Carlo Comanducci

Carlo Comanducci
SPECTATOR SH I P
and FILM THEORY
The Wayward Spectator
Spectatorship and Film Theory
Carlo Comanducci
Spectatorship and
Film Theory
The Wayward Spectator
Carlo Comanducci
Vistula University
Warsaw, Poland
ISBN 978-3-319-96742-4 ISBN 978-3-319-96743-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1
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Acknowledgements
A work is made of many people, what may be good in what I have

written goes to them.
In particular, I would like to thank Saverio Zumbo for his amiability
and example. Michele Aaron for everything that came from her teach-
ing. Jan Campbell for her enthusiasm, support and thoughtful supervi-
sion. Everyone at the Café Royale Custine for accepting me as part of
the furniture. Flora Cruces for being there when I was no longer there.
Marina Pensieri, Gian Siano and Antonello Mura for all they taught me
about music: they saved my life a thousand times, and counting. Deidre
Matthee for her poems: they always came at the right moment to remind
me of the pleasure of writing. My father for all the sound advice I never
followed. Giacomo Conti for his friendship and twisted sense of humour.
Valentina Ghio for suggesting that I read all of Pontalis and for insisting
that there are more important things in life than film theory.
To Nic, in memory.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Film Theory, a Divided Passion? 1
2 The Heteronomy of Subjectivity and the Spectator’s

Emancipation 17
3 Everyday Film Theory 45
4 Situatedness and Contingency of Film Experience 73
5 The Process of Free Association and Film as an

Evocative Object 99
6 The Indeterminacy of Embodiment 137
7 The Spectator as a History of Encounters 175
Index 203
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Film Theory, a Divided

Passion?
The One Who Turns Around

“How can you recognize a psychoanalyst in a party crowd? When a
beautiful woman enters the room and everybody is looking at her, he is
the one who turns around to look at everybody else.” There are versions
of this joke about sociologists and psychologists, but it works perfectly
for film theorists as well: the film theorist would be that spectator who,
as soon as the projection begins, turns away from the screen to stare at
the other members of the audience.
Theory, and film theory above all theories, is often conceived at once
as an act of observation and as an act of detachment. Like the psycho-
analyst in the joke, then, the film theorist would seem to be somewhat
removed, or wish to remove itself, from the power of attraction exerted
by the spectacle. So that the desire animating the study of cinema would
appear to come less from the theorist’s own enjoyment of film as a spec-
tator, than from its fascination with the other’s visual pleasure made into
the object of its look. It is sometimes the case with film theorists, indeed,
especially when they deal with spectatorship, that they shift their atten-
tion from the contingencies of their own involvement with film and from
the significance it holds for them, to the visible signs of the involvement
of everybody else. Instead of interrogating its own pleasure in watching,
the theorist would rather look at the way other people make their pleas-
ure visible. Rather than questioning the institutions and the ideological
assumptions that articulate its own practice, the film theorist would be
© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Comanducci, Spectatorship and Film Theory,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_1
2 C. COMANDUCCI
content to address film ideology only as that system of powers and dis-
courses that sets the position of the spectator apart from its own.
“The posture which inaugurates knowledge,” Christian Metz argued
in the first pages of Psychoanalysis and Cinema, “is defined by a backward
turn and by it alone […]”1—knowledge corresponds to the position,
“the posture,” of the one who turns around.
It would be hard to conceive a better scene to illustrate this quintes-
sentially disciplinary understanding of film theory, in which theory is at
the same time imagined as a look and as the gesture by which the film
theorist distinguishes itself from the spectator. The examples Metz gave
of this gesture or posture were those of the anthropologist toward the
native, of the psychoanalyst toward the self-knowledge of its patient, of
the political agent toward the weapons of its adversary.2 Questionable
examples, of course, as is questionable their comparison with film the-
ory. Still, we see how in all these cases knowledge is not simply a matter
of knowing or learning, not even of self-reflexion, but comes from the
appropriation and transformation of forms of knowledge that belong to
somebody else. The film theorist, from within the situation of spectator-
ship, would turn back toward and against the spectator in order to reap-
propriate, and redress, the look by which film experience is created.
There is a threatening element in the gesture of the theorist as Metz
described it: the risk of “relapsing” into the condition of the spectator,
but also the violence of a theory that condemns itself to stand against
what is keeping it alive:
“If the effort of science is constantly threatened by a relapse into the very
thing against which it is constituted,” wrote Metz, “that is because it is
constituted as much in it as against it, and because the two prepositions
are here in some sense synonymous.”3
Existing both in and against the situation of spectatorship, film the-

ory turns out to be for Metz a divided passion. According to him, the
desire of the spectator has to split “into two diverging and reconverging
1 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (London:
Palgrave, 1982), 5.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
1 INTRODUCTION: FILM THEORY, A DIVIDED PASSION? 3
desires, one of which ‘looks’ at the other. This is the theoretical break,”
Metz argued, “and like all breaks it is also a link: that of theory with its
object.”4
So while Metz was affirming the intimate connection between the
look of the spectator and the gaze of the film theorist, he was also affirm-
ing their radical distinction: what made of film theory a science was pre-
cisely what opposed it to spectatorship. For Metz, the analytic study of
film and the film analyst’s characteristic activity corresponded to a mode
of apprehension (visée de conscience) that was unlike that of the specta-
tors who merely go to the cinema to enjoy themselves.5 The theorist
was imagined not just as a knowledgeable viewer, then, or as a spectator
engaging with film in specific ways, but very precisely as somebody else
than a mere spectator.
It was thus on account of its ability to remove itself from the state of
fascination and misrecognition that was seen to characterize spectator-
ship that the theorist was granted the right to speak and theorize about
this state. In Peter Wollen’s grudgingly humorous (and involuntarily
funny) analogy, since serious critical work “must involve a distance, a gap
between the film and the criticism, a text and the meta-text,” the removal
of this gap would be as absurd as a meteorologist being asked, in order to
prove its science, to go walking in the rain.6 In such a scenario, theory is
understood as something else than a form of knowledge and rather as a
way to discriminate between two kinds of look, two kinds of subjects, two
kinds of bodies, and to produce an articulation of the space of film on the
basis of this distinction. Not only film theorists, and theorists in general,
are not supposed to get wet, but theory is made into the guarantee of the
theorist’s separation from the spectacle: “the film analyst,” Metz stated,
“by his very activity places himself […] outside of the institution.”7
The study of film not being quite like weather forecasting, there is a
sense instead in which being one with the dimension of spectatorship
and with the pleasure of the text should be fundamental to the prac-
tice of film theory. We should therefore find no solution of continuity
between the forms of power and knowledge that explain the spectator’s
4 Ibid., 79.
5 Ibid., 138.
6 Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings at the Cinema: Expanded Edition (London: British
Film Institute, 1998), 115.

7 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 138.
4 C. COMANDUCCI
experience and the forms of power and knowledge that articulate the prac-
tice of spectatorship. Theory, I think, is not a gaze cast on a situation from
its outside, but a constitutive part of the situation from its onset, and thus
a critical engagement with the discourses and institutions that regulate
film experience always has to include film theory itself within its scope. On
the other hand, the everyday practice of spectatorship always bears with it
a theoretical dimension. So that the relation between theory and specta-
torship always influences our understanding and practice of both.
As Valerie Walkerdine noted, a disconnection of theory from visual
pleasure within a critical discourse on spectatorship is symptomatic of a
broader disconnection between “the intellectuals” and “the masses”8—a
disconnection that is in turn inextricable from the discipline’s heterosex-
ist and anti-egalitarian biases.
“The crusade to save the masses from the ideology that dupes them,”
argues Walkerdine, “can obscure the real social significance of their pleas-
ures and, at the same time, blind us to the perversity of radical intellectual
pleasures. The alternative is not a populist defence of Hollywood, but a
reassessment of what is involved in watching films.”9
The scene from which we started can thus serve to upset the idea of the-
ory as a form of detachment and to reaffirm the fundamental homology
between the look of the theorist and that of the spectator, thereby coun-
tering the authoritarian assumptions of a disciplinary theory of film. For,
indeed, the gaze of the one who turns back is itself a passionate look
and, conversely, there is no reason why the look of the spectators should
not be taken as a form of knowledge.
The joke that opened the chapter is sexist, of course, because it wants
you to assume that the theorist is a heterosexual male, and because it
frames both the woman as a spectacle and the spectacle as an objecti-
fied woman.10 If we keep with this sexist inflection, we can picture the
theorist of the apparatus as a special kind of voyeur,11 looking at a male
8 Valerie Walkerdine, “Video Replay: Families, Film and Fantasy,” in Formations of
Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London and New York:
Methuen, 1986), 195.
9 Ibid., 196.
10 See Michele Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London: Wallflower, 2007), 25.
11 See Walkerdine, “Video Replay,” 167.

heterosexual spectator who is staring, in turn, at a beautiful woman on

the screen. In this sense, we can see in the joke how the turning around
of the theorist is not a detachment from visual pleasure at all, but actu-
ally a symptomatic negation—that is, a denial that works, in itself, as a
confession. On one hand, indeed, the theorist assumes something about
the other’s desire, while this assumption is in fact the manifestation of its
own desire: theorists would pretend to look at the film only indirectly,
neutrally, as an object of the other’s desire, while in fact they would be
desiring the film in the same way they believe that the other spectators
are desiring it. On the other hand, this turning around which distin-
guishes the theorist from everybody else is the expression of a fantasy
of mastery. More precisely, through the detachment that theory affords,
a pretense of mastery over one’s desire is transformed in a pretense of
intellectual mastery over the other’s desire: I am not taken in by the
spectacle, therefore I can know what others are merely looking at.12
We have evoked here a certain consensual understanding of the rela-
tion between film theory and spectatorship and, more generally, between
theory and knowledge, which is based on a split between the subject
of knowledge and the subject of pleasure and experience, between the
poetic and the philosophical word.13 Against this understanding, the
intention of this book is to explore the ways in which film theory—as an
academic practice, but also as an integral aspect of film experience itself—
can act not as a principle for the distribution of the space of film and for
a disciplinary articulation of the significance and pleasure of film experi-
ence, but as another form and dimension of its sharing. A move beyond
the disciplinary articulation of the space of film, then, entails accepting
to deal with the film theorist first of all as a contingent, embodied and
desiring spectator and, conversely, with the spectator as the fundamen-
tal agent of film theory. From the same Greek root stem both the term
“spectator” and “theory”: theoria would then be nothing more and
nothing less than the practice of the theoros, the spectator.
A critique of the distinction between spectatorship and theory is
always the product of contingent struggles, but never resolves itself
12 “Perhaps the ‘desire to look’,” writes Walkerdine, “belongs with the film theorist and
social or behavioural scientist who disavow their own fantasies into a move into the sym-
bolic, the desire for the mastery of explanation.” Ibid., 171.
13 See Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xvii.

6 C. COMANDUCCI
once and for all in any of those struggles. For this reason—and this is
a deliberate focalization—spectatorship is described in this work as a
tension and as an empty position: empty, that is, never essentially corre-
sponding to any kind of subject or mode of experience, but rather free
to be appropriated by any subject in any situation whatsoever. This is
not meant as a disengagement from concrete political struggle, but on
the contrary as an interrogation of the initial dissensus that characterizes
politics, at least according to the understanding of politics proposed by
Jacques Rancière.
So, for example, while an egalitarian impulse clearly found its first
and most prominent form in film studies with feminist film theory,
I will not discuss sexism or heteronormativity in cinema directly in this
book, but rather focus on a critique of the disciplinary coordinates accord-
ing to which sexist and heterosexist discourses often come to be lodged in
film theory. This is the reason behind my privileging, within the tradition
of feminist film studies and cultural studies, a line that moves away from
the original exposure of the naturalized sexist, racist and classist assump-
tions of the apparatus toward an understanding of film experience as a
scene of fantasy which is not described in terms of metapsychological or
sociological categories, but characterized by a free play of fluid, queer,
positionings.
Perhaps what cinema can do for feminism, queer theory and all other
struggles against norms and discriminations is precisely to show how fan-
tasy plays a constitutional role in the lives of people, while at the same
time being a matter of impermanent and non-essential identifications
that always work across and potentially against recognized identities and
sanctioned social positions. Rather than focusing on identification as an
imaginary alignment with hero or camera, then, one should rather focus
on the moment of cinematic identification as something that disrupts the
subject’s sense of identity and, with it, puts into question the discourses
that set it into place. Fantasizing is an encounter with the potentiality
of being other than what one is, or supposed to be, as well as with the
performative (and thus non-essential) nature of any socially established
identity, starting from the identity of the subject with itself (which is lit-
tle else than the principle of its fundamental subjection).
Against a certain feminist practice that, as Elizabeth Cowie has
argued, has “more often focussed on identification as an issue of con-
tents, and on identity as the effect of identification with a certain content
of image or role,”14 fantasy provides in her work a way to avoid the

production of “fixed and polarized positions” that are characteristic of
patriarchy.15 As an alternative, this perspective makes possible a broader
critique of the heterosexual reproductive regime and, potentially, of the
disciplinary function of sexual difference as such.16
The reassessment of spectatorship discussed by Walkerdine can in the end
be seen to have taken first the form of a somewhat “unilateral”17 feminist
critique of the theory of the cinematic apparatus (of which Mulvey’s “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is the emblematic text), and then that of a
further feminist critique of feminist Film theory, constantly questioning the
reproduction of positions of power through the exercise of academic theory.
Laura Mulvey’s construction of the spectator as a masculine position
was indeed a way to theorize how sexism infiltrates not only the content
but the style of filmmaking and the very functioning of cinema as an ide-
ological apparatus. This theory’s reliance on some of the categories of
normative discourse that it criticized, however, also had the unwanted
effect of reinforcing an idea of spectatorship that in fact reduced the
experience of non-normative subjects within the terms of the discourses
that oppressed them.18 I see this more as a disciplinary limit within film
theory than as a limit of feminist discourse itself.
From this standpoint, we may say that the original feminist break
within the theory of the cinematic apparatus renewed itself, after having
opened up a space where sexist assumptions about mainstream cinema and
the average spectator could be questioned, to further suggest the oppor-
tunity of theorizing spectatorship beyond the binary oppositions that
underscored those assumptions. The discussion of the spectator’s “way-
wardness” in this book is meant as a further contribution in this direction.
14 Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (London:
Macmillan, 1997), 70.

15 Ibid., 164.
16 See ibid., 8.
17 Walkerdine, “Video Replay,” 71.
18 “Mulvey’s revision is important for two reasons: it displaces the notion of the fixity
of the spectator position produced by the text; and it focuses on the gaps and contradic-
tions within patriarchal signification, thus opening up crucial questions of resistance and
diversity. However, the binary mode of sexual difference used still reinforces the some-
what problematic notion that fantasies of action “can only find expression […] through
the metaphor of masculinity.” Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female
Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 2009), 60.
8 C. COMANDUCCI
I think that cinema, all while being wholly discursive and largely a
matter of ideology, is never exclusively an ideological apparatus. Or,
which is to say the same, that the cinematic apparatus not only has ide-
ological elements, but always disciplinary elements as well, that it is
never just an apparatus for the reproduction of a given subject position,
but first of all an apparatus for the normalization of film experience.19
Cinema, in this perspective, remains a stage of discursive power and ide-
ological struggle, but is not condemned to be a scene in which the ideal
subject of power is necessarily reproduced, and is always something more
than a “bachelor machine”20 infallibly sanctioning the fake, particular-
ized, universality of the white heterosexual male.
Generally speaking, I consider the feminist and the egalitarian or
anti-authoritarian critiques of the cinematic apparatus (together with
its discourse and its theory) to be two parallel and mutually reinforcing
lines of struggle against the normalization of spectatorship. Even though
some of the traditional concerns of feminist film theory remain in the
background of this work, then, the critique of disciplinarity and mastery
that it advances is nevertheless meant on one hand to highlight the rad-
ical egalitarian and anti-normative elements of feminist film theory and,
on the other, to propose a critique of identity and disciplinarity within
feminist and queer discourses themselves. More specifically, the discus-
sion of the waywardness of spectatorship in this book constitutes an
attempt to think the actual spectator besides both the rigidly structur-
alist assumptions of the apparatus and the sociological categorizations
that sometimes condition the ways in which critical approaches to spec-
tatorship make sense of culturally and historically situated viewers. If, in
order to move away from the idea of the spectator as a mere effect of
19 Walkerdine suggests that we should connect this disciplinary elements of the cinematic
apparatus with the logic of identity: “modern apparatuses of social regulation, along with
other social and cultural practices, produce knowledges which claim to ‘identify’ individu-
als.” Walkerdine, “Video Replay,” 194. Waywardness would then be the remainder of this
operation of identification or, better, what is incommensurable—because of its heteronomy,
contingency, radical embodiment and dialogic relationality—with the logic of identity.
20 Bachelor machines are defined by Constance Penley as “anthropomorphized”
machines that “represent the relation of the body to the social, the relation of the sexes
to each other, the structure of the psyche, or the workings of history.” Constance Penley,
The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989), 57. For a discussion of the cinematic apparatus as a bachelor
machine see ibid., 58–59.
“textual polarities”21 we fall into a distribution of viewers according to

sociological or metapsychological polarities we are not, I believe, truly
breaking with the logic that connects academic disciplinarity with disci-
plinary power.
In the end, the realization that apparatus theory was never able to
account for the many possible practices that originate from the agency
of emancipated spectators lies, I believe, not in the “abstractness” of the
ideal subject of film that the theory individuated, but rather in the the-
ory’s authoritarian and disciplinary assumptions; not in the employment
of psychoanalytic theory as such, but rather in the reduction of psycho-
analysis to its metapsychology; not in the discursivity of film experience
that the theory of ideology assumed, finally, but rather in a conception of
subjectivity and agency that still presented some elements of consensual
logic and essentialism.
The Consensual Spectator

Within disciplinary regimes of knowledge, power and sexuality, visual
pleasure is construed as a spectacle. Looking at the other looking
becomes thus the dominant metaphor for the discursive regulation of
spectatorship: it is what film producers do as they anticipate and test the
reactions of the audience in order to design profitable films; it is what
film theorists do as they probe the boundaries and define the articula-
tions of the experience of different kinds of spectators or different
modalities of spectatorship; it is what spectators themselves perform as
they relate to film, picturing themselves as spectators, in the primary
identification by which the viewer comes to occupy the position of the
subject of film.
Reified and commodified, but still remaining somewhat inscruta-
ble, visual pleasure is the center around which all practices and fantasies
of cinema as a psychic scene and as a social technology gravitate. The
spectator’s look makes visible a visual pleasure that otherwise remains
a secret: or better, one that is desired in the guise of a mystery. Visual
pleasure is made visible, studied, named and controlled in many ways,
then, through many technologies and discourses—not least, by academic
film theory itself.
21 See Stacey, Star Gazing, 59.

10 C. COMANDUCCI
If visual pleasure is construed as yet another object of a scientia

sexualis,22 that is, as that fundamental dimension of film experience and
visual pleasure that institutions seek to signify, direct, and produce, make
visible, study and name, then academic film theory must be addressed
first of all in terms of a Foucauldian incitation to discourse23: a tentative
to construe, rationalize and control the experience of watching and the
pleasures that come with it, in order to allow not really the repression of
visual pleasure, but rather its regulation and regulated intensification and
extension. In this way, the spectator becomes the object of a discipline at
once in the sense of academic, explanatory and empirical, articulation of
knowledge about spectatorship and in the sense of spectatorship’s social
and discursive (self-)regulation.
Film theory, as a disciplinary gaze, is an integral part of those mecha-
nisms of regulation of film experience that at the same time may consti-
tute the objects of its speculation. The theory explaining the discourse
of the apparatus is in fact integral part of its discourse, and so spectator-
ship is construed at once as the object of a discipline and as a disciplinary
concept. In one and the same gesture, the look of the spectator that is
explained by film theory is supposed to bear the truth of the theory that
interprets it: a theory of the “passive” spectator assumes this passivity to
be an essential characteristic of the look that the theory itself investigates,
instead of something that the theory may be contributing to produce.
In this sense, the passivity of the spectator appears to be a consen-
sual idea and a form of Rancièrian police.24 The conformist and passive
spectator is not a reality that film theory sets out to explain, but first of
all a consensual understanding produced by a disciplinary regulation of
spectatorship in which film theory itself plays a crucial part. This passivity
22 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and “The Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 3.

23 “Incitation to discourse.” See “Incitation au discours” in Michel Foucault, Histoire de
la Sexualité: La Volonté de Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 25.

24 Police, for Rancière, is a “symbolic constitution of the social” in which everything is
accounted for and everybody is assigned to its proper place. Its logic is not the logic of
repression, but that of a distribution which leaves nothing outside and nobody uncharted.
Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 36.
In relation to the spectator, the fundamental action of police is that which reduces spec-
tatorship to what can be made intelligible of it through sociology and textual analysis: the
fundamental passivity of the spectator to ideology and to the text is also what makes the
spectator intelligible to the gaze of the theorist.
is therefore a verité de La Police (a Lapolissian truth, a police-truth), a

normative and self-validating assumption, or a truth that is only true
because it corresponds to and reinforces an existing distribution of the
sensible. The passive spectator is first of all the spectator that conforms to
this consensual definition: the conformist spectator is first and foremost a
consensual spectator.
The “wayward” spectator which gives the title to this book is
imagined as a way to negate this consensual understanding of spec-
tatorship. It is not the spectator that does not correspond to the rul-
ing ideology or dominant discourses, then, but the spectator that,
more fundamentally perhaps, does not correspond to its theory. In
other words, it is the spectator that is not reduced to what can be
made intelligible of it. Its waywardness is first of all a trouble in our
understanding of spectatorship and in the articulation of spectator-
ship and film theory as two connected but essentially distinguished
practices.
The fundamental aim of disciplinary theory is not to repress, but
rather to give form to this waywardness in the existing distribution of the
space of film: the effects of film theory as a discourse have to be located
in the distribution of positions that it produces and in the horizon of
intelligibility that it establishes. As Judith Butler wrote, “the power of
discourse to materialize its effects is thus consonant with the power of
discourse to circumscribe the domain of intelligibility.”25 The way-
ward spectator, therefore, is in some ways a perverse spectator in Janet
Staiger’s sense, for it does not constitute an “essential subversion” of the
cinematographic apparatus but is rather, first of all, the tentative and elu-
sive object of its power.26
There are no wayward spectators, really, but spectatorship is neverthe-
less characterized by a constitutive waywardness. This waywardness is a
trouble in the existing domain of intelligibility27 and, as such, it is also
25 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and
London: Routledge, 1993), 187.

26 See Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York and
London: New York University Press, 2000), 2.

27 Trouble, after Judith Butler, is fundamentally epistemological trouble, a disturbance in
an established regime of perception and understanding. As Butler conceives it, “trouble” is

what happens when the fact that power produces the ostensible categories of ontology is
exposed. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York
and London: Routledge, 1999), xxx.
12 C. COMANDUCCI
a crucial aspect of the spectator’s fundamental emancipation. In turn,

the discursivity of experience, the heteronomy of the subject, the con-
tingency of spectatorship, the free associative character of an extended
dimension of spectatorship and the indeterminacy of embodiment that
are the subject of the various chapters of this book are all different
aspects of the waywardness of the spectator.
Precisely in order to avoid wrongfully suggesting that this wayward-
ness essentially corresponds or can be reduced to any specifically identifi-
able kind of spectator, or form of spectatorship, I have made the difficult
but necessary choice to almost entirely avoid the discussion of film exam-
ples. There is, indeed, no possible representation of spectatorship that
can capture and completely render its waywardness—for any such rep-
resentation would already be an inscription of spectatorship, while
spectatorship in many ways is exactly what transcends (or at least is not
essentially bound to and determined by) this inscription. Waywardness
is not the irrepresentable, then, but very precisely what has no essential
representation.
Although it is always possible to discuss and make use of the wayward-
ness or ungraspability of spectatorship in relation to any specific text (and
the purpose of my argument is precisely to allow for a greater freedom in
the discussion of film experience in all possible situations) it was never-
theless important for me not to suggest to the reader any possible “reifi-
cation” or essentialization of “waywardness” that would have assimilated
it a priori to subversiveness, gender or race alterity, psychoanalytic other-
ness, abjection, queerness, the irrepresentable, unconscious creativity and
so on and so forth.
More specifically, I think that the trope of self-reflexivity in film
(film-within-the-film and thus spectator-within-the-film), which is inev-
itably evoked in film examples that discuss spectators, may constitute
an even older and more entrenched discipline of the spectator’s experi-
ence than academic and Althusserian film theory, so that I strongly feel it
should be reserved for a separate project. I thus opted for a compromise,
which was to find representations of spectatorship that were not seam-
lessly embedded in film.
Choosing two of my three examples from literature, then, had the fur-
ther advantage of not only foregrounding the dialogic dimension of spec-
tatorship—which is one of the main concerns of the book—but also of
showing how film spectatorship is heterogeneous and always connected
with the scene of the reader, of the theater audience and of the subject
of aesthetic experience in general. The examples I chose—a short story

by Luigi Pirandello on the disastrous success of a theater play caused by
an uncontrollable event, a film by David Cronenberg that foregrounds,
through the technology of teleportation, the collapse of the self-identity
of the embodied subject, and a novel by Paul Auster which presents a
compelling scene of dialogic and free associative engagement with film—
all deal in different ways with the reification of the spectator’s wayward-
ness. By trusting the readers with any further extension and appropriation
of the arguments in this book, finally, I hope to be keeping to their spirit.
What a Spectator Is Not

Spectatorship names not only that dimension in which embodied expe-
rience and theory converge, but also that in which the subject’s lack
of mastery over itself and a form of political agency can be thought
together. In this sense, the question of spectatorship is linked to the
question of the heteronomy of the subject: in the next chapter, “The
Heteronomy of Subjectivity and the Spectator’s Emancipation,” the pre-
sumed passivity of spectatorship is reinterpreted in connection with the
idea that who we are depends upon a complex history of encounters and
that agency can only take place in a field of relational dependencies. As
Judith Butler wrote, “the source of personal and political agency comes
not from within the individual, but in and through the complex cultural
exchanges among bodies in which identity itself is ever-shifting.”28 An
understanding of the spectator’s agency and responsibility in terms of
the heteronomy of subjectivity is in turn used to imagine the spectator’s
emancipation beyond a fantasy of self-mastery.
Assuming the fundamental equality of the intelligence and the experi-
ence of film that is performed by all subjects involved with the medium,
the third chapter, “Everyday Film Theory,” suggests that we rethink film
theory as an internal aspect of film experience rather than as its exter-
nal explanation. More specifically, the chapter highlights the negative
role of a pedagogy of emancipation in the theory of the cinematographic
apparatus from the standpoint of Jacques Rancière’s critique of Louis
Althusser and talks about the effects of including the spectator’s free use
of the film text in our understanding of spectatorship.
28 Ibid., 173.
14 C. COMANDUCCI
The fourth chapter addresses the concept of contingency which

underscores both the situatedness and the discursivity of film experi-
ence and the relation between spectatorship and film theory. Taking into
account the singular contingency that makes each and any act of specta-
torship a unique experience, I argue for an understanding of spectator-
ship that is extended beyond the situation of projection and the scene of
film watching to include a scene of dialogue and encounters.
The fifth chapter examines the role of psychoanalytic metapsychology
and the logic of interpretation in the construction of the normative sub-
ject of the cinematographic apparatus and discusses free association and
free floating attention as part of an alternative way of understanding the
relation between psychoanalysis and the arts, foregrounding film as an
evocative object in the sense suggested by Christopher Bollas.
The following chapter is dedicated to the concept of embodiment as
well as to the status of spectatorship and of the spectator’s body after the
phenomenological turn in film theory, seen both as an attempt to break
free from the normativity and the disembodiment of the apparatus and as
a more bodily and non-objectual form of film epistemology. The tensions
between embodiment, contingency and the heteronomy of subjectivity on
one hand and, on the other, an ethics and “aesthetics” of pure presence,
are then examined through a reading of David Cronenberg’s film The Fly.
In the first part of the final chapter, “The Spectator as a History of
Encounters,” I retrace the arguments of the book, moving from a cri-
tique of the allegory of the cave as a model of film spectatorship to Leo
Bersani and Ulysses Dutoit’s ideas of aesthetic illumination and homo-
ness. In the second part of the chapter, I use Paul Auster’s novel Man
in the Dark as an example of the everyday, situated, free associative and
embodied practice of spectatorship and theory, finally defining the spec-
tator as more than one viewer and the viewer as a history of situated
encounters with film.
By addressing the relation between theory and spectatorship and
the way in which a non-authoritarian understanding of this relation
influences in turn our understanding of spectatorship and cinema, The
Wayward Spectator brings together critical theory and Rancière’s theory
of emancipation with some aspects of the English school of psychoanal-
ysis and queer theory in order to affirm the importance of an irresoluble
waywardness in spectatorship and film theory. In this sense, it is its some-
what naive aspiration to make it easier to imagine the spectator for what
it is not.
Bibliography
Aaron, Michele. Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. London and New York:
Wallflower, 2007.
Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and
London: Routledge, 1993.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New
York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. London:
Macmillan, 1997.
Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la Sexualité: La Volonté de Savoir. Paris: Gallimard,
1976.
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.
London: Palgrave, 1982.
Penley, Constance. The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury,
2010.
Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. New
York: Routledge, 2009.
Staiger, Janet. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York and
London: New York University Press, 2000.
Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and “The Frenzy of the Visible.”
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Walkerdine, Valerie. “Video Replay: Families, Film and Fantasy.” In Formations
of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, 167–
199. London and New York: Methuen, 1986.
Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meanings at the Cinema: Expanded Edition. London:
British Film Institute, 1998.
CHAPTER 2
The Heteronomy of Subjectivity

and the Spectator’s Emancipation
Spectatorship is a wide-ranging concept. In its broadness it encompasses

heterogeneous arts and media, various kinds of relations that spectators
entertain with them in dissimilar contexts and different methodological
approaches to their study. Its theoretical function is not to map this het-
erogeneity—to articulate a description of all possible scenarios of spec-
tatorship—but to provide a synthesis, to tie together different aspects of
film experience, and of the discourses that define it, at a specific point:
the spectator. In the context of film studies, spectatorship abstracts, sys-
tematizes, and provides a name to the dynamic of forces that shapes the
ways we experience film and informs its social significance together with
its aesthetic and political dimension.
Spectatorship, however, is also something else than a word and a the-
oretical construct, for it points back to the situation and the psychic state
we are in when we are watching a spectacle—a spectacle which exists not
only as it is projected, or displayed, on a screen, but as part of a scene
made of our desires and pleasures. The forces that define spectatorship
are at once material and involved with fantasy and although the concept
of spectatorship is often used to systematize those forces, film experience
itself can never be grasped entirely.
Spectatorship is always first of all a situated and contingent, embod-
ied individual experience: it encompasses the emotions, the fantasies and
the associations that come from our encounter with particular films, as
well as the accrual of feelings that marks our involvement with the act of
watching. We may be in love with spectatorship itself, indeed, as much

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_2
18 C. COMANDUCCI
as we may be in love with cinema or with particular films. And yet, spec-
tatorship is also an interpersonal experience that only exists insofar as it
is shared with other people and as it extends beyond the moment of the
film’s projection. Spectatorship is structured by the discourses and insti-
tutions in which it is embedded but it is also affected by the way anybody
puts into words, it is reflected in and diffracted by film, it always exists in
other images and other experiences and constantly produces new mean-
ings in the encounters that take place through it.
Spectatorship as a Discursive Practice

In its most restricted sense, film spectatorship can be defined as the rela-
tion between viewer and film: the experience that a viewer has of a film
and the viewer’s understanding of this experience. A theory of spectator-
ship would then be a systematic study of the relations between viewers
and films, of the possible modes of film experiencing, as well as of the
discourses that are employed to make sense of film experience itself.
If the relation between viewer and film is at times reduced to the
physiological, cognitive, and psychological mechanisms of audiovisual
perception, it is nevertheless characteristic of the concept of spectator-
ship that it be addressed as something extending beyond what is proper
of those mechanisms, and to be framed instead as a discursive practice
and a matter of ideology and fantasy. As Judith Mayne argued, spectator-
ship “denotes a preoccupation with the various ways in which responses
to film are constructed by the institutions of cinema and with the con-
texts—psychic as well as cultural—that give those responses particular
meanings.”1 As such, she concludes, “spectatorship is not just the rela-
tionship that occurs (3) between the viewer and the screen, but also and
especially how that relationship lives on once the spectator leaves the
theatre.”2 In other words, the scope of spectatorship relates to the sig-
nificance of the experience of film as it is lived by viewers during and
after the moment of the film’s projection, as well as to the context of dis-
cursive practices and institutions that situate this experience and extend
it in space and time. Spectatorship would then be the practice and the
1 Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1993),
32.
2 Ibid., 2–3.
2 THE HETERONOMY OF SUBJECTIVITY … 19
dimension in which these two aspects of film experiencing—its embodi-

ment and its discursivity—come together and become inseparable.
To this notion of spectatorship corresponds in turn a particular con-
ception of the film image, which addresses images as they are perceived
contingently by embodied and situated spectators, rather than focusing
exclusively on the image which is projected on the screen. From this per-
spective, the film image appears as a textual and experiential construct,
as a tension between the “objective” and material image on the screen
and the embodied, experiential, image created by the spectator. When
we are dealing with film and the film image—in this work at least—we
are dealing with experiences more than with objects, and not simply with
the experience of watching or with the dimension of perception, but
rather with heterogeneous practices whose meaning is articulated across
a plurality of spaces and dimensions. “No image is just perceived,” Victor
Burgin writes, “it is comprehended, interpreted, to an extent invented,
by the individual observer who also invests it with its precise range of
significance for him.”3
We can say that at the origin of contemporary theories of spectator-
ship is the extension of the scope of spectatorship from the description
of the physiological and psychic mechanisms of perception to the study
of the social and discursive dynamics that are seen to inform them. If we
accept this, no such thing as mere film perception, prior to its contingent
discursive construction and embodied experience, can be imagined. The
understanding of perception in the cinema, in fact, much like the under-
standing of the cinematic subject, is largely a function of the broader
dynamics that regulate spectatorship as a social phenomenon and, more
specifically, film as a signifying practice.4 Rather than addressing film per-
ception as a physiological and cognitive process, spectatorship theory
addresses film experience as a material and discursive practice, embodied
and contingently situated, and understands it as a convergence of cin-
ematographic enunciation, cultural discursivity, ideology and personal
significance.
What in many ways was the first and most influential, and what has
now become the paradigmatic, theory of spectatorship—conceived in the
3 Victor Burgin, Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2009), 27.

4 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 37.

20 C. COMANDUCCI
early 1970s at the crossroads of critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis

and semiology—discussed spectatorship in terms of subject positioning:
it made sense of spectatorship, that is, through a particular metapsycho-
logical and ideological characterization of the position of the spectator.
This position was inscribed within, and informed by, what Jean-Louis
Baudry famously called, adapting Louis Althusser’s concept of appareil
idéologique,5 the basic cinematographic apparatus. Spectatorship emerged
as a concept and as a specific area of study, then, in the context of a
rethinking of cinema as an ideological institution which attended to the
reproduction of social relations of production, and of film as an ideolog-
ical object whose meaning was to be analyzed through the instruments
of textual analysis, the critique of ideology and psychoanalytic interpreta-
tion. From the ontology of the image and the quest for cinema’s formal
and aesthetic specificity in relation to the other arts, then, film theory’s
main task became in this perspective the theorization of the ideological
power of film.
The spectator was individuated in turn as the ideological object of
film, interpellated and positioned by textual structures and cinematic
technology. The spectator was not simply imagined as the target of film’s
ideological discourse, in fact, but as the product of the fundamental ide-
ological discourse that subtended the cinematographic apparatus and
cinema as such. As Baudry put it, the ideological function of the basic
cinematic apparatus was, like artificial perspective, expressed primarily
in the construction of the subject as the illusory center and the unitary,
passive, subject of perception.6 The imaginary unity of the subject pro-
duced by the apparatus, further linked to the Lacanian account of the
mirror stage, provided in this way a model of the fundamental misrecog-
nition through which the ideological effects of cinema were explained.
The spectator was conceived as the model of the political subject in a
society dominated by the spectacle, and the formulation of a theory of
spectatorship was thus understood to be coterminous with the critical
analysis of ideology and subjectivity in the context of capitalist society. In
this way, apparatus theory gave (and can still be used to give) a powerful
5 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 144.
6 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film
Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974–1975): 46.

interpretation of film as a consumerist ideological product and of specta-

torship as a conformist practice.
The very interest of film studies in ideological state apparatuses was,
in some respects, a consequence of the Frankfurt School’s main claim
and cornerstone of critical theory: that the relationships of domination in
capitalist society could not be explained as a function of coercion alone.
Critical theory attempted to give reasons for the subject’s active impli-
cation in the functioning and in the re-creation of the institutions that
oppressed it. Cinema, in this regard, provided the perfect case of a cul-
tural apparatus, one that operated predominantly by means of ideology:
cinema, indeed, does not reproduce existing social conditions through
intimidation and repression but nevertheless exerts a major ideological
influence by regulating and expanding the fantasies of the audience and
by capitalizing on, commodifying, and directing their enjoyment.
Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle drew an explicit parallel between
the commodity form and the spectacle.7 For him, the spectacle was both
an element of reification and commodification (for both reification and
commodification entail a mediation through the image) and a new phase
in the history of capitalism in which the image became absolutely cen-
tral to the understanding of social relations. Almost entirely passive, will-
ingly and happily, the spectator was taken as the model of the conformist
consumer and the alienated social actor, as the manageable body and the
pacified subject of liberal democracy. Beyond film spectatorship, then,
spectatorship in the sense of the condition of the subject in the society
of the spectacle appeared to be the defining form of subjection in late
modernity.
When Slavoj Žižek, discussing the Marxist notion of commodity fet-
ishism, argues for the fantasmatic character of the commodity, film
appears indeed to be a very appropriate example.8 As Žižek reminds
us, Karl Marx had a complex and almost quizzical understanding of the
7 “The fetishism of the commodity—the domination of society by ‘intangible as well as
tangible things’—attains its ultimate fulfilment in the spectacle, where the real world is
replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time
succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality.” Guy Debord, Society of
the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 2005), 17.
8 See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 27–28. Also see
Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek, Talk at Princeton University, May 5, 2005, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=LBvASueefk4.
22 C. COMANDUCCI
commodity: hardly the no-nonsense category that it may appear to be,

a commodity would rather be “a very queer thing, abounding in meta-
physical subtleties and theological niceties.”9 In this sense, commodities
would not be defined entirely, nor essentially, by their use value. On the
contrary, Žižek comments, their value ultimately rests on the ideologi-
cal fantasy that dictates our relation to them10: in other words, there is
no reality to the commodity beyond the ideological fantasy that illumi-
nates it as such. In this sense, we could say that every commodity funda-
mentally functions like a film, acquiring value largely through its power
over fantasy. Today, this insight into the special proximity of fantasy and
mediation is ever more relevant: not only the relation between ideology
and fantasy constitutes a fundamental frame for the understanding of the
spectacle, but the spectacle constitutes a more and more fundamental
element in our understanding of ideology and fantasy in the first place.
Where sociological approaches to the study of spectatorship probe and
systematize viewer responses, Althusserian film theory11 was concerned
more with the spectator as an imaginary position, than with the view-
ers materially present at the film’s projection. The Althusserian theory
of ideology marked a break from a sociological interest in the audience
as well as from a psychological interest in the viewer, shifting toward a
metapsychology of the spectator and a political economy of film pleasure.
In this sense, Judith Mayne can write that the distinction of the cine-
matic subject from the viewer has been the fundamental insight of 1970s
film theory.12 To put it differently, we can say that the main accomplish-
ment of this moment in film theory has been precisely that of making
film experience conceivable in terms of spectatorship, understanding the
9 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1995–1996), 46.

10 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 29–30.
11 I am aware that, talking about, “Althusserian film theory” I am making a broad gener-
alization. Nevertheless, three combined assumptions can allow us to define, in this generic
sense, an Althusserian approach to spectatorship (especially in relation to the problem of
intellectual authority): first, the negation of the primacy of the spectator’s emancipation
(emancipation is always “to come”); second, the idea that film signification rests essen-
tially in the creation of an illusory impression of reality; and, third, a specific connection
between ideology and psychoanalytic metapsychology that conflates psychic repression
(Verdrängung) with social repression and thus reads the problem of the unconscious and of
the speaking subject too simply in terms of demystification and subversion.
12 Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 33.
viewer as a spectator, at the same time foregrounding the political and

ideological dimensions of cinema and film experience.
Now, a focus on the subject of film over the viewer can be taken to
be a strategic, disciplinary, negation of the more situated and embod-
ied agency that spectators have. This negation spurred what is probably
the most consistent and widely shared line of criticism against appara-
tus theory: that it cannot account for the “real” spectator—that is, for
either the cultural contingency of spectatorial practices or for the degrees
of freedom that viewers are regularly able to perform. Conversely, how-
ever, an excessive focus on the viewer may be criticized because it down-
plays the discursive and ideological dimension of spectatorship. Despite
the valid criticism, then, apparatus theory can never be completely disre-
garded, unless one wishes at the same time to disregard the ideological
implications of film theory and the political dimension of spectatorship
as such. I think that a way out of this deadlock requires a more radi-
cal engagement with some of apparatus theory’s key insights, together
with a critique of its disciplinary foundations, beginning with the politi-
cal dimension of spectatorship and the problem of the spectator’s agency.
The cinematic subject of apparatus theory was constructed according
to practices and discourses—on spectatorship itself, and, more generally,
on perception and subjectivity—that clearly had a longer history, and a
broader scope, than those of cinema, psychoanalysis, and film theory on
their own. Baudry’s reference to Renaissance perspective to describe the
normative mechanisms that regulate cinematic perception and attend to
the formation of the cinematic subject was, in some respects, part of the
critique of the rationalist subject of Enlightenment and of the presumed
neutrality of optical technologies and, consequently, of bourgeois philos-
ophy and capitalist ideology.13 And yet, although on one hand, the his-
tory of film spectatorship could be made to coincide with the birth of
cinema and, on the other, the historical development of the discourses
and institutions that frame spectatorship in general could be seen to date
back to ancient theater and to the first philosophical discussions on sub-
jectivity and political action, as a theoretical concept in film studies spec-
tatorship has of course a shorter history and a tighter focus.
One could say that spectatorship, in its current conception, was born
at the moment in which film, from being a social technology among
13 Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 40.

24 C. COMANDUCCI
others, was also starting to be understood as a technology of the social.

In other words, film was taken not only to advance particular ideologi-
cal positions within a given society, but, precisely through the concept of
spectatorship, also to inform the ways in which the social space itself was
conceived.14 From that moment, spectatorship was foregrounded both
as a necessarily political dimension and as a key element in the network
of power, knowledge and sexuality that structured a particular idea of
society.
If, in more traditional film criticism, film was taken as a reflection
of a given social reality,15 from the more dynamic, dialectical, perspec-
tive offered by critical theory and Althusserian film studies, cinema was
studied instead as an active part of the historical, ideological and psychic
forces that concurred to shape the social reality in which cinema itself
existed. As such, apparatus theory configured itself more (at least, more
than other academic theories of film) as an active intervention in the
contemporary aesthetics of cinema, in the politics of spectatorship and,
ultimately, in political action as such, than solely as an academic recon-
struction of the medium’s historical, aesthetic, or technical specificities.
From this perspective, the concept of spectatorship calls for an essen-
tially political definition. Political in the sense that it has to do with insti-
tutions and power relations, and with our ways of understanding them,
as well as in the broader sense that it has to do with dialogue, subjective
encounters and contingent social struggles. The relation between these
two aspects of the political dimension of spectatorship is an important
question in film studies. More concretely, their connection is the the-
oretical field of action of those film theorists who accompanied their
academic activity with more direct forms of political engagement: the
realities of the struggles they were involved in or that they supported—
from class struggle and the opposition to authority to feminist and queer
movements, from the fight for racial equality to the resistance against
colonialism and so on—were, and still are, an essential part of specta-
torship theories, without which a significant dimension of their meaning
would be lost.
14 See Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 5.

15 Ibid., 32.
The Ideological Unconscious and the Heteronomous

Subject
The understanding of film as a social and political phenomenon, on one
hand, and, on the other, a practice of theory that was at the same time
meant to bring about political emancipation, were the premises for the
elaboration (for the necessity, really) of a comprehensive theory of spec-
tatorship that linked cinematic modes of production and a semiological
understanding of film signification to the dimensions of ideology and
fantasy.
Or, one should rather say dimension, in the singular, for it was indeed
characteristic of 1970s film theory to conflate these two domains: appa-
ratus theory found a precise correspondence—in Metz’s wording, a
“dual kinship”—between the libidinal economy of the spectator’s meta-
psychology and the political economy of cinematographic production.16
This was not just a way to address cinema’s evident affinity with imagi-
nation and to provide a sophisticated account of the psychology of film
experience, but also, it seems to me, one of the ways of establishing the
authority of film theory and, more specifically, to further the alliance of
Althusserianism and film semiology. By folding Freud’s psychic appara-
tus onto Althusser’s ideological apparatus, in fact by reading the former
largely as an internalization of the latter’s structures, film theorists took a
strong hold of the psyche in sociopolitical and semiological terms.
This idea of internalization was another trait that film studies had
inherited from critical theory. As Horkheimer had written in 1937,
the whole psychic apparatus of members of a class society, insofar as they

do not belong to the nucleus of privileged people, serves in large meas-
ure only to interiorize or at least to rationalize and supplement physical
coercion.17
Notable in this passage is also the exemption of the psyche of the “priv-
ileged” from social determination, as it is a first index of apparatus the-
ory’s tendentially anti-egalitarian positions: both psychic internalization
16 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Film: The Imaginary Signifier (London: Macmillan,
1982), 8.
17 Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New
York: Continuum, 2003), 56.

