Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses 9781503626683

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BECOMING VISIONARY

Cultural Memory

Present Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

BECOMING VISIONARY Brian De Palma's

Cinematic Education of the Senses

Eyal Peretz

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peretz, Eyal, 1968Becoming visionary : Brian De Palma's cinematic education of the senses I Eyal Peretz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-o-8047-5684-6 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-o-8047-5685-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) l. De Palma, Brian--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PNI998-3.D4P47 2008 791.43 '0233092--dc22 2007019354

To my teachers-Shoshana, Stanley, and lrad

Contents

Foreword: On Eyal Peretz's Becoming Visionary by Stanley Cavell Introduction: The Realm of the Senses and the Vision of the Beyond-Toward a New Thinking of the Image

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I

1.

Carrie-Film and the Wounding of Representation

23

2.

Between Paranoia and PassionQuestioning the Frame and the Screen in The Fury

47

3· Film and the Memory of the Outside: Or, Cinema as Technology, Cinema as Pornography, Cinema as Scream-Blow Out

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Coda: For a New Enlightenment: Femme Fatale, A Paradoxical Happy Ending; or, The Idea of a Future

157

~~

I~

Index

22I

On Eyal Peretz's Becoming Visionary

The following comments, touched up here and there and slightly amplified, were my response to an invitation to supply a reader's report to Stanford University Press in view of their interest in publishing this remarkable book. I am accepting the sense expressed by both Eyal Peretz and by the book's editor, Norris Pope, that the appearance of my comments together with the book may encourage productive conversation with it. Peretz's book on a small set of films of Brian De Palma is openly and triply ambitious. First, it seeks to show that this well-known filmmaker, about whom in my hearing it is rather taken for granted that he is no more than a gifted sensationalist and imitator of, especially, Hitchcock, is instead an artist and thinker in film who ranks in originality and depth with the greatest directors in the history of sound film. Second, it accepts the challenge that to show this requires a new perception and altered conceptualization of what one is to understand by the history of film. Third, it asserts that this new understanding requires an invocation not of some more or less vague invocation of a "theory'' of film, but precisely the tracing of an intersection of film with philosophy, which in turn requires, or has required, a reconception, even a kind of overcoming, of philosophy as it stands. (One might include as a fourth ambition the demonstration that these three tasks are, or should be, part of the same intellectual effort.) The ambition is bound to seem preposterously vast. This in itself should not, however, seem very surprising where philosophy comes insistently into an argumentative picture: As I have had occasion variously to insist, philosophy is inherently arrogant, arrogating to itself the power of speaking universally, speaking for all (all who will hear), without claiming (indeed disclaiming access to) knowledge that the rest of the world does not possess (those who merely do not know that they possess it). (The arrogance is just as relentless in the tones of]. L. Austin and ofWittgenstein in

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their demand for the ordinary as it is in the culture of European sages who behave as if the ordinary is itself a source of horror. I do not say that the latter are perfectly wrong in this. In a sense Austin and Wittgenstein equally insist upon it.) What is really surprising is the extent to which Peretz succeeds in realizing his extravagant ambitions. Something I must regard as a limitation on this success is internal to the condition that makes Peretz's success possible for him. He does to my mind show and articulate an irreducible sense in which film and philosophy call upon each other, a task close to my heart, one without which, I am convinced, philosophy as well as film is deprived of an essential register of contemporary effect and understanding. But I take it as a fact of contemporary intellectual life that philosophy continues to exist in two states, to some perhaps irreducible extent unintelligible to each other. The mode of philosophy Peretz invokes and unquestioningly accepts and puts into play, represents one half of the split contemporary philosophical mind. It is a brilliant half, explicitly in Peretz's text including the names of Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Nancy, etc.-so brilliant indeed that the idea of a mere "half" of philosophy invoked by Peretz will seem to some drastically understated. For two particular reasons. First, the opposite half of the philosophical mind, poorly named analytical philosophy and poorly identified with England and the United States, leading figures in one of its branches being Wittgenstein and Austin, in the other branch Carnap and Quine and Donald Davidson and Hilary Putnam, has developed comparatively little that is apparently useful to the understanding of film, or indeed to the arts more generally. Second, Peretz's intense and precise readings of individual films reflects back upon the philosophy with which Peretz demonstrates its encounter and thus brings new and surprising illumination and comprehension to that philosophical strain. This second reason emphasizes the deeply pedagogical intention and achievement of Peretz's text. Its analysis of individual films are among the deepest known to me, tireless and surprising to the end, unswervingly following the experience or conviction that film, in its high instances (more numerous than a hasty glance announces), deserves the attention due to, rewarded by, a great art. (Writers-apart from those who have wonderfully devoted an occasional essay to a film-whom I have found repeatedly to reach and articulate this depth in the experience of individual films, on the other side of the English Channel, and without heavy explicit attention to

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philosophy, are Victor Perkins and Andrew Klevan, and on this side of the Atlantic, William Rothman, who along with this critical intensity remains in touch with his analytical philosophical formation.) And Peretz's management of the philosophical tradition in which he places his confidence is not the result of fashion (the mere fashion of the thing, while for a couple of decades world-consuming, seems to be past), but of years of hard and intelligent and subtle and fruitful immersion in working with it. He is by training and beyond the evidence of his writing a thoroughly trustworthy teacher of this material, moreover one to whose value students readily attest. (To one not accustomed to the idea that films can be shown to reveal the dimensions of a great art on the wings of recent decades of French philosophizing, I recommend a look at Peretz's superb study of Moby Dick, a revision of his doctoral dissertation, where the surprising intersection of that thinking with a text whose greatness few would deny is a feat whose success is perhaps initially easier to see and accept.) So good are Peretz's separate readings, indeed, that they form a serious attestation of the fact of film, an understanding of the cinematic medium, that does justice to the reach of its experience, hence to be a ground upon which the two traditions of philosophy have a reasonable chance for intelligible encounter and precious exchange. I realize that such an encounter, while of key importance to me, is not high on everyone's hopes for a future of academic humanistic work. So I shall sketch my own stake in my hopes for the success of Peretz's film book. Here I must allow myself a certain latitude of explicit immodesty, namely in assuming that the work I have published on film counts as some contribution to a field that might be called Film and Philosophy. (This is a title I have been hearing for the past year or two. Early this year, after a lecture I gave on film at the Ecole Normale in Paris, where I have lectured on various occasions, but not for several years now, I was surprised by the standing room audience, and afterward at dinner I asked the professor sitting across from me where this evidently increased interest in film has come from. He replied that he and others had initiated a program in film at the Ecole Normale prompted by student demand for this addition to the curriculum. I said I could not imagine that this meant the Ecole plans to offer courses in filmmaking. "Of course not. The program is called Film and Philosophy." I was startled and I asked what that title includes. "Well, it is Deleuze and you." It was not the first time in recent months that I had

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heard this pairing in the context of comments noting how few philosophers who publish with reasonable regularity within the realm of philosophy also publish multiply about film. (I cannot accept this state of affairs as a mere curiosity. I find it, supposing the claim is roughly true, depressing and anything but easy to comprehend, given the unprecedented and worldwide effects the invention and the achievements of cinema have had on the means and ends of the traditional great arts.) Peretz registers a comparable perception in the course of a long footnote (Chapter 2, Note 37) in which he explains why he is developing Deleuze's idea of a frame rather than the related idea of it in my work, especially in The World Viewed A cautionary word here. My interlocutor from the Ecole Normale may in his identification of the field to be known as Film and Philosophy have simply been showing courtesy to a visiting lecturer. Or he may conceivably have meant something quite different, something that in the States I see announced more or less as Philosophy and Film, represented for example in a substantial proposed anthology which puts together selections from the history of philosophy and from recent analytical philosophy arranged by topic (philosophy of mind; ethics; free will, etc.) and suggests in each case segments from films that illustrate the topic, promising thereby increased student interest in learning of and discussing these established issues. No problem here, and talented teachers may thereby achieve heightened classroom results; one could even say that philosophy has been pedagogically slow in making use of what we used to call audiovisual materials. A way to put the difference in what I might like to see become the field of Film and Philosophy, anyway in how I have conceived my writing on film to be motivated philosophically, is that it takes the fact of film itself to become a challenge for philosophy. (It may be the inkling that film possess this power that from its beginning has caused philosophers, with rare exceptions, to avoid the subject.) Cinema's bursting onto the artistic and intellectual scene full-blown, in the second decade of the twentieth century, scarcely twenty years after its technological realization, joined in questioning the concept of art, of modernism, of narrative, of character, of perception, of intention, of entertainment, of identification, indeed of every concept touching the region of the aesthetic, to go no farther. I say immediately that if there is such a field in the offing as Film and Philosophy, so conceived, Peretz's book must form a notable piece of its curriculum.

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Peretz is quite explicit about a new intersection called upon by the art of film and the practice of philosophy. In the last pages of the longest essay in his book, that on De Palma's Blow Out, Peretz describes and instances a gesture he recurs to throughout his text: "Once again, by resorting to a fundamental image in the history of philosophy, we can illuminate what is at stake in this final projection in the dark room'' (Chapter 3). I pair this with a passage from a lecture I gave ("Something Out of the Ordinary") to the American Philosophical Association in 1996, collected in my Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow: "I am proposing ... , following what I construe Kant's examples of the transgressions of reason, in their intersection with Shakespearean drama, to suggest (perhaps it is Hegel's suggestion) [,] that the arts, beginning with tragedy (or, in Hegel's aesthetics, ending with tragedy), may variously be seen, or claimed, as chapters of the history, or development, of philosophy, hence perhaps of certain of its present manifestations" (p. 14). But this self-evidently close conjunction of perceptions between Peretz and me at the same time underscores differences I have begun to suggest, deriving from our each recognizing responsibilities to sometimes opposed states of present philosophy. (This is something of an exaggeration, perhaps only of interest to me, namely that in my case the two strains are meant to be at work, if still variously at odds, within the same prose.) My hopefulness prompted by this conjunction of closeness and distance in the philosophical invocations in Peretz's and in my addresses to cinema lies practically, in my reading of Peretz's new book, in my experience that, so often with each new insight Peretz arrives at, I could sense the prompting to another route of arrival from within the texture of concepts deployed in my World Viewed, if not suggesting a coincidence of result then suggesting a difference promising to my mind fruitful lines of variance. Unnecessary incomprehension is something I am always on the lookout for. In my first decade and a half of studying and teaching philosophy, Wittgenstein and Heidegger were regarded as blanks to each other. It was an important turn in my intellectual life when I began to grasp the intimacy of their differences. (In Chapter 2, Note 37, referred to here previously, Peretz locates my work in relation to Deleuze as "more or less of that tradition." The generality of that description captures something important here, but as I suggested a moment ago, I feel it of decisive importance to the way my concerns have unfolded that I was trained

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Foreword

exclusively in analytical departments of philosophy and that the "other" tradition was one, and remains one, to which my attractions were always deep but always threatened to isolate me and were always in need of justification; eventually this meant that my relation to the analytical tradition stood equally in need of justification.) If there is an active source of this series of intimate differences between Peretz's and my lines of investigation, more concrete than differing orientations of philosophical practice, it lies in the relation between what Peretz identifies as the excess of experience as expressed in the concept of haunting, and what I characterize as skepticism, which for me is what produces the impulsion toward, a longing for, a beyond, say an excess. This reading of skepticism is something I find dramatized in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which distinguishes my reading of Wittgenstein from the rather favored reading which takes him to deny the meaningfulness, or else to provide a refutation, of skepticism. Wittgenstein, according to my reading, should accordingly be included in, or related to, Peretz's observation that "overcoming metaphysical dualisms characterizes every major modern philosophy since Hegel" (p. 129), dualisms namely that are immediate or distant inheritors of Plato's dualism between the sensuous immanent and the intellectual transcendent-where "overcoming" is not a matter of refuting or denying but of what some have called dialectic, others deconstruction, what Austin calls dismantling, what Wittgenstein shows to require alertness to differences among the grammars of concepts. (Wittgenstein, like Emerson, and not unlike Heidegger, seeks to demonstrate how the radical instability of our concepts demands of our lives an unending philosophical vigilance.) Another yet more concrete instance of similarity I difference may be found in Peretz's contrasting Deleuze's and my accounts of what is "beyond" or in excess of the frame by saying that for Deleuze there are two senses of an excess beyond the frame, a continuous and a discontinuous sense, the former an opening into, let's say, the rest of what a given focus leaves outside the frame, adjacent to it, the latter an opening onto an absolute outside, the outside as such. What in The World Viewed I conceive as the absolute outside is the world as such, and what "implies" it on my account is not the frame, but what the frame covers, namely the screen, screening us from the world. The screen is one of the few fundamental facts of the necessary conditions, or automatisms, of film, in contrast with the automatism of the frame (among such facts that

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xv11

are articulated in his or in my texts), that Peretz, as I remember, does very little with. But his concentrating on the frame produces unique and indispensable returns. For example, Peretz's consequent discussion of the senses, of their splitting and supplementation through film, is breakthrough material, true advances in understanding. The division in the contemporary philosophical mind is of its nature not something that most philosophers, or theorists generally, are likely to be distressed by, finding work enough to do within, and perhaps in struggle with, the separate dispensations they have inherited. Since it is not likely, nor desirable, and perhaps not really conceivable, that one side will overcome the other, the task of thinking will for the foreseeable future continue to exist within or between each. I add that my sense of fruitfulness in reading Peretz is not something I have so far managed to derive from reading (to the extent I have been motivated to read) Deleuze's own two books on film. (In a recent conference on what might as well been called Film (or the photographic) and Philosophy, organized by Michael Fried, I was moved in response to one paper to declare that I would now read through Deleuze on cinema, which various attending voices found to be a rash promise.) Certainly a decisive cause of this difference is the fact of the countless conversations about film and literature that Eyal Peretz and I have had in the course of our acquaintance and friendship over the past decade. But an accompanying cause is a signal difference between the practices of Peretz and (to the extent that I am aware of them) of Deleuze, in their considerations of film, namely that Peretz's theoretical claims are motivated by a persistent uncovering of the workings of a few individual films, as if following a wager that neither a progress of theory nor a disclosure of the depths of a significant work of film will be the first to exhaust itsel£ There were times when I felt some editing would be able to remove a certain repetitiveness in Peretz's accounts, but each time I changed my mind. The repetitions express Peretz's sense of pedagogical necessity, and I can see that they make possible the certain cascades of surprises that Peretz likes to unleash. In the light of his achievement I find plenty of work cut out for me. Not for me alone I trust.

Stanley Cavell

Introduction: The Realm ofthe Senses and the Vision ofthe BeyondToward a New Thinking ofthe Image I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary. A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed-and the supreme scientist. RIMBAUD,

Lettres du Voyant

Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately. PLATO,

Republic, VII

Toward the end of Brian De Palma's film The Fury, in a moment of fear and trembling, the film's heroine, a teenager named Gillian, a girl possessing extraordinary visionary powers to see the future and the unknown past, cries out: ''I'm afraid to close my eyes, afraid of what I'll see." Marking the opening of her visionary powers to the future and the past, of the extraordinary type of seeing she possesses, as having to do with the experience of closing her eyes, of blocking the perception of the world

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Introduction

surrounding her, Gillian's statement poses for us the following questions: What type of seeing opens when the eyes, paradoxically, close, when the eyes are wide shut? What is the significance of the doubling or splitting of the eye's function, between the opened eye's perception of the surrounding world and the closed eye's visionary seeing of the future and the past, and what is the relation between these two functions? And finally, what is the source of the anxiety and fear involved in this visionary seeing coming out of the closing of the eyes of perception? Gillian's visionary moments in The Fury always arrive as a strange experience of film watching, where giant screens emerging from nowhere present hallucinatory and otherworldly visions, offering a series of cinematic images in excess of the perceptual world surrounding her, to which she is exposed, which she cannot control, and which haunt her. The exposure to the cinematic image in De Palma's film, then, announces, allegorically, the opening of a second eye, a visionary eye seeing into the future and the past in excess of the eye of perception. The cinematic image shows something that cannot be perceived, the film allegorically seems to suggest, something that can be shown only to the one whose eyes are closed and in whom a different type of seeing, of the future and the past, opens. Yet what kind of thing is the cinematic image that it could thus show us something in excess of, or beyond, that which we perceive? What is its power or force to open our eyes to an otherworldly-that is, to that which is not of the order of the surrounding world open to perception-vision? If we are to understand what kind of thing the cinematic image is and what type of force it possesses, we might want to start by asking the more general question: What kind of thing is an image? How are we to define and conceptualize this strange thing that the philosophical tradition tried to grasp by the term image and that the artistic tradition tries to bring into view through dedicating itself to the practice of its creation? Confronted by these questions we might immediately want to say, when we survey most of those things we usually take to be images, that what is evident about them is, to begin with, that they seem to be images ofsomething. The image is not a regular thing or object of perception, we say, but involves a process of mediating our access to the object ofwhich it is the image. The image is an image of an object, we say, but it is not the object itsel£ A difference thus immediately seems to open between what we take to be real objects and what we perceive to be the images of these

Toward a New Thinking ofthe Image

3

objects. Yet how are we to think through this difference between the two and how are we to understand the nature of this process of mediation that seems to be involved in the very activity of the image? The manner in which these two questions are answered, I suggest, determines our understanding of the essence of the image. It is the Platonic manner of raising these questions and responding to them that has most famously dominated the West's philosophical and theoretical determination of the essence of the image; I would like to very briefly turn, therefore, to this Platonic determination. It is well known that the division into image and object, or image and its model-that which an image is an image of-is at the very heart of the Platonic universe, crossing all of Plato's major philosophical moves and conceptual decisions (be they ontological, aesthetic, or ethical, to use categories not yet found in Plato)-and indeed, it seems to me that it might be argued that, if examined from the perspective of these questions, the whole Platonic system could be said to originate in Plato's unprecedented sensitivity to, and attempt to respond to and understand, these strange and uncanny things we call images, which are not of the order of objects but seem to double them and enigmatically appear to point in a mediating way beyond themselves. That is, I suggest that instead of regarding the question of the image as one among many dealt with by the Platonic system, we regard rather a certain strange experience having to do with the discovery of a difference between objects and images as that which gives the impetus for thinking to the whole Platonic project. 1 The nature of philosophy consists, the Platonic texts seem to suggest, in articulating what is at stake in these uncanny things we call images. The Platonic response to the question of the image, to speak in a very brief and reductive manner, has famously opted for a fated and specific understanding of the image by interpreting the difference between objects and images (a difference Plato himself articulated philosophically for the first time) as pointing to a difference between two levels of reality and two types of objects. One level, associated with the image, is now interpreted as a level of inferior objects, whose ontological status is considered in certain cases false and imaginary and in all instances less real than what exists on another level, a level of true reality, associated with real objects to which the image points as its beyond. The relations between these two levels of reality are highly complex, for the lower level, that of the image, is simultaneously

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Introduction

understood as (1) that through which the higher level shows itse!J(for example, in a painted portrait the model shows himself or herself through his or her image even, and especially, when no longer present2 ); (2) that which, by mediating our access to the model and showing us only a partial view of it, actually obstructs our direct access to the model; (3) that which, in certain extreme cases, pretends to take the place of the model and be selfsufficient, declaring itself to actually be the model (in trompe l'oeil painting for example); and (4) that which can come into view and show itself only because of its being related to a model. We would not have any access to or understanding of the image, were it not for some implicit intuition or understanding of a model that guides our access to the image (thus, a painter would have to have a model, be it only in his or her mind's eye, to guide and direct, to prefigure the creation of the image). To sum up these points, to be an image ofan object therefore now means, for Plato, to be an inferior object pointing to and revealing a certain aspect of, or even to be an inferior object letting shine through it and partially show-but at the same time obstructingfrom a direct view--an original real object, which, most famously perhaps, it is supposed to imitate and copy, model itself on, and which, in the worst-case scenario, it pretends to replace, positing itself deceptively as the real thing it actually hides from view. 3 The difference discovered between the object and the image has thus turned into a difference between degrees of reality and types of objects, entertaining between them a highly complex set of relations. 4 Perhaps the most significant arena in which Plato works out his understanding of this essential difference between image and object at the center of his thinking is the one involving his most influential philosophical move, the theoretical separation between two realms of existence: a sensible realm, a realm of appearances opened to our perception and senses, the world we encounter in our everyday existence; and a non-sensual, or intelligible, realm ofldeas, an other to the world, a realm not available to the senses but that the realm of the senses, the world, points to as its beyond, a true reality, of which the world is a pale reflection, or an image, which it copies or imitates, which it lets shine through it, but which it also at times obstructs from view, pretending to take its place. 5 The difference between the object and the image, then, has been transformed into the separation between this sensible world, experienced as an image, and its non-sensible intelligible beyond, the object it reflects but that it also obstructs from direct view. 6

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5

What is played out in this conceptual move from the identification of a difference between image and object to the decision on a separation between a realm of the senses and an intelligible realm? What issues are at stake in this move? At stake, for our context, in this Platonic separation of the realms are two major issues. The first concerns the dimension of the senses and the determination of the senses' limits. A fundamental aspect of the Platonic procedure of articulating a division and a separation between a sensible and an intelligible realm, a procedure originating in the discovery of the difference between image and object, is his crucial insight that what is at stake in this difference between object and image, what plays itself out in the philosophical interrogation of this difference, is nothing less than the discovery of a strange dimension in existence, the dimension of the senses, the dimension of that through which we relate to things and open up to them. The difference that the image makes reveals the dimension ofthe semes. A further Platonic insight is that the articulation of the dimension of the senses essentially involves a thinking of the senses' limits: A sense has to do, essentially, with a relation to a limit. What is a limit in the case of the senses? It is that which marks a relation between what can be said to be open to the senses-the world-and what is closed to them-a beyond the senses, a beyond the world. A sense, we could thus say, has to do with a certain determination of a mode ofopening. The difference made by the image reveals to us, then, that the senses open to the world, to the realm of the senses, only in relation to something that makes possible their opening but is dosed to them, beyond them and the world. We see the sensible world, for Plato, only through the mediation ofthe Ideas, but the Ideas themselves are not available to the vision of the sensible, or to perception. The drama of the senses, then, is the drama of this tension between the opening to the sensible world and that which opens us to the sensible world, yet which is itself not of the order of the sensible, but is beyond it. What is it, we then want to ask, that is open to the senses? And what is dosed to them, beyond them? The second major issue for our context concerns the Platonic discovery that what is also at stake in the difference between object and image has to do with the problem of the nature of the relation between the question of intelligibility, or meaning, and the question of the senses, a relation that is essentially tied to the question of the limit of the senses. What is beyond the senses, what is closed to them, is the dimension of meaning or intelligibility, says Plato. The question of meaning or sense, then, opens up

6

Introduction

in relation to the discovery of the limit ofthe senses. What is, we then want to ask, the relation between meaning and the senses, or perhaps between intelligible sense and worldly senses? What is at stake in the difference between the object and the image is, then, to repeat, on the one hand, the discovery of the question of the senses from the perspective of the problem of what is closed and what is open to them and, on the other hand, the question of the relation between meaning and the senses. These Platonic discoveries-the discoveries of the question of the senses in relation to the idea of a limit and a dimension beyond the world, a dimension having to do with the question of meaning-are, I suggest, crucial, and should serve as guide to any thinking of the image. Yet, the question remains, how are we to interpret them? There is a failure in the Platonic, or perhaps more precisely, Platonist interpretation of these issues that we need to examine critically. Yet such an examination should not take the traditional form of a reversal ofPlatonism, of an attempt to affirm this world, the world of the senses, and eliminate the idea of a beyond as a projection made from the point of view of the only reality that is ours, the reality of this sensible world. No, a more complex relation to Plato is needed, one in which the idea of a beyond, of an outside the world, while serving as a guide, is to be interpreted completely differently. The challenge is, then, I argue, to accept the Platonic discoveries of the difference between object and image as pointing to a thinking of the senses in relation to a beyond, yet reject the separation of the realms in the way Plato, or at least what came to be called Platonism, effects it. 7 In the following pages I would therefore like to very briefly examine the Platonic way of responding to these issues and then open up an alternative way, an alternative, I suggest, that guides the most fundamental contemporary efforts to think the question of the image, manifested in the writings of such thinkers as Waiter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, or Jean-Luc Nancy, and in the works of the most serious artists, among them our unlikely hero, Brian De Palma. Let us start with the question of the definition of what is open to and what is closed to the senses. I would like us from now on to take the sense of vision as our focus, as it is for Plato; we will therefore be dealing with the question of what is closed and what is open to vision or to the eye. What are the limits of the eye, and how does Plato come to conceptualize them? We have seen that for Plato, the intelligible realm, separated from the sen-

