).

In the image, the object is at once impoverished and enriched; it becomes less in order to become more. In these lines, we should hear Stéphane Mallarmé’s influence on Blanchot. When the object becomes an image, its “value” and “meaning [are] suspended” in the same way that, according to Mallarmé, poetry is characterized at once by language’s devaluing—withdrawn from circulation, the word loses its utility—and expansion, insofar as the poetized word regains its resonance (becomes, once again, sonant) with others from which it had to distinguish itself so as to achieve functional form, to operate in the system of language. In poetry, language “recovers … its virtuality” (Mallarmé, “Crisis” 43; “Crise” 368, my trans.).¹⁰ Mallarmé further suggests that, apart from disrupting language’s smooth economy by causing objects’ “vibratory disappearance [disparition vibratoire]” (“Crise” 368), poetry similarly annihilates the poet: “The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet,” whose words “light up in reciprocal reflections like a virtual train of fire on precious stones [ils s’allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelle traînée de feux sur des pierreries]” (366). Both object and speaker vanish, are “virtualized,” in poetic expression.

The antinomial quality Blanchot indicates in the above passage—the coincidence of “impoverishment” with “enrichment”—similarly characterizes Bersani’s philosophy, including his theorization of cinema. As in Blanchot, one of the sources for the idea in Bersani is Mallarmé. In the 1982 study The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé, he cites Blanchot’s idea that poetry is a “depersonalizing” or “de-realizing” medium insofar as in it language loses “its epistemological function”: “the self undergoes an ontological regression in poetry, it recedes into virtuality” (Death 42). If poetry virtualizes, so does cinema: both show how to unplug from the world rendered familiar through the production of knowable “personalities,” a production that Michel Foucault identifies as one of the central aspects of the modern dispositif. To use the term that Foucault coins in his effort to think his way through the fine grid of disciplinary modernity, poetry—and art in general—may occasion desubjectivation in its ability to dissolve the “I” in(to) fascination (Foucault 241). The idea of the self’s desiccation emerges in Bersani’s work under such various names as “betrayal,” “impoverishment,” “unnaming,” and—the neologism is borrowed from Samuel Beckett—”leastening.” Blanchot anticipates Foucault’s and Bersani’s argument about such undoing: “man,” he writes, “is unmade [défait] according to his image,” the image whose appearance induces fascination (“Two” 260; “Deux” 354).

Drawing from his clinical observations, Thys similarly asserts that fascination, as the subject’s experience of “being radically sucked in by an all-embracing and overpowering object,” is “de-subjectivizing” (“On Fascination” 635). The subject is undone—devoured by the too-proximate object—in fascination, a loss that, contrary to the most valent of the term’s contemporary connotations, “is not at all enriching for the subject” (635). Although the fascinating object evokes “the fear of annihilation,” “the subject cannot allow itself to take a distance from the object because a fundamental part of the subject is stored in it. Taking a distance from the object is leaving oneself behind, which would entail signing one’s own death warrant. So the object is both life-threatening and necessary for one’s survival” (644). What would happen to such characterizations if we were to rethink the subject/object dichotomy beyond our training in Cartesian modernity? Is there a way to yield to the slow death, to one’s dissolution by the other, otherwise than through an experience of “annihilation”? It is precisely the potential for subjective dissolution that prompts Blanchot’s and Bersani’s interest in the phenomenon of fascination. Particularly for Bersani, the fascinated subject’s “freezing” coincides with a potentially new mode of connectivity. In this sense, the subject’s “cautious defrosting” will uncover a radically reorganized world (Thys, “On Fascination” 647).

Thys echoes commentators—among them Blanchot—who have located fascination’s trigger in the experience of a teasing incomprehension: “the fascinating object,” he writes, “seems pregnant with a mysterious meaning, which for the time being doesn’t release itself” (“On Fascination” 646). Yet Bersani’s work helps us disambiguate forms of fascination by encouraging us to think doubly about the mysteries that call out to us: there is the Proustian mystery, where the fascinated subject’s unknown self is being secreted in and by the object; yet there is also the Dumontian form of this experience, where the subject’s attention perhaps continues to be solicited by the promise of the world’s redemption into meaning, but then extends into the pleasures of witnessing and participating in the formal play inherent in extension. One is a fascination prompted by the Proustian will-to-knowledge, the other a form of capture by an aesthetic pleasure, the world’s nonsignifying flesh. As a medium, cinema is apt to engage both: we are likely to be enthralled by the murder mystery in Humanité and the increasingly intense stories of sexual torture in Salò. But amidst these narratives we can also be seduced by the fleshiness of the chief inspector’s neck or the “lateral divertissements” that Pasolini weaves into—or out of—Sade’s stories (“Merde” 29; Receptive 10). If, as Bersani writes, human subjects “are educated into how they see themselves as being-in-the-world” (Is 150), we can learn to receive the fascinating world differently from the way it captures Marcel. Works of art, including films, can be vehicles for such retraining, the means by which we can begin to “de-Proustify ourselves” (Bersani, “Rigorously” 283). Blanchot implies this when he writes that, in fascination, the gaze is trained (entraîné) on but also by the enigmatic object (“Essential” 32; “Solitude” 25). Apart from evoking the fear of annihilation, the world that calls forth an epistemological and affective paralysis—that empties us out of the will to know, the will to revel in the other’s pain—can also be a site of our (always partial) deprogramming.

