What We Don’t See in What We See:A Response to Cinema and Fascination

Ackbar Abbas (bio)

The world is an enigma, Nietzsche said, but an enigma composed of its various solutions (qtd. in Calasso 3). In much the same way, we can say that fascination in cinema is an enigma made up of its various interpretations. The essays in this special issue of Postmodern Culture, each brilliant in its own very different way, draw on a wide range of disciplines—from psychoanalysis and philosophy to sound art and quantum physics—as if to say that what is fascinating about cinema exists everywhere and not just in cinema alone. However, each essay manages to construct its argument around a reading of one or two films. The arguments are staged in dialogue with Freud or Lacan, Blanchot, Barad, or Bersani, but these canonical figures are not given the last word on the enigma of fascination. (More often than not, they appear like apotropaic gargoyles attaching themselves to an argument.) Rather, the significant emphasis is always on how fascination informs and deforms all the elements in cinema, including words and images—informs by de-forming them, like the sly way Deleuze’s “dark precursor” works, or the way Lucretius’s clinamen conditions atoms to swerve from the straight and narrow. What emerges from this special issue, then, is not a unified theory of fascination, but something perhaps more valuable: descriptions from the field of how fascination is present in a film and how a viewer or reader experiences it. Taken together, the essays suggest that behind the question “What is fascination?” lies the question “What is cinema?”

Let me begin with Kwasu D. Tembo’s essay, which raises some key questions about fascination and cinema, including, if only by implication, the question of film form. Tembo notes that fascination is often used today as a term of approbation, especially when we do not know what to say, but he also reminds us that there is a sinister side to it, highlighted by the psychoanalytic study of sexuality. When sex is linked to power, as it always is, we find “aberrations” like sadism and masochism. In the first half of the essay, Tembo brings out the heavy artillery (Freud, Lacan, Gallop, and others) to argue that Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002) is about psycho-sexual fascination as a form of bondage. The film deals with the affair between Lee Halloway and her boss Edward Grey; Lee has masochistic tendencies, and Grey sadistic. Not unlike the master/bondsman dialectic, psycho-sexual bondage is “bidirectional.” Furthermore, it turns around a Lacanian “thing,” an objet petit a, a thing that is a no-thing—like the dead earthworm Lee mails to Grey—which Tembo calls in his title “the power of absolute nothing.” The work of Jane Gallop, herself a reader of Freud and Lacan, opens the further possibility of a feminist reading.

However, it should be obvious that what accounts for the film’s fascination is not any scholarly apparatus but its overall tone, the fact that it is not a case study but a romantic comedy given several generic twists. In the film, bondage as “bidirectional exchange” is less a psychological insight than a comic formula whose automatism makes it appropriate for farce: so less a psychoanalytic tour de force than a Schnitzleresque tour de farce. The marriage of true minds takes the farcical form of a sadist and a masochist falling in love. Of course, it will have to be a kinky kind of love, romantic comedy taken to unexpected places. Nevertheless, like more conventional affairs, kinkiness has its own trials and tribulations, as well as its own precise if perverse algorithm of desire, seen most clearly in the minute detail of the fetish. One example is Grey’s red pencil. He uses it like an instrument of torture, a red-hot branding iron, to circle Lee’s typing errors. Tembo points to an even better example, the dead earthworm that Lee mails to Grey when all else fails to rekindle his passion. She tries enticing him to no avail by placing a sexy photo of herself on his desk or dressing in suggestive clothes. Then, she hits upon an inspired alternative, the perfect trigger: she mails him an earthworm, dead on arrival, an emblem of complete passivity and submissiveness. When Grey receives it, he takes out his red pencil, his “phallic ghost,” and in a fit of sexual arousal excitedly draws red circles around the worm. Peering in the door like a voyeur, Lee murmurs in sexual-comic tones, “Finally!” This coupling of worm and red pencil, the power of absolute nothing multiplied by two, is the ultimate climax and most intense sex scene in the film, because nothing happens. Grey says, “We can’t go on like this,” to which Lee replies, “Why not?”

