How Does the Perfect Theorist Fall?

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Notes

notes

I am grateful to my colleague Antonis Balasopoulos for his invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this essay. I would also like to thank Salah el Moncef and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and intellectual generosity.

1. See Margaroni.

2. See Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind.

3. See Foster 155.

4. In their introduction to “Witnessing Theory,” a special issue of Parallax published in 2004, Chare, Bailey and Kilroy inform their readers that “At Theory's Limits” was their working title (1).

5. See Geoffrey Hartman's discussion with Chare on this issue in Hartman.

6. Martin McQuillan et al. write: “Post-Theory rejects the dead hand of a self-satisfied and hypostasized ‘Theory,’ a theory in love with and, finally, indistinguishable from its own rhetoric” (xi–xii).

7. I am paraphrasing Derrida here who is discussing the metaphysical concept of “Man.” He writes: “Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word” (“The Ends of Man” 123).

8. See also the simile of the Sun in Plato, The Republic 245–49.

9. Kristeva, Hannah Arendt 106. Kristeva is here referring to Hannah Arendt's understanding of the ancient Greek concept of theorein as a denial of the inter-est of the polis: “a life apart, which means ‘leaving the company of his fellow-men’” (ibid.). In Means without End Agamben defines bios theoretikos in similar terms: “a separate and solitary activity (‘exile of the alone to the alone’)” (10).

10. For a detailed account of the development of this vision see David Michael Levin (The Opening of Vision and Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision) and Martin Jay.

11. See Jean Starobinski's discussion of “le regard surplombant” in L’Oeil vivant.

12. My translation from the Greek edition.

13. In The Opening of Vision Levin defines sub-stance as what stands “under the masterful gaze, transfixed and possessed” (74).

14. For a discussion of the Ancient Greek understanding of theoria as a journey away from home see Nightingale.

15. Perseus’ name originates from the Etruscan Phersu (mask, persona, role).

16. The sun has also traditionally been represented frontally, as a plate.

17. The gendering of the figure of the Medusa in this context and its maternal connotations are important, for the trauma of infinite exteriority in psychoanalysis has become synonymous with the trauma attributed to the maternal feminine.

18. See, for example, Levi, Sebald and Agamben (Remnants of Auschwitz).

19. See esp. chapters 4, 5, and 7 in Felman and Laub.

20. See Lyotard, The Differend and “Emma.”

21. “Testimony, however, contains a lacuna,” Agamben writes (Remnants of Auschwitz 33). In a similar vein, Felman emphasizes that “the texts that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounter – and make us encounter – strangeness” (Felman in Felman and Laub 7; emphasis in original).

22. In Demeure Derrida insists on “tying testimony both to the secret and to the instant,” in an attempt to emphasize, as he explains, that “in the indivisible unicity of the instant” something (a secret) is “temporalized without being temporalized permanently” (30).

23. The instant in Derrida is what erupts in and disrupts history as continuity, movement, progress, the unfolding of presence. Similarly, Agamben points to the temporal caesura that lies at the heart of testimony, in other words, the gap between the time of the event (which is “without time”) and the historical time of testimony qua narrative. See Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.

24. In Agamben the temporal caesura inherent in testimony is inextricable from a subjective caesura, for the vision of the traumatic Real reduces the human witness to a less-than(perfect)-human and thus posits him/her outside human memory, indeed, beyond the possibility of a com-memoration (i.e., a shared remembering in/through narrative). See Agamben, ibid.

25. In The Drowned and the Saved Primo Levi distinguishes between the “true” or “the complete witnesses” (who are the Muselmanner) and “the pseudo-witnesses” who speak “in their stead, by proxy” (63–64).

26. The self-denial performed by testimony translates itself precisely in the two mutually cancelling gestures described above. In his account of testimony Paul Ricoeur points to the “maneuver of unsaying,” which is, according to him, “the epistemic status of testimony” (124).

27. I have concentrated on Levi, Felman and Agamben because their accounts of witnessing converge on a suspicion towards all processes of mediation (i.e., interpretation, theorization, representation) and the figure of the survivor qua mediator of the traumatic event. In his critique of Agamben, J.M. Bernstein writes: “at no point does his account veer off from the space of impossible sight to the wider terrain … Just the inhuman itself fills Agamben's gaze, and hence ours; such is the pure desire to bear witness.” He concludes: “the anxiety must be that by apparently denying all mediations we will be struck as dumb as the victims, becoming what we behold” (7).

28. This is why Levi and Agamben's accounts depend so much on a distinction between the “true” and the “pseudo-”witness for, in contrast to the latter (as I have already suggested), the “true” witness is utterly determined by (and has no existence beyond) the instant of the face-to-face encounter with the event.

29. According to Baudrillard, obscenity no longer has anything to do with sex, but with the contemporary compulsion towards production: the uncovering/revelation of truth. See Baudrillard, Seduction.

