The Blind Spot

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Notes

notes

I would like to thank Angelaki's anonymous reviewer who recommended this essay's publication, despite his or her critical disagreement with elements of the argument, and also Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa for his editorial collegiality.

1 The point of origin for Peirce is the Scholasticism of figures like St Thomas Aquinas, St Anselm, Duns Scotus, and others – and a medieval reference is not without significance for Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut. Peirce writes: “In the Middle Ages reason and external authority were regarded as two coordinate sources of knowledge, just as reason and the authority of intuition are now, only the happy device of considering the enunciations of authority to be essentially indemonstrable had not yet been hit upon.” He goes on to ask: “what if our internal authority should meet the same fate, in the history of opinions, as that external authority has met?” (“Questions” 69).

2 Mention should also be made of A Clockwork Orange as a critique of liberal democratic progressivism and its constitutive hypocrisies – the latter summed up in Alex's phrase “the old in-out” with a perspicacity that strangely, and brilliantly, prefigures the structure and tonality of Kubrick's final film.

3 Ligeti glosses his piece in these terms, with bemused recognition of the irony in Kubrick's contemporary use of it, in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures.

4 See Jacques Rancière's Hatred of Democracy for his account of the rhetorical strategies that underpin this consensus – in France, but in terms resonant for an American context as well. For a good overview, on a political and economic register, of liberalism since the 1980s in the Atlantic states generally, see Peter Gowan's “Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism.”

5 A number of elements in the film suggest just how deliberately Kubrick interrogates liberalism's self-understanding vis-à-vis its totalitarian other: the choice of music (the Hungarian Ligeti, the Soviet Russian Shostakovich, Jocelyn Pook's “Masked Ball,” which involves a Latin mass sung by Rumanian priests), the Hungarian dancer but also the Slavic costume store owner (played by the distinguished Croatian actor Rade Sherbedgia).

6 For an argument along these lines, see Jean-Claude Milner's Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique.

7 Agamben's logic is expressly that of “double exclusion,” by which the tension of norm and fact, law and life, in the state of exception informs the political space of liberal democratic societies, specifically through the value accorded there to the human qua anomic source of a depoliticized social being.

8 See Hannah Arendt's Volume 3 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, particularly her account of totalitarianism's relation to the breakdown of liberal democratic class structures, for the appeal in anti-establishment sentiment of the period between the world wars (for cultural elites no less than for disenfranchised “masses”) of conspiracy theory as explanation of social power (30–31, 49 and passim). The Jew, of course, as a figure at once inside and outside society, was the privileged locus of such concern (as Arendt also analyzes). It is a nuance of Kubrick's political stance in Eyes Wide Shut that he registers this history in the present not by sustaining the fantasies it discloses but by symptomatically evoking them as a stake in the viewer.

9 My sense for the political relevance of the reading that follows derives in part from Wendy Brown, who suggests – prompted by informal remarks by Stuart Hall – the usefulness today for political theorists of thinking “the various powers and rationalities configuring the present … according to the logic of dreamwork” (Brown 690).

10 See, for instance, Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract and Lynn Hunt's The Family Romance of the French Revolution. In a literary critical vein, see also Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction.

11 The term “pornocracy” originates in a pamphlet written by the nineteenth-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The fundamental premise is two-fold: that the powerful deserve their power because they are sexually superior, and tyranny operates through prostitution. Proudhon's point of reference was the ancien régime, whose legitimation strategies he saw surviving the French Revolution in the implicit self-understanding of a properly bourgeois social order. For an account of a naturalized sexual division of labor that also presumes this residual survival of an aristocratic spirit in more recent times, at least in France, see Pierre Bourdieu's Masculine Domination (49–50). I am indebted for these references and also this reading to Matt George's unpublished essay “Legs Wide Shut: The Hallucination of Sociodicy in Kubrick's Final Film.”

12 See Ellie Ragland's “Eyes Wide Shut: The Woman Not Seen” for a Lacanian account of the hatred that plays itself out between Bill and Alice at an unconscious register of sexual “non-relation.”

13 Slavoj Žižek reads Bill and Alice in this final scene “awakening” into a fantasy that structures reality – or informs its cognitive apprehension – as aversive denial of a more “fundamental” traumatic split (“Che Vuoi?”). The sexual act, he argues, works not to dispel Bill's “dream” but to sustain the self-protective disavowal of the overwhelming “excess” this split produces in it, one that Alice seems to know constitutes the “truth” of subjectivity tout court. A further implication is that the disavowal of this “excess,” as Žižek elsewhere puts it vis-à-vis the “neutral economico-symbolic machine” of late capitalist society, appears as such, “directly posit[ed] as [capitalism's] driving force” (Parallax View 318), and leads to a dream-like distortion or “loss of reality” normalized in or as consensus itself. Bill and Alice's attempts to trivialize their experience, to reduce it to nothing or nothing special, would then suggest the inanity of discourse (or “conversation”) in the liberal public sphere generally as a kind of functional aphanisis.

14 See Rancière's Disagreement 1–22. I rely here as well on Jacques Derrida's account of the same authors in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason 75–77.