26 C. COMANDUCCI
and subjection to ideology, insofar as they were made into objects of crit-
ical analysis, were definitely posited as features of the passive masses.
Years later, the Althusserian notion of interpellation, and after that the
notion of cinematic identification, originated precisely from the theo-
retical move that combined social and psychic repression, joining what
subjects were supposed to ignore about the mechanisms of their oppres-
sion to what they could not know about their own desire and about their
own situation and history as subjects. Film theory in this way described
spectatorship very precisely as a lack of knowledge and mastery, giving to
this lack of mastery the connotation of an illusion and of a radical dispos-
session. At the same time, this lack was not represented in terms of mere
deception (ideology as a lie), but rather as a deception which satisfied
and, more importantly, articulated, the spectator’s own desires (ideology,
precisely, as a matter of fantasy and the construction of an imaginary sub-
ject position).
Characteristic of this passage through psychoanalysis, then, was to
put the ideological dimension of film spectatorship beyond the grasp of
the spectator’s conscious agency,18 at the same time granting the theo-
rist authority over it. The general assumption was that the ideological
impact of cinematic institutions was greater, when its effects were not
consciously acknowledged by the viewers.19 This assumption clearly
relies on a paternalistic, pedagogical or more generically authoritarian
understanding of the relation between knowledge and the unconscious,
between the subject of theory and the spectator: the critical awareness
of the theorist is predicated upon the spectator’s lack of awareness, the
former’s pretense of mastery rests upon the lack of mastery of the latter.
By identifying the ideological effect with the lack of conscious awareness
of the spectator, apparatus theory did not just make the dimension of
the unconscious more intelligible, but negated any form of agency con-
nected with it and, in the same gesture, also an important aspect of the
agency and emancipation of spectators.
The Althusserian scene of interpellation onto which this understand-
ing of spectatorship was, in part, based affirmed the discursivity of the
spectator’s position only after having pronounced the primacy of the
subject of power over the subject of experience. The whole regime of

19 Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 40–41.
understanding of subjectivity expressed by Althusser’s theory of inter-

pellation does not only assume the responsivity, or vulnerability, of the
subject to the Law, but involves, I think, an additional authoritarian
“blackmail”: this theory is built upon an understanding of subjectivity
that subordinates the very existence of the subject to its intelligibility, to
its discursive and social sanction, and thus posits subjectivation essentially
as an act of subjection. In Judith Butler’s words, “if the terms by which
we gain social recognition for ourselves are those by which we are regu-
lated and gain social existence, then to affirm one’s existence is to capitu-
late to one’s subordination.”20
Against this understanding, the question of subjectivation/ emanci-
pation becomes not really the question of opposing the agency of the
subject to its discursive construction but rather the question of an agency
that is opposed to its sanction. “One inhabits the figure of autonomy
only by being subjected to a power,” Butler argues, and this implies
“a radical dependency.”21 But there is no need to interpret this radical
dependency as a radical form of submission. What we call independence,
indeed, “is always established through a set of formative relations”22 that
are surely relations of power, but not necessarily and never entirely rela-
tions of authoritarian sanction or disciplinary regulation.
“On the one hand,” writes Butler, “the problematic of life binds us to
others in ways that turn out to be constitutive of who each of us singly
is. On the other hand, that singularity is never fully subsumed by that
vexed form of sociality.”23 So, to the kind of autonomy that can only be
obtained through a gesture of submission we can oppose a heteronomy,
a condition of relational dependency in which a certain vulnerability as
well as a certain freedom are expressed. We are formed and changed by
everything that we encounter and this is both binding and liberating,
precisely because neither our attachments nor our disattachments are
ever totalizing.
Heteronomy implies a deconstruction of the idea that agency is the
expression of a self-possessed subject and can thus be used to map the
20 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford

21 Ibid., 83.
22 Ibid., 11.
23 Ibid., 67.
28 C. COMANDUCCI
relation of psychoanalysis to the fields of ideology and the arts in a

non-authoritarian way. The concept of heteronomy understands agency
as something paradoxical: heteronomy is not an agency with which
the subject is endowed, but an agency of the subject that comes from
where the subject is not. This paradox is not just a psychoanalytic par-
adox—heteronomy as the agency of the unconscious subject—but a
political paradox as well: heteronomy is the condition of an agency that
springs from a conflict over what counts as a subject and over what
counts as a free act.
From this perspective, we can say that Althusserian interpellation does
not really address the scene of subject formation, but rather that of the
formation of identity, as a self-consciousness prompted by a response
to the law and as a recognition of the subject which is made to coin-
cide with its acceptance of subordination. The “Althusserian” spectator,
therefore, should be seen first of all as a subject of power, as that position
within the cinematographic apparatus that not only accepts and confirms
the power of existing institutions but that also supports, by its very intel-
ligibility and through the articulation of its experience in terms of iden-
tity, the disciplinary power of film theory.
On the contrary, we should see the agency of the spectator and of
the aesthetic subject more generally (better, the agency of the subject in
the aesthetic regime) to be intimately connected with the heteronomy
of the subject. For Schiller, Jacques Rancière writes, the dismissal of a
certain autonomy is a requisite of aesthetic experience.24 The particular
kind of autonomy that the aesthetic subject has is “not the autonomy of
free Reason, subduing the anarchy of sensation. It is the suspension of
that kind of autonomy. It is an autonomy strictly related to a withdrawal
of power.”25 Heteronomy constitutes, by the same token, a relational
and anarchic understanding of agency, and an aesthetic understanding of
agency. At stake in the shift in perception which is the aesthetic regime of
art, Rancière has stated, is “the idea of autonomy insofar as it is linked to
that of heteronomy.”26
24 Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 116–117.

25 Ibid., 117.
26 Ibid., 118.
The Future of Disillusion: Emancipation as a Knowledge

Effect
The Althusserian conception of the relation between unconscious and
ideology influences the understanding of the relation between knowl-
edge and experience that subtends the concept and the practice of theory
and, in turn, the idea of emancipation.
In apparatus theory, both spectatorial agency and the authority of the
critical theorist were generally imagined as an act of disentanglement
from the apparatus, involving a demystification of the discourses that
informed it and a shattering of the positions it defined. Yet, quite par-
adoxically, this act could only be performed from a position that was in
fact already external to the apparatus itself. While the theory’s emanci-
patory goals presupposed that real spectators and political subjects could
assume this external position, the spectator as the subject of film, by defi-
nition, could not: its emancipation was either bound to come from an
external agency, or to be realized in self-effacement. In any case, either
through increased participation, intellectual advancement, or critical
detachment, the position of the spectator was attacked and was meant to
be relinquished.
If we accept that power and knowledge are coextensive, instead, we
have to renounce to the idea that knowledge is intrinsically emancipatory
or redemptive: every relation of knowledge inevitably configures a rela-
tion of power—in our case, not only the relation between the viewer and
the cinematic apparatus, but also the relation between the spectator and
the film theorist. The issue of the spectator’s emancipation becomes then
not just a matter of enlightenment, but has to pass through an analysis of
the very discourse and institutions of emancipation itself.27
In the theory of the cinematographic apparatus, the possibility of the
spectator’s emancipation from the apparatus was predicated on a “knowl-
edge effect,”28 external and opposed to that of ideology. This knowl-
edge, in the end, could only be possessed and professed by the apparatus
theorist, acting as the subject who is supposed to know about the cine-
matographic situation for what it really is. The knowledge effect, then,
no less than the ideological one, presupposes and supports a fantasmatic
27 See Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and

28 Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 41.
30 C. COMANDUCCI
position of authority incarnated by the theorist, that not only rests upon
but reproduces the spectator’s intellectual inequality and thus confirms its
passivity in relation to the power of the apparatus.
In his work, Rancière puts forward a stark critique of this kind of
logic, which, for him, is nothing less than an intellectual imposture (in
fact, we could say, it is the quintessential imposture of the “intellectual”
as a persona and of a pedagogy of emancipation in general). In the fol-
lowing passage of The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière links the power
of ideology with the power effects of its demystification, criticizing the
standard Althusserian theory of ideology together with its potential
reversals:
Forty years ago critical science made us laugh at the imbeciles who took
images for realities and let themselves be seduced by their hidden mes-
sages. In the interim, the ‘imbeciles’ have been educated in the art of
recognizing the reality behind appearances and the messages concealed
in images. And now, naturally enough, recycled critical science makes us
smile at the imbeciles who still think such things as concealed messages
in images and a reality distinct from appearances exist. The machine can
work in this way until the end of time, capitalizing on the impotence of
the critique that unveils the impotence of the imbecile. […] To escape the
circle is to start from different presuppositions, assumptions that are cer-
tainly unreasonable from the perspective of our oligarchic societies and the
so-called critical logic that is its double. Thus, it would be assumed that
the incapable are capable; that there is no hidden secret of the machine
that keeps them trapped in their place.29
From this point of view, both the ideological regime that assumes (or,
which is to say the same thing, enforces) the spectator’s passivity, and the
regime that announces (or, which is to say the same thing, appropriates)
the spectator’s activity equally constitute a form of stultification (abru-
tissement), because they both negate the fundamental emancipation and
independent agency of spectatorship. What both facets of this regime of
understanding affirm, in fact, is the spectator’s intellectual inequality and
dispossession, its lack of awareness and true knowledge.
Not only spectators always already have their own forms of agency
and understanding, and do not need to receive them from the outside,
Rancière argues, but, more fundamentally, one should regard the very
29 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London, New York: Verso, 2009), 48.
dualistic oppositions of knowing and seeing, reality and appearance,

activity and passivity, that underscore authoritarian understandings of
spectatorship as “incarnated allegories of inequality.”30 Whenever knowl-
edge acts as a principle of distinction and distribution of roles, we could
say, it is no longer knowledge but, on the contrary, already a form of
stultification.
Let me try to make this point less clear, momentarily, by address-
ing the problem of ideology and knowledge from another angle. When
Slavoj Žižek, in order to explain the work of ideology, returns to Marx’s
dictum—“they don’t know it, but they’re doing it”—he asks himself
where is ideology expressed: at the level of knowledge, or at that of
action?31 In other words, is ideology neutralized as its effects become
conscious and is emancipation then really an effect of knowledge? Or is
ideology active at the level of practice and reality, embedded, as it were,
in things themselves?
The point, Žižek writes arguing for the second option, is not that peo-
ple have a false representation of their social reality, as Althusser presumed,
but that, even as they know that their relation to reality is mediated by
imaginary representations, they still act as if what they imagine were real.32
The illusion is not on the side of knowledge,” Žižek explains, “it is already
on the (30) side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they
do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an
illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecog-
nize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality,
their real social activity.33
What this means, among other things, is that our knowledge of things
“as they really are,” is much less effective than the ideological fantasy
that animates them. In the end, from Žižek’s perspective, the formula
to describe the workings of ideology becomes one that traverses (cyni-
cism), or simply bypasses (disavowal), the dimension of knowledge: after
30 Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur Émancipé (Paris: Fabrique, 2008), 18. Translation
mine. Gregory Elliott translates this expression as “embodied allegories of inequality.” Cfr.
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 12.
31 Žižek, The Sublime Object, 27.
32 Ibid., 28.
33 Ibid., 29–30.
32 C. COMANDUCCI
Octave Mannoni’s “je sais bien, mais quand même,”34 Žižek’s subjects
of ideology “know that they’re doing it, but they are doing it all the
same.”35 Telling “them” what they are really doing, as the Althusserian
theorist would try to do, would not sabotage the ideological machine:
on the contrary, it is precisely what drives it on.
The irony is, then, that the Althusserian knowledge effect becomes
effective only insofar as knowledge is already working like an ideology.
Capital “K” knowledge itself—the knowledge that is supposed to be the
knowledge of things as they actually are—can exist, in fact, only insofar
as it always already driven by a fantasy of intellectual mastery.
This, I believe, has very significant consequences on the way critical
theory should be conceived and performed. Rather than being imagined
as an effect of critical knowledge and demystification—as an action of
theory on experience, so to speak—emancipation must take the form of
a rupture within the fields of knowledge and theory themselves. A distri-
bution of roles between the critic of ideology and the subject of ideol-
ogy, between the philosopher and the ordinary subject, between the film
theorist and the spectator, is already a product of ideology and part of a
disciplinary regime.
Freud’s Horse
All in all, knowledge can be seen to have as little impact on the domain
of ideology as it has rein on the work of psyche. Like in Freud’s meta-
phor of the horse and the rider, through which he sought to explain the
relation of the ego to the id, often the rational subject has to boldly go
where the irrational sends it:
The ego’s relation to the id might be compared with that of a rider to

his horse. The horse supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has
the privilege of deciding on the goal and of guiding the powerful animal’s
movement. But only too often there arises between the ego and the id the
not precisely ideal situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse
along the path by which it itself wants to go.36
34 Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’Imaginaire: Ou, l’Autre Scène (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 12.
35 SeeŽižek, The Sublime Object, 30.
36 Sigmund Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis,” in Freud: Complete
Works, ed. Ivan Smith (2000 [1933]), 4685.

The ego “guides” the id where the id wants to go: figuratively speaking,
the id needs to use the experiential and psychic structures of the ego in
order to relate to reality, and at the same time the ego, “only too often,”
has to pretend, precisely in order to perform its function, that it has a
power of choice. There is no easy separation between the ego and the id,
in this sense, and no direct equation between the rider and the rational
subject, for the ego is not the self. Nevertheless, the metaphor implies
the existence of two separate agents and, more importantly, suggests two
different kinds of agency beyond the agency of the classical subject.
On one hand, we see a kind of agency that consists in acknowledging
and giving in to its very lack. The rider says: “since I am going where the
horse wants, I might as well go that way.” It is not, as it might seem, a
cynical or desperate choice of not choosing (“the horse is going where it
wants, there is nothing I can do”) nor a disavowal of the horse’s agency
(“it’s me, not the horse, who wants to go that way”), but rather a free
choice that at the same time recognizes not being entirely the product of
free will. It is an agency that comes to the subject from where the subject
is not, but that the subject nevertheless accepts as its own choice, at the
same time assuming responsibility for it. While the first two “choices”
still entail the idea that there is a subject distinct from the horse, and an
agent subject distinct from a position of passivity, the last does not make
these distinctions. “Since I am going where the horse wants,” the psy-
choanalytic subject says, “I might as well be the horse.”
On the other hand, we see how the horse, from being a mere repos-
itory of energy, suddenly manifests an independent agency. Or, better,
we see how an agency makes itself manifest where none was supposed to
exist. Despite psychoanalysis’s constant effort to reduce it to intelligibil-
ity and thus to make it more tractable, what Freud was describing was an
idea of agency as an irreducible tension between the conscious and the
unconscious subject. The idea of agency developed by psychoanalysis is
radically incommensurable with a classic idea of agency as the deliber-
ate action of a self-willed subject: in this sense, we cannot interpret the
unconscious as an “other” agency either, but we are rather led to under-
stand agency as something else than the expression of a single, autono-
mous subject. Agency corresponds to the heteronomy of the subject and
can only exist because of this heteronomy.
The place of this agency cannot be clearly located “inside” or “out-
side” the subject, for it actually traverses the subject and makes it other
to itself. Heteronomy is as much intrapsychic as it is interpersonal and
34 C. COMANDUCCI
it is as much a psychic category as it is a discursive one: in fact, it brings

these very domains together and prevents them to be clearly distin-
guished. As the metaphor of the horse and the rider makes clear, het-
eronomy does not mean the subjection of the subject to an external
authority. Heteronomy does not individuate a scenario of mastery, either,
and as much as it troubles the articulation of the subject’s mastery over
itself, it troubles the idea of its complete subjection to any figure of
authority, system of institutions or disciplinary regime. Heteronomy does
not mean the existence of an external and intelligible agency more pow-
erful than the subject and thus able to control it, nor does it suggest that
the id is such an agency, an unconscious agency “within” the subject. To
put it in more Lacanian terms, the heteronomy of the subject is not the
subject’s lack of mastery, but a lack in every form of mastery: as much as
there is no autonomous subject, there is no big other pulling the strings
of the horse, and no big horse as well.
An agency that is incommensurable to the intelligible rationality of
the subject master of itself disturbs the understanding of subjectivity
that was articulated in terms of this rationality. By manifesting itself as an
agency, what appeared to be the mere “locomotive energy” of the horse
disrupts the autonomy of the subject and the understanding of agency
and responsibility that was defined in terms of it. In other words, by
manifesting itself as an agency, what appeared to be the pure passivity
and instrumentality of the subject disrupts the existing regime of agency
and responsibility, together with the particular distribution of the parts
constructed upon these principles. The heteronomy of the subject could
thus be seen in some respects to correspond to a Rancièrian conception
of political subjectivation.
We can conceive heteronomy as a form of relational dependency with-
out domination. And there is a sense in which heteronomy, thus under-
stood, is a fundamental condition of the subject’s freedom as well as an
important element within the scene of spectatorship. As much as the idea
of heteronomy suggests that we are never entirely “free” from discursive
and ideological power, it suggests that we are not free only in the meas-
ure that we are not influenced by external causes. In this sense, agency
can never be “owned”, nor truly dispossessed, for it is rather a dimen-
sion that traverses the subject, disturbing the articulation of its identity
and sense of self: agency takes place at once in the form of dissensus and
of self-shattering. It is only within the dimension of ideology, then, (of
discourse and desire, pleasure and signification, as they are inseparably
linked together) and only due to its discursivity and heteronomy that the
agency of the emancipated spectator can exist. So that, eventually, the
problem of film ideology should not be seen to end with the spectator’s
emancipation, but rather to begin with it.
The fact that one cannot distinguish between the dimension in which
agency takes place and that of ideology and discursive power can be
addressed more clearly, perhaps, in Foucauldian terms. A Foucauldian
idea of power, indeed, can be used to place the dynamics of ideology and
emancipation beyond their reduction to a knowledge effect or a fantasy
of mastery, at the same time addressing the pervasiveness and the decen-
tralization of discursive power.37 If power is not primarily an instance of
repression, but a creative expression of social technologies and discur-
sive practices, we are not allowed to distinguish clearly where ideological
determination ends and free will begins, so to speak, nor to tell real and
imaginary relations unambiguously apart. The idea of disciplinary power
can then make more evident that the issue of film ideology is not just a
question of mystification and demystification but more broadly one of
the politics of pleasure and desire.
The idea of autonomous agency implies that agency is active and
whole (that it expresses itself through action and that it completely
encompasses the scope of an action), and that the subject is capable of
making, on its own, an informed and uncoerced decision. Instead, we
know from critical theory that no action is completely unconditioned
and, from psychoanalysis, that the very knowledge of our own motives
is fundamentally and irremediably compromised. The autonomous sub-
ject is judged in terms of what it does, and its responsibility begins and
ends with its full responsibility over its actions. As such, a conception of
politics that rests on the idea of free will is tendentially unable to account
for a vaster domain of responsibility, one that cannot be reduced to the
direct accountability of human actions. On the contrary, the heterono-
mous subject is never entirely active nor passive, never entirely respon-
sible for its actions, nor completely irresponsible from the unwilled
consequences of its being in the world. In other words, the subject psy-
choanalysis has posited is not autonomous, unitary, rational and self-suf-
ficient, but at the same time it is still agent and responsible—agent of
37 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 85–86.

36 C. COMANDUCCI
an agency that is radically incommensurable to its intelligible articulation

and thus responsible for something more than its actions.
An idea of ethics and politics that depends entirely on free will reduces
the much vaster domain of responsibility of the subject to a particular
regime of its visibility—that of the accountability of its deeds. In this
regime, what escapes accountability—not just in the sense of a crime that
is recognized as such but not pursued, but more importantly in the sense
of a wrong whose nature is such that it is not, or cannot be, accounted
for by the law of the State—also escapes responsibility. To put it simply:
stealing an apple is an accountable deed, while being part of a social sys-
tem in which people die of starvation is not. The particular configuration
of power that defines the autonomous subject, in turn, also corresponds
to a particular regime of the regulation of social injustice: not just the
regime that punishes the apple thief but not the exploiter or the uncon-
cerned member of society, but also and above all the regime that has the
power to interpret social categories—the regime that only sees theft in
shoplifting, that can only recognize exploitation and social injustice in
starving masses, as well as the regime which defines that the “proper”
response to starvation is stealing apples and not, say, Apple computers.
This regime, in the end, is the one that defends property over freedom,
and that values freedom, intelligence, equality and emancipation only
insofar as they are construed as something that can be owned.
To equate freedom with autonomy and subjectivity with free will is
characteristic of the position of a subject who identifies its subjectivity
with a mastery over the self. Both the idea of an unconditioned sub-
ject and that of a completely determined one, in fact, correspond to an
essentially authoritarian fantasy of mastery, to a scenario of mastering
and being mastered in which ignorance is conceived as a lack that can be
inflicted and repaired.
The Heteronomous Subject and the Power of Looking on

The spectator is the epitome of the subject who is not accountable for
what happens in front of its eyes, while still being responsible toward
what it sees. An authoritarian regime of understanding identifies the
passivity of the spectator with its want of awareness and emancipation—
assuming, as Rancière (through Debord) synthesized this position,
that the more the spectator contemplates, the less she is.38 One should
instead reverse the logic and assume that, in fact, the spectator’s “pas-
sive” looking on already constitutes a form of agency.
In her Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On, Michele Aaron sug-
gests to link the recognition of an agency in the passivity of the apparatic
spectator with spectatorship’s ethical dimension, through a connection
between spectatorship and masochism. While, we could say, sadism
entails the questionable ability to relate to reality (and in particular to the
reality of the other’s pain) as we relate to a spectacle, film spectatorship,
Aaron argues, presents a masochistic character.39 Defining masochism as
a pleasure in unpleasure, as an agent desire played out through passiv-
ity,40 and as a state of troubling expectation face to a fantasy of impend-
ing pain,41 Aaron reinterprets the whole economy of pleasure that
sustains the cinematographic apparatus, at the same time moving beyond
apparatus theory’s disingenuous binarism of activity and passivity, sexual-
ity and gender, and confronting the spectator with the responsibility that
comes with its desiring agency and fundamental emancipation.
Spectatorship in the cinematographic apparatus can thus be seen to
involve a masochistic contract42 in which the spectator agrees to relin-
quish its mobility and active imagination in exchange for the film’s pro-
ficient domination of its embodied fantasy. Spectatorship’s presumed
lack of agency is thus exposed as some kind of performance: the position
of the spectator signifies and eroticizes a lack of activity and independ-
ence, but in fact loses nothing of its agency and of the responsibility that
comes with it. In this way, spectatorship’s ideological dimension becomes
not merely a matter of the institutional manufacture of consent but,
jointly, of the spectator’s complicity in it.43 “Consent,” Aaron argues,
38 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 16. “The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces
the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: the
more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of
need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires.”
39 Michele Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London and New York:
Wallflower, 2007), 52.

40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 60.
42 Ibid., 90.
43 Ibid., 89.
38 C. COMANDUCCI
“is the disavowed but crucial element” in the fulfilment of the fantasy of
being mastered that defines a masochistic model of spectatorship.44
As apparatus theory saw it, to the film spectator is offered the illusion
of autonomy, and what it gets instead is an absolute passivity to cinema’s
ideological effect. But, as Aaron notes, the mechanism can also be seen
to work the other way around: to the spectator are offered moments
of pleasurable passivity—“conservative masochistic episodes”45—that
arouse the mobility of the spectator’s desire without really disturbing the
subject’s sense of unity. In both cases we are dealing with an articulation
of the space of film that is based upon a fantasy of mastery.
While the fantasy of mastery outlines scenarios in which passivity and
activity, autonomy and subjection, are mutually articulated in pleasura-
ble ways, we should instead conceive the spectator’s agency in terms of
a suspension of this very articulation. The idea of heteronomy implies a
collapse of the distinction between active and passive: “it is only by being
acted on that any of us come to act at all,” Judith Butler writes refer-
ring to Merleau-Ponty.46 So it is not because Aaron describes the film
spectator as a masochist position, but because she reads the passivity of
spectatorship as a form of agency that her theory can go beyond its own
redescription of the cinematographic apparatus.
In the measure that masochistic spectatorship is taken as a new artic-
ulation of positions of activity and passivity, rather than as the collapse
of this articulation within the very idea of agency, indeed, it remains
quite conservative. On the contrary, it is by recognizing an agency
in the passivity of the spectator (not merely a form of “activity” in the
spectator’s immobility), that is, by exposing the constitutional ambiva-
lence of agency and desire themselves and by foregrounding the politi-
cal valence of spectatorship in these terms, that the masochistic pleasure
of the spectator can lead us beyond its conservative framing. It is only
by going beyond the idea of masochism as pure passivity, Aaron argues,
and rather taking it as a pleasure in its own right,47 that it can escape its
hegemonic normalization. A theory that would conceive of the spectator
as a “natural” conservative masochist would arguably also be reinforcing
44 Ibid., 91.
45 Ibid., 56.
46 Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 8.
47 Ibid., 56–57.
the consensual idea of the average spectator’s fundamental conformism

and, thus, reproduce the idea of the passivity of spectatorship at an even
deeper level.
It is not that the spectator is conformist despite being an embodied
viewer and a free subject, then; on the contrary, the spectator is always,
to an extent, being anti-conformist against the viewer’s will, so to
speak. In other words, the conformist spectator can never be conformist
enough. Similarly, the masochist spectator might want to sign a contract
and relinquish its autonomous agency, but it does not really possess that
agency to begin with (not in the form of an autonomous agency, that
is). In this sense, the masochistic gesture—especially as it may be used
to interpret the spectator’s conformism—already constitutes a strategy of
disavowal of the subject’s fundamental heteronomy, of the more general
lack in all forms of mastery and of the kind of responsibility that is con-
nected with this lack. From the point of view of heteronomy, there is
no such thing as delegation of power, authority or desire—one is always
responsible for them.
Emancipation, I think, must be thought beyond the idea of self-mas-
tery and of self-possessed subjects. An agency beyond the fantasy of mas-
tery would involve, on one hand, the recognition of the discursivity and
heteronomy of our subjectivity, a sense of a radical lack in our autonomy
and identity as well as in the regime of understanding through which
we make sense of the world. On the other hand, it would consist in the
assumption of a responsibility beyond the direct accountability of our
actions and a hospitality toward the emergence, in us and in the situa-
tions we inhabit, of an agency that was not supposed to exist.
Spectatorship as Tension
Film theory—as a specific part of film studies—foregrounds the spectator
as the dynamic point of convergence of seemingly opposed dimensions:
the personal and the political, the signifier and the signified, passivity and
agency, fantasy and reality. Many a theory of film capitalizes on one of
the terms of these dichotomies that characterize spectatorship, trying to
rescue one from the hegemony of the other, or attempting to reach some
kind of simplistic “integration.”48 It is rather more interesting to address

40 C. COMANDUCCI
these various couples in that they produce hybrid categories, concepts

or situations in which the two terms become not only inseparable but
also indistinguishable. Film spectatorship is, in this sense, a liminal and
conflictual space, where the distinction and the articulation between per-
sonal and political, sign and referent, passive and active, the imaginary
and the real is constantly put into question.
Judith Mayne, with reference to Linda Gordon, defines spectatorship
precisely as a conflict, and the spectator as the site of a “tension.”49 She
opposes, more precisely, “the cinematic subject and the film viewer so as
better to situate the spectator as a viewer who is and is not the cinematic
subject, and a subject who is and is not a film viewer.”50 We could then
define spectatorship as the relation between the contingent experience
of physically and emotionally present viewers, on the one hand, and the
subject of film as a discursive position in the text and as an abstract con-
struction of film theory, on the other.
Unlike pure textual analysis, which focuses on the subject of film,
and audience studies, which focus on viewers, a discussion of the spec-
tator requires not only to acknowledge the historical and cultural con-
tingency of spectatorship but also to foreground the radical contingency
of film experience and not only its connection with ideology, but with
the dimension of fantasy and with the heteronomy of subjectivity as well.
When the focus shifts from the textual spectator to actual spectators,
Jackie Stacey argues, “possible positions multiply,”51 but in her view this
multiplicity seems also to become a limit in cultural critique and femi-
nist film theory. Implicitly criticizing Elizabeth Cowie’s understanding of
cinematic identification as a fluid positioning that takes place across and,
in a certain measure, independently of specifications of sex and gender,
Stacey claimed that:
If gender identifications are no longer thought to be connected to the

gender of the spectator, and all spectators are similarly free-floating and
autonomous, the investigation of the different psychic investments of
women and men in the cinema becomes impossible.52
49 Ibid., 76.
50 Ibid., 36.
51 Stacey, Star Gazing, 67.
52 Ibid., 70.
I do not think this is always true: a theory of spectatorship that is not

grounded in gender binaries does not necessarily lose the capacity to crit-
icize sexist assumptions as they are concretely realized in cinema, specta-
torship or film theory, but instead allows itself to affirm the potential of
cinema, spectatorship and film theory to be something different. If spec-
tatorship is posited as a history of encounters and not as a field created in
response to a discipline, then the disciplines and norms that regulate it
become more apparent and are made more dispensable, both at the level
of academic discourse and at that of everyday practice—and this without
taking anything away from our capacity to describe the reality of discrim-
ination and oppression or from our power to act against them.
We cannot forget indeed that the individual viewer is itself a discursive
subject—subjected in turn not only to the cinematic apparatus, but to a
plurality of ideological institutions (frequently spectacular in nature) and
to a discursive regulation than may be greater, in specific cases, than that
of the subject of film. In this respect, the cinematic subject could appear
to be “freer” than the viewer, in the sense that, even in its total sub-
jection to the cinematographic apparatus, it would still be escaping (at
least in some respects) from more radical forms of subjection to other,
more encompassing, ideological apparatuses. “While I think it crucial to
acknowledge that real people do exist outside of the categories of the-
ory,” Mayne writes, “it is equally crucial to acknowledge that those real
people are always the function of my or my culture’s notion of what a
real person is.”53 The viewer is not really thinkable by itself, then, but
can only be addressed from the standpoint of a theory of spectator-
ship, and so it never provides in itself a solution to the questions of film
experience.
One should keep in mind that the very relation between the per-
son and the subject is not something that falls outside of the domain
of ideology: on the contrary, it is its fundamental field of operation. As
we have argued, then, the autonomous agency of the viewer cannot be
regarded as a simple and evident solution to the problem of film ideol-
ogy: the constitution and the ideological mapping of this agency is in
fact the very scope of the mechanism of ideological interpellation. To put
it simply, ideological institutions should not be regarded like repressive
institutions that operate in the field of discourse: for their specificity rests
53 Ibid.
42 C. COMANDUCCI
instead in the way in which they appear to enforce the spectator’s agency
at the same time that they are in fact policing it and normalizing it. It
is proper of ideological institutions not only to want to lock the subject
within their power, but to make it believe that its subjection nevertheless
coincides with an expression of autonomous agency:
The bureaucratic/symbolic Institution not only reduces the subject to

its mouthpiece, but also wants the subject to disavow the fact that he is
merely its mouthpiece and to (pretend) to act as an autonomous agent.54
At the same time that it constructs the spectator’s position as passive—

conformist, masochist, merely escapist—the apparatus encourages the
spectator to assume this position as if it were the expression of an auton-
omous choice.
“Despite the insistence on real ‘viewers’ as distinct from the ‘sub-
ject’,” Mayne argues, “the place of the ‘spectator’ in film studies is not
easily or readily defined as ‘either’ a real person ‘or’ a position, a con-
struction.”55 Rather than confirming this split between a discursive
subject and a real person, thus disregarding both the spectator’s embod-
ied experience and the ideological discursivity and fantasmatic contin-
gency of its encounter with film, it is much more productive to address
spectatorship itself as a tension between these two dimensions. In this
way, Mayne’s systematization of spectatorship allows to go beyond the
authoritarian split between theory and practice that, as we will see, is
characteristic of authoritarian film theory, at the same time avoiding to
relinquish the political tensions that characterize spectatorship.
Politics, for Rancière, is not a relation between subjects, but a con-
tradiction between two definitions of the subject.56 The fundamental
political gesture of film theory, then, is not that of intervening in the
distribution of power between different groups of viewers or forms of
spectatorship, but that of working with the contradiction between two
definitions of the subject of film. This gesture, however, means nothing
without the indisciplinary gesture that questions the distinction between
spectatorship and theory.
54 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London:
Verso, 2008), 306.

55 Ibid., 36.
56 Rancière, Dissensus, 28–29.

Bibliography
Wallflower, 2007.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays, 127–186. New York: Monthly Review Press,
1971.
Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus.” Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974–1975): 39–47.
Burgin, Victor, and Alexander Streitberger (ed.). Situational Aesthetics: Selected
Writings by Victor Burgin. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Butler, Judith. Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press, 2005.
Freud, Sigmund. Freud: Complete Works, edited by Ivan Smith, 2000. https://
www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf. Accessed 12 July 2018.
Horkheimer, Max. “Authority and the Family.” In Critical Theory: Selected Essays.
New York: Continuum, 2003.
de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984.
Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. London and New York: Routledge,
1993.
Mannoni, Octave. Clefs pour l’Imaginaire: Ou, l’Autre Scène. Paris: Seuil, 1985.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I. Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1995–1996.
Metz, Christian. Psychoanalysis and Film: The Imaginary Signifier. London:
Macmillan, 1982.
Rancière, Jacques. Le Spectateur Émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique, 2008.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. London and New York: Verso, 2009.
2010.
Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship.
New York: Routledge, 2009.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.
London: Verso, 2008.
CHAPTER 3
Everyday Film Theory
Film Theory as an Integral Element

of Film Experience
Academic film theory is often treated as a necessary condition for the

existence of a theoretical dimension of film as such. As if viewers could
not, or did not, reflect independently on their experience as spectators.
As if they did not perform concretely, every time they watch a film and
in all the activities that originate from watching, more or less systematic
views on their being spectators and of their understanding of film as a
medium and as a signifying practice. As if, on one hand, a theoretical
component was not intrinsic to film viewing and filmmaking and, on the
other hand, the contingent and material aspects of spectatorship and the
embodied dimension of film experience did not inform the activity of the
film theorist. A living, operative, ground of film theory exists, which is
performed in the act of watching. Theory, in this sense, is a part of the
experience of spectatorship during and after the moment of the film’s
projection.
In a way, the very field of discourses and practices which is individ-
uated by the concept of spectatorship implicitly assigns to spectators a
theoretical agency, if only in the form of self-reflection. “The study of
spectatorship involves an engagement with modes of seeing and tell-
ing, hearing and listening,” Judith Mayne writes, “not only in terms

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_3
46 C. COMANDUCCI
of how films are structured, but in terms of how audiences imagine

themselves.”1 More radically, if the field of spectatorship is the tension
between flesh and bone viewers and the subject of film, as Mayne argues,
and if the function of a study of spectatorship is to bridge that gap, as
Aaron suggests,2 then viewers themselves must be seen, in their concrete
everyday experience of film, as the first agents of film theory.
The everyday practice of spectatorship implies a performance and
a reconfiguration of what is pleasurable in the scene of film, and of
what is intelligible of the spectator’s relation to it as an aesthetic object
and to cinema as a means of sharing and organizing the common.
Spectatorship, as a concept and as a field of enquiry, names then what
Jacques Rancière calls a partage du sensible (distribution of the sensi-
ble)3—that is, it individuates at the same time a shared space and a par-
ticular distribution and regulation of this space. If art is first of all “a
matter of dwelling in a common world”4 then spectatorship is the field in
which the commonality of film experience is affirmed.
Film theory should not be seen as an external explanation of the social
and textual dynamics of film, then, but as something integral to them.
In watching a film—no less than in writing or talking about it, and no
differently than in directing one or taking part in its production—one
necessarily performs a specific understanding of film experience. This
understanding is at the same time unique to the particular viewer and to
the contingent conditions of viewing, and constructed through consen-
sual ideas and established habits. In other words, spectatorship is shaped
by the tension between the experiential and discursive contingency of the
conditions of viewing and their discursive and institutional regulation.
32.
2 Michele Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London and New York:
Wallflower, 2007), 2.
3 Rancière defines partage du sensible as a system of perceptible features that manifest
at once the existence of a common space, the partitions into which it is articulated, and
how bodies and subjects are assigned to them; this distribution determines in turn the
ways in which what is common can be shared and who actually takes part in the sharing.
See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London:
Bloomsbury, 2006), 12. In Dissensus, Rancière further notes that the expression implies
a tension between a shared common and its distribution. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On
Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 36.
4 Ibid., 121.
3 EVERYDAY FILM THEORY 47
At the same time, spectatorship also takes form as a tension between

conscious and unconscious forms of engagement with and reflection
on film: spectatorship’s theoretical aspect is not entirely a function of
rational reflection or a matter of acquiring knowledge about film, but a
transformative and dialogic involvement with film experience and with
other spectators. Generally speaking, the tensions that animate spectator-
ship reconfigure the relation of theory and experience in ways that do
not rest on their distinction.
Spectatorship is always also a theoretical practice, then, having its own
forms of articulation and enunciation, its own epistemologies and its
own methods. Academic film theory would thus exist in continuity with
a more pervasive theoretical dimension of spectatorship, which would
in fact be inseparable from film experiencing as such. The formulation
of a theory of spectatorship would thus appear as a particular aspect of
spectatorship, different in its methods and scopes from that which is per-
formed in everyday film-going perhaps, but on equal grounds with any
other intelligence of film. In this perspective, the elaboration of an aca-
demic theory of spectatorship should not be taken as an interpretation or
an explanation of film experience, but rather as a particular field in which
film experience and the agency of spectators can extend themselves.
On one hand, there can be no spectatorship without the performance
of some kind of theoretical agency from the part of the spectator; and,
on the other hand, there can be no theory separated from film experi-
ence and a passionate engagement with cinema. The spectator and the
film theorist share the same space, they occupy as equals a common
scene and are subjected to the same institutions and discourses. There
should be no separation between the spectator’s perception and the the-
orist’s understanding and no hierarchy should be inscribed in the relation
between these two forms of experience. The fundamental emancipation
of the spectator that Rancière is arguing for means, I think, that specta-
torship should be taken as the common stage of film experience and less
as an object than as the common ground of film studies.
Theory, from this perspective, cannot be addressed as a restricted
practice. It cannot be seen merely as the expression of the authority or
creativity of a class of experts, nor should it be taken as a prerogative
of the learned, the ethically responsible or the critically aware. In fact, if
theory is to be taken as a reconfiguration of relations of power, knowl-
edge and desire in the context of a broader net of relations (as a change
of perspective within a given regime of perception), it cannot even be
48 C. COMANDUCCI
individuated as the practice of a specific subject, for it would already

name a kind of relation between subjects. Beyond their authoritarian
articulation, in which spectatorship is reduced to the principles of its
intelligibility, spectatorship and theory become, then, one practice and
a single dimension where knowledge is always a matter of the emergence
of a voice, and of a scene of dialogue rather than of a distribution of the
parts.
Breaking the Spell of Theory

Refusing the distinction between observation and theory that informed
Popperian scientific epistemology, Paul Feyerabend wrote:
Learning does not go from observation to theory but always involves

both elements. Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not
before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible
as is (allegedly) a theory without experience […].5
A clear-cut line of separation between theory and experience is character-

istic of pedagogical and authoritarian regimes of knowledge. Authority,
more generally, rests on a regime of understanding that connects a mas-
terful gaze with an intelligible distribution of the sensible. A non-author-
itarian understanding of knowledge, on the other hand, maintains no
clear distinction between theory and practice, between the object that
theory attempts to define and theory itself as an object among other
objects.
In the scene of film, the spectator is the subject for which experience
and theory are not separated. The spectator is that agency for which
looking on, being-looked-at (interpellated) and the understanding of this
experience are inseparable: theoria is the activity of the spectator and, in
turn, the defining gesture of the space of film.
Compared with the broader dimension of film theory that we are
discussing, the systematic articulations of academic film theory must be
seen to perform, first and foremost, a mise en discours, a “putting into
discourse,” of spectatorship and film experience.6 Disciplinary theory
5 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 2010), 151.

6 Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité, 20. For the English translation Michel Foucault, The
History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978), 12.
dissolves the spectator’s fundamental emancipation in the articulation of

a more and more comprehensive mapping of film experience, and thus
plays a fundamental role in moving our understanding of spectatorship
away from its politics and from the aesthetic regime.
The essential form that this mise en discours of spectatorship assumes is
that of a discursive hegemony—that is, the inscription into the order of
discourse of the very opposition between discourse and what lies beyond
it.7 Every disciplinary film theory, indeed, constructs as its object not just
the visible, intelligible, or measurable phenomena of spectatorship (or
the experience of film in terms of its visibility, intelligibility, and meas-
urability) but, more or less implicitly, also the body and the agency of
spectators that seem to exist prior to or to exceed the given distribution
of the parts.
This is where a pedagogy of emancipation becomes necessary to main-
tain the distinction between the spectator and the professional theorist:
disciplinary theory sets out not only to validate the consensual under-
standing of spectatorship and define all possible forms of film experience
but, more fundamentally, exerts its power over the practice of spectator-
ship through a mise en discours of the spectator’s fundamental emancipa-
tion from this consensual understanding. The wayward spectator is that
excess of the mise en discours of spectatorship that disciplinary theory
constantly attempts to map and signifies that perspective, incommensura-
ble with the logic of identity, which disciplinary theory has to exclude in
order to sustain its pretense of mastery.
As long as it posits itself as something external to the dimension of
spectatorship, film theory becomes the first and fundamental form of the
spectator’s stultification. Spectators must therefore claim their emanci-
pation from two concurrent sets of powers: the power of the apparatus
that construes film experience as passive consumption and the power of
a pedagogical theory of emancipation that submits the emancipation of
spectators to the action of the theory.
On one hand, quite clearly, the assumption of the spectator’s funda-
mental emancipation does not automatically make of film watching a
political practice. On the other, it is not through a mise en discours of the
spectators’ emancipation that we can expect a politics of spectatorship to
come into existence. In this respect, the proliferation of discourses on
7 See Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-
theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 32.

50 C. COMANDUCCI
film becomes in many ways complementary to the ideological effects of

the apparatus and performs a function of police. The political dimen-
sion comes into being, Rancière writes, not when the balance of powers
within an existing distribution of the sensible is rearticulated, but as it is
troubled by a part of those that have no part (a part de sans-part), by the
manifestation of something that is incommensurable with the principles
that regulate the existing distribution.8 The political dimension ceases
to exist, on the contrary, when this gap (écart) is brought back within
the intelligible articulation of what can be said to exist. The distinction
between disciplinary and everyday theory is not a distinction between
elitist theory and conformism, but a distinction between consensus and
dissensus, between politics and police.
We should therefore assume no solution of continuity between the
performance of spectatorship and academic discourse, between film cul-
ture and film theory, and that the forms of the latter necessarily come as
the extension of the never clearly graspable forces of the former. Before
they are framed as sociological or critical objects of enquiry, indeed, the
film theorist necessarily partakes in those communal forms of film expe-
rience that spectatorship names—theorists are themselves, first and fore-
most, viewers and they remain spectators at every step of their specific
practices. The same, of course, can be said of filmmakers. In this sense,
the spectator is the common term, although not quite the common
measure, of the space of film.
Rather than establishing the authority of the film theorist on its being
external to the mechanisms of spectatorship that it describes, one should
ground the effectiveness of its activity in the theorist’s very involvement
as a spectator, in its capacity to let go of the mastery of concepts and
rather make use of the self-shattering potentials that both the space of
film and the space of theory afford. More generally, rather than establish-
ing the function of film theory as its ability to make cinema and specta-
torship intelligible, one should rather take it as a hospitable space—in the
same way as the space of film spectatorship and, more generally, aesthetic
contemplation are—to the appearance and the sharing of something rad-
ically incommensurable with the existing distribution of perceptions.
As soon as we take theory as a practice and practice also as a theo-
retical performance, we may recognize that both are more a matter of
8 See Rancière, Dis-agreement, 19.

dialogue and encounters than of explanation and interpretation, and we

may begin to see in academic theory itself the same living and never fully
graspable tensions that animate film experience. On the side of the spec-
tator, as well, all the ways in which the experience of film lives on and
is extended and transferred to other aspects of life, in what we can call
extended spectatorship, verify that spectatorship is primarily a theoretical
activity. This dimension of free use of film experience, which we will dis-
cuss at the end of the chapter, is precisely the dimension of spectatorship
(an implicational spectatorship)9 that disciplinary theory cannot grasp
and, at the same time, the ground of a non-authoritarian theory of film.
Everyday non-authoritarian theory should not be seen as the self-af-
firmation of any particular subject, I think, but rather as an effect of the
myriad of encounters that make up subjectivity as a dynamic without
center. The dimension of free use is in fact intimately connected to the
heteronomy of the subject: reading against the grain is first of all reading
against the grain of the subject’s identity.
In this sense, film experience does not offer just conservative
moments of imaginary union and identification, but moments of
self-shattering as well.10 Self-shattering is a kind of waywardness in which
the subject comes closer to its heteronomy—it talks about the pleasures
that the subject can find in its fundamental emancipation from itself.
“True freedom,” writes Žižek, “means not only that I am not fully deter-
mined by my surroundings, but also that I am not fully determined by
myself.”11 Therefore, emancipation expresses itself not only against the
authority that institutions have, but also against those forms of mastery
that the subject can enjoy and exert upon itself. If there is a ground of
equality, it is never just the speaking subject in the sense of the rational
and self-sufficient self, the one who possesses meaning, but the subject
who is traversed by signification while never grasping this signification
(and itself in it) entirely.
If the spectator’s intellectual emancipation takes shape through the
claim of its equal intelligence of film, then the theorist’s emancipation
9 See Yuka Kanno, “Implicational Spectatorship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke,”
Mechademia 6 (2011): 288. “By implication, I want to address the historicity of the pres-
ent viewer, whose specificity is no less important than that of the past text.”
10 For a discussion of self-shattering see Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 46.

11 Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 2007), 71.
52 C. COMANDUCCI
must be sought for in a return to, or rather a constant connection with,

the faltering of its own speech. Not a theory that would return to its
primitive origins in the blindness of visual pleasure, but a theory that
would never be parting from its ever hesitating beginnings.12 In writ-
ing, and in theoretical writing this is even more important, one must
indeed constantly begin again. The theoretical parole is the contrary of
the word of authority—that masterful gesture that links the essence to
the name. Theory should not claim an exclusive allegiance to clever-
ness, either: an intelligence that never wavers is indeed one that lives in
thrall of its stupidity and one that would eventually resort to the stulti-
fication of others. A speech that never trembles would ignore, Pontalis
wrote, that which actually nourishes it and brings it into being—this
something, for him, was nothing else than the unconscious, a time
not reduced to measure, the voice of that which was not supposed to
speak.13
The Beginnings of Film Theory

Film theory is born in the curious, but never innocent, look that children
cast upon the medium as they are discovering it, it is in the everyday
performance of viewing and the pleasures it affords as viewers and the
people working with film continuously engage with films and with each
other. As children, we are told and shown in many ways, by many people
on and off screen, what the medium and our relation to it are supposed
to be. In this sense as well, the first form that pedagogical theory takes
is that of a discipline, a mapping of the sensible that assigns each subject
to a part and to each aspect of film experience a definite place within a
given regime of understanding. We come to understand film through a
layout of the seeable, the imaginable and the sayable, which is at once
normative and productive, arbitrary but apparently indispensable or, at
least, quite inevitable.
And yet, learning what the medium is means first of all learning what
it is and what it means to other people: whenever we encounter the dis-
courses that code cinema in our cultural symbolic, we are finding those
discourses as the people around us embody them and relate to them.
12 See Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Avant (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 18.