Toward a New Thinking ofthe Image

7

sible one, is conceptualized as closed to the eye and comes to define the manner in which it is delimited, the logic of its delimitation. And this logic is an objective or substantial one. What the worldly eye cannot see, what is thus invisible to it, are certain types of objects or substances, the intelligible Ideas in the realm beyond the world. We can say then that the eye's limits are defined for Plato by the type ofobjects it can and cannot see. Here we can conveniently start to articulate the major problem with the Platonic way of proceeding. And this problem can be succinctly defined as originating in the insufficient distinction between the two major components involved in the question of the eye: the dimension of the eye or of vision as a sense, that is, as a manner of opening onto something (what in later philosophy came to be called intentionality), and the dimension of the object of vision, that onto which the eye opens. The Platonic procedure, then, tends to confuse the eye's manner of opening and that onto which the eye opens, and thus ends up understanding the eye's limitations in the terms of the objects onto which it, the eye, opens. What we need is a thinking of the eye's limitation whose terms are guided by the question of what is an eye as sense rather than by the question of the objects onto which the eye opens. In philosophical terms, such a move is implied in the transition from classical ontology to modern phenomenology (usually understood as inaugurated by Kant's transformation of philosophy), 8 that is, from an examination of the types of objects that compose the world to an examination of the logic of their appearance, or of our opening up to the world. In this conception, the image, in its distinction from the object, will reveal to us something about the eye as sense and about the logic of its opening up to a world in relation to a dimension of closure, or of a beyond the world. Let us examine, then, the Platonic procedure from a perspective that isn't Plato's, at least not in a clear enough manner, the perspective of the experience of the eye itself, rather than from the perspective of the objects to which the eye is directed, and try to understand the logic guiding his confusion of the status of the eye (which we can also define as the status of the human subject) and the status of the object. In the few remarks to come, I will not therefore follow the Platonic procedure itself but will suggest a different perspective from which to interrogate it. I will try to open up again the difference between image and object in a way that is to an extent more primary than its final elaboration in the Platonic text. My manner of speech will therefore be something like a free indirect discourse, speaking

8

Introduction

through Plato but trying at the same time to speak on behalf of an excess found in Plato but repressed by him. If we take the experience of the eye as our focus, we can say that the Platonic discovery of the difference between image and object, a discovery resulting in the separation of the realms, was initially made at the heart of the worldly experience of the senses themselves, or at the heart of worldly vision, as a difference between what we can now call two experiences of the eye: between the eye as it relates to a regular object of perception, let us call it the objective eye, and the eye as it is experienced in the relation, for example, to a mirror image, a reflection in the water, a shadow on a cave's wall, or a painting, let us call it the image-eye. If the objective eye is unobstructed and seems to involve a direct relation to the object of perception, the image-eye seems to involve, we have seen, a moment of mediation, as if we relate to the object only through some other thing, not directly. This dimension of mediation is also felt by the eye as involving an obstruction, of something closed to it, a closure in relation to which, through the mediation of which, it opens up to what it sees. 9 This seeing of the mediated object is experienced as sensing, that is, as opening onto something through the mediation of a closure. Thus we can say, as Plato basically does, that only in relation to the image does the eye feel itselfas sense, that is, as passing through a dimension of closure to open up to its object. This is why Plato can say, absolutely accurately, that the world of the senses (both in the case of empirical objects and in the case of images appearing in the empirical realm, such as paintings, and so on) is, at bottom, an image, or opens up as an image, haunted by mediation and pointing beyond itselfto a closure from

which it senses itselfopening. We can thus say that Plato has managed to distinguish two activations of the eye: the eye opened to an object, perceiving the object directly, and the eye feeling itselfas sense, that is, as opening onto an object from or through the mediation of a closure. The image reveals to the eye its being as sense, shows Plato. We can thus distinguish between the experience of perceiving an object, already found in the opened world, and sensing an image, feeling the opening onto the world out of a closure. The image, then, activates the world's opening as a realm ofsenses whereas perception is already within the opened world. These, I suggest, are Plato's essential discoveries in relation to the question of the difference between image and object, when taken from the point of view of the experience of the eye.

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Yet, as we have started to see, to some extent Plato himself misses these insights by interpreting them through the logic of objects, or, we can now also say, a logic dominated by the experience of the objective eye of perception, the eye relating directly to objects, rather than that of the imageeye. If the eye feels a mediation and an obstruction, if it feels itself opening in relation to a closure, then, says Plato, this is because it is obstructed by some object that is unavailable to it, closed to it-that is, some object it cannot perceive. Rather than formulating the question of the senses or of vision by asking what is the manner of the eye's opening, heard as a verb, Plato asks what is open to the eye and what is closed to it, heard as a substance. In this same manner, he also represses his essential finding, that of the image-eye in its difference from the eye of perception, by interpreting the image-eye according to the logic of the eye of perception, as an eye perceiving directly objects of lesser ontological status. What Plato or Platonism has lost and rejected, then, finally, is the eye as sense, as a mediated relation to objects emerging out of a closure. And this loss and repression, this privileging of the eye of perception over the image-eye, is also at the origin of Plato's paradoxical conceptual creation of a non-sensible eye, or a nonsensuous gaze, an eye of the invisible Ideas. This conceptual creation rigorously follows from his own discovery, and rejection, of the dimension of sense, or of the image. For, as we have seen, Plato realized very clearly that any eye in the world, in the realm of the senses, is finally an imageeye, a sensory eye, an eye opening to the world from a closure. This would mean, very rigorously, that an absolutely objective eye of perception, an eye without the experience of closure and mediation, is basically impossible in the realm of the senses. If we then want to have an objective eyeand Plato's desire is to save the objective eye-we need a realm of objects that are not of the order of the senses. A certain split or difference that Plato has discovered in the worldly eye, between an eye of perception and an image-eye, has thus turned into another splitting of the eye: between an eye of the world, an eye of lesser objects that is understood from the point of view of a logic of perception, and an invisible eye, an eye of a beyondthe-world, understood as well from the point of view of perception. This second eye, the eye of the beyond, is now understood as seeing more, as seeing better, perceiving higher objects than the eye of the world can, and yet the logic of its mode of being is basically the same as the first eye. The image-eye, an eye opening up from a relation to a closure essential to it

10

Introduction

and part of its very functioning, an eye that is one of Plato's most essential and mysterious discoveries, has thus been rejected and lost for philosophical thinking. Let us quickly move on to the other fundamental Platonic conceptual discovery I have mentioned, also originating from the difference between object and image: that of the relation between the experience of the beyond and the question of meaning. Plato discovered that the dimension of meaning is not of the order of the actual world open to the senses but has to do with the dimension of closure, the outside of the world or the beyond, a beyond, I have said, that is somehow inscribed in the form of closure experienced through the sensing of the image. The dimension of meaning or, better yet, sense (and we will soon see the difference) is at heart Other worldly, always implying a more than the world open to the senses, an excess over the world. Any thinking that is philosophical, that is, any thinking seeking to stay true to the fundamental insight at the heart of the philosophical project, has to take as its guide, I suggest, this Platonic discovery of a dimension of excess beyond the realm of the senses. In the modern era, this dimension of excess has been conceptualized perhaps most rigorously, both as a continuation and as a radical transformation of the philosophical tradition, in that disturbance of philosophy that is the Freudian unconscious, that guide into a new thinking of the beyond the world. It is an excess sensed in the basic experience that psychoanalysis conceptualized in a novel way: There is always more in what we say than we can actually mean; we are exposed to this more that is closed to us yet haunts us, is part of our very being and yet is beyond us. But the question is, of course, how are we to understand this more implied in the dimension of meaning or sense, this more than the world that insists and persists in everything we say in the world? We have started to see that Plato's response is objectifying because meaning is conceptualized as a dimension of higher objects beyond the world of the senses. And yet, though closed to the world-and this is part of the Platonic mystery-there is nevertheless a relation between the world and the beyond, and the notion of meaning, as well as signifying a realm of superior intelligible objects, also concerns the logic of this relation between the two realms. How does the realm of the senses, the world, relate to its beyond? What kind of relation is involved here? We have seen that for Plato this relation between the world and the beyond, between the open and the closed, is finally a relation between two

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substances, a relation, Plato famously says, where one substance imitates the other, the one a model and the other its copy. Without getting into this question, let me just say that this logic of relations between substances, developed by Plato to give an account of the strange dimension that is meaning, ends up understanding meaning, this dimension of a more than the world, as the teleological aim of the world, as that substance that is supposed to give the world a justification from above or from beyond. The open world of the senses aims or means to conform to a dimension of which it is an image and by the higher ontological status of which it is judged. To mean, for Platonism, is to mean or aim to conform to an ideal and superior substance by which one is judged, and by the distance from which one is measured. The world open to the senses is meaningless in itself in this Platonist view; it receives its meaning in the form of a striving to and a judgment by an ideal substance beyond it. The mysterious Platonic discovery of the dimension of meaning as excess over the world has thus been substantialized and turned to a logic of judgment. Can we think of the notion of meaning or sense, I would now like to ask, not according to the substantializing logic of a model judge and meaningless copy, and can we think of the being of the senses in a manner that does not separate between two realms and yet is nevertheless true to the essential Platonic discovery of the question of the opening of the world as a relation to a closure beyond it? I would like to suggest that indeed we can, and that the way to do so is by examining another tradition that has intensely occupied itself with the question of the image yet has done so in a different manner than Platonism has, a difference that notoriously earned it the exile from the ideal city. I am talking about the artistic tradition. The artistic tradition is the tradition that has dedicated itself to the investigation of the image's enigma, that is, to the investigation of the experience of the sensing of a closure at the heart of an opening to the world, the sensing of an obstruction at the heart of the activity of the senses, an obstruction pointing to a beyond the world. Yet this tradition has understood this obstruction-let us stick to the question of the eye as sense for the convenience of exposition, but my point will later be expanded to the question of the plurality of the senses 10-less in relation to the discovery of a realm of inaccessible objects, and more with regard to an investigation of an experience of the eye, the "experience" of blindness. 11 At the heart ofthe

opening to the world as a field ofvision, the artistic tradition has always felt,

12

Introduction

there is an experience ofa blindness, a blindness, a blocking of perception, pointing beyond the world. For this tradition, the experience of blindness was not a call for the discovery of a perception that will eliminate the blindness but, rather, a call to the activation of blindness-to open up that which blindness itself and it alone can reveal, blindness understood not as a deprivation of perception to be overcome but as holding a mystery of its own. 12 The image, for art, I argue here briefly, but it is a point I will develop further later on in this book, has therefore been understood not as a pale reflection of a superior model, an unobstructed object of ideal perception, but as an inscription of blindness at the heart of vision, a blindness this tradition attempts to activate and to inflict on those who are supposed to receive its images, the viewers or readers of its images. To create an artistic image, the tradition seems always to have felt, is thus a manner of activating blindness, and it is to this creation, I suggest, that the artistic tradition has dedicated itself. While the artistic activation of blindness shares with Platonism the insight that the discovery of the eye's obstruction implies the opening of a different kind of seeing, of a second eye, of a vision of the beyond, it has differed from Platonism in that its second eye was not modeled on perception, but, precisely, on the image-eye. 13 The artistic tradition tries to bring about a visionary eye that sees blindness and sees out of blindness, that senses its opening out ofa closure beyond it, rather than conceptualizing a non-sensual eye that perceives objects of a superior kind. Oedipus, the man "metaphorically'' blind to his destiny who ends up "literally" blinding himself, 14 and Tiresias, the blind visionary whose sight emerges as if from Oedipus' failure of vision, who can see the future as well as the hidden past, are perhaps the paradigmatic figures signaling the artistic tradition's mode of working out its own understanding of the image as a relation between the obstruction of the eye of perception and the opening of a visionary eye, of a seeing coming out of this closure. 15 But what is blindness and how is it different as a figure of obstruction from the substantializing creation of a realm beyond the senses effected by the philosophical tradition? Blindness, as Oedipus shows us, is not a failure to see any thing, any object; it is not the deprivation of perception but the blindness to one's selfas a being inscribed in time, with an unknown past and an unknown future. 16 Blindness is thus, initially, and simply put, the human subject's blindness to time, that is, a blindness to what the world will bring in the manner of an unknown future. This discovery of an essen-

Toward a New Thinking ofthe Image

13

tial dimension of blindness internal to human existence, a blindness defining the very being of the human self as a being in, and of, time, a being open to a future and relating to an unknown past is, as I've mentioned, what opens in the tragedy of Oedipus the possibility of a second vision, the vision of time, a vision coming out in the powers of the blind Tiresias to see beyond the actual world, into the past and the future. Yet, we might say, this discovery of the visionary power of blindness in Oedipus still involves to an extent a procedure of substantialization, though of a different type than the Platonic one, and this has to do with the figure of destiny and with the vision of the future taking the form of a prophetic prediction of coming events. If the human is inscribed in a time that constitutes its blindness, the tragic vision goes, it means that a person is inscribed in a destiny beyond his or her powers to act upon it, a destiny that is an inescapable dictation of the order of his or her existence in relation to which he or she is helpless and to which he or she is, essentially, blind, which he or she cannot know. The visionary power opening from the blindness of the human thus becomes the visionary power of prediction, of seeing the way that time will unfold as destiny. Yet this visionary power of prediction entailed by the figure of destiny treats time and the blindness it implies as a thing, an actuality already there that cannot be seen by the regular eye. As such, the prophetic or predictive vision of the future can itself be said to be modeled on the eye of perception, an eye that directly sees things, and, in the case of the blind visionary, is an eye open to different types of objects or things, future things. As such, the tragic view of the human, though discovering an internal dimension of blindness as the manner of the human's inscription in time, a dimension to which it is dedicated, is nevertheless itself victim of a procedure of substantialization that eliminates its essential discovery. Can we have a mode of blindness as a blindness to (and as) time, can we have a vision coming out of this blindness, that is not finally substantialized and turned into a vision of future and past things modeled on perception? Although this might always have been the question driving the artistic effort of inscribing blindness at the heart of vision, it has perhaps gained urgency in our time, both in art as well as in contemporary theoretical efforts. Time's manner of inscription in contemporary art and thinking, I suggest, takes the figure of blankness or whiteness (the white blankness of

14

Introduction

Moby-Dick, Kasimir Malevich's famous white-on-white paintings, the horror that is Carrie White in De Palma's Carrie), of a haunting no-thingness traced in the field of vision and of the world, of the realm into which the senses are opened, as a blind spot with no content, with no object. This blank blind spot is the new figure of a beyond the world. This blankness, time, that is beyond the world is no longer a realm of ideal substances nor a destinal and unknown future that can prophetically be predicted; it is nothing but the fact that the world is incomplete, that there is more than the (actual) world; there is an excess beyond it in the sense that the world can transform, can open up unpredictably; in other words, the world has a future. As such, this beyond is not a separate realm of substances but is immanent to the world, a beyond internal to the world's very constitution, a beyond that is part of the very being of the world as an openness to transformation. The world's openness to transformation is part of what the world is. The beyond, the outside of the world (what used to be called the transcendent), is inside it (immanent). The more that the world, the more that Tiresias sees, the more that Gillian sees in her visions of the future in The Fury, is thus simply the world's future, or more precisely, its futurity, not the fact of the future that will happen as something we can predict, but the fact that the world is transformable in essence and open to unpredictable change, an openness that is part of what the world is. 17 What is closed to the world, what one is blind to, is thus simply the future or futurity, its potential openness. And this blindness, internal to the world, opens the possibility of a world and of being in a world, that is, of being in a dimension in excess of the actuality of the present, of an openness to transformation to which one is blind but from which one sees, which opens one's eyes to things and to the world. To see, or to hear, smell, touch, and so forth, means to open up to the world, the realm of the senses, out of an immanent closure (blindness, deafness, and so on), a beyond that is part of its being, that is the dimension of its futurity. What haunts our senses, what obstructs but also opens them, is the beyond that is the world's openness to transformation. This beyond is inscribed at the heart of the artistic image as a blank blindness immanent to the being of the human, and the human subject is, we might say, nothing but this configuration of the beyond in the inside. The image is that which shows us this beyond that is part of our world, that which makes our eye experience its own internal blindness as the dimension of futurity (and of an imme-

Toward a New Thinking ofthe Image

15

morial past), and as such, the image is, to use Deleuze's crucial formulation, a time-image. It seems to me that there are three paradigmatic formulations in twentieth-century thought of this new understanding of the opening to a vision of a beyond, to this experience of the image as a blank inscription of blind openness. The first is the Freudian primal scene, a traumatic experience of seeing more than what one can understand or grasp as meaningful, a more that we can now view as the way that the beyond is inscribed in the experience of the scene; the second, an elaboration of Freudian discoveries, is the Lacanian "gaze," that concept signifying the inscription of a blindness internal to the field of vision, a blindness signifying the moment of the field of vision opening up as an image, that is, in relation to an internal closure, the inscription of a beyond, a blinding beyond that is the "place," says Lacan, from which we are seen, and, we can add, from which our eyes open as sense, as a relation to a closure that continues to haunt them. In the Lacanian articulation of the gaze, there is a distinction between the place from which we perceive, what he calls the look, and the place, though Lacan doesn't necessarily formulate it this way, from which our eyes open, what we called the image-eye as distinguished from the objective eye of perception. We thus open our eyes from the "place" from which we are seen and that constitutes our blindness. We open our eyes because there is a more than what we can perceive and mean, a closure, and this more that is beyond us, the gaze, is also the place from which we are seen, that is, which implicates us in the dimension, the dimension of the world, that is in excess of us as centers of perception, an openness beyond that which we can give it, beyond us and thus including us, "seeing" us. The gaze is also, says Lacan, the place of the inscription of the "subject" in the field of vision, a place that is a blind spot in the field of perception; as such, we can say that the "subject" is that openness to an excessive and blinding beyond that is always more than it and more than the world it inhabits; the "human subject" is thus the one "seen'' by a beyond, a blind and blinding blank gaze of time, that opens its (the human) eyes. To be seen by a beyond is precisely not to be seen by any specific or actual beyond, any judging deity or transcendent Idea. To be seen by a beyond, to be subject to what Lacan calls the gaze, is precisely to occupy the strange position where no One sees me, where there is no transcendent and stable position by which I am perceived and in relation to which I can orient myself, for then there would be no unpredictable future. To be

16

Introduction

the subject of the gaze means that no One is watching (in the sense of perceiving from an actual and recognizable place, even an invisible transcendent one) me; I am "abandoned" by the watching One and exposed to an unpredictable futurity that constitutes my blindness. The image, that which inscribes the blank gaze and wishes to activate it, can thus be defined as that which marks my blindness, as that which traces the place from which I see in relation to a closure, a closure signifYing also the "place" out of which I am seen or from which I am exposed to the gaze of no One. The image marks the place of my blind exposure, where I cannot see (or perceive) the "place" from which I am seen, where I cannot orient myself to a One that I know sees me. (See also my remarks on the Lacanian gaze in Chapter 3.) The third major formulation of the new opening of vision is the previously mentioned Deleuzian time-image, a concept that I claim basically tries to capture as well the experience of the vision of this internal blindness at the heart of the eye, a blindness that the time image, precisely, shows. To see the time-image, to see time, is to see the blindness internal to the field of vision, or, in the terms Deleuze uses in his film books, it is to see the "open whole" of the universe. The universe or the world is essentially open and, as such, includes as part of it what is beyond it, a beyond Deleuze calls an absolute outside. This outside, though, is precisely an integral and internal part of what the world is, is inside the world; as such, this outside that is the possibility of the world to open is internal to the world, and it is this we call time. To see time would thus mean to open to the inscription of this blind and blank outside (an outside that is nothing, simply the universe's potentiality for transformation) at the heart of the world, and this absolute outside, this openness to the world, image shows, by inscribing at its heart an experience of blindness and of a traumatic more-than-one-cantake, what Deleuze calls the unbearable. We might also designate as a fourth major formulation of this new understanding of the image the Levinasian "face," the experience of a traumatizing beyond that inflicts us with blindness. To an extent, we might say that the face as image is, paradoxically, the inscription of a moment of facelessness, or a blankness, at the heart of the face we perceive. To become visionary in the terms of this book thus means to open up to this dimension of internal blindness as futurity that haunts the being of the senses as their internal beyond. To educate the senses means to get us to relate to the senses' limits-implying not a dimension of a beyond exter-

Toward a New Thinking ofthe Image

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nal to the senses but an opening up to our own blindness as internal to the senses and part of what they are, a non-sense (in all the various meanings of this term) internal to them. Meaning itself, that which has essentially to do with the dimension of the beyond or more than the world, can now be viewed as inscribed in the image in the manner of the world's opening its futurity that is closed to us, to which we are blind. The dimension of meaning is neither a substantial realm beyond the world, nor a dimension of permanent ideality to which the world needs to conform, but that which makes sense, a beyond that gives the world and opens the possibility for a new world out of the world's incompleteness, or its future. The image, understood now as that which traces at the heart of the senses a non-sensicality (blindness, deafness ... and meaninglessness) internal to the very activity of the senses, a non-sensicality, or a new beyond, that gives sense and is the very condition of the opening to a world of sense, is thus no longer an imitative relation to a luminous and ideal, invisible model that it lets shine through it and partially shows; nor is it that which hides the direct vision of the model, pretending to take its place. It is rather a showing of the trace of a blinding beyond that gives sense, an invisible future that is nothing but the world's incompletion. The image no longer marks the relation of a copy to an original model that it imitates, but marks the inscription of an origin of the world, of that "futurial" and unpredictable beyond that gives the world. And if we still want to speak of the image in terms of imitation and relation to a model, then these concepts can be revised, and if we now say that the image imitates a model, we no longer understand model as a stable ideality preexisting the image but take what has always been the model's main defining feature, its ability to trace a future in advance of any actuality (as in the case of the craftsman who should have a model or plan in advance of what he creates)-but understand this "in advance" no longer as a pre-given and defined form but as that which opens a future in excess of any actuality precisely because there is no pre-given form, no predetermination of the shape of the future. If the image is that which imitates the model (another concept for which is the Idea), it does so not as a relation to a preexisting ideality but as a relation to a haunting of the beyond traced in the actual, a haunting that the image activates, imitating or repeating its originating force. Rather than being an imitative relation to a preexisting stable ideality, the image is a repetition

18

Introduction

and activation of an unprecedented futurity. The image is that which activates an Idea (that which gives in advance of actuality) of the future.

* This book claims that it is the cinematic image that has expressed in a particularly profound manner, and perhaps more deeply than the images of any other artistic medium, this new condition of the image as the inscription of a blank beyond, a closure to the senses, internal to the world and to the very activity of the senses. This book is dedicated to examining several major devices through which cinema creates the images that are singular to it, that is, through which it inscribes the dimension of this internal beyond, thus opening our senses to their visionary power. Very few directors in the history of film, it seems to me, have more rigorously and profoundly, more analytically, complexly, and diversely, investigated the status of the cinematic image, the status of this strange thing inscribing a blankness at the heart of the senses, than Brian De Palma. De Palma is, in my opinion, the greatest contemporary investigator, at least in American cinema, of the nature and the logic of the cinematic image and should be viewed as the equal, and heir, to such great thinkers of the cinematic image as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Robert Bresson, Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Jean-Luc Godard. That De Palma has not been viewed this way so far, and, even more than that, that he has been often derided and viewed with contempt, especially among American critics, is itself a fact raising highly interesting questions, but is a matter for another study and is beyond the scope of this book. Let me just say that the reasons for such treatment are diverse and can probably be attributed to many causes, be they sociological, historical, or matters of so-called aesthetic sensibility; yet I would like to suggest two main causes that are in my view essential. The first being, paradoxically perhaps, the absolute dedication ofhis cinema to the question ofthe image rather than to narrative plausibility, the creation of reality effects, or the creation of convincing, realistic, and psychologically rounded characters. The status of the image, we have seen, is not that of an object in the actual world, but that of a strange doubling of the actual object involving the feeling of a mediation and an obstruction, an obstruction that we, as good Platonists, want to overcome, to reach directly the Real Thing, the

Toward a New Thinking ofthe Image

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real object that we feel the image hides and obstructs from view. De Palma's cinema, through many devices this book will discuss, does not show us anything directly; it only shows us strange, doubling, and obstructing images that do not seem to be real, actual figures. They are not flesh-and-blood human characters acting in a world recognizable as our own, but exist as the disturbance of these figures, the introduction of an internal blindness into them, a beyond internal to them, a disturbance I will call haunting. The viewers who react violently against De Palma's cinema, I suggest, are reacting, precisely, as Platonists, seeking to erase the haunting obstruction of the images he creates so they can have a true reality, a reality they feel De Palma distorts. A particularly striking case in point seems to me the oft-pronounced accusation of De Palma as a derivative imitator of Hitchcock, Hitchcock's body double, we might say, who seems to really want to be, but can never achieve in his impossible mission, the status of the real thing, the ideal model "Hitchcock'' that De Palma's cinema reflects as a pale imitation. It is this real thing, "Hitchcock," that De Palma, dressed to kill in his cinematic obsession, seems to obstruct from direct view, which these accusing viewers seem to want; it is the real face of Hitchcock, a face De Palma scars and distorts, that they desire to see. If De Palma's cinema indeed relates in a privileged way to the Hitchcockian oeuvre, it does so, precisely, I suggest, by becoming its image, its double-not in the sense of a derivative copy of a preexisting model, but in the sense of introducing into it, through this strange doubling, a haunting mediation that activates what we might call a blindness internal to Hitchcock, a blindness that is the way that futurity (the Idea, or the model, understood in the new sense sketched earlier) is inscribed in Hitchcock's work, which has perhaps more than any other body of work in film history introduced a dimension of an obstruction of a beyond at the heart of its disturbing images, an obstruction known as Hitchcockian suspense. 18 Yet it is as if only by doubling Hitchcock that this obstruction at the heart of Hitchcock can be sensed and opened up to in a visionary way. Thus, through this procedure we lose our direct relation to Hitchcock (as ideal model) and open up to his work, precisely, as an image, that is, as mediated by an obstruction and a closure and as activating a blank "futurial" force of origin to be repeated in its turn, or "imitated." De Palma becomes the beyond-Hitchcock, his futurity, that is internal to Hitchcock, and through which we open up to Hitchcock, as if creating out of the blankness traced in Hitchcock's works.