What makes the fetishist fantasy doubly fascinating is its coexistence with the unspoken assumptions of ordinary life and the conventions of mainstream cinema, which have not disappeared. We see these assumptions and conventions in Grey’s sense of guilt over his sadistic tendencies, Lee’s institutionalization early in the film, and the obligatory narrative that relationships should end in love and marriage. Perhaps this is the true bidirectionality of the film: its double bondage to farce as fascination on the one hand and to convention on the other, which is what allows the film to be both kinky and mainstream. This suggests that fascination in cinema is found not in subject matter, but in play with form: in the case of Secretary, in farce as the de-formation of generic forms.

Eugenie Brinkema’s essay on Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) focuses not on farce but on horror as fascination and de-formation. As we might expect of her work, the argument on horror is provocative and original, designed not only to make us read against the grain but also to feel against the grain. Brinkema begins, like Tembo, by reversing a contemporary tendency to see fascination in too positive terms, but she takes the critique beyond the psychoanalytic tradition all the way back to myth. In traditional myth, fascination is associated with bewitchment and mystification as well as with horror and violence. The siren song is irresistible, but whoever listens to it dies. Brinkema’s reading of Martyrs develops the link between horror and fascination, suggesting that horror is a form of fascination that does not forget or mitigate the negativity that lies under the surface of contemporary life.

Though Laugier’s film is grouped with New French Extremism and sometimes dismissed as “horror porn,” it is in fact very carefully crafted, which makes it much less sensational and much more provocative than slasher movies. The stress is not on mindless horror, but on how horror reminds us of what certain versions of culture make us forget. Brinkema makes a crucial reference to the sirens episode in Homer, which Blanchot and Horkheimer and Adorno also explicate. In Homer’s poem, when Ulysses succeeds with his stratagems to listen to and escape the sirens, he overcomes mythic repetition, but at the same time, he turns culture into kitsch; that is to say, he turns it into culture lite, culture without horror and danger. Milan Kundera famously defines kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as “the absolute denial of shit in both the literal and figurative sense of the word” (248), and shit is what Laugier’s version of horror does not allow us to forget.

As Brinkema points out, Martyrs is a film in two parts, with a crucial scene in the middle relating the parts. For most of the film (and to a far greater extent than in most horror movies) action and motive are very murky, and we are left guessing about what is happening and why. The first part centers on Lucie, a teenage girl subject for unknown reasons to extreme torture, who manages to run away from her captors. Fifteen years later, she exacts revenge on her torturers and their two children by massacring the apparently ordinary family in their house with a shotgun and then committing suicide. The second part concerns Anna, Lucie’s only friend, who reluctantly helps Lucie with her plan for revenge and who may be in love with her. At the house, Anna discovers a door that leads to a secret chamber where she finds, in addition to horrendous photographs on the walls, another girl being tortured, thus proving that Anna’s story is based in reality. Before she can make her escape, the house is overrun by paramilitary soldiers. Their leader, an elderly woman everyone calls Mademoiselle, expounds to Anna the weird logic behind a philosophy of pain in this central part of the film: one can respond to pain either as a victim or as a martyr. A victim rejects pain as unnatural and unjustified and seeks revenge or commits suicide. In Lucie’s narrative there is neither change nor transformation: she dies a victim. A martyr, or so the argument goes, accepts pain, embraces it, looks beyond it, and emerges on the other side transfigured. (Brinkema shows how the image of Anna’s entire body flayed and bloodied, except for her face, resembles that of Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s classic film.) There is no indication whether this philosophy is esoteric doctrine or the ravings of a mad cult leader. What is clear is that the society that Mademoiselle heads has been using torture to search for martyrs and has found only victims, though Anna may be an exception. In the final scenes, we see Mademoiselle rushing to Anna’s bed to hear what visions of “the other side” Anna-asmartyr will reveal. Members of the cult, all established and well-to-do citizens, meet the next day to hear these revelations from Mademoiselle, but she shoots herself through the mouth before her scheduled appearance. Her last words are “Keep doubting.”