13 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Fenêtres (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 29.
We are educated to film, and our relation to it is explained to us, as we

learn to produce the proper behavior in the proper situations. At the
same time, however, we discover the experience of film more inde-
pendently. Sometimes we do not recognize the situation we are sup-
posed to be in. Other times we might not, or might not want to,
produce the appropriate behavior. We never perfectly cope with the
emotions we, and other people we know, attach to film, we never
entirely adapt to the consensual language games that define film expe-
rience in the spaces we inhabit. The discursivity and heteronomy of the
subject and the performativity of discourse mark from the outset the
dimension of our embodied experience of film. If the subject is born
into language, this language is given to the subject in the form of a
parole.
As we get to know the existing regimes of understanding film we are
inevitably subjected to them: we are identified as subjects of film. In the
same gesture, however, we put ourselves beyond this identity: interacting
with others and mastering specific sets of notions, discourses, and modes
of experiencing film we are already changing them in some of their
respects. So that our relation to film is, from the very beginning, both
an embodied and a dissensual one, embedded in discourse but emerging
through dialogue, influenced by ideological fantasy but always open to a
wide range of contingent disruptions, accidents and idiosyncrasies. Even
as we are explained what film is, we are still able to discover it, as it were,
for what it is not, and by other means than those which we are supposed
to be using. Oddities are accumulated together with performative itera-
tions of the various laws and consensual habits that regulate spectator-
ship, making of each viewer an individual spectator with a complex and
composite history. Both spectatorship and subjectivity can be imagined
in this sense as a history of encounters.
To possess an independent and personal understanding of film expe-
rience, however, is never enough: we are asked proof of an understand-
ing and of an experience which must be valid for others. Children
in front of the screen seem to be engaged with the film, but do they
know what it means? Are they really watching and do they really see?
Our learning of moving images is subjected to the logic of explanation:
we are not supposed to know what film is until we are able to explain
what it is, until we are able to produce the visible gestures and intel-
ligible sounds that will allow others to recognize our understanding.
54 C. COMANDUCCI
We are not allowed our saying on the film until, and even then only in
the measure that, we are recognized as spectators and speaking subjects.
On the other hand as well, how could we ever be sure that our under-
standing is in fact an understanding without some kind of response from
somebody else? A sanction is thus imposed over the contingent and rad-
ically dialogical ground of spectatorial practices. Sometimes one has the
impression that, as a social phenomenon, spectatorship is nothing but
the ensemble of these coded and proper responses, a masquerade—and
it surely is not much more than that from the standpoint of the theory
of interpellation.
The beginnings of authoritarian theory can be found precisely in the
discourse that assumes the intellectual inferiority of the child: children
are not taken to be merely lacking the experience they need in order
to understand the world the way it is collectively and discursively con-
structed (the way other people see it), but as people who are yet to
acquire the power of understanding the world for what it “is.”
Emancipation must thus be thought beyond a fantasy of mastery: the
emancipation of the subject does not correspond to the acquisition of a
form of mastery (this is precisely the lure through which both the cine-
matographic apparatus and the pedagogical regime function in the first
place), but rather is a fundamental emancipation that corresponds to the
enjoyment of the radical lack in all forms of mastery.
Without a recognition of the fundamental equality of all
intelligences—and first of all of the equality of intelligences of the child
and the adult—the spectator will always be in need of explanations and,
so to speak, never grow out of its infantilization. The pedagogical regime
described by Rancière is not a regime through which children grow to
understand the world but, on the contrary, a regime in which speaking
subjects are thrown back into infancy, it is the regime of the infantiliza-
tion of all subjects. In this regime, truly spontaneous and independent
knowledge—not spontaneous experience, but what we may call learning
as opposed to comprehension—is first ignored (they cannot understand),
then reviled (they do not know what they are talking about) and finally
put under control (we are going to teach them). This is, I think, the way
in which the subject of film experience is turned in the passive subject
of the apparatus: the former, an expression of the equality of all intelli-
gences face to film; the latter, that position of ignorance that disciplinary
theory needs to sustain its authority.
The Spectator as Infans

Taken as that empty dimension in which the equal intelligence of all sub-
jects who have to do with film is expressed, spectatorship can be seen as
the part de sans-part that constantly traverses the existing distribution of
the space of film. This part of those that do not have one, we have begun
to address it by imagining a child in front of a screen: and yet it does not
correspond to childhood, literally, but is rather closer to what the French
psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis called the infans.
If childhood is clearly a “part”—a moment in life that corresponds
to a category of subjects and a set of fantasies, normative ideals, and
even a specific market—the infans names instead an experience of diso-
rientation in our everyday encounters with language, discourse and the
unconscious, one that begins in, but in no way ends with, our childhood.
Every language and every experience is, at first and at its core, a foreign
one,14 and no logos, no agency of the speaking subject, can exist without
the struggle by which we make it, day by day and always precariously,
our own.
In-fans—the one who does not speak—would then name not really a
space outside of language, but that silence which precedes and supports
the emergence of the voice.15 That which is no part of language and
which, during the course of our life, at the same time wants no part in it
and, paradoxically, drives language on. Language exists, Pontalis wrote,
only when it is inhabited by what it is not.16 More generally, he believed,
the power of an art lies in the fact that it can face what negates it,17 what
remains incommensurable, external, to it (and he clearly considered lan-
guage at large, not merely writing, to be an art).
So, the child speaks from a space that cannot be measured and says
“I, too, am a speaking being”—by this giving a positive expression of
the fundamental equality of all (speaking) beings. And yet, this equality
is not a given, and is never the simple realization of an essential human
faculty: the most banal of utterances, in this perspective, already has the
full magnitude of a political act.
14 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, L’Amour des Commencements (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 30.

15 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, En Marge des Nuits (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 74.
16 Pontalis, L’Amour des Commencements, 29–30.
17 Ibid., 53.
56 C. COMANDUCCI
In the scene that authoritarian film theories construct, the specta-

tor is imagined not just to be literally silent but to be lacking a voice.
We should say instead that the cinematic situation, before the infan-
tilization assumed by authoritarian theory, actually puts the spectator
in the position of the infans. We become spectators by affirming our
voice in relation to our experience of film; authoritarian theories, on
the contrary, assume that we become spectators when we lose it. The
whole idea of spectatorship as a state of psychic and intellectual regres-
sion in fact reduces film experience’s connection with fantasy, discur-
sivity and heteronomy to nothing more than a state of passivity and
dispossession.
The speechlessness of the infans is not an aphasia,18 but an affirmation
of silence and an attack against the mastery of language. Much like the
voice must become able to argue for itself in order to be distinguished
from mere babble, so must silence tell itself apart from the incapacity to
speak. The infans is, in this sense, a creature of dissent, an “unaccounta-
ble Bartleby”: that thing in us that would prefer not to speak. For both
Rancière and Pontalis a fundamental misunderstanding animates lan-
guage, without which language would be very little, and say nothing
at all. A language without possible misunderstanding, Pontalis wrote,
would not be able to sustain a single signification19—without dissensus,
for Rancière, no possibility of political subjectivation.
Political dissensus can be defined as “a conflict about who speaks and
who do not speak:”20 we can thus say that a political dimension exists
when, in the sharing of experience that language allows, we learn not to
neutralize its tensions. Infans, in this sense, names the question of the
entitlement to speak as it is part of the process of individual subjectiva-
tion. Language can never be a direct access to the thing, Pontalis wrote,
but it would be nothing more than a code were it not driven by and
moving toward what it is not.21 Similarly, the subject would be nothing
more than a spokesperson (not a speaking being) were it not driven by
18 Ibid.
19 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Après Freud (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 121.

20 Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds.), Reading Rancière (London: Continuum,
2011), 2.
21 Le langage “ne serait rien de plus qu’un code s’il n’était porté par et emporté vers ce
qu’il n’est pas.” Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, La Force d’Attraction (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 99.
Translation mine.
and moving towards what the subject is not: here we find together, per-
haps, the politics and the aesthetics of the unconscious acting, as it were,
as a part de sans-part of the psychic subject.
The unconscious, for Pontalis, corresponds to the silence of the
infans, it is part of that which has no part in language or consciousness.
The unconscious would not be a dimension before or beyond mean-
ing but a rupture within meaning itself, a continuous emergence of an
incommensurability in experience and speech. In this sense psychoanal-
ysis is, or should be, for Pontalis, hospitable to everything that migrates,
to everything that does not have a proper place.22
If the infans’s telling silence is first of all meant as a sign of its emanci-
pation, Pontalis appropriately called fatum the subject of a speech which is
supposedly never its own23: I don’t speak, but rather I am spoken (fatum
sum). In a similar sense, Rancière initially referred to the Platonic use of
the term aisthesis to address the language of the subaltern, the language
of a subject to which is recognized only the capacity to speak, but not that
to make its own meaning.24 Translating this to the cinema, then, the spec-
tator of Althusserian film theory (but apparatus theory is not alone here)
was clearly being assigned the position of the fatum, of the subject who is
merely able to read what the flow of images manifests without being able
to create its own meaning. The spectator was spoken by the film, by its
social conditions and by the limits of its own situated perception, and so
the theory that spoke its predicament at the same time erased the spec-
tator’s voice. Emancipation, Rancière wrote in The Nights of Labor, is the
“thinking of whose not destined to think”25—who are not those who can-
not think, but those whose thinking is not recognized as the expression of
an agency, whose words are not taken as a voice. Emancipation takes place,
then, in the struggle for the recognition of a voice as meaningful and, we
may add, of a look as the expression of a theory.
In a scene from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio,26 Jerusalem,
Caravaggio’s foundling and mute, lifelong companion, is crying out
at his friend’s deathbed with all the strength of his passion. He cannot
22 Jean-BertrandPontalis, Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 72.

23 Ibid.,
30.
24 Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 17.

25 Rancière, The Nights of Labor, xii.
26 Derek Jarman, Caravaggio (British Film Institute, 1986), 35 mm.

58 C. COMANDUCCI
cry with his own voice, however, for he is mute and, literally, has none.
So instead he blows into a whistle. In the film we can see him do that,
desperately, but we cannot hear any sound: the film has doubled his
silence. This scene evokes the strange impression of hearing a phantas-
mal sound—a visual and narrative cue evokes a sound that is not actually
there—and of seeing silence—we see the signs of blowing in the whistle,
and through them we perceive a lack of sound. So that we actually have
a sound, but deprived of its aural dimension, and we perceive this lack
through the image. This scene can be taken as a figuration of the silence
of the infans, which is not the trauma of a silenced subject but rather the
passion of a speaking silence. In a similar way, the spectator finds a voice
even as the viewer keeps silent.
And yet, the infans is continuously talked about, interpreted, and
tentatively put into discourse27: the infans, after all, keeps being
treated as a child. And so successful and pervasive this pedagogy of
subjectivity is, that one might finally lose the ability to hear the infans
and let it speak. One might indeed lose touch with the heteron-
omy that animates language and subjectivity and it would be one of
the functions of a radical psychoanalytic discourse to awake ourselves
again to it. Analysis, for Pontalis, aims to make fatum silent, and let
the infans speak.28 Fatum here corresponds not really to the repressed,
nor to the traumatic, but, on the contrary, to identity and the self: to
the consensual. Fatum is that which has been put into discourse and
which is subjected to the mastery of discourse and to the subject’s own
fantasy of mastery over itself. The silence of the infans and the diver-
sions of the unconscious would provide, against this, those wayward
elements, that confusion within the sphere of language and the senses
which trouble the identity of the subject and, by that, allow the expres-
sion of an individual voice.
At what point, and on what conditions, are the sounds of the spec-
tator’s voice recognized as a discourse on the film? When, and how, do
wavering patterns of light become a moving image? What makes us and
unmakes us as spectators and as human subjects? These are the ques-
tions to which the film theorist, the child, and the emancipated specta-
tor continually return to. And they return to them, perhaps, precisely
27 Pontalis, Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas, 31.

28 Ibid., 32.
to prevent a final answer from being found. One could say that the film
theorist, inasmuch as it is a spectator and an emancipated subject, is the
one who keeps cherishing film as an unknown object, as a manifestation
of an incommensurable, as a site of otherness. The one who cannot let
go of the fascination with the very process that weaves and unweaves the
texture of film experience. The one who constantly returns—a détour,
always—to the trouble of beginnings. In the end, the film theorist would
be the one who, before the moving images, can never stop being lost.
In its essence, a non-authoritarian film theory would not aim toward an
ontology of the moving image or of film experience, then, but rather
attempt to passionately preserve their paradoxes.
Knowledge always comes from a desire for the unknown: which then
takes the form either of a desire to erase it, or of a desiring relationship
with our own ignorance. The theorist is, in this sense, not only an eman-
cipated spectator but an ignorant viewer—not in the sense of one that
lacks a knowledge that somebody else has, but, precisely, of one that is
engaged with the necessarily faltering beginnings of its own.
Explanation and masterful interpretation could thus be conceived
as something like the end-pleasure of film theory—in them, the object
would be enjoyed only in the measure that one is able to master pleas-
ure and eventually do away with it. So, on one hand we would have the
fantasized end of film theory, the climax of its progression to annex every
possible experience to the symbolized, to the sayable, to the seen—all of
which is inevitably predicated on a depoliticization of spectatorship (as
we have suggested, politics only exists in the continuous emergence of
an incommensurable within the consensual distribution of the sensible,
which is the opposite of the disciplinary mise en discours). On the other,
we would have a film theory that mocks its own mastery and “flirts” with
its own limits.29
Rancière’s Lesson
Steven Corcoran individuates two main fronts in Rancière’s critique of
intellectual authority. The first is the antiAlthusserian one, based on the
idea that
29 See Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994).
60 C. COMANDUCCI
political thought is not that which is performed in transcendent fashion by

the intellectual, who reads culture for its signs of truth, but as that which
is produced immanently by the collective of those engaged in political
action.30
The second is directed against the Habermasian logic of argumen-

tative exchange and rests on the assumption that “genuine political
speech above all entails a dispute over the very (9) quality of those who
speak.”31 Emancipation proceeds in this sense from the combination of a
commonality and a dissensus.
By presenting Althusserianism as a practice32—that is, by foreground-
ing the politics of Althusser’s thought in relation to their historical and
institutional context, rather than addressing his ideas about politics from
a purely theoretical standpoint—Rancière was already negating a central
argument in Althusser’s theory of ideas: namely, the separation of theory
and practice. When Althusser affirmed the independence of theory from
contingent political practice, Rancière conceded,33 he was doing it first
of all to separate theoretical knowledge from the entrenched logic of the
French Communist Party.34 At the same time, however, Althusser’s posi-
tions entailed a split between theory, on one hand, and any emanation of
political rationality coming from the actions of the base, on the other: for
him, there was no possibility of finding solutions to political problems in
what was emerging from concrete struggles.35
Instead, Althusser claimed the necessity of a return to the sources of
Marxist thought and to the implicit dialectic of the great revolution-
ary moments.36 Althusser’s was a double return to theory, then: first as
a focus on theoretical texts, and then as a theoretical reassessment of
their founding principles. A task—this theory of theory—that he made
to coincide with the essence of political action. In Rancière’s synthetic
reconstruction: for Althusser, “politics would be philosophy in act.”37
30 Corcoran. “Editor’s Introduction”, in Rancière, Dissensus, 8.

31 Ibid., 8–9.
32 Jacques Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser (Paris: Fabrique, 2011 [1974]), 8.
33 Ibid., 67.
34 Ibid., 68.
35 Ibid., 71.
36 Ibid., 64.
37 Ibid., 67.
Theory was thus made to be the sole possible guarantee of the

“scientificity”—the rationality, the soundness and thus the effective-
ness—of political action.38
This idea of the necessity of theory and of its absolute independence
from political practice got starker by May 1968: “false ideas come from
social practice,” Rancière thus summarized Althusser’s position, and
so, “science can only be established from a point outside of the illu-
sion of practice.”39 Althusser’s conception of ideology as a system of
representations that automatically subjected individuals to the domi-
nant order, Rancière continued, on one hand sustained the idea of a
radical cultural revolution while on the other it was used to condemn
the student revolts—which were depicted by Althusser as a movement
of petty bourgeois, in thrall of an ideology from which they had to be
emancipated.40 Althusser’s celebrated article on ideological state appa-
ratuses, which acquired such a central importance in 1970s film the-
ory, had been in fact a way of putting into theory (and thus somewhat
under control) what the student revolts had already spontaneously man-
ifested.41 In the measure that it maintained that the oppressed needed
to be assisted in order to achieve their emancipation, Althusserianism
configured itself as a philosophy of order,42 and, more specifically, as
a reversal in the service of order of the discourses of emancipation and
subversion produced in revolutionary situations: a form of authoritar-
ian education and disciplinary regulation of more spontaneous forms of
agency.
One cannot avoid to note a similarity between the delegitimation of
political subjects in Althusser’s theory and the lack of agency and aware-
ness which define the spectator in the theory of the cinematographic appa-
ratus. In this sense, Althusserian film theory is less to be criticized for its
“formalism”43—that is, for describing spectatorship as an abstract subject
38 Jacques Rancière, “Sur la Théorie de l’Idéologie: Politique d’Althusser,” in La Leçon
d’Althusser (Paris: Fabrique, 2011 [1969]), 240.

39 Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser, 96.
40 Ibid., 9.
41 Ibid., 136.
42 Ibid., 17.
43 Abraham Geil, “The Spectator Without Qualities,” in Rancière and Film, ed. Paul
Bowman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 73.

62 C. COMANDUCCI
position rather than as the practice of a culturally and historically situated

real viewer—than for its intellectual paternalism and authoritarian fancies.
According to apparatus theory, the less the spectator knows—the
less the experience of spectatorship is intelligible to the spectator—the
stronger is the apparatus’s ideological effect. But the stronger the ide-
ological determination is, the more the experience of the spectator
becomes intelligible to the theorist as well. The incapacity of the specta-
tor and its lack of emancipation are a requisite not really for the ideolog-
ical effect, which can survive demystification, but, first and foremost, for
the mastery and the authority of the theorist who interprets this effect.
In this sense, as we have seen, apparatus theory is an essential compo-
nent of the very apparatus it describes. It thus become even more clear
how Rancière’s “unreasonable” assumption of the primacy of equality
and emancipation in the rest of his work is then, among other things, a
precise consequence of his initial refutation of the authoritarian and ped-
agogical aspects of Althusser’s theory of ideology.
From Rancière’s critique emerge two faces of Althusser’s under-
standing of theory—theory as the fundamental instrument of emancipa-
tion and theory as the authoritarian sanction of political practice—that
are also present in Althusserian film theory. On one side, we have the
presupposition of the passivity of spectators and of their incapacity for
autonomous emancipation. On the other, the project of an avant-garde
cinema driven by a radical theory that, by exposing the secrets of the
machine that imprisoned them, was to liberate spectators from the con-
dition of spectatorship. What links the two is the refusal to recognize
the theoretical and the aesthetic dimension of spectatorship as such. In
the same way, the kind of “political” art that conceives itself as a way to
awaken the spectator’s awareness and foster its creativity must be seen
first of all to presume, and thus to reinforce the idea of the spectator’s
lack of creativity, awareness, and agency.
Althusserian theorists (but also “radical” filmmakers) can thus pres-
ent themselves as the heroic agents of the emancipation of those subjects
whose independent agency they are at the same time essentially negat-
ing. Here, theory’s discourse of emancipation is not simply wavering
but turning into its opposite. As Rancière will later argue in Le Maître
Ignorant, it is the master who needs the incapable in order to sustain
its authority, not the pupil who needs the master in order to be liber-
ated from a condition of ignorance: by distinguishing between mere
apprehension and comprehension, by establishing a hierarchy within
intelligence and perception, it is the explanatory master who constructs

the incapable as one.44 Framed in this way, the dominated are subjected
to a double regime of oppression: that of the forces of domination, and
that of the authoritarian appropriation of their autonomous means of
emancipation by institutional agents of critique.
This double regime would in the end be characteristic of a form
of bourgeois, “philanthropic”, materialism. If both pre-Marxist and
Marxist, dialectical, materialism hold that subjects are products of their
social circumstances, and that new subjectivities are products of mutated
social circumstances, Rancière wrote, only Marxism maintains that are
those who are subjected to given social conditions, and not those who
organize them, who actually have the means to change them.45 In
this sense, Rancière claimed, Althusserian theory specifically fails to be
Marxist46: in the measure that it configures itself as an institution whose
reason to exist is the supervision and the promotion of those forces and
conditions that theory itself establishes to be necessary for revolutionary
change, theory becomes authoritarian.47 As long as social relations and
the historical process are held to be knowable only through the media-
tion of the scholars, Rancière continued, the power of the masses is just
the power of those masses that the scholars have instructed. In a similar
way we can say that, as long as the power and agency of spectators is
reduced to the power that is framed and mobilized by external agents—
the critic, the ideologue, the engaged filmmaker, the agenda of a specific
social group or the features of a specific technology—this power comes
to hinder and even prevent the full expression of the spectator’s funda-
mental emancipation.
Althusserian film theory’s understanding of cinema assumed cin-
ema’s ideological nature as much as it banked on the theorist’s critical
distance from the fundamental ideology of the apparatus. On the con-
trary, Rancière argued, the relationship between objective knowledge
and ideology is never one of rupture or separation, but always a prob-
lematic articulation.48 There is no separating of scientific knowledge and
44 Rancière, Le Maître Ignorant: Cinq Leçons sur l’Émancipation Intellectuelle (Paris:
Fayard, 1987), 15.

46 Ibid., 39–40.
47 Ibid., 30–31.
48 Rancière, “Sur la Théorie de l’Idéologie,” 236.

64 C. COMANDUCCI
ideological discourse: in fact, it is only in an ideological—and, specifi-

cally, bourgeois—conception of scientific knowledge, Rancière claimed,
that knowledge becomes thinkable as a distinct object.49 Knowledge is
not an object, but a form of sharing; it is not opposed to practice, but is
itself a practice—a practice that, more specifically, constitutes a common
on the basis of the equality of all intelligences.
Following Althusser, 1970s film theory configured itself essentially as
a critique of false knowledge: not really in the sense of a demystification
of the false arguments of bourgeois films, but rather as an elucidation of
the ideological form of the cinematic apparatus of representation itself
(through this, film theory was about to take the step that would set it
apart from film criticism). “Narrative,” Stephen Heath wrote, “gives
the meaning that the photographic image shows real.”50 In this way,
Althusserian film theory tendentially identified the ideological nature
of film with the longstanding issue of the impression of reality and
imagined the practice of theory fundamentally as a matter of a demysti-
fication of the image. “The impression of reality,” Christopher Williams
wrote in the same year, “spawns two processes in the spectator: recogni-
tion, and then mystification. The task of political cinema, and of cinema
(22) criticism, is to destroy those processes.”51
The study of film was particularly receptive to the logic that opposes
truth to phenomenological experience: “truths” Paul Narboni and Jean-
Luc Comolli wrote, arguing against the no less authoritarian positions of
Fargier on Cinéthique from the pages of the Cahiers du Cinéma, “never
came to be ‘known theoretically’ through a film: known, yes; theoret-
ically, no. Cinéthique,” they added, “misuses language in many ways.
An over-hasty marriage between ‘theory’ and ‘cinema’ goes side by side
with an equally unwise divorce between ‘cinema’ and ‘ideology’.”52
49 Ibid.
50 Stephen Heath, “Film and System: Terms of Analysis,” Screen 16, no. 2 (1975): 108.
Note that the verb “to show” is used in the same text to convey the idea of the function
of theory. Also see Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni, “Cinema/ldeology/Criticism,”
Screen 12, no. 1 (1971): 34.
51 Christopher Williams, “Politics and Production: Some Pointers Through the Work of
Jean-Luc Godard,” Screen 12, no. 4 (1971): 21–22.

52 It is less important here to give the details of the discussion than to acknowledge its
vocabulary and grasp its tones. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,”

33–34.
Such emphasis on truth and demystification could not but have resolved
in a police of words,53 both in the form of internecine struggles over
the correct understanding and practice of theory and in the sense of the
constitution of a technical vocabulary that was at times rigorous and at
times, it was noted, merely hermetic. The polemic between the Cahiers
and Cinéthique assumed the form of a quarrel between true versus false
science, between mere exhibition of militantism and actual revolutionary
action. The allegations were, coherently, those of not having understood
correctly, of making a mystifying rather than an actually theoretical use
of theoretical concepts: “pseudo-scientific rigour quickly takes the place
(and masks the absence) of genuine theoretical rigour,” Narboni and
Comolli criticize their colleagues, noting incidentally that “(the word
theory itself has a high frequency ratio in the text but is still never for-
mulated theoretically).”54 Despite the fact that many good ideas were
nevertheless born in the exchange, the Cahiers and Cinéthique were
in fact accusing each other of having the same kind of inability they
imputed to spectators, translated from the domain of film experience to
that of professional criticism. In both cases, what was questioned was the
other’s capacity to comprehend: “the Cinéthique team may have read their
Althusser, but they have not digested him, and their use of his terminol-
ogy is sometimes unscientific to the point of fantasy.”55
Thus, the Althusserian split between ideology and science reinscribes
itself within the science which is needed to separate science from ideol-
ogy. Althusserian film critics are haunted by the very dualistic logic of
knowledge versus false appearances that they set themselves out to
combat within the cinema.56 This deadlock returns every time a final
ontological, epistemological or methodological arbitration is invoked,
whenever theoretical practice pretends to reach a completely coherent
explanation of contingent phenomena from, as it were, some higher
53 See Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser, 127.

54 Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism (2),” Screen 12,
no. 2 (1971): 147.
55 Ibid., 148.
56 “The vehement demand—itself a wish—that we should be able to tell the difference
between reality and fantasy even in fiction,” writes Elizabeth Cowie expanding the scope
of this issue, “bears witness perhaps to the fear involved in apprehending the reality of
fantasy.” Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (London:
66 C. COMANDUCCI
plane of consciousness. In his recent rational reconstruction of film

theory, Warren Buckland quotes Mario Bunge, providing a very apt for-
mulation of this kind of standpoint: “if we want to explain experience we
must rise above it by analyzing it in nonexperiential terms.”57 Terms that,
precisely as they are subtracted from everyday embodied experience, put
themselves, and the people who use them, to the task of an arid and end-
less scrutiny.
In the end, Althusserian critique did not offer a weapon to change the
world, but only a recipe for its interpretation—actually, for establishing
the necessity of its perpetual interpretation.58 Pedagogy, or the pedagog-
ical regime, indeed aims at maintaining alive the very power it simulta-
neously only pretends to dethrone59—for, as we have seen, it is in that
power that its authority actually resides.
“Class struggle in the domain of ideology,” Rancière declared,
“remains unthinkable as long as we keep with a theory of ideology as
a theory of illusion, imprisoned in the three terms of subject, illusion
and truth.”60 With Althusserian film theory, in particular, we move into
a field in which the relations between these three elements can be fur-
ther naturalized where it was still possible to argue for the capacity of
emancipation of the workers and the vocal masses, the very category of
spectators was all too easily conceivable, and treated, as the tangible form
of the passivity of the masses as such.
Free Use
From the perspective of Rancière’s critique of Althusser, then, the ques-
tion of the spectator’s emancipation becomes not how to go beyond the
illusion embedded in the images or produced by the apparatus, but first
of all how to go beyond the illusion of the passivity and incapacity by
which the position of the spectator is defined. The way to counter this
57 Mario Bunge, Philosophy of Science: From Problem to Theory (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 1998), 453. Quoted in Warren Buckland, Film Theory: Rational
Reconstructions (London: Routledge, 2008), 17.
59 Ibid., 103.
60 Ibid., 140.
illusion is, as we have seen, to begin from an apparently unreasonable

assumption: that all forms of the experience and understanding of film
are an equal expression of the same intelligence and of the fundamental
emancipation of all subjects. In this book I chose to address the specta-
tor’s emancipation mostly in relation to the practice of film theory, rather
than in relation to “dominant” cinema precisely to foreground how this
agency does not correspond just to the spectator’s potential for subver-
sive or individualized reading, but, more fundamentally, to its capacity to
define what counts as a subversive reading and what counts as watching
film in the first place.
Spectatorship becomes in this perspective something more than a
position, then, and something more than a set of practices that can be
defined once and for all: it is, instead, the dimension through which the
space of film can be understood as a space of sharing. If we take politics
to be not a redistribution of power, but the struggle to bring a common
scene into existence, then spectatorship would name both the ground
and the means of a politics of film. As a consequence, a politics of film
can never just be a matter of filmmaking or film theory, but is first of all a
matter of a politics of film experience.
At the same time, spectatorship and film experience are the core of
cinema’s aesthetic dimension: the aesthetic regime is precisely that
regime of art in which use—spectatorship and dialogue, reinterpretation
and dissemination—plays the most important part. Cinema, in this sense,
would be quintessentially the art of spectatorship.
Less ambitiously, we can claim that cinema should be thought of as an
art primarily in relation to an embodied and extended dimension of film
spectatorship. As Rancière wrote:
To consider only the shots and processes that compose a film is to for-
get that cinema is an art as well as a world to itself, that those shots and
effects that vanish in the moment of projection need to be extended, to be
transformed by the memory and words that make cinema exist as a shared
world far beyond the material reality of its projections.61
From this perspective, film experience becomes something radically dif-

ferent than the mappable and intelligible relation between a viewer and
61 Jacques Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema (London: Verso, 2014), 6.

68 C. COMANDUCCI
the images on the screen, but rather creates an aesthetic space of het-
erogeneous impressions and expresses a series of political tensions that
escape any a priori categorization.
For Rancière, the aesthetic regime is at the same time a specific histor-
ical configuration of practices and ideas about art, emerging in the late
nineteenth century,62 and the regime of understanding of art and artistic
experience that made it possible.63 In the aesthetic regime, the distinc-
tion between thought and aesthetic experience, between the work of art
and its reception, between the ordinariness of life and the extraordinari-
ness of art, is reduced, bridged, if not outright abolished.
First, the autonomy staged by the aesthetic regime of art is not that of
the work of (117) art but of a mode of experience. Second, the “aesthetic
experience” is one of heterogeneity, such that, for the subject of that
experience, it is also the dismissal of a certain autonomy. Third, the object
of that experience is “aesthetic”, insofar as it is not, or at least not only,
art.64
Aesthetic experience also corresponds to a tendency and a potential that

anybody has for moments of contemplative drifting, of a Schillerian play
drive.65 In this way, aesthetic experience can be seen to be an expression
of the fundamental equality of all beings as well as a situation open to the
emergence of dissensus.
To conclude, I would like to contrast the freedom of interpretation
which is granted to the spectator in a semiological description of film
experience, with the more radical, dissensual, dimension of free use that
instead defines extended spectatorship. For, indeed, it is not that author-
itarian theories of film entirely negate the ability of spectators to read a
film in an autonomous way: it is, mainly, that they frame this capacity as a
reflection of the apparatus, the theory or the text and, more generally, as
a function of the intelligibility of the spectator’s experience.
Umberto Eco formulated this principle in a clear way in relation to
the reader of the literary text: there should be a distinction, he claimed,
between the “free use” of a text and its “reading”, a distinction which
62 Jacques Rancière, L’Inconscient Esthètique (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 12–14.

63 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 11.
64 Rancière, Dissensus, 116–117.
65 Rancière, Dissensus, 116.

is essential to the epistemology and the method of semiology.66 While

interpretation rests on the mapping of the possible meanings that an
ideal reader can find in the text (and the text in this respect can be more
or less open), free use names instead a reading that does not take place
on this map. Free use in fact produces a novel text, thus transforming the
experience of the reader into something that is basically incommensura-
ble to reading.
By the distinction that Eco proposes, a certain order is brought in the
empire of signs: the reader and, in our case, the spectator, is granted a
certain, intelligible, intelligence, and an agency over the text that can
in turn be grasped by the theorist through its own grasp of the text.
But to the opera aperta, to the open text, still does not correspond an
emancipated reader—precisely because its agency as a reader is made
into a recognizable part and a manageable aspect of the existing textu-
ality. Through the mise en discours of free use that semiology necessarily
attempts, through the very articulation between reading and use that it
puts forward, the meaning of the text becomes available to the semioti-
cian as a more complete object. But the actual experience of reading and
signification remains always a step beyond the semiotician’s grasp. 67
At this level, the spectator’s emancipation is not just a matter of a
power that the spectator can gain by engaging in interpretation, or in
the intertextual or intermedial dimensions of a film, it is not a matter of
gaining the authority of a theorist, and even less of affirming the absolute
equivalence of all opinions, but rather a matter of challenging an authori-
tarian understanding of theory and knowledge as a whole.
66 Umberto Eco, Lector in Fabula: La Cooperazione Interpretativa nei Testi Narrativi
(Milano: Bompiani, 2010 [1979]), 59.

67 Free use is, if you like, a form of Certeausian poaching. “The autonomy of the reader
depends on a transformation of the social relationships that overdetermine his relation

to texts. This transformation is a necessary task. This revolution would be no more than
another totalitarianism on the part of an elite claiming for itself the right to conceal differ-
ent modes of conduct and substituting a new normative education for the previous one,
were it not that we can count on the fact that there already exists, though it is surreptitious
or even repressed, an experience other than that of passivity. A politics of reading must thus
be articulated on an analysis that, describing practices that have long been in effect, makes
them politicizable. Even pointing out a few aspects of the operation of reading will already
indicate how it eludes the law of information.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday
Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 173.
70 C. COMANDUCCI
The exclusion of free use from our understanding of spectatorship

is, simply put, the exclusion of dissensus. The agency of the spectator
should not be seen exclusively as a strategy of watching, then, but rather
as the emergence within film experience, and in the relation between
film experience and its explanation, of something unforeseen and incom-
mensurable to the existing principles of its understanding. Without this
theoretical gesture and expression of a fundamental waywardness, the
fundamental equality and the tensions that animate spectatorship are
lost, and film theory either resolves in the falsely reassuring affirmation
of the always already resistant presence of viewers as “real spectators”,
or in the totalitarian image of the complete ideological determination of
spectatorship.
Dissensual is not what is recognizable as a subversive reading, but
rather a reading which begins as something that is not recognizable, or
acceptable, as one: free use is always coded as an improper use, then,
and as such excluded from the scope of disciplinary theory or included
only under the mark of the irrepresentable. Spectatorship is thus what con-
stantly questions the given understanding of reading and seeing. The same
is true for theory: adapting Rancière’s definition of art in the aesthetic
regime, we can perhaps define non-authoritarian theory as that which con-
stantly displaces the distinction between theory and non-theory.
Bibliography
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University of California Press, 1988.
Comolli, Jean-Louis, and Jean Narboni. “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” Screen
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Screen 12, no. 2 (1971): 145–155.
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1976.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction. New York:
Random House, 1978.
Heath, Stephen. “Film and System: Terms of Analysis.” Screen 16, no. 2 (1975):
91–113.
Kanno, Yuka. “Implicational Spectatorship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke.”
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Phillips, Adam. On Flirtation. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. L’Amour des Commencements. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. La Force d’Attraction. Paris: Seuil, 1990.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Après Freud. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Ce Temps qui ne Passe Pas. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Fenêtres. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. En Marge des Nuits. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Avant. Paris: Gallimard, 2012.
Rancière, Jacques. The Nights of Labour. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1989.
Rancière, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Rancière, Jacques. L’Inconscient Estéthique. Paris: Galilée, 2001.
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London: Bloomsbury, 2006.
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Rancière, Jacques. La Leçon d’Althusser. Paris: La Fabrique, 2011.
Williams, Christopher. “Politics and Production: Some Pointers Through the
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Post-theory. London: British Film Institute, 2001.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder. London: Verso, 2007.
CHAPTER 4
Situatedness and Contingency of Film

Experience
In different ways, all major critiques and revisions of the 1970s

paradigm of psychoanalytic film theory are concerned with reclaiming
the contingency of film experience and cinematic subjectivity, against
the somewhat abstract position assigned to the spectator by the theory
of the cinematographic apparatus. A discussion of contingency is taking
place whenever film theorists argue that the structures and dynamics of
film experience are certainly materialistic, but are not entirely norma-
tive, nor mechanistic; that the experience of the spectator is culturally
situated but not discursively determined; that there is always a space of
freedom from necessity, of possibility, of variety, particularity, unfore-
seeability and uncertainty to spectatorship that ideological institutions
and consensual habits cannot repress nor regulate completely, and so
on. A revaluation of the historicity, cultural relativity, situatedness and
embodiment of the spectator’s experience is characteristic of a broad
range of studies and perspectives, from David Bordwell’s “case” for
cognitivism and its “contingent universals,”1 to Vivian Sobchack’s sit-
uated encounter between the intentionality of the spectator and that of
the film; from Laura Marks’s hapticity and synaesthesia, to Leo Bersani
and Ulysse Dutoit’s idea of spectatorship as an act of phenomenolog-
ical illumination—just to name a few. Even Žižek, one of the most
1 David Bordwell, “A Case for Cognitivism,” Iris 9 (1989): 22.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_4
74 C. COMANDUCCI
“theoretical” film theorists, addresses the ideological subject in terms of

its (of course, “radical”) contingency.
No one indeed can comfortably negate that the conditions of cine-
matic signification and of film production, marketing, and reception,
are, to some degree, situated and discursive, and no one can safely
affirm that they correspond instead to fixed features of cinematic tech-
nology and the human psyche, entirely independent from their specific
historical and cultural coordinates. One can thus conceive contingency
as the kind of concrete specificity that the spectator of apparatus the-
ory lacked, and thus proceed to map new cinematic technologies, new
genres and kinds of spectators and new modalities of film experiencing
in relation to a relatively consensual and stable understanding of spec-
tatorship. Taken in this broad sense, the idea of contingency offers little
controversy and the concept would be, in itself, of little interest. Moving
beyond this approach, if we hold that contingency is not simply a quality
of the objects of theory but a condition of theoretical reflection itself, a
discussion of contingency is bound to problematize the consensual frame
in which the mapping of different kinds of spectatorship takes place.
From this perspective, we can say that contingency individuates a tension
between the situatedness of spectatorship and its intelligibility.
Contingency and Film Theory

The field of ideas that contingency touches upon in relation to specta-
torship is vast, complex, and heterogeneous. First of all, contingency
addresses the various levels of historical and cultural specificity of spec-
tatorial practices. On a different, but clearly interconnected, level
it refers to the embodied and bodily nature of film experience and, at
the same time, to the subjectivity of film experience, to the fact that no
spectator can have exactly the same experience of the same film. In this
sense, contingency points toward the potential openness of film signi-
fication or, rather, to the impossibility of its closure. Contingency also
evokes the particular kind of reality that the cinematic medium is capa-
ble of capturing, the minute texture of visual, aural, and kinetic details
that the cinematic medium can record, as well as the materiality of the
recorded images themselves, which change in time as they are trans-
formed by use and by the environment. As it refers to events that can-
not be foreseen with certainty nor completely controlled, contingency
also presents a particular connection with the unconscious, with the
4 SITUATEDNESS AND CONTINGENCY OF FILM EXPERIENCE 75
sudden manifestation of ideas and feelings in the psyche characteristic of

free association and the Einfall, which will be discussed in the follow-
ing chapter. Finally, contingent is also the status of the relation between
spectatorship and theory as embodied and discursive, mutually related,
practices. Contingency is, in this respect, the fundamental quality of
everyday practice in contrast to the trace.2
On a more abstract plane, “contingent” can be defined as that
which is “neither impossible nor necessary; i.e. both possible and
non-necessary.”3 Contingency in this sense refers to what does not derive
from either logical or metaphysical necessity: it individuates that which
happens causally,4 but not inevitably as a result of an immanent and
unalterable structure or law. A certain degree of contingency is, then,
inescapable and irreducible: the very idea of knowledge, one could say,
implies contingency.
Precisely because of this, however, contingency should be seen a ten-
sion traversing our relation to the phenomenal world, not simply as a
category that defines the phenomenal in correlation with quasi-transcen-
dental structures of cognition that make sense of it. There is a slight, but
crucial, difference between taking contingency as being simply a quality
of the phenomenal world that invites explanation and systematization or
as a tension produced within our regimes of understanding and percep-
tion by the very historicity of the principles that inform explanation and
systematization in the first place. Contingency finds its role in film the-
ory depending on how this epistemological tension is conceptualized and
how this conceptualization affects our understanding of film experience
and of the spectator’s agency and emancipation.
2 “Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain
strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself
against the visible.” See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 93. “It is true that the operations of walking
on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden,
there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin
curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss
what was: the act itself of passing by. […] The trace left behind is substituted for the prac-
tice.” Ibid., 97.
3 Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge

4 See Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-theory
(London: British Film Institute, 2001), 100.

76 C. COMANDUCCI
Universality and Contingency
Generally speaking—and only apparently in a contradictory or paradox-
ical way—a reduction of the scope of contingency in our understanding
of film experience and film theory also determines a reduction of the
scope of their universality. Refusing to address contingency, choosing
to address it only at a certain level or only in specific forms, makes it
increasingly problematic for any theory of spectatorship to sustain the
universality of its claims.
The strongest form that a reduction of the scope of contingency can
take is that of an identification of universality with metaphysics or some
other transcendental system.5 This is, to put it simply, the essential-
ist solution to the problem of contingency, an example of which could
be apparatus theory’s use of psychoanalytic metapsychology to describe
the spectator as a unitary subject position somewhat connatural to the
imaginary.6
If we accept that no transcendental system can actually exist beyond
historical context and specific discursive coordinates the problem of the
relation between contingency and universality takes then the form of
hegemony, of the conflict between competing notions of universality.7
In other words, if we do not account for the contingency of the very
relationship between contingent conditions and universality we end up
reducing the latter within the discursive universe, the ethos, of a particular
group or category of subjects. At this level, we can only have particular
universalities that nevertheless (it cannot be otherwise) still claim to be
universally valid and that, contingently and in a limited context, really
act as universals. Hegemony is in fact inextricable from the discourse of
5 See Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,”
in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 11. For a discussion of the “lure” of metaphysics

in film theory, see Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression
of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47–80.
6 Elizabeth Cowie has advanced a critique of this understanding of the imaginary in these
terms: “the imaginary, with which cinema has so often been identified by film theorists, is
not a full, fixed subjectivity; it comes into existence in the loss of any such full subjectivity,
the regaining of which is in fact the central fantasized scenario of the imaginary.” Elizabeth
Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (London: Macmillan, 1997),
166.
7 Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution
of Political Logics,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 50–51.

universality as such: as Butler argues, hegemony is expressed precisely by

assuming that the dynamic between the particular and the universal is
non-contingent.8
Feminist and queer critiques of the apparatic spectator are a classic
example of the deconstruction of a particularized universal: by investi-
gating the specificity of female or homosexual spectatorship, feminist
and queer theories of film foreground the contingency of cinematic sub-
jectivity so as to rescue it from its male heterosexual, particularized, uni-
versality—in this way not only allowing new forms of film experience to
be addressed, but also questioning the very principles by which specta-
torship is lived and theorized in the first place.
This operation can be seen in turn to depend upon the prior recon-
figuration of the spectator as an empty position that can be occupied by
all sorts of subjects. In other words, the deconstruction of particularized
universals may be seen to depend upon a conception of universality as
an empty position, close to Ernesto Laclau’s: “the universal is an empty
place,” Laclau writes, “a void which can be filled only by the particu-
lar, but which, through its very emptiness, produces a series of effects of
structuration/destructuration of social relations.”9 Thus conceived, the
universality of spectatorship would not individuate a “part of spectators”
nor any specific model or modality of spectatorial experience, but rather
act as a supplement of “radical contingency” that separates the embod-
ied, situated and individual dimension of film experience from the disci-
plinary distribution of the space of film.
In relation to feminist film theory, then, this perspective highlights the
initial and constantly renewed break that feminist and other anti-norma-
tive discourses and practices effect within the naturalized universality of
the subject, before it is fixed in any relatively stable and intelligible iden-
tity or social part. “Empty” universality is thus the opposite of a natu-
ralized universal, for while the latter is implicitly exclusive, the former is
explicitly and radically inclusive: it corresponds to a completely declassi-
fied space which at the same time foregrounds the radical contingency of
every subject position and the equality of all.
8 Judith Butler, “Competing Universalities,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality,
163.
9 Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 51.
78 C. COMANDUCCI
Radical Contingency and the Psychoanalytic Subject

According to Slavoj Žižek, a radical contingency is the very foundation
of the idea of universality, the paradoxical, minimal ahistorical kernel of
historicism.
“Every version of historicism,” Žižek argues, “relies on a minimal
ahistorical’ formal framework defining the terrain within which the open
and endless game of contingent inclusions/exclusions, substitutions,
renegotiations, displacements, and so on, takes place.”10
“Historicity,” Žižek had written two years earlier, elucidating the rela-
tion between contingency and discourse, “is not the zero-level state of
things secondarily obfuscated by ideological fixations and naturalising
misrecognitions; historicity itself, the space of contingent discursive con-
structions, must be sustained through an effort, assumed, regained again
and again.”11
The same is also true of ideology and subject positioning in relation
to the Lacanian Real: “when Lacan emphatically asserts that there is no
big other […],” Žižek writes, “his point is precisely that there is no a
priori formal structural schema exempt from historical contingencies—
there are only contingent, fragile, inconsistent configurations.”12 We can
then understand the paradox of radical contingency precisely as a tension
between the historical and the transcendental—or, rather, as something
internal to what is historically posited as transcendental: a negativity that
prevents the formation of any “truly essential” system of interpretation
or regime of understanding.
Radical contingency is not pre- or anti-discursive, then, but is, on
the contrary, an essential aspect of discursivity, while at the same time it
constitutes an element that resists complete intelligibility. Contingency
simultaneously grounds and uproots every discursive formation: “a
constitutive contingency […],” Judith Butler writes discussing Žižek,
“emerges within the ideological field as its permanent (and promising)
instability.”13
10 Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism?” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality,
112.
11 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 67.
12 Slavoj Žižek, “Holding the Place,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 310.
13 Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London:
Routledge, 1993), 192.

The contingency of ideological formations relates to their discursivity,

while ideology is in many respects always a negation of contingency and
a disavowal of discursivity. Ideology is not a matter of discursivity, then,
but of discursive determination: even though ideology is itself contin-
gent, Victor Burgin has argued, “within it the fact of contingency is sup-
pressed.”14 This is true of all normative subject positions, or identities,
from “man” and “woman” to “the spectator.”
Radical contingency is something more than the fact that, in Žižek’s
words, “a certain historical constellation can be symbolized in different
ways:”15 it does not point simply toward a plurality of possible interpre-
tations, but to discursivity and universality—that is, to the question of
politics. Radical contingency is the dimension of that which contains no
necessary mode of its symbolization16 and is thus, to put it simply, always
open for discussion.
In other words, the universal character of radical contingency does
not individuate a pre-discursive substance, but rather the field of dis-
cursivity as such. The same is true of the embodied and situated expe-
rience of the “real” spectator, which does not have to be imagined as
pre-discursive “direct” experience—wayward because of a wayward
“nature”—but rather as a discursive and embodied experience that is
wayward precisely in the sense that it contains no necessary mode of its
symbolization. We can relate to spectatorship in singularly contingent sit-
uations, but spectatorship cannot be reduced to what can be grasped of
it from any single standpoint or collection of standpoints, lest it loses its
potential to act as the empty place of universality and becomes instead a
disciplinary category.
We could say of spectatorship what Judith Butler wrote about gender:
only when the mechanism that constructs the spectator implies the con-
tingency of that construction does this constructedness prove useful to
the diversification of possible spectatorial practices.17 It is in this sense,
14 Burgin, Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (Leuven: Leuven

15 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 107.
16 See ibid.
17 “Only when the mechanism of gender construction implies the contingency of that
construction does ‘constructedness’ per se prove useful to the political project to enlarge
the scope of possible gender configurations.” Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 51.
80 C. COMANDUCCI
I believe, that the egalitarian and libertarian gesture that may be found at
the core of feminist discourse eventually points toward a declassification
of all gender positions. Similarly, every anti-normative discourse, every
struggle against discrimination, is at its core an indisciplinary practice
and thus a political gesture against all forms of disciplinary power.
As a consequence, the contingency of spectatorship would not be
intrinsically opposed to the ideological or discursive dimension that
apparatus theory described, as we have seen, but rather be a constitu-
tional and productive aspect of the discursivity of experience. In the end,
if we can say that spectatorship is discursively constructed but not discur-
sively determined it is also because we conceive of it in terms of a specific
link between contingency and universality—as a political, rather than a
disciplinary category.
Radical contingency is a fundamental concept because it allows the
voicing of the non-coincidence between the singularity of the embod-
ied subject’s experience and the consensual continuities in which this
experience acquires a meaning that is recognizable a priori. The idea of
radical contingency makes not only each unique act of watching relevant
but places the singular contingency of film experience at the core of the
understanding of spectatorship.
In this work, the break with the ideal spectator of apparatus theory
is done more in the terms of radical contingency and of an extension
of spectatorship from a scene of looking to a scene of dialogue than in
terms of “mid-level” sociological or cultural research, but this of course
does not negate the necessity to consider specific cultural and historical
contexts. So, while Stacey for instance argued for historical and cultural
contingency against the “universalism of much psychoanalytic work on
female spectatorship,” I would rather read her criticism to be directed
against the normativity of psychoanalytic metapsychology than against
the idea of the universality of spectatorship as such.18
Psychoanalysis, Žižek argues, finds its specificity against other forms
of empiricism precisely in the way it deals with the relation between the
utterly contingent and the universal: psychoanalytic theory is indeed a
matter of looking for the exception in order to understand the norm, for
symptoms in order to understand normal psychic dynamics, for the most
idiosyncratic use of language in free association in order to understand
18 See Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New
York: Routledge, 2009 [1994]), 40.

meaning-making, and so on. In short, psychoanalytic epistemology per-

forms a jump from the singular to the universal, bypassing the mid-level
of the particular.19
The reason why this jump is significant, and the reason why it can be
made at all, is precisely because there is no universal which is not itself
contingent. If, on one hand, the singular contingency of the case study
elevated to the essential expression of a quasi-transcendental form of
experience would never satisfy the established criteria for empirical vali-
dation, on the other hand, the kind of universality which can be obtained
through research in mid-level contingency would never satisfy the more
radical level of universality that radical contingency allows to realize.20
Only psychoanalysis, Žižek suggests, is actually able to address the full
spectrum of contingency, including the radical contingency that separates
the subject of knowledge from itself. So that, as Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
argued from a different perspective, while traditional epistemologies are
concerned with our capacity to foresee and control contingent events,
psychoanalysis would rather be concerned with our ability to embrace
contingency and encounter the unexpected.21
The psychoanalytic description of the subject adds a layer to the con-
tingency and situatedness of experience that returns us to the heteron-
omy of the subject. Contingency is not “out there” in the phenomenal
world but is already in play in the very constitution of the subject. In
this sense, the psychoanalytic subject is a radically contingent subject: the
very idea of subjectivity in psychoanalysis moves away from the stability
of the self and the unity of identity, towards a regime of understanding in
which the subject is nothing but a series of contingent encounters.
“Even more radically,” Žižek writes, “the very basic constituents of
the subject’s identity—the signifiers around which his/her symbolic uni-
verse has crystallized itself, the fundamental fantasy which provides the
co-ordinates of his/her desire—result from a series of contingent trau-
matic encounters.”22
Contingency thus names a form of freedom, the freedom of the het-
eronomous subject and of everything that has no proper place. Beyond
19 Žižek, “Da Capo Senza Fine,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 241.