20

Introduction

De Palma can thus make us see Hitchcock from the "place" where Hitchcock cannot see himself 19 Hitchcock can become Hitchcock, De Palma seems to suggest, the lmage-Hitchcock-a beyond-Hitchcock traced at the very heart of the Hitchcockian oeuvre-rather than the Ideal-ModelHitchcock, only by being mediated through De Palma, his body double or Siamese sister. Such a procedure actually destroys the Platonic conception of model and copy, a destruction that De Palma's denigrators anxiously sense and want to prevent. This procedure of doubling Hitchcock20 also offers a renewed conception of the history of art and of the relations between generations of artists, a conception strikingly different than the Bloomian Oedipal conception of the anxiety of influence, in which the generation of sons struggle with the ideal model of the fathers, in that the relation to the "fathers" is not a struggle against an original model but the doubling of the model, thus destroying its position as a model or father and opening it to a blindness internal to it, a blindness that is the unpredictable future internal to his very being, a future that the "sons" activate and to which they serve as witnesses. The father loses his position as a father or model precisely because he has a future to which he is blind, and the task of successive generations of artists is to activate the blindness or futurity in the "fathers" rather than rival their positions as models. 21 We might thus say that Hitchcock/ Oedipus (or perhaps Hitchcock/ Lear) opens the way for De Palma/ Antigone (or perhaps De Palma/ Cordelia). 22 The second major objection to De Palma has to do with the violence of his images, a violence permeating all his films that viewers often find too shocking or gratuitous, and so on, and against which they often unleash in a very violent way themselves. This accusation fails to distinguish between two main dimensions of violence in De Palma's films: the one we can call violent representations, or violent content in his films; the other is the violence of the images, not of the content of the images as representation, but of their impact by being images rather than direct objects of perceptions, that is, by being inscriptions of an obstructing beyond, an internal blindness that they seem to communicate to viewers, or even violently inflict on them, undermining their powers of perception and their positions as spectators occupying an ideal point in relation to which the film is supposed to be constructed. What is striking about De Palma's films is that their subject, what they are about, is precisely the relations between these two dimensions of violence. It is precisely as a defense against the violence

Toward a New Thinking ofthe Image

21

of the image, the violence of being inflicted with a blindness that undermines one's mastery of perception, that all the activities of violence in De Palma's films occur. These are violent actions against the submission to the violence of the image (two very different types of violence)-a violence against the image that perhaps repeats itself in the critical violence against De Palma's films. 23 The murders, the rapes, the horrible killings that De Palma represents in his films, that are the content of his films, always result from the impossibility of the characters in his films to bear the violence inflicted by the image on one's perception. What De Palma's films attempt to do in their creation of some of the most extraordinary images in the history of film is to open the viewers to the dimension of the image, and to its violence as image, the violence of its blinding of the audience, a blinding, though, that can open up a new, visionary force. Only through the opening up to the dimension of the image as image, as an infliction on the world of perception with the blindness of a futurity, De Palma's films seem to suggest, can we be released from the violent desires of destruction permeating the world, desires of destruction that attempt, taking the Platonist tradition to its extreme limit, to overcome the dimension of the image and to eliminate its blinding force. The following book is dedicated, through a close reading of three of De Palma's films, to an examination of this juxtaposition that constitutes, I claim, the center of the De Palmian cinematic project: the juxtaposition of the thinking of the essence of the image, of the cinematic attempt to create these strange and haunting things that are images, and the forms of violence resorted to as protection and defense against the image, attempts to exorcise its haunting and unsettling powers. By very rigorously juxtaposing these two dimensions, De Palma's cinema seeks to liberate us from a whole tradition, a Platonist, metaphysical tradition, a tragic-prophetic tradition, that has resisted the image and attempted to overcome its blinding force and mute its visionary power. 24

Carrie- Film and the Wounding of Representation

Adapted from a Stephen King novel and set in a typical American high school, Carrie is the story of an especially shy teenage girl, Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), an outsider at school and a victim at home of a fanatically religious mother, a woman horrified of sexuality who is set on confining Carrie and defending her from any knowledge of life outside, especially of men or sexuality. At the outset of the film, at the late age of seventeen, Carrie has her first period, an event for which she is completely unprepared. This occasions growing ridicule of Carrie by her schoolmates, an increase of her shyness and reserve, and an intensification of her fear of being hurt

24

Chapter I

and wounded by the others' humiliating gazes. It also brings about Carrie's discovery of an extraordinary, supernatural, telekinetic power, a power that seems to manifest itself in inverse proportion to her absolute helplessness and timidity. The film's narrative takes place during the short span beginning with her period and ending on the night of the senior prom. The main storyline follows Carrie in her various interactions with the school authorities as well as with her mother (Piper Laurie) and charts Carrie's attempts to learn about her powers. There are two minor storylines, one focused on a girl, Sue (Amy Irving), who regrets ridiculing Carrie and tries as a compensation to get her boyfriend to ask Carrie to the prom, and the other following a bad girl, Chris (Nancy Allen), who plots against Carrie to take revenge for the girls' punishment by the school authorities following their mocking of Carrie. At first reluctant to go to the prom because of fear of being hurt, Carrie finally consents, making a great effort to overcome her intense fear and shyness and resist her oppressive mother. Unaware of the horrible plot against her, Carrie spends a magical night, and is even elected prom queen. But at the moment of Carrie's crowning, when she is at the height of her elation, Chris' plot is activated. A bucket of pig's blood is spilled over Carrie's head, repeating the traumatic scene of her humiliation following her period, this time in front of the entire school to whose laughter she is exposed. At this moment, an incredible destructive force is unleashed by the maddened Carrie, bringing about the death of everyone at the prom. Returning home to her crazed mother, who in the meantime has decided to kill the rebellious daughter, Carrie washes the blood off her body-only to be stabbed by the mother. Through the aid of her powers, to defend herself, she kills her mother, at which moment their small house collapses, closing down on the two women and burying them under it. A sole survivor and witness remains to this horrible story of destruction: the good girl Sue, with whose screams at waking up from a nightmare in which Carrie's bloodied hand comes out of its grave to grab her, the movie ends.

*

Carrie-Film and the Wounding ofRepresentation

25

Such is the setting for one of Brian De Palma's first great meditations on the question of cinema: a seemingly run-of-the-mill gothic horror story. Thinking about De Palma's conception of cinema has to start, I claim, with a reflection on his conception of horror, for his cinema, which is always a cinema of nightmare, originates in confrontation with horror as an enigma, that is, as a problem ofsense. 1 Why choose horror as an entrance to a meditation on the question of cinema and of the significance of cinematic image? What is horror, what does that which we call horrifYing consist of, what are the structures and problems it brings into play, and why does it seem to entertain such dose, we might say essential, relations to cinema from its very inception, witnessed by the constant fascination it has exercised over some of the greatest filmmakers (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Car! Theodor Dreyer, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick) as well as over so many others? These are the questions with which I start. Let us then examine how De Palma opens up this mutual implication of cinema and horror, which is, I argue, the original matrix for his conception of cinema, by looking at the two sequences with which Carne opens.

A Horrifying Discovery and the Primal Gesture The film opens with a static open-air shot of a physical education class, on a clear and sunny day in which a group of girls is energetically and enthusiastically absorbed in a volleyball game. The score is 14- 14, and

26

Chapter I

one of the teams drops the ball, bringing the score to 15-14, that is, match point. The gym teacher standing on the sidelines calls out to serve, a serve that might end the game. At this point, the static and stable cameralocated at an upper right-hand angle at some distance from the players, seemingly quite uninvolved in the game and occupying the point-of-view of no one-starts to move from a motivation that does not seem clear and the movie starts to signify, that is, starts to implicate us, the viewers, in an event that matters to us, and matters to us precisely because we do not know what it means, what its motivation is. In other words, the movie begins to address us. Let us look closer at the nature of this originary movement of the film, a movement of great complexity achieved in the most economical of ways, 2 which, I claim, should be understood as an address, that is, as a signifying operation implicating us in something that we do not comprehend. In what does its nature as movement and as address consist; what are its components, and why does this movement initiate De Palma's interrogation of horror in Carrie? All sorts of moving bodies, in the physical sense of the term, interact in this scene: the moving camera, the girls chasing after the flying ball and trying to hit it over the net, and the ball, bumped from hand to hand, constantly on the verge of falling down and hitting the ground. But it is not in this that the real movement of this scene consists. In what, then, does it? Real movement consists, first and foremost, in the suspension of the stable meaning of our point of departure-of our capacity to orient ourselves and have a specific perspective toward that which we see and to assign identities to its components-and in a process of transformation that we follow as we are accompanying the creation of a new possibility to assign meaning, unforeseen as yet, that depends on the way that the game will conclude, on the way in which the ball will fall. For what we can say after the game is different from what we can say before and during the game; for example, we can talk about winners and losers, about who was central and who was not, and so on. The movement itself, to begin with, thus involves the suspension and the process of transformation between our two capacities to mean. Jean-Luc Nancy, quoting Gilles Deleuze's definition of motion in his book on film, and commenting on it, helpfully articulates this idea in the following way: "Motion is that which 'only occurs if the whole is neither

Carrie-Film and the Wounding ofRepresentation

27

given nor givable.' Motion is not a displacing or a transferring, which may occur between given places in a totality that is itself given. On the contrary, it is what takes place when a body is in a situation and a state that compel it to find its place, a place it consequently has not had or no longer has. "3 Without insisting too much in this context on understanding precisely what a place, and what finding a place, might mean, it is important at this moment of the argument to grasp movement as that which happens only when there is a loss of any presupposed and stable reference point or center of orientation, any presupposed structure of meaning, in relation to which we can coordinate that which happens. Movement, the loss of any presupposition, is thus importantly distinguished from what Nancy calls displacing or transferring and what Deleuze in his film books called translation in space, that is, it is distinguished from a structure of something happening within a presupposed container (be it a defined physical space or a presupposed structure of meaning and intelligibility) that itself remains stable and doesn't change. Movement then happens only where there is a loss of any presupposed reference point and is the creation of something unforeseen in advance, which could not have been presupposed, call it a new capacity to mean or a new place, that wasn't there before one's arrival and the intelligibility of which could not have been contained within the previous state. De Palma's volleyball game incorporates a specific understanding of movement and of its unforeseen aspect, and this understanding depends on the introduction of two major concepts, the "accident" and the "fall," understood in the sense of a fall of bodies in motion. Looking as we do at the game in Carrie, or for that matter at any game, we suppose one central element to be unpredictable and unmasterable in advance: the game's outcome. 4 Although what counts as a legitimate outcome is dictated by a set of rules prescribed in advance-for example, the fall of the volleyball and its touching the ground within the outlines of the court constitutes a point, to be authorized as such by the judgewe nevertheless presume that this outcome is in principle unknowable in advance, and that even if the relations of force between the opponents are vastly unequal, there could always be an accident that would contradict our expectations. The accident, then, and an essential principle of accident, is discovered at the heart of the game and makes it something we understand as a game-a codification allowing for real movement-and not, for example, a program dictated ahead of time.

28

Chapter I

We might say that the game signifies as a game for us-and, by extension, I suggest, De Palma's films signifY-as long as we are held in suspense and caught in a movement, which in principle will terminate as an accident. 5 For once we admit that the game's outcome might depend on an accident that will reverse our expectations, we must concede that any outcome is, finally, accidental. Movement, then, at least in a game, can be defined as what happens until the accident that decides the game's outcome arrives, an accident that creates a new place in existence not there before, or a new capacity to mean. 6 There is no common measure, no common container, for the world before the game and the world after it. Something irreversible has happened that has changed everything. Once the outcome is decided, we can assign the game a stable meaninra unified direction in a narrative we tell-and divide its players, for example, into winners and losers and so forth. But this decision upon meaning already involves a forgetting of the suspensefUl movement and accident, of the loss of any presupposed container, that made the game and is always in excess of its outcome as meanmg. It is this opening into the suspenseful movement and accidental nature of the game that De Palma's volleyball game announces and through which it signifies. This signification, or this making sense, is not the decision upon a meaning, but exactly stable meaning's suspension in movement. This movement, I have said, is experienced by the viewers as an address because it implicates them in a process that matters whereby their capacity to mean is itself held in suspension and undergoes a transformation-a capacity to mean that only opens to begin with through an originary implication in that which happens. The suspense is thus not simply that which happens there on the screen but, rather, that which makes the viewer-as a stable identity, a container of manners of understanding, secure in his or her position and mastery of meaning-question who he or she is because who one is seems to always involve a capacity to locate and orient oneself in relation to that which happens, a capacity that is, precisely, suspended in the movement. Suspense, the moving loss of any presupposition, we might thus further say, is not to be understood as the withholding of what will happen next in a narrative that can after the fact be understood as knowable in advance; rather, suspense should be regarded as the suspense of presupposed orientation, of a center of meaning, the surprise of the accident

Carrie-Film and the Wounding ofRepresentation

29

and of the discovery that something happens that in principle cannot be reduced to categories of knowledge and be mastered as meaning. In this sense, as Hitchcock emphasized, it holds no significance if we know perfectly well what is about to happen-this has no impact on the feeling of suspense, and we might say that in some way it even increases it, in getting us to experience the irrelevance of the language of knowledge in relation to the accidental event and movement as suspense. Continuing to examine De Palma's volleyball game, we see that it announces as well a specific understanding of the nature of movement and of the accidental, an understanding, I contend, that will dominate all his films. The accident in the game arrives as the falling ofthe ball a falling ofa body that has exhausted its capacity for movement. What is thus discovered in De Palma's rendering of the volleyball game is this suspenseful accidental movement dictated by an unpredictable fall of the body at the heart of the game that exceeds all the categories of the game as meaning. This discovery is finally the entryway for horror in Carrie in particular and in De Palma in general. For this discovery of the suspension of stable and unique meaning by the accidental movement and fall of the ball threatens the safe validity of the game's outcome. And this threat holds equally for the stable categories of the winners and the losers that we create after the game, as well as for the viewers implicated, for if everything has changed in this movement, even for the best in the case of the winners, and a new place in existence is created, then this change is due to an unmasterable fall that exceeds the winners' mastery of the meaning of their status as well as the losers' mastery and the viewers' mastery, and this is precisely what horrifies. If De Palma is essentially a director of horror and suspense, it is because his work emerges from the insight of their essential eo-belonging and origin in the discovery-the cinematic discovery par excellence -of movement as suspension ofa presupposed center oforientation and of stable meaning and as unmasterable falU Thus, reading this game as an allegory of what De Palma's cinema is about, we might say that film, for De Palma, is this discovery ofa horrifying and suspensefUl movement at the obscure heart of the light of (and Carrie, we recall, starts in clear daylight only to enter a dark room after the ball's fall), a horror and suspense that signal an excess over the mastery of meaning-that is, over the presupposition that meaning has to do with a relation to an ideal center that controls it in advance and in relation to

dal

30

Chapter I

which it finds its justification-and the principal of its collapse. 9 Horror enters as this loss of any presupposed center of orientation and the cinematic image, the image that exposes us to real movement rather than to the transferal or displacement of bodies, shows us and exposes us to this originary horror. 10 Coming back to Carrie and its volleyball game, we see that the camera's movement, which followed the ball until its fall, arrests on Carrie's face at precisely the same moment she misses the ball and decides the game's outcome. Following Carrie's failure, we see most of the girls she played with, winners and losers, approach Carrie, some hitting her, others cursing her, still others mocking her, before everyone enters the dark locker rooms for the next scene. What is the significance of this arrest of the camera's movement, what is its significance in relation to the horror that the camera's movement exposed, and how does it relate to Carrie and to her position in relation to her schoolmates and to us the viewers? At first, we might say that the girls are harassing Carrie because she lost the game, but all the girls, not only those from the losers' camp, abuse Carrie. For what the girls deem Carrie responsible for, I suggest, is not simply the game's loss but, rather, her occupying the place of the accident and of the falling body that is the entryway of horror, as I mentioned, for the winners, for the losers, and even for us the viewers. This is precisely what Carrie incarnates, and the camera's arrest on her face marks her, at the same time, as the one who finally established the game's meaning, the principle of the closure of its movement, and as an accused, including in the eyes of the viewers who thus become implicated in the girls' abuse. Carrie is accused precisely of the fact that there are accidents, that there is movement, that bodies fall. She comes to incarnate a center responsible for a loss of presupposed center. 11 This arrest of the camera's movement announces one of the great principles of De Palma's interpretation of the camera: There is always great danger and menacing potential lurking in the camera's movement, that the camera will stop on you, choose you, arrest you, and frame you as responsible for the fall and for the movement. Carrie's incarnation of the principle of finding a responsible scapegoat for the horrifying movement erupts in the film's next scene, the famous shower scene, and erupts from within Carrie's body as a symptom of the accidental place of the body's fall that she came to occupy, an erup-

Carrie-Film and the Wounding ofRepresentation

31

tion signifYing the full entry of horror into the film, in its most profound dimension.

Moving from the light of day into the girls' locker room involves a sharp transition, signaled by a slow, dreamlike movement of the camera and the introduction of a no less dreamy musical theme. We seem to have entered a realm of pure pleasure in which the girls, revealed to us by the camera as it sweeps across the room, are shown in various stages of dressing and cleaning themselves up, but most are naked, cheerfully slapping each other with clean white towels. Very slowly the camera, as it moves toward the back of the room in the white, steamy atmosphere of the hot showers, reveals Carrie under the shower, soaping and cleaning herself with great pleasure, her body occupying almost the entire screen. As she is washing between her legs, we see the cleansing soap slipping from her hand and falling to the floor and then, as the camera offers a close-up of Carrie's hand between her legs, we suddenly notice the beginning of a bleeding, and here the dream is interrupted, the music stops, and the camera's slow-motion ceases. 12 As she notices the bleeding, Carrie lifts her bloodied hand in front of her eyes, looking at it incredulously, without comprehension, obviously completely unaware of what is happening to her. Then, increasingly bewildered and horrified, Carrie sees all the other girls, already dressed and ready to leave. At first slowly, and then more frenetically, Carrie advances toward the girls, and in a gesture that is the paradigmatic gesture of De Palma's cinema, repeating in almost all his films, she reaches out her bloodied hands toward them screaming, "Help me!

32

Chapter I

Help me!," touching Sue's white sweater, stammg it, screaming louder and louder, now completely inarticulately, as the girls, at first horrified by her plea but soon recovering from the initial shock, push her away from them into the shower, mocking her and throwing tampons and pads at her, shouting "Plug it up, plug it up." Carrie's discovery of her bleeding as an enigma, then, her encounter with a problem for knowledge and understanding, is the form in which horror enters this scene. What does the naked Carrie, overwhelmed, discover under the shower that seems to her incomprehensible and horrifies her so? Is it merely the discovery that girls at a certain age start getting their period, a simple fact of nature? A discovery for which she was simply unprepared because she was never told about it, unlike all the other girls who know about this "natural" event and find the sight of Carrie completely ridiculous? Not at all! What Carrie discovers under the shower is precisely that she has a period, that is, that she is a body, and a body as nakedness, that is as something that can bleed and therefore be wounded, a naked body that is not a self-sufficient totality but a vulnerable open surface that is exposed to, and marked by, time, that is, by its period. It is crucial to note here that what Carrie discovers, to her horror, is a bleeding rather than blood, a verbal occurrence, an event, rather than a frightening substance. Unlike almost any other use of blood as an element of horror in the movies (including, for example, the celebrated use of blood in Kubrick's major horror film The Shining, and perhaps even the more ambiguous and interesting understanding of blood in Hitchcock's Marnie) De Palma is a director who is never interested in blood as a "Thing" but only in bleeding, in the discovery of bodily exposure to time as movement and verb. 13 This discovery of bleeding almost simultaneously brings about Carrie's discovery of the other girls' presence, as if the discovery of one's capacity for being wounded is at the same time the discovery of being exposed to others. And this relation between the discovery of her bleeding and the discovery of the others' existence becomes the site of birth for Carrie's language and bodily gesture as supplication, a birth oflanguage as an addressed cry and an addressed gesture to the others, saying-"Help me, for I am bleeding."14 The discovery of bleeding thus manifests its full significance not as a simple physical event but as an event of sense and of language, and we

Carrie-Film and the Wounding ofRepresentation

33

can say that Carrie's cry is not a report about a physical bleeding but is rather the expression of bleeding as bleeding, that is, as the discovery of an exposed vulnerability that is the opening of language as relation before any specific meaning. This shower scene, a scene at the threshold of De Palma's meditation on horror and cinema, can be viewed as De Palma's primal scene and be read allegorically as showing the discovery of one's bleeding as the matrix for the originary human gesture-the reaching out of a bloodied hand-and the originary human utterance-an addressed cry or scream. Language as bodily gesture opens up not as saying this or that, communicating this or that content or meaning but, rather, as a cry and gesture addressed to the others, an address communicating nothing but one's period, one's bodily exposure to time and to another as a bleeding. Language is blood transmission.