Perhaps what these enigmatic last words point to is first of all the enigmatic formal complexity of the film, with close-ups that decontextualize rather than intensify, irrational cuts, visual allusions (to Dreyer for example), and dark lighting. Brinkema rightly insists on the “ultraformalist” nature of Laugier’s version of horror: “the body is made a form, violence to which produces a new form.” But even more important is the fact that this formal complexity makes us “keep doubting” the horror that we see. Such horror is speculative and not merely spectacular, and it makes epistemology the middle term standing between horror and fascination. This brings us to the film’s important coda. The film ends with the screen showing that martyr is a word etymologically related to “witness.” Perhaps epistemology is not about how the knowledge Anna arrived at as a result of torture could be openly shared, but about how the experience of violence itself transforms her and the viewer together into joint witnesses and “secret sharers” of the fascination and horror of contemporary life.

E. L. McCallum is concerned with yet another kind of film. Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) is often called experimental or avant-garde. McCallum begins her essay by suggesting that even though the film is famous, it is not necessarily well known. It may be “best misremembered as the story of a 45-minute zoom shot across a New York City loft to a photograph of waves that fills the screen.” This impression of the video is based on a certain way of reading fostered by apparatus theory. It is very much an ideological reading that emphasizes first, narrativity; second, an active viewing subject identified with the camera’s perception of a passive world of objects; and third, a perspectival quattrocento space with depth. Such an ideological reading leaves out many crucial elements, which only come back into focus when we approach the video with a different reading apparatus. McCallum turns to Jean-Louis Baudry on ideology in cinema, but more importantly she turns to the work of Karen Barad on quantum physics. Quantum theory highlights the existence of many queer phenomena at the quantum level, and McCallum uses Barad’s explications of it to queer the narrative about Wavelength and assert that in the video “narrativity … is a fiction,” and “so too is its appeal to a centered and discrete subject.” While Laugier’s Martyrs turns to horror to raise epistemological questions, McCallum looks to quantum theory to queer the way we see physical reality: Wavelength may be the closest thing we have to a visual experience of quantum physics.

In this quantum reading, Wavelength is not the story of a more or less continuous zoom shot that ends with the picture of waves. It is seen as much more multilayered, made up of a discontinuous series of reframing, with one frame in superposition over another. It feels therefore as if the video restarts every few seconds, and what we find between one frame and the next is not the persistence of identity, because subtle distortions brought about by slight twists in perspective or changes in color or lighting are constantly taking place. Superposition can be seen as a kind of relay race, where the baton of continuity is passed from one frame to another. Sometimes the baton is dropped, which is when random colors and noise show up on screen and sound track as signs that there are other things that demand the spectator’s attention. Instead of focusing on objects already valorized by a narrative of continuity, depth, and perspective, we find a flattening of value as a consequence of superposition. One example is how the distinction between meaningful sound and meaningless noise is blurred. In the video, John Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever, one of the greatest pop songs ever written, is no more or less important than the noise of traffic or the monotonous buzzing of a mechanical note of fixed wavelength. Similarly flattened is the distinction between the human and nonhuman. There are four human events in the video, but McCallum is right to say that they are distractions and not elements of a human-centered plot. In one scene, a man stumbles into the room from the bottom of the screen and collapses, and for the rest of the video the body becomes part of the furniture, or the material that makes up the space of Wavelength. Or could he be an avatar of Schrödinger’s cat?

What superposition and flattening ultimately give us is a materialist film, in a sense that needs defining with the help of Barad’s work. The space of Wavelength is not a fixed entity with an identity persisting across time. Rather, it is what happens between each reframing that calls the space into existence. Barad calls “what happens between” a form of intra-action rather than inter-action. Inter-action works between finished entities, intraaction between entities on the point of becoming, entities not pre-classified as human or nonhuman, alive or dead, subject or object. This is the “new materialism,” where everything is matter and everything matters. As Barad writes, “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, and remembers”: it is animate. In a similar vein, McCallum talks about “the freeing of the object to its animacy.” Animacy does not mean that everything is alive, because “alive” is already a classification; it means that everything is active, in a process of becoming. That is why McCallum can title her essay on Wavelength “A Moving Which Is Not a Moving”: it concerns activity that is indiscernible but real and material, like the way “matter feels, converses,” and so on.