20 Ibid.,240.
21 Pontalis, Après Freud, 114.
22 Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, 100.

82 C. COMANDUCCI
its metapsychological myths, the psychoanalytic discourse on the subject

foregrounds what Athena Athanasiou has called the “eventness of the
human.”23
“The human,” Athanasiou writes, “has no ‘proper’ place to take out-
side social situatedness and allocation, including the exposure to the
possibility of being undone. The human is always the event of its multi-
ple exposures—both within its relatedness to others and within its expo-
sure to the normative forces that arrange the social, political and cultural
matrices of humanness.”24
Seen from the perspective of this theory of subjectivity, the spectator
appears as a history of its encounters with film and each film, conversely,
as the event of its multiple exposures to subjective perception. As we
will see in the two final chapters, film text and film experience are inter-
twined, meaning that the subject of film is always plural and that the film
text is never completely objective.
The singular, idiosyncratic experience of film, then, takes center stage
in the theory of spectatorship, not as the object to be made sense of, but
as it individuates a form and understanding of knowledge. We should
stress that radical contingency does not name a category of events, objects
or practices, but rather a particular relation between knowledge and expe-
rience, a tension within the scene of knowledge which corresponds to a
tension within the speaking subject. In this sense, radical contingency is
the point of contact of psychoanalytic and critical theory and, in more
than a way, the dimension that makes their connection a necessary one.
Singular Contingency and Extended Spectatorship

The levels of historical and cultural contingency of spectatorship are gen-
erally accepted and acknowledged, but there is a level of singular con-
tingency which corresponds to the unique experience of each individual
spectator that is harder to include in the scope of disciplinary theory: at
this level, we find the idiosyncratic ideas and the faulty memories, the
unrepeatable situations, the accidents and the unforeseen encounters that
make not only the experience of each spectator different from that of
everybody else, but the watching of every single film a unique experience.
23 Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 32.

24 Ibid. Emphasis added.
Now, this difference can be great or small and this uniqueness can be
more or less sensational but, I believe, both are always significant. They
are clearly significant to spectators: after all, it is at the level of our indi-
vidual and unrepeatable experience, each time we watch a film, that we
first encounter it and it is at this level that our endearment with cinema
first takes place. But it is also significant because it defines the beginnings
and the scope of film theory as an everyday practice. The idea of radi-
cal contingency requires us to include this level of singular contingency
in our understanding of spectatorship and film theory. And this inclusion
prompts in turn an extension of the scope of theory and spectatorship.
The fundamental tension of spectatorship is first of all the tension
between a consensual and a subjective understanding of film experience:
between what a film is supposed to mean and the significance it comes to
have in our lives (when the first is reduced to the second we sometimes
call it cinephilia and when the second is reduced to the first we may want
to call it conformism). In turn, the communal experience of spectator-
ship consists primarily in an expansion of the universe of circumstances
that are characteristic of any situated and individual film experience. The
ways we remember a film, the ways we talk about it with other people,
the ways we connect it with other films and other events in our lives
take place first of all as a series of contingent connections: signification is
first of all a matter of creating contiguities and only after of establishing
sense.
It is clear, then, that singular contingency is a radical dimension,
bound to remain opaque to disciplinary research. In order to engage
with it, it calls not only for an aesthetic regime of understanding of art,
but, more generally, for an aesthetic regime of understanding of knowl-
edge: one in that does not rest on a pretense of mastery and collabo-
rates instead with the contingent and associative play of signification,
taking this playfulness of dialogue as something integral to the sharing of
knowledge, rather than as an impediment or an accessory to it.
What we may call extended spectatorship is first of all a matter of
including memory and dialogue to the scope of film experience, thus
not only extending spectatorship beyond the moment of projection but
extending its scope from that of perception, comprehension and con-
sumption to that of theory, imagination and sharing.
Extended spectatorship is something else than film beyond the cin-
ema hall or a multiplication of forms and technologies of spectatorship.
84 C. COMANDUCCI
It is the effect of understanding spectatorship as a scene that involves two

scenes: the scene of looking on and the scene of dialogue.
When we tell somebody about a film that we have watched, we
reevoke the scene of looking on as we narrate the film: the film is present
as a remembered experience but this memory is always already influenced
by the scene of dialogue, by everything that is taking place between the
two speakers—their feelings toward each other, the ideas, memories and
experiences that they share or not share, things they feel they have or
do not have in common, what they know and do not know about each
other, their past, their desires, the future they imagine for themselves
and so on. Conversely, a scene of dialogue is being evoked each time
we are watching a film: we translate the images into situations, feelings,
meanings by projecting over them the filter of our past experiences, by
connecting them with other images we have seen, by re-living in them
significant parts of our life. In this way, the scene of spectatorship never
entails just one film, but many, and never just one spectator or an indi-
vidual subject, but rather a heteronomous subject, who is already a his-
tory of relations and, in a way, more than one person.
Contingency evokes the idea of contact, of signification by contiguity:
all experiences are connected and the embodied subject is contingent to
all of the experiences that are part of its history. In an encounter, with
film or with other people, the subject comes in touch with other encoun-
ters in a continuum of lived experience that is at once embodied and
“enworlded.”
If this is true, then a problem of continuity, so to speak, presents itself
to disciplinary theory: where do you cut in the flow of the lived expe-
rience and begin separating what is proper of the experience of a spec-
tator from the rest of its subjective experiences? In other words, when
the experience of a film begin? When the ads end and the titles appear?
When the lights are turned off? When we take our place in the cinema
hall? When we pay for the ticket? When we decide what film we are
going to watch? And how do we even decide? How far does everything
that shapes our decision to watch that particular film reach back?
Everything that might happen as I walk to the cinema has the poten-
tial to influence my experience of a film. On the way, I might meet a
friend who might tell me about another film she has seen: unexpectedly,
and unaccountably, that film will become part of the intertexual dimen-
sion of the film I am going to watch. My walk to the cinema—the places
I traverse, the buildings I look at and the thoughts I may be thinking as
I go—could become as essential to my reading of the film as the actual

projection. The kind of embodied and wayward spectator we are dealing
with here is then one who might not even reach the cinema, who might
change its mind on the way or arrive too late: paradoxically, we can say
that the experiences this spectator would have instead of that of the
film’s projection would still constitute a part of its history as a spectator.
Let’s say our spectator does enter the cinema hall, though: this place,
as Roland Barthes has famously noted,25 bears in turn its own set of dis-
tractions and potential encounters. Even when I concentrate my atten-
tion on the screen rather than on the shadows around it, I experience the
film first of all as a shifting mass of light as a series of somewhat arbitrary
details that only become coherent images through the work of my expe-
riencing, in relation to my embodied, discursive and psychic coordinates.
If the film image is discursive and experiential—that is, if it can only
be made sense in relation to an embodied and discursively constructed
subject—then there is no image to begin with: every image is already a
contingent and heterogeneous formation. This is why, of course, even
though everybody can refer to the objective text of the film, every spec-
tator has a different experience and idea of it.
After the projection, our experience of the film loses something of
its immediacy and detail, and at the same time acquires another, as con-
tingent and possibly even more embodied, dimension: that of memory.
In our memory, all those personal associations that shaped the film as
we experienced it during the projection are already settling down, as it
were, without us necessarily being aware of it: some will acquire more
importance with time, some will change completely, some others we will
remember exactly and yet others we will forget. Film, as it exists in the
spectator’s memory, is necessarily incomplete and bound up with sub-
jective imagination: it inhabits a dimension of embodied memory which
is in fact defined by a certain forgetfulness and is affected by the mobil-
ity of psychic intensities (condensations and displacements, for example).
Remembering a film we are always already forgetting something about
it: we are reshaping it, in a free-associative way, and extending its sig-
nificance in new and unforeseeable directions. When we finally narrate
our experience of a film to someone—the scene from which we have
25 Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theatre,” in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 346. Originally published as “En
sortant du cinéma,” Communications 23 (1975): 104–107.
86 C. COMANDUCCI
begun—every aspect of the encounter and of the dialogue will concur

to evoke yet another, different, film in the person who is listening and
responding to us.
On one hand, then, we can say that the objective or consensual mean-
ing of film never exhausts the film’s contingent significance (works of
film theory, for example, are often a way to resignify, to extend or sub-
vert, the significance of a film beyond its most conventional meaning).
On the other, we see that the efficacy and the pleasure of the sharing
of film experience rest not only, and not primarily, in the proficiency
with which we command cinematic codes and the codes of conversation,
but essentially in our ability to engage with the singular contingency
of the dialogues and the encounters in which that experience is evoked
and discussed. In this sense extended spectatorship is first of all a form
of aesthetic and interpersonal relation, and only secondarily a matter of
decoding or comprehension.
In the end, no theory of cinematic signification can aspire to reach the
level of complexity that takes place in the everyday, ordinary, practice of
spectatorship. From the perspective that a full account of singular contin-
gency opens up, then, a film cannot be, strictly speaking, “understood”:
we should say on the contrary that its significance is extended form the
experience we have of it during the projection, to our memory of it, and
beyond, in a series of encounters with other people, other contexts, and
other films. Meaning is never coded before in the objects we experience,
it only comes after, through the correspondences we are able to establish
with the rest of our embodied experience. In this way, the simple scene
of telling the story about watching a film acts the living and ungraspable
ground in which both spectatorship and theory have their source: a level
in which they are found together and in which it is in fact impossible to
tell them apart.
Everybody agrees that a broad context precedes and follows the
moment of projection and that it has some influence on our experi-
ence of the film. In film theory, the contingency of spectatorship is
usually accounted for in terms of intertextuality and/or by address-
ing particular groups of spectators or specific modalities of film watch-
ing: but this is just the extent of extra-textual contingency that can be
addressed through the text and only the contingency of spectatorship
that can be addressed through a psychologization or sociologization of
the spectator—that is, precisely through a significant reduction of the
singular contingency of film experience.
By choosing not to downplay the singular contingency of specta-

torship and its theoretical import, we are not condemning ourselves to
some sort of nominalist vertigo, which would prevent us from reflecting
on or communicating our experience. On the contrary, we are address-
ing the core tension of discursivity which makes this reflection and
communication possible in the first place—the fact that a thing never is
just what can be said to be, all while being only what we say about it.
We must understand, Antonin Artaud wrote, that “intelligence is only
an enormous contingency.”26 The impossibilities and vertigoes caused
by the contingency of film experience do not disturb spectatorship
and theory as such, then, but only disciplinary theory and pedagogical
explanation.
Film experiencing is characterized by a tension, Miriam Bratu Hansen
writes in her study of Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of film, between the
focusing of our attention and our being constantly “sidetracked by
details,” potentially wandering with our eyes and minds at the margins
of the screen, or committing to our memory other transient images
or thoughts.27 For Kracauer, this kind of “spectatorial mobility,”
Hansen continues, induced a “centrifugal movement […] away from
the film, into the labyrinths of the viewer’s imagination, memories and
dreams”28—an aesthetic form of engagement with film that is similar, in
some respects, to the process of free association that will be discussed in
the next chapter. Many of the associations and feelings that make up the
moving image have little to do, at the level of consensual meaning, with
the film’s recognizable content or with its material form: on the contrary,
most of them are free associative and, in respect to the objective or refer-
ential meaning of the film, quite inessential. If the meaning of the mov-
ing image must be, at least to some degree, conventional and consensual,
on the contrary what makes it significant to the single spectator is possi-
bly what is most contingent about it.
A final issue to be discussed is the relation between contingency,
chance and fate, for it is all too easy to confuse contingency with ran-
domness and then, in a typical reversal, turn contingent events into an
26 Antonin Artaud, Complete Works, vol. 1 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 71.
27 Miriam Bratu-Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin,
and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California
Press, 2012), 276.
28 Ibid.
88 C. COMANDUCCI
expression of an underlying, fateful, meaning. Through this gesture, in

fact, utter contingency is transformed in yet another measure of intel-
ligibility. Contingency describes deterministic processes whose outcome
is not foreseeable, not random events whose meaning was in any way
ordained, so that even as it invites a heightened significance, inherently,
it is meaningless.
Žižek resumes the problem at the core of the idea of fate with this
question: “is there a deeper meaning beneath contingencies, or is the
meaning itself the outcome of a contingent turn of events?”29 A question
that, we might note, echoes the question of the ontology of the image in
relation to its embodied experience: is there a deeper meaning beneath
the contingency of the experience of film, or is the objective and discur-
sive meaning of the text merely the contingent outcome of an ultimately
ungraspable series of events?
In the end, Žižek’s argues that the idea of fate constitutes a desperate
way of making sense of the meaninglessness of contingent experience.30
Fate relates to fatum—to the subject which is spoken by a masterful dis-
course, and which is therefore deemed incapable of autonomous speech.
In contrast with the fullness of meaning that the idea, as well as the
“feeling,” of fate allows to entertain, contingency constitutes instead the
horizon—the limit as well as the scope of possibilities—of the emanci-
pated subject. The very nature of the image in the aesthetic regime can
then be understood as the tension between the discursive articulation
and the material contingency of the encounter of the spectator with the
film. Or, as Bratu Hansen writes about Kracauer again, as the tension
between “the implied horizon of our ‘habits of seeing’ […] and that
which momentarily eludes and confounds such structures.”31
Contingency disturbs the articulation of the world as a meaningful
scene and as a representation of a well-ordered fable. In order to give
an example of this disturbance, but also of the difficulty to “grasp” con-
tingency and reduce it within a textual dimension, I am going to discuss
a short story by Luigi Pirandello. Apart from its ante litteram Lacanian
flair, it should quickly become evident how the problematization of con-
tingency and of its inscription in the story can be made relevant to our
argument.
29 Žižek,The Fright of Real Tears, 101.

30 Ibid.,
107.
31 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 268.
If Only a Bat Hadn’t Come into the Story

A few days before the premiere of his new play, playwright Faustino
Perres suddenly finds himself in an unforeseen and upsetting situation.
Things, so far, had gone exactly as he expected. About the play—a rather
conventional one, and poorly written—Pirandello writes that there was
“nothing so new and startling […] that the audience was likely to take
offence.”32 The actors, as well, were just about adequate for and satis-
fied with their parts. Everything was as plain and dull as possible. Or, it
would have been “if only a bat hadn’t come into the story.”33
Each night, indeed, a bat that had presumably made its nest among
the beams of the theater’s dome, or that was coming in from a hole in
the roof, was lured in by the stage lights during rehearsals and flew insist-
ently over the performers’ heads. All actors were disturbed, of course.
But the young actress Gastina was so terrified by it that she could barely
hold herself together, horrified by the idea that the animal could get
stuck into her hair.
The night before the dress rehearsal, Gastina asks Perres to revise the
script so as to have more scenes in which the lights are dimmed, in order
to reduce the risk of attracting the bat. At the playwright’s initial refusal,
she insists, setting off a typically Pirandellian dialogue on contingency,
truth and illusion. “No, I mean it!” she says, arguing with Perres:
After all, don’t you want your play to give a perfect illusion of reality?
An illusion? No, that’s not it at all. Art creates reality itself, not an
illusion!
Very well. But if art creates reality, the bat destroys it.
What do you mean? Why?
Just because. Just imagine that in real life you have a family quarrel,
a scene between husband and wife, mother and daughter, a question of
money or anything you like. And in the middle of it, a bat flies into the
room. Well, what happens? I can tell you. The quarrel is held up; either
the lights are turned off, or the opponents go into another room, or else
somebody fetches a broom, gets up on a stool and tries to knock the bat
unconscious. And then they forget what they were quarrelling about and
gather around, half smiling, half disgusted, to look at the creature and see
how it is made.
32 Luigi Pirandello, “The Bat,” in Modern Italian Short Stories, ed. Marc Slonim and
trans. Frances Frenaye (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954 [1920]), 22.
33 Ibid., 23.
90 C. COMANDUCCI
All right, that’s everyday life, if you like […] but I didn’t put any bat
into my play.
Maybe you didn’t, but the bat got into it, willy-nilly.34
Since the bat imposes itself not only as a presence on the stage, but also,
as it were, as a presence in the fiction of the drama, Gastina continues,
not only she, the actress, cannot ignore it but Livia as well, her character,
should not act as if the bat were not there. The most natural thing to
do, she says, would be to have the characters take a broom, get up on a
stool, and chase the beast away or kill it. Without even letting her finish
her sentence, Faustino protests, exasperated, that that was surely impossi-
ble. So the actress rebukes:
[But] your play is sure to benefit. After all, the bat is part of the scene:
whether you like it or not he’s forced his way into it… A real bat, too. If
you don’t take him into account, he’s bound to seem artificial. […] Can’t
you see?35
Throughout the exchange, Faustino is made to defend the regime of

representation, with the clear-cut separation and respective self-suffi-
ciency that it must assume between real reality and the reality of fiction.
For Faustino, a thing—a bat or a character, an event or an experience—
can only exist either inside or outside the world of fiction, inside or
outside of reality, never in-between and never in both places at once.
Pirandello usually compares this view of reality to madness and, in his
stories and plays, he often brings it to its point of rupture.
Faustino is now saying:
If I were to take the bat into account and make my characters pay atten-
tion to him, then he would have to be part of the reality which I have
created. And in that case he’d be an artificial bat, not a real one. And, inci-
dentally, an element of perfectly casual reality can’t be allowed to introduce
itself into the essential and created reality of a work of art.
But what if it does introduce itself?
But it doesn’t! It can’t! That bat doesn’t get into my play; it simply gets
onto the stage where you are reciting it.
34 Ibid., 24.
35 Ibid., 25.
Very good! Where I am reciting your play. Then one of two things (26)
must be true. Either your play is alive, or the bat is alive. And the bat is
alive, very much so, I can tell you. I’ve proved that to you because he’s so
alive Livia and the other characters can’t seem natural if they go on with
the scene as if he weren’t there. So the conclusion is this: either throw out
the bat, or throw out the play.36
The dialogue touches here the relation between the reality of the scene and
the reality of the play and asks where must this reality be seen to exist: in
the diegetic reality of the play as it is written, in the material reality of its
performance, or somewhere in-between? Does one dimension exclude the
other, and can the two even be distinguished? Is not the intrusion of the bat,
Gastina compellingly argues, the only real thing happening in Faustino’s play?
The opening night comes and they still cannot get rid of the bat, also
because of the dismissiveness of the director who cannot allow himself
to take the matter too seriously. The play begins without incidents and
Faustino is ridiculously absorbed in his own creation, gesturing along
as the lines are spoken and silently mimicking the actors’ expressions.
Inevitably, the bat comes in, but no one in the audience notices it. Even
Faustino, at first, fails to acknowledge its presence: he only realizes that
the animal is there, Pirandello notes, when the mediocrity of the play
begins to show through and the performance is met with “little and fee-
ble applause”37: he is only able to see the bat, that is, as an excuse for the
failure of his play.
A moment later, Gastina enters the scene and the audience falls silent
in expectation. Still, no one has noticed the bat flying over the stage.
Gastina does notice, however: the actress strains to keep her composure
as the animal keeps fluttering over her head. And then, of course, for the
first time after days of rehearsals, the bat hits her on the head. With a cry,
Gastina faints into the arms of the actor who was next to her.
While he is dragging her away, to the surprise of everyone in the
crew, the spectators let out a thunderous applause. Unaware of the
bat, they had taken Gastina’s fainting as a part of the play—and as the
most brilliant one at that! “The fainting scene,” Pirandello writes, “had
been played so realistically as to convince them that it was an integral
36 Ibid., 25–26.
37 Ibid., 26.
92 C. COMANDUCCI
part of the whole, and this was the reason for their ovation.”38 The
applause does not die out and the playwright, the director, and Gastina
are loudly called to appear on stage. Unfortunately, the director has to
explain, the actress had been so proven by the intensity of her perfor-
mance, that she was in no condition to go on: “the performance had to
be interrupted.”39
Minutes later, when the theater is finally empty, the troupe gathers to
ponder on the situation. Not only, Faustino laments, it was for him way
worse to owe the bat this unexpected success than it would have been
to blame it for its failure, but they now find themselves in an impossible
predicament. How, indeed, could they possibly remain true to the only
successful scene of the representation the following night, and then the
next? How could they stage, every time, control and repeat that which
had been in fact a complete coincidence? If they wanted to go on with
the representations at all, they had to include, somehow, anyhow, the
fainting scene into the play.
Surely, the director says, it will not be a problem for the actors to
perform it. But that is not the point, Perres rebuts. The director cannot
understand that if the scene came out so well it had been only because
Gastina was not acting at all. So, for Perres, there is no possible solution:
the play has to be cancelled.
At that point Gastina comes in, now recovered and visibly pleased that
her point had been so thoroughly proved. With a smile, she rubs some
salt on the two men’s wounds:
I could have an artificial fainting spell in the second act, if Signor Perres
were to follow your advice and write it in for me. But you’d have to have
the bat under control, so that it wouldn’t make me do the real thing, say
in the first or third act, or right after tonight’s scene.40
Ignoring her remarks, the director is thinking of forcing Gastina to play

anyway, but Faustino knows better and he is already resigned. In the end
the play will indeed be cancelled. As the narrator relates, concluding the
story:
38 Ibid., 27.
39 Ibid., 28.
40 Ibid., 29.
[Faustino] was convinced that the success of his play was due entirely to
the violent intrusion of a purely casual, extraneous element, which instead
of upsetting his artifice completely had miraculously fitted into it and given
the audience the illusion of truth. He withdrew it from the boards, and it
was never given again.41
The Inscription of Contingency

Now, imagine that someone had filmed the first and only performance
of Faustino’s play. Through the film recording, the incredible coinci-
dences that led to Gastina’s one-off performance would have been cap-
tured and could have been then reproduced and experienced again and
again.
At a first glance, cinema appears to be the ideal medium for the
recording of contingency: indeed, as Mary Ann Doane argues, “the
emergence of photographic and phonographic technologies in the nine-
teenth century seemed to make possible what had been previously been
beyond the grasp of representation—the inscription of contingency.”42
And yet, what a recording of Gastina’s unwarranted exploit would have
afforded is not a true expression of contingency but, precisely as Doane
wrote, merely its inscription: “the paradox of photographic (or elec-
tronic) contingency […] is that once registered, once fixed in representa-
tion, the contingent loses its contingency.”43
On one hand, contingency seems to be fundamental to the “nature”
of the medium.44 On the other, it seems to be precisely what the
medium has the most power to remove. The relation between the cen-
trality of contingency in film aesthetics and the paradox of its inevitable
disappearance in its inscription is one of the main elements in the tension
between the regime of representation and the aesthetic regime through
which Rancière discusses cinema in Film Fables.
41 Ibid.
42 Mary Ann Doane, in Linda Connor et al., “Notes from the Field: Contingency,” The
Art Bulletin 94, no. 3 (2012): 348.

43 Ibid., 349.
44 See Janet Harbord’s discussion of contingency in Siegried Kracauer’s Theory of Film.
Janet Harbord, “Contingency’s Work: Kracauer’s Theory of Film and the Trope of the
Accidental,” New Formations 61 (2007): 90.
94 C. COMANDUCCI
Through its capacity to capture the utmost contingency of visual real-

ity, indeed, cinema seems to completely erase the image in the Platonic
sense of an imaginary double of a thing:
Cinema revokes the old mimetic order because it resolves the question
of mimesis at its root—the Platonic denunciation of images, the oppo-
sition between sensible copy and intelligible model. The matter seen
and transcribed by the mechanic eye, says [Jean] Epstein, is equivalent
to mind: a sensible immaterial matter composed of waves and corpuscles
that abolishes all opposition between deceitful appearance and substantial
reality.45
For Epstein, cinema returns the perceived world to its most material and
most radical contingency, before both narrative/discursive ordering and
embodied perception, to “a state of waves and vibrations” before intelli-
gible objects take shape.46 At this level of proto-image we can locate two
of the specificities of camera-reality that have to do with the inscription
of contingency: the singular contingency of material objects and events,
and the material contingency of the cinematographic medium itself. The
camera, indeed, registers what makes of the bat not just any bat but that
unique animal; of its flight, not just a flight but that unrepeatable tra-
jectory; of Gastina’s scream, a scream with a definite length and pitch, a
unique constellation of overtones, and so on. In fact, film cannot avoid
this contingency. Camera-reality also plays against the mimetic regime
by foregrounding the materiality of the cinematic medium, which in the
regime of representation tends instead toward transparency: glitches, film
burns, all cases in which the machines of recording and projection fail or
when the material support of the images ages or becomes corrupt fore-
ground a specific kind of cinematic contingency.
Both these characteristics have been recently mobilized in favor of a
haptic film aesthetic and a more embodied or bodily understanding of
the experience of the spectator. “Despite the reputed realism and mime-
sis of photographic, electronic, and digital imaging systems,” Doane
writes, “it is the defectiveness of the image (or sound) its deficiencies,
that constitute the confirmation of its contact with (touching of) the
45 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006), 2.

46 Ibid.
real, its collaboration of contingency.”47 Cinematographic contingency

suggests a broad redefinition of physical reality precisely through the link
it establishes between the enhanced materiality of the perceived world
and the faltering of its representation.
The cinematic power over contingency is also expressed through the
narrative inscription of the unexpected. Cinematic technology surely
enjoys a great deal of mastery over the contingency of the event: it can
rule it out, by discarding failed shots, and stage it in—waiting for it, as
it were, in the unfolding of staged as well as unstaged situations—it can
evoke it, provoke it and also fake it quite effectively. But its capacity to
record contingent events overall acts as a taming of their contingency. In
this, cinema is closer to literature than to the theater: a real bat can hap-
pen to fly on a stage, but cannot fly into a page or out of a screen.
Cinema appears to be the medium of contingency par excellence, then,
but it is actually the one that has the highest potential for leading con-
tingency back within the logic of representation. For what film affords
are, in fact, representations of contingency, which submit contingency to
a particular regime of its visibility. As in the case of Pirandello’s play, in
which the reality effect is produced by the spectators failing to notice the
bat, film could then aim at the creation of a perfect illusion of reality
through a completely seamless inscription of contingency—which would
in fact amount to its complete foreclosure. From this point of view (the
point of view of the regime of representation after the cinema, perhaps),
nothing contingent could ever happen on a screen: the category of the
filmed would be the category of the ordained. The suppression of cine-
ma’s aesthetic potential is therefore complete when cinema is conceived
again as a machine for the production of simulacra: when, as Doane put
it, “the act of filming transforms the contingent into an event character-
ized by its very filmability”48—and, we may add, little else.
Once filmed, Pirandello’s bat would therefore be cannibalized by
the bat in the film: the real bat would become nothing more than the
filmed bat and its incontrollable intrusion would be transformed—as in
Pirandello’s story—into the point of suture of the impression of real-
ity. The inscription of contingency, indeed, marks the return of the
regime of representation, and the inscription of contingency through
47 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the
Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 349.

48 Ibid., 23.
96 C. COMANDUCCI
the intensification of camera-reality marks a particular inversion of this

regime: the idea of the original as a copy of its representation. In this
sense we see how the idea of the inscription of contingency predates and
conditions its realization through cinematic technology.
One should stress that the interplay between contingency and staged
reality that Gastina and Faustino discuss in the story is part of a fic-
tional world: the “real” bat that Pirandello wrote about is in fact merely
diegetic, and as an element of a story it is precisely not contingent, but
fateful. The irruption of the bat and its “dramatic effect”—the break-
down of the representation which saves Faustino’s irredeemably bad
play—in relation to the story is the exact opposite of the intrusion of an
uncontrollable event. Contingent only within the story, the uncontrolla-
ble bat becomes absolutely necessary to the story itself.
If the contingency that cinema seemed able to capture disappears in
its fateful inscription, it can only be found again and revived in the con-
tingency of film experience, in the dimension of extended spectatorship
and free use. In this dimension, signification involves “close contacts and
resonant connections”49 which we are going to discuss in terms of conti-
guity and hapticity in the chapter on embodiment and, in the next chap-
ter, through the psychoanalytic idea of free associations.
Bibliography
Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of
Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Artaud, Antonin. Complete Works, vol. 1. London: Calder and Boyars, 1968.
Audi, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. “En sortant du cinéma.” Communications 23 (1975): 104–107.
Barthes, Roland. “Leaving the Movie Theatre.” In The Rustle of Language.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.
Bordwell, David. “A Case for Cognitivism.” Iris 9 (1989): 11–40.
Bratu-Hansen, Miriam. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter
Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
Burgin, Victor. Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin. Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2009.
49 Maria Brennan, in Mary Ann Doane, in Linda Connor et al., “Notes from the Field:
Contingency,” 347.
Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the
Political. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclaum, and Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality. London: Verso, 2000.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Connor, Linda, Giovanna Borradori, Marcia Brennan, Mary Ann Doane, Angus
Fletcher, Peter Geimer, Gloria Kury, Mark Ledbury, C. Brian Rose, Frances
Spalding, and Chris Spring. “Notes from the Field: Contingency.” The Art
Bulletin 94, no. 3 (2012): 344–361.
Macmillan, 1997.
Doane, Mary-Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency,
the Archive. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Harbord, Janet. “Contingency’s Work: Kracauer’s Theory of Film and the Trope
of the Accidental.” New Formations 61 (2007): 90–103.
Pirandello, Luigi. “The Bat.” In Modern Italian Short Stories, edited by Marc
Slonim and translated by Frances Frenaye, 22–29. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1954.
Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006.
Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. New
York: Routledge, 2009.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and
Post-theory. London: British Film Institute, 2001.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York: Verso, 2008.
CHAPTER 5
The Process of Free Association and Film

as an Evocative Object
A revaluation of the contingency of film experience is one of the central

features of those reactions to apparatus theory that, while being critical
to it, wish neither to disregard nor to downplay the ideological and polit-
ical tensions proper of spectatorship. This contingency, as we have seen,
can be addressed in terms of the plurality of available positions and exist-
ing modes of film experiencing and in terms of a radical contingency,
which would correspond to the heteronomy and emancipation of the
spectator beyond its normative reduction to a passive subject position.
Where this passivity is taken to be a core attribute of a psychoanalyti-
cally informed understanding of spectatorship, addressing the spectator’s
emancipation has often become a matter of abandoning the psychoan-
alytic perspective entirely. Contrary to this position, I would argue that
the normativity of the description of the cinematic subject in psychoan-
alytic film theory does not depend on the use of psychoanalysis as such,
but rather rests in the reduction of the scope of psychoanalysis to that of
its metapsychology.
Even when the sexism of the apparatus and of its theory have been
questioned, for instance, its metapsychological grounding has been
more often the field than the object of debate. This, as Jacqueline Rose
has argued, has sometimes led to the paradox of feminist film theory

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_5
100 C. COMANDUCCI
criticizing sexist discourses in film and film theory by recurring to the

same conceptual framework that sustained them.1 “Psychoanalysis has a
two-fold role,” Jackie Stacey wrote in a different tone: “on the one hand
feminists have excoriated it as a theory of the institution of patriarchy at
the level of the psychical, and on the other hand it has been used criti-
cally to question those psychic structures.”2
As I have mentioned in the introduction, I do not believe this kind of
deadlock to be the expression of an intrinsic limit of feminist discourse
or, I would add in this case, of psychoanalysis. I think, on the contrary,
that it is rather the result of the disciplinary aspects of psychoanalytic film
theory. Directing the “excoriation” not only against specific sexist argu-
ments or premises but against the very reduction of the psyched subject
to its construction in metapsychology could be a way to better integrate
these two demands: having a theory that effectively describes and coun-
ters the existing discourses of discrimination and that at the same time
does not construct its understanding of film experience on the basis of
those discriminations—in Rancièrian terms, a theory that does not take
place within the same distribution of the sensible as the inequalities it
describes.
Elizabeth Cowie’s theory of cinematic identification implicitly sug-
gested two critical gestures that are similarly directed against the role
of psychoanalytic metapsychology in film theory. The first is given in
response to Metz’s (and Baudry’s) conception of primary identifica-
tion as primary subjection—what I have described as an insistence of
Althusserian theory on the spectator as a subject of power: “in Metz’s
framework,” Cowie contends, “psychoanalysis does not offer a theory of
identification in cinema, but the theory of the constitution of a subject
for cinema.”3
The subject of film in apparatus theory is in this sense more the
subject that theory fantasizes about than an actual theorization of
the fantasizing spectator: in this, the theory is normative and some-
what disconnected from reality even before we begin to consider what
1 See Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 2005 [1986]),
199–200.
2 Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York:
Routledge, 2009 [1994]), 9.

3 Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (London:

5 THE PROCESS OF FREE ASSOCIATION AND FILM … 101
particular fantasies it may be sustaining. At the same time, the specta-

tor is addressed less as an embodied and situated, individual and psyched
subject than as the representative of a particular perversion, as the stage
of psychological and political “development” where the mirror stage
meets the society of the spectacle and finally, in some ways, as a gender.4
The second gesture Cowie suggests entails the idea of abandoning
the ground of metapsychology entirely: “the concept of fantasy does
not of itself provide the means to an alternative meta-psychology of cin-
ema,” she writes, “it does not secure a plural and mobile subject for film
in opposition to the fixed—and masculine—spectator-subject of Metz
and Baudry.”5 The main point of this gesture—or, at least, the point I
am going to take up here—is precisely that we should avoid both the
Althusserian solution, based on the idea that the spectator is an always
already intelligible subject position, and the neoliberal voluntaristic solu-
tion, based on the idea that the spectator constitutes a new kind of sub-
ject who can choose each time between different positions, and rather
understand spectatorship as that tensions that makes both these solutions
impossible.
On the one hand, as Cowie argues, “theories of the dispositif of the
subject, explain only the fixing of the subject,” while “the process of
representation, and the production of the subject in representation, is
a process of fixing and unfixing, a play of identity and non-identity.”6
On the other, the multiplicity of positionings cannot be thought of as a
multiplication of identities, because it only becomes possible in radical
self-shattering and can only take place beyond both the logic of iden-
tity and otherness and that, closely connected, of mastery and subjec-
tion. “Fantasy,” Cowie argues, “defines the limits of the subject, not its
infinite dispersal.”7
4 If gender, in Judith Butler’s understanding is “the repeated stylization of the body, a
set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to pro-
duce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being,” then the discipline of spec-
tatorship, a repeated stylization of the looking body, would constitute in itself (before any
further inscription of the heterosexual gender binary in spectatorship and spectatorship the-
ory) an act of normative sexuation. See Laura Mulvey, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 48.
5 Cowie, Representing the Woman, 165.
6 Ibid., 286.
7 Ibid., 165.
102 C. COMANDUCCI
Much like affirming the discursivity of the subject does not automati-
cally entail accepting its discursive determination, so the psyched subject
is something inevitably more contingent and less intelligible than
any of its possible identities or metapsychological positions. Not only
psychic experience and psychoanalysis as a therapy, respectively, consti-
tute and address a kind of relationality and self-experience which cannot
be reduced to a form of mastery and knowledge about the self,8 indeed,
they can also be seen to oppose the kind of mastery that psychoanalytic
metapsychology itself professes. “Psychoanalysis can be good at showing
the ways in which certain points of view become invested with author-
ity,” Adam Phillips has written, “but it is also too good at assuming an
authoritative point of view for itself.”9 And all too easily film studies have
been drawn to the positive knowledge of psychoanalytic metapsychology,
disregarding the dimension of rupture that makes this knowledge possi-
ble in the first place.
Psychoanalysis as Discourse and Practice

Metapsychology constitutes at the same time the most systematic, the
most normative, and, potentially, also the most disciplinary and author-
itarian dimension of psychoanalytic theory. Metapsychology is, so to
speak, the “theoretical” division of psychoanalysis: its function is, indeed,
that of constructing an articulated complex of conceptual models that
are “more or less far-removed from empirical reality”10—to systematize,
that is, the infinite contingencies of analytic experience, and the spe-
cific results of the psychoanalytic method of enquiry during therapeutic
practice into a series of claims and notions, perspectives and recurring
scenarios.
It should not come as a surprise, then, that metapsychology has been
for Louis Althusser the key field for establishing a dialogue between
psychoanalysis and the analysis of ideology.11 Jacques Lacan’s return to
8 Pontalis,Après Freud, 13.

9 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the
Unconscious Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.
10 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis (London:
Hogarth Press, 1973), 249.

20.
Freud, in particular, clearly fulfilled the Althusserian requirement of an

eminently theoretical reassessment of the concepts behind the founding
acts, and the founding fathers, of the psychoanalytic revolution.
Althusser was particularly interested in rescuing psychoanalysis from
the accusation of being a practice without a theory.12 For him, metapsy-
chological concepts had to be more than an extension of psychoanalytic
practice, they had to be given absolute primacy:
“Neither do the technique and method contain the secrets of psycho-anal-

ysis, except as every method does, by delegation, not from the practice but
from the theory. Only the theory contains them, as in every scientific disci-
pline,”13 he wrote.
Althusser’s defense of psychoanalysis as a science, then, even as he strug-

gled to maintain psychoanalysis’s specificity against behaviorist and psy-
chological revisions, coincided with the absolute foregrounding of its
metapsychological dimension.
As a consequence, if the scientificity of psychoanalysis had to proceed
from metapsychological concepts to contingent practice, and not the
other way around, it was perfectly acceptable, in the context of the appli-
cation of psychoanalysis to the study of ideology and the arts, to disre-
gard not only the therapeutic aims of psychoanalysis, but also any of the
specificities that could be found at the level of its practice and of psychic
lived-experience as well. All that mattered, in this perspective, was the
establishment of a metapsychological framework that could support a
stable and powerful system of interpretations.
On the contrary, I think that what is most specific to the psychoana-
lytic method always tends to undermine the systematicity of its metapsy-
chology, that psychic experience is meaningful in that it resists normative
description and that a productive connection between psychoanalysis and
the arts must be sought for not in structures of interpretation, but rather
in those forms of psychoanalytic knowledge that exist in contiguity with
unconscious experience. The psyche and its science would rather side
with the principles of the aesthetic regime than with a logic that proceeds
from consensual understandings and normative classifications.
12 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy: And Other Essays (London: Unwin Brothers,
1971), 183.
13 Ibid., 184.
104 C. COMANDUCCI
The insistence of an Althusserian conception of theory in our under-

standing of psychic experience, in the end, is what authorizes the reduc-
tion of psychoanalytic theory to an ideological discourse on subjectivity.
A discourse upon which, as Althusser argued, the method itself had in
turn to come to depend. By submitting the psychoanalytic method to
the structures of its metapsychology, however, Althusser was hardly mak-
ing a case for the scientificity of psychoanalysis and was rather positing
the conditions only for its articulation as a disciplinary discourse.
It is often this discourse on subjectivity that psychoanalysis is criticized
for in film studies. The teleology of the stages of psychic development,
for instance, the ubiquity and hegemony of the Oedipal narrative, the
heterosexist bias of some psychoanalytic notions of identity, pleasure and
desire, and so on, all take their full normative character only in the meas-
ure that psychoanalysis is seen primarily as a metapsychological system of
symbolic sanction and interpretation. In its normative aspects, however,
this conservative psychoanalytic discourse is less a product of the limits of
psychoanalysis as a practice, than a consequence of the reduction of this
practice within a fantasy of intellectual mastery.
At one level, then, metapsychology names that regime of under-
standing of the psyche which gives the psychoanalytic method its shape:
clearly, Freud’s ideas about the psyche, its topography, economy and
dynamics, have been consubstantial with the development of psychoana-
lytic therapy and different conceptions of psychic dynamics will inevitably
orient the therapeutic process and its instruments in different directions.
This much we can concede to Althusser: there could not be a method to
psychoanalytic therapy without a theoretical systematization of its under-
standing of the psyche.
On the same level, metapsychology also constitutes the ground upon
which different psychoanalytic approaches and new theories confront
themselves. It is the space of the interaction between orthodoxy and cur-
rents, so central to the history of the psychoanalytic movement. It is the
dialogic and the institutional space of the analyst’s training, of the for-
mulation of the procedural standards that are supposed to regulate the
course of the therapy and the relation between analyst and analysand.
At the same time, metapsychological principles, scenarios and nar-
ratives provide, de facto, the most immediate mapping of the poten-
tial connections between psychoanalysis and philosophy, other sciences,
and the arts: metapsychology is usually the field of choice both when
psychoanalysts venture to write about art and whenever a psychoanalytic

approach is adopted by scholars in the humanities and the social sciences.
With the exception of the sometimes seductive but generally disdained
writing of “psychoanalytic” biographies, this privilege of metapsychol-
ogy as the main connection between psychoanalysis and the arts mainly
takes the direction of interpretation. In the measure that psychoanaly-
sis is reduced to its metapsychology, its interaction with the arts is also
reduced to the scope of a hermeneutics, which is all too often further
narrowed down to pedagogical explanation.
It is, from the very outset, the very prestige that Freud assigned to,
and sought for, psychoanalytic metapsychology that allowed not just for
the translation of psychoanalysis into other disciplinary fields, but for its
reduction to a structuralist “masterplot”14 as well. Freud, however, was
also aware of the dangers coming with the power the young science of
psychoanalysis was borrowing from metapsychology: what he considered
to be the ambassador of psychoanalysis he also represented as a Faustian
witch.15
At another level, instead—the level of therapeutic practice—
metapsychology has a more pragmatic role: primarily, it sustains and
informs the analyst’s acts of interpretation. Such acts—of which the
classic model would be, of course, the interpretation of a dream—are
focused interventions by the analyst within the session and constitute its
most apparent contribution to the analytic process. Quite clearly, inter-
pretations can only be made in relation to a metapsychological frame,
but, it is important to note, they are never made exclusively in relation to
it. The interpretation of a dream, for instance, can never be reduced to
a purely intellectual decoding of its manifest content detached from the
dimension of transference, or to a symbolic reading separated from the
contingent play of free associations in which both the analysand and the
analyst are engaged during the session.
Before being active at the level of the latent meaning it uncovers,
then, interpretation in psychoanalytic practice actually confronts its effec-
tiveness as an utterance, as a performative expression of the analyst’s own
14 PeterBrooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 285.

15 Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” in Freud: Complete Works,
ed. Ivan Smith (2000 [1937]), 5022.
106 C. COMANDUCCI
emotive presence in an “analytic field.”16 I interpret, Winnicott once

wrote, because otherwise the patient would get the impression that I
understand everything.17 The act of interpretation “situates” the analyst
in the transferal relation and ties it to the contingency of its own fantasy
and associations, partly divesting the analyst of its fantasmatic authority.
This shift of focus from the intellectual aspect of interpretation to
interpretation as an act internal to the relation of transference is a fun-
damental one in psychoanalytic therapy and theory. It is a change that
took place gradually, beginning with Freud’s divergence from the classi-
cal, symbolic, reading of dreams to their interpretation in the context of
the analysand’s free and the recognition of the limited power of interpre-
tation and rationalization against the compulsion to repeat.18
The centrality of transference in psychoanalysis requires a rethinking
of the role of the analyst’s interpretations and, eventually, a reconfigu-
ration of psychoanalytic epistemology as a whole. Transference, Pontalis
suggestively wrote, is like a fifth season,19 a mark of the atemporal-
ity (ucronie) of the unconscious and a part beyond the parts of time.20
In this perspective, the dimension of the unconscious would no longer
be a realm of the hidden and not be other to language and knowledge
as such, but rather opposed to what Pontalis called (in partial polemic
with Jacques Lacan) the tout-langage21—the “all-language” and the
“everything-language,” the kind of language that allows for masterful
interpretation. In this sense, transference would name something else
16 The concept of analytic field (campo analitico) is characteristic of the work of the
Italian psychoanalyst Antonino Ferro, who drew from Kurt Levin, Madeleine Baranger
and Wilfred Bion for its elaboration. With this concept, Ferro refers to the conscious and
unconscious, emotive and semantic space that the analyst and the analysand evoke and
inhabit during the session, and, more generally, to what “happens” in the transferal rela-
tion that is established between the two. Through this, Ferro proposes an approach to
analytic technique and, in particular, to interpretation, that is based more on the collabora-
tion of analysand and analyst than in the latter’s authority or skill. See Antonino Ferro, The
Bipersonal Field: Experiences in Child Analysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
17 Quoted in Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, 106.
18 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Avant (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 51. See also Catalina
Bronstein, “On Free Association and Psychic Reality.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 18,
no. 4 (2002): 478.
19 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 35.
20 Ibid., 16–17.
21 Pontalis, Avant, 114.

than the comprehensive articulation of the sensible and the knowable

that language can seem to realize22 and almost the opposite of the fan-
tasy of mastery that comes with this semblance. Much like the idea of
identification in film theory had to be restored to some of its original
complexity, so the idea of film interpretation and the interpretation of
spectatorship should perhaps be problematized along the same lines in
which interpretation has been questioned in psychoanalysis.
The broadening of the field of interpretation in transference was also,
at least in part, a move away from a logic of demystification and uncov-
ering of psychic “truth” and toward a more embodied and collaborative
working-through of the relation between the analysand and the analyst.
This goes hand in hand with the recognition of the contingency and
embodiment of symbolization as well as with the acknowledgement of
a fundamental equality of intelligence in the analytic encounter and in
encounters in general that are distinctive of the English school of psy-
choanalysis. Adam Phillips is building on these foundations when he
states that psychoanalytic theory is made with sentences, not ideas23:
what he means is that psychoanalytic practice rests more in the dimen-
sion of dialogue, of the contingent encounter between two subjectivi-
ties, than in the masterful knowledge of one of the two. In this view,
the analyst and the analysand find in free-floating attention and free asso-
ciation a common state and a shared practice. For Christopher Bollas,
the analytic situation entails indeed “two complementary sources of free
association”24 so that patient and analyst are seen to share a self-analytic
function.25
The Unconscious and the Mastery of Concepts

Instead of being a form of technical knowledge, or a method for probing
and collecting data from the unconscious, psychoanalysis should be seen
to touch upon a kind of non-knowledge, not a refusal of knowledge but
the enjoyment of its partiality and incompleteness:
22 Pontalis,Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas, 35.