* We can thus see that the first two sequences of Carrie incorporate a structure of an address. I have identified the address during the volleyball game as the putting into question who the viewer is through the viewer's involvement in a suspenseful movement resulting in an accidental fall, and I have designated the address during the shower scene as the communication of an event of bleeding that is also a communication of one's discovery of the body as period and as exposed capacity to be wounded. Thinking about the way De Palma's cinema signifies, or is implicated in the question of sense, demands that we understand the essential relations between these two addresses, that is, that we understand the relations between our being implicated in an event of real movement and the discovery of the human body as a bleeding and as capacity to be wounded. 15 Carrie herself, as these two sequences demonstrate, is precisely the incarnation of the relation between these two principles, for her occupying the place of the accidental movement and fall in the first sequence manifests itself as her subsequent bleeding, as I have suggested, a bleeding that implies that an event of bleeding is a being marked by an accidental fall and that the human is a body whose sensitivity to the accidental movement, to the principle of non-presupposition and lack of center of reference, becomes a principle of signification or of making sense. 16

34

Chapter I

On the Question of the Gaze: Cinema and the Pedagogy of the Eye A complex orchestration of various kinds of gazes and viewer positions is carried out around the relations between these two primary sequences of Carrieand their discovery ofhorror. 17 The question of the status of the eye thus opens from this initial discovery of horror. The viewer, we have seen, is drawn into the film, addressed by it, through a suspenseful movement announcing an accident, a movement that is the entryway of horror. Now, the question that interests us is this: in what way does this movement implicate the posing of the gaze, of the modality of the fUnctioning of the eye, as a problem for De Palma? Or, in other words, what happens to an eye addressed by, and caught in, such a movement, both the eye of the participants in the film and the viewer's eye? We have seen that the static, impersonal opening shot establishes a single-point perspective of no one in particular in which what is seen and the seeing eye are external to each other. It can thus be said to situate the viewer in the position of the master. The master understood as one whose field of vision receives its meaning from its being present to the surveillance of a viewer external to the situation; a master also as one whose field of vision emanates from a central perspective that hierarchically dominates all other possible perspectives. In short, the opening shot creates what has often been described as a classical space of representation where the world is given as an objective spectacle for one to enjoy. 18 Carrie, as a setting in motion, is precisely the bringing about of this horrifying collapse of the classical space of representation and of the positions of those occupying such a space, a collapse into horror that it also analytically investigates, and from which, I claim, De Palma wishes to liberate us. 19 For the movement into which the viewer is swept and by which is overwhelmed, the movement of the game in which one necessarily becomes an involved participant, is one of destabilization and decentering, of a loss of sovereignty, and thus of the collapse of this space. What is the shape of this collapse? The discovery of the period. 2 For what the eye (understood as a structure of opening onto the world) undergoes in the game's movement is a horrifying, thrilling, and suspenseful event of dynamic transformation whereby the look is understood and experienced as opening not from a stable and ideal position of exteriority and mastery

°

Carrie-Film and the Wounding ofRepresentation

35

(a position philosophers would call transcendent)-which in principle precedes the scene opening in front of it for contemplation and is the condition of possibility of this scene's appearance-but, rather, from the midst (a situation philosophers would call immanent) of a dynamic or moving playing field always experienced as too large and too fast for the eye, 21 an excess (a more than the eye can control) haunting the very opening of vision, that precedes the eye's capacity for perception, as if the eye is pushed from behind by a fiery explosion that marks its blindness, its failure to master its perception, and catapulted ahead, 22 exposed to an essentially unknown and accidental future (and to an immemorial past, a past that essentially precedes it and is thus not available to it as conscious mastery) able to arrive in any shape, from any direction, at any moment23 and to the unexpected welcoming of which the eye tries to adapt itself, by giving up its self-sufficient, ideal sovereignty and keeping open to the unknown, to its internal blindness that the movement as excess marks, and responding as best it can to that which unexpectedly arrives-as if the perceiving eye is not given, but is called for, addressed, and performatively created, by that which arrives (change24)-until, at least for a moment, the ball falls and the movement stops. The eye can again find its bearing. Like Carrie in the shower, the moving eye discovers its own internal bleeding, its internal constitutive blindness, its exposure to an immemorial past and to that which can suddenly arrive, and thus discovers itself as unself-sufficiency and as capacity to be wounded, as a body exposed to, and defined by, what time as movement brings to it and demands that it do. The eye as Carrie: a body discovering its period. As a theoretical aside, we might observe that "period" has another major meaning here: a mark of punctuation at the end of the sentence, conceptualized by Jacques Lacan as a "point de capiton," an anchoring point (also known as quilting point). For Lacan, the sentence is an open structure, we might call it a movement, that receives its meaning only retrospectively, after having been punctuated, that is, given a period. Until the arrival of the period-the falling of the ball in the case of our game-the sentence has no meaning but is rather, I would say, an open address. The discovery of the linguistic period, I would then suggest, is also the discovery of the time of the sentence, the sentence as time, where the sentence bleeds, that is, when it is constantly exposed to the arrival of a period, always unexpected, never given in advance, and that fixes the sentence only retroactively as meaning, thus

36

Chapteri

making it at last a sentence, an arrest and possibility of accusation. And the period, this anchoring point, indeed arrives as a falling body, an anchor thrown to sea. (We will soon see that the question of the period makes one further significant appearance in this film.) In De Palma's films, it is always the arrest of the camera's movement that punctuates, that gives the period, and it is always highly instructive in watching his films to notice precisely when he decides to stop moving, when he decides to show that the ball has fallen. And this arrest of the camera is also at the basis of its menacing potential because there is always the menace that the period will fall on you and arrest you as responsible for the fall and reveal your bleeding. But let us try to get our bearing again, for a moment, and attempt to understand the enigmatic and horrifying bleeding of the eye mentioned earlier. 25 We are faced with two interpretations of the eye or the look and what it perceives. The first one-which I called that of the master-eyeunderstands the eye as a certain stable, given, and ideal capacity to perceive what confronts it, and this capacity, self-sufficient and unchanging, gives the measure of that which can be perceived, is its condition of possibility. The relation between this eye and the events that confront it is one of complete adequacy, for that which arrives can immediately be perceived, understood, and responded to, adequately and satisfactorily with an action that it might demand. We can therefore also call this eye the action-eye. In the second interpretation of the eye-which I have called the dynamic conception-the eye is understood as an exposed body opening in relation to an excess, from within a movement too fast and too large for it. This conception has several implications: First, the eye as an opening onto the perceptual field is understood not as given and stable but as something called for and created by a movement internal to the functioning of the eye, yet exceeding what the eye can see, marking its blindness. 26 That is, the eye is passive in relation to this movement. Second, the articulation of this passivity demands the thinking together of three terms-body, wound, and movement. The eye is a body, that is, a finite relation of capacities to act upon other bodies and be acted upon by them in turn. Yet, a body is not a body unless it is also an exposure to something that is not of the order of the body, and that is movement; movement being simply understood as a body's openness to a process of differentiation and to unpredictable transformations (the openness of the game to the essentially unpredictable falling of the ball). Brian Massumi clarifies this relation between the body and a

Carrie-Film and the Wounding ofRepresentation

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non-bodily, or incorporeal, movement of which the body partakes when he writes of a body's indeterminacy, "its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise than it is in the here and now." And he adds, "The charge of indeterminacy [that is, of openness and exposure to change and transformation] carried by a body is inseparable from it. It strictly coincides with it, to the extent that the body is in passage or in process (to the extent that it is dynamic and alive) ... to think the body in movement thus means accepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension ofthe body." 27 This exposure of the eye or the look to an unforeseeable and thus always surprising elsewhere, and consequently its passivity to this unmasterable elsewhere, makes the arrival of this unforeseen surprise always too fast and too large for the eye because it is not the eye that now gives measure to that which arrives but, rather, that which arrives (change) that gives measure to the eye, which thus has to be transformed and constantly created anew to welcome this arrival. This demand for transformation endured by the passive body-and in our present case, the eye as passive body-in its exposure to unforeseen movement is expressed in the wound and is implied in any attempt to conceptualize the wound. The wound is the process of transformation in which some capacities of the body are destroyed while others are called to be created, all in relation to an excess we called movement, the excess of the principle of non-presupposition to which the body is exposed. 28 There is thus no such thing as a wound in the sense of a stable state of exposure, but rather, there is only a wounding, or a bleeding, a process of transformation, during which, for as long as it lasts, the wound can be said to be open and exposed, that is, involved in an open process and constant exposure to that which arrives. 29 This passivity of the body to an excessive movement (or to movement as excess-excess being that which designates the body's openness to the new that cannot be contained in advance as mastery) disturbs its stable, given capacities and opens the body to the dimension of surprise that demands the thinking of the notion of address. Being addressed means being wounded and bleeding, being passively exposed to that which arrives and demands transformation, and the eye's passive exposure to this address, 30 or this call, makes this second kind of eye, which I have called a dynamic eye, also an eye of passion, or a passionate-eye; 31 what expresses this becoming-passionate of the eye, the exposure to this shock of the openness of movement, is the cry.

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Chapter I

Carrie's cry is precisely the expression of the horrifying discovery made by the eye as body in the first scene and by the bleeding body in the second scene, the discovery that there is a body, there is movement, there is transformation and exposure to the unforeseen. The cry can thus be said to be the expression of the limit-dimension of the eye, of what the eye cannot see, its own exposure to the new. The cry, this discovery at the level of language of a dimension in excess of words and stable meanings, the dimension of the openness of these words and meanings to a process of transformation and the coming of the new, is also that which expresses the eye's exposure, the limits of what it can perceive. The cry, language's bleeding, the expression of the eye's passion, of its discovery of an excess of movement internal to its functioning and constituting its blindness: the origin and birth of the cinematic image, of what cinema gives us to see. If De Palma's cinema, as allegorized and actuated in Carries opening scenes, is first and foremost a pedagogy ofthe eye, a dynamic attempt to effectuate and teach, to accept this becoming-passionate of the eye, then it is no less a critical investigation into the ways in which the discovery of horror involved in this becoming entails the creation of various defensive gazes and human actions that attempt in several ways to suppress this newfound eye, to trap it in the mechanisms of representation. That is, De Palma's cinema is a laboratory attempting to isolate, demonstrate, and give a genetic account, in other words, a historical account, of the emergence of various defensive human gazes. 32 Carries first two scenes demonstrate in embryonic form the emergence of three major De Palmian gazes, which I will elaborate upon in later parts of this book. 33 The first of these, as we have seen, emerges almost instantaneously with the arrest of the camera as it frames Carrie's face when she is accused by the other schoolgirls and, in a sense, by us the viewers, of the accident and fall, the arrest of movement. Let us call this gaze the framing I accusatory I destructive gaze (the girls strike Carrie, wanting to hurt her). The second of these gazes emerges when the girls retreat to the showers after the game and enter the slow-motion realm of pleasure. What kind of viewer is constituted by this pleasure-chamber, epitomized by the naked presence of showering girls, what kind of gaze is invoked? The voyeuristic consumer of pornography emerges in this scene. Seeing but not seen, safe from involvement in the action, thus safe from passionate expo-

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sure to the unforeseen, this gaze constitutes its defense against the previous discovery of the eye's bleeding and loss of mastery, its being swept up and brought into movement that precedes it, by making sure that nothing remains unseen and uncontrolled (the penetration of the seemingly secret world of the girls' showers-at least for male viewers-and the evocative space of the shower as one of inspection, where nothing can remain hidden, even under clothes). -Furthermore, the pornographic space of the showers becomes a zone of cleanliness (the girls dean themselves with gleaming white towels) as if the horrifying discovery of the wound, and thus of the body, is a sullying-the penetration of the opening outside can only be regarded as a contaminating danger. 34 But as we've seen, within the space of the shower and the scene dedicated to it-a scene repeating the earlier game sequence and responding to it-an excess is discovered, interrupting the scene with the event of the body's bleeding and of Carrie's cry, interrupting the pornographic logic of this scene, just as the falling of the ball disrupted the logic of the earlier scene (followed by a similarly abusive response by the girls, who now aggressively throw tampons at Carrie). 35 Yet, Carrie's delayed response to her own bleeding, after the initial horror, in the transition to the third scene in the school principal's office, marks the emergence of the third major De Palmian gaze, the paranoid gaze. From the moment Carrie exits the horrifying shower space, she seems to be looked at by everyone, and the school becomes a menacing openness, a space where danger and hurt may come from any angle. 36 Exposed, unprotected, suspecting that everyone intends to hurt her, Carrie attempts to dose space around her more and more, as if to leave no opening or possibility of hurt. The paranoid gaze thus follows the discovery of the body as exposure to movement and openness, the experience of the wounding potential that is the event of movement, interpreting it as an intentional desire, even a conspiracy, to wound the exposed subject. That is, what the paranoid gaze reveals of significance is our being exposed to an excess constituting our blindness, an excess by which we are "watched" before we watch others, 37 which is to say our passive subjection to that which addresses and calls us, an address and call which the paranoid interprets as an actual some one who is looking with malicious intent. 38 Leaving aside for later the crucial question of Carrie's paranoid gaze and the thinking of space that the film develops around it, let us go back to the shower scene and examine two further important issues raised through

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Chapter I

its depiction of the effect of Carrie's cries and addressed gestures on two of the film's characters, the girl Sue and Miss Collins, the physical education teacher (played by Betty Buckley). The first of these issues is raised through Carrie's encounter with Sue and concerns the emergence of one of the most significant of De Palmian figures, that of the witness. 39 What does the emergence of the witness involve? We have already seen Carrie rushing toward the girls; her bloodied hands reaching forward, screaming, "Help me, help me!" Perhaps accidentally, perhaps not, Carrie initially heads toward one of the girls standing a little apart from the others, conspicuous in her glowing white sweater, and seizes her while continuing to scream. Pushed away by this girl, whom we later come to know as Sue, Carrie rushes toward the others only to be pushed by them as well. She returns to Sue, grabbing her sweater more forcefully, as if electing her to help her cope with her enigmatic wounding. Yet, at first, to no effect, for in a manner perhaps more violent than the others, Sue pushes Carrie away and seems to lead the pack in throwing tampons at her. As if called by Carrie's helplessness, Miss Collins, whom we haven't fully seen so far, despite getting a glimpse during the opening scene, dynamically and suddenly appears as if out of nowhere and asks what's going on. 40 In a manner not unlike Carrie's, she singles out Sue, taking hold of her stained white sweater and demanding repeatedly, out of a strange incomprehension, "What are you doing?" only to receive the odd response: "Carrie, she's got her period." Seeming not to understand what was said she asks, "Who's got her period?" and again is told, "Carrie," causing her again to ask, incomprehensibly and with a helpless frustration, "What are you doing?" Pushing Sue and the girls violently aside, she goes to Carrie, who grabs Miss Collins' white pants with her bloodied hands and is grasped in return, as the gym teacher tries to make her listen, to be reasonable. Yet Carrie, in a state of complete bewilderment, screams incomprehensibly, paying no attention to the teacher until Miss Collins forcefully slaps her, telling her to calm down. Things quiet down for a moment. This slap has an immediate, though momentary, effect not only on Carrie but also on the rest of the girls and seems to operate as a procedure of separation between most of the girls (whom we see in one shot giggling and smirking at Carrie) and Sue, who now appears in a separate shot, shivering and frightened, cornered into the wall in a position not unlike Carrie's. 41 From now on, Sue is separated from the girls, following a line of action

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that seeks to have her make up for this initial betrayal of Carrie's demand and supplication; Sue's conscience, a conscience of a witness, or conscience as witnessing, is born. In what sense, then, can Sue be called a witness?42 In the sense that at the core of her actions operates a strange principle that I propose to call the principle of the witness. The strangeness of this principle can be traced to its origin in an encounter that the subject (in this case, Sue) neither wants nor understands, which nevertheless seems to force her, despite herself, to act, and the form of this encounter has to do, I claim, with her being stained by Carrie's blood, inflicted, we might say, against her will (and it is in this sense important that at first she pushes Carrie away) by Carrie's wounding as address and supplication. I should stress again that Sue is not merely stained with Carrie's blood but with her wounding as incomprehensible excess that she cannot contain. For if Sue finds herself in a state of incomprehension, it is because her exposure to Carrie involves her reception of Carrie's wounding as the enigma it originally was, a mystery the other girls quickly try to cover up by simply considering it a "natural" period, instead of the enigma of the body as wound, as vulnerable exposure to transformation. The witness is the one whose principle of action originates in passive, unwilled exposure to the incomprehensible excess of another's wounding experienced as address, whose conscience is constituted by another's wounding as commandY Bur we have seen that Sue's incomprehension came about only after the reproach from Miss Collins, who shakes her and demands repeatedly, "What are you doing?" It is as if the birth of the witness implies a pedagogical moment understood as the interruption of one's doing by the question of a teacher, or as if the articulation of the witness's lesson requires the articulation of a strange pedagogy whose task it is to bring home an interruption of one's doing by putting one's principle of action into question through the intervention of an external principle to which one submits unwillingly. Yet if the gym teacher intervenes as a pedagogical figure in the creation of a witness, she is also called to respond in the same pedagogical role to Carrie's horrified helplessness, to Carrie's discovery of her wounding. Thus a double, interconnected call for pedagogy seems to be uttered by the film. What kind of pedagogy would this be and how can we articulate its lessons?

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Physical Education-A Pedagogy of Heaviness and Exhaustion; A Pedagogy of Touch Carrie is De Palma's most explicit and elaborate meditation on pedagogy and, by extension, on the relations between pedagogy and cinema. 44 At least half its scenes involve some sort of pedagogical encounter, either with teachers and school administrators, or with parents (especially Carrie's mother) as educative authorities. Yet, as a film opening under the guiding eye of the physical education teacher-to whom it gives the most prominent (and sympathetic, though ambivalently so) role among all the school's authorities, almost equaling Carrie's mother in screen time-it is undoubtedly a film that puts at the center of its meditation on pedagogy a meditation on physical education; one might even say the film understands pedagogy and its tasks first and foremost in relation to a physical education and sees its own pedagogical task as elaborating such an education. But what is physical education and what does it have to do with the question of horror, if indeed, as I have claimed, this film stands primarily under the sign of a meditation on horror? These questions, opened up by the film from its first scene onward, are crystallized in the shower scene, when Carrie's agonized cries call forth the apparition of the physical education teacher, as if the horrifying discovery of the body's woundedness is at the same time a call for an education that can respond, be equal, to this discovery. If cinema-which, for De Palma, is the art par excellence through which the body is discovered as wound and in which the event of wounding can be witnessed-is to be equal to its own discovery, it has to be an art, De Palma seems to suggest, that has the pedagogical role of a physical educator, an educator of the body as wound. What response, then, do Carrie's cries elicit from the teacher? As befits a physical education teacher, she comes energized and ready for action to confront the problem that faces her but, as we have seen, is struck by incomprehension and a certain helplessness, as if the discovery of the period is a crisis to her normal functioning as physical educator and to her understanding of her tasks. When confronted with Carrie's cries, the teacher at first holds Carrie at arm's length, saying caringly but firmly and with increasing anxiety: "Come on Carrie, Carrie, quit it, come on, stop it now, relax, calm down, listen to me, it's ok, just stand up and take care of yourself, grow up, stand up, and take care of yourself, come on do it."

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Thus, the physical educator first responds to the discovery of the wound with an imperative for erection. She responds to the body's helplessness and weakness, which the educator cannot stand, with a demand to return to fitness, that is, to a forgetting of the body's initial exposure through its construction as a grown-up, self-sufficient totality-"grow up, stand up, and take care of yourself!" Yet, Carrie doesn't respond well to this gymnastic, or even orthopedic, 45 treatment, her screams increasing until finally, through the releasing of her telekinetic powers, she causes the light bulb above to explode. As if released from the reign of this enlightenment, the teacher, waking up from her orthopedic dream, seems to understand something, embraces Carrie warmly and says, "Carrie, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't know, ok? I'm sorry, come on now, don't you know? Listen, listen, I'm going to talk to you about it, just calm down." The educator's second response thus accepts the student's helplessness, yet accepts it as a temporary lack, construes it as ignorance, a darkness about facts that, if illuminated, will be dispelled, the broken light fixed, and clarity restored. 46 This pedagogical interpretation of the body's helplessness as temporary ignorance, a failure in knowledge, does not seem to abandon the principle of erection, yet accepts a momentary frustration on the way to its achievement, as if the demand for erection is put on hold, slightly delayed. Knowledge (at least a certain kind of knowledge) is thus the temporary mediator between the discovery of the wound and the achievement of erection. Yet, if this (economic) principle of supplying knowledge to heal the demand of the body's wound would have been sufficient, the film could stop then and there, the narrative opened with the discovery of the wound would close. 47 But because the film doesn't end here, there seems to be an excess in the demand of the wound over that which knowledge can supply and which still calls for a pedagogical response, for a strange physical education, which would involve neither the disciplinary demand for the body to stand up on its own and be fit to take care of itself, nor the forgiving and accepting pedagogy of a temporary helplessness solvable by knowledge. How would we articulate such an education? We can start by looking, precisely, at a physical-education session that occupies a central scene in the movie. The gym teacher, after her encounter with Carrie's cries and demand for help, seeks to punish the girls who mocked Carrie. She and the school authorities settle on a punishment

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Chapter I

of a week's detention of fifty minutes a day when the girls will be under her supervision and control. It is as if the teacher feels, although this is not articulated as such, that within these detention sessions Carrie's cries can get their appropriate response. Going even further, it is as if a certain wound that opened up in the teacher through her encounter with Carrie, can itself be answered, for this wound overwhelmed the teacher, challenging her understanding of her role as a physical education teacher and her assumption of that role. That is, Carrie's wound, her cries, her exposure to the horrifYing movement become a principle of contagion, of an involuntary communication, transmitting itself to become the teacher's wound, her own "internal" cry, and the physical education class becomes the arena where this cry now speaks. What, then, does it say, what are its demands? I suggest that the cry's demands are double: On the one hand, the teacher's relish of her control of the students during the class and her ability to make them suffer as a unit makes it quite clear that the teacher's wound, her discovery of a helplessness she cannot control, has resulted in an increased desire for mastery, and mastery understood as complete control over the bodily movements of the students. The discovery of the body's passivity, which, as we've seen, was at the same time the discovery of one's exposure to others, thus becomes the desire for a complete control of the body, not only of one's self, but of others as well, and even more so the desire to turn the others into one, a unity, and to reduce their frightening plurality. But from another point of view, that of the suffering bodies of the students who exercise to the point of exhaustion during the class, something else seems to be heard, to come through this class, and this something says that the body is, precisely, a suffering, an exhaustion, and a heaviness. That is, what the physical education class transmits-a lesson in excess of its attempts at mastery and control and in excess of the regular understanding of such classes as a place to become fit, to develop resilience to external forces and influences-is the lesson called forth by the horrifYing discovery of the period: The body is not first and foremost an athletic capacity, an instrument to exercise control over its environment, but a passive openness, a receptive capacity to assume various movements that are always in excess of what the body can do and thus exhaust it. We can perhaps phrase the relation berween these rwo points of view in the following manner: it is a question of understanding the exercise as

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a discovery of an essential and constitutive exhaustion, rather than understanding exhaustion as an unnecessary evil that the exercise can in principle eliminate on its way to becoming fit. And this physical lesson of exhaustion cannot be understood as a communication of knowledge about the body but, rather, has to be endured as an exercise, that is, as a practical participation in a movement essentially constituted on its possibility of exhaustion. This is the period's lesson, 48 and one of the tasks of De Palma's cinema, I propose, is to make us participate in the movements of such exercises. 49 Through the complex way he shoots and edits the class, De Palma tries to transmit this lesson of exhaustion-but what I want us in the present context to take from this class are two things. The first is the way in which this lesson of exhaustion is presented as a lesson of the body's heaviness. The girls' exercises move from an energetic standing up and jumping as a unified group to an exhausted attempt of separate individuals, each with her own rhythm, to do push-ups and to lift themselves away from the increasing pull of the ground. We feel not only the girls' growing heaviness but that of the camera itself because with every new exercise, the camera shoots from a lower and lower angle until it is itself almost touching the ground, as if pulled down by the gravity affecting the exercises. My second point concerns this lesson of heaviness, which reveals the limits of a logic of the body as actively becoming fit, exposing it to its constitutive exhaustion, becoming for De Palma a principle of cinematic narrative. For at the point where the girls are so close to the ground and some have given up the possibility of lifting themselves, De Palma, for the first time in the film, breaks the linearity of the narrative and cuts to an alternative story, perhaps happening simultaneously, perhaps not, it is impossible to tell: that of Carrie in the library doing research about telekinesis, after which the film returns to the gym class. At this point-when we discover De Palma pointing to a strange understanding of cinematic narrative, not completely developed in Carrie, but more fully worked out in his next film, The Fury, whose whole narrative logic is dictated by the alternation of two narratives, one dominated by an athletic understanding of action and of the body and a second, opening from out of the limit and collapse of the athletic narrative, and dominated by events of passion-unfortunately, we have to cut.

Between Paranoia and PassionQuestioning the Frame and the Screen in The Fury

One can imagine that a toe, always more or less damaged and humiliating, is psychologically analogous to the brutal fall of man. A return to reality does not imply any new acceptances, but means that one is seduced in a base manner, without transpositions and to the point of screaming, opening his eyes wide: opening them wide, then, before a big toe. GEORGES BATAILLE, "THE BIG TOE"

The transfigured shoes are in a state of levitation, they are the haloes of themselves. Don't look down anymore, toward the low or the very low (the feet, the shoes, the soil, the subsoil) but once more (follow the peasant woman) look up, toward the most high, the face facing you, the Face. JACQUES DERRIDA,

The Truth in Painting

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Chapter 2

Before moving on to the interrogation of the next De Palma film that will interest us, The Fury, I would like at this moment to say a few more words about this book's methodological context and its theoretical background, for we are at the moment when some of the essential questions that are at stake for the book and some of the ways of dealing with them have been raised in a preliminary way, yet without elaborating enough on their guiding background. We might say that the general questions guiding this book are the following: How is one to think through the significance of the art of film for philosophy? What would it mean to introduce film as a question into the heart of the philosophical enterprise? How would this transform our understanding of film, on the one hand, and of philosophy and the philosophical tradition, on the other? And finally, why is a concept of reading a film needed to think about these questions rigorously? Let us take an outrageously brief and reductive look at these questions. Philosophy can be very succinctly defined, to use Gilles Deleuze's formulation, as a "logic of sense," that is, as that strange discourse that interrogates the logic, or the generalized rules, governing the ways in which things and the world make and don't make sense for us, as well as trying to understand what making and not making sense actually mean. What interests me in relation to this definition of philosophy is to examine how works of art can be said to contribute to what has traditionally been the domain of philosophy; or otherwise put, I am interested in investigating works of art as proposing for us a view of the logic governing the relations between what makes and what doesn't make sense. If the philosophical tradition has not treated works of art in such a way, it is because there is something in the artistic understanding and interrogation of sense that exceeds the traditional philosophical understanding. This excess made philosophy blind to that which it could not grasp through its own conceptual frame. One of the main concepts that can help us understand the significance of art to the logic of sense, I suggest, is the seemingly simple concept of reading. Why is it that reading is such an essential concept in the constellation of these questions? When designating reading as a concept in this context, I don't mean it to be understood as that act of going through a book or a newspaper article at our disposal, through which we immediately understand and grasp the meaning of that which is presented us. No, in the context of our discussion, reading is a concept that designates the particular way of interacting with the work of art's interrogation of sense.