McCallum’s reading of Wavelength as materialist film also draws on Barad’s notion of agential realism. Realism implies a response in the sense of a respons-ibility to all matter, rather than automatically relegating some matter to the dustbin of meaningless details or noise. This is the theoretical basis of sound art. Agential raises the question of the causal determinants of phenomena, the real agents at work. Agential realism asks the basic question of what is happening in Wavelength. To answer this requires a certain intimacy with or respons-ibility to the material of the film, a critical intimacy rather than a critical distance. This is done not on the model of interaction between subject and object, which already creates distance between them, but on the model of intra-action or entanglement. Subject and object are neither the same nor different; they are products of a process that Barad calls, using a quasi-cinematic notion, a cutting together-apart. Besides the cut that separates or connects, Barad imagines a cut, McCallum points out, that connects by separating and vice versa—which is what superposition and quantum theory make thinkable and what Wavelength demonstrates.

McCallum reads Wavelength through Barad’s quantum apparatus to foreground its fascination. Snow’s film ends with an image of waves that takes up the whole screen. Or could it be the other way around: could the room and everything human and nonhuman in it have been made up of wavelengths that elude our perception and formalist analysis all along? Is what we have been confronted by an epistemological puzzle? In epistemology we find a surprising rapprochement between Brinkema on horror and McCallum on materialism. In her materialist account, Brinkema sees epistemology as an issue inseparable from ethics, responsibility, and fascination. She reads the film as staging an ethical onto-epistemological encounter with the material world in all its queer indeterminacy. And if ethics can be described as looking for “difference that makes a difference,” then the fascination of the project is that while such differences are real, they are at the same time, because of superposition and entanglement, indeterminate and indiscernible. The fascination of Wavelength and the fascination of quantum physics reiterate one another.

In Calum Watt’s essay, the topic of fascination and cinema is approached in a circuitous way. The circuit relates Blanchot’s seminal work on fascination and writing to filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux’s shooting diary for Malgré La Nuit (2016) and then to film critic Raymond Bellour’s work on film spectatorship. In this circuit, we see Blanchot’s ideas on fascination re-situated and translated into cinematic terms by Grandrieux and Bellour. The circuitous approach is justified because while Blanchot’s ideas about fascination potentially seem to be very germane to cinema, he has written little on the medium. In tracing Blanchot’s obvious and acknowledged impact on Grandrieux’s and Bellour’s thinking, Watt attempts to reconstruct a picture of what Blanchot might have said had he written on fascination and cinema.

“To write is to arrange language under fascination and, through language, in language, remain in contact with the absolute milieu” (Blanchot, “Essential” 414). To arrange language under fascination suggests that fascination informs and de-forms literary language and makes it faulty. This link between “fault” or “defect” and fascination may explain why Grandrieux chose as epigraph for his shooting diary Blanchot’s line, “Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault.” In his essay on the “Song of the Sirens,” Blanchot suggests something similar. The sirens’ song fascinates not because it is beautiful, but because it has a defect, an exceptional fault or anomaly: the astonishing fact that these marvelous, beautiful, monstrous creatures could simply “reproduce the ordinary singing of mankind” (443), in much the same way as Kafka’s “Josephine the Mouse-Singer” does. However, the resemblance of the sirens’ song to ordinary human singing portends that the frightening opposite may also be true, “a suspicion that all human singing was really inhuman” (443). In fascination, the difference between ordinary and extraordinary, human and inhuman, seems to have disappeared, and we are in the realm of pure resemblance, where one thing can morph into another as in a dream, “when there is no more world, when there is no world yet” (Blanchot, “Essential” 414). In Blanchot’s literary essays, terms like fault, mistake, resemblance, or dream lose their dictionary meanings and take on a special valence that allows us to intuit a world we no longer or do not yet understand, a world in many ways like Ulysses’s, caught between myth and modernity. It is this special valence or mistake that constitutes “language under fascination,” and it is this language that remains in contact with “the absolute milieu.” How can we translate these thoughts into cinema?