Footnotes

1. On Blanchot’s revision of Plato in this essay, see Watt 26-27; Hart 53-54; and Alanko-Kahiluoto 176-77.

2. On “contact at a distance” in ancient and medieval texts, see Delaurenti; and Kovach esp. 204-13. On the idea’s continuation in Bacon, Mesmer, and Blanchot, see Weingart 86ff.

3. Before Watt, Oliver Harris, in “Film Noir Fascination,” and Steven Shaviro, in “Film Theory and Visual Fascination,” had drawn English-speaking scholars’ attention to the possible connection between Blanchot and film theory.

4. In what follows, page references to “Merde Alors” indicate both its original publication in the journal October and its reprinting in Bersani’s Receptive Bodies (2018).

5. See also Weingart 72; and Baumbach 25-26. Oliver Harris writes that Blanchot’s own writing solicits fascination because of its opacity: “Blanchot’s account [of fascination] is so repetitious in its phrasing and of such opaque intellectual brilliance as to exercise its own form of fascination, because as a condition of radical perplexity, to be fascinated suspends the possibility of seizing experience and refuses decisive knowledge” (6).

6. On fascination in Heart of Darkness, see Baumbach 211-18; and Seeber, “Surface.”

7. See Bersani, “Representation” 7; Freudian 39, 89; Culture 36; Is 24. The argument concerning the human subject’s constitution-by-undoing in primary masochism enters Bersani’s oeuvre via Laplanche’s close reading of Freud in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970) in the concluding chapter of A Future for Astyanax; this is subsequently elaborated in Baudelaire and Freud (1977), esp. chs. 6-7.

8. Raymond Bellour (100ff.) is one of the 1970s film theorists to link cinema and hypnosis. On the imbrication of the reception of early cinema in discourses of mesmerism and hypnosis, see Andriopoulos esp. 116-23; and Curtis 135-40, 162ff.

9. In “Film Theory and Visual Fascination” (1993), Steven Shaviro, too, finds an alternative to post-1968 theorization of spectatorship in Bersani. The value of Shaviro’s rethinking of cinematic fascination—whose primary goal, it should be recognized, is not to remain faithful to Bersani—is not diminished by the fact that he neglects to observe the distinction Bersani makes between two modes of fascinated spectatorship. In opposition to the distanciation efforts of apparatus theorists, Shaviro, citing The Freudian Body (and particularly the passages borrowed from “Merde Alors”), proposes as his methodology a ready acquiescence to the paralytic fascination that psychoanalytic and ideology-critical commentators, according to him, identify with unethical misrecognition: “My own masochistic theoretical inclination,” he writes, “is to revel in my bondage to images, to celebrate the spectatorial condition of metaphysical alienation, and ideological delusion, rather than strive to rectify it” (25). Consequently, he suggests, contradicting film theorizing of the 1970s and 1980s, that “we surrender to and revel in cinematic fascination, rather than distance ourselves from it with the tools of psychoanalytic reserve and hermeneutic suspicion. … Film … should … be praised as a technology for intensifying and renewing experiences of passivity and abjection” (65). This account, whose premises are drawn from the Laplanchean theory of projected masochism, is very much in line with Bersani’s methodology (and his onto-ethical account of the human), but with a crucial difference. Unlike Shaviro, Bersani, as I have indicated, distinguishes between two modes of fascination: apart from the masochistic pleasure of ébranlement, he delineates for us the distractive attention performed by Pasolini’s pianist and, later, Pharaon de Winter. Attending to these two interrelated affects, Bersani would remind us that, because the “delicious passivity” (Shaviro 56) of projected masochism entails the desire to witness objects’ undoing, it is urgent that we develop other modes of being implicated in—devoured by—the world.

10. Bradford Cook translates sa virtualité as “its full efficacy.”

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