23 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 105.
24 Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis and the Unthought Known
(New York: Columbia University Press), 202.

25 Ibid., 255.
108 C. COMANDUCCI
“Psychoanalysis bores me when it gets everywhere without being invited,”

Pontalis wrote, “when it affirms itself as the interpretation of all possible
interpretations. I claim for everyone not a refuge in the uninterpretable,
but a land of the uninterpreted whose borders will never be firmly set.”26
Psychoanalysis invites us to entertain a relation to knowledge that values

its limits and the potential inherent in its suspension.
This can be grasped, from another perspective, in terms of the dif-
ference between a lack of knowledge and a lack in knowledge: psycho-
analysis believes that there is an irreducible gap in our understanding
of ourselves and that this gap is at the same time the sole dimension
in which symbolization can take place and, thus, the sole place that
we can inhabit as psyched and speaking subjects. “Ironically enough,”
Bollas writes, “the aspersion ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’
becomes a stunningly positive quality in psychoanalysis.”27
Pontalis’s idea that psychic experience is radically incommensurable
with intellectual mastery proceeds very rigorously from a fact of analytic
therapy: that conscious apprehension of repressed material, or of the rea-
sons for its repression, is not enough in itself to suppress the effects of
repression.28 Through therapy and reflection, we can obtain a reasona-
ble understanding, image, or explanation of previously repressed psychic
situations and complexes of ideas, without this leading to a significant
change in their psychic economy, nor in our behaviors, symptoms and
desires. It is often easy enough to accommodate repressed ideas and feel-
ings in the conscious mind: what is difficult is to work through them at
their more intractable, thing-like, level.
Slavoj Žižek likes to tell the following story: a man is convinced that
he is a grain of wheat and so he is afraid that chickens will eat him.
Unable to lead a normal life, he decides to commit himself to a men-
tal institution. After many years of treatment, the doctors finally man-
age to cure him: the man no longer thinks that he is a grain of wheat
26 “La psychanalyse m’assomme quand elle entre, sans y être invité, en tout lieu, s’affirme
comme l’interprétation de toutes interprétations possibles. Je revendique pour tout un cha-

cun non le refuge dans l’ininterprétable mais un territoire, aux frontières mouvantes, de
l’ininterpreté.” Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, L’Amour des Commencements (Paris: Gallimard,
1986), 27. Translation mine.
27 Christopher Bollas, The Evocative Object World (New York: Routledge, 2009), 14.

and so he is ready to leave the clinic. As soon as he leaves, however, the

man encounters a chicken and runs back to the doctors, utterly terrified.
When they ask him how come he is still afraid of chickens, since he now
knows that he is not a grain of wheat, the man replies: “I know, alright,
but does the chicken know?29 It is easy enough to train the man: the
point is to educate the chicken. It is not through a process of disclosure,
then, nor as an effect of self-mastery, rationalization or demystification
that one is able to engage with the psyche in such a way that its economy
can be altered, together with its symptomatic effects.
Psychoanalytic therapy involves a continuous, if partial, collapse of the
knowledge possessed by both the analysand and the analyst, not only as
an effect of the contingency of the analytic encounter, but because the
very nature of the unconscious is to escape the mastery of concepts,30
to provoke diversions not merely in the objects of knowledge but in
the very act of knowing, by this continuously subtracting consciousness
from itself. Analytic experience and what of it can be translated in the
humanities, then, actually exists largely in counterpoint to the practice of
interpretation.
Psychoanalysis is not a discourse that enables us to articulate and solve
questions but rather a language that allows us to speak about paradoxes
in their own terms. If psychoanalytic experience is the tension between
a drive to know and its constant (sometimes pleasurable and sometimes
traumatic) faltering, psychoanalysis becomes a practice that attempts, but
never quite manages, to bridge not between language and the irrepre-
sentable, but between the intelligible and the significant, between the
inevitable and the unexpected.
Nothing is a clearest instance of collective repression, Pontalis jokingly
stated, than a conference of the psychoanalytic association31: the pursuit
of scholarly coherence and authority in psychoanalytic theory was indeed
for him often just a way of eluding a real confrontation with the uncon-
scious. If his first interest in psychoanalysis came as a reaction against the
conceptual mastery that he had disliked in philosophy,32 he quickly turned
29 For one of Žižek’s versions of the story, see Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek, Talk at
Princeton University, 5 May (2005), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBvASueefk4.

Accessed 13 July 2018.
32 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, En Marge des Nuits (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 20.

110 C. COMANDUCCI
his critique to the pretense of mastery that psychoanalytic discourse itself

could be seen to perform. Pontalis’s writings, which he meant to occupy
a place in-between the theoretical language of psychoanalysis and the aes-
thetic language of literature and the psyche, entail what can be described
as a phenomenological shift from the dimension of psychoanalytic knowl-
edge to that of the significance of analytic and psychic experience, from
the interpretation of dream contents to the significance of the experience
of dreaming.33 Psychoanalysis would thus be the discipline that, at the
same time and by the same token, sanctions the existence of an unruly,
unintelligible, dimension of subjective psychic experience, and attempts
to reduce this dimension into something ordered, meaningful, or at least
contingently significant. “Like dream,” Pontalis wrote, “analysis at the
same time discloses what is boundless and tames it.”34
It is not the order of metapsychology, then, that should define
the epistemological and theoretical significance of psychoanalysis in
film studies, but rather that of the contingency and erraticness of its
embodied practice. In real life, there is no single traumatic core to be
unearthed, but rather an ever expanding meshwork of thoughts, feel-
ing and experiences spinning a yarn whose meaning is always elusive
and changing. Even in film and film theory, a psychoanalytic perspective
should leave us, quite literally, clueless: in Pontalis’s brilliant epigram,
psychoanalysis is Citizen Kane without a Rosebud.35
If the essence of psychoanalysis and of its language lies in its atten-
tiveness to “everything that remains at the margins of the prose of life,”
Pontalis wrote, psychoanalysis
Must then refrain from substituting to the singularity of that kind of expe-
rience a pre-established order of relations, even if this order has been con-
stituted through the discoveries of psychoanalytic practice itself. The order
that suits psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite.36
33 See Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Entre le Rêve et la Douleur (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 19.
Also see Bollas, The Evocative Object, 36: “every dream fulfils the wish to dream.”
34 “Comme le rêve, l’analyse tout à la fois ouvre à l’illimité et l’apprivoise.” Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis, La Force d’Attraction (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 54. Translation mine.

35 Pontalis. L’Amour des Commencements, 24.
36 “À tout ce qui reste dans le marges de la prose de la vie […] elle doit donc se garder de
substituer à cette singularité un ordre préétabli de rélations, fut-il constitué par le savoir qui
s’est organisé à partir de ses découvertes. L’ordre qui lui convient est exactement l’inverse.”
Pontalis, Après Freud, 39. Translation mine.
From Pontalis’s standpoint, psychic experience is therefore marked from

its onset by a kind of indifference to power and discipline, a certain way-
wardness, a resistance even to the lures of identity and the calls of inter-
pellation. Psychic experience is, for Pontalis, both trans-individual and
pre-subjective:
This region of being that Freud has pulled out from the night, and to
which it is so difficult to assign an ontological status, has its structuring
effectiveness precisely in the fact of its latency: psychoanalytic reality is
trans-individual and pre-subjective, trans-temporal or outside of the tem-
poral sequence of events, and it leaves consciousness, if not entirely with-
out knowledge, at least without grasp.37
Psychoanalytic experience is opposed to grasp (prise) and mastery

(emprise), not to knowledge. Beyond the mastery of concepts we find
what Pontalis called a dreaming speech,38 or dreamful thought,39 a
modality of language that happily ignores some of its constraints. More
than any particular literary style or kind of speech, dreamful thought
would be like an aesthetic mood, a mental, emotional and bodily state
in which every thought, emotion or sensation is accepted without any
prior sanction and cultivated without any particular restriction. Dreamful
thought individuates a dimension which is still internal to signification
but in many ways would lie beyond intellectual mastery: it is a practice (a
specific way of getting to know) as well as an epistemology (a particular
understanding of knowledge).
I think the closest link between the experience Pontalis described and
psychoanalytic theory can be made through the concept of free associa-
tion. “Free talking is its own form of thinking,” writes Bollas about the
process of free association.40 Free association, Pontalis argued, is fun-
damentally a language beyond the mastery of concepts: a language that
37 “[…] Dans la mesure où, cette région de l’être que Freud à tirée de la nuit, et à
laquelle il est si difficile d’assigner un statut ontologique, doit son efficacité structurante
précisément ay fait de sa latence: elle est transindividuelle et présubjective, transtemporelle,
ou hors de la série temporelle des événements, et laisse la conscience, sinon sans savoir, du
moins sans prise.” Ibid., 19. Translation mine.
38 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, La Traversée des Ombres (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 179.
39 Pontalis, Fenêtres, 37.
40 Bollas, The Evocative Object World, 24.

112 C. COMANDUCCI
cannot be reduced to the functions that describe it.41 In general, free

association is a matter of experiencing through language that rests on the
extension rather than the fixing or the saturation of meaning.
Analytic experience, and psychic experience in general, would then
consist in a double movement: one, constantly breaking up the equilib-
rium and transparency of “normal,” consensual, habits in life and lan-
guage; the other, at each moment rising from an utterly contingent and
fleeting dimension of “dreamful” lived-experience. In the end, the rele-
vance of psychoanalysis to literature and the arts can be sought for not
in the technique of interpretation, but rather, as Leo Bersani also sug-
gested, in “a certain relation between meaning and movement in dis-
course,”42 a “coming into form” which is also a “subversion of forms”
and a resistance “to the formal seductions of all coercive discourses.”43
With his concept of dreamful thought, then, Pontalis was in fact recog-
nizing the connection between the psychoanalytic idea of free association
and that of aesthetic free play.
The Metapsychological Spectator and the Regime

of Interpretation
Where the application of psychoanalysis to the study of film should have

led to pay attention to what is most contingent about film experience, it
mostly prompted, instead, an abuse of metapsychology. Further reduced
in its scope and themes by its dependency on semiology, sociology and
the theory of ideology, and then by a certain routine, psychoanalytic
metapsychology has often become in film studies a standardized cano-
vaccio for textual interpretation. At the same time, textual interpretation
and psychoanalytic interpretation have been aligned too closely, as if they
were both equally a matter of discovering hidden meanings or demystify-
ing false appearances.
Combined, the metapsychological paradigm of subjectivity and the
idea of interpretation as demystification formed what we could call a
regime of interpretation which placed the metapsychology of the psychic
41 Pontalis,L’Amour des Commencements, 33.

42 Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1977), 11.
43 Ibid., 11–12.
apparatus above both the phenomenology of psychic experience and

the rest of psychoanalytic theory and practice. This regime has survived
several paradigmatic shifts. Symbolic reading based on metapsychology,
conceptual metaphors or consensual representations continue to be prac-
ticed even after the decline of apparatus theory, and metapsychological
counternarratives are more often explored than approaches that do not
rely as much on metapsychology, at the expenses of the epistemologi-
cal, theoretical and aesthetic significance that a different understanding
of psychoanalytic theory could bear.
Much as the spectator of ideological interpellation is not imagined in
its contingent, performative, encounter with language and ideology, but
is rather held to be possessed and shaped by them, the psychic experi-
ence of the spectator is not taken as a situated, fleeting and substantially
erratic phenomenon. Instead, it is reduced to the ahistorical order of the
metapsychological structures and narratives that are used to make sense
of it, or to the historically and culturally contingent, but still somewhat
consensual, categories of sociology and social psychology through which
the experience of different viewers is mapped. These metapsychological
or sociological structures acquire at once their interpretative power and
their normative character by means of a strategic downplaying of the rad-
ical, psychic, contingency of film experience.
Through the regime of interpretation, the role of psychoanalysis and
the psyche in film and cultural studies risks to be reduced to that of
inscribing at a more intimate level, and beyond the agency of the sub-
ject, what has already been made intelligible at the level of consensual
discourse and disciplinary theory. In apparatus theory, in particular, one
frequently has the impression that the ideological and the sociological
are used as a model to understand the psychic, rather than the psychic
as a way to problematize ideology and consensus. In other words, the
regime of interpretation attempts a conflation of the “subjective symbolic
order” with the “social symbolic system”44 that is characteristic of disci-
plinary normalization.
44 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 67. Although I am considering here the limitations that the social
symbolic system imposes on the speaking subject, more than the benefits Kristeva envis-
aged, I agree with her that a distinction between these two dimensions is fundamental. The
incommensurability between these two orders, eventually means that the signifying process
is “the only concrete universality that defines the speaking being.” Ibid.
114 C. COMANDUCCI
An authoritarian framing of spectatorship rests, as we have seen,

in two concomitant assumptions: that the experience of the spectator
is fundamentally intelligible and that the spectator is not capable, on
its own, to understand it for what it is. Coherently with this logic, the
unconscious is first reduced to a repository of latent meaning and, then,
this latency is equated with the subject’s alienated relation toward its real
conditions of existence. In this way, the idea of the unconscious ends
up enabling that of masterful interpretation: the bar of repression, as
Pontalis put it, is eventually what allows for a science of the hidden and
the unknown.45 The failure of Althusserian psychoanalytic film theory to
account for the spectator’s fundamental emancipation depended, among
other things, on its adherence to authoritarian assumptions on the
embodied and speaking subject that, in fact, both preceded and survived
psychoanalytic film theory as such. The apparatic spectator would be los-
ing something of its agency and emancipation, then, not because psycho-
analysis affirms the subject’s lack of mastery, but rather because the more
radical lack which corresponds to the unconscious and to the subject’s
heteronomy is interpreted in terms of subjection and dispossession.
The idea of ideological determination imposes itself as an explanation
of psychic processes in apparatus theory where those processes receive
instead a much more dynamic and subtle description in psychoanalytic
theory. The recognition of the discursivity of the psyche and of the fan-
tasmatic character of ideology does not automatically allow to match
subjects with a recognizable social position or discourse. In fact, one
should rather expect to find within the domain of discourse the same
diversions, paradoxes and bizarre logic that characterize the primary pro-
cess, than try to uncover always-already intelligible ideological structures
in the individual unconscious.
With its particular appropriation of psychoanalytic metapsychology,
apparatus theory installed a certain discursive determinism in the dimen-
sion of the psyche,46 at the same time significantly downplaying the com-
plex and paradoxical agency that is proper of the psychoanalytic subject.
Either by being taken as an essentially meaningful and intelligible but
hidden object—and thus as a prompt for the logic of interpretation—
or as a dimension absolutely external to meaning and signification—and
45 See Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham and London: Duke

46 Not to be confused with Freud’s idea of psychic determinism.
thus as the pre-discursive support of discursive power itself—the uncon-

scious would thus serve to reinforce the power of disciplinary theory and
cement the authority of pedagogical explanation. In this sense, the appa-
ratic spectator is taken less as a psyched being, than as a metapsycholog-
ical subject. When the unconscious is understood as the internal form of
an external mastery over the self it becomes an incarnation of the logic of
inequality: rather than an aspect of the subject’s experience, agency and
responsibility, the unconscious becomes a further sanction of the sub-
ject’s incapacity to understand.
In the end, we can say that the spectator of apparatus theory is a
metapsychological subject not just in the sense that it occupies an
abstract position, constructed according to a particular set of meta-
psychological concepts, but, above all, in the sense that it is a form of
subjectivity that results from a specific regime of understanding of psy-
choanalysis and psychic experience, in which the scope of psychoanalysis
and psychic experience themselves is reduced to that of metapsychology
and interpretation. The limits of the apparatic spectator are first of all
the limits of this reduction, only secondarily a problem of representation
and, clearly, not of the limits of a psychoanalytic approach to the arts as
such. To go beyond this reduction is also to go beyond a fantasy of mas-
tery and self-identity, toward a more collaborative understanding of psy-
choanalytic therapy, in which less emphasis is put on the psychoanalyst
as the subject supposed to know, and toward a more phenomenological,
aesthetic and dissensual understanding of the relation between psychoa-
nalysis and the arts.
In this respect, the specifically theoretical significance of free associa-
tion is not frequently acknowledged. Even when taken in consideration,
free association is often understood merely as a way to produce material
for interpretation and not as a way to rethink the modalities and possibly
undermine the role of interpretation in the first place.
The concept of free association can be related even more specifically
to a critique of disciplinary mastery: “the method of free association,”
Christopher Bollas writes, “subverts the psychoanalyst’s natural author-
itarian tendencies as well as the patient’s wish to be dominated by the
other’s knowledge.”47 A theory of cinematic fantasy, as well, with its
multiple and simultaneous identifications suggests both the unruliness
47 Bollas, Evocative Object, 15.

116 C. COMANDUCCI
and the mobility of film experience that this idea of free association
extends: if, as Cowie writes, “we will be moved by images in ways which
we neither expect or seek or want,” this is also because signification and
experience are fundamentally produced within a process of free associa-
tion, which can then be seen to bridge between the heteronomy of sub-
jectivity and the contingency of embodied experience.
While Jennifer Friedlander, for instance, is mostly concerned with the
exploration of free associative connections that take place in relation to
specific texts,48 here I try to flesh out the consequences of this under-
standing in the extended field of spectatorship. The following discussion
of free association is in this sense an attempt to conceive the relation
between theory and experience in terms of a scene of dialogue and from
the standpoint of free use and aesthetic play.
From Hysteria and “the Great Complex of Associations”

to the Interpretation of Dreams
The method of free associations emerged gradually as the distinctive

and fundamental aspect of psychoanalytic practice: from the studies on
hysteria and the seminal case studies of Emmy von N., Elizabeth von R.
and Dora in The Interpretation of Dreams, to fuller theoretical elabora-
tion in Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, “On Beginning the Treatment”
and “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” until it became
such an established element of the therapy that it seemed to require
no further attention. A few recent psychoanalytic authors have discussed
free association to a significant extent (I will focus on Christopher Bollas,
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and, tangentially, Adam Phillips) but the con-
cept remains, somewhat appropriately, undertheorized and has no strong
48 “By exploring anomalies between form and content, psychoanalytic theories of the
image can be articulated with a more detailed approach that pays due attention to the idi-
osyncratic associations through which individual viewers flesh out such tensions.” Jennifer
Friedlander, Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2008), 30. Emphasis added. For a critique of the use of psychoan-
alytic theory in film studies exclusively in relation to the textual dimension, see Valerie
Walkerdine, “Video Replay: Families, Film and Fantasy,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed.
Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), 168: “psycho-
analysis is used,” Walkerdine writes, “to explore the relations within a film rather than to
explain the engagement with the film by viewers already inserted in a multiplicity of sites
for identification.”
connection with the galaxy of metapsychological concepts and positions

familiar to film theorists. Here I want to suggest how free association
has a specifically theoretical import in relation to film studies which is
coherent with a phenomenological approach to film experience and at
the same time with a Rancièrian understanding of politics and aesthetics.
On one hand, free association requires from the analysand an active
effort to express its own thoughts and feelings without restraint as well
as to formulate them without concern to the rules of identity, language,
storytelling or argumentation; on the other, it requires the analysand to
enter a state of inward watchfulness and heightened psychical sensitivity.
In free association, subjects become in a way spectators of themselves, as
they get closer to the heteronomy that marks their own psychic life and
to their binding history as speaking subjects.
As we have seen, the idea of free association questions the regime of
interpretation not so much because the method based on it unearths
something that essentially resists interpretation, but because it construes
psychic experience and its sharing as something incommensurable with
their masterful explanation. This can be shown by highlighting a connec-
tion, internal to the history of psychoanalytic theory, between free asso-
ciation and, on one hand, the rejection of interpretation through a fixed
system of symbols and, on the other, the abandonment of the practice of
hypnosis and of the notion of suggestion.
The idea of free associations was initially developed by Freud in the
context of his work on hysteria. We find in Freud and Breuer’s Studies
on Hysteria the first formulation of what will become a basic principle
in the psychoanalytic method: hysteric symptoms were conceived to be
the result of an idea getting shut off from a process of associations con-
stantly going on in the mind. In order to develop hysteria, Freud wrote,
“one essential condition must be fulfilled: an idea must be intentionally
repressed from consciousness and excluded from associative modifica-
tion.”49 Here we note how repression from consciousness and exclusion
from associative activity are not simply two conjoined processes, but two
ways of describing the same thing. The severing of its associative link
with the rest of the mind was seen to isolate a traumatic experience, thus
preserving its quota of psychic energy, which in turn was used to gener-
ate hysterical symptoms. Conversely, the physiological associative activity
49 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, “Studies on Hysteria,” in Freud: Complete Works, ed.
Ivan Smith (2000 [1895]), 102. Emphasis added.

118 C. COMANDUCCI
of the psyche constituted a functional response to excitation, which pre-

vented it becoming pathogenic by reworking and discharging the initial
quota of affect.50 As Pontalis will later put it:
The barriers of repression are located in-between representations. Their

function is to prevent the establishment of connections in between them.
The aim of the rule of free association is [instead] to establish new connec-
tions and to multiply the associative networks.51
So, as hysteria was conceived as a missing connection between a particu-

lar traumatic experience and other experiences and ideas in the “great
complex of associations”52 that constitutes conscious mental activity,
therapy was defined as the restoration of this connection—what Freud
called an “associative correction” of the trauma.53 Association was thera-
peutic, then, since through it the patient could bring herself to re-expe-
rience the trauma, find a place for it among her other experiences, and
finally put up an adequate response.
According to what we said so far, associative activity could seem to be
a prerogative of the conscious mind, but it is not so: unconscious ideas
can be, and indeed are associated among themselves, forming uncon-
scious complexes of ideas. In fact, the unconscious is characterized by
a markedly free, unbound, associative activity, which Freud will later
describe in terms of the primary process: it was precisely the associa-
tions between unconscious ideas that the method of free associations was
devised to bring to the surface.54
The idea of a missing connection between representations gradu-
ally gave way to the idea of a displaced connection, as can be evinced
50 Ibid., 12.
51 Pontalis, Fenêtres, 109. Translation mine.
52 Breuer and Freud, “Studies on Hysteria,” 12.
53 Ibid., 17.
54 Ibid., 66. Also see Yoav Yigael, “‘The Primary Process:’ The Vicissitude of a Concept,”
International Forum of Psychoanalysis 14, no. 2 (2005): 77. One should note that the
method of free association replaced hypnosis precisely as Freud became convinced that the
kind of free talk that the patient under hypnosis was producing could be reproduced in a
state of wakefulness through free association. See Breuer and Freud, “Studies on Hysteria,”
54, note 1. At the same time, Freud realized that a certain kind of resistance, especially con-
nected with sexual ideas, was present both in conscious life and in the hypnotic state, thus
compromising what he had thought to be the specific usefulness of the latter. See ibid., 73.
from Freud’s description of the mechanisms of hysteric conversion

and defense. Conversion, he wrote, was “the transformation of psychi-
cal excitation into chronic somatic symptoms,”55 which came as a con-
sequence of the impossibility to process the quota of traumatic affect
through association.56 Rather than being simply a blockage of the asso-
ciative process, conversion was seen to take place when a quota of affect
could not take its intended path. Associative connections between the
physical symptom and the traumatic experience were still required in
order for conversion to take place.57
In particular, conversion entailed what Freud called a symbolic trans-
position: the physical symptom symbolized the whole complex of ideas
that constituted the memory of the trauma, in the sense that it was a
means of representing them and in the sense that it evoked again the
emotions and thoughts that were connected with it (it constituted a ten-
tative abreaction).58 Through the physiological function of association,
then (that of providing an adequate abreaction to trauma), the task of
representation and that of elaboration of traumatic experiences would
seem largely to coincide—this idea is part of the genealogy of free associ-
ation and, more generally, of psychoanalysis as the “talking cure,” a ther-
apy that functions by finding a voice that speaks unutterable feelings on
the frayed surface of language.
It is important to note that Freud and Breuer’s notion of symbolic
representation should not be taken in the simple sense of connecting
an idea to a symbol: their view of conversion involved the concept of
symbol, but always in relation to associative connections and poly-
semy. The conversion symptom represented repressed traumatic expe-
riences by psychic, semantic and conceptual contiguity, not because of
a transcendent symbolic meaning. That “the symbolic relation linking
symptom and meaning is” characterized by polysemy, so that “a sin-
gle symptom may express several meanings,”59 Laplanche and Pontalis
commented, can indeed be explained by the fact that this relation always
takes place within a contingent network of associations. Symbol is used
here then more in its radical sense (from the Greek verb symballo, to

56 Ibid., 102.
57 Ibid., 158.
58 Ibid., 66, 86, 130.
59 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, 90.

120 C. COMANDUCCI
bring together), than in the sense of a sign that conveys one specifically
coded meaning. If Freud’s empiricism led him to systematize the results
obtained through the method of free association in a metapsychology,
we should keep in mind both that we are not really dealing with a phi-
losophy60 and that the strangeness and peculiarities of the method always
have theoretical significance.
While the mechanism of conversion shed some light on the process
through which ideas are connected in the psyche, the mechanism of
defense addressed, to put it simply, the motives for repression. Defense
was conceived as “the refusal on the part of the patient’s whole ego to
come to terms” with a traumatic group of ideas,61 and it would acquire
an increasing scope in psychoanalytic theory, from being characteris-
tic of hysteria to being a fundamental mechanism in the functioning of
neuroses and of the psyche in general. In particular, we are interested
in Freud’s conception of displacement, as one of the forms of defense,
in that it can be seen to ground the logic of manifest and latent content
that will become central to his understanding of dream and, through it,
to the elaboration of the method of free association.
In his essay on screen memories, which shortly preceded The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud addressed the relevance of childhood
amnesia, and the frequent, and apparent, triviality of the few memories
that one retained from that period of one’s life. He conceived this phe-
nomenon as a result of a displacement along associative lines, intended
to preserve, and disguise, emotively significant experiences that had been
subjected to repression:
We shall then form a notion that two psychical forces are concerned in
bringing about memories of this sort. One of these forces takes the impor-
tance of the experience as a motive for seeking to remember it, while the
other—a resistance—tries to prevent any such preference from being shown.
These two opposing forces do not cancel each other out, nor does one of them
(whether with or without loss to itself) overpower the other. Instead, a compro-
mise is brought about, somewhat on the analogy of the resultant in a parallel-
ogram of forces. And the compromise is this. What is recorded as a mnemic
image is not the relevant experience itself—in this respect the resistance
60 See Elizabeth Allison, “Observing the Observer: Freud and the Limits of Empiricism,”
British Journal of Psychotherapy 33, no. 1 (2017): 94–95.

gets its way; what is recorded is another psychical element closely associ-
ated with the objectionable one […]. The result of the conflict is therefore
that, instead of the mnemic image which would have been justified by the orig-
inal event, another is produced which has been to some degree associatively dis-
placed from the former one.62
So, the value of a screen memory resides not in its own content, “but
in the relation existing between that content and some other, that has
been suppressed.”63 The connection between the two is one of associa-
tive displacement, modeled on the idea of the associative link underneath
hysterical conversion symptoms. In the case of screen memories, the
emotive significance of certain childhood experiences is diverted along
an associative path within a network of associations. It will be by evoking
other parts of this network (in fact, as the evocation of this network of
associations) that the original experience will eventually be brought to
consciousness.
Freud affirmed that displacement was a form of substitution,64 but,
I would say, only in the sense that, in the conscious system, we have the
screen memory and not the memory of the actual experience. Quite
obviously, in fact, the screen memory is present and significant in the
first place only because the repressed memory still exists in the uncon-
scious, and because the associative link between the two is firmly in
place: the two memories do not cancel one another out but rather inter-
act, as Freud put it, in order to give rise to the compromise formation
that is the screen memory. From this perspective, “latent” does not mean
something that is lost or erased and thus something that can be “found”
again. The idea of the unconscious, in this sense, refers less to a place
where something is banished than to a particular regime of understand-
ing of experience and signification.
Screen memories in turn suggested the notion that apparently erratic
and senseless ideas and associations in everyday life are neither truly ran-
dom nor senseless, and even less irrelevant (or, at least, that they can
always be made significant through a series of associations). On the
contrary, analytic experience brought Freud to think that, in fact, the
62 Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” in Freud: Complete Works, ed. Ivan Smith (2000
[1899]), 490. Emphasis added.

63 Ibid., 501.
64 Ibid., 491.
122 C. COMANDUCCI
more an association seemed trivial and unreasonable, the more it was

likely to be significant. We find the same logic, of course, at work in
The Interpretation of Dreams: as every Freudian case history shows, the
interpretation of a dream is only possible through (and in fact consists
first of all in) the evocation of an ample network of seemingly irrelevant
associations—dreams, phrases, events, emotions, physical sensations and
so on—in which, and only through which, the elements of the dream
assume their psychic significance. The method of free association is then
first and foremost a method for the evocation of this associative field,
and it is the whole of this heterogeneous field of associations that is the
object of interpretation, not just the manifest content of the dream.
Jacqueline Rose has noted the importance for Roland Barthes of the
idea “that the history of the patient did not consist of some truth to be
deciphered behind the chain of which emerged in the analytic setting;
it resided within that chain and in the process of emergence which the
analysis brought into effect.”65
The text of dream interpretation, in this sense, is never just the man-
ifest content of the dream as it was experienced at night by the dreamer
or what of it can be grasped through its verbalization. It is rather the
experience of the dream as it is expressed and extended through
free association, in connection with everything else that the analysand
says and does during the session as well as in relation to the analyst’s own
free and the memory that both the analysand and the analyst have of
the rest of the treatment. Free association, Bollas writes, drawing a clear
connection between it and the problematization of meaning and inter-
pretation in the theory of literature, is what “deconstructs” and “dissem-
inates” the dream.66
Describing dream content and the dream-work as a result of an asso-
ciative activity implies considering the singular contingency of the act of
interpretation and, according to Freud, requires to go beyond an inter-
pretative technique that “translates any given piece of a dream’s content
by a fixed key.”67 The method of free association thus replaces interpre-
tation through a fixed system of symbols with a much more dynamic
and fundamentally collaborative process, based on a form of aesthetic
65 Rose,Sexuality in the Field of Vision, 228.

66 Bollas,
The Evocative Object, 10.
67 Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in Freud: Complete Works, ed. Ivan
Smith (2000), 606.

self-contemplation, on the expansion of the dream’s meaning through

free talking and on its sharing through a particular form of dialogue.
The experience of free association and free floating attention suggests to
the subject the existence of a place beyond the logic of interpretation,
beyond a reduction of signification to the principles that make it immedi-
ately intelligible.
In relation to film analysis, then, a focus on free association over sym-
bolic reading would prompt a shift from the search for latent content
and the interpretation of the text based on metapsychology and symp-
tomatic reading toward more creative and centrifugal—intertextual but
also dialogic—forms of engagement with cinema which take place in
an extended dimension of spectatorship and are related to an aesthetic
understanding of film experience. Psychoanalytic interpretations of film
texts, of the kind that read unconscious complexes as the hidden struc-
tures of the narrative, or as the hidden meaning of a film’s discourse, in
fact largely suppress the dissensual and aesthetic potentials of free associ-
ation, in that they concentrate on those theoretical assumptions and con-
scious judgements that the method of free association, in its fully fledged
formulation, has precisely the function to bypass.
Method and Process of Free Associations

With “free associations” we first of all mean a method in psychoanalytic
therapy.68 Through the method of free associations—that is, by saying aloud
to the analyst whatever comes to their mind, regardless of logic or any other
conscious concern—analysands shape for the analytic couple their inner
train of thoughts and emotions. In this sense, free association is the tech-
nique by which analysands comply with the fundamental rule of psychoanal-
ysis: to speak their mind by relinquishing their conscious watch over it.
Through analysis, language is released from all function. It is returned,

as it were, to its fundamental power and infirmity. It carries us away and
toward what continuously escapes it. It is transported outside of itself, it is
transferred.69

69 “Par l’analyse, le langage est délié de toute fonction. Il est comme rendu à sa puis-
sance et à son infirmité foncières. Il porte et déporte vers ce que lui échappe. Il est trans-
porté hors de lui, il est transfert.” Pontalis, Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas, 33. Translation and
emphasis mine.
124 C. COMANDUCCI
By letting go of their mastery over the flow of their feelings, thoughts

and speech, analysands allow another agency to speak, which at the
same time is and is not the subject. In a way, free association is a form of
self-shattering and self-dissemination, done within language more than
through it, by which the subject comes in contact with its own heteron-
omy and language is confronted with its waywardness. Free association
exposes the radical contingency of subjective experience and the incon-
sistency of identity: in it, the sense of identity of the conscious subject is
not completely erased, but gaps between self and self nevertheless appear
and are made significant.
Unlike hypnosis, free association does not entail a complete loss
of consciousness or awareness from the part of the analysand—it can
rather be seen as a different regime of consciousness and awareness
and, in particular, as a form of self-observation.70 Spectatorship can
thus be seen to have something in common with free association, in
the sense that both are states of fantasizing, in which the subject veri-
fies and confronts its own otherness to itself, in which it discovers and
experiences thoughts and emotions that are coming from “an other
scene” that is at once within and outside the self. Free association
reveals indeed “an Other line of thought,”71 Bollas argues, the line of
thought of the unconscious as the “true other:” the “other within the
self.”72 In this sense, “free association manifests the unconscious,” he
continues: “it functions as an ever-sophisticated pathway for the artic-
ulation of unconscious ideas […]”73—not, we may want to note, for
their disclosure.
In more technical terms, the method of free associations is intended
to make the first censorship—the one that represses ideas into
the unconscious—more evident by suspending the second censorship—
the voluntary selection of thoughts that operates at the border between
the pre-conscious and the conscious system.74 The removal of the sec-
ondary censorship brings to the surface a flux of unconscious thoughts,
70 Christopher Bollas, Free Association (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), 7.

71 Bollas, The Evocative Object, 4.
72 Ibid., 73, note 2.
73 Ibid., 14.

feelings and experiences that are, as we have noted, themselves organized

according to the logic of free association. This stream of associations,
which is constantly taking place in the mind and continuously intertwin-
ing conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings, memories and
sensations, could then be called a process of free associations which the
method of free association in the analytic setting would be designed to
bring to the surface.75
In this sense we can talk of free association as a phenomenon that
is not exclusive to the analytic setting and transference, but relates
to everything that goes on in the psyche and the mind independently
from the scope and control of our conscious awareness and mastery over
the self, on the model of Freud and Breuer’s “great complex of associ-
ations”: this is what Bollas argues when he claims that free association
constitutes a creative component of ordinary language and thinking.76
“Although he did not ‘discover’ free association,” Bollas writes,
“Freud’s invention of the psychoanalytical session gave this ordinary way
of thinking a highly privileged and utilitarian space. Most importantly, by
asking the person to think out loud, he referred the monologist nature
of solitary inner speech to the dialogic structure of a two-person relation,
a partnership we might term the Freudian Pair.”77
Free association is, thus, also a form of dialogue. If free association
is radically dialogic, though, for Bollas the reverse is also true: everyday
dialogue in many ways involves unconscious free association.
In free dialogue, when two people free associate in the course of a long
conversation, as is typical of close friends, they create unconscious lines of
thought, working associatively, as they jump from one topic to the next.
This is easy to do because we are open to such unconscious mutual influ-
ence when relaxed in the presence of an other.78
The scene of dialogue that is set up by free association, however, is not

exactly like an ordinary scene of conversation: on one hand, it involves a
75 “It seems difficult and perhaps wrong to dissociate the process of ‘free associa-
tion’ from the psychic process that mobilizes the associations.” Bronstein, “On Free
Association,” 480.
76 Bollas, Free Association, 67.
78 Ibid., 14.
126 C. COMANDUCCI
letting-go of self-mastery and the establishment of a certain form of rela-

tional dependency, which is not always the case in conversation, and, on
the other, it is part of a situation that invites the expression of a particu-
lar form of dissensus.
In the analytic setting, free association is complemented by the ana-
lyst’s evenly suspended, free-floating, or evenly hovering, attention: free
associations made by the analysand are met by the analyst’s own open-
ness to association, which is intended to produce a similarly unrestrained
flow of thoughts and feelings in the analyst, devoid of “personal incli-
nations, prejudices, and theoretical assumptions however well-grounded
they might be.”79 These thoughts and feelings are not voiced, but their
evocation in the analyst constitutes a necessary step for the analyst to
relate with and understand the analysand’s associations, prior to interpre-
tation. These conjoined processes—the analysand’s self-observation and
free associative speech, the analyst’s distracted listening and silence—are,
as Pontalis attested, in many ways homologous.80 For both the analyst
and the analysand, the method of free association is an emotional and
dialogic encounter that takes place through the evocation of a network
of conscious and unconscious associations.
In this encounter both the analyst and the analysand, in different
ways and in different measures, forgo some of their conscious control
and mastery over themselves: the analyst lets itself be played upon by the
analysand’s associations while at the same time, through those associa-
tions, the analysand is exposing itself by addressing not just the actual
person sitting behind the couch, but also certain parts of the analysand
which have been projected onto the analyst in the transference. If the
analysand’s free association can be seen as a form of self-shattering, the
analyst’s freely floating attention is perhaps a form of self-effacement.
The practice of free association, indeed, is not simply an open dia-
logue, but a particular kind of free-ranging talk that separates the sub-
ject from itself and exposes its fundamental heteronomy. The unity of
both speakers is compromised by the free play of dialogue, which is at its
core a free play of psychic attachments and disattachments. What comes
up in free association often disturbs the subject’s sense of identity, one’s
understanding of oneself as a subject, as well as the articulation and the

control of the relational space that the subject inhabits: we cannot say
that free association is in itself dissensual, but the method is clearly aimed
at the creation of a space which is hospitable to the emergence of a psy-
chic form of dissensus.
We can distinguish the process of free association from free talking
also because in free association what matters is the emergence of some-
thing unexpected and in many ways disruptive and transformative.
Pontalis had referred to the Freudian term Einfall—a term which means
“idea,” a thing that falls into the mind unexpectedly, but that also means
“invasion” and “inroad”—to speak about the moment of the emergence
of an association, before it is given a further and more defined form (lin-
guistic, emotive, visual or otherwise).81 Einfall, Pontalis wrote, is the
unexpected thought, a strange thought and thought as a stranger, a con-
tingent event that contradicts the most assured theories, a dissonance.82
There is an element of unwillingness and waywardness at the core of free
association: the analyst can prescribe to free associate, Pontalis wrote, but
he cannot “demand from the unexpected to come to his patients, or to
himself.”83 What is free in free association does not refer to any kind of
autonomy from a clearly identifiable authority, then, it is neither a sub-
version nor a liberation, but rather a form of emancipation that comes
after a relinquishing of mastery over the self.
In this respect, it could be misleading to think about the process of
free associations as a simple accumulation of connections or correspond-
ences. Indeed, the precondition of the Einfall is a cut, a disassociation.
To associate, Pontalis writes, is first of all to dissociate from consensual
meaning.84 As Freud wrote, free associations “upset” the innocence
of the manifest dream,85 or, we could say that they “crack up” the self
81 Pontalis, En Marge des Nuits, 112.

82 Pontalis, L’Amour des Commencements, 148. Also, if Žižek can describe thought as
a radical suspension of being, as a break in the reproduction of the life cycle, it is pre-
cisely because thought proceeds not only associatively but through instances of Einfall. See
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2006), 6.
83 “L’analyste peut prescrire: associez’. Il ne peut pas exiger que l’inattendu vienne
à la rencontre de ses patients, ou de lui-même […].” Pontalis, En Marge des Nuits, 112.
Translation mine.
84 Pontalis, L’Amour des Commencements, 115.
85 Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in Freud: Complete Works, ed. Ivan
Smith (2000 [1900]), 673.

128 C. COMANDUCCI
we are accustomed to.86 The process of free association is never a sim-

ple addition of new associations, but a tension between free talk and
its arrest, between Einfall and our habits of thinking and perceiving,
between the conventional structures of signification and their appro-
priation by the primary process, as well as by the other in the situation
of dialogue. Pontalis’s writings indeed suggest to conceive free associa-
tions in terms of dissensus and the unconscious as a dynamic agency that
plays a role in our fundamental emancipation from consensual regimes
of identity and understanding: to free associate, he wrote, is first of all
to disassociate from “the established associations, those that are firmly
in place, in order to make other associations appear, often dangerous
ones….”87
What free association plays against, then, is not really the dimension of
language and meaning as such—whose existence, in fact, it can be seen
to enable—but the existing principles that individuate “proper” mean-
ing and consensual connections. While still being a source of singularly
contingent significance, the process of free association is not reducible
to any definite or stable articulation of meaning: each new association in
fact prevents us from completely grasping the whole, because it moves
signification further and displaces the meaning of the entire complex of
associations by a slight, but always salient, degree. More stable mean-
ings only arise in the interruptions, in the folds and the repetitions of the
associative process.
Bollas incorporates this insight in psychoanalytic therapy and claims
that free association is therapeutic not really because latent unconscious
material is being uncovered, but because it develops the patient’s capa-
bility for unconscious thinking: “by evoking set after set of derivatives of
the unconscious, psychoanalysis increases the reach and depth of uncon-
scious thinking, and thereby expands the unconscious mind itself.”88 In
this perspective, the aim of psychoanalysis is not to “shrink” the uncon-
scious but, on the contrary, to increase the reach of the analysand’s
unconscious capacities, something that is not done exclusively, nor prin-
cipally, by making unconscious thoughts more conscious. In this per-
spective, the act of interpretation does not incorporate and exhaust the
86 See Christopher Bollas, Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (London:
Routledge, 1995), 168–169.

87 Pontalis, Ce Temps Qui ne Passe Pas, 115. Translation and emphasis mine.

significance of free associations and free floating attention: what makes

free association valuable is first of all the kind of interpersonal space that
it allows to imagine.
Film as Evocativev Object

As we have presented it, free association is a signifying practice that
mobilizes at once the contingency of the dialogic situation and the
heteronomy of the subjects involved in it. It is, if we like, an aesthetic
and dissensual free play that takes place in the scene of fantasy: a way
to deconstruct conscious fantasies and allow unconscious fantasies to
emerge within them.89 As a method, free association refers to a specific
situation—the therapeutic setting and transference—but, as a process,
it is also an everyday way of experiencing the world. In this sense, free
association can be used to define a form of spectatorial engagement with
film which takes place both during and beyond the moment of projec-
tion and combines perception and understanding with film memory, film
talk and, more generally, the sharing and free use of film experience.
A link between associative logic, the experiential image and extended
spectatorship resonates with Bollas’s distinctive extension of the scope of
free association beyond free talk and the subject speaking on the ana-
lytic couch and toward, precisely, the embodied subject wandering the
phenomenal world. “We may extend the domain of the free associa-
tive to the world of actual objects,” Bollas writes, “where the way we
use them—and how they process us—is another form of the associative.
In walking though the world of actual objects we meander about in a
world-daydream.”90 In this perspective, phenomenal objects are found to
be psychic objects, and the reverse.
What we have called the process of free association includes different
forms of communication beyond the strictly verbal domain91 and takes
place outside of the analytic setting not only as an ordinary way of expe-
riencing but as the regime of experiencing that is in fact most distinctive
of everyday life. Bollas’s concepts of the evocative object and the evoca-
tive object world in particular, establish a connection between embodied
89 Cfr.Cowie, Representing the Woman, 127.

90 Bollas,The Evocative Object, 1.
91 Bronstein, “On Free Association,” 479.
130 C. COMANDUCCI
experience and the unconscious and relate the psychoanalytic theory of

cathexis to a phenomenological understanding of our relation to the
world.
The evocative object is, for Bollas, “something that inspires idiosyn-
cratic parts of myself which have been projected into that space during
the course of my lifetime.”92 An evocative object is the result of a sort
of gravitational accumulation: associations and psychic intensities aggre-
gate around centers of attraction, different centers gravitating in relation
to each other. With time, these heterogeneous aggregations become
perceivable as distinct objects. So that, when they are perceived the sub-
ject at the same time perceives, as it were, the whole universe of tensions
that had gradually put them together. When I was writing, in the second
chapter, that spectatorship encompasses the emotions, the fantasies and
the associations that come from our encounter with particular films, as
well as with the accrual of feelings that marks our involvement with the
act of watching, I was talking about a film and about the scene of film in
general as evocative objects.
Free association is a daily form of evocation: feelings, memories and
images come into the mind, creating similarities between distant objects
by following all sorts of contiguities—sensory, semiotic, semantic,
memorious, dialogic, psychic. As it is taken up in a field of association
and in the movement of the free associative process, then, every object
and any object becomes evocative.
The evocative object world is the world that the subject engages with
as a world populated by evocative objects. The subject’s ability to think
and feel is, for Bollas, embedded in the evocative object world: not only
the objects we encounter call forth specific thoughts and feelings, but
they become a constitutive element of our capacity for perceiving and
understanding. “Unexpected encounters are mind-expanding,” Bollas
argues,93 and so the object world can be seen as an “extraordinary lex-
icon for the individual,”94 a repository of forms in which subject and
object of perception are intertwined. Thinking associatively also means
thinking through things: our capacity for thinking and feeling is itself in
the world, it reacts to it, it is stimulated and informed by the specific

93 Ibid., 54.
94 Ibid., 56.
qualities of the objects we encounter. So that not only the thingness of

the object—its contingent formal qualities and its specific situation—is
added to the meshwork of associative experience but it also complements
free association, as it were, with its own agency or evenly suspended
presence.
Film is, in many ways, an evocative object. Not only the specific
qualities of the images on screen call up a myriad of singularly subjec-
tive associations in the spectator, but they eventually become part of
the spectator’s capacity for experiencing. The experienced image itself
can be understood as a radically heterogeneous associative construct—a
fleeting aggregation of visual experience, memory, discourse and dia-
logue—brought to life and illuminated by each spectator’s contingent
act of perception. One could say that the moving image emerges in the
spectator’s experience from visual matter by means of associative free
play.95 This “free associative” theory of the image would return significa-
tion and perception to their at once embodied and discursive dimension,
making of film experiencing a function of situatedness and contiguity, of
free associative dialogue and passionate contingent encounters, rather
than a simple matter of decoding and comprehending.
The film theorist and visual artist Victor Burgin has proposed a strong
connection between a theory of the image and free association which in
many ways echoes Bollas’s description of the evocative object and the
evocative object world. In the same way in which Bollas affirms that “for
the unconscious there is no difference between a material and a non-ma-
terial evocative object,”96 Burgin noted an isomorphism between the
impressions of everyday life—noise, chance meetings, glimpses, smells,
all sorts of sensory encounters—and psychic processes: “the phenomena
95 One should not take this emphasis on spectatorship and film experience as a way to
make light of the art of filmmaking. On the contrary, this foregrounding is also a way to
emphasize filmmaking as the production of sets of tensions within associative fields. Steven
Shaviro provides us with an example in relation to film editing: “the ‘lines of flight’ opened
up by the material practice of film editing are never entirely effaced, even when they are
recuperated in the stratifications of continuity rules. Every attempt to manipulate and to
order the flow of images only strengthens the tendential forces that uproot this flow from
any stability of meaning and reference.” He then concludes that “cinematic vision pushes
toward a condition of freeplay: the incessant metamorphosis of immanent, inconstant
appearances.” Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), 39.
132 C. COMANDUCCI
of everyday life form an amalgamated field of broadly isomorphic endog-

enous and exogenous impressions.”97 In turn, the spectator’s relation to
the image is seen by Burgin to take place in this kind of heterogeneous
but synthetic associative space:
In its random juxtapositions of diverse elements across unrelated spatial

and temporal locations, our everyday encounter with the environment
of the media is the formal analogue of such ‘interior’ processes as inner
speech and involuntary association.98
The notion of the film image that corresponds to this space is a

“sequence-image,” an experiential and embodied image which is consti-
tuted by a series of associations both fantasmatic and material in charac-
ter, but so condensed that, instead of being perceived as a sequence of
impressions, the series appears to be a still image.99 The sequence-image,
Burgin wrote, “is largely a product of free association,”100 it traces a path
in an associative field.101
Burgin is using the idea of the sequence-image both to blur the dis-
tinction between the still and the moving image and to foreground the
film image as an experiential and situated object, partly constituted (like
the dream) by the “day residues” of the ordinary lived experience of
each and any spectator. The image, from this perspective, is a compos-
ite psychic and material object that is not only connected with memory
but made of other images and other experiences that the spectator has
encountered. In other words, it is not only free use that proceeds by free
associative encounters and connections, but film experience itself—or,
which is to say the same, ordinary film experience is always in part a kind
of free use. In the same way, Burgin is suggesting to address film mem-
ory not just as an essential and neglected dimension of spectatorship, but
as a crucial element in the formation the film image. Like Bollas’s theory
of the evocative object, Burgin’s theory of the sequence-image points to
a phenomenological understanding of embodied experience in which the
97 Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 15.
98 Ibid., 14.
99 Ibid., 15–16.
100 Victor Burgin, Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2009), 299.