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Works of art are notoriously difficult to understand, their meaning is never immediate and always seems to be elusive and escaping. Reading, therefore, when applied to the encounter with works of art, designates precisely that which is called for when something does not immediately make sense for us, when we encounter a dimension we might call enigmatic. The question then arises what is the function of reading; is it to restore meaning, to make that which was enigmatic comprehensible, or is it rather, which is my suggestion, to make us open to the very dimension of the enigmatic, expose us to how it comes about and how it operates, and help us activate it, or render it creative? This dimension of the enigmatic, I claim, escaped the traditional way in which philosophy tried to account for the relations between what makes and what doesn't make sense. Though I will not be able in this context to elaborate much on this claim, I will nevertheless try to point to it in a limited way as we go along.

* Let us go back, then, to De Palma. De Palma is, I claim, a philosophical filmmaker in that his cinema involves us in a profound logical investigation of the cinematic ways of producing meaning, or of making sense. The philosophical interrogation of sense that De Palma's cinema practices involves, I argue, two main components: First, De Palma's cinema is a rigorous analysis of the signifying logic governing all the major filmic categories-from the frame, to camera movement, to the editing cut, to the dose-up, to the relations between vision and sound, and so on. Second, this signifying logic that De Palma develops and shows to be operating at the heart of these filmic categories is a profoundly nonmetaphysical logic of sense, that is, a logic of sense that exceeds the determination of sense effected by the philosophical tradition. By unfolding a logic of sense in excess of the tradition, De Palma's films call upon us (1) to rethink the major categories of sense that have served, implicitly or explicitly, in all major interpretations of art and film, and (2) to examine the particular significance that the art or medium of film has for the general question of sense. In this chapter I investigate, through a reading of The Fury, De Palma's development of the logic of sense that can be said to be implied in several key traditional cinematic categories, taking as the focal point of my investigation the problem of the cinematic frame and examining how it confronts

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us with the dimension that, I claimed, exceeds the philosophical interrogation of sense, the dimension I termed enigmatic.

* Let us move, then, to The Fury, and to an investigation of its questioning of the cinematic frame. How does the frame function in film, the art most evidently consisting of a multiplicity of frames and depending for its means of signification on the relations that successive frames maintain with each other? De Palma's The Fury is, to my mind, one of the films to pose this question most complexly and rigorously. To better orient our discussion, I will briefly sketch its narrative. Peter Sandza, a secret agent for a mysterious federal agency, is the father of Robin, an exceptional teenager with remarkable paranormal powers, whom Peter is raising by himself. At the film's beginning, Sandza and his son are about to go back to Chicago after many years abroad. Yet Sandza's partner, Childress, has other plans; he intends to turn Robin into a secret American weapon in the Cold War. To remove the father-the only obstacle to his plan-Childress stages a fake terrorist attack in which Sandza is supposed to be killed. Though the attack fails and Sandza manages to escape, he is believed to be dead. His son witnesses what he takes to be his father's death at sea. Sandza henceforth concentrates his efforts on locating and saving his son. One attempt involves finding someone with psychic powers who might help him communicate with and so track down Robin. Thus the film's second scene introduces Gillian, a sensitive teenage girl with psychic and telekinetic powers who becomes the film's second focus, the plot alternating between her story and Sandza's. Gillian's most distinctive quality is her uncontrollable tendency to cause those who touch her to bleed, which produces in her an incredible fear of being touched. To better understand why she causes others to bleed, she checks herself into an institute dedicated to researching paranormal behavior-the very same institute, as it happens, where Robin was held following his kidnapping. After many complications, Sandza communicates with Gillian, who contacts Robin telepathically, escapes the institute, and helps Sandza identifY the place where his son is held. But it is too late. Robin, now paranoid and destructive, cannot and will not accept the returning father. In desperation, Robin

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lets himself plunge from the top of a building to his death. Sandza, witnessing his son's death, throws himself off the building as well, killing himsel£ In the film's dosing scenes, Childress, who considers Gillian a potential replacement for Robin, tries to manipulate her into adopting him as a father. Acting as if she believes him, Gillian slowly kisses his eyes, making them bleed and bringing about his blindness. When the blind Childress desperately attempts to catch her, Gillian telekinetically makes his body explode into pieces, images of flying bodily fragments and a decapitated head bringing the movie to its end. The plot might sound slightly outlandish, but the movie itself, though indeed excessive and unreasonable to the point of ridicule, is an extraordinary cinematic investigation, as are all De Palma's films. I would further say that these films' excessive quality is precisely what constitutes their challenge to philosophical thinking. So without further preliminary remarks, I would like to look at how the movie poses the question of the frame with its opening scene.

The Father's Frame The Fury opens with a tightly framed swimming contest between a father and son. The viewer is positioned exactly in front of the contest, basically at eye level (the camera is very low, almost on the surface of the sea), the competitors being viewed rather closely by a quite stable, very slowly moving camera. The viewer is thus in full possession of the scene, the relatively stable frame and the closeness of the action allowing for tight control of the situation and its meaning. As the two reach the shore, they come out of the water half running, half falling, stumbling with some difficulty toward the race's finish line, where they collapse and fall on the ground, breathing heavily, obviously exhausted. At the moment the father hits the ground exhausted (claiming nevertheless to have won, though he actually lost)-the camera all the while showing the action at eye level, framing the current situation very low, showing the ground at the bottom of the frame-a small, strange, at first unidentified thing seems to intrude from outside the lower right side of the frame. At this point, I claim, the movie can be said to start to address the viewers, that is to implicate them in that which happens on the screen, thus opening a relation between them, but

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doing that by precisely taking something away from them-the clear ground of the meaning of the situation. This being addressed has to do with what I shall therefore call the enigmatic interruption ofthe frame, that is, with the event through which something is discovered within the frame that cannot be explained by, or contained in, the frame, something that exceeds it, and thus functions as an enigmatic sign implicating the viewers, who have lost their position as masters of the frame and of its meaning, in a demand for response. This uncanny film most rigorously interrogates and develops this enigma of the interrupted frame and its implications-having to do with the exhaustion of the father, with his body and his fall, with the discovery of the earth at the limits of the frame, and with the kind of addressee that this enigma calls for. 1 This enigma will occupy the center of our investigations in this chapter. My hypothesis is the following: The Fury takes as its point of departure the discovery of a homology between two concepts, that of the father and that of the cinematic frame, two concepts whose mutual implication can help shed light on each other. The film interrogates the consequences of their mutual collapse and demonstrates that film can be thought of as the art par excellence dedicated to the question of the interrupted father I frame or, as we will later see, to the question of the wounding of the father and the breaking of the frame. But what is the status of the frame in film, at least as it has been traditionally elaborated? What kind of thing is the cinematic frame? It is immediately obvious, it would appear, that it is not the static frame of painting, separating a stable inside from a seemingly unrelated outside, and which marks the borders of a painting. In the most basic manner, the film frame has been defined, for example by David Bordwell, as "that which produces a certain vantage point onto the material within the image" and doing this "by means of (1) the size and shape of the frame, (2) the way the frame defines on-screen and offscreen space, and (3) the way framing controls the distance, angle, and height of a vantage point onto the image." 2 Going slightly further, the film frame can be said to be (and I quote) that which "makes the image finite. The film image is bounded, limited. From an implicitly continuous world the frame selects a slice to show us." 3 Though not functioning as a border as it does in painting, the film frame is thus nevertheless a principle of limitation and marks a distinction or a separation between an inside and an outside, between the image seen and what is

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external to the image, technically referred to as that which is out-of-field. If indeed there is a homology, as I suggested, upon which The Fury is constructed, between the function of the frame and the function of the father, we can now define the father as a figure of delimitation that guarantees the separation between what is inside and what is outside the frame; or in other words, the father is the frame, or a framing device. But if indeed both the pictorial frame and the cinematic one involve a separation between inside and outside, the nature of this separation seems to substantially differ. As Stanley Cavell argues, there is an important distinction to be made between the way in which the relations of the inside and the outside function in film and photography and the way in which they function in painting. For, as Cavell says, "You can always ask, of an area photographed, what lies adjacent to that area, beyond the frame. This generally makes no sense asked of a painting. You can ask these questions of objects in photographs because they have answers in reality. The world of a painting is not continuous with the world of its frame; at its frame, a world finds its limits. We might say: A painting is a world; a photograph is of the world. What happens in a photograph is that it comes to an end. A photograph is cropped, not necessarily by a paper cutter or by masking, but by the camera itsel£ ... When a photograph is cropped the rest of the world is cut out. The implied presence ofthe rest ofthe world, and its explicit rejection, are as essential in the experience of a photograph as what it explicitly presents." And going a bit further, talking about film, Cavell says "Because it is the field of a photograph, the screen has no frame; that is to say, no border. Its limits are not so much the edges of a given shape as they are the limitations, or capacity, of a container. The screen is a .frame; the .frame is the whole field of the screen"4 (italics mine). These distinctions between film and painting seem to confirm, though perhaps not explicitly, that a thinking of a distinct logic of delimitation that the film-frame effects is called for, thus of the logic of the specific way in which the filmframe negotiates the relations between an inside and an outside. Cavell suggestively offers the term rejection for thinking this logic. Why should the world beyond the frame be understood as rejected, we may ask? Can we say that there is a certain anxiety in the very experience of the world that calls for such a term? I would like to suggest that indeed there is, and I would like to call this anxiety-provoking dimension the opening of the world, wishing opening to be heard as a verb rather than as substance. That

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which is external to the frame and which the frame precisely rejects, I suggest here and will elaborate later on, is not simply other parts of the world understood as a collection of things, but this dimension of the world we can call its opening. We might therefore say, that the outside of the frame, that which the frame does not contain, is not just the realm of other parts of the world, other things or substances that the frame cannot encompass but, rather, a dimension different than things, the dimension of the world's activity of opening. The outside of the frame understood now as the opening of the world is therefore of a different dimension than the inside of the frame, understood as the collection of things presented to our perception. And can we then not say, taking this thought further, that this anxiety-provoking opening, the outside of the frame that, as Cavell says, is implicitly present in the image, is therefore inscribed at the very heart of the frame, disturbing the inside, as something not present in it and thus strange and incomprehensible? We might thus describe the way in which the world's opening is strangely inscribed at the heart of the frame, I claim, as a ghostly and absent disturbance, or as an enigmatic haunting, of that which the frame does not contain. 5 This is the hypothesis I would like to examine. The cinematic frame, I therefore suggest, would thus seem to simultaneously expose us to the anxiety of the world's opening inscribed in it, and to attempt to cover up or repress, defend against this opening and reject it, in its negotiations of the inside and the outside. 6 It would thus seem that the cinematic frame becomes the locus of tension between the actual things present in it, the content of a slice of the world, and the verbal dimension of the world's opening that is inscribed in it as a ghostly enigma. What makes the concept of the cinematic frame interesting and important, I therefore argue, is that it involves simultaneously these two dimensions, that of the frame's content and that of the haunting opening, the outside of the frame that leaves its enigmatic traces in it. I wish to interrogate this tension, which constitutes the very being of the cinematic frame, by looking at a series of enigmatic interruptions of the frame in The Fury.

* Let us, then, return to The Furjs opening scene on the beach and see what happens when the father becomes exhausted and when the frame is enigmatically interrupted. What is the enigma uncovered by the two athletes, the father and the son, falling on the ground, what is this unidenti-

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fied thing that interrupted the frame? A toe, we soon discover, an exposed toe, for the moment isolated within the frame, separate from any body, occupying a small, shadowy part of the frame. Thus, an exposed fragment of the body, and of that part of the body in closest contact with the ground, constitutes the opening enigma of this film, as if that which is in excess of the frame and of the father has to do with the relations between the ground and the body as fragmented, or as fragment, as a big toe. We might even suggest that it is the discovery of the body as fragmented, as a dismembered non-whole, in excess of the frame, and the simultaneous discovery of the body's relation to the ground, that exposes the opening of signification, or perhaps of sense, as having to do with an enigmatic address. This enigma, then, opens the film and sets it in motion, in a motion whose task is to respond to the enigma, for the scandal of the toe has to be resolved, the anxiety of the interrupted frame has to be eliminated. The subsequent narrative of the film-with its two alternating stories-can be read as two trajectories responding to the interruption of the frame. The first trajectory, dominated by Peter Sandza, deals with his attempts to recover his son; the second is dominated by the visionary Gillian's story and by her telepathic relations to the psychic, lost son. Continuing briefly with the scene at the beach, and with an interrogation of the logic dictating the first trajectory, we see that the enigmatic interruption of the frame repeats three times, each time through a different filmmaking strategy that nonetheless repeats the same movement: The frame is interrupted enigmatically and this enigma receives each time an answer, the same answer-Childress. The toe, it seems, this scandalous excess, has to belong to someone, has to be mastered and framed, and the shape of this new frame involves constituting, at first, a benevolent, heavenly judge, and then, in a reversal of values, an evil, dark, and maimed manipulator, who can be said to be responsible for the meaning of that which at first seemed enigmatic, as if pulling the strings from outside and constituting a new frame in which the situation can finally be comprehended. This repetitive series of enigmas and responses, making it increasingly clear that evil Childress is the manipulator of the enigma and that a new frame exists that can finally be grasped, leads this brilliant first scene of The Fury from a discovery of the frame's interruption to the constitution of something we can call a paranoid cinema ofaction, one of the cinemas in which De Palma is interested the most, a cinema that reveals the

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limits of a cinema of action while showing the roots of its constitution. 7 Let us briefly continue to interrogate the three ways the enigma of the interrupted frame is posed, culminating in the coming into being of the paranoid cinema of action. We have seen that the first enigma is posited through a disturbance of the frame by a strange element that penetrates it, yet remains sufficiently external to the frame as to not yet receive its meaning from the frame. The second enigma is simultaneously posed through two devices, the cinematic cut and the changing of the perspective of the shots. When Childress and the Sandzas begin walking, the film suddenly detaches itself from them and shows them in three consecutive shots, each from a different perspective. In the first one, we see them together. In the second shot, from another perspective, the Sandzas and Childress really begin to separate, and while Childress' figure starts to grow, the Sandzas' figures start to diminish until, in the third shot, we view the scene from the perspective of a close-up showing Childress talking on the phone, with the tiny, distant figures of the Sandzas in the background. What is enigmatic in these three shots is the way the cut and the change of perspective do not as yet seem to point to any organizing and thus framing principle, do not seem to form a whole. 8 We thus lose again our bearings, denied an external position from which to interpret the three shots, and are thus enigmatically addressed by the cut itself, which now occupies the same position as the toe penetrating the frame did earlier. The cinematic viewer in this case is thus the one who responds to the enigma of the cut. Finally, the third enigma is posed in the conversation between Peter Sandza and his son Robin, sitting alone for a minute while Childress is on the phone. The conversation follows a pattern of questions and answers, of anxious interjections and reassuring responses, in which the son, worried about returning to life in America, asks the father about his future, seeking help, reassurance, and guidance. The son, telekinetically and psychically gifted, is worried about being considered a freak at school, not fitting in, and what he thus wants his father to do is to make a place for him, assure him he will fit in. This conversation is shot in such a way that the enigma enters the film, an enigma that we can name in this scene the enigma of the father's failure, of his exposure, or of his impotence. Starting to move as the son asks his questions, the camera begins to slowly circle the pair in a movement articulating the anxiety that remains unanswered

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in the conversation in terms of framing and the opening of space. For what does the movement of the camera indicate? It indicates that something in the son's questions, and in the son as a question, is in excess of the possibility of the father to respond, thus to arrest. Something in the son's questions, in what he demands of the father, cannot be answered and arrested as meaning, thus framed by the father. Something in the sonthe film calls this something his freakishness, his not fitting in, thus not having a place-points essentially to the impotence of the father, and thus to the impotence of the father as concept. For what the father cannot do is make the son fit in, and the camera's movement exposes and activates this freakishness and not fitting in, not being able to find a place. 9 For the movement of the camera, constantly changing even in the slightest of ways, altering the way the space the father and son occupy is framed, indicates that what is at the basis of the father's impotence is, precisely, and only that, the openness of the frame, its exposure to a threatening and unpredictable elsewhere. We don't know when the camera is going to stop or what its movement will reveal next, that is, what can suddenly enter the frame and change its meaning, and what enigmatically addresses us now is precisely this movement of the camera, its suspension of the frame. Thus, the enigma of the interrupted frame, which was at first the toe, and then the cut, now becomes the camera's movement. The enigma of this movement by which we are addressed has to do with the suspense of the frame, its non-arrest and final meaning. 10 And again, as in the previous two enigmas, the movement of the camera, thus the constant exposure of the frame, reveals Childress. As the camera continues its menacing movement, suddenly Childress enters the frame, coming in between the son and the father, even asking the son to leave because he needs to talk to the father, thus finally separating the two. Childress' arrival as the principle of giving an identity to the menacing exposure of the frame, manages to separate the father and the son, constituting an unbridgeable gap that the movie will never close. Yet it is precisely the conjunction of this separation of the father and son, thus the discovery of the enigma of the interrupted frame, with the giving of an identity, a name, to this enigma, Childress, that to a certain extant calms the anxiety of the exposure of the frame to the unanticipated. And this conjunction finally defines the destiny of the father-son adventure as a paranoid cinema of action. For right away, following the separation of the

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two by Childress, this cinema of action is constituted at last. This is a cinema in which the enigma of the interrupted frame, by receiving an identity, is erased, and replaced by a belief that the breach between father and son does not point to an essential impotence at the heart of the human-the exposure of the frame to an openness it cannot control, an exposure that destroys the very concepts of father and son-but rather, that this breach is only of a temporary and accidental nature, and once the coordinates are established about who is responsible for the breach and what should be done to fix it, an action could be undertaken to bring about this final resolution. Paranoia is thus the name for the mechanism transforming the enigma of the interrupted frame into a stable identity that, despite its temporary menace, can finally be eliminated. Thus, just after the two are separated, the father is shot, and this shooting segment of the opening scene of the film seems to completely erase the disturbance of the frame with which the film opens. The father paradoxically sheds his impotence by being explicitly attacked, and in heroic actions, he manages quickly to trace the source of the shooting and respond to it. And this heroic restoration of the father manifests as well the change undergone by the editing and cutting functions. If the cut previously introduced the enigma, it now stitches together several points of view into a whole of action. The existence of several perspectives, that had earlier, because of its lack of motivation, introduced an uncanny strangeness to the situation is now explained through the cut as consisting of the various angles from which the enemies of the father shoot, and what had thus been unexplained is now explained away as a conspiracy against the father and son, a conspiracy to separate them. Unfortunately, the father's heroic actions do not suffice, and the son, who is taken away, believes, erroneously, that his father died at sea. On the immediate level of action, this mistake might be seen only as a temporary setback, not essentially altering the logic of action dictating the father's itinerary, but on a deeper level, what is revealed is an excess beyond the cinema of action, an excess that will prove impossible to eliminate. For what the son witnessed in this scene is the death of the father, and though this death proves mistaken, the witnessing is in fact real, for if the "empirical" father did not really die in this scene, his function nonetheless did. And it is precisely this excess revealed by the death of the father and of the father function, an excess we called that of the enigmatically interrupted

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frame, that opens up the second main itinerary of the film, that of the psychic girl Gillian, an itinerary that does not respond to the interruption of the frame by constructing a paranoid, athletic cinema of action but, rather, constitutes a second type of cinema, a cinema ofpassionate witnessing ofthe broken frame. Before moving on to Gillian's testimonial cinema, I would like to briefly relate our discussion so far of the enigmatically interrupted frame to a concept that has occupied such a major place in the theoretical discussion of film from the 1970s onward, that of the suture. As has often been repeated, the suture, a term coined by Jacques Lacan and extensively elaborated by Jacques-Alain Miller in his essay "Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)," 11 an essay attempting to theorize the logic of the introduction of the human subject into the order of meaning, was introduced into film theory by Jean-Pierre Oudart, and developed further by such theoreticians as Stephen Heath, Daniel Dayan, Kaja Silverman, and more recently by Joan Copjec and Slavoj Zizek To avoid rehearsing the various moments in the development of this concept (a useful summary of the field can be found in Kaja Silverman's "On Suture" and in a more recent contribution to the question, the second chapter of Slavoj Zizek's The Fright of Real Tears 12 ), suffice it to say that what seems to me crucial and essential about the theoreticians of the suture, which goes beyond those many details of their analyses that are arguable, are three moments: (1) their attempt to develop a theory of cinematic signification, that is, of the way film is related to the problem of sense; (2) their attempt to theorize the cinematic viewer, to answer the question, who is the subject of film, who is the spectator?; and (3) their formulation of these questions around a fundamental experience of film viewing that we can call the discovery of the anxiety of the image at the limits of the frame. The early theoreticians of the suture defined the cinematic viewer as the one whose initial identification with the cinematic image is interrupted through the anxious discovery of the dimension of the frame, which these theoreticians defined as a discovery that there is a dimension external to, or outside of, the image viewed, an other to the frame. Through this discovery of an other, or even an Other (which they have called the absent-one), to the frame, the viewer realizes that "what I see is only a part, and I do not master what I see," 13 and the viewer's anxiety

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has to do with this loss of mastery. 14 This anxiety, they argued, opens up the question of cinematic signification because the discovery of a dimension outside the frame opens up the necessity of a relation. Thus, meaning is not given in the framed image, but happens in, and depends on, the movement of the relation, thus the movement of signification, of this first image to an Other that is then understood as its signified, of giving us the meaning of the first retroactively. Yet they have also argued (more or less; I'm trying to point to the essence of their claims, if not always repeating what they actually said), the anxious discovery of the dimension of an Other to the frame, a discovery of a dimension unmeaningful in itself but opening a search for meaning and necessary for the process of its articulation, has to be immediately appeased as meaning by turning this Other into another frame or image, which as if answers within the world of the film the anxious question raised by the discovery of an Other to the frame. For example, realizing the limit of the frame, if the viewer can find in the next shot a character from whose point of view the first frame is supposedly viewed, then the anxious discovery of an Other is resolved because the viewer identifies this Other with the character the film introduced, and thus regains mastery of the situation. This appeasement is called suturing, and it turns the mechanism of the opening of the movement of meaning through the necessary mediation of an Other into a meaningful, complete statement that covers up and hides the mechanism permitting its articulation. The viewing subject is thus, for these theoreticians, the one constituted by this structure of appeasement, the one whose anxiety is calmed by turning the Other to the frame into another frame within the filmic world. It is easy to see that the mechanism of suturing follows the logic of the creation of what I have called a paranoid cinema of action, and that the character of Childress very precisely functions as offering within the filmic world someone or something who could be viewed as occupying the position of an Other who can be understood as having interrupted the frame, and thus accused of this interruption. We can thus say that all cinema, or at least all classical cinema, according to the early theoreticians of the suture, is essentially, though implicitly, a paranoid cinema of action, or at the very least a paranoid cinema, and the sutured subject, the cinematic viewer, is a paranoid spectator. Now, it becomes clear that not only does The Fury's opening scene follow the inevitable mechanism of suture that these theo-

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reticians claim dominated film's means of signification, but that the scene is itself a narrativization of suture, turning the theory of suture (whether De Palma is aware of it or not) into a narrative. 15 Now, the theoreticians of the suture, especially when the concept was in its early stages, tried to limit the suturing mechanism to a few cinematic techniques held up as exemplary, especially the shot I reverse-shot. But such a limited range of techniques was increasingly questioned, and the concept of the suture was expanded to other cinematic procedures. We can now say that although the question of suture undoubtedly possesses an acute significance for film theory, no specific mechanism is more apt than another in achieving the suturing effect. Based on the reading of The Furjs opening sequence, it seems we can say that basically any way of enigmatically interrupting the frame-and there are numerous ways of doing it (I have pointed to four examples)-can bring about the anxiety that demands responseand there are thus equally numerous ways to attempt to quiet this anxiety, to create a new frame. Thus, we can say that the minimal definition for the opening of cinematic signification, and thus for a need felt for suture, is the enigmatically interrupted frame. 16 Yet, though The Furjs opening scene most definitely presents a narrative of suture, I have argued that the excess beyond this narrative, and thus beyond suture, is precisely what interests De Palma, an excess that demands a new kind of cinema. This cinema I have called the cinema of a passionate witnessing of the broken frame. The task we now face in relation to the question of suture is the following: If the excess beyond suture will now define a new kind of cinema, then this excess will also define anew who the cinematic viewer is and what cinematic signification consists of. This "new" cinematic viewer, I suggest here and will try to develop, is precisely not the paranoid spectator of the suture, but the witness addressed by the enigmatic interruption of the frame, or the one wounded and addressed by the broken frame, and cinema's means of signification will not have to do with the reduction of the Other of the frame into an element in the movie but, precisely, with the frame's exposure to another logic, the logic of the enigma, by which the viewer is addressed, or in which she or he is implicated. 17 To achieve these theoretical developments, we will need to be able to define more rigorously and precisely the dimension of the frame's Other, and we will have to see the implications of this dimension clearly, for this is where the theoreticians of the suture

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failed, resolving too quickly the issue of the relations between the question of the frame and the question of an Other, not developing a thought of the dimension of the Other that was complex enough. They have failed to distinguish between various possible thoughts of the Other, of (a) an Other as simply that which is external to the frame, which thus maintains a spatial thinking, thus a framed thinking, between an inside and outside to the frame, and (b) an Other as an ideological operation of control of the order of articulation of the various images, that nonetheless can still be viewed as operating according to a logic of the frame because it seems able to control the way in which meaning is constituted, thus to control what is meaningful and what isn't, the inside and outside of meaning, we might say. And (c) an Other to the frame in the sense of that which points to a logic different than the logic of the frame. 18 That is, rather then attempting to develop a logic of the frame and its Other, the question guiding this essay will be the attempt to develop a thought of an Other that demands a logic other than the logic of the frame. 19 I have said that the opening scene of The Fury ends with a constitution of a paranoid cinema of action, a cinema attempting to restore the figure of the father following the discovery of his collapse and the interruption of the frame. What I have not yet mentioned is that this paranoid restoration involves a strange procedure where to restore the father, he must be doubled, and this doubling involves a confrontation of a heroic father (Sandza) with his dark double, the evil manipulator (Childress) discovered or constituted by the mechanism of paranoia. Thus, for the good father to be restored, for the frame to be reinstated, a strange mirror has to be constructed, wherein the father's image is restored only if his dark, inverted, double is reflected back to him. A paranoid cinema of action thus depends for its constitution on the construction of a mirror that will reflect back a negative frame-an Other to the positive frame, in the sense of the Other manipulator of the theoreticians of the suture-that will restore to the positive frame its coherency and meaning. Thus, if indeed, as I have claimed, an excess beyond this paranoid, sutured cinema is discovered and called for by this film, it has to be introduced as a third term, a nonreflexive excess, whose logic is discovered in the bleeding cracks of the inverted mirror, in a blind spot where neither the good nor the evil father can see, for all these fathers can see is each other, and what escapes their field of vision, what constitutes their blindness, involves the birth of a new cinema and of a new eye.