We can imagine Grandrieux to be saying that to make films is to arrange images under fascination. We follow Watt as he turns not to Grandrieux’s Malgré La Nuit but to his shooting diary on the film, where the focus is not on the end result but on the process of filmmaking, just as Blanchot’s essays are about the process of writing. In the diary, “mistakes” and good ideas for “film takes” coexist as in a dream, making the diary a template for Blanchot’s dream state of pure resemblance. In terms of Grandrieux’s film style, Watt points out, resemblance or de-differentiation can be seen in the frequent use of blurred images and extreme close-ups that confuse rather than clarify, in the prevalence of nocturnal shots, and in the scenes of drug use. It can also be seen in what can be pieced together with some effort as the story or non-story. The film is apparently about a man named Lenz searching for a lost love in Paris named Madeleine. In this quest, he is sidetracked by two other women, Lena and Helene. It is not difficult to surmise that all four characters, if we think about their similar-sounding names, may be aspects of the same person.

The dream state can also be linked to what the diary calls radical passivity, some signs of which in the director himself include a constant sense of fatigue and asphyxia. It is as if Grandrieux enters into the making of a film as if he were stepping into a dream. However, passivity does not mean simply doing nothing; it is more like letting the film come to you and not forcing the process. Perhaps the most revealing gloss on this point is the last entry in Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms: “It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy” (108). The last line of that aphorism may well describe the effect Malgré La Nuit is aiming for. Radical passivity can also be linked to at least one more major theme, namely Grandrieux’s preference for sensation over story, which is why he likes to use wide-angle lenses (up to 85mm or even 100mm) that allow him to put more pure sensation into the image. In Grandrieux, sensation has no story to tell, no event to contextualize. As in Francis Bacon’s paintings, we find in Grandrieux’s film violent sensations that do not have the garrulousness of sensationalism. If, as Blanchot says, every artist is in an intimate relation with a particular “mistake,” then Grandrieux’s “mistake” is “the temptation to lose himself in a pure sensation of the image.” But this “mistake” allows Grandrieux to claim that to make films is to arrange images under fascination.

Watt turns next to Bellour, who sees film criticism as “capturing something of cinematic fascination through a practice of writing.” What Bellour writes about, in constant dialogue with Blanchot, is not filmmaking but film spectatorship. Film induces a hypnotic state in the spectator, but fascination in cinema has to be distinguished from hypnosis, though there is a relation between them: “if hypnosis, in the cinema,” Bellour writes, “is that which sends the spectator to sleep, fascination is that which wakes him up” (Corps 294). Sleep is associated with the night, but in the cinema we are surrounded by a different kind of night, “an experimental night” (Pensées 228). For Blanchot, “night—the essence of night—does not, precisely, let us sleep” (Space 185). Insomniac nights then are nights of fascination. E. M. Cioran, who claims not to have slept in fifty years, did all his writing on white nights. Another central thesis of Bellour’s is that the child is the paradigm of the cinema spectator; in Watt’s description, “when we are fascinated by cinema, we reawaken the fascination that typified our earliest childhood.” The experience of powerlessness and passivity that Grandrieux speaks about has far-reaching consequences for filmmaking, and by extension, for film spectatorship. In Cinema 2 Deleuze notes the importance of the child in neo-realism, whose motor helplessness goes together with an increased capacity to hear and see (36). In an act of inspired spectatorship, Bellour is able to view Malgré La Nuit, despite the night and the raw violence, as “an attempt to bring to an obscure clarity … images which would be images of childhood” (Pensées 229)—and fascination.

I consider finally the essay by Mikko Tuhkanen, who edited the volume and also contributes a helpful introduction. Tuhkanen turns to the work of Leo Bersani on fascination and cinema, particularly the essays “Merde Alors,” co-written with Ulysse Dutoit on Pasolini’s Salò (1975), and “Staring,” a single-authored essay on Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité (1999). Fascination is a pivotal notion in both essays, but in two different and seemingly opposed senses. There is firstly fascination as “interrogative spectatorship,” an active “looking, probing, detecting.” This is the form of “paranoid fascination” associated with the will to know that cinema apparatus theory critiques. But there is also fascination that takes the form of passive staring: an intimate rather than an invasive being-with the other, on the model of Bellour’s helpless child as spectator.