101 Ibid., 305.
object and the subject of perception cannot be told apart, as will be dis-
cussed in the next chapter.
This aspect of the phenomenology of film experience can be connected
with the idea of the spectator’s emancipation in the aesthetic regime. The
difference between a passive and an emancipated spectator would not be
a function of knowledge and mastery, but, as Rancière put it, of a shift to
a different kind of sensible world which entails the rupture of the links
between meaning and meaning, as well as the rupture of the sensual coordi-
nates that seemingly allow one to be at its proper place within a given order
of things. “What occurs are processes of dissociation: a break in a relation-
ship between sense and sense—between what is seen and what is thought,
what is thought and what is felt. Such breaks can happen anywhere and at
any time. But they cannot be calculated.”102 As we have seen, free asso-
ciation acknowledges a certain heteronomy and dissensus within the scene
of fantasy and dialogue, including in the scope of emancipation also a cer-
tain emancipation of the subject from its own mastery. “The spectator,”
Rancière writes, “who experiences the free play of the aesthetic […] enjoys
an autonomy of a very special kind. It is not the autonomy of free Reason,
subduing the anarchy of sensation. It is the suspension of that kind of
autonomy. It is an autonomy strictly related to a withdrawal of power.”103
Free association is not intrinsically or essentially beyond the dimen-
sion of discourse and power, but it still constitutes a trouble within
established systems of understanding or masterful regimes of subjectivity.
“Free” in free association is indeed the opposite of masterful, volitional
and consensual: in free association a dissociation between meaning and
meaning, self and self, takes place and is made significant. The shift from
a logic of film signification based on encoding and decoding or pure
presence to a logic based on associative construction is also part of a
move from the regime of representation to the aesthetic regime, from an
ontology to a phenomenology of the film image and from a disembodied
or disembodying to a more embodied account of film experiencing. In
these respects, the theory of free association constitutes less a model of
linguistic signification or a modality of film experiencing than a way to
understand spectatorship as a whole: free association is the principle of
102 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009),
139–140.
103 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010),
117.
134 C. COMANDUCCI
signification that corresponds to the whatever singularity of the spectator

and to the radical heterogeneity of film experience.
The scope of extended spectatorship shifts our focus from an under-
standing of film experience centered on a unitary and self-sufficient indi-
vidual, to one that is at the same time interpersonal—that is, dialogic and
made of encounters with other people—and impersonal or heterono-
mous—made of encounters with what (in us and outside of us) is not
us. The theory of free association construes the space of film at the same
time as an evocative scene and as a scene of self-shattering. This theory is
relevant to our understanding of film experience for the kind of interper-
sonal space and heteronomous subjectivity that they call into being. Free
association evokes a dimension of embodied meaning that is always inter-
personal, but also one that is never entirely personal either, conscious
or graspable: even in the solitude and self-withdrawal that characterize
the moment of cinematographic projection, film experience engages the
spectator as at the same time and by the same token as an embodied sub-
ject and as a history of encounters.
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Bersani, Leo. Baudelaire and Freud. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
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Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis and the Unthought
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Bollas, Christopher. Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience. London:
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Bollas, Christopher. Free Association. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002.
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Burgin, Victor. Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin. Leuven:
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Burgin, Victor. The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.
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State University of New York Press, 2008.
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CHAPTER 6
The Indeterminacy of Embodiment
Ontology and the Phenomenological Turn

In recent years, we have come to speak of a “phenomenological turn” in
film studies, taking place in the context of the decline of the paradigm of
apparatus theory and of an overall renewal of interest in embodied and
bodily experience in both cultural studies and the arts. To set a landmark
for the use of the expression, it is becoming customary to refer to the
2013 Queen Mary University of London symposium that was dedicated
to the subject.1
The foundations of the turn itself, however, were established grad-
ually in the mid and late nineties through a range of references—from
transcendental to existential phenomenology, from radical feminism to
cognitive theory, from deconstructionism to the neurosciences. There
is hardly one simple common measure to these perspectives: the “phe-
nomenological” denomination in film studies is in fact heterogeneous
in its methods, in its very conceptions of phenomenology, in its themes
as well as in its aims. If any common features are to be found they are,
first of all, in the general intention to place film phenomenology beyond
apparatus theory through a revaluation of the embodied agency of spec-
tators, of the situatedness of their encounter with film and of the material
sensuousness of film and film experience. Other recognizable features of
1 “The Phenomenological Turn in Film Studies,” Queen Mary University of London, 23
May 2013.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_6
138 C. COMANDUCCI
the turn are less specific topics or perspectives than a series of tensions—
between non-linguistic forms of knowledge and their discursive regula-
tion, between meaning and presence, the image and the flesh, pleasure
and desire, representation and ethical immediacy2—that phenomenology
allows to refashion and connect in novel ways, despite the fact that these
tensions are often resolved by different authors in antithetic directions.
In the most basic and most radical way, we can say that film phenom-
enology should entail a turn away from the logic of ontology—from the
idea of reality as something independent from, or preceding, its appre-
hension by a human subject. So that a phenomenological approach to
film would, or should, place itself beyond an ontology of the moving
image. That is, on one hand, beyond the idea that the moving image can
be studied “as such,” independently from it being a more or less con-
tingent object of embodied experience; and, on the other, beyond an
objectification of perception itself, of the relation of the spectator to the
image, as well as of the relation of the film image to the phenomenal
world. A phenomenological approach would also shift the focus from an
eminently communicational conception of film signification to one that
is centered in an embodied and situated sharing of experience.
It should be clear that, in this broad sense, a phenomenological per-
spective is not a recent fact in film theory, but rather a long standing
concern in the understanding of film, independently from any specific
philosophical paradigm. With the idea of film as a discursive object, of
cinema as an ideological institution and of spectatorship as a signify-
ing practice, for instance, apparatus theory and cultural studies already
entailed a fundamental shift from the ontology of the moving image
toward its phenomenology in the sense I want to discuss here. In many
respects (the situatedness of spectatorship, the relation of the “real” sub-
ject and of more bodily forms of experience with the dimension of lan-
guage and discourse, the role of the body in the conceptualization of
subjectivity, and the politics of the body’s representation), the phenom-
enological turn comes as a critique but also as an extension of some of
the fundamental issues that were addressed by apparatus theory.3 What is
characteristic of a phenomenological theory of film, in the end, is less the
disclosure of a previously uncharted territory, than a different account of
2 On this last opposition, see Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics
(London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 137.

3 Richard Rushton, “Deleuzian Spectatorship,” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 46.
6 THE INDETERMINACY OF EMBODIMENT 139
the dimension of film experience, an alternative regime of understanding

of spectatorship as a contingently situated encounter between the specta-
tor and the film.
A phenomenological approach is bound to foreground the embod-
ied experience of film as the main object of film theory, and the viewer’s
body as the main site of its significance. A phenomenological turn, in
this sense, inaugurates a revival of the study of spectatorship, at the same
time granting more power and responsibility to audiences in relation to
aesthetic experience and shifting the barycenter of our understanding of
it closer to the individual viewer. If anything, however, a critical phenom-
enology of film experience must include in its analysis of spectatorship
the vaster range of apparatuses that attend to the regulation of the body
and not limit itself to the cinematographic apparatus alone. A clear exam-
ple of this is of course the feminist tradition of film studies, which inte-
grates a broader consideration of the forces that shape subjectivity and
the body outside the cinema within the scene of spectatorship and film.
In some of its forms (Laura Marks, Laura McMahon, Jennifer Barker),
phenomenological film theory pursues an epistemology of touch, con-
tiguity and connectedness, as opposed to the distance-based, objec-
tual, forms of knowledge and experience that are characterized by
a close alliance of vision and intellectual mastery.4 While embodied
experience—in the work of Vivian Sobchack, for instance—is centered in
the body but can still be seen to constitute a form of conscious cogni-
tion,5 the description of bodily experience and the revaluation of its scope
against that of vision that we find in the work of Marks points instead
to a different epistemology and a different equilibrium of power relations
4 See Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
the Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 162–163. Incidentally,
Marks’s work can, among other things, also be taken as a coherent development of the
Debordian critique of the spectacle, which, for him, entailed a substitution of touch by
sight. Also see Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 2005), 18–19.
5 “Without an act of viewing and a subject who knows itself reflexively as the locus and
origin of viewing as an act, there could no film and no film experience.” Vivian Sobchack,
The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992), 54. Sobchack also returns to the Metzian trope of turning back toward
the spectator as a form of self-reflexive apprehension: “A description of the film experi-
ence as an experience of signification and communication calls for a reflexive turn away
from the film as’object’ and toward the act of viewing and its existential implication of a
body-subject: the viewer.” Ibid., 51.
140 C. COMANDUCCI
between bodies and their representations. What this approach suggests is

to look for the significance of embodied film experience not in the con-
traposition of the visible and the invisible—of the body and its screen
(mis-)representations—but rather in a tension between the visible and
the visual.
This particular form of film phenomenology displays an attention to
the discursivity of bodies beyond their discursive objectification. At the
same time, it reaches out toward forms of experiencing that are closer
to the contingency of the subject and the precarious materiality of the
medium, forms that a cognitive philosophical approach on its own is not
equipped to address. Such a “tactile” approach to the subject, the world
and its experiencing entails first of all a change in our ways of knowing
as well as in the forms of academic writing: other than being a theory
of embodiment, then, phenomenological film theory at the same time
aspires to be a more embodied philosophy of film.
For Marks, a tactile epistemology “conceive[s] of knowledge as
something gained not on the model of vision but through physical con-
tact.”6 She claims that the modality of this form of knowledge is not
representation but mimesis, which she understands in Auerbach’s sense
of a “lively and responsive relationship” between the listener to a story,
or a reader, or a spectator, “such that each time a story is retold it is
sensuously remade in the body of the listener.”7 Since mimesis in this
sense corresponds to the embodied nature of experience and to our sen-
suous and psychic implication with the world and its evocative objects,
I would not oppose it to representation and signification, but rather take
it as an expression of their semiotic dimension, in Julia Kristeva’s sense.
The way I understand it, mimesis can be taken as a form of symbolic
relation that is not subordinated to an act of interpretation, while still
constituting a form of knowledge: if mimesis is a way of knowing, then it
is a dialogic way of knowing that echoes and transforms its object, rather
than reducing the object to what of it can be understood. Mimesis is,
for Jan Campbell as well, a fundamental form of embodied relation that
comes before, and cannot be reduced within, an Oedipal and authoritar-
ian regime of knowledge.8
6 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 138.

7 Ibid.
8 Jan Campbell, Film and Cinema Spectatorship: Melodrama and Mimesis (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2005), 53.

In the perspective that Marks and Campbell open up, then, it is not
vision as such that should be criticized for objectifying the body, but
only one particular modality of vision, a specific form of visual experi-
ence and a particular regime of its understanding: that sort of “instru-
mental vision,” as Marks puts it, “that uses the thing seen as an object
for knowledge and control.”9 Here, the phenomenological approach
touches upon the issues of authority and interpretation that we have
discussed, suggesting a kinship between the spectator’s presence and its
emancipation, at the same time refraining from construing the body as
yet another principle of intelligibility and rather exploring the sense in
which embodiment may correspond to a further dimension of the way-
wardness of subjectivity.
Even in its most “cognitive” formulations, like Vivian Sobchack’s
early work The Address of the Eye, what phenomenology brings to our
understanding of film is the sense of a more material (if not always neces-
sarily more contingent) and more egalitarian (if sometimes no less tran-
scendental) relation between viewer and film. In its more distinctive, and
perhaps more radical, expressions the phenomenological turn attempts to
refuse the reduction of vision to visibility and contrasts apparatus the-
ory’s metapsychological spectator with a more bodily and subjectively
situated subject, and the film text with images that are more visually
material. Phenomenological film theory can be seen to foreground the
presence—and, by that, the agency and ethical responsibility—of spec-
tators as they interact with film and with other spectators. And yet it
sometimes foregrounds this presence as something transcendental, con-
struing it as the ground of an immediate relation between the body and
the world, the spectator and the film, and thus somewhat depriving film
experience of both its psychic and its ideological tensions.
In some respects, film phenomenology competes as a paradigm of
film experiencing against the metapsychological account of the position
of the spectator in psychoanalytic film theory. As such, phenomenology
finds, or at any rate should find, in the contingency and situatedness of
the spectator’s encounter with film an ally against the abstractness and
potential normativity of this approach. Still, even as film phenomenol-
ogy generally refuses to take film as a non-intentional object, as a text

142 C. COMANDUCCI
or a physical item “absolutely external to any mind,”10 as a cognitivist

like Dominique Chateau does,11 it does not necessarily address the full
contingency of experiencing and the heteronomy of the subject. What
I mean is that phenomenological film theory may still seek to systema-
tize and objectify sense-experience and the body on the ground of basic
psychological and cognitive processes or transcendental categories, by
this eventually failing its intended critique of the body’s normalization.12
A focus on the body, indeed, does not automatically come with a rec-
ognition of the radical indeterminacy of embodiment. In this sense we
can understand the distinction that James Penney proposes between a
film phenomenology of Deleuzian ascent, like that of Shapiro and Marks,
and one like that of Allan Casebier and Vivian Sobchack13: the latter
approach would, so to speak, fall somewhat shy of radical contingency.
Another categorization of the phenomenological turn could be estab-
lished on the difference and the articulation of embodied versus bodily
experience—between an interest in the situatedness and indeterminacy of
perception and in the intentionality of the relation of the subject to the
world, on one hand, and, on the other hand, an interest in the particu-
lar qualities of sense experience, in touch and smell and taste as opposed
to sight and sound, and in the synaesthetic and sensuous potentials of
embodied experience as opposed to its disembodied conceptualization.
These two approaches, while clearly not being antithetic, do not neces-
sarily go together. So that, in some aspects, this distinction runs parallel
to the philological one advanced by Penney—we might associate a focus
on the sensuousness of the body to the latter, and a more philosophi-
cal postmodern take on film subjectivity to the former—but it also cuts
through it and crosses over, with different results, to the fields of femi-
nist and queer studies, medical humanities and the arts.
Embodied experience becomes significant, in my view, inasmuch as
we take the body as a site of conflict, as a discursive category and as a
10 Dominique Chateau, “A Philosophical Approach to Film Form,” in Subjectivity:
Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience, ed. Dominique Chateau (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 165.
11 Ibid., 163.
12 See Jenny Chamarette, “Embodied Worlds and Situated Bodies: Feminism,
Phenomenology, Film Theory,” Signs 40, no. 2 (2015): 289.

13 James Penney, “The Failure of Spectatorship,” Communication Theory 17 (2007):
57–58.
radically contingent and material ground of experience and agency.

Driven by and toward what it is not, toward other people, the body is
never a mere object, a field to be mapped or a repertoire of clues for
finding one’s identity: the body’s discursivity never resolves into cultural
determinations.14 As Judith Butler wrote, not only “bodies tend to indi-
cate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own
boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central
to what bodies ‘are’.”15 Embodiment is then a horizon more than a bor-
der and thus something that is marked by a founding, persistent and pro-
ductive indeterminacy. The body is never fully present to itself and never
a pure presence.
For Butler, “the body is not an independent materiality that is
invested by power relations external to it, but it is that for which materi-
alisation and investiture are coextensive.”16 There can be no simple and
unbiased representation or understanding of the body, then: in this way,
issues of normative authority and self-mastery become central to the life
of the body and to the discussion of embodied experience. “Bodily con-
tours and morphology,” Butler continues, “are not merely implicated in
an irreducible tension between the psychic and the material but are that
tension.”17
Contemporary critical theory can be seen to extend the material con-
tingency and the discursivity that are characteristic of the psychoanalytic
subject to the domain of the body, precisely to counter its conception as
the naturalized ground of identity.
“The fact that ‘presence’ can never quite be disengaged from the met-
aphysical conceits of self-identity self-sufficiency and self-transparency,”
Athena Athanasiou argues, “does not mean that it is always already sub-
sumed by these conceits. Presence, in its modality of becoming present to
one another, can be an occasion for critical displacement.”18
14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and

15 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and
London: Routledge, 1993), ix.

16 Ibid., 34.
17 Ibid., 66.
18 Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 14.

144 C. COMANDUCCI
If film phenomenology at times attempts to return to the idea of the

body as a unitary center of selfhood and experience, as an essential but
still situated presence, the kind of body that Butler describes, instead, is
never the measure of a reassuring intelligibility, but rather a trouble at
the core of the subject.
Non-objectual Embodiment
There are, of course, precedents of this position in phenomenologi-
cal philosophy that radically oppose the reduction of the scope of phe-
nomenology to that of a cognitive mapping and objectification of
lived-experience and that make an alliance of film phenomenology with a
critical conception of the body and the subject not only coherent, but, in
more than a way, necessary.
Emmanuel Levinas, an author who is mostly evoked in film theory on
the issue of ethics, but who is also interesting for his critical reconstruc-
tion of the foundations and the development of phenomenology, wrote
that “phenomenological reduction has been a radical way to suspend
the natural approach of a world posited as an object—a radical struggle
against the abstraction that the object epitomizes.”19
Phenomenology problematizes perception by putting perception itself
in the phenomenal world. In relation to film, then, to reduce percep-
tion to a relation between an object and a subject, independently whole
and distinct from each other, and to disregard the mutual implication
and even the fusion of the two that the phenomenological concept of
intentionality instead entails, is already a way to concede to abstraction
and normativity. On the contrary, phenomenology exposes any direct
vision of the object (and any unmediated form of self-representation)
as naive,20 and holds that the perception of the object is an inte-
gral part of the object itself.21 Neither the film subject nor the image,
then, would exist prior to the contingent act of experiencing. This per-
spective supports at once the discursivity of lived-experience and the
19 “La réduction phénoménologique a été une façon radicale de suspendre l’approche
naturel du monde posé comme objet—la lutte radicale contre l’abstraction que l’objet
résume.” Emmanuel Levinas, En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris:
J. Vrin, 1994), 122. Translation mine.
20 Ibid., 114.
21 Ibid., 122.
limits to the intelligibility of the embodied subject; in fact, it affirms their

interdependence.
In this sense, phenomenology would not address the relation between
subjects and objects, but rather, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it, a
“thing-subject” (chose-sujet)22—a subject which is also an object, and
an object that always already bears a subjective mark. The Pontisian idea
that perception is made within things23 suggests that subject and object,
perceiver and perceived, speaking and being spoken, are not separated
positions or mutually exclusive practices, but are rather mutually depend-
ent and cannot be clearly told apart.
In this sense, the phenomenological concept of intentionality (the
idea that consciousness is always consciousness of something) should not
be confused either with the general idea of conscious intention, or with
the one-way directionality of our conscious apprehension of objects. It
signifies less the ways in which the world enters our consciousness than
the sense in which our very apprehension of the world is always already
contingently embedded in it as part of a response to the world’s evoc-
ative potential. There are no objects that are not experienced objects,
then, but there is no consciousness beyond the objects it beholds, either.
Embodiment would then become something different than the cen-
tering of conscious experience in the body as a hospitable and intelligible
site of agency and signification, and rather a decentering and scattering
of the subject in the world. As Thomas Csordas aptly puts it, embodi-
ment is “the existential condition of cultural life,” not reducible “to rep-
resentations of the body, to the body as an objectification of power, to
the body as a physical entity or biological organism, nor to the body as
an inalienable center of individual consciousness.”24
It is then through a dissolution of the body as a thing with bounda-
ries and as a coherent image schema of the experienced world, that film
phenomenology can transcend the logic of discursive determination, the
regime of intelligibility and the endless circularity of representation and
misrepresentation that characterized the theory of the cinematic appa-
ratus, not by making embodiment more intelligible, or the body more
thrilling or familiar.
22 MauriceMerleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 305.

23 Ibid.,
312.
24 Thomas J. Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of
Culture and Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi.

146 C. COMANDUCCI
From this perspective, indeed, one of the characteristic claims of

Althusserian film theory—that the spectator’s subjectivity is a product
of the film’s textuality and of the cinematographic situation—could be
reformulated in a less authoritarian and deterministic way: what were
seen as the exclusively stultifying constraints of the spectator’s situation
can be shown to have productive power as well, precisely in their phe-
nomenological and performative contingency. So that there would not
be any viewer beyond its encounter with the film (the spectator would
still be something else than a viewer), but also, conversely, there would
be no film beyond its subjective experiencing. Neither the spectator nor
the text would be made entirely intelligible in terms of the other and this
mutual in/determination would leave open the space in which film can
be taken as an evocative object.
Embodiment is not construed as a structure of intelligibility, eventu-
ally, but rather as the material and aesthetic, discursive and fantasmatic,
ground of signification. The encounter of the spectator and the film can
be described as embodied, then, precisely inasmuch as embodiment is
conceived as a tension. Losing this tension is, arguably, also to lose the
specificity and the significance of the experience of spectatorship.25
A move away from the ontology of the moving image, in this perspec-
tive, entails both the recognition of the discursivity of the body and the
acknowledgement of the radical contingency of embodiment itself: not
only a transformation of the body from visible object to visual agent, but
a foregrounding of the radical lack in the mastery over the body itself.
Embodiment is never just the mere material presence of the body, nor
just its mise en discours (its normative classification, say, from a medical,
sociological or metapsychological perspective) or its mise en image (its
cinematic representations and its inscription within regimes of visibility).
Conversely, the body is never an entirely active instrument of volition or
the always hospitable and inalienable site of subjectivity and self-identity.
25 To be sure, apparatus theory already realized that the boundary between the spec-
tator’s embodied fantasy and the discourses and ideological structures that regulate film
experience was a permeable one. It was precisely upon this presupposition that the idea of
the spectator’s passivity and the ideological nature of cinematic perception were elaborated
in the first place. The contingency and heteronomy of the spectator’s encounter with film,
however, were then subjected to a further turn that reduced the theoretical dimension of
film experience only to that of meta-language and meta-politics.
Discursivity of the Body and Incitation to Discourse

The relation of embodiment and spectatorship is often addressed in
terms of the relation between the lived-body of spectators and the rep-
resentations of bodies that are given on-screen. This relation can be used
to define a particular dimension of the politics of filmmaking and recep-
tion, and constitutes a specific epistemological and methodological field:
in different forms, this has been a constant concern in film theory.26
The phenomenological turn in film studies should not be taken to
be a move away from the discursivity of this relation. Both the sensu-
ous viewer and the embodied spectator are indeed themselves discur-
sive constructs, so that the dimension of the body that may at times be
contrasted with the dimension of its representation is already framed by
discourses and, conversely, the dimension of on-screen representation
always comes with its own materiality and reality.
We have seen in the second chapter how spectatorship theory entails
a mise en discours of the spectator and of its subjectivity. The same can
be said, on one side, of the longstanding interest of film, feminist and
cultural studies in the body and its representation, and, on the other,
of the focus on embodiment which is characteristic of the more recent
phenomenological turn. Like sexuality, the field of our knowledge of the
body is inextricable from the discourses and the relations of power that
inform the body in the first place.
A reduction within visibility may very well be the most specific field
of operation of disciplinary theory in general, and the gaze can be taken
at the same time to be the prime agent of the body’s normative regula-
tion. A mise en discours of the body begins, indeed, with its disciplinary
observation: its surveillance, its examination, classification, autopsy and
self-inspection, and so on. But discipline is not limited to surveillance
and surveillance is not bound exclusively to optical technologies. A dis-
cipline of the body can come with a proliferation of the sensuous, a pro-
motion of bodily experience, with a revaluation of the body as the origin
of our conceptual schemata, with its hypostasis as an ethical threshold as
well as with its enjoyment as an aesthetic form. Discipline does not stop
at the frontiers of the regime of representation either, but also insists in
the construction of the body as a pure, pre-discursive, presence.

148 C. COMANDUCCI
The normative definition and the governance of the body are per-
formed not just through its coercion and repression, but they are also
positively affirmed in the articulation of our modes of living and ways
of understanding embodied experience itself. For this reason, the prac-
tice of theory—and of a theory of the body in an exemplary way—can
never claim a comfortable distance from its object, nor from its poten-
tial effects of policing and regulation. It is never entirely possible to
distinguish a more positive articulation of embodied experience and of
a discourse about the body from the body’s disciplinary reduction into
discourse. The body’s normalization, Foucault argued, must be seen first
of all as an intensification of the scope of the body and as its valorization
within relations of power and knowledge. All those theories of film that
aim to make embodiment and forms of bodily experience more tangible
and comprehensible, in fact, constantly run the risk of overstepping their
subversive intentions—subversive, for instance, of the power over the
spectators’ bodies that is exerted by ideological institutions—precisely by
determining an extension of the field that those powers can reach. In this
proliferation, the body becomes again a mere object of inscription. An
inert object of a more dynamic discourse, perhaps, but still an object that
is made more visible, and that is thus subjected, in the greater freedom
that is recognized to it, to an intensified regime of surveillance; an object
that is made more knowledgeable and intelligible, and, by this, is sub-
jected to a more comprehensive mastery and a closer control. What pre-
sents itself as a subversion of the disembodied conditions of spectatorship
described by apparatus theory can—it does not have to, but can—deter-
mine an intensification of the disciplinary regulation of film experience.
If institutional power aims at the reproduction of the conditions in
which its own power is established—that is, in the case of film, at the
reproduction of the spectator as a passive subject position and as an
active consumer of film—disciplinary power works instead on a princi-
ple of comprehensive mapping, through a permanent extension of the
domains and of the forms of observation and regulation. Ideology, which
we can take to encompass both institutional and disciplinary modes of
power, attends not only to the definition of spectatorship as a specific
position of subjection, then, but also to the articulation of a plurality of
recognizable and recognized forms of film experience. The theory that
denounces the passive spectator is the same theory that produces new
forms of spectatorship, opening up new economic and discursive markets
for the apparatus.
Slavoj Žižek is referring to this Foucauldian understanding of discur-

sive power when he links Lacan’s discourse of the university to one of the
defining features of capitalist ideology: its capacity to absorb everything
that exceeds it.27 At the same time, Žižek criticizes this understanding
of discourse and subjectivity, on the grounds that Foucault identifies the
subject with that which is created by the mise en discours, and not as
what the mise en discours cannot address, or that is left unaddressed:
The university discourse is enunciated from the position of ‘neutral’

Knowledge; it addresses the remainder of the real […] turning it into
the subject ($). The ‘truth’ of the university discourse, hidden beneath
the bar, of course, is power, i.e. the Master-Signifier: the constitutive lie
of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension,
presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power
as a simple insight into the factual state of things. What one should avoid
here is the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply
the subjectivity which arises as the result of the disciplinary application
of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of
knowledge-power.28
The discursivity of the body is, in this perspective, fundamentally a mat-

ter of the contingent limits of its normative regulation—it relates to a
discursive lack and opposes intelligibility as a form of discursive regula-
tion in general.
The body, and especially the body conceived as a pre-discur-
sive entity or site of inscription of discourse, becomes then the
ideal object of the discourse of the university. One cannot stress
enough how this pre-discursive body is not the same as the body
as discursive remainder: the first refers to an imaginary plenitude
in which the body exists before discursive determinations; the sec-
ond implies not only the existence of discursive production, and
thus a lack in the autonomy and presence of the body, but also a lack
in the coherency of discourse itself. Where the classical, self-pos-
sessed, subject is grounded in the image of the pre-discursive body,
in the case of the body as remainder the reverse happens: the body
27 Slavoj Žižek, “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses,” Lacan.com (2006), http://www.
lacan.com/zizfour.htm, accessed 14 July 2018.

28 Slavoj Žižek, “Homo Sacer as the Object of the Discourse of the University,” Lacan.
com (2003), http://www.lacan.com/hsacer.htm, accessed 14 July 2018.

150 C. COMANDUCCI
is found to be fraught with all the inconsistencies of the discursively con-

structed and heteronomous subject.
The opposition is not between the pre-discursive body and its disci-
pline (for disciplinary regulation is precisely what produces that form-
less pre-discursive body as the site of inscription of its power) but one
between a regime of understanding in which the bodily is considered to
be pre-discursive and one in which it is not. Only by thinking the rad-
ical discursivity of the body—as Butler has argued—one can think the
arbitrariness of the norms that make sense of it in the existing regimes
of perception, and only in thinking embodiment beyond identity we can
imagine and live bodily experience beyond both the ethics of presence
and the logic of exchange.
The discourse of the university is, in a sense, the prototype of peda-
gogical explanation, and as such it should not be seen to be limited lit-
erally to the university institution. For instance, a pretense of mastery
over the body can be an integral part of spectatorship as well: it defines,
very precisely, the scope of the spectator’s consensual agency—its power
within already existing structures of power.
That the body and subjectivity are discursive does not mean that their
performativity is volitional (“I can create what I am”), nor that they are
entirely determined by disembodied structures discourse, dominant or
not (“what I am is created for me”). These two assumptions actually
require and reinforce each other: both fantasize about the same mastery,
they only assign it to a different position, to a different side of a nor-
mative split that commands a single distribution of the sensible. In both
cases, this fantasy of mastery corresponds to the assumption of inequality
through which authoritarian regimes of understanding justify themselves.
In this perspective, emancipation corresponds more to a dissensual
than to a subversive spectator. The spectator’s “perverse” pleasures are
indeed regulated in counterpoint to the masterful distance of the theo-
rist: in a Foucauldian fashion, we can say that perverse spectators were
“invented” not by cinema as such, but when film theory established itself
as a technology of spectatorship. The idea of a perverse spectator is a
result of disciplinary theory’s successes, we could say; the waywardness of
spectatorship depends instead on its failures.
Embodiment takes place as a contingent and discursive encounter,
which cannot be accounted for in its entirety by either the logic of rep-
resentational mediation or that of ethical immediacy. In the same way,
the body cannot be reduced to either the mere expression of a discursive
structure or to the essential and inviolable ground of the subject’s

volition. To put it as succinctly as possible, the discursivity of the body is
never tantamount to its mise en discours. What resists discursive deter-
mination is not the dimension of the body as such, then, but the con-
tingency and indeterminacy of embodiment, of which discursivity is a
fundamental part and, in a sense, also the ultimate guarantee. This is one
of the reasons why I am convinced that we cannot have Rancièrian egal-
itarianism without Butlerian critical theory, and the reverse—the reason,
as well, why we need both for a non-authoritarian theory of film.
Visibility and the Visual

It is characteristic of the mise en discours of the body that it be at the
same time overtly and widely discussed, and presented as something
intrinsically unfathomable: as Foucault wrote of sex, the body is at the
same time exposed and prized as a secret.29
The incitation to discourse that we have discussed requires indeed first
of all to establish a territory absolutely external to discourse, in relation
to which the articulation of its discursive power can then be effected.
Seeing this from a different angle, we can say that what is considered
external to discourse (either pre-discursive or irrepresentable, formless or
utterly deformed) is actually defined by discourse in the first place, and in
turn motivates the performance of discourse’s own regulatory function
in everyday life. The distinctive operation of disciplinary regulation is not
simply to dictate what the body is or should be, but at the same time to
appropriate what it is not, to articulate what is proper and improper for
the body in a given social and symbolic space.
We therefore need to disentangle the idea of the indeterminacy of
embodiment—of the discursivity of the body beyond its discursive
determination—from the idea of the body as an irrepresentable presence,
which is possibly the highest form of discursive hegemony. In this con-
text, Rancière’s concept of the partage du sensible is particularly appro-
priate, for it addresses discursive power as an act of distribution and
articulation of perceptions and understandings that defines the horizon
29 “Ce qui est propre aux sociétés modernes, ce n’est pas qu’elles aient voué le sexe à
rester dans l’ombre, c’est qu’elles se soient vouées à en parler toujours, en le faisant valoir
comme le secret.” Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité: La Volonté de Savoir (Paris:
Gallimard, 1976), 42.
152 C. COMANDUCCI
of the possible.30 Spectatorship is never quite a problem of faulty rep-

resentations or of the impossibility of representation, then, but rather
entails, as Rancière argues, problems of relational distribution and of
representational distance.31 More specifically, Rancière suggests a shift
from the idea of the irrepresentable to that of a fundamental, and funda-
mentally political, incommensurability at the core of the distribution of
the sensible. This incommensurability is a matter of a dispute between
definitions, not that of an opposition between different things, and as
such it does not separate the body from discourse, but questions the cat-
egories of intelligibility of the embodied and discursive experience of the
spectator.
If the body is never simply an object or a presence, then it is never just
visible or invisible, representable or irrepresentable. Embodiment does
not name either the discursive determination of the body or the fullness
of a pre-discursive dimension, but rather the partiality and situatedness
of both lived experience and its signification—a partiality that in fact
makes subjectivity and signification possible in the first place. From this
stems that the “invisibility” or formlessness of bodies already constitutes
a hegemonic category of vision, completely integral to the norms of rep-
resentation, and thus already a reduction to the category of the visible of
the embodied experience of the visual.
This regime of visibility entails a reduction of the scope of vision, as
well as an authoritarian and objectual regime of understanding of visual
experience and the image. Visibility is as much a normative category of
the body, as it is one of embodied perception in general and visual per-
ception in particular. Once it is made intelligible by being reduced to its
visibility, a body becomes not just less than what it actually is, but also
less than what can be seen of it. This is how a return to the embodi-
ment of film experience also becomes a return to the visual qualities of
the image.
30 Rancière defines partage du sensible as a system of perceptible features that manifest
at once the existence of a common space, the partitions into which it is articulated, and
how bodies and subjects are assigned to them; this distribution determines in turn the
ways in which what is common can be shared and who actually takes part in the sharing.
See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London:
Bloomsbury, 2006), 12. In Dissensus, Rancière further notes that the expression implies
a tension between a shared common and its distribution. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On
Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 36.
31 Jacques Rancière, Le Destin des Images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), 128.
The hegemony of vision discussed among others by Laura Marks under

the name of “ocularcentrism,” then, is always already the hegemony of a
particular regime of understanding of vision, over other possible ways of
understanding and experiencing the visual. Technologies of visibility (which
are never just optical technologies but include, for instance, heterosexist dis-
course) not only frame the body in terms of what can be made visible and
intelligible about it, but they subordinate visual experience itself to its visi-
ble forms. In this sense, disciplinary film theory is part of the apparatus that
attempts to make visual pleasure visible and, by that, available for regulation.
The sexist regime of understanding of woman as image and specta-
cle could not be in place without the preliminary gesture that situates
the look of the spectator within a regime of visible things, thus making
visual pleasure and the look into objects of discipline. In other words,
the regulation of how “woman”—and, on the model of “woman,” every
other subject—must look like always passes through the regulation of
how women—and, on the model of women, every other subject—should
look. This is one of the ways in which feminism makes available a new
universality and, in relation to the cinema, a more universal—less nor-
mative and in this sense more “empty”—subject position for spectators
to assume. This is also one of the reasons why, I believe, a feminist film
theory is always more than simply the articulation of “feminine” forms of
spectatorship. If women take up the position of the signifier of the lack
in the Other, as Jennifer Friedlander argues, they may be doing that as
(white heterosexual) “woman” from the perspective of the sexist regime
of perception, but they are in fact already occupying a different distri-
bution of the sensible, which transforms their position as well as that of
everybody else.32 The position that signifies lack, to put it differently,
corresponds less to a feminine pole of sexuality, than to a feminist under-
standing of the world which can be occupied by any subject regardless of
prior qualifications.
The ocularcentric regime names a particular regime of distribution
of the visual: one that is organized on the basis of a masterful vision, a
gaze, that makes things intelligible. This gaze produces a form of visibil-
ity which is largely deprived of visuality—it corresponds to a disembod-
ied and disembodying vision that is aligned with mastery and cognition
not only against the sensual qualities of embodied perception but also
32 See Jennifer Friedlander, Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2008), 9–10, 63.

154 C. COMANDUCCI
against its subjective contingency and indeterminacy. Such a disembod-

ied vision is integral to both the cinematographic apparatus (as a regime
of intelligibility of spectatorship and visual pleasure) and the ocularcen-
tric apparatus (as an authoritarian and disciplinary regime of visual expe-
rience and knowledge in general). There is a connection between the
establishment of vision as the sense-organ of intellectual mastery, as the
most masterful of the senses, and the strength of authoritarian and ped-
agogical versions of film theory: the discourse that divides the world of
experience between those who know and those who do not know is also
the discourse that sets apart those who are supposed to see things for
what they truly are and those who are blind to the meaning of their own
experience.
If the alliance of vision with reason and cognition through optical
technologies promises us to see the invisible, not only it cannot really
fulfil its promise, but it will inevitably take something away from our
lived-experience of the visual as well. The result of any mastery over
experience and the self is always a kind of sensory deprivation. Within
an authoritarian regime of understanding of subjectivity, we assume
a stable identity by giving up some of the possibilities of our exist-
ence. Within the ocularcentric regime, we assume control of what we
see at the expenses of a wider, more embodied and at the same time
less controlled dimension of shared experience. Eventually, the disci-
pline and mastery of the subject inevitably cause a longing for unity
and wholeness: what we are giving up in our present is mistaken for
something that we have lost in the past or with what we had to lose
in order to exist in the first place. The ocularcentric gaze produces
a nostalgia for pure presence, thereby reinforcing the disembodiment
that caused the feeling of loss in the first place. This nostalgia consti-
tutes at the same time a disavowal of the subject’s heteronomy—the
level of its relational dependency—and thus intensifies the longing for
the “pure presence” of the body in the form, if you like, of fetishistic
disavowal.
From a different perspective, the dimension of the visual is neither
one of mastery and discursive determination nor one of immediate,
pre-discursive, experience: it is informed by what is contingent, embod-
ied, discursive, elusive and wayward, and not merely more tactile and
bodily, about the subject’s experience of vision. Rather than being iden-
tified with what is not visible, the visual would correspond, in Marks’s
words, to a diminished visibility, characteristic of a “haptic” regime of the
image.33 The visual appears then not as a lack in vision, really, but a lack
in our mastery over it; it does not suppose an invisible image, but rather
blurs, as it were, the experience of vision itself.
Rather than being disconnected or opposed to knowledge, this alter-
native regime of understanding of visual experience would constitute
a more sensuous kind of knowledge, one that, as Marks argues, can be
organized and “cultivated” not unlike rational and conceptual knowl-
edge.34 In this sense Marks can speak of a tactile or haptic epistemol-
ogy, that we could in some respects compare to Christopher Bollas’s
idea of cultivating the subject’s capability for unconscious experience. As
we have been arguing, a more sensuous experience of the visual would
not bring about a complete freedom from ideology and institutions, but
rather bring with it alternative forms of understanding embodied experi-
ence that would be less dependent on a fantasy of mastery.
Embodiment and Contingency
The problem with the logic of visibility is that it circumvents the con-
tingency of embodiment and reduces what can be said about, or expe-
rienced through, the body to the extent of what can be subjected to
normalization and surveillance. The indeterminacy of embodiment resists
the mise en discours of the body: what makes embodiment more graspa-
ble and controllable is also what expends the discursivity of the body and
with it the experiential and political scope of embodied experience. We
could say, then, that the discursive mapping of the body and the kind of
mastery that attends to it are, in a way, technologies of disembodiment.
Disembodied would be what is regulated about the body, masterful about
subjectivity and objectual about vision. In this sense, disembodiment would
not mark a loss of materiality, nor of presence, but rather a loss of contin-
gency and an increase of mastery and intelligibility; it would not name the
heteronomy of the body or the indistinctness of sensory experience, but, on
the contrary, the embodied experience of a disembodying mastery. One of
the consequences of this formulation of the question of embodiment is that
it individuates the celebration of the body and its supposed pre-discursive
“presence” as particular forms of disembodiment. Not only embodiment is a
33 Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 91.

156 C. COMANDUCCI
subspecies of singular contingency, in fact, but radical contingency is a funda-

mental characteristic of the embodied subject in the first place.
If embodiment, thought together with the intentionality of percep-
tion, surely points beyond the individual and rather leads to see the sub-
ject as a “site of correspondences with the world,”35 it also names the
fact that there are certain limits to our sharing of experience. As permea-
ble and uncertain its borders can be, the body still names a boundary and
sets limits to our capacity to reach out toward the world and be influ-
enced by it. The body is never self-sufficient, but at the same time it is
never perfectly hosted in the otherness of the world. Embodiment has a
weight, so to speak: on one hand, it conditions our extensibility in time
and space, our availability to different encounters and even the transpar-
ency of our being-there-ness; on the other hand, and by the same token,
it makes the body wayward from the standpoint of its disciplinary regula-
tion and renders it opaque to the authoritarian gaze.
As the ocularcentric regime articulates the visual under the aegis of vis-
ibility, it also distributes the other senses in relation to vision qua ration-
ality, thus establishing a hierarchy and a regime of separation among the
senses. The very cognitive distance that defines sight as a distance sense,
then, is forced upon our understanding of other forms of sense experi-
ence. The ocularcentric regime sustains an epistemology and a whole
mode of being that are based on detachment and objectification. On the
contrary, Marks argues, the human sensorium is primarily characterized
by what she calls “synaesthesia”: a connectedness and permeability of all
sense impressions, such that a sensation can evoke sense impressions that
pertain to different sensory domains (sight can evoke smell, for instance,
or touch, and the reverse).36 Marks’s synaesthesia, at once names spe-
cific instances in which sense impressions and experiences trespass their
assigned boundaries, and a particular regime of understanding of sense
experience in general: a “syn-aesthetics,” if we like, in the sense of an aes-
thetics of connectedness and a level of non-hierarchical association and
confusion of the senses, which would be inseparable from the indeter-
minacy of embodiment that we have discussed. In this sense, synaesthe-
sia signifies less specific instances of synaesthetic sensation (in which one
impression is perceived across different senses), than a regime of sensuous
experience based on contingency, contiguity and free association.
35 Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2010), 70.
To understand spectatorship in this way entails the idea that see-

ing already constitutes a form of touch, the idea that one cannot really
see, in fact, without entering in intimate and mutual contact with the
image. One cannot bring about meanings or power effects without being
involved in them, indeed, as one cannot touch without being touched.37
Contingency, then, would essentially be a form of co-presence and
mutual touching, as the origin of the word also suggests: from the Latin
contingo, to enter into contact, reach, meet, touch.38
In turn, free-floating attention and the process of free association can
be taken to be a kind of dialogue that is also a form of psychic and aes-
thetic fondling—a haptic flirtation. Free association can indeed be seen
as a principle of signification, of experiencing and of the sharing of expe-
rience, that proceeds by contact and contiguity.
While Marks concentrates on the mastery of vision on the other
senses, I am focusing more on a discursive mastery on vision, which does
not take place primarily through the look, but rather through the discur-
sive account that is given of embodied visual experience. Vision does not
necessarily master the object that it beholds, as Marks suggests, but the
haptic gaze that negates this mastery can still be subjected to normative
regulation and surveillance. The point is less, then, to have more hap-
tic films or more haptic media, but rather to recognize the fundamental
hapticity of each and every spectator’s experience of any film whatsoever.
What matters for the spectator’s emancipation is that we locate the hap-
ticity of the image not in the materiality of the medium or in some spe-
cific formal device, but rather in the contingent dimension of aesthetic
use that characterizes spectatorship as an embodied practice.
Bodies are material and bound to a contingent dimension of encoun-
ters in no matter what situation and thus spectators find themselves in a
“cinema of the senses,” I believe, no matter what film they are watch-
ing. Beugnet’s “aesthetic of sensation”39 in this respect has little to do
with “aesthetics” in the Rancièrian sense. In a Rancièrian perspective,
in fact, there is no essential correspondence and there can be no rule of
correspondence between the material qualities of a medium or the spe-
cific qualities of a film and the modes of its experience by spectators:
37 See Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible, 304.