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Wounded by Whiteness; or, The Witness and the Horrifying Discovery of the Blank Screen But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power

to

the soul. HERMAN MELVILLE,

Moby-Dick

At the very last moment of the opening scene, Childress is finally discovered and recognized by Sandza as the one responsible for the assault against him, a recognition that prompts Sandza to shoot Childress, inflicting a wound that causes Childress to fall. Just before his fall, Childress recognizes Sandza's knowledge, and thus constitutes the perfect mirror whereby both see and know that the other sees and knows and so forth. But just when the mirror is constituted, Childress immediately falls, and the scene fades out and bleeds into the following scene, a fall signaling a crack in the mirror, an interruption of the new, restorative evil frame constituted by paranoia, and a call for a new cinema, a cinema beyond the mirror and beyond the suture. A double falling of the father, both of the good father and of his devilish opponent, thus occurs in this scene, a double fall to earth calling for the opening of the second trajectory of the film, a call heard across the ocean, mysteriously touching from a distance the girl Gillian, whom we first encounter in the second scene of the movie, taking place, like the first, on the beach. As if mysteriously continuing Childress's fall across the ocean-transmitting as a call the movement of the father's fall (a movement that is the

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father's fall 20 ) that characterized the first scene-the camera at the opening of this second scene, into which the previous scene with its last image of Childress falling slowly fades, starts a descent to earth from its rather high position framing the sky, the sea, and the beach. As it finally reaches the lowest point in its slow descent, offering an eye-level view of people strolling on the beach, a minor accident happens. A boy on his bike loses his balance and bumps into, or even slightly falls on, one of the strollers. Just as the accident happens, we suddenly hear, strangely, an unseen voice out of the frame, a voice as if coming out of the accident, as if the voice coming out of the exposed bodies, discovering through the accident their openness to hurt. This is the voice of the girl Gillian, a fatherless girl living with her mother, who enters the frame less than a second later. She begins walking with her back to us, the camera following or spying on her and a friend with whom she is conversing. Suddenly, she seems to be uttering a name-why she cannot explain-and we soon discover that she is responding telepathically to a strange man following them, a man, we realize, who works for Sandza, trying to locate gifted people who might help him get in touch with his son. This is an extraordinarily pregnant and complex cinematic moment whose task is to articulate the logic governing this character's entrance into our film. We might first say that she is introduced as a principle of an enigmatic interruption of the frame, and this from two perspectives: She speaks, for a slight second, before she is seen, or enters the frame, and her voice, because its source cannot be located on or off screen, raises the momentary anxiety we associated with the interruption. Her voice has the uncanny quality we showed the toe to have, of a contexdess fragment, severed from any whole body, signaling to us, and addressing us, precisely because its meaning cannot be framed or mastered. Thus, the opening of signification as an enigmatic, bodiless, or more precisely personless voice in excess of the frame, parallels the opening of signification in the exposed, fragmented body as big toe in excess of the frame. Going perhaps even further, we can say that the voice itself, the voice before this or that meaning that it articulates, is the voice ofthe fragmented body, or its resonance, that is, the sound of its discovery of its fragmentation, of its accident. 21 The voice, the human voice, is the signifying sound of the discovery of the body as fragment, a decontextualized exposure to the non-whole (we will have to develop all these connections further), and just as the disturbance

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of the toe had to be quickly resolved by attaching it to someone (Childress), so here the scandal of the voice has to be fitted to some body who can assume responsibility for it, thus frame it. 22 In this sense, Gillian first comes onto the screen in a way parallel to Childress's entrance, as partially resolving the scandal of the frame's interruption. But we might also say that this resolution comes with the price-as it did in Childress's caseof a paranoid construction, which we might also view as a scapegoating mechanism. That is, we might say that Gillian's entrance into the frame makes her, among other things soon to be examined, responsible for the anxiety of the detached voice. To examine the complex nature of her responsibility in its relation to the interruption of the frame, we should take a look at the second perspective from which her entrance into the frame, and thus into our visual field, is thought-a more prominent perspective in this context than that of the voice. 23 This is the perspective of the camera's movement. I have said that Gillian enters the movie just a moment after the camera-which has continued the movement of the fall of the first scene-ends its descent to earth and the frame is arrested on the accident. We might thus say that, like Childress, she occupies the suturing position of the one responsible for the interruption of the frame, thus the one responsible for the anxiety produced by the camera's movement. By occupying the place of the arrested frame following the movement, Gillian becomes responsible for the anxiety of this movement. In this sense, Gillian's entry into the frame a second after the accident seems a structural statement about filmic movement and arrest in general. It is as if any one who accidentally happened to enter the frame at this moment could have occupied this position of being accused and responsible for the frame's suspense and interruption in movement. We might thus say that it is not necessarily the responsible heroine of the film on which the camera lands but, rather, the reverse: the heroine of the film is the one accidentally occupying a certain framed position with which a camera movement ends. Thus, when Gillian enters the visual field of the film and starts to walk with her back to us, there is a sense in which she occupies implicitly the position of a suspect, or even someone accused, someone we-and the camera-need to keep an eye on, because our fears and our anxiety, but also our hope for resolution, focus on her. But there is another dimension

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of Gillian's entry into the visual field and another logic of her place in it and of the nature of her responsibility, a logic that goes beyond the suturing logic of the one responsible for the anxiety of the interrupted frame. This dimension is that of a witness to a telepathic call a dimension implying the logic ofexposure to movement, a witnessing and an exposure called for by the very nature of the camera movement as the event of the suspension of the frame. A few seconds after entering the film, Gillian suddenly feels an alien voice speaking within her, as if bringing her to say things she cannot give reason for, and this is, we soon discover, an emissary of the fallen father Sandza who telepathically communicates with her, in his attempts to find someone to help get the father in touch with the son. We can thus say that Gillian's entry into the visual field as one responsible for the movement expressing the father's fall is here not only a scapegoating, suturing mechanism but also has to do with how Gillian's position makes her respond as an addressee to a certain excess beyond the frame communicated by the camera movement, an excess that says, "the father has fallen, he is exposed to a dimension beyond the frame, and he calls upon you to help him. "24 What does this mean? It means that Gillian occupies a unique position in both the visual and auditory fields, the position of an addressee exposed to a dimension-the dimension of film-beyond the frame. 25 This dimension communicates itself-and it is the dimension that opens communication and relation understood most profoundly-not according to the logic of the frame, or the logic of consciousness. For the logic of the frame is a logic of positions and places, and when submitted to it, we occupy, at least ideally, or as a teleological goal, a stable position of control toward communicated meanings, that is, a position in which our coordinates, and thus our relation to the place from which someone or something communicates, both temporal and spatial are known and thus are framed. We know where we are, we know where and when that which communicates is-it can be in the distant past, for example, but we know our position in relation to this past-and we know what does and what doesn't belong to the situation we occupy. But the telepathic, vertiginous dimension, which Gillian occupies, does not follow this logic, for the suspension of and excess beyond the frame of which she is the addressee is a movement that suspends the possibility of any framed and stable position, and thus of any known coordinates in relation to which she can receive that which arrives. That which arrives thus arrives out of context, thus

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out of any frame, as a non-intentional transmission, and is not received from a position of controlled stabiliry, but one of exposed and thus passive instabiliry, for we do not know from where or when it emerged, what it wants from us, or what it attempts to communicate. But we know we have to respond. In this sense, Gillian is precisely a telepathic addressee, understood most literally as the one who suffers passively from a distance, but a distance understood not in spatial terms, because this would imply rwo determinate places berween which things communicate, but as the distance involved in the loss of place, having to do with an uncontrolled movement of distancing (which can also involve getting closer, as well as further away), and thus with a disorienting passive exposure, a suffering of the other's call as the call of the enigmatic interruption of the frame. It is important to stress that though the film itself might lead us to think so, this is not at all a question of some fantastic events in a film following the conventions of science fiction and horror stories (whatever that might mean), but a very precise conceptual and logical point (which perhaps goes beyond what was normally understood as logic and a thinking of the concept) that simply opens up a strange place-or rather nonplace-in relation to the economy of meaning or sense. To investigate further this atopic logic, and to understand more precisely its operation, let us look closely at rwo scenes that articulate most complexly the logic of this telepathic addressee, an addressee, I suggest, called for by this new rype of film De Palma attempts to bring about. The cinematic viewer as a telepathic witness.

In the first of these rwo scenes, Gillian, sitting with a few fellow highschool students in a classroom, watches a demonstration about the potentialities of psychic powers, given by visitors from the Paragon institute, an institute for the investigation of paranormal phenomena such as telekinesis and extrasensory perception. In the demonstration, a woman is connected to an electrode, and converting with sheer mental power what the visitors call alpha-wave energy into electriciry, she manages to get a toy train to run slowly. After the demonstration, the scientist in charge, Dr. Lindstrom, stresses that "anybody can achieve alpha ... with a little patience," and thus can tap into these mysterious sources of the human mind. To prove her point, she asks one of the girls, who happens to be Gillian, to come and try it herself. As she connects Gillian to the electrodes, she advises, ''Alpha is another word for passive," and instructs her: "Visualize sitting

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in an empty theater, in front of a blank screen, and let that screen fill your mind." Penetrated by this blank screen, Gillian immediately manages, to everyone's astonishment, to make the model train move at extraordinary speed, and as she enters what seems to be some hypnotic zone she suddenly sees a dead face, with open eyes, covered with blood. Horrified, she jumps out of her seat, making the train crash, and has to be brought back to her normal conscious state by Dr. Lindstrom who, much like the gym teacher in Carrie's shower scene, holds her, trying to provide comfort, as the hallucinating Gillian keeps saying, "No, no." What has happened, what is the horror discovered in this scene? Nothing but the horror of the blank, or white, screen. A blankness to which one is mysteriously and passively exposed, and on which is projected a human bleeding, a dead face whose opened, cold eyes do not return one's gaze. And it is a death, we discover at the end of the film, that has not yet happened, that will happen, but that Gillian nevertheless "sees," as if out of time. A primary and primordial image of humanity, as if the opening of vision, in a discovery of a white screen, occurs as an image of a detached, we might say decapitated, bleeding head whose eyes do not return one's gaze, something that cannot be assigned a period, that is, is not located and framed in a specific time and place, is neither future nor past, but is rather transmitted or communicated to Gillian as an excess over time, a veritable anachrony, if we understand time historically, as a successive and located series of events. 26 I am still using here a somewhat imagistic, nonconceptual, language. However, before trying to formulate in a more precise conceptual fashion what actually happens here, and what is the logic operating in this scene, I would like to move forward to another great scene showing Gillian's exposure to a screen, and thus to the second great allegorical moment of The Fury, to better articulate De Palma's understanding of Gillian as a passionate witness to the interruption of the frame. And this articulation can be achieved ... with a little patience. After the horrifying incident of the encounter with blankness, we discover that, at times, when someone touches Gillian during moments of distress, she causes them to bleed, as if transmitting to them the interruptive, destructive, and wounding power of the blank screen, and receiving from them, through this wounding touch, an image whose origin is unknown to her. Gillian develops an increasing horror of touch and, seek-

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ing to understand what is happening to her and perhaps be cured, decides to check herself into the Paragon institute. At first, the Paragon Institute proves to be a very welcoming, homey place. For the first time, it seems that Gillian has a stable, familial, and familiar environment. She has at last a father figure, in the form of Dr. McKeever, and seems to be integrating well into this new family. 27 The film shows the first stages of her stay at the institute as a very safe and warm period, conveyed cinematically by various means such as clarity of frames, abundance oflight, scarcity of editing cuts, symmetrical divisions of space, smooth, mostly horizontal, camera movements, stable positioning of the camera angles, and so forth. But this framed stability cannot last. In one of her talks with Dr. McKeever, he mentions that his one great youthful ambition was to be Fred Astaire, and shows off a couple of dance moves. As they ascend the stairs, Gillian mentions that she took dance for a couple of years at the insistence of her mother, who did not think she was graceful. 28 As she says this, she suddenly trips and loses her balance, almost falls, and the good doctor offers his hand to stabilize her. At the moment when she takes his hand, something strange happens. In a completely disorienting way, the film quickly cuts five times. It is as if the whole image is fragmented, as it focuses more closely on the hand, until its final close-up that shows Gillian's hand holding the doctor's hand where it touches a scar. At this moment, it is as if a giant movie screen opens out of the doctor's scar, and Gillian seems to be experiencing a cinematic vision of some sort. Thus begins one of the greatest allegories of film I know o£ In this dark vision, Gillian, standing almost hypnotized before a projected screen, witnesses a boy (whom we know to be Robin, but she doesn't) running away from Doctor McKeever, up the stairs of the Paragon Institute. As he reaches the top, some of the other workers try to stop him, but he manages to avoid them, and moves backward, facing them, and silently uttering something. As the doctor advances toward him, he backs away and accidentally falls out of a window frame, and the doctor, who pushes his hands to catch him, cuts his hand on the broken glass and bleeds, his cut becoming the scar now touched by Gillian. Now we cut back to Gillian holding the hand of the doctor, whose cut has reopened, and who bleeds again, as if it was his bleeding hand that transmitted, as in a hallucination, as a veritable annunciation to the virgin, the projected movie to Gillian. Horrified at the sight of McKeever's bleeding

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hand, covered with his blood, Gillian cries, "Don't-don't touch me anymore. Please, don't touch me." Putting her bloodied hand on the wall, staining it, leaving the trace of her fingers, she runs away upstairs.

What has happened here, what is the logic of the origin and birth of the cinematic image articulated in this scene? What seems to be conveyed to Gillian here, and thus opens her vision to film, is, precisely the touching discovery of the father's scar or his wound; that is, the discovery of a crack in the frame. A scar received by Gillian through touch as a bleeding, non-intentional, or perhaps irrational communication, showing her that what the father as frame represses, but what his bleeding scar, thus his wound, nevertheless unwittingly exposes, is the event of the son's falling out of the frame (the window frame, in our scene)-that is, the destruction of the structure of the frame as a discovery of the wounded body, of its falling, and of its fragmentation. The cinematic viewer is precisely the witness to this breaking ofthe frame, to the scarring or wounding cut of the father, and to the horror of an event of falling that the frame attempted to arrest. Let us try to articulate all this more precisely, see what it means, and examine a bit closer the scene under discussion. We have seen that this cinematic vision opened with Gillian touching the scar on the doctor's hand, a touch cinematically conveyed with five very rapid editing cuts, each getting closer to the scar. In this way, the film conveys the relation between a bodily scar or cut and the process of editing, a relation most famously brought to light by the shower scene from Psycho. But the question is, and I'm not convinced Hitchcock thinks of the problem with the

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same complexity as De Palma does, what is an editing cut, and what is a bodily cut, that they should be related, and what is therefore the logic that articulates their relations. 29 The edit, we have started to see earlier, has to do with the interruption of the frame. In the present scene, this interruption takes on the character of a fragmentation into pieces of the whole image, yet these pieces cannot be reassembled as a whole because each consecutive one is on a different scale. This fragmentation into several successive frames that cannot be reassembled into one whole frame reveals to us the status of the relations between the framed inside and the dimension of the outside, the dimension of opening that the editing cut introduces, to be the status of what we can call a fragment with no whole. The frame, we have seen, is by definition a slice ofthe world, or we might now say a fragment of the world; yet such an expression might have led us to think that that of which the frame is a slice, the world, is itself a whole that in principle, if we had a large enough frame, could be encompassed. What the logic of the frame as a fragment with no whole into which to reassemble reveals is that the world as opening in excess of the frame is not a missing totality, a larger frame, but that which precisely prevents there being a totality, or a total frame. The frame is a fragment not of a whole that preexists it, but of a dimension of excess that prevents the existence of a whole. 30 Now this editing procedure seemed to have released or unleashed a strange kinetic force, a dynamism we can call, in an expression perhaps pointing to the essence of the De Palmian understanding of the origin of the cinematic image, the telekinetic power of the fragment with no whole, the power that Gillian as a character in the film holds, and this seems to communicate something to us, the viewers. But where does this telekinetic force reside? Not in any of the separate images, nor simply in their cumulative succession. Rather, it resides in the blank nothing of the cut between the images and in the feeling of fragmentation by which the viewer is overwhelmed, a feeling that is nothing but the vertiginous experience that there is no whole (of the image, of the world) given in advance, and that the world is unexpectedly opening. The force released by the fragment with no whole, the force offilm itself, is the feeling of the excess of the dimension of opening beyond the frame that prevents the whole. What is thus communicated to us-and this is the very opening of communication in general-is nothing but the experience of the blank cut

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as that which signifies our implication in existence as a fragment, that is, as an opening with no teleological end and no beginning. Thus, the editing cut, but we have seen that the editing process was related to a bodily scar in this scene. What does this mean? First, it is crucial to point out that the editing is related not merely to the scar but to a scar that Gillian touches; that is, to a relation between two (Gillian and the doctor), thus to a communication of something passing between them. What is seemingly suggested in these relations between the edit as the discovery of the power of the fragment with no whole, the communicative bodily scar, and the question of touch, is that the human body is a body whose woundedness is not simply the painful rupturing of a bodily surface but, rather, a rupturing related to the question of sense, or of communicative transmission, and what opens sense as human sense-of touch, but also of seeing, hearing, and so forth, all of which are understood here under the general term touc~is the existence of the body as not whole, as a fragment. The body is that which is exposed, and this exposure immediately and simultaneously means that there is more than one body, that is, that there are others, and that what every body shares with each other, and is actually the only thing shared and communicated between everyone is their common exposure to each other, exposure being simply the discovery of an Other that cannot be returned reflexively to the self because then the whole would be reconstituted. This common, wounding exposure is precisely what these bodies primarily communicate to each other, before any specific meaning, and this also, and only that, has to be communicated or transmitted because by definition it cannot be limited to one body because it is the very discovery that there is more than one, a discovery that by definition can only happen between at least two. This discovery we call communication or transmission. The movie calls this communication touch, which by definition cannot be considered as something contained in one that then intentionally decides to communicate to another; rather, it is that which can only happen, immediately and unintentionally, in between at least two. And this communication is the event of the opening of language and signification, or at least of sense, as a communication between bodies of their common exposure to each other and to the world. Touch, we might thus say, and this is the horrifYing discovery Gillian makes on the staircase, is not simply contact, that is, the coming together of two or more bodies understood in spatial terms as the absolute reduction of distance, but is rather a

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communication between two or more bodies ofa third term (we can call it the cut, or simply blankness, the blank screen), a third term that is simply the blank nothing of their common exposure to each other and to the world as a fragment, a nothing that they communicate to each other, that relates between them, but thus also separates them. The scar or the wound, marking the body's passive exposure to blankness as the horror of its incompleteness, is the name for this opening of communicative relations. It is that which happens between bodies, and is thus the first transmission of sense, before any established sign. 31 Gillian's double horror, then, in the two scenes we have examined, the horror of the blank screen and the horror of touch, the horror of the scar, are one and the same. It is the horror not of this or that thing, but the horror of the discovery of a blank no-thing, a blank that is simply the potentiality of an unexpected opening of the world-we have earlier called this opening an event-to which one is passively, and passionately, exposed. A blank opening-that is, an opening not of any content, but simply the opening of change-that reveals, at the same time, the horror of one's fragmentation, that is, the discovery of not being whole, of being exposed to unexpected change that does not have any predetermined shape or endand the horrifying opening to an Other as a wounded, bleeding fragment, who does not return one's gaze, that is, does not allow for a reflexive return to oneself as complete and communicates nothing but their blank exposure. We can call this communication of the no-thing of exposure that mysteriously passes between Gillian and the doctor, in the terms of the film,

extrasensory perception, the perception with which Gillian is gifted, and it can henceforth be defined not as a perception of some mysterious thing that the senses do not perceive but, rather, as the reception of the communication of the non-sensory opening of the senses from an exposure to blankness-that is, from the experience of incompletion that sensitively opens one to others and the world. Returning to the staircase scene, we can continue to investigate the implications of this blank and wounding discovery-a discovery, I suggest, holding the potential for a new kind of thinking of the cinematic image in particular, but also of sense and signification in general, that we can call white or blank thinking, a thinking that is at the same time a new thinking of the body in its relation to sense. We have seen that the movie screen in Gillian's testimonial vision opens our as the blank exposure communicated

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through touch onto which is projected the son's falling out of the frame, a fall breaking the frame, and which, as an event that apparently took place, is communicated as if out of time, through the bleeding scar transmitting it, a scar thus still seeming to leave open the event, or a certain dimension of the event, beyond its historical actualization in place and time. We might thus say, in attempting to articulate the significance of this extraordinarily complex scene, that the scar-as the communicative transmission of blankness, and thus as the originary opening of sense from the discovery of the exposed fragment-transmits first the nonplace of things. That is, the scar communicates that things don't have a place, or are essentially and constitutively out of place-freaks, in the terms of the film, or gifted, in excess of a frame, and decontextualized. 32 That is, we can say that traditionally meaning was understood based on a model of taking a place in a context. We can call it the paternal model of meaning, or simply Logos, where something's meaning was understood to be the place it occupied in an ordered whole, thus in a frame, or in a contextual totality, be it understood spatially, or temporally and teleologically. However, according to the enigmatic, atopic logic of blank thinking that governs De Palma's cinema, the logic is undoubtedly that of the Freudian unconscious at its profoundest/3 what opens sense-of touch, of sight, and so forth, but also of orientation and the dimension of meaning, or, to speak the language of phenomenology, of manifestation-is an unanticipated movement of destabilizing dislocation in excess of any frame, a crack in existence we might say. 34 And what this crack essentially says is that the world is unexpectedly, unprogrammatically opening, or closing; there is an essential, non-frameable, blank dimension to existence. This blank dimension opens the question of sense as an infinite, white potentiality for inscription, re-inscription, and recontextualization. For what opens the question of sense and orientation is not that things have place in a whole but, rather, the enigma that they don't, that things could have been otherwise, and that the things that actually happened can constantly change their always contingent significance, that is, their place in an always open totality. We can say that the question of sense opens out of the strange, dual nature of any event. 35 For any event, we might say, has a double face-as the two faces of a single sheet of paper, to use the famous Saussurean metaphor, or perhaps as the written face, and the still white face of a sheet of paper-the face of its factual, actual, having