However, it is only when we place Bersani’s work on cinematic fascination together with his other work, like the texts on Proust, that we begin to understand a little more clearly how he thinks of this opposition: it is not the opposition that matters but its reversibility. The Proustian subject can be said to be the precursor of the cinematic subject because the contradictory forms of cinematic fascination, displayed separately in different films, are present together and reversible in Proust’s novel. We might say that fascination in the Proustian subject is both active and passive. Paranoid fascination, the will to know, takes on a passive form in Marcel. Does this active/passive form surreptitiously reintroduce the distinction between subject and object, which in turn reinforces the subject’s position of mastery over the world? Tuhkanen notes that this is a possible reading, but it is not the whole story. He turns to the clinical work of Michel Thys, which suggests that fascination can be traced to a cleaving of the subject, “at once an adhesion to and a separation from the other”. In other words, it is the split or gap between adhesion and separation that constitutes the subject of fascination in the first place. As constitutive gap, present and absent all at once, it has to remain hidden, secret, and lost, like time in Proust, where the search for lost time is a search that is interminable. Or, it is like the secret of the erotic in Caravaggio as described by Bersani. The viewer of Caravaggio’s paintings “strains to penetrate the secret being simultaneously offered and withheld” (Bersani, Caravaggio’s 66); his paintings flirt with the viewer, promising everything, delivering nothing. This double movement can be “qualified as ‘erotic’ … It is … the movement away that fascinates, indeed that eroticizes the body’s apparent (and deceptive) availability” (Caravaggio’s 3). Or, we might add, it is like Claude Lévi-Strauss in the jungles of Brazil in search of ‘unknown’ tribes. The anthropological dilemma begins when he miraculously stumbles across one: “I had only to succeed in guessing what they were like for them to be deprived of their strangeness … Or if … they retained their strangeness, I could make no use of it, since I was incapable of even grasping what it consisted of” (333). We know his solution to this dilemma: the rejection of phenomenology and the recourse to structuralism as method to bridge the gap. But if the gap is constitutive, success in filling it is always a Pyrrhic victory. La musique savante manque à notre désir.¹

One of Tuhkanen’s best insights in his presentation of Bersani is to show that the two modes of fascination—the epistemophilic desire to know the world and the vertiginous passivity of registering the world—imply, morph into, and have an “intimate, dangerous proximity” to each other. Salò and L’humanité show on analysis to be made up of many anomalous details: they cannot be simply slotted into one category of fascination. This is why cinematic apparatus theory and the ideological critiques associated with it cannot do justice to either film.

Of course, it would be difficult under any circumstance to do justice to Salò, a film that is still banned in some countries, or to Pasolini himself. Pasolini was an atheist obsessed with god. He made one of the best films—amazingly, commissioned by the Vatican—about the life of Jesus Christ. He believed that certitude was the only sin, and that the forbidden and scandalous are signs of saintliness: Gramsci wrote his Notebooks behind prison bars. Yet none of this prepares the viewer for the visceral onslaught of Salò, not even its anti-fascist politics or the use of Dante’s Inferno as structural frame. In fact, the section called “the Circle of Shit” (after Dante) contains some of the most shocking and abhorrent scenes ever filmed. However, what seems like the most virulent form of “interrogative spectatorship” in the history of cinema turns out to have another, more passive side to it. Bersani and Dutoit write: “Pasolini’s most original strategy in Salò is to distance himself from his Sadean protagonists by going along with them … It is as if a fascinated adherence … were, finally, identical to a certain detachment” (“Merde” 30). In this regard, Tuhkanen points out, an important though minor figure in the film is the pianist, an accompanist to the events but not an a ccomplice, a figure at once “enigmatic” (“Merde” 32, 33) and “unsignifying” (“Merde” 34), adherent and detached. Perhaps one final twist can be added to this account. After all the atrocities and moral/sexual violations, the film ends with two ordinary soldiers, two hapless supporters of an oppressive order, dancing with each other, one talking about going back to life “outside,” the other about seeing his girlfriend again; in other words, a return to normality, to things going on as before. Except “normality” is not an escape from disaster: it is what led to the disaster in the first place. Salò ends with a bang, not a whimper.