38 See Marks, The Skin of the Film, xii.
39 Ibid., 63 and following.
158 C. COMANDUCCI
for this lack of correspondence is the aesthetic regime of art. I think that
a phenomenological break with the ontology of the image is also a good
occasion to renew Rancière’s criticism of onto-technological arguments,
which pretend to link essentially a technology or a kind of enunciation
with their effects in the field of spectatorship. This of course does not
challenge Beugnet’s readings of the French films she discusses, nor her
argument that there is in fact an important connection between film the-
ory and filmmaking40—my point is merely that the ideas of spectatorship
and aesthetics lead us in a different direction.
In the measure that we downplay the radical contingency of embodied
experience, we can entertain the fantasy of a world clearly partitioned into
an exterior and an interior, into subjects and objects, and further imagine
that something might be (or should be) in control of this distribution. It
is then beyond this fantasy of mastery that embodied subjects relate to
their actual situations: being there is first of all a matter of self-shattering
and doubt. Rancière often evokes the political dimension at the same time
in impersonal terms and as a being-there: il y a de la politique.
Political subjectivation can be described as a dissonance in our
self-perception and as a general indeterminacy or waywardness of the
subject—which, for me, is less a disruptive formlessness than a produc-
tive lack in the interpretation of form and does not (or not only) corre-
spond to the dissolution of individuality but rather to the breaking down
of identity.41 The political subject is not an individual with an estab-
lished identity, which would already be a part of the consensual distribu-
tion of the sensible and of a disciplinary fantasy, but rather an embodied
and thus a “free floating” subject. In the same way, the presence of the
body is never unmediated, never entirely intelligible and never “pure.”
As Judith Butler has suggested, ideas of the body that construe it as an
essentially pre-discursive and intrinsically subversive domain are in fact
likely to support a further reification and regulation of the body itself.42
40 If the relation between theory and practice functions as an exchange, then theory
develops most fruitfully where it is initially found and already present elaborated in and by
films themselves.” Ibid., 13.
41 On the contrary, for Beugnet, “a cinema of the senses always hovers at the edge of
pleasure and abjection—between the appeal of a sensuous perception and exploration of

the reality portrayed, and the close encounter with the abject, that is, the immersion in
the anxiety of the self when individuality dissolves into the undifferentiated and form-
less.” Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 32.
42 Butler, Gender Trouble, 123.
What we are looking for is a trouble within the very physical presence,
the psychic reverberations and the discursive significance of the body.
One thing is to say that the sensual and emotive elements of percep-
tion are a fundamental part of a film’s discourse (“discourse” as in “dis-
course analysis”); quite another is to say that those elements are part of a
dimension that “pre-empts”43 and conditions discursivity44 as such (“dis-
cursivity” as in “discursive construction”). The first claim is distinctive of
what Martine Beugnet calls a “cinema of the senses” or an “aesthetics of
sensation” which, among other things, would foreground the hapticity
of the experience of specific films; the second instead seems to promote
an ethical reduction of spectatorship and of the understanding of the link
between politics and aesthetics as whole.
Not the invisible of the formless, but the blurred, is what escapes and
subverts the regime of visibility: the power of normative distributions of
the sensible is performed in the establishment of a clear split between
embodied experience and disembodied mastery, between normal and
abnormal bodies or subject positions. Normative regulation, in turn,
implies the production of such a split and its incisiveness depends on the
neatness of the cut between the abnormal and the normal. Authoritarian
discourses institute a difference when there is in fact a tension, they dis-
criminate where there is in fact a continuity. The fantasy of a pure pres-
ence of the body and its reduction to an observable and intelligible
object, then, meet at opposite ends as two equivalent positions defined
within a normative regime of representation of the body and of the
embodied subject. The two are positions within the same regime and,
together, they articulate the split that allows for a normative framing
of the body in the distribution of the social space. In other words, the
hypostasis of the pre-discursive body corresponds essentially to the logic
of hegemony and mise en discours. As Butler effectively summarizes:
Foucault argues that the desire which is conceived as both original and
repressed is the effect of the subjugating law itself. In consequence, the law
produces the conceit of the repressed desire in order to rationalise its own
self-amplifying strategies […].45
43 Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation, 8.

44 Ibid., 61.
45 Ibid., 88.
160 C. COMANDUCCI
If we attempt to translate these considerations more specifically to the

domain of the body of the spectator, then, we will see that they tenden-
tially thwart any attempt to assume the body as a comfortable cogni-
tive, neurological, psychological or ethical ground onto which to build
a discipline of spectatorship, and that they prevent us from making of
it the essentialized a priori figure of equality: for, indeed, as there can
be no equality beyond dissensus, there can be no embodiment without
a tension between its discursivity and its mise en discours. The idea of
the pure presence of the spectator’s body, or of the “body” of the film,
appears then to be a way to avoid this tension, an attempt to negate the
indeterminacy of embodiment, to master the discursivity and contin-
gency of the body, and thus to negate its politics.
If Only a Fly Hadn’t Come into the Body

In order to present you with a figuration of this tension and, more gen-
erally, of my argument for the waywardness and radical contingency
of embodiment, I would like to discuss an apparently odd topic: tele-
portation—in particular as it appears in David Cronenberg’s The Fly.46
Through the film, we can address how the representation of a split
between heteronomy and identity, chance encounters and reproduction,
the proper and the improper body, eventually becomes a means to make
the radical contingency of real bodies more manageable and to submit
the embodied subject to disciplinary regulation.
Teleportation makes visible a fantasy of mastery over the body: it
stands to the flesh like the cinematographic apparatus stands to the
spectator’s embodied vision; it literalizes a regime of understanding by
which the body is reduced to the principles of its intelligibility and that
implies and performs a reduction of matter to information, of the body
to a mappable organism, and of subjectivity to an expression of the
self-sameness of identity. What is teleported, indeed, if not the pure,
non-situated, autonomous and self-sufficient presence of the normalized
body? And what is the monstrous fly of the film, then, if not a figura-
tion and a reification of the radical contingency and impurity of the body?
What are the heteronomy and contingency of our embodied encounters,
46 David Cronenberg, The Fly (20th Century Fox, 1987), 35 mm. I am referring in par-
ticular to the pre-2005 theatrical release.

finally, if not what cannot be accounted for and teleported, what cannot
be replicated about subjectivity or de-contextualized about the flesh?
Quantum teleportation—as I found out fishing up a couple of
Scientific American articles from the internet—appears to be perfectly
feasible. And yet, compared to its many cinematic versions, it turns out
to be quite a disappointment. In fact, nothing about quantum tele-
portation points to the effortless and instantaneous transportation of
objects, let alone animals or people, that we find in science fiction films.
“Teleportation,” writes Doctor Jeff Kimble of the California Institute of
Technology, “is a protocol about how to send a quantum state—a wave
function—from one place to another.”47 What is teleported is not mat-
ter, then, but rather certain properties of quantum particles: a pattern of
information encoded in quantum states.48 Even in the farthest imagina-
ble future, we will not likely be able to teleport objects but just a blue-
print for their replication—not bodies, but merely the instructions for
their reproduction.
In the end, as J. R. Minkel nicely puts it, teleportation is “more a
matter of computing than commuting,”49 and its only conceivable appli-
cations lie in the field of information technology. The essential imaginary
feature of quantum teleportation would then be its potential (a prerequi-
site, really) for an absolutely comprehensive mapping and “knowledge”
of the object to be teleported. Human teleportation, in particular, would
require and perform an extremely precise mapping of the body, like an
all-encompassing quantum “picture” of it. After the mapping, the body
would not be, strictly speaking “moved,” but rather destroyed and recre-
ated according to the blueprint that has been obtained.
Teleportation would be, in the end, still a question of dematerial-
ization: but only in the sense of a radical “disembodiment” of matter.
The teleported body, in particular, would lose all of its indeterminacy.
Especially in its “computing over commuting” version, the teleporter is
47 J. R. Minkel, “Beam Me Up Scotty?: Q&A About Quantum Teleportation with
H. Jeff Kimble,” Scientific American, 14 February 2004, http://www.scientificamerican.

com/article/why-teleporting-is-nothing-like-star-trek/, accessed 14 July 2018.
48 Joel N. Shurkin, “Quantum Teleportation in Space Explored as Message Encryption
Solution,” Scientific American, 15 March 2013, http://www.scientificamerican.com/arti-

cle/quantum-teleportation-in-space-explored-as-message-encryption-solution/, accessed
14 July 2018.
49 Minkel, “Beam Me Up Scotty?”
162 C. COMANDUCCI
not only a machine that plays with the situatedness of the body but, very
precisely, a machine for the elimination of its radical contingency. If, in
Žižek’s definition, a parallax is “the name of the gap that separates the
one from itself,” then we can say that teleportation reduces parallax to
mere spatial displacement, by that confirming instead of questioning the
identity of the subject.50
If we hold that the body at the other end of the teleporter is exactly
the same body and exactly the same subject that came in, indeed, this
coding of the body must be seen to constitute some kind of norma-
tive mapping as well. As long as we hold the two subjects to be the
same, in fact, the coding that precedes and allows teleportation would
imply not just a translation of the living body into digital code, but
its reduction to it: the subject would be proved to be nothing more
and nothing less than what can be mapped of it. If dissensus can be
taken as a radical negation of identity, then the teleporter is the lit-
eralization of the quintessential apparatus of police: more than the
archive, it would force the subject and its body to be identical with
their representation.
The mapping would entail in fact a reduction of embodied existence
to a measurable state of matter and of the body, the mind and the psyche
to what can be predicated about them. In Cronenberg’s rendition it is
on this preliminary operation of “integration,” more than on the jump
through space, that the interest of the trope of teleportation is focused.
In this sense, the teleporter is above all a disciplinary device. The molec-
ular mapping that takes place in the film acts in turn as the fantasmatic
ground for all other sorts of normative distributions of the human body:
it fulfils the wish of a complete knowledge of the subject and, thus,
makes possible its complete alienation and its total reduction under mas-
terful control.
The teleported body—the body that the imaginary technology of tele-
portation produces, in a Foucauldian sense—is fully reduced to intelligi-
bility and this intelligibility reinforces, among other things, the various
discursive categories by which the subject corresponding to that body
was defined—a classical subject, unitary and self-contained, male, white,
Western, late modern and neoliberal. Teleportation grants this ideal
subject that validation of its own self-sameness and absolute autonomy
50 See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7.
which the embodied subject can never truly find in actual life. Nothing
less and nothing more than what can be mapped about it, the subject
who passes through the teleporter can identify with a mastered “image”
of itself, it is produced in its own image—only the image, in an ultimate
wish-fulfilment, is now its very body, flesh of its flesh.
What is lost in exchange for this mastery over the body are the con-
tingency, heteronomy and historicity that characterize embodiment, and
with them some of the conditions of the subject’s fundamental eman-
cipation as well: self-same anywhere, the disembodied body, the body
entirely reduced to information, guarantees in the end the stability of the
subject’s identity which is needed for its control. Teleportation would in
this sense produce, with the complete mapping of the body, the ultimate
certification of its identity.
It is in connection with this ideological fantasy of self-sameness, then,
that teleportation is bound to go awry. Especially in Cronenberg’s ver-
sion of the story of The Fly, teleportation has something in common with
cloning: if cloning is a reproduction of a man in its own image,51 tele-
portation entails the reduction of the body to its image—it is cloning
without the production of a double, simulation without proliferation.
So, while cloning exposes the uncanniness of identity through the dou-
ble, teleportation is bound to express this trouble through the return of
the contingent. The fly, indeed—the measly insect, not the monstrous
creature—comes or rather returns to unsettle the normal body and,
apparently at least, to reinstate the trouble of heteronomy in the illusion
of perfect self-replication.
Inaccurate Self-Replications
Even before the fly incident the telepods were far from being functional.
Animals were killed in questionable experiments: Doctor Delambre in
Langelaan’s short story phased out the house cat, and, in Cronenberg’s
adaptation, Doctor Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) turned a baboon
inside out and into a homage to Carpenter’s Thing.
In the film, the problem with the teleporter seems to be that the com-
puter is incapable of processing the erraticness of the flesh. Teleported
organic matter acts waywardly and cannot be mapped properly: running
51 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 144.

164 C. COMANDUCCI
a steak from a pod to the other gives you the computer’s interpretation
of a steak, having a foul and not just a synthetic taste. Flavor functions
here a sign of a harmonious, more-than-objectual, embodiment which
the computer, at first, cannot handle.
What Brundle seeks, then, is a better mapping of the body, but not
simply in the sense that this mapping has to be more precise. What is left
to be mapped is, in fact, the unmappable. What the technological and
ideological machine has to achieve in order to master the contingency
and heteronomy of the body is, precisely, a hegemonic mise en discours
of its pre-discursive deviance (of that abnormality and waywardness
which also makes it desirable). As Brundle puts it, the computer has to
learn how to “get crazy on the flesh.” What the computer has to per-
form is not just a reduction of the body to molecular or genetic informa-
tion, but a reduction that reduces to information what escapes this very
reduction. Without the molecular mastering of what is more than molec-
ular, in fact, the computer’s mastery of the body would not amount to
much—from the standpoint of ideology and enjoyment, at least.
In order to teach the computer how to get crazy on the flesh, so we
are told, Brundle has to teach himself first. This happens with the gra-
cious compliance of the film’s heroine Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis),
the scientific reporter to whom Brundle had confided the results of his
research and who ended up living with him in his laboratory. After he
has sex with Veronica, indeed, Brundle is finally able to improve the
integrator–disintegrator and teleport the brother of the less fortunate
baboon successfully. The computer’s mastering of the flesh is clearly
meant to coincide with the male character’s getting of the girl: sex is
constructed as a gesture of commandment, a form of mastery over
the body, which can then be translated into computable information.
Teleportation thus becomes even more specifically a device for the reg-
ulation of human reproduction and the disciplinary control of the body.
The normative framing of embodiment on which teleportation is made
to depend corresponds at the same time to the overcoming of a certain
male anxiety through the affirmation of the male body’s potency and is
enabled by the heterosexist framing of the body of a woman as some-
thing to be conquered and possessed.
Beginning with Langelaan’s story—first published in Playboy and
interspersed with different forms of objectification of the body, mostly
of women—the story of The Fly is inseparable from sexist underpinnings.
Cronenberg’s film picks up and arguably tries to make some interest-

ing use of this sexist ecosystem. Much of the film addresses the relation
between Veronica, a rather male-pleasing figuration of the “independ-
ent woman,” and her current boss and persistent ex-lover Stathis Borans
(John Getz), a blatantly unsympathetic male chauvinist character, who
was not in the original story. In one of her most convincing moments,
Veronica describes him as a “petty schmuck.” If Stathis’s vulgarity strives
to look funny, with very little success, Veronica’s acquiescence instead is
outright despairing: seeing her coming back to the man for counsel and
comfort at the first difficulty was, for me, more painful to watch than the
final agony of the creature. Apparently thanks to a panning from a pre-
view audience in Los Angeles,52 we have at least been spared a “happy”
ending in which Veronica and Stathis got married and which would have
completely spoiled the film.
Despite his accomplishments, Brundle is still insecure and possessive:
when Veronica leaves him for a few hours to talk with Stathis, he drinks
himself into a fit, tries the machine on himself and goes through the tele-
pods several times. Anxiety is at the core of identity and the demateriali-
zation and rematerialization of the male body in the film represents well
the reiteration which is typical of disciplinary regulation. Identity is, to
borrow Butler’s words, never a
Simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory

norms materialise ‘sex’ and achieve this materialisation through a forcible
reiteration of those norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that
materialisation is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply
with the norm by which their materialisation is compelled.53
The integration and disintegration of Brundle’s body corresponds to

his tentative affirmation as a male subject and the compulsive repetition
is an attempt to cope with the inevitable failure and incompleteness of
the process of subjectivation as such. In this game of dematerialization
and rematerialization we can recognize the paroxysmal version of the
process by which the unmarked hegemonic subject is ever precariously
constructed: the frenzied Brundle putting the integrity of his body and
52 David Prior, Fear of The Flesh: The Making of The Fly (20th Century Fox, 2005), Video.
53 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2.
166 C. COMANDUCCI
identity to the test (not simply testing his device) suggests the construct-
edness of the body even before it is merged with the fly later in the nar-
rative. So, when the fly is locked with Brundle inside the telepod and the
computer, acting like a gene splicer, fuses the two in a single body that is
part human and part fly, the fly actually serves to disavow how heteron-
omy is part of the normal body to begin with.
After the incident, Brundle will gradually transform into a monstrous
creature—a four legged fly!54—as the genes of the insect take over his
body and his personality. In this respect, Langelaan’s story was more sim-
plistic: the human and the fly swapped body parts—the doctor ended
up with the fly’s head and arm, and the reverse—but, even though the
parts had to change in size and the Doctor’s personality veered more
and more to the animal, each displaced part maintained its recogniza-
ble physiology. In the Playboy story, then, the ideological function
addressed the body more as a visible form, while in Cronenberg’s ren-
dition the body is addressed more at the level of its genetic coding and
chemical composition. This allows to address the process of embodiment
more directly, but also to intensify the normative regulation of the body.
While in Langelaan’s story the monstrous embodiment was a matter of
an immediately visible redistribution of body parts, in the film, instead,
the horror becomes visible only by degrees and is represented as a matter
of hybridization—coherently, we can say, with the fantasies and anxieties
that came with the intensified knowledge of the body provided by genet-
ics and digitalization. Compared to 1957, teleportation technology, and
the narrative framing of the contingency of embodiment that it allows,
seem to imply and require a further mise en discours of the body: not
just a troubling representation of its heterogeneity, but a reduction into
discourse of its very heteronomy.
54 We can read this as an unintended reference to the anecdote according to which, since
Aristotle had said that flies have four legs, everybody was compelled to affirm that against
all evidence. “The affirmation by the wise Aristotle that the common domestic fly has four
legs, an arithmetical reduction that subsequent authors continued to repeat for centuries
thereafter, when even children knew from their cruel experiments that the fly has six legs,
for since the time of Aristotle, they have been pulling them off and voluptuously counting
one, two, three, four, five, six, but these very same children, when they grew up and came
to read the Greek sage, said amongst themselves, The fly has four legs, such is the influence
of learned authority, to such an extent is truth undermined by certain lessons we are always
being taught.” José Saramago, The Story of the Siege of Lisbon (New York: Harcourt, 1996),
44.
Cronenberg’s The Fly presents then, in another context, the same rep-
resentation of contingency, and the same representation of the break-
down of the regime of representation, that we have found in Pirandello’s
short story. Like the bat’s, the erraticness of the fly is a staged one, pre-
cisely the opposite of the irruption of a contingent event. The unfore-
seen intrusion of the fly in The Fly—not unlike the irruption of the bat in
Pirandello’s The Bat—is fateful rather than random: within the universe
of the diegesis, indeed, the fly is considered to enter the pod by pure
coincidence, but if we consider the levels of narration and discourse, this
coincidence is actually inevitable.
Moreover, and more importantly, the fly’s intrusion should not be
considered to be truly disruptive. Through the fly, in fact, the story and
the film provide a figuration and a manageable understanding of contin-
gency and of the body’s heteronomy, by this not only leaving the logic
of representation intact, but arguably contributing to reinforce the nor-
mative framing of the embodied subject. If a somewhat credible embod-
ied subject could have been represented through Brundle’s transitional
state, as we will see, the fly instead acts as a reification of heteronomy
at the beginning of the story, and the monstrous creature at the end
provides a manageable reification of the heteronomous body which can
indeed be removed with a shotgun shell once and for all. What appears
to suture the split between a normative and a heteronomous subject, in
the end reinstates it: as Brundle metamorphoses into the final stage of
the fly-creature, the subject he represents loses its heteronomy again to
become a reification of the abject, a figure of the traumatic body beyond
discourse and representability, which is functional to the mise en discours
of real human subjects. The split between the transparent normativity
of the human and the absolute heteronomy of the fly that we have at
the beginning, is reinstated at the end as the split between the visible
humanity of Stathis, with his stereotyped masculinity, and the overstated,
spectacular, monstrosity of the creature.
Heteronomy is not “the Other” in respect to the body, but rather the
radical indeterminacy and relational dependency that are the conditions
of the body’s very existence. The contingency and the troubling heter-
onomy of the body that are shown in the story as an effect of the fly inci-
dent, are in fact constitutional features of the embodied human subject.
The body “without the fly” that Brundle has at the start of the film is
already a normative fantasy, the fantasy of a proper body “without heter-
onomy.” While in fact the living body is always already the result of some
168 C. COMANDUCCI
incident: rather than being destroyed by its encounter with heteronomy,

it is created and recreated by it.55 The fundamental fantasy of the film is
not that of the hybrid body of the creature, then, but that of the proper
(male) body: the function of fantasy (to close the gap between symboli-
cally mediated reality and the pre-ontological Real that “precedes” it)56
is not performed by the monster, but by the male body—Brundle’s body
“before the fly,” and later Stathis’s body face to the monster’s. In both
cases, it is the male heterosexist body that is truly monstrous.
The whole narrative of the film can thus be read as a symptomatic
attempt to frame and tame the anxiety which the founding indetermi-
nacy of embodiment and heteronomy of subjectivity provokes to subjects
who identify themselves with normative positions. As a matter of fact,
we are rather “Brundleflies” (as the film calls Brundle’s transitional state)
than pure humans: human subjects already bear with them the contin-
gency that the story first traps into the fly, and then removes entirely
through the killing of the creature. Brundle comes the closest to actual
human subjectivity, I would say, when he is neither the monstrous insect
nor the pristine human, but rather something in-between.
From this perspective, the coming of the fly is not only fateful, but
redemptive. When it fuses Brundle and the fly together, the computer
is trying to give the proper, and properly tragic, solution to the prob-
lem of the flesh that it had been asked to solve: it does not really splice
two different creatures together, as much as it tries to make Brundle
whole again. By recognizing a single being inside the telepod and by
fusing them together, it apparently attempts to redeem the primal split
onto which the normative male subject had been constructed in the first
place.
When he is neither human nor creature, Brundle seems indeed,
momentarily, to be more “embodied.” While he is precariously balanced
in-between the two identities that, so to speak, lay claims onto his body,
he also feels positively liberated. What he is liberated from, I believe, is
precisely the oppression of a stable identity. In one scene, Brundlefly
describes the disintegration and the reintegration that he has experienced
55 The center to be deconstructed is the very supplement that threatens the body:
the voice that grounds self-identity is in itself an alien parasite. See Žižek, Indivisible
Remainder, 100.
56 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London:
Verso, 2008), 64.

as a purifying process, comparing the teleporter to a coffee filter. In

the view of the hybrid, in fact, the impurity being filtered out would
be nothing but the purity and the properness of the normative human
subject.
Coherently with the sexist underpinnings of the film, however,
Brundlefly’s liberation from “society’s thick and grey fear of the flesh”—
as he puts it—finally amounts to nothing more than a paroxysm of mas-
culinity, involving random feats of gymnastics, arm-wrestling, picking up
an easy blonde in a bar and producing himself in a particularly vigorous
sexual performance. As Brundlefly is reduced to a barfly, the redemptive
promise of hybridity first dissolves into stereotypical sexism and then
devolves in a totalitarian position. “Insect politics,” the film calls it. It
is a politics that finds its supreme ideal above all in an extreme essential-
ist version of the human heterosexual reproductive family: to Brundlefly,
being together as a family means to be physically fused together. A sim-
ilar exhibition of the obscene underside of the most mundane social
structures can also be found in Brian Yuzna’s film Society, where grown
up sexuality and upper-middle-class sociability are imagined from the
point of view of a male teenager as a literal orgy of alien flesh.
We find no contradiction between the law and the abject thing it sanc-
tions as monstrous: in Society, respectability is shown to be in fact total
perversion and, in The Fly, the most normative heterosexist scenario is
shown to be that of the fusional pre-Oedipal relation. We can add here
a final Žižekian twist, then: by dying as the monstrous creature, Brundle
clearly gets what he wanted: the whole point of building the disintegra-
tor–integrator was to turn himself into the pre-Oedipal thing. His final
plea, then, when he asks Veronica to kill him, would not be a call for
mercy but a cry of jouissance. In the same way, the subversive dive into
the plasma pool would be nothing but the obscene climax of the hetero-
sexual reproductive regime.
On Choice and the Benefits of Doubt

If we limit ourselves to Brundle’s perspective, we can certainly try to
see the deadlock and the tragicness of this normative framing of the
body, but we would still be missing something that is central to its dis-
ciplinary regulation. Indeed, the metamorphoses of Brundle’s body are
linked from the outset with the verification of a control and a hegemony
170 C. COMANDUCCI
over another body, that of Veronica. The technology of teleportation—

the technology that was supposed to produce the transcendental male
subject—can only act by framing the body of a woman and, in turn, this
framing is used to negate the fundamental emancipation of all subjects.
The framing of Veronica’s body takes above all the form of a forced
choice. While in the short story, Delambre’s wife is made to play the role
(at the same time and by the same token) of the female killer and the
faithful wife, Cronenberg introduces a whole new element in the plot:
Veronica is pregnant. The baby is surely Brundle’s, but of which Brundle
(before or after his splicing with the fly) she, and the spectators, can-
not be sure. So, Veronica is confronted with two bad alternatives: to be
“faithful” to the creature and end up being devoured, or to destroy the
creature and marry Stathis. In metapsychological fashion, we could say
that she is caught between the visible presence of a “schmuck” and the
unsightly, dismorphic, reification of its lack—between the extreme mas-
culine and feminine sides of a monstrous heterosexist split. This is not
only an unjust choice, then, it is actually not a choice at all: for both the
obnoxious Stathis and the fusional creature are equal expressions of the
same normative regime that is trying to control her body. It is neither by
just exposing nor by redeeming this heterosexist split that we can free
ourselves from the way it distributes bodies and the sensible, but only by
unsettling the logic behind this distribution.
Even if we direct our sympathy to the shapeless thing more than to
the sexist shmuck, indeed, and thus make the superficially more subver-
sive choice, we would not be avoiding normalization. Veronica’s sole
possibility for independence—and, with it, the sole possibility we have
to imagine some kind of emancipation for human subjects in general in
relation to the story—would be to refuse the terms of the alternative
she is presented with. In this sense, her agency must become something
more than an action and something more the expression of her freedom
of choice: her agency must transform the very terms in which the ques-
tion and the situation are put. She, a character, must transform the text
in which her choices are embedded.
The film does not give Veronica the possibility to negate the false
alternative she is presented with—the obvious solution of having an
abortion and not marrying Stathis, for instance, seems never to cross her
mind. Instead, she is stuck, afraid and unable to transform her predica-
ment. The undecidable baby in her body is thus turned quite precisely
into a phobic object, which, Julia Kristeva writes, signifies an “avoidance

of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from
decisions.”57
As the film ends, we still do not know if the child will be monstrous
(a larva) or post-human (a human baby with butterfly wings). Its gender
is not only unknown—a he or a she?—but troublesome—a human or a
monster? But this situation is in fact integral to the heterosexist regime:
the troubling excess to the normative question by which sexual differ-
ence is inscribed on the body is an essential part of the question itself—
“is it a boy or a girl?”
The suspended conclusion is what finally allows to imagine the heter-
onomy of the embodied subject: little matters from this point of view if
the child will be born as a she or a he or an it, for this indeterminacy is
the actual condition of all human beings.
This reading, however, is only possible beyond the horizon of the
film: it is only in the dimension of spectatorship, as an extension and a
free use of the film, that an actual human subject can be imagined. What
we have seen literally as a matter of reading against the grain of the sub-
ject by reading against the grain of the film is, I believe, generally true:
the question of embodiment in film can only be met by the question of
the indeterminacy of its embodied experience.
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Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave? Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010.
Beugnet, Martine. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of
Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the
Political. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
57 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 42. Also see Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being
Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unconscious Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1993), 22.
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Campbell, Jan. Film and Cinema Spectatorship: Melodrama and Mimesis.

Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
Chamarette, Jenny. “Embodied Worlds and Situated Bodies: Feminism,
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Chateau, Dominique. “A Philosophical Approach to Film Form.” In Subjectivity:
Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience, edited by Dominique
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Csordas, Thomas J. (ed.). Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of
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Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press, 2005.
1976.
Friedlander, Jennifer. Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2008.
Levinas, Emmanuel. En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris:
J. Vrin, 1994.
Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000.
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Visible et L’Invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.
Minkel, J. R. “Beam Me Up Scotty? Q&A About Quantum Teleportation with
H. Jeff Kimble.” Scientific American, 14 February 2004. http://www.scienti-
ficamerican.com/article/why-teleporting-is-nothing-like-star-trek/. Accessed
14 July 2018.
Penney, James. “The Failure of Spectatorship.” Communication Theory 17
(2007): 43–60.
Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the
Unconscious Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Rancière, Jacques. Le Destin des Images. Paris: La Fabrique, 2003.
2010.
Rushton, Richard. “Deleuzian Spectatorship.” Screen 50, no.1 (2009): 45–53.
Saramago, José. The Story of the Siege of Lisbon. New York: Harcourt, 1996.
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London: Verso, 2008.
CHAPTER 7
The Spectator as a History of Encounters
Partages de l’ombre
I am borrowing the title of this section from a collection of poems by
the French writer and film theorist Raymond Bellour. When I read it,
I inevitably hear a Rancièrian ring in the word “partages”, suggesting at
once a shared space and normative attempts at its distribution. At the
same time, in this context, “l’ombre”—the shadow, the darkness—cannot
be but a cinematic one, and thus bring with it a series of associations.
First among these associative overtones is a Platonic absence of true
light: the obscurity of the cave and the mere flicker of the candle pro-
jecting the play of illusions on the wall that in turn suggest a regime of
understanding of cinema in which the image is reduced to a simulacrum.
Jean-Louis Baudry famously compared the cinematographic apparatus
with the Platonic cave: both are based on an illusory impression of reality,
he claimed, and in both cases this impression does not come from the
fidelity with which the images on the wall reproduced real-world objects,
but rather from the structure of the apparatus itself—from the fact that
both the situation in the cinema and that in the cave produce a subject
position.1 This subject position is, of course, the position of the spectator.
In Baudry’s perspective, it is spectatorship that produces ideology
and not the other way around: the illusion of reality and the ideolog-
ical effect do not depend exclusively on the meaning conveyed by the
1 Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura 1, no. 11 (1976): 110.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_7
176 C. COMANDUCCI
images, but are the primary effect of the passive state of the spectator. It
is first of all through the bonds of the prisoners that the images acquire
their more-than-real, hallucinatory, reality. We should, I think, give a
particular prominence to this aspect of Baudry’s rendition of the cine-
matographic apparatus, for there we find the disavowed authoritarian
gesture of apparatus theory. The illusory character of the captives’ per-
ception is determined by the coercive disembodiment of their conditions
of experiencing.
As a consequence of this, the impoverished materiality of the images
that we find in the Platonic allegory—the shadows on the wall are mere
shadows and not even shadows of real objects but shadows cast by card-
board figures—can no longer be taken as the fundamental element of
cinema’s ideological effect, but rather becomes the means of a secondary
and additional stultification of the spectators. The darkness that we are
discussing appears then not as a product of simulation, but as the effect
of a state of captivity and sensory deprivation through which, and only
through which, simulacra become deceptive.
The prisoners live in a sensory-impoverished world: they can only
experience a pale copy of the real world, their eyes would not be able to
withstand the light of day outside the cave and they would immediately
reject the words of the philosopher who, having escaped and having seen
the truth, would try to convince them of the limitedness of their condi-
tion. This rendition of the ignorance of the spectators is already fraught
with a pedagogical understanding of emancipation. Indeed, who is in the
position to say that the world of shadows where the prisoners are forced
to live is intrinsically inferior to the real one, if not those who live outside
of it? Who is in the position to say that the closed environment of the
subjects who are being held hostages has impaired their intellect to the
point that not only their sensory world, but their experience and under-
standing of it, is of less consistency and value, if not those who believe
their own world and understanding to be intrinsically superior?
In the allegory we see how this condition of inequality is artificially
produced by keeping the prisoners captive. At the same time, the par-
ticular knowledge of the philosopher depends on the existence of this
inequality—it is essentially the knowledge of a difference and a knowl-
edge that makes him different from the people that are still in the
cave. The allegory does not acknowledge, however, that what makes
the philosopher different from the people in the cave also makes him
7 THE SPECTATOR AS A HISTORY OF ENCOUNTERS 177
equal to those who are keeping them captive. The darkness that we are
discussing appears then more fundamentally as the effect of inequality.
Finally, we can note how the conditions of enunciation of the alle-
gory themselves replicate the gesture by which the subjects are kept
prisoners in the cave: the philosopher explains us how to free ourselves
from the cave by telling us how the prisoners can only remain in the
dark. Emancipation is presented as always already given (because we,
listening to the allegory, are not living in a cave) but also as impossi-
ble because, in turn, we are told that if we did in fact live in a cave
we would never be able to realize it on our own. What is transmitted
through the allegory as a whole, then, together with the discourse on
ideas and simulacra, is the very gesture that sustains intellectual inequal-
ity: the idea that knowledge is fundamentally knowledge of somebody
else’s ignorance. Through the allegory, in the end, we are only taught
how to assume the position of the master: that is, how to reproduce
inequality.
The prisoners in the cave are thus also prisoners in the allegory: their
sensory deprivation may be real and has real effects, but it exists as the
realization of a project of inequality and stultification of which the alle-
gory is integral part. In the same way, the reference to the Platonic cave
in the theory of the apparatus contributes to establish the passivity of
spectators, who are thus, as we have argued, held in a double grip: that
of their conditions of unfreedom, and that of the authoritarian under-
standing of their predicament.
In this sense, for Rancière, emancipation cannot be a quest for equal-
ity that begins from the recognition of an inequality, but must instead be
a principle which must first be affirmed against all reasonable evidence
and then verified in practice. If we start from an assumption of inequal-
ity, instead—as both the allegory and the metaphor of the cinema as
Platonic cave so clearly do—we are bound to find inequality again on
the other side of the process of emancipation.2 As long as knowledge and
emancipation are understood in this way, they will always reproduce ine-
quality. At most, by learning, a spectator will come to occupy the same
position of mastery that was once occupied by the film theorist. But the
price of intellectual mastery will always be that of making somebody else
2 See Jacques Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses Pauvres (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), xi. Preface
to the French edition.

178 C. COMANDUCCI
an ignorant and a slave. Until our whole understanding of spectatorship

changes, the theory of cinema will always need a passive and intelligible,
consensual, spectator, and spectators will always depend upon the mas-
terful agency of the apparatus, for their pleasure, and of the theorist, for
the articulation of both their understanding of existing codes and their
disagreement with consensual reality. If construing the spectator as an
ignorant in a world of shadows is the price to be paid for a theory of
film, then it would be better for such theory not to exist at all.
Spectatorship’s Light
In Beauty’s Light, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit suggest to take
spectatorship—and, more generally, an aesthetic experience of the
world—as an act of illumination.3 The film image would not merely be
cast by the projector, in this sense, like the shadows on the cave’s wall,
but would also be a product of the projections of the film spectators,
who would be lighting up the scene of film through their passion-
ate look. Where the allegory and the apparatus place light outside and
shadow within the situation of spectatorship, Bersani and Dutoit’s erotic
theory of aesthetics does exactly the reverse.
At the same time that they “perform” the moving image, as a musi-
cian performs a score, the spectator’s acts of illumination would thus
bring the image’s beauty, its aesthetic potentiality, into being. This
beauty that the spectator evokes, Bersani and Dutoit argue, is essentially
a form of the spectator’s relation to the object and a manifestation of the
subject’s vaster implication in the world.4 Aesthetic perception would be
a radical form of sharing that corresponds to the mutual implication of
the spectator and the image, across a distance that would be nothing else
than the spectator’s pleasurable longing.
As the subject discovers something of itself in the image, the image,
through the spectator, comes to exist for Bersani and Dutoit as a form
of being. Spectatorship would thus become the shared dimension of an
aesthetic communality of being.
3 See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “Beauty’s Light,” October 82 (1997): 17. See also
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge and London: MIT Press,
1998); Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: British Film Institute, 1999).
4 See Bersani and Dutoit, “Beauty’s Light,” 27.
Now the world of the film can no longer be seen as an object; the film-
maker, his representation, and the spectator are all working together,
and in so doing, they are discovering and constructing their being as that
working together, as an incessant compositional and associative activity of
which, finally, the film itself is only an episode.5
The look that arouses the beauty of the image is understood by Bersani and
Dutoit also to introduce the figure of a witness within the scene that the
image depicts6—the spectator’s implication in the image would also be a
mise en abîme of the act of illumination itself. In their work on Caravaggio,
Bersani and Dutoit discuss this idea mainly from the point of view of the art-
ist painting a representation of himself as an observer inside his own works:
similarly, the spectator would be present in the aesthetic scene as a redou-
bling of the gesture by which the artist rediscovers itself in the work of art.
I do not think, however, that the aesthetic presence of the spectator
has to take a human form, nor that it has to be necessarily coded in the
text or, more specifically, be mediated through a figure representing it, or
“the artist.” On the contrary, I believe, the spectator’s implication always
finds itself a step beyond its representation in the text: it rather coincides
with a broader and more fluid field of identifications beyond clear identi-
ties and with the embodied experience of film as such. The implication of
the spectator would thus be one with the coming into being of the mov-
ing image as an experiential and evocative object.
The spectator’s presence within the moving image would not be lim-
ited to reflexive representations of spectatorship, in this sense, but would
begin with the image’s grain, so to speak, with the sound’s timbre, and
take shape in the marginal details and the microcosm of fleeting corre-
spondences and erratic associations, at the confluence of the materiality
of the image and the materiality of the spectator’s situated and embodied
experience of it. If the artist may find in its work a space ample enough
to accommodate the expanse of its agency and passion, the spectator can
only do so in a dimension that extends beyond the moment of projec-
tion. What is peculiar to the spectator’s aesthetic involvement lies in the
transformation and dissemination of film experience, in the dimension of
film memory and film talk in which the film realizes its potential of being
something else than what it was supposed to be.
5 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, 57.

6 Bersani and Dutoit, Beauty’s Light, 27.
180 C. COMANDUCCI
Rather than being a site of coherent identifications, we can conceive

the film to be a scene in which, precisely due to the greater permeability
between subject and object of perception that spectatorship allows for,
the subject is exposed to its potential to move beyond itself. Through its
implication with the film, the spectator illuminates it as an aesthetic and
political object. But on the reverse as well, in its encounter with film, the
spectator is potentially illuminated by the image as an aesthetic and polit-
ical subject, as a subject other than and to itself. Spectatorship’s acts of
illumination can in this respect be taken as the exact opposite of the ped-
agogical explanations and of the subject’s self-regulatory identifications
promoted by apparatus theory and, more generally, by the discipline of
spectatorship. Aesthetic illumination does not proceed by a reduction of
the world to the principles of its intelligibility, but is rather based on a
universal correspondence or a free play of being. As it partially thwarts
the attempts to control it from without, aesthetic pleasure also troubles
the self-mastery of the subject, though, and as it is never entirely predict-
able, it tends to catch the subject by surprise.
Illumination is a look that is also a passionate contact but, at the
same time, precisely because it blurs the distinction between subject
and object, it does not take place as a definite relation between clearly
established parts. From this perspective, aesthetic experience ceases to be
defined in terms of the articulation of specific positions within a given
distribution of the sensible, and is rather reimagined as a site of an imper-
sonal relationality. “The desiring individual,” Bersani writes, “is erased in
order to become a site of correspondences with the world.”7
The subject can then be seen as the history of its illuminations: it is, at
once, what of its subjectivity has been brought into being by the encoun-
ters it has made or missed, and what it has brought into being of the
people and objects and situations the subject has met or let go. We exist,
scattered beyond our own bodies, as a history of encounters and our
very body is largely a unique coming together of other people’s actions
and desires. In this sense, Bersani’s universal connectedness of being
would be another name for what I have called so far the heteronomy of
the subject.
A heteronomy that we might as well call “homoness.” Homoness is
defined by Bersani as
7 Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010),
70.
A communication of forms, […] a kind of universal solidarity not of iden-

tities (44) but of positionings and configurations in space, a solidarity that
ignores even the apparently intractable identity-difference: that between
the human and the nonhuman.8
It is unfortunate that heterosexist habits may tend to give homoness and

heteronomy oppositional connotations in terms of sexual orientation that
have in fact little reason of existing: as much as homoness, for Bersani, is
not specific of a homosexual identity, but rather refers to a homosexual
modality of desire that is shared by all subjects,9 heteronomy does not
entail, in my view, neither a reaffirmation of sexual difference nor of a
heterosexual, sadistic, “split” identity, as Bersani would put it.10 One
of the first functions of the heteronormative contract, we could say, is
precisely to disavow and overwrite heteronomy through the establish-
ment of a clear-cut distribution of sanctioned genders and correspond-
ing fantasies and pleasures. Homoness, instead, would name a fluid form
of contact and an open responsiveness to the encounter: fear of homo-
ness, in James Baldwin’s words, is fear of the transformative potential
of touching and being touched—“the root of this word, as Americans
use it—or, as this word uses Americans—simply involves a terror of any
human touch, since every human touch can change you.”11 The relation
between the spectator and the film, then, is one of homoness and in this
sense an aesthetic theory of spectatorship, and of the spectator’s emanci-
pation, entails a queer theory of the desiring subject.
If I maintained a difference between homoness and heteronomy, in
the end, it is only because, in the permeability of the border between
object-love and identification which is characteristic of both, heter-
onomy does not imply a perfect correspondence between the subject
and the world, nor the latter’s boundless hospitality.12 While Bersani
appears to predicate the possibility of universal connectedness and of
the self-shattering and self-dissemination of the subject on a universal
8 Ibid.,43–44.
9 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 120.
10 See Leo Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 32, no.
2 (2006): 145–146.
11 James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (London: Michael Joseph, 1976), 67.
12 Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” 152–153.

182 C. COMANDUCCI
solidarity of being,13 I tend to see the possibility of this correspondence

and impersonality precisely in the fact that there is no essential order or
harmony, no boundless receptivity, that guarantees them.
Heteronomy would thus name a connectedness that does not rest
upon, nor necessarily encounters, a perfect correspondence with the
world—one that does not depend on immanent resemblances,14 or,
as Kaja Silverman puts it, on “ontologically equalizing similarities,”15
one that does not promise, nor expect, any unlimited bliss. To say that
all is connected but that not everything harmonically and essentially
corresponds—in between subjects, things, and within things and subjects
themselves—does not seem to me to constitute a relapse into the idea of
a fundamental hostility of the world to the subject that Bersani rightly
decries, but rather to point toward the very much necessary recognition
of the existence of suffering, subjective lack and the constant necessity of
struggle.
In order to question what appears to me to be a troubling disappear-
ance of trouble from Bersani’s aesthetic subject, we could ask, from a
Butlerian perspective: how does one become an aesthetic subject? Would
it be through a realization of this essential harmony of being, in the
same way one is supposed to become a woman, a homosexual, or a
human being, by realizing the imaginary harmony and by embodying
the transparency of the social sanctions and expectations that define
those subject positions?16 What about those subjects that are unwill-
ing, or unable, to correspond? Or, from a Rancièrian perspective, we
could ask: can a world of perfect correspondences also be hospitable to
dissensus?
Aesthetic being would prove, Bersani and Dutoit write, that there are
“no gaps, no empty spaces in creation. [That we] are not cut off from
anything; [that] nothing escapes connectedness, the play of and between
13 Ibid., 150.
14 “Immanent in every subject is its similitude with other subjects (and other objects).”
Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being, 8. “Universally immanent” connections that are in turn
made to correspond to a “limitless extensibility [of the subject] in both space and time.”
Ibid., 9.
15 Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 4. See
also Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2.
16 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York
and London: Routledge, 1999), 152.

forms.”17 In this sense, aesthetic being would name the perfect, and
most oppressive, of regulatory regimes—the one no one would ever be
able to oppose and escape. And while I agree that everything is indeed
connected, Bersani’s insistence on an essential correspondence risks to
make of the aesthetic subject the subject of a consensual fantasy.
Within Bersani’s universal connectedness of being, then, het-
eronomy would name the moment of dissensus, a realization of
non-correspondence that corresponds in fact with the finiteness and con-
tingency of everyone’s being. Heteronomy would name the moment
in which the subject does not perfectly correspond with itself and with
the world, a moment that, in turn, is open to the emergence of some-
thing radically incommensurable to the existing order of the sensible.
Heteronomy would thus bear with it, as we have seen, a responsibility
which is not comforted, nor limited, by the world’s hospitality. Such a
feeling of connectedness beyond correspondence or of connectedness in
dissonance, is, I believe, one of the indispensable elements of the sub-
ject’s emancipation.
And still, heteronomy and homoness should not be seen to com-
pete. If, for Bersani, difference (which is, in this context, not really sex-
ual difference but rather the distance that separates one individual from
another)18 becomes in aesthetic experience the “unthreatening supple-
ment of sameness,”19 on the reverse, from the standpoint of heteronomy
this difference is never neutralized, never becomes completely unthreat-
ening. But homoness remains to the heteronomous subject as something
like falling in love, and, possibly, as a drive toward the concrete realiza-
tion of the equality we wish for.
In this sense, heteronomy can be seen as the complementary shadow
of aesthetic illumination, the dark scene where we can imagine, rather
than a world of immanent forms, a world in which forms emerge as they
continuously falter.
17 Bersaniand Dutoit, “Beauty’s Light,” 28.

18 Bersani,Is the Rectum a Grave? 43, 87.
19 Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press, 1990), 86, 100.

184 C. COMANDUCCI
Afterimages
So, in a way, we are back in the dark. This time, however, it is a darkness
that envelops and permeates the subject, one that invites radical forms
of promiscuity and at the same time connects everyone and everything
impersonally, beyond the performance and the discipline of identity.
Even though he still connected it with a semi-hypnotic state in which
spectators lapsed, Roland Barthes also evoked cinematic darkness as the
condition of a “diffused eroticism” within the cinema hall, a letting go
of appearances and an “absence of worldliness” that made the cinema “a
site of availability”—sexual availability, of course and, by extension, aes-
thetic availability as well.20 “In this darkness of the cinema […],” Barthes
continued, “lies the fascination of the film (any film).”21 In order to
“come out” of cinema’s ideological dimension the spectator had to be at
once in a passionate relation with the image and to be more present as an
erotic subject in the cinematic situation, to let itself be fascinated “twice
over—by the image and by its surroundings.”22 Critical spectatorship
comes out in Barthes’ reading as a redoubled—rather than a divided—
passion. A passion that, in various forms, spills out of the cinematic situa-
tion to play a part in every aspect and in any form of life.
Against the authoritarian gesture that separates cinematic shadows
from the light of masterful understanding, then, this other regime of
film sense cannot be addressed in terms of the film text or the moment
of projection alone, but has to include in its theory the heterogeneous
forms in which film experience is embodied and disseminated. Film is
not a self-contained narrative entity, Alexander Streitberger wrote, refer-
ring to Victor Burgin’s works and writings, but is always part of a psychic
space of remembered and imagined images.23 If we consider film to be
an aesthetic object made of experienced images, then every film is always
also the memory of an encounter.
How pale and uncertain these film memories can seem, however, face
to a medium that has in its mastery over memory (even more, perhaps,
20 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1989), 346.

21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 349.
23 In Victor Burgin and Alexander Streitberger (ed.), Situational Aesthetics: Selected
Writings by Victor Burgin (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), xiii.

than in its already considerable mastery over contingent events) one of

its defining features. Like the Freudian unconscious, film apparently
never forgets, and every projection would seem to entail not even a
remembrance, but a mechanical repetition of the past. Human, embod-
ied memory, on the other hand, can only be defined by its capacity for
forgetfulness—a “forgetful memory,” in Pontalis’s suggestive expression,
which is not oblivion but rather a form of creative and vital imperfec-
tion.24 Memory (mémoire), Pontalis thought, is something different than
an archive of memories (souvenirs),25 it cannot be reduced to a collection
of items or translated into a string of data. Our embodied memory is
rather like a flux of associations and disassociations and it is only when
this flux is frozen that the souvenir appears—a Rosebud, an object of
memory, a reification of the dimension of the past. Forgetfulness would
thus correspond to the contingency of embodied memory, which is less
a relation to the past than to the passage of time and at the same time to
our mortality and to the mobility of our desire.
There is a precise connection between remembrance and free associ-
ation, of course. For Pontalis, to free associate is already to come close
to the wavering of embodied memory.26 To speak freely, and somewhat
against ourselves, may be our only way to remember. That is, at least,
what psychoanalysis has imagined: through a speech that is free from
the constraints of the secondary process and from the conscious self’s
controlling mastery—from the imaginary fixity of consensual meaning as
well as from the speaking subject’s own pretense of mastery over itself—
one can return memory to the flow of life and not so much revive the
past as work-through its insistence in the present.
The memory of a film would then be a free flow of associations that
traverses, and by this weaves together, the projected images as well as
those “afterimages,” thoughts, and sensations that linger on after the
projection, which are both the most real, concrete and embodied
form that the film takes in relation to its spectator as well as a part of
the spectator’s capacity for future experience and unprecedented pleas-
ures. “Already undone, or redone from the start,” Bollas writes, “we are
24 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Avant (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 23.