30. Bernstein writes: “Witnessing in Agamben becomes, finally, an aesthetic act; witnessing aestheticises the remnant, producing a pornographic scene, the pornography of horror” (3).

31. Rather than the zealous possessor of the gaze, Perseus is an ocular voleur: on his journey to the Gorgons, he steals the only eye of the Graie and steals away in Hermes’ helmet, which renders him invisible. In his encounter with Medusa, he cheats her into attacking his shadow, displaces and then appropriates her gaze, which he uses to save his mother (Danae) from King Polydectes’ advances. He, finally, offers Medusa's lethal gaze to Goddess Athina (another mother figure for him) who places it on her shield. It is interesting, of course, that in her recounting of the myth, Hélène Cixous foregrounds “voler” as a distinctively feminine gesture, the counter-practice to male logos and theoria (see Cixous, “Sorties”). There is, then, space for reading Perseus as his mother's son rather than the agent of a paternal/patriarchal desire to silence female wisdom (which is what Medusa stands for in some versions of the myth). Taking into account the feminine and maternal connotations of Medusa would, needless to say, be very interesting, especially in the context of witnessing where femininity is yet again used as the index of alterity and unrepresentability. Given the scope of the present essay, however, I will have to refrain from following this thread.

32. As Jean-Joseph Goux suggests, a number of Ancient Greek myths which stage the confrontation between a human male hero and a female monstrous figure (e.g., the myths of Perseus, Oedipus or Jason) are ultimately initiation narratives which dramatize the hero's transition from childhood to maturity and archaic time (centred on the sacred) to historical time centred on logos (i.e., reason and language).

33. In other words, its representative, for this is the meaning of antiprosopos in Greek.

34. See also Agamben, Means without End 91.

35. This is why for Arendt the space of appearance is inextricable from her understanding of the polis and the political. In a similar vein, Agamben writes: “Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open … Human beings thus transform the open into a world, that is, into the battlefield of a political struggle without quarter” (ibid. 93).

36. For a discussion of the difference between the face and the visage see ibid. 91–97.

37. The face, Agamben writes, is “only opening, only communicability” (ibid. 92).

38. In his review of Dora Apel's Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing Nicholas Chare writes: “The secondary witness is an after-effect seeking authentic affects. They want to pass on an experience which is not of their past, to act as proxy for the dying and the dead” (“Testimony” 245).

39. “Perhaps nothing in our history has been so short-lived as trust in power,” Arendt writes, “… nothing – finally in the modern age – more common than the conviction that ‘power corrupts’” (204–05).

40. Derrida uses the phrase in his discussion of the duel between Apollo and Dionysus in Nietzsche (Memoirs of the Blind 122).

41. As Leth tells Trier, there is something Faust-like in their pact.

42. Baudrillard writes: “… in a strategy (?) of seduction one draws the other into one's area of weakness, which is also his or her area of weakness. A calculated weakness, an incalculable weakness” (83).

43. See Benjamin 173.

44. Trier's Dogme 95 (which he devised with filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg) marked a break from both Hollywood, mainstream cinema and Modernist auteur cinema. It was an attempt to return cinema to its primitive origins (the techniques used before it became an entertainment industry), reclaim a tradition of austere realism and democratize the process of filmmaking (by encouraging collective efforts and rejecting the role of the director qua auteur). Dogme 95 is based on the conviction that invention is the product of restriction rather than of an ideology of laissez-faire. This is precisely what The Five Obstructions demonstrates, unfolding (as it does) as Leth's apprenticeship to the rules of Dogme 95. If Leth becomes a target for Trier this is not merely because of the Oedipal feelings the younger director may harbour for his ex-teacher, but also because Leth represents (a) the tradition of auteur cinema that Trier seeks to challenge and (b) the tradition of cinematic detachment that has placed the director in the position of privileged observer. See J⊘rgen Leth's interview with Xan Brooks, “The Pupil's Revenge.”

45. Each obstruction asks Leth to produce a version of his 1967 film The Perfect Human by following certain rules: e.g., to use only 12 frames, not to build a set, to film the movie in the “most miserable place in the World” (which turns out to be a red light district in Bombay, India), to act the main part himself, to do a cartoon, to read a script that Trier has written for him.

46. This is a phrase that the narrator of the cartoon version of The Perfect Human uses.

47. In Memoirs of the Blind Derrida writes: “… for the blind are beings of the fall, the manifestation always of that which threatens erection or the upright position” (21).

48. Interestingly, in the process of producing his cartoon version of The Perfect Human, Leth manages to integrate the image of the tortoise on its back into yet another “interesting arrangement.”

49. It is precisely banalized repetition that Trier expects from Leth, which he sees as an indispensable part of the therapeutic process he has initiated, a process aiming at helping Leth become less perfect and more human.

50. At the end of the film, Leth thanks Trier (who has written the script he is in the process of reading) for showing him what he really is: i.e., “an abject human human.”

51. See Benjamin 173–74.

52. This is how Leth describes the semi-transparent screen he uses in the second obstruction.