A SACRIFICIAL ECONOMY OF THE IMAGE

Abstract:

The theme of sacrifice appears in Jean-François Lyotard's writings on cinema not in terms of any representational content but in terms of the economy of the images from which a film is formally constructed. Sacrifice is here understood in a sense derived from Bataille, and related to his notions of general (as opposed to restricted) economy, and of sovereignty. Lyotard's writings on cinema have received some attention in English-language scholarship, but so far this attention has been focused almost exclusively on two essays which have appeared in English translation: “Acinema” and “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène.” I offer an analysis which also incorporates his two other important essays on cinema, “Deux métamorphoses du séduisant au cinéma” [Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema] and “Idée d'un film souverain” [The Idea of a Sovereign Film]. The interest of the former is that it makes most explicit the aesthetic politics – evident in many of Lyotard's writings on art – specific to cinema. In the latter, Lyotard gives his most extensive treatment of cinema, and frames it in terms of Bataille's notion of sovereignty. I offer an interpretation of Lyotard's philosophy of cinema which links these quite disparate essays, foregrounding the political dimension of the sacrificial economy of images he proposes: films of any variety, even commercial cinema, may include some sequences and images which are “sacrificial” in that they are “other” to the chronological narrative of the whole. These images liberate us from the seductive effects of the narrative, and the invitation to fantasise, which act as means of imposing and reproducing dominant social and cultural norms.

Keywords:

• Lyotard
• cinema
• sacrifice
• psychoanalytic film theory
• post-structuralism
• avant-garde cinema

Notes

1 See Turim; Rose; James; Krauss; Bignall; Trahair, “Figural Vision,” Comedy of Philosophy, and “Jean-François Lyotard”; Knox; and Jones.

2 Knox. Maureen Turim has similarly argued that there is the danger in the Lyotardian perspective of ignoring the representational content of art (146–47).

3 This is not the case in francophone scholarship, which has seen a relatively recent thorough study, Jean-Michel Durafour's Jean-François Lyotard: questions au cinema (2009).

4 See, for example, the essays collected in Part III of The Bataille Reader.

5 Lyotard, “Syncopes, Landscapes” 621, 623.

6 See the essays collected in Part V of The Bataille Reader.

7 Lyotard, “Acinema” 53–54.

8 See Bordwell and Carroll.

9 See Copjec; Žižek, Fright of Real Tears; and McGowan. See also Žižek's essay “The Undergrowth of Enjoyment,” a pioneering introduction to “The Real Lacan” in the domain of cultural theory.

10 Two useful historical overviews of Lacanian film theory, on which I have drawn here, are McGowan and Kunkle; and McGowan, “Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze” in The Real Gaze.

11 Lyotard, “Idée d'un film souverain” 214.

12 Idem, “Acinema” 55.

13 Trahair, “Jean-François Lyotard”; Jones.

14 Lyotard, “Acinema” 170.

15 Lyotard, “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène” 97.

16 See in particular the essay “Freud selon Cézanne” for a concise statement of this argument, which is developed in more detail and through various nuanced modifications in the major works of this period, Discourse, Figure and Libidinal Economy, as well as the essays collected in Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud and Des dispositifs pulsionnel.

17 Lyotard, “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène” 87.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid. 88.

20 Called here – more accurately – “Drives and their Vicissitudes.” The unfortunate elision of the distinction between instincts and drives in James Strachey's Standard Edition English translation of Freud is well known.

21 Lyotard, “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène” 94.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid. 98.

24 See Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” and “Freud and Lacan.”

25 Second-wave Lacanian film theory, influenced by Žižek's defence of the category of ideology, continues to use this term, but in his significantly modified understanding of it. (See his “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology.”) The complex question of the relation between Lyotard's displacement of ideology and Žižek's renewed understanding of it is one I can here only pose for further discussion. Briefly, however, we may note that Žižek's understanding of ideology posits a cynical relation to social reality in which we are aware of ideology yet conform to it anyway, because we suppose this cynical awareness is sufficient to place us beyond its grasp. Yet the key point, for Žižek, is that this cynicism still functions ideologically in so far as it removes any motivation for changing social conditions. This view of ideology is not so clearly opposed to Lyotard's Nietzschean perspectivism in so far as it circumvents the Platonic structure of “traditional” ideology which distinguishes illusory appearances from a supposed underlying truth. Some further reflections on Lyotard and ideology are made in the following section above, and at the end of the paper.

26 Lyotard, “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène” 98.

27 Lyotard, “Deux métamorphoses du séduisant au cinéma” 93. All translations from this text are mine.

28 Ibid. 93–94.

29 Ibid. 95–96.

30 Ibid. 96.

31 Ibid.

32 See Benjamin.

33 Lyotard, “Deux métamorphoses du séduisant au cinéma” 98.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 This essay may also be regarded as Lyotard's most extensive discussion of film. With reference to “Acinema” and “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène,” Lisa Trahair suggests that Lyotard gives so few filmic examples that his theories verge on not really being about film at all (Trahair, “Jean-François Lyotard”). However, he makes up for this lack somewhat in this essay, citing (in addition to various directors and experimental films) many neo-realist films, including Rossellini's Paisà, De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, Antonioni's Story of a Love Affair, Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Welles's Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and Laughton's The Night of the Hunter.

38 See Deleuze, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.

39 Lyotard, “Idée d'un film souverain” 213.

40 Ibid. 212. All translations from this text are mine.

41 Ibid. 214.

42 See Schrader.

43 Lyotard, “Idée d'un film souverain” 215.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid. 220.

46 More broadly, Lacan's and Lyotard's later works would appear to be in closer proximity than they were in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Anne Tomiche provides an instructive discussion of the changing relationship of their thought in “Rephrasing the Freudian Unconscious.”

47 McGowan, Real Gaze 213–14 n. 19. For a critical discussion of the insufficiency of Žižek's work in accounting for art, see Dean.

48 Lyotard, Peregrinations 10–11.

49 Mulvey 8.