A Cinema of Desire: Cinesexuality and Guattari's A-signifying Cinema

Abstract

Desire is forced to maintain itself in this space between reality and pleasure, this frontier that power jealously controls with the help of innumerable frontier guards: in the family, at school, in the barracks, at the workshop, in psychiatric hospitals and, of course, at the movies (Guattari 1996a:144).

Notes

1. Deleuze and Guattari call this ‘biunivocalization’, a selection from a series of binaries that unify into one sign. The example they use in A Thousand Plateaus is the face (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The face is the most immediate encounter of readable subjectivity, where flesh becomes sign: black old woman, young white man and so forth.

2. I do not have the space here to go into the particularities of the televisual event as it differs from the cinematic one; suffice it to say each has its own separate configurations. My focus on film (including home cinema) precludes discussions of the more evident didactic function of many television programmes.

3. This mercilessly rudimentary discussion of becoming is brief due to constraints of space, but the key aspect is Guattari's notion of ‘woman’ and so it is this term that is emphasized in the expression ‘becoming-woman’.

4. Many feminist film theorists have commented on the breakdown of women as object into women as, literally, bits in film through framing and focusing on eyes, mouth, breasts and buttock. A dismembering of woman's body fetishizes parts while both refusing the whole as subject and affirming the whole as object.