Like Salò, L’humanité cannot be viewed as a film that simply opposes fascination as a passive registering of the world to a will to know. For one thing, its form is that of film noir, where typically the detective in solving a crime restores order and meaning to the world. However, Pharaon is a detective of a different kind, as the opening scenes and the rest of the film show. Instead of actively working to solve the heinous crime, the rape-murder of an eleven-year-old girl, his attention seems to wander, focusing randomly on apparently trivial details, like the sweat on his superior’s neck. In the course of the film, we learn a fair amount about his affective life: his wife and child have died in an accident; he lives with his not very pleasant mother, and interaction with her consists of avoiding confrontations; he is attracted to his neighbor Domino, but does nothing about it, even when she offers herself to him, except tagging along with her and her macho boyfriend Joseph on outings. However, it is not accurate to say that what we see in Pharaon is affective paralysis or passive staring. What we see rather is affect that does not immediately result in motor action. To cite Deleuze, Pharaon is part of “a new race of characters … kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers” (xi). It is as if something prevented affect and perception “being extended into action in order to put it in contact with thought” (Deleuze 1). When Pharaon does act, it is action that is aberrant and surprising because it follows a different logic. For example, when the child killer is caught—it turns out to be Joseph, Domino’s boyfriend—Pharaon does not berate him, but kisses him on the mouth. This is clearly a repetition of the scene in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov where Christ kisses the murderous Grand Inquisitor on the lips. It also reminds us of Kafka’s Leni in The Trial who “finds most defendants attractive. She’s drawn to all of them, loves all of them” (184). This aberrant action goes together with atleast two others, which viewers might not even notice because they seem so inexplicable. The last shot shows Pharaon in handcuffs. Why? Has he handcuffed himself? Another example occurs a little earlier, the strange scene in the garden where Pharaon seems to levitate, reminiscent of the scene in Pasolini’s Teorema where the maid levitates.

These scenes in L’humanité suggest that cinematic fascination in Dumont is not about seeing or not seeing, or about knowledge or non-knowledge: it is about what we don’t see in what we see. This mode of perception amounts to a radical problematization or desubjectivation of seeing. Tuhkanen explains by citing Foucault on desubjectivation as the ability “to dissolve the ‘I’ into fascination.” One example is Rimbaud’s famous line Je est un autre (“I is an other”). The “error” in grammar desubjectivates by doing violence to the pieties of language that keep subjects and objects in place. Rimbaud’s linguistic violence is paralleled by the shocks administered to the language of film in the movies discussed in this special issue. They show that nothing is more anathema to fascination than grammar and piety. There is no fascination in cinema without the promise of heresy.²

Footnotes

1. The beautiful untranslatable last line of Arthur Rimbaud’s prose-poem “Conte,” from Illuminations. A very clumsy paraphrase might read something like: The music of knowledge cannot gratify our desire.

2. cf. Nietzsche’s line in Twilight of the Idols: “I fear we do not get rid of God, because we still believe in grammar…” (119).

Works Cited

• Barad, Karen. “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns, and Remembers.” New Materialisms: Interviews and Cartographies, edited by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, Michigan Publishing / University of Michigan Library, 2012, quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/–new-materialism-interviewscartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext. Accessed 18 Jul. 2020.
• Bellour, Raymond. Le Corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités. P.O.L., 2009.
• —. Pensées du cinéma: Les Films qu’on accompagne, le cinéma qu’on cherche à ressaisir. P.O.L., 2016.
• Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Caravaggio’s Secrets. MIT P, 1998.
• —. “Merde Alors.” October, vol. 13, Summer 1980, pp. 22-35.
• Blanchot, Maurice. “The Essential Solitude.” Translated by Lydia Davis. The Station Hill.
• Blanchot Reader, edited by George Quasha, Station Hill Press, 1999, pp. 401-415.
• —. “The Song of the Sirens.” Translated by Lydia Davis. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, edited by George Quasha, Station Hill Press, 1999, pp. 443-450.
• —. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1982.
• Calasso, Roberto. The Forty-Nine Steps. Translated by John Shepley, U of Minnesota P, 2001.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, U of Minnesota P, 1989.
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