26 Pontalis, Avant, 25.
186 C. COMANDUCCI
formed, and as formed, we came to be always partially undone by what

we come to sense and know.”27
Spectatorship offers itself as a model of our experiencing of the world.
When we are living, we are first of all spectators: both from the perspec-
tive of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and from Bollas’s theory of
evocative objects, indeed, it is only as we let ourselves be moved by the
objects we perceive, the people and the situations we encounter, that we
can think and feel and act. So that it is not just that spectatorship con-
stitutes a specific practice and a form of agency but that agency is, at its
core, a form of spectatorship and a theoretical act.
An elaborate rendition of this extended dimension of spectatorship,
in which the contingency of film experience meets the heteronomy of
the subject, can be found in Paul Auster’s novel Man in the Dark. In
the novel, we see a comprehensive representation of spectatorship as
a contingent, free associative practice and an embodied and shared, at
once passionate and theoretical, dimension of dialogue. Auster presents
us with a complete and quite realistic figure of the spectator, drawing
almost all of its possible relations with film, and showing how spectator-
ship constructs film as a space of interpersonal relations and the subject
as an erratic history of significant encounters.
Man in the Dark

In the solitude of Vermont’s wilderness, during a long night of insom-
nia, the narrator August Brill is making up in its mind a very roundabout
story about his suicide, involving a dystopic alternate reality in which
9/11 has not taken place and the United States has fallen into civil war.
The character of the story imagined by Brill, Owen Brick, awakes into a
pit in this other universe, of which he knows nothing and to which he
has been “called” by an organization that is plotting for the murder of
the sole individual responsible for the war: none other than August Brill
who is imagining the story. Brick is then threatened into accepting the
mission to return back to the parent universe and kill the man who is
dangerously fantasizing about him in the obscurity of his house… but we
do not need to spoil the narrative line any further.
27 Christopher Bollas, Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (London:
Routledge, 1995), 11.

For Brill, making up this narrative is not only a means of coping with
the lack of sleep, but also a way of keeping at a distance the memories of
a series of mournful events in his life and in the lives of the close mem-
bers of his family. Brill’s wife died of cancer, leaving him ageing and
alone. Their first daughter, Miriam, divorced from her husband five years
earlier and she is now alone, too, and stuck while writing an academic
book on Rose Hawthorn. Miriam’s daughter, Katya, has lost her fiancé,
Titus, in tragic circumstances: he was beheaded by an unknown terror-
ist group while working as a contractor in the Middle East. Brill himself
crashed his car while driving to the house in Vermont, was hospitalized
for a long period, and is now facing partial paralysis in his bed. Brill
makes a constant effort, throughout the book and throughout the night,
not to think about all of this, he tries to replace the thoughts and images
of his memory with other thoughts and other images. In particular, he
tries to erase the violent images of Titus’s death that the terrorists had
recorded and uploaded on the internet and where the family had been
able to watch them:
I think about Titus’ death often, the horrifying story of that death, the
images of that death, the pulverizing consequences of that death on my
grieving granddaughter, but I don’t want to go there now, I can’t go there
now, I have to push it as far away from me as possible […]. That’s what
I do when sleep refuses to come. I lie in bed and tell myself stories. They
might not add up to much, but as long as I’m inside them, they prevent
me from thinking about the things I would prefer to forget.28
In part, Brill tries to forget by “turning the world around,” as he calls

the imagining of his dystopian story. In part, which leads to us, by
watching films with his granddaughter Katya, who was a film scholar in
New York before dropping out after Titus’s death. Brill and Katya watch
films together, compulsively, and then talk about them, discussing their
views and making up their own theories of film. In this, the two literally
represent the mutual permeability of spectatorship and theory, as well as
the minimal “coupling” that defines film experience. The space of specta-
torship, as I have argued, is not essentially, or not just, the space between
the spectator and the screen, but the space between two subjects sharing
their experience of film. Even in the case of a single spectator watching
28 Paul Auster, Man in the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 2.
188 C. COMANDUCCI
a single film, I believe, it is this scene of sharing that is re-evoked, and it

is through this projection of a heteronomous subjectivity onto the mov-
ing image that the film acquires its significance and that spectatorship
becomes an aesthetic experience.
In the discursivity and contingency of its encounter with film, the sub-
ject evokes a history of its other encounters. Even if for Katya and Brill
watching films is an attempt to escape their reality and their traumatic
memories, then, as their dialogue unfolds they cannot avoid to return
to the events of their life—because their words and the moving images
themselves are made of them. By telling each other the story of the films
that they have seen, at the same time they are asking one another about
their past, they are working-through their past as they begin to question
their present and reimagine their future. “She begins her story,” Auster
had written about Scheherazade in his first book, “and what she tells
is a story about storytelling, a story within which there are several sto-
ries, each one, in itself, about storytelling—by means of which a man
is saved from death.”29 Not from death, maybe, but surely from his
obsession with it—the story of storytelling appears to be essentially one
of self-dissemination, working against the anxiety of a paralyzing and
deadly identity. In Man in the Dark, then, what is a theme of the novel
and its structural cypher—a mise en abîme of storytelling and spectator-
ship and the mutual pervasion of life and fiction—is further characterized
in terms of free association and rememory.
Free association, Christopher Bollas writes, is always a compromise
formation between psychic truths and the self’s effort to avoid the pain
of such truths.30 Brill and Katya’s wished-for forgetting, their warding
off of their memories of pain through film-watching, their free-roam-
ing conversation (as well as the artificial “sleep” that Brill finds in his
solitary fantasizing) are all compromise formations, in this sense. Free
association becomes the connection between the contingency of film
watching and storytelling, on one hand, and the heteronomy of the
subject, on the other. The site of this connection is the memory and
retelling of the film, a space that is not irrepresentable (on the contrary,
like the dream, it is already in itself little but an act of signification), but
that nevertheless is not entirely intelligible: it can find a correspondence
29 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 161.
30 Christopher Bollas, Free Association (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), 10.
in another subject, but it cannot be defined in terms of the sharing of

a precisely coded meaning. Indeed, it is only by way of its associative
connection that a memory becomes significant—strictly speaking, that
embodied memory can exist at all.31 More than this, it is only through
an inter-personal sharing that remembering itself becomes significant
and it is only by introjecting a scene of dialogue that we acquire a sub-
jective voice.
Theory as a Form of Forgetfulness

A long passage in the book is entirely dedicated to a theory of film.32
Brill and Katya have just gone through roughly six hours of screenings:
Each time we finish a movie, we talk about it for a little while before Katya
puts on the next one. […] Just tonight, however, after we watched three
consecutive foreign films—Grand Illusion, The (16) Bicycle Thief, and The
World of Apu, Katya delivered some sharp and incisive comments, sketch-
ing out a theory of filmmaking which impressed me with its originality and
acumen.
Inanimate objects, she said.
What about them?, I asked.
Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions. That’s
the language of film. Only good directors understand how to do it, but
Renoir, De Sica and Ray are three of the best, aren’t they?33
Maybe we could have expected something different from a film scholar,

perhaps something more, or maybe that is exactly what there is to be
expected, for Katya is actually making an aesthetic remark and she is then
proposing an understanding of cinema which depends on her aesthetic
feeling more than on anything else. “Aesthetics of taste,” Christian Metz
would have dismissively commented.34 And yet, this taste is the driving
force of both spectatorship and theory—though this is clearly not the
point of the passage.
31 See Pontalis, Avant, 50–51.

32 Auster, Man in the Dark, 15–22.
33 Ibid., 15–16.
34 See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (London:
Palgrave, 1982), 10.

190 C. COMANDUCCI
In the pages that follow, Katya arguments her theory with examples
from the films that they have watched. The first scene she picks is from
Bicycle Thieves35: when the unemployed Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani)
returns home after he has been robbed of his bicycle, he finds his wife
Maria (Lianella Carell) carrying two buckets of water into the house but,
as Katya remarks, he only picks up one bucket to help her. “Everything
we need to know about their marriage,” Katya tells us, “is given to us in
these few seconds.”36 Moments after this scene, Maria goes to a pawn
shop to pawn the family bed sheets, wrapped into a bundle, in an effort
to raise the money to buy another bicycle, which her husband will need
in order to look for a job.
The pawn shop is rendered by Katya on a grand scale: “[it] isn’t
a shop, really, but a huge place, a kind of warehouse for unwanted
goods.”37 As the camera pulls back, she describes, the film reveals a
ceiling-high shelf full of similar bundles, suddenly universalizing the scene
into a representation of the poverty of the entire country: “in one shot
we’re given a picture of a whole society living at the edge of disaster.”38
Which is an engaging interpretation, only the camera does not pull back
at all, and the pawn shop is not quite like she described it. The scene is
actually shot from two alternating perspectives: one is Maria’s subjective,
in which we see a medium shot of the clerk, and the other is taken from
behind the back of the clerk, framing the wicket through which he and
Maria are talking from a one-hundred-and-twenty-degrees angle. The
shelves full of bundles are visible, out of focus, in the background from
the woman’s point of view, but no camera movement highlights them in
any particular way. Similarly, the shop proportions are not as epic as sug-
gested, on the contrary, the store is a rather claustrophobic space, cut in
two by a screen of glass panes. People are pushing behind the counter
and there is very little space on the side of the clerk too—a similar set-up
is used again later in the film for the bicycle shop, arguably suggesting by
connotation more the tightness of the economic situation, than its scale.
We see here how Katya’s experience and her retelling of the film scene
deformed, more or less intentionally, but still in a significant manner,
35 Vittorio de Sica, Ladri di Biciclette [Bicycle Thieves or, in the United States, The Bicycle
Thief] (ENIC, 1948), 35 mm.

36 Auster, Man in the Dark, 16.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
what can be regarded as the objective text of the film. The passage shows
how the film which is experienced and remembered frequently and sub-
stantially diverges from the conventional text of the film, suggesting the
subjective presence of the spectator within the images. Katya’s reading of
the film is in fact already a use of it and Auster, of course, is giving us a
representation of this use. In turn, my own reading cannot be but partial
and oriented as well: for instance, as I read again the lines that I have
just written, the space behind the clerk does not seem so cramped any
more, and I recognize that I might have slightly exaggerated the effect
for the sake of my own argument. I can go back to the film and, even-
tually, choose to correct my impressions: academic writing could be dis-
tinguished precisely by this return to the image, by a sharpening of our
memory of film until, in fact, what we have in us is almost no longer
a memory, but merely a souvenir—a readily intelligible but rather insig-
nificant object, an object of which, in fact, we have exhausted the sig-
nificance. The hypermnesia that all technologies of the image allow and
encourage, the possibility they give to return to our experience of film as
if it were made, like the film-reel, of distinct immobile frames, goes at the
expense of our embodied memory: by circumventing the forgetfulness of
its experience, is not the pensive spectator cutting itself off from a large
swath of the image’s significance?
From a semiological perspective, Katya is definitely using the film
freely, but so far it is still not clear how this use could be described in
terms of a process of free association and rememory. Katya, Brill, and
Auster make it clearer with the next example. From Renoir’s master-
piece La Grande Illusion,39 Katya selects what she calls the “dishwashing
scene.” The scene takes place toward the end of the film, when Maréchal
(Jean Gabin) and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), two French fugitives on the
run from German soldiers, leave the house of Elsa (Dita Parlo), where
they have been hiding on their way to the Swiss border. As they leave,
Maréchal and Elsa—who, in their few days together, have fallen in love—
know that they will never meet again. Katya is describing the scene for
her grandfather:
Renoir then cuts to Gabin and Dalio running through the woods, and
I’d bet every other director in the world would have stayed with them
until the end of the film. But not Renoir. He (18) has the genius—and
39 Jean Renoir, La Grande Illusion (RAC, 1937), 35 mm.

192 C. COMANDUCCI
when I say genius, I mean the understanding, the depth of heart, the
compassion—to go back to the woman and her little daughter, this young
widow who has already lost her husband to the madness of war, and what
does she have to do? She has to go back in the house and confront the din-
ing table and the dirty dishes from the meal they’ve just eaten. The men
are gone now, and because they’re gone, those dishes have been trans-
formed into a sign of their absence, the lonely suffering of women when
men go off to war, and one by one, without saying a word, she picks up
the dishes and clears the table. How long does the scene last? Ten seconds?
Fifteen seconds? No time at all, but it takes your breath away, doesn’t it? It
just knocks the stuffing out of you.
You’re a brave girl, I said, suddenly thinking about Titus.40
The dishwashing scene that Katya so beautifully evokes lasts in fact

no time at all: it simply is not there. The rest of the scene, as well, is
not exactly as Katya recalls it. There is no cut to the two men running
through the woods, but only a shot of them going away from the front
door and into the dark. After that, there is a short pan following Elsa as
she escorts her daughter to the table and picks up the dishes. The mean-
ing is there, suggested, but its full expression is only Katya’s doing. In
the end, it would be our loss, and an act against the spectator’s emanci-
pation, to remove the dishwashing scene from the film, to argue against
its existence: after listening to Katya, after reading Auster, Renoir’s La
Grande Illusion should be seen to last a few frames longer. It is precisely
this kind of fantasmatic extension of the material film and of the con-
ventional film text that makes of spectatorship a form of theory and an
aesthetic practice.
With this passage of Man in the Dark, we begin to see connections
between the spectator’s creative, forgetful, retelling of the film and its
embodied subjectivity. This connection acts associatively, and takes first
of all the form of a secondary identification.41 Katya is the one living the

41 Secondary identification—identification of the spectator with some identifiable feature
of the characters on screen—clearly works in the other direction as well: in our experi-
ence and memory of film, characters assume subjective features that only we, as specific
spectators, can project in them. Semiological film studies preferred to concentrate on the
first kind of movement of identification, and on the spectator’s primary identification with
the camera, clearly because they allow to downplay the permeability of the space of film and
to make film experience and the position of the spectator more intelligible.
trauma of those un-homely dishes turned into a symbol of death: at the

same time that she projects this association in the character, she has to let
Elsa remind her of Titus. It is only in her dialogue with Brill, however,
that this association is consciously spoken. We can see here how using a
film also entails a capacity of letting oneself be used by it—to be illumi-
nated and, often, interpreted by it. As Pontalis wrote, reading a book is
in fact to allow oneself to be read by it, which implies a double move-
ment of appropriation and estrangement.42
Brill understands what Katya is hinting at with her associative con-
struction of the film scene. He gets it, unconsciously, and replies some-
what automatically, abruptly bringing up the death of Katya’s husband.
The association remains unspoken (Brill merely tells her that she is a
brave girl), but, as Katya replies in the following line that she does not
want to talk about “him,” it is clear that the death of Titus has been
suggested to both. Brill’s association has been understood, and, what
is more, it hurt. Indeed, Katya immediately retorts with a joke. As Brill
tries to move on the conversation, proposing to “stick to the movies,”
and says that he liked the Indian film best, she replies ironically: “that’s
because it’s about a writer.”43 We can see how she is turning the previous
situation on its head: where a moment before Brill spoke the unwanted
and painful memory lying beneath Katya’s rendering of the scene, now
she mocks his identification with the character of another film, turning
the very idea of identification into something harmless and somewhat
senile.
After having discussed all three films, Brill adds to Katya’s theory,
returning on the subject of his granddaughter’s personal life. Brill is
saying:
There’s another thing about those three scenes. I wasn’t aware of it while
we were watching the films, but listening to you describe them now, it
jumped right out at me.
What?
They are all about women. How women are the ones who carry the
world. They take care of the real business while their hapless men stumble
around making a hash of things. Or else (22) just lie around just doing
nothing. […]
42 Pontalis, Fenêtres, 110–111.

43 Auster, Man in the Dark, 118.
194 C. COMANDUCCI
At last, Katya said, giving me a small poke in the ribs. A man who gets
it.
Let’s not exaggerate. I’m just adding a footnote to your theory. Your
very astute theory, I might add.
And what kind of husband were you, Grandpa?44
Again, the free associative character of Brill’s words is made evident—“it

jumped right out at me” signals an instance of Einfall, and at the same
time it is an expression which also contains an element of threat. From
here on, the subtle references and cross-references between the story, the
films, and the character’s lives will continue to expand throughout the
night, toward dawn and the symbolic writing of Brill’s memoirs, toward
the moment in which he and Katya will finally talk openly about life and
death—a situation she describes, with her characteristically crude expres-
siveness, as “Truth Night at Castle Despair.”45
Halfway through the book, another film comes to Brill’s mind in sup-
port to Katya’s theory:
Thinking about films again, I realize that I have another example to add to
Katya’s list. I must remember to tell her first thing tomorrow morning—in
the dining room over breakfast—since it’s bound to please her, and if I can
manage to coax a smile out of that glum face of hers, I’ll consider it a wor-
thy accomplishment.46
The film is Ozu’s Tokyo Story,47 that Auster/Brill narrates for the length
of seven pages.48 Brill can translate most of the situation he is living into
the film. Noriko (Setsuko Hara) is Katya, for she has lost her husband in
the war and she is also Miriam (Brill’s other daughter, whose part in the
story we cannot address) for she has chosen to take care of his lonesome
father, Brill himself, who acts as the old man (Chishû Ryû) in Ozu’s
film. What can be easily recognized as an extensive structure of iden-
tifications between Brill’s personal experience and the discourse of the
film is in fact made up by a myriad of small-scale associations, which are
44 Ibid., 21–22.
45 Ibid., 153.
46 Ibid., 73.
47 Yasujirô Ozu, Tokyo Story (Shôchiku Eiga, 1953), 35 mm.

part of a greater net, including the other films the film-watching cou-
ple have seen, the memories evoked by them, and the discourses arising
from them (Brill says that Noriko is Elsa in Katya’s dishwashing scene,
for instance).49 Tokyo Story is charged by Brill with particular significance:
not only he has watched the film twice, the first a long time before, but
he has asked Katya to play again the scene of the dialogue between the
old man and Noriko, a scene which is also a doubling of Brill and Katya’s
“scene,” their intimate film-watching and the space of their dialogue.
What comes out the most from the net of relationships and associa-
tions that Brill finds in Ozu’s film is the sentence (a wish): “I want you
to be happy.”50 At this point of the narrative, however, there is an abrupt
change, for instead of developing on his relationship with Katya, Brill
suddenly thinks of his sister Betty: “impossible not to think of my sis-
ter now,”51 we are told. So Auster/Brill introduces a new character and
brings us, avoiding the closure of meaning, through another wide, circu-
lar, associative gesture. Betty is another widow of war, a fact which opens
up a sequence of memories and stories about her and her husband Gil,
from a race riot in Newark to the eviction of Gil’s corpse from the grave-
yard at the end of a “Balzacian inheritance war”52 and Betty dying of a
broken heart. As it is peculiar to embodied memory and experiencing,
meaning is never final but can only be scattered forward.
To add a further layer of complexity, we can also find various trespass-
ing of Brill’s life in the alternate universe he is imagining: for instance,
the name of Brill’s first love is the same as Brick’s, and at one point Brick
himself starts planning his suicide. Brill comments about his activity as
a writer, in fact describing the alternative between grounding aesthetic
experience in memory and subjective contingency, or not: “either I put
myself in the story to make it real, or else I become unreal, a figment of
my imagination.”53 Either we accept the living-ground of the spectator’s
subjective experience and compromise the supposedly detached theoreti-
cal gaze with it, or else we cannot but render the experience of the spec-
tator unreal, turning it into a mere instance of the text.
49 Ibid., 75.
50 Ibid., 79.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 86.
53 Ibid., 102.
196 C. COMANDUCCI
It Takes Two (to Be Less Than One)

There is much more in the book than cannot be discussed here and,
indeed, much more that the readers may add on their own—we have
to turn back to film theory and, which is harder, approach the end of
this book.
At a first glance, Auster manages to evoke through Brill the entire
spectrum of the spectator’s experience. Brill is the classic male, fetishistic,
and partially paralyzed cinematographic subject trying to escape from the
real in order to better redeem the wounded reality he feels he is forced
to inhabit. He is that “man among other men plunged into darkness for
the time of a screening, living the vision of his intimate memory in that
intimate memory that the film offers to him”54 that Bellour sees at the
cinema. At the same time that Brill theorizes about cinema, and by the
same token, Auster is theorizing about spectatorship and aesthetics. Brill
is a pensive spectator, but a talkative one as well: not only does he watch
films, but he shares his views in lengthy conversations. He is aware of his
position as a spectator and of the role spectatorship plays in his life. He
makes use of the films and he is able to use the passivity and the alterity
that they put him into. All this makes of him, at the same time and by
the same token, a spectator and a theorist in the sense we have explored.
Everything is rendered with a light touch and a sensibility to the
contingencies of reverie and conversation and the nuances of writing
that not all viewers, and surely not all film theorists, can have. In this
Vermontian night, in fact, everything is quite brilliant: the fine grain of
the dialogues is extremely convincing, the fictional stories are moving,
the anecdotes are both incredible and life-like, the narrations of the films
are perfect in their imprecision—this is indeed how the novel becomes so
relevant to our argument, because it makes so many things so clearly and
perfectly visible.
Still, what we are facing is not spectatorship, it is not free association,
and it is not really the heteronomy of the subject: it is, of course, only
their representation. As Brill represents so well an embodied spectator
he is also inevitably, to some degree, a mise en discours of the spectator’s
waywardness. Being a character, he is deprived of a fundamental part of
54 “Un homme parmi d’autres plongé le temps d’une séance dans le noir et vivant la
vision de sa mémoire intime dans celle que le film lui propose.” Raymond Bellour, Le Corps
du Cinéma: Hypnosis, Émotions, Animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009), 17. Translation mine.
the tension, of the indeterminacy, of the ambivalence and the mobility

that trouble the position of the spectator—a tension we can only find
again in our embodied experience as spectators and as readers of Auster’s
book.
In their intimate connection, literature (dialogue, film, any form of
signification) and lived-experience are animated by their incommensura-
bility. Without this tension, we might still call an object “art,” but strictly
speaking, no aesthetic experience would be possible. So as Auster signi-
fies the faltering texture of contingent experience he inevitably weaves it
back together, and it is to the reader to unweave it again. In an interview
with Joseph Mallia given in 1987, Auster said:
the one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the
prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe it’s the reader
who writes the book and not the writer. In my own case as a reader […] I
find that I almost invariably appropriate scenes and situations from a book
and graft them onto my own experiences—or vice versa.55
In Man in the Dark, Auster can be seen to treat language and dialogue
themselves—a scene of speaking subjects—as the contingent “animal” of
the two other stories that we have discussed—the bat and the fly. “In
philosophical terms,” Auster continued during the same interview, “I’m
talking about the powers of contingency. Our lives don’t really belong
to us, you see—they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts
to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.”56
Flirting with words, we could say that what was the bat and the fly’s
flight becomes here like the flight of the signifier. Auster’s storytelling
and spectatorship are not reduced to narrative, but rather bound with
narration, and they circumvent the Einfall precisely by performing and
showing its incorporation in every act of signification.
The unexpected and the erratic of free association are embroidered,
so to speak, in Brill and Katya’s exchanges: after a long period of silence
in their life and against the stillness that defines the insomniac Brill, this
hyper-aware subject, language is returned to its mobility but, with this
mobility, comes the presence of death. In order to really talk to each
other, indeed, the two characters must mourn. Still, this contingent and
55 Paul Auster, The Red Notebook (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 111.
56 Ibid., 117.
198 C. COMANDUCCI
deathly beast, the flying signifier, is somewhat tame. It disrupts the con-
versation only so that the conversation can become more significant, and
as it unsettles the characters, it eventually soothes the reader.
A story is told about death and loss and two people are rescued from
their solitude and sorrows. A story is told about watching a film and the
position of the spectator is rescued from its melancholic oneness. In a
way, Man in the Dark is a redemptive novel—or at least a novel about
the redemptive power of spectatorship and writing—in the sense that
it represents aesthetic experience and, more specifically, free associative
film watching and storytelling, as a remedial completion to an essentially
wounded world.57
In the novel, trauma can indeed be seen to act, specifically in relation
to the significance of spectatorship, as the hypostasis of the dimension
of meaning. In other words, the elusive flight of free association and the
Chinese-box play of narration that characterize the book are eventually
brought back to meaning—or, better, they are sutured to a certain idea
of meaningfulness—through a background reference to the irrepresent-
able. In fact, they are made meaningful through a reference to a par-
ticular, and particularized, “irrepresentable”: the recording of Titus’s
beheading (at the same time an unbearable film image and, if we like,
a stock metaphor for symbolic castration and threat to the US world
order). To put it in another way: by anchoring signification and its sig-
nificance to the process of rememory of a quintessential trauma, the
associativity of stories and the contingency of the dialogue lose much of
their dissensual disruptiveness, and rather become, face to the universal-
ity of death, something essentially conciliatory. (But is death really uni-
versal, we can ask, as long as life remains unequal?) In this way, writing
and spectatorship themselves become less hospitable to the Einfall and
are rather transformed in a support for its redemptive and disciplinary
inscription.
On one hand, then, Auster is illuminating the reader to itself: as a
reader, as a heteronomous subject, and as a mortal body. On the other
hand, however, in being thus mediated, this heteronomy loses some-
thing of its troubling and dissensual nature—something that can only
re-emerge in the contingency of the subject’s embodied experience of
the text. It is in this sense that film spectatorship constantly escapes the
57 See Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 10.

forms that make it intelligible—not just the authoritarian forms of ped-

agogical film theory and the static forms of normative identity, but also,
at least to some extent, the very aesthetic forms that, like Auster’s novel,
illuminate it and make it visible and significant. Aesthetic experience is
traversed by its incommensurability with the text, and by the heteron-
omy of the subject that allow this experience to exist and at the same
time make it ambiguous and troubling. Embodied experience and aes-
thetic use remain thus as external points of tension in relation to signi-
fication, not irrepresentable but never fully grasped and always already
traversing and deconstructing the multiple subject positions that are
implied in the scene of enunciation.
In the end, if we can address the contingency and embodiment of the
heteronomous subject in Man in the Dark it is not through Brill alone,
but rather through the relationship and the space that exist in-between
Katya and him. The man in the dark is only one part of the picture and
not just one person in a dialogic pair but only half of a subject: if Brill is a
spectator and a subject it is indeed also Katya’s doing and vice versa.
We can say that one spectator is always made by more than one
viewer, then, and that a viewer already is a contingent and embod-
ied history of heterogeneous acts of spectatorship. The men and the
women and the children in the dark are a cluster of different stories and
positions: at the same time they are spectators, filmmakers and theo-
rists. Their very body is not quite an object with boundaries, but rather
a tension surface shifting with the flows and ebbs of relationality and
changing with every new encounter. What makes the couple of char-
acters in the novel interesting, then, is that, together, they allow to
imagine a spectator with a psyche rather than a mere metapsychologi-
cal “build,” with a voice rather than a mere ability to decode, with an
agency that is not just reduced to the expression of mastery and will,
and with a sexual and emotional life that goes beyond any definite sense
of gender, identity or self.
Auster wrote that:
we learn our solitude from others. […] What is startling to me, finally, is
that you don’t begin to understand your connection to others until you
are alone. And the more intensely you are alone, the more intensely you
plunge into a state of solitude, the more deeply you feel that connection.
It isn’t possible for a person to isolate himself from other people […] you
200 C. COMANDUCCI
are inhabited by others. Your language, your memories, even your sense of
isolation—every thought in your head has been born from your connec-
tion with others.58
The subject can be alone, but it is never just one and only. Likewise, the
spectator is always situated, embodied, discursive: at the same time, it is
never entirely graspable and never entirely in control of itself, it is always
less than one subject and more than one viewer. Spectatorship, in this
sense, is inherently dialogical.
We are One, No one, and One Hundred Thousand, to borrow from
Pirandello again. We are one, because we are uniquely contingent,
because there are limits to our embodied experience, because our pres-
ence is finite in time and space, and because our connectedness with the
world is not necessarily comforted by a perfect correspondence. We are
no one, because we are not a unitary, identifiable and self-same subject—
in this we elude the grasp of normative discourse at the same time that
we face the lack in our own mastery and understanding. We are one hun-
dred thousand, finally, because in our situated and erratic encounters
with the world we are (often unwillingly) multiplied and disseminated—
in fact, “we” are little but this multiplication and dissemination. It is to
this heteronomy and radical contingency of being that film spectatorship
returns the subject to, to the estrangement of a child, to the dissent of
the infans, to the muteness of passion, and to the falterings of theory,
not—not necessarily, and not in the first place—to the state of need and
dispossession through which these very feelings are framed and inter-
preted from the point of view of authority.
Not surprisingly, the wayward spectator has turned out to be an eva-
sive subject. Talking about the waywardness of the spectator, we have
not been talking about a special kind of individual but about a tension,
an incommensurability of forms of being and forms of signification to
the principles that are supposed to order and make sense of them. The
discussion of the relation between spectatorship and theory from which
this book has begun inevitably takes us in a political dimension, in a
space of encounters and dialogue which is also a dimension of depend-
encies and struggles. It is precisely in the failure of a masterful theory,
then—taken both as academic mise en discours and as disciplinary reg-
ulation and self-observation—that spectatorship exist as an emancipated
58 Auster, The Red Notebook, 143–144.

practice. And it is precisely as it is part of this emancipated dimension of

spectatorship, and not the prerogative of a special kind of subject, that
film theory, in turn, becomes significant.
Bibliography
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Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.
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Index
A theory, 7–9, 20, 23–26, 29, 37, 38,

Aesthetic, 14, 20, 24, 28, 46, 50, 62, 57, 61, 62, 64, 68, 74, 76, 80,
68, 86, 87, 95, 110–113, 115, 99, 100, 113–115, 137, 138,
116, 122, 123, 129, 133, 146, 141, 148, 176, 180
147, 157, 178–184, 189, 192, Associations. See Free association
199 Athanasiou, Athena, 82, 143
experience, 13, 17, 28, 67, 68, 94,
139, 178–180, 183, 184, 188,
195, 197–199 B
regime, 28, 49, 67, 68, 70, 83, 88, Bersani, Leo, 14, 51, 73, 112, 156,
93, 103, 133, 158 178, 180, 181, 183
Agency, 9, 13, 23, 26–30, 33–39, 41, Bollas, Christopher, 14, 107, 108,
42, 45, 47–49, 55, 57, 61–63, 115, 116, 124, 128, 155, 186,
67, 69, 70, 75, 113–115, 124, 188
128, 131, 137, 141, 143, 145, Burgin, Victor, 4, 19, 79, 116, 131,
150, 170, 178, 179, 186, 132, 184
199 Butler, Judith, 11, 13, 27, 38, 76–79,
Althusser, Louis, 13, 20, 25, 27, 31, 82, 101, 143, 158, 182
60–62, 64–66, 102–104
Apparatus, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 20,
21, 25, 28–30, 37, 38, 41, 42, C
49, 50, 54, 62, 63, 66, 73, 113, Cave (Plato’s), 14, 175–177
139, 145, 146, 148, 153, 154, Consensual. See Consensus
160, 162, 175–178 Consensus, 50, 113
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 203
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1
204 Index
Contingency, 12, 14, 23, 40, 42, E

46, 73–84, 86–89, 93–96, Egalitarian, 4, 6, 8, 25, 80, 141
99, 106, 107, 109, 110, 116, Einfall, 75, 127, 128, 194, 197,
122, 129, 140–143, 146, 151, 198
154–157, 160, 163, 164, Emancipation, 12–14, 22, 25–27,
166–168, 183, 185, 186, 188, 29–32, 35–37, 39, 47, 49, 51,
195, 197–199 54, 57, 60–63, 66, 67, 69, 75,
radical, 8, 40, 74, 77–83, 94, 99, 99, 114, 127, 128, 133, 141,
113, 124, 142, 146, 156, 158, 150, 157, 163, 170, 176, 177,
160, 162, 200 181, 183, 192
Cowie, Elizabeth, 6, 7, 40, 65, 76, Embodied, 5, 14, 19, 23, 31, 37, 39,
100, 101, 116 53, 67, 75, 85, 94, 101, 107,
110, 114, 129, 131–134, 137,
140, 142, 146, 147, 152–154,
D 157, 158, 160, 162, 167, 168,
Demystification, 22, 29, 30, 32, 35, 185, 186, 189, 191, 192, 195,
62, 64, 65, 107, 109, 112 196, 199, 200
Dialogic, 8, 12, 13, 47, 104, 123, 125, experience, 13, 17, 19, 42, 45, 53,
126, 129, 130, 134, 140, 199 66, 74, 77, 79, 80, 84, 86,
Dialogue. See Dialogic 88, 116, 129, 132, 137–140,
Discipline. See Theory, disciplinary 142, 143, 146, 148, 152, 154,
Discourse, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 20, 29, 34, 155, 157–159, 171, 179, 184,
41, 49, 50, 53–55, 58, 62, 64, 197–200
76, 78, 80, 82, 88, 100, 102, subject, 13, 80, 84, 134, 145, 156,
104, 109, 110, 112–114, 123, 158–160, 163, 167, 171
131, 133, 138, 148–154, 159, Embodiment. See Embodied
166, 167, 177, 194, 200 Encounter, 6, 17, 27, 42, 52, 73, 81,
discursive determination, 149, 151 83, 84, 86, 88, 107, 109, 113,
incitation to discourse, 10, 147, 151 126, 130–132, 137, 139, 141,
mise en discours, 48, 49, 149, 166, 146, 150, 158, 168, 180, 181,
167 184, 186, 188, 199
Discursivity, 9, 12, 14, 19, 26, 35, history of, 13, 14, 41, 53, 82, 134,
39, 42, 53, 56, 78, 79, 87, 102, 180, 186, 188
114, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147, Equality. See Egalitarian
149–151, 155, 159, 160, 188. See Event, 13, 82, 90, 95, 96, 121, 127,
also Discourse 167
Dispossession, 26, 30, 56, 82, 114, Evocation. See Evocative
143, 200 Evocative, 130, 134, 145
Dissensus, 6, 10, 28, 34, 42, 46, 50, object, 14, 108, 110, 111, 115,
56, 60, 68, 70, 126–128, 133, 122, 124, 125, 128–132, 140,
138, 152, 160, 162, 182, 183 146, 179, 186
Index 205
Experience, 2, 4–7, 9, 10, 12, 14, Film theorist, 1–3, 5, 29, 32, 45, 47,
17–19, 26, 28, 29, 32, 40, 45, 50, 58, 59, 131, 175, 177
47, 48, 51, 53–57, 59, 62, 64, Formless, 150, 151, 158, 159. See also
66–69, 73, 74, 77, 79–88, 90, Irrepresentable
96, 99, 100, 102–104, 108–123, Foucault, Michel, 10, 48, 148, 149,
128, 130–132, 137–148, 150, 151, 159
152–157, 159, 171, 176, 178, Free association, 14, 75, 80, 87, 96,
180, 183, 185, 186, 188, 105–107, 111, 112, 115–120,
190–192, 194–200 122–134, 156, 157, 185, 188,
embodied, 13, 19, 23, 73, 85, 148, 191, 196–198
152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 179, Free use, 13, 51, 66, 68–70, 96, 116,
184, 197–199 129, 132, 171
film, 5, 6, 8–10, 12–14, 17, 19, 22, Freud, Sigmund, 25, 32, 103–106,
25, 40–42, 45–47, 49–54, 56, 117–122, 125–1277
59, 65, 67, 68, 70, 74–77, 80, Friedlander, Jennifer, 116, 153
83, 84, 86–88, 112, 113, 116,
117, 123, 129, 131–134, 137,
139–141, 146, 148, 179, 186, G
187, 192 Gender, 11, 12, 29, 37, 40, 41, 79,
lived-experience, 18, 77, 84, 103, 80, 101, 143, 158, 171, 182, 199
112, 132, 144, 152, 154, 197
subjective, 83, 84, 110, 111, 124,
195 H
Explanation, 5, 13, 46, 47, 51, 53, 59, Haptic, 94, 154, 155, 157
65, 70, 75, 87, 105, 108, 114, Heterogeneity. See Heterogeneous
115, 117, 150 Heterogeneous, 12, 17, 19, 68, 74,
85, 122, 130–132, 137, 184, 199
Heteronomy, 8, 12–14, 27, 28,
F 33–35, 38–40, 51, 53, 56, 58,
Fantasy, 4, 6, 7, 13, 17, 18, 22, 25, 81, 99, 114, 116, 117, 124,
26, 31, 32, 37–40, 53, 56, 65, 126, 129, 133, 142, 146, 154,
81, 101, 104, 106, 115, 116, 155, 160, 163, 164, 166–168,
129, 133, 146, 158, 159, 163, 171, 180–183, 186, 188, 196,
167, 168, 183 198–200
of mastery, 5, 35, 36, 38, 39, 54, Heterosexist, 4, 6, 104, 153, 164,
58, 107, 115, 150, 155, 158, 168–171, 181
160. See also Pure presence Historicity, 51, 73, 75, 78, 163
Feminism. See Feminist
Feminist, 6–8, 24, 40, 77, 80, 99,
100, 139, 142, 147, 153 I
Filmmaking, 7, 45, 67, 131, 147, 158, Identification, 6, 8, 9, 26, 40, 51, 76,
189 100, 107, 116, 181, 192, 193
206 Index
Identity, 6, 8, 11, 13, 28, 29, 34, 39, Mayne, Judith, 18, 22, 24, 26, 39–42,
49, 51, 53, 58, 76, 77, 79, 81, 45, 46, 102
101, 104, 111, 115, 117, 124, Memory, 67, 83–87, 119, 121, 122,
126, 128, 143, 146, 150, 154, 129, 131, 132, 179, 184, 185,
158, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 187–189, 191–193, 195, 196
168, 181, 182, 184, 188, 199 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 38, 145,
Ideology, 2, 4, 8–11, 18–23, 25, 26, 157, 186
28–32, 34, 35, 40, 41, 61–66, Metapsychology, 9, 14, 22, 25, 76, 80,
78, 79, 102, 103, 112–114, 148, 99–105, 110, 112–115, 120, 123
149, 155, 164, 175 Metz, Christian, 2, 3, 25, 100, 101, 189
Incommensurability. See
Incommensurable
Incommensurable, 8, 33, 34, 36, 49, N
50, 55, 59, 69, 70, 108, 117, 183 Normalization, 8, 38, 113, 142, 148,
Indeterminacy, 12, 142, 143, 151, 155, 170
154–156, 158, 160, 161, 167,
168, 171, 197
Interpellation, 26–28, 41, 54, 111, P
113 Pedagogical, 26, 48, 49, 52, 54, 62,
Interpretation, 14, 20, 21, 47, 51, 59, 66, 87, 105, 115, 150, 154, 176,
66, 68, 69, 103–110, 112, 114– 180, 199
117, 120, 122, 123, 126–128, Phenomenological turn, 14, 137–139,
140, 141, 158, 164, 190 141, 142, 147
regime of, 78, 112, 113, 117 Phenomenology. See
Irrepresentable, 12, 70, 109, 151, Phenomenological turn
152, 188, 198, 199 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 52, 55–58,
81, 102, 106–111, 116, 185
Practice, 1, 3–6, 14, 18, 19, 21, 25,
M 29, 31, 42, 45, 47–50, 60–62,
Marks, Laura, 73, 139–142, 153–157 64, 65, 67, 75, 80, 102–105,
Mastery, 5, 8, 13, 26, 32, 34, 36, 39, 107, 109–111, 113, 116, 117,
49–51, 54, 56, 58, 59, 62, 83, 126, 129, 131, 138, 148, 157,
95, 101, 102, 104, 108–111, 158, 177, 186, 192
114, 115, 124–127, 133, 139, discursive, 18, 19, 35
143, 146, 148, 150, 153–155, everyday, 4, 41, 46, 69, 75, 83, 86
157, 159, 163, 164, 177, 180, Psychoanalysis, 2, 7–9, 14, 20, 23, 25,
184, 185, 199, 200 26, 28, 33, 35, 57, 65, 76, 80,
of concepts, 107, 109 81, 99, 100, 102–110, 112–116,
self-mastery. See Fantasy, of mastery 118, 119, 123, 128, 181, 185,
Materiality, 74, 94, 95, 140, 143, 147, 189
155, 157, 176, 179 Pure presence, 14, 133, 143, 154,
159, 160
Index 207
Q Stultification, 30, 31, 49, 52, 176, 177

Queer, 6, 8, 14, 22, 24, 51, 77, 142, 181 Subjection, 6, 21, 26, 27, 34, 38, 41,
42, 100, 101, 114, 148
R
Rancière, Jacques, 6, 10, 13, 28, 30, T
31, 46, 57, 60, 61, 67, 68, 94, Technology, 9, 13, 20, 23, 24, 63, 74, 95,
114, 133, 138, 152, 177 96, 150, 158, 161, 162, 166, 170
Relational dependency, 27, 34, 126, Tension, 6, 19, 33, 39, 40, 42, 46, 47,
154, 167. See also Heteronomy 74, 75, 78, 82, 83, 87, 88, 93,
109, 128, 140, 143, 146, 152,
159, 160, 197, 199, 200
S Text, 3, 7, 10, 12, 13, 40, 51, 64, 65,
Self-shattering, 34, 50, 51, 101, 124, 68, 69, 82, 85, 86, 88, 122, 123,
126, 134, 158, 181 141, 146, 170, 179, 184, 191,
Sexist, 4, 6, 7, 41, 100, 153, 164, 192, 195, 198, 199
165, 169, 170 textuality, 69, 146
Situatedness, 14, 73, 74, 81, 82, 131, Theory, 2–11, 13, 14, 18–22, 24–27,
137, 138, 141, 142, 152, 162 29, 30, 32, 35, 38, 39, 41,
Spectator, 1–5, 7–14, 17–23, 25, 26, 42, 45, 47–52, 54, 57, 60–66,
28–30, 32, 35–40, 42, 46–51, 70, 73–76, 80, 82, 83, 86, 87,
53–59, 61–64, 66–70, 73–77, 79, 93, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106,
80, 82, 84–86, 88, 94, 99–101, 107, 109, 111–117, 120, 122,
112–115, 131–134, 138–142, 130–134, 137, 138, 140, 142,
146–148, 150, 152, 153, 157, 143, 145–148, 151, 155, 158,
160, 175–181, 184–187, 191, 177, 178, 181, 184, 186, 187,
192, 195–200 189, 190, 192–194, 200
consensual, 9–11, 39, 49, 73, 87, 178 authoritarian, 4, 9, 26, 27, 42, 48,
emancipated, 9, 30, 31, 35, 58, 59, 54, 56, 62, 63, 69, 102, 114,
133, 201 115, 146, 184, 199
perverse, 11, 150 disciplinary, 2, 4–11, 48–51, 54,
wayward, 11, 14, 49, 85, 200 70, 82, 84, 87, 102, 113, 115,
Spectatorship, 1–14, 17–26, 30, 31, 147, 148, 150, 153, 200
34, 37–42, 45–51, 53–56, 59, 61, film theory, 1–14, 20, 22, 23, 25,
62, 67, 70, 73–77, 79, 80, 82– 26, 28, 39–42, 45–50, 52,
84, 86, 87, 99–102, 107, 114, 59, 61–64, 66, 67, 70, 73,
116, 124, 130–133, 138–140, 75–77, 83, 86, 99, 100, 107,
142, 146–148, 150, 152–154, 110, 114, 138–142, 144, 146,
157–160, 171, 175, 178–181, 147, 150, 153, 154, 158,
184, 186–189, 192, 196–201 196, 199, 201. See also Film
extended, 12, 14, 51, 67, 68, 82, theorist
83, 86, 96, 116, 123, 129, non-authoritarian, 14, 48, 51, 59,
134, 186 70, 151
208 Index
U Woman, 1, 4, 5, 7, 65, 76, 79, 100,

Unconscious, 12, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 101, 129, 153, 164, 165, 170,
33, 34, 37, 47, 52, 55, 57, 58, 182, 190, 192
74, 89, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109,
114, 115, 118, 121, 123–126,
128–131, 155, 171, 185, 186 Z
Universality, 8, 76–81, 113, 153, 198 Žižek, Slavoj, 21, 22, 31, 32, 42, 49,
51, 73, 75, 78–81, 88, 108, 109,
127, 149, 162, 168
W
Waywardness, 7, 8, 11–14, 51, 70,
111, 124, 127, 141, 150, 158,
160, 164, 196, 200

Carlo Comanducci - Spectatorship and Film Theory - The Wayward Spectator-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

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Carlo Comanducci - Spectatorship and Film Theory - The Wayward Spectator-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949319

Cover image: Shahal F Rahman/EyeEm/Getty Images

A work is made of many people, what may be good in what I have

1 Introduction: Film Theory, a Divided Passion? 1

2 The Heteronomy of Subjectivity and the Spectator’s

3 Everyday Film Theory 45

4 Situatedness and Contingency of Film Experience 73

5 The Process of Free Association and Film as an

6 The Indeterminacy of Embodiment 137

7 The Spectator as a History of Encounters 175

Introduction: Film Theory, a Divided

The One Who Turns Around

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Existing both in and against the situation of spectatorship, film the-

Film Institute, 1998), 115.

8 Valerie Walkerdine, “Video Replay: Families, Film and Fantasy,” in Formations of

11 See Walkerdine, “Video Replay,” 167.

heterosexual spectator who is staring, in turn, at a beautiful woman on

and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xvii.

of image or role,”14 fantasy provides in her work a way to avoid the

14 Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (London:

Macmillan, 1997), 70.

17 Walkerdine, “Video Replay,” 71.

“textual polarities”21 we fall into a distribution of viewers according to

The Consensual Spectator

21 See Stacey, Star Gazing, 59.

If visual pleasure is construed as yet another object of a scientia

University of California Press, 1999), 3.

la Sexualité: La Volonté de Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 25.

is therefore a verité de La Police (a Lapolissian truth, a police-truth), a

London: Routledge, 1993), 187.

London: New York University Press, 2000), 2.

an established regime of perception and understanding. As Butler conceives it, “trouble” is

a crucial aspect of the spectator’s fundamental emancipation. In turn,

of aesthetic experience in general. The examples I chose—a short story

What a Spectator Is Not

The fourth chapter addresses the concept of contingency which

The Heteronomy of Subjectivity

Spectatorship is a wide-ranging concept. In its broadness it encompasses

© The Author(s) 2018 17

Spectatorship as a Discursive Practice

dimension in which these two aspects of film experiencing—its embodi-

3 Victor Burgin, Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (Leuven:

Leuven University Press, 2009), 27.

University Press, 1984), 37.

early 1970s at the crossroads of critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis

Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974–1975): 46.

interpretation of film as a consumerist ideological product and of specta-

7 “The fetishism of the commodity—the domination of society by ‘intangible as well as

commodity: hardly the no-nonsense category that it may appear to be,

9 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I (Moscow: Progress

Publishers, 1995–1996), 46.

viewer as a spectator, at the same time foregrounding the political and

13 Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 40.

others, was also starting to be understood as a technology of the social.

14 See Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 5.

The Ideological Unconscious and the Heteronomous

the whole psychic apparatus of members of a class society, insofar as they

York: Continuum, 2003), 56.

18 Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 28.

understanding of subjectivity expressed by Althusser’s theory of inter-

The Heteronomy of Subjectivity

Spectatorship as a Discursive Practice

The Ideological Unconscious and the Heteronomous

The Future of Disillusion: Emancipation as a Knowledge

The Heteronomous Subject and the Power of Looking on

Film Theory as an Integral Element

Breaking the Spell of Theory

The Beginnings of Film Theory

The Spectator as Infans

26 Derek Jarman, Caravaggio (British Film Institute, 1986), 35 mm.