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taken place, having happened, and its blank face, or the face of its blank suspension. And this blank face says two things about any event: (1) it could have been otherwise because, according to the open logic of blankness, there is no necessity that the event would have happened the way that it did-it has an essential accidental dimension to it; and (2) that which has happened is also still in constant suspension because according to the logic of blankness it can always change its significance and place in existence. This blank aspect of its suspension means that the event, though completed chronologically as fact, constantly keeps an enigmatic, anachronistic side open in excess of its having happened, the enigmatic side of precisely, its excess as event. Any event, by the definition of its having happened out of blankness, is in excess of every frame of explanation of its meaning, is nonsensical, unrealistic, and freakish because the frame, that which conceals blankness, operates according to the logic of order and place. 36 Through this nothingness of the difference between the factual side of the event and its blank side-another version perhaps, or interpretation, of what Heidegger calls ontological difference-the question of meaning or sense enters because this blank excess beyond the factual allows a dimension of "ideality" and repeatability to arise-a dimension often indicated as necessary for any thought of meaning-and that basically means that because every fact is constitutively exposed to blankness, and thus has no essential context, there is always the possibility of relating to the facts in different contexts and different situations, beyond the actual times and "contextual" circumstances in which they took place. In this sense, perhaps paradoxically, it is only an essential and constitutive contexdessness and placelessness, what we call blankness, that allows for an opening of language as an ideality, that is, as a dimension, the dimension of freedom, beyond the factual, empirical circumstance. Ideality thus always depends on a wounding and horrifying communication of blankness that opens it, and this blank dimension of existence, appearing as communication between bodily fragments discovering their exposure to the blank and to each other, is what we call language. Returning to the stairway scene, we can now see why the opening of the blank screen essentially has to show the breaking of the frame because the logic of blankness is the logic of the non-frameable. It means also that there is no frame-we can never be outside the frame because being outside the frame implies a position external to the situation. The

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blank event, the always-open side of the factualities, means that there is never an outside to the situation; we are always still involved in the blank excess. We can also see why it is the son, the one abandoned by the father's frame, who has to fall out of the frame. Every event, we might say, when allegorically understood, is an event of an abandoned son, or daughter, falling out of the frame. But one falls precisely because things have no place. Falling, at least human falling, is not simply the physical fact of the loss of balance and secure position, but is this physical foct experienced on a blank background That is, the fall is an event in which even the perhaps slight fact of making a misstep, for example, as happens to Gillian on the staircase, exposes one to a suspension of place, to the horrifYing, unanticipated, abyssal, and blank opening of existence, and thus, to one's bodily fragmentation, according to the logic sketched earlier. One thus discovers that the simple fact of walking or standing erect presupposes a frame of existence, a capacity for orientation, in which the coordinates, and thus the division of places of one's existence, are presupposed as known in advance. Otherwise, a single step could not be made. However, a misstep allows one to glimpse the blank non-place at the heart of existence, an original fall preceding the capacity to stand or, when linguistically interpreted, an original stutter and falling silent before words, and it means that the whole world is in suspension, nothing is in its anticipated place any longer, and one glimpses the possibility that nothing ever will be. At this horrifYing moment of falling, thus of being exposed to blankness and to fragmentation, something is revealed that I would like to call the fragmentary powers of the earth, a fragmentary power occupying the heart of De Palma's cinema. For if the fall is always the fall to earth in De Palma's films (even when it is on Mars, as in his Mission to Mars), it is because earth is understood not only as this planet we inhabit, but, in a manner perhaps close to Heidegger's thinking of earth in his essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art," 37 as a blank, violent, decontextualizing, deframing principle of the uncontrolled opening and closing of existence. This discovery of the powers of the earth, call it gravity if you will, experienced also as the discovery of one's self as a big toe, of one's bodily fragmentary existence in its relation to the earth, opens, as we saw, communication and transmission, and this is what Robin, that fragmentary boy falling out of the frame, can be said first to communicate to Gillian, announcing perhaps one version of the first linguistic utterance: "Help me, for I am falling."

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It is this communication of the falling body, which I wish to call her act of witnessing. The concept of witnessing has been undergoing a radical theoretical transformation in the last couple of decades, its status changed from a legal concept-signifying the act of the one brought as a third party in front of a judging authority to report on a knowledge unavailable to others-to an ethical one. 38 What is common to all the major recent thinkers of witnessing, I suggest, trying to synthesize their insights and elaborate them, in their attempt to forge an ethical conception of the witness, is a call for, and an attempt to, develop a new logic of the event as that which precisely exceeds the language of law, or, in our terms, of the frame, and to define the witness as the subject of this event in excess of the law. Now, De Palma's articulation of the staircase scene and the logic of witnessing it envelops helps us further elaborate and deepen the logic of the subject of the event in excess of the law I frame. We can now say that the witnessing act does not have to do with the perception of the facts of what happened but, rather, has to do with the passive and passionate suffering of what I called the blank dimension of the event, the enigma of its interruption of the frame. In this sense, every witnessing is a witnessing, allegorically, of falling out of a frame; that is, of the blank excess of the event as the loss of place, a blank dimension that remains open, as I have said, as an anachronistic, haunting wound beyond the factual happening of the event. Thus, and this further emphasizes the split nature of the event, what Gillian witnesses through the communicative scar is the blank dimension of an event that, as actuality, she did not even perceive because she was not present in its happening and doesn't know how it took place chronologically. The logic of witnessing is not one of present perception but rather of an anachronistic, blank, and wounding haunting. The event of falling can thus be said to be communicated to Gillian according to a logic close to that of Proustian involuntary memory, which is to say a logic in which the past imposes itself on the present in a way that cannot be willed by consciousness, with the difference that here the memory is not limited to an individual having to have experienced the event as factuality in the first place (although the perceiving individual can also be a witness, but it is not necessary that he or she be), but rather, it comes unwillingly, as if out of nowhere, and out of context through a transmission of an Other. A haunting, involuntary memory, that, if extended perhaps to the question of the history of humanity, might be said to approach something

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like the Freudian conception-no doubt still too naturalistic-of phylogenetic transmission, a transmission through touch and a scar passing through the ages. 39 One does not then witness necessarily what one has factually seen, but rather, what has been transmitted according to an altogether different logic; one does not witness facts, but the blank and enigmatic excess of an event that is the other, invisible, and haunting side of these facts. Witnessing is thus neither a legal nor a historical category-at least when history is understood as the chronological narration of factual events-but an evenemental I ethical one. Art in general and film in particular is dedicated to this transmission of a blank and wounding haunting whose task is to create a witness to the dimension of the enigma of the interruption of the frame. 40

* We can now move toward ending our discussion of the film. We have seen that the film alternates between two narratives, and thus between two kinds of cinema, that of the paranoid cinema of action characterizing the father-son adventure, and that of the passionate witnessing of the broken frame characterizing Gillian. The father-son axis is characterized by an immediate defense against the enigmatic interruption of the frame, and thus by a refusal to receive anything that it might entail. Perhaps the main figure in their defensive adventure is one of refusal to accept the body as heaviness and fall. We have seen how the father's adventure, an athletic adventure, begins with an initial fall of exhaustion on the beach and the refusal to accept the horror of his exhaustion, and it basically continues throughout the film to operate this way. He constantly jumps around, trying to control everything with his athletic capacities, and even when asked about his son, the only thing the father can basically say is that his son was a great athlete. The son's adventure is characterized no less by this refusal of the body as heaviness and fall. In one brilliant scene, we see the son at the institute where he is held, involved in physical activity. He is polejumping, attempting to jump over the bar that inevitably proves too high, and he keeps falling without ever managing to cross it, always causing the bar to fall, thus again and again breaking the frame, not managing to leave it whole. This failure provokes an extraordinary rage, and when his doctor is asked about it, she says that although in his relation to machines he

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proves basically omnipotent, his physical abilities, his control of his body, is only adequate. This he cannot accept. By the end of the film, his telekinetic and psychic powers are such that he can basically levitate, as if finally managing to free himself of the wounding earth that opened his adventure. 41 Yet this liberation proves illusory, and when his father finally arrives at the end for a potential reunion with the son that would restore the broken frame, he arrives only to witness a scene of complete destruction: the son in mad rage, levitating in the air. There is no possibility for reunification, the son seems to recognize; the frame cannot be restored because the reappearance of the father, whose false death the son took to be real at the beginning of the film, fails to restore what has been broken. Though the "empirical" father is alive, his framing principle is destroyed, and only his living reappearance finally proves it to the levitating son beyond any doubt. Thus, the enraged son throws himself down on the father, falling from his elevated position, and together they are thrown out the window, breaking its frame. But they are still on the roof, the father having managed to catch the falling son, who is now helplessly hanging in the air, and he still refuses to let the son go, trying to save him, holding with all his strength a fragment of the broken window frame. But it's too late, the son wants to fall and crash. He reaches up, wounds the father's face, and, as if coming from this wound, he finally falls to earth and dies. The grief-stricken father, having witnessed his son's death, realizes his failure, throws himself to the ground as well, and dies. Yet, something happens just before the son's death, as he is lying on the ground, at horrified Gillian's feet (she has witnessed this whole scene from the ground). He looks at her, she looks at him, and something strange is communicated between them, something is transmitted in this touching exchange happening in the hallucinatory dream zone between the opening and closing of the eyes, between life and death, something that connects for the last time the adventures of these two abandoned fragments, bringing their logics, two different logics of the broken frame, together. For what he seems to finally transmit to Gillian, a power as if coming out of his final fall, is something like the powers of the earth mentioned earlier, a de-framing, passionate power of fragmentation, the furious power of the non-place, the very power offilm itself, as I have tried to define it here. The power of letting go of the idea and ideal of the father finally seems to be transmitted in between the two. For Gillian too was constantly in

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search of a father and has been moving from one father figure to the next, from the doctor to Peter Sandza, and so on. But it seems that in this scene she now finally realizes that this quest is an illusion, she finally opens up to the logic of the earth, the logic of the excess beyond the frame. Perhaps for her, it is not too late. She does not need to accept the earth and the fall through self-destruction, but rather through assuming and accepting its powers of fragmentation. Thus in the very last scenewhen she is approached by the evil Childress, upon waking up after having spent the night at his institute, following the horrible death of the Sandzas-she knows what to do. Childress attempts to manipulate her into becoming Robin's replacement, and promises, in his words, to be a good father to her. Pretending to believe him, Gillian kisses him on the eyes, bringing them to bleed and blinding him. The horrified, blinded, and disoriented Childress, a new anti-Oedipus, walks helplessly in the room, trying to catch Gillian, yet stumbling and falling, completely out of control. But it is not enough; with her new powers of fragmentation, Gillian, the newly born filmmaker, no longer in search of a father, no longer Antigone, blows Childress into pieces, and it is with the catastrophic, and exhilarating vision of his fragmented and exploding body, and with the uproarious flight of his decapitated head shooting up, that the movie ends. 42

From a witness to the enigmatic address of the wounding of the father I frame, Gillian has become the one activating a force of fragmentation. This trajectory between witnessing and the transmission of a force of fragmentation, I claim, traces for us the horizon of a new logic of sense this chapter has tried to start pointing to, a logic of the enigma, which

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exceeds the horizon of the traditional philosophical elaboration of the question of sense. It is thus that we can also say that the figures of the witness to an enigma and of the transmitter of a force of fragmentation are figures that had no place, would have been considered freaks-in the history of philosophy. I cannot expand upon it in this context, but can only state it, that we can now better understand the philosophical significance of De Palma's cinematic interrogation of the question of the frame from the perspective of this elaboration of a logic of the enigma. For we might view the operation of the traditional logic of sense, as Derrida has demonstrated to an extent in his famous discussion of the frame in The Truth in Painting, as the operation of what I have called the paranoid frame, a frame constructed on the rejection of the dimension I have designated as enigmatic, through the creation of a completely meaningful inside, an inside that has paranoically turned everything in it into a meaningful content. This inside, we might say, has separated itself from an outside that it now viewed as irrelevant, separated itself, that is, from the enigma of the world's opening that haunted it, as I argued. This operation of framing, argued Derrida, is at the heart of our understanding of the autonomous aesthetic object, existing on its own in a hermetic sphere. The task of the work of art in general and of the cinematic fragmentation of the frame in particular, I have tried to show through my reading of The Fury, is to dismantle this aesthetic/philosophical creation of a paranoid frame separating a meaningful inside from an irrelevant outside, by witnessing and activating the dimension of enigmatic haunting, of this opening of the world, the outside of the frame, that is enigmatically inscribed in the frame's inside. The task of what I called reading, in a similar manner, is to be the procedure of the dismantling of paranoia and its opening into passion, to be the passive witness to an enigmatic address and the transmitter of a force of fragmentation. Reading, we might now say, that which is called for when the dear ground of meaning is taken from us, is thus no longer a hermeneutic, an interpretive operation of restoring meaning, but something we might term an energetic, something more akin to a fragmenting praxis of shock that the reader as witness to the enigmatic dimension of the world's opening is called to transmit.

*

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There is one more perspective from which to describe the relations between the two cinemas this movie confronts, and I would like to end our discussion from this perspective. This perspective is the question of cinema's relation to the mirror. If the paranoid cinema of action is, in the final account, a cinema of the constitution of a reflective mirror, this is because, as I have repeatedly mentioned, its attempt to restore the frame involves a logic of recognition whereby the frame can be restored only if the enigma interrupting it receives a stable, actualized, figure, which I can recognize and identi£Y. 43 As such, it has to be a figure that can recognize me, return to me the gaze I direct at it, thus reflect me. That is, in a very basic manner, the whole can be restored only if I can control and identifY the place from which I am seen. On the other hand, the second kind of cinema, the one Gillian represents, which I have named that of passionate witnessing of the broken frame, is precisely a cinema of nonreflection, a cinema that can also be described as a cinema ofthe vampiric transmission of the non-reflexive blank screen. 44 That is, this cinema, which is dedicated to the uncovering of a logic of blankness, with its implications of telepathic transmission and the communication of fragmentation, is dedicated to the transmission of what cannot be reflected. And blankness indeed cannot be reflected, for two reasons. First, because blankness is, precisely, nothing, and only things, actualities with identities, can be reflected; second, because blankness involves a logic of the enigma and nonrecognition. The enigmatic interruption of the frame cannot be reflected because, by not being recognizable, by introducing an unprecedented event unable to be recognized and identified according to the categories of the frame, it cannot return to me my gaze. I thus cannot control the place from which I am seen because I am myself not in any place, but caught in a suspended movement of the loss of place. 45 A haunting cinema of bleeding, then, a blank, contagious horror, was revealed at the enigmatic crack of the mirror, in the fragments of the broken frame, and De Palma's cinema is dedicated to the communication of this unframed and blank horror.

Film and the Memory of the Outside Or, Cinema as Technology, Cinema as Pornography, Cinema as Scream-Blow Out

To see or not to see the sound's source: it all begins here, but this simple duality is already quite complex.... These sounds and voices that are neither entirely inside nor clearly outside are those that interest . .. the most ... because perhaps it is with these sounds and voices left to wander the surface of the screen that the real and specific power of the cinema comes into play. Indeed, all the other cases or types of voices in cinema may have derived from older dramatic forms . . . . However, sounds and voices that wander the surface of the screen, awaiting a place to attach to, belong to the cinema and to it alone. MICHEL CHION,

The voice in Cinema

The question of the difference between the arts ought to be transformed into the question of the difference between the senses. Perhaps in fact they are the same question. But how is one to understand this identity? JEAN-LUC NANCY,

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Chapter 3 Only the essence of truth understood in the original Greek sense of aA.~SEta-the unhiddenness that is related to the hidden (to something dissembled and disguised)-has an essential relation to this image of an underground cave. Wherever truth has another essence, wherever it is not unhiddenness, there an "allegory of the cave" has no basis as an illustration. MARTIN HEIDEGGER, "PLATO's DOCTRINE OF TRUTH"

What's in a scream? What is it that we hear, what is it that reverberates and communicates, what is sensed, in a scream, and what does it have to do with film? Brian De Palma's Blow Out, one of the essential works of American cinema, is perhaps the film most profoundly and analytically dedicated to this question. De Palma's darkest film, Blow Out is his most sustained vision of hell, of a suffocating place with no way out where the screams of the condemned are collected as objects of enjoyment, to be consumed and forgotten without a witness. In the previous chapter, I delineated what I take to be the fundamental problem occupying De Palma's cinema in its exploration of the nature of cinematic signification, an exploration that is our main interest in this project, and I defined this problem as that of developing the logic dictating the relations between the order of the cinematic frame (or even more precisely, the activity of framing) and a dimension in excess of the frame, an Other to the frame, which I have termed blankness. 1 The cinematic image, we might now say, can be defined as the relation between a constitution of a frame and an Other in excess of the frame that leaves its trace in the frame as its enigmatic interruption. De Palma's cinema is dedicated, I claimed, to the transmission and witnessing of this blank dimension, this Other to the frame. In the present chapter, I would like to further pursue the manifestations and the implications of the essential tensions in De Palmian cinema between these two dimensions (the frame and its Other) by choosing as a guideline the fundamental figure of Blow Out-the figure of the scream. The guiding hypothesis of this chapter is that around the enigma of the scream and around the exploration of the complex logic required to think this enigma, the film orchestrates

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its interrogation (perhaps De Palma's most forceful one) of the logic and powers of the frame, of its excessive Other, and of the various modalities of their interaction.

* Jack Terry (played by John Travolta) is a sound technician working for a sleazy film production company specializing in soft porn I slasher horror movies. 2 At the film's opening, taking place in the days preceding the Liberty Day celebrations in Philadelphia during a presidential campaign, Terry, and the director for whom he works, are watching their latest creation, Co-Ed Frenzy, in a dark screening room, and realize that a scream recorded for the movie, to be heard at a key moment when a murder victim is about to be stabbed by the murderer, is unconvincing and ridiculous. It's a terrible scream, says Terry. The director, disappointed as well with the quality of the scream, sends Terry, without indicating where and how, to find a good scream, which will make the scene convincing. Terry sets out at night, taking his equipment to record some other sound effects he was asked to improve. Standing on a bridge recording the wind, Terry suddenly hears a tire's blow out and sees a car sliding off the bridge into the water. Immediately jumping in, he swims to the car where a screaming woman, Sally (played by Nancy Alien), is trapped, and where another man, whom we later discover is a prospective presidential candidate likely to be elected, appears to be dead. Saving Sally, Terry takes her to the hospital, where he learns the dead man's identity and is asked by the man's associates to keep quiet, so the politician's family (the woman in the car was not his wife) won't be embarrassed. After consenting to say nothing about the accident, and taking Sally away from the hospital to erase any trace of the incident that would, naturally, interest journalists, Terry is still bothered by something. He is convinced that the tire's blow out was no accident and that he actually heard a gunshot just before it happened. He thus listens over and over to his recording of the accident, convinced there was a shot. In a separate narrative line, we learn that a bullet was indeed fired, by a man working for the candidate's enemies, who did not intend the accident to end in death but, rather, to simply result in the candidate's being caught in embarrassing circumstances with a woman (Sally)-who was herself planted to expose the candidate, but without knowing anything about the shot being fired.

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Following this incident, the film progresses along two main narrative lines: we follow the man who fired the shot, Burke (played by John Lithgow), in his attempts to erase any trace of the incident's having been more than a simple accident. We also track Terry's attempts to uncover the truth of the incident and to show the conspiracy behind it. Terry's attempts involve getting hold of a film of the accident and synchronizing it with his audio recording to prove the existence of the shot, and Burke's attempts involve replacing the blown-out tire and setting off on a spree of murders of women resembling Sally so that her death seems to be part of an apparently unrelated narrative of serial killing. Toward the end of the film, the narratives ofTerry and Burke meet through the mediation of Sally. On the eve of Liberty Day, while pretending to be a reporter interested in making public Terry's findings, Burke contacts Sally, who agrees to hand over Terry's synchronized film. Although uneasy about this exchange, Terry agrees to let Sally go, as long as she wears a hidden microphone so that he can monitor everything that happens. Various complications ensue, and the killer manages to isolate Sally and drag her to a place where he can kill her. Trying to escape, Sally screams horribly for Terry, who hears everything through his earphones, to come and rescue her. But it is too late. Though managing to reach the place of assault and kill Burke, Terry is unable to save Sally, whom he finds already dead. Left only with Sally's recorded screams, with no way out but to listen to them again and again, Terry finally completes the mission with which the movie started, to get a convincing scream. In Blow Ouis last scene, having inserted Sally's screams into the mouth of the Co-Ed Frenzy murder victim, we see Terry and the director listening to this excellent scream. "Now that's a scream," says the director. "It's a good scream," mumbles Terry, a good scream, and the movie ends with the sound of the screaming Sally and the image of the desperate Terry, the soundman, covering his ears.

* Let us see then how this philosophical/cinematic investigation into the nature of the scream opens, 3 that is, let us see how De Palma frames the film through its opening questions, and examine the parameters that he poses to lay out his study of the relations between scream and film.

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The Ear I The Eye-The Heart I The Breath A heart beats . . . It is heard, but nothing yet is seen. An arrhythmic, syncopated, alternation of sound and silence, an opening and closing of a valve, of increase in, and release of, the tension of a muscle, marks the film's opening before the appearance of any visual image, of any light. 4 To whom does this beat belong? Whose life does it announce? A primordial anxiety arises, an anxiety of the unlocatability, the non-identification of the heartbeat; an unlocatability having to do, at least on the most immediate level of explanation or description, with its purely auditory nature, and in its detachment from any visual coordinates, but also with its detachment from auditory and temporal coordinates, from a regulated rhythm. For the auditory beat is, precisely, unlocatable, has no assignable place, is not an identifiable object, and belongs to no one and, as such, is immediately constituted as anxious haunting, that is, as the restlessness of that which has no place. 5 But if the beat cannot be assigned a place, if it is a phantom,6 neither can we, the viewers, find a place, for we seem to need to define ourselves through identification, that is, in relation to that which has a place, meaning a place in a regulated order. 7 This mutual placelessness of the sound of the heartbeat and of us the viewers marks, from the perspective of the viewer, the opening of this film, immediately, as having to do with an auditory address. For this unlocatability implicates us in its happening, involves us in a dimension that concerns us, concerns who we are, and achieves this precisely by not giving us anything to hold on to, by taking the ground away from us, and constituting us as the falling and questioning subjects of its enigmatic event. We cannot, therefore, be assigned any identity that is separate from the heartbeat (for we cannot identifY it, and therefore cannot identifY ourselves, but we remain, because of this, implicated) and can thus master it from a-given, determined--distance. This impossibility of separating ourselves clearly from (or identifYing completely with) the beat marks it as a haunting, a dimension in excess of our recognizable and meaningful world (and haunting always has to do with the effect of this double placelessness) where we cannot even know whether we are dealing with something external to us or internal, for it is both at once in a sense. This "something" is separate from us, and as such calling us (although there is no "us" before this call)

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from an "externality'' we cannot identifY, yet as calling us and constituting us, it marks what is most "internal," our intimacy, an intimacy before, or in excess of, any worldly identity, in excess of our being in the world. In short, it marks our heart. The viewers, haunted, that is, troubled at the heart of their "internal" being by an encounter with an "external" dimension of placelessness, are thus touched and penetrated by the film's heartbeat, joined to it as two bodies sharing a heart, separate yet inseparable, anxiously called for and pumped into existence by its opening, enigmatic, rhythms. 8 It is important to stress again that this address does not assign the viewers an identity (not even that of an incomprehensible, yet identifiable sign), that is, a locatable place they lacked and are anxiously looking for. Rather, it assigns them the enigmatic non-place of the arrhythmic beat. 9 We will have to inquire into the nature of this strange address, or address as strangeness-having to do with the ear, with listening, and with the placelessness of a beat, of a movement of opening and closing-and the strange nature of the "subject" that it seems to call for-a subject to a haunting in excess of the recognizable world. Through this beat, at first heard only, the visual image emerges; the camera starts to give us a world, a frame of existence starts showing. We open our cinematic eyes to the dislocating sound of a heartbeat coming from nowhere. What is it we find? A young man and woman open a door

to what seems to be a women's college dorm. The man looks suspiciously behind his shoulder, to make sure he is not seen crossing the forbidden threshold. They enter the building. A policeman, guarding the area and marking its borders, the separation and protection of the inside of the dorm from an outside that might want to unlawfully penetrate it, is circling the grounds. All the while we continue to hear a heart beating, but now also heavy breathing, whose source is unknown, and the blowing wind. Not being located, not finding a place, inside the cinematic frame nor locatable in any identifiable, actual (spatial or temporal) realm outside the frame, these sounds continue to haunt the visual image and to undermine any separate position the viewers might attempt to adopt in relation to it. The viewers therefore remain implicated and addressed by this dimension of non-place and cannot cancel their dependence on, their passivity to, or their passion of, the image, their subjection to that which calls them despite themselves. The visual image itself, then, seems to be missing something, to have a "hole" punctured in it, as a result ofits disjunction

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from the soundtrack, and becomes an enigmatic fragment (a fragment in the sense that it seems to be a piece of something larger, but because this something larger doesn't really exist, or exists only as a haunting that cannot be identified, it is a fragment with no whole), expressing the restlessness of the non-place, from which the viewers cannot separate, cannot even know whether they are external or internal to the image "out there" on the screen. But more than the breathing and the beating sustain this haunting of the image, for the unseen moving camera itself, as yet lacking motivation for its selection of the visual field (it does not yet have a recognizable or actual point of view), marks a disturbance that operates as a phantom introducing a haunting enigma, a non-identifiable Otherness at the heart of the image. A Deuleuzian Detour

Hold your breath! Before moving on with the analysis of this suspenseful opening scene, I would like to make a philosophical detour to discuss and develop what I take to be the crux of Gilles Deleuze's definition of the cinematic frame in his book Cinema 1: The Movement Image (disregarding its Bergsonian context, which is less significant for our discussion), so that it might help us sharpen the conceptual issues at stake in this chapter. 10 The question implicitly guiding Deleuze as well as much of the discussions to follow is, What kind ofunit is the cinematic frame? How are we to think it, if it is not to be thought, as indicated before, along the lines of the pictorial frame? I will thus try as we go along to give an increasingly concrete content to the way we are to think of the cinematic frame. The frame, for Deleuze, or more precisely the operation of framing, involves, to begin with, basically two procedures, that of selection and that of delimitation. The selection refers to the activity of choosing all the elements that will be present in the cinematic image-sets, characters, props, and so on-whereas delimitation refers to the necessarily simultaneous operation of distinguishing between what's inside the framed image and what's outside, left out by the selection (depending on the choice of angle on the material, the size of the frame, and so on)-in cinematic terms, the out-of-field. So far, nothing new, and it is obvious that we don't need a Deleuze to tell us that the frame both selects and delimits, or creates a

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border between an inside and an outside. But, and here Deleuze's simple profundity leaves its mark: There are two notions of the outside, and thus two points of view about what is a frame. The first Deleuze calls the relative outside, and it is an outside whose logic is a logic of continuity, that is, the outside is on the same level, or of the same dimension, as the inside and simply continues what we perceive on the inside beyond the borders of the frame, for example, a character who exits the frame is presumed to continue existing outside the frame, or a half-hidden room is presumed to be only temporarily out of frame and to be seen fully once the camera changes its perspective or location. We might say, though Deleuze doesn't, that from this perspective, the frame is understood as a part of a preexisting, given totality, of which it gives us only a slice. The whole view of this totality is, in principle, available. 11 The second outside, which Deleuze terms absolute, depends on a logic of discontinuity. The outside is not on the same level, and not of the same dimension, as the inside. It is an "outside of this world," 12 and the significance of the order of the frame, from this perspective-when the emphasis is put on the frame's ability to isolate, to decontextualize, a fragment from a larger continuity (such as the slicing of the space of a room mentioned earlier)-lies in its allowing us to be exposed because of its interruption of continuity, to this absolute discontinuous outside, to this Other to the frame. 13 The frame, from this perspective, then, is that which liberates an absolute outside. To develop a logic of this outside (the main Deleuzian concept for which is the virtual) and to determine its relations with the order of the inside (which Deleuze terms the actual) is basically the sole interest of Deleuze's philosophy and will remain mostly, at least as a thematic articulation of Deleuzian categories, outside the concerns of this essay. We can say, though, that the frame is the concept allowing Deleuze (in the context of his philosophy of film) to start thinking the logic of relations between actuality and what he calls virtuality, the inside and the absolute outside. But before continuing to develop the significance of this absolute outside, I must stress what it is not. It is not a concept that can be thought according to the metaphysical, or at least Platonist, separation between this world (the sensible world, as the philosophers used to call it) and another world, a separate, transcendent, and stable order, a metaphysical elsewhere (a world of Ideas or an intelligible world). What is at stake in the Deleuzian thinking of the frame and its absolute outside, or its Other (as well as in all the other filmic catego-

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ries he develops out of this initial matrix)-and it is precisely from this that his thinking of film draws its philosophical significance-is the attempt to transform metaphysical logic and all the divisions and limits between realms and the dualisms implied therein (sensible, intelligible; Being, becoming; mind, body; reality, appearance; essence, existence; the one, the many, and so on), implied in it, into a new logic. Yet this new logic nevertheless stands in a strange relation to metaphysics, a relation of both radical interruption yet also of a certain continuity, a strange relation that means that the new logic remains philosophical, but at the same time changing what philosophical now means. 14 A major part of what is at stake in the current project is to try to describe what film in general and De Palma's films in particular can contribute to the understanding of the transformative logic taking us from metaphysics to something we might call a "new thinking." 15 By way of moving back to our discussion of Blow Out and to the issue of the frame and the Other, I would like to mention what I take to be the main transformation, implied in Deleuze's discussion of the frame, from the logic of metaphysics to new thinking: If metaphysics, or at least Platonism, has divided existence into two separate realms, each external to the other, between which there is a limit-a transcendent, static, nonsensual, realm of ideas, and an immanent, worldly realm of change and of the senses-then the main move of new thinking can be described, to keep using for the moment the technical language of philosophy, as something like an immanentization of transcendence. This operation involves (in a complex logic into which I will increasingly try to inquire) bringing the transcendent realm, the sky of Ideas, "down" to earth, into the heart of this, the immanent world (not leaving either of them the same). What has been understood as another realm, another world, outside this one, becomes somehow "internal" to this one, yet "external" to it, folded into it, the outside in the inside, or a paradoxical immanent outside (an immanent outside for which another term might be the unconscious), rather than a transcendent elsewhere. 16 It is crucial to stress that the dissolution of the transcendent realm in its metaphysical configuration has not simply left intact the so-called empirical world, the immanent realm. Existence is not reduced to a single level or dimension, that of the empirical world of the senses. As Nietzsche stressed, when the real (transcendent) world is dissolved, the empirical world (of appearances) evaporates with it because they depend on each

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other for their definition. A distinction thus remains, yet somehow completely transformed, and all the concepts that operated according to the metaphysical division (basically all our concepts) now have to be reconfigured, according to a redistribution of the registers of existence. The thought

ofthe frame and its absolute outside allows us to begin to think, from the perspective offilm, this transformation of metaphysical logic, of the folding ofthe outside in the inside. 17 I must stress here that the crucial aspect of Deleuze's conceptual move, which allows for the complex transformation of the metaphysical division of outside and inside, lies precisely in his insistence on keeping the concept or figure of the frame-that is, a figure of delimitation and of the slicing of a fragment out of a larger whole-as well as his insistence on keeping a distinction of outside and inside (although according to a new logic, of discontinuity). 18 There is an inside and an outside, there is an activity of delimitation, and there is an operation of slicing out of a "larger" "whole," and the whole enigma is to try to figure out how to think about these now, completely otherwise, not according to a logic of continuity (the logic that dominated metaphysics, which tried to interpret the inside and outside, as in Plato, as a continuity on a line one can divide) but of discontinuity. 19 What this important insistence on the concept of the frame with the simultaneous demand for a new logic thus seems to suggest is that if a frame is by definition a certain slicing of a fragment separating an inside and an outside, and if we do not want to view it according to the logic of a continuum, that means that the frame gives us a glimpse of a totality that already preexists it, then the only other possible way to understand it is as that which gives us a slice or a fragment but without such a preexisting totality. What can this mean, how are we to understand the concept of a slice, or a fragment, without a totality? What is a fragment with no whole? This has to mean three basic things: (1) The slice or the frame, instead of giving us a fragment of a totality, reveals to us that there is no totality, that there are only frames or fragments. But if there are only frames, what would the Other be to the frame, the absolute outside? Nothing but the principle of non-totality. The Other, the absolute outside, means first that there is no totality or, in Deleuze's words, no whole given in advance. (2) Yet the frame, we have said, is not only a fragment, but also a delimitation, a separation of an inside, which has to signifY a certain closure, from an outside. But if the outside is a principle of non-totality,

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what can the frame delimit, what does the closure implied in its very concept mean? What the frame delimits, it seems, is precisely nothing but the principle of non-totality. Within this principle, which has to consist of an imperative of essential openness, thus the destruction or refusal of every limit (the infinite), the frame seems to trace a certain figure oflimit, of a finitude. The frame delimits this destructive openness, slices the infinite to trace a certain closure. The limit involved in the concept of the frame is thus not a limit between two separate realms, but the marking, within a principle of openness and destructive un-limitation, of a certain figure of a closure. The frame is therefore the relation between opening and closing, but we might say that there are two points of view to take on this relation. From the point of view of an absolute outside, the frame is that which marks a (certain) closing within an infinite opening, 20 but from the point of view of the inside, the frame is a figure that allows for opening, establishing an opening to an outside that, as we will soon see, because it is not a separate outside along a continuity, continues to operate at the very heart of the frame, leaving it open. From the point of view of the inside, then, the frame is a delimitation that opens rather than closes. 21 Another concept with which we can designate what the frame does is the concept of place. 22 If a place by definition has to do with the concept of a limit, or is perhaps nothing but the experience of a certain limit, then we might say that the frame is the tracing of a place within an essential principle of placelessness that is the infinite and destructive openness of the Other. Again, we would have two points of view from which to regard the limit; from the point of view of the placeless outside, that which will limit it will be the place, but from the point of view of the place, the limit will not be another place, another territory, but a placelessness, the outside. (3) But if the frame is that which comes out of the Other, the principle of non-totality and un-limitation, within which it traces a certain figure of a limit, within which it marks a place, it means that any specific frame that is traced could not have been included in advance in this principle because otherwise it would be a principle of totalization where everything is known beforehand, that is, has a place in a preexisting totality, and the frame would be only the first kind of frame. If this is indeed the case, then it means, most rigorously, that the frame is created, or that framing is a creation because it brings something new, something

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surprising and unpredictable, coming from the Other, or from the absolute outside. The frame, this fragment with no preexisting whole, is thus a creation coming out of a principle or dimension of nowhere, an infinite destructive un-limitation and placelessness, which it slices and thus transforms. The Other, from this perspective, is the principle of the possibility of true creation coming from nowhere, and the frame, we can therefore also say, is not the finding of a place within a preexisting totality but is rather the creation of a place out of an originary non-place or nontotality that it slices. 23 If in the metaphysical picture, as we saw, the relation between the inside and the outside was the relation between two distinct places between which there is a limit and which therefore can be mapped on a continuous totality, then in new thinking we can say that the relations between the inside and the outside are those between an essential, and from a certain point of view, destructive, principle of non-place, and the creative principle of delimitation, of bringing about a place. Thus, the slicing of a fragment, framing, is no longer understood as an isolation of a part of a continuum, an already given whole but, rather, as the transformation ofa dimension, from the infinite Other to a creative delimitation, and the relations between the inside (the fragment/frame) and the outside are thus defined not as the crossing of a limit on a continuum but as a discontinuous, transformative leap. 24 Another essential pairing of terms with which to designate this new, creative logic of relations between the inside and the outside implied in the Deleuzian conception of the frame is the couple potentiality (the Deleuzian virtuality) and actuality. The Other, this principle designating the imperative of non-totality, implying necessarily an essential thought of creation, can also be viewed as the very potentiality for something to actualize, yet the actualization, being essentially a creative actualization, that is, an actualization arriving from a principle that cannot dictate it in advance, cannot be viewed as exhausting the potentiality from which it arises (because then it would be completely present in the potentiality before having actualized, and thus would not be creative, would bring nothing new). For the same reasons, actualization cannot be viewed as somehow resembling the potentiality but only changing its modality to actuality because again, nothing new would have arrived in this case. 25 No, the potentiality (the absolute outside) has to remain completely different and in excess of the actualizing coming from it and, as such, contin-

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ues to function at its heart, to remain "active" in it, as its other, excessive, and potential side that is not exhausted. The frame will be the strange concept allowing for the interaction of the actual and the potential, in that on the one hand, it allows for a delimitation (actuality) but only as a relation to that which exceeds it (potentiality) and which thus keeps still operating "in it." In this sense, we can also call the frame, the mechanism creating an enclosed actualization open to a potentiality that exceeds it (the absolute outside which it doesn't exhaust), a perspective. Perspective, in this sense, is not a perspective on that which already exists out there (the presupposed totality of the first frame) but, rather, akin to a fragment with no preexisting whole, is a creative act, the singular slicing, the coming into actualization coming from a potentiality it does not exhaust. Perspective (the frame) is a perspective "on," or the slicing of, the absolute outside, and it is essentially a perspective because, by not exhausting the outside, it assumes an openness to other perspectives. To sum up these three points, we can say that the frame, or framing, is a transformative, creative, and actualizing perspectival delimitation of a principle of open potentiality, or non-totality. The inside (the immanent world) therefore now means what takes place creatively as a transformative leap (it is not a static, substantial inside but a creative verb signifYing the change in dimension, of coming into, or passing out of, and through, the Other that is delimited), whereas the outside (Other) is the non-totality and non-place within which and from which something transformatively happens, as if from nowhere, that is, without any reason and according to no preexisting law. This discontinuous, creative logic allows us to think the paradoxical "outside in the inside," for now the "in'' doesn't mean being contained. Rather, what the "in" now means, to begin with, is that because the outside is a principle of non-place, rather than a place separated from the inside by a limit, it is transformed from being another realm, the first meaning of outside, into something that we can call (as I have in relation to Blow Outs opening), a haunting, which is to say the outside has been transformed into a principle of disquietude operating at, and as, the heart of every place, preventing it from completely closing, the essential outside (opening) operating at the heart of, "in'' the inside, preventing it from constituting itself as a totality and forgetting its fragmentary nature, forgetting its origin in the placeless principle of destructive non-totality. This is the principle of non-totality operating

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at the heart of this world, keeping it open and in transformation, yet it is not part of this world, for it is the principle of the world's incompletion, its inability to close upon itself, to become a frame with no outside, that is, no frame at all. The frame is thus this strange mechanism that, being a decontextualizing fragment with no totality, constructs the paradoxical configuration of the outside in the inside, that is an essentially haunted inside. These are the points I will continue developing and elucidating as we go along, but we might say for now as a way of returning to Blow Out that what we are searching for are the implications for film of a constitutive logic ofhaunting, or, to borrow Derrida's coinage, of a hauntology, of a principle elucidating the operation of the outside in the inside, a principle of non-totality preventing the inside from closing as well as keeping it breathing and open to further transformation and creation. 26 For once we assimilate this new way of viewing, the outside in the inside, this new logic of haunting and of the frame open to the Other, we can start to rethink our traditional concepts that were dominated by the thinking of the continuous frame. What we can immediately see, though, is that once the outside dominated by the first conception of the frame, a stable and static realm beyond this world, is dissolved into a haunting, immanent, and insubstantial outside, we are confronted simultaneously by two new principles that were not available for metaphysical thinking, a destructive principle of an absolute outside that signifies a constant imperative of opening, and a creative, transformative principle of the coming out of this outside and creating a certain effect of closure. Thus, every concept we develop will have to incorporate within itself these two principles that the new conception of the frame brings with it. 27

Organs and Senses Let us then return to Blow Ouis opening scene and start examining, through the guiding thread of the thought of the frame and its Other, the conceptual contributions that film, as a medium of haunting, can bring with it. Because we have defined the relation between the inside of the frame and the Other to the frame (its absolute outside in the inside) not in visual terms but as a relation between a taking place and a haunting, and because we have also tried to insert the concept of the frame into a logic

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of creation, that is, into a dynamic logic of transformatively and surprisingly coming out of the Other, rather than the static logic that dominates the first type of frame, we are now free to expand substantially the experience and dimensions of the cinematic frame and thus expand the conceptual dimensions implicated with it. I have designated in Blow Out three main dimensions of haunting, of the enigmatic marking of the outside of the frame in its inside: An auditory-rhythmic-temporal dimension, the haunting of the irregular heartbeat (and the breath); a visual dimension, the disturbance of the frame by the unmotivated camera movement; and a dimension of haunting entering through the disjunction between visual track and soundtrack, hearing and seeing. From a slightly different perspective, I have also implicitly suggested that the question of haunting and the frame in the film should be thought according to the model of the activity of a muscle and of something slightly irregular happening in the muscle's functioning as an organ controlling an activity of opening and dosing, as well as of heightening and releasing of tension. These are therefore the dimensions through which Blow Out initially proposes to think the question of the frame and its outside, and they harbor, I suggest, a promise for new models for thinking what film is and its significance for the question of"the outside in the inside." But what precisely do these dimensions for thinking about the question of the frame and its excess point to? What do they introduce into the thinking of film and what can film, through them, help us think? I suggest that these dimensions of the interruption of the frame mentioned earlier, taking us well beyond a merely visual thinking of the frame, raise for us two main interrelated questions: (1) What is the relation of the logic of the cinematic frame and its Other to the question of the senses, to what the senses are and to what the logic of their interaction is? (2) What is the relation of the cinematic frame and its Other to the question of the bodily organs, to what the organs are and to what their mode of interaction is? And going a bit further, what is the relation between film and the concept of organism? That is, I suggest that the drama of the frame and its Other, of an inside and a haunting outside, when introduced through the question of the isolation of the ear, and through the disjunction between the ear and the eye, is revealed first to be the very drama of the senses themselves, as if each sense, in our case seeing and hearing in particular, lives

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this drama, has an inside and a haunting outside that film makes that sense discover. The ear discovers its haunting (in an irregularly rhythmic beat, for example), the eye discovers its haunting (in being isolated from the ear as well as through the device of the camera movement, for example), and so on. It is as if the relation between the cinematic frame and its Other is marked at the very heart of each sense, becoming the logic dictating the inner tensions between the senses as well as what dictates the modes of their interaction, a disjunctive interaction, with each other. This would seem to suggest that each sense is structured around the tension of the frame and its outside as its logical model and, more complexly, that the cinematic frame and its haunting Other are to be defined according to the visual space of the screen that the projection occupies as well as according to the dramatic places in the film where we sense a haunting of some sense (mainly, sight or sound) either alone, or in between the two senses. Thus, a beating of the heart, even when we see nothing on the screen, is no less the event of the creation of a cinematic frame and its haunting outside than the relation between the on-screen space is occupied by the visual image and the absolute out-of-field haunting it. 28 We might thus speak of two essential cinematic frames, and two types of absolute outside, that always coexist in sound cinema, a sound frame and a visual frame, but also perhaps of a third frame, the sound-visual frame, that dominates most cinema, and means that the two primary frames are not put in disjunction, and thus cooperate to such an extent that they are basically a unified sound-visual frame. But if the film starts by introducing us to a haunting of the eye and of the ear, which at first we mainly treat from the point of view of the senses they represent, it also starts by introducing us to a haunting associated with the heart's beating as well as with the lungs (and mouth, and nose) breathing, an addition that seems to point our attention, also in relation to the eye and the ear, to the question of the bodily organs, sense organs as well as others. The ear, the eye, the heart, the lungs, and finally, in a culmination of the opening scene, the mouth: The film's opening is a veritable orchestration of organs. 29 Yet, there are three striking things about this strange (disharmonious) orchestration of the organs: First, they are all involved in a discovery of a haunting disturbing them (the heart's arrhythmic beat, the eye's disturbance by the ear and the camera, and so forth). Second, they seem to be iso-

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lated or disjoined from each other through the technique and technology of the film. The eye is disjoined from the ear, the heart from the lungs, and so on, each seeming almost to operate independently, as if the organic, unified body is fragmented. And third, these organs whose haunting and fragmentation announces the film's opening-the ear, the eye, the mouth, the lungs, and, most mysteriously perhaps, the heart-are not just any organs but those that control the transaction between the body and the outside by way of opening and closing. 30 They are, in other words, frame organs. 31 What are the implications of these three points, both for film as well as for the question of the organism as they illuminate each other here? Traditionally, we might say, an organic system, such as the organic body, is defined, from Kant on, as the harmonious and hierarchical working together of several parts or organs to constitute a complete and unified whole in view of a common goal, a harmonious organism that served, most famously, the early romantic philosophers (Schlegel, Schelling, Novalis, and others) as a model for the very functioning of the work of art. In Blow Out, on the other hand, the organs are not viewed as parts cooperating in a whole but, rather, are viewed or defined as fragments I framing devices-that is, not according to their cooperative relationship toward a common goal whereby each complements the others, but first, according to our definition of the frame, as a relation to an absolute outside, an Other, or a principle of non-totality, which they delimit but that continues to haunt them as their "inside." 32 Each organ seems to constitute a frame, and if they do relate to each other, and they surely do, it seems to be done in a "mediated" fashion, as the relation of several frames or fragments to each other through the intermediary of an absolute outside that always continues to haunt them. They thus don't seem to work with each other as "parts" or organs cooperating in a whole; rather, they almost seem to work against each other, to interrupt and disrupt each other, to operate as fragments with no whole. This would also seem to suggest that we are dealing with a proposal for a new model of the work of art (but also with a new model for thinking about the organs). This new model, though, which involves a conception of art as the event of the fragmentation of the organism, the discovery of a principle of non-whole (the Other) at the heart of the idea of its unity, has to be thought, and this is a crucial point, in relation to the idea and model of the organism and as transformation of the thought of the organ.

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It is not a matter of completely discounting the thought of the organism (it is not, for example, or not simply, a mechanical, digital, technological, and so forth, model of the work of art), but rather, it is a question of introducing into the organism a strange experience of fragmentation, understanding the organs as frames or fragments slicing an outside that remains operating at their heart as an excessive haunting, fragments with no whole, rather than as parts communicating to form a totality, or as fragments coming together to form a whole. A haunting outside is introduced into the organic body (the frame), becoming a phantomlike immanent part of it, thus changing completely its nature. Into this phantomlike disturbance of the organs (a phantom limb at the heart of each organ33) that we will have to inquire, for it is not simply a question of understanding how the heart cooperates with the lungs, the eyes, and so forth, to form a unified totality but, rather, a question of understanding anew the organs as well as the new type of relations they can enter into from the point of view of their haunting disturbance. We will thus need to ask again, what is a heart, what is mouth and breath, what are the eyes and the ears, and so on, understood from the point of view of a logic of the outside in the inside. 34 This reinterpretation of the organs as haunted frames also comes with an essential thought of a simultaneous multiplicity of frames, thus of simultaneous openings and closings, into which we will have to inquire. If the film starts with a proliferation of senses I frames as well as organ I frames, it means that the film itself becomes a very strange kind of"organism" with multiple openings and closings, multiple outsides and multiple insides, which operate simultaneously. If our relation to the movie, as I indicated earlier, has first to be understood as being addressed by a haunting, then the viewer, given this proliferation of outsides in the insides, becomes as well a strangely fragmented being, a complex "organism," exposed simultaneously to multiple outsides by which the viewer is haunted and several framing devices into which he or she fragments. The viewer is split into a heart, a mouth, an ear, and an eye. By way of a privileged example for one type of many provided by such an opening in the film, the outside of a frame, to which we are exposed and through which we are addressed by the film, an example that will also start to illuminate the possibilities that this new thought of the haunted organs seems to me to offer, I would like to look at the heart, the organ with which the film opens and under the sign of (the failure of) which it

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stands. 35 What is a heart, the film asks through its opening, uncanny beating, and more precisely, what is a haunted heart, and what are its implications for the thinking of film? In our usual (metaphysical, dualistic) way of thinking, a heart seems to be either, when literally understood, a muscular organ pumping blood through our bodies, or, when metaphorically understood, the organ of love, that which signifies that inexplicable way of relating to others, often opposed to a different, rational, type of relation we associate with the mind. But what is the relation, the film implicitly asks-through its opening, haunting, and enigmatic rhythms, by which we are addressed and through which we are unwillingly implicated, connected in a strange way to the film-between these two ways of understanding the heart, and what if this division of the heart (literal, metaphorical, biological, cultural) is already to a certain extent the avoidance of the real heart? 36 But what is the real heart? It is, precisely, the film's opening suggests, the "organic," "biological" heart plus its haunting, phantomlike, Other. In between the heart's beats, we glimpse an Other, an absolute outside, at its "heart," in its inside. The real heart (and this is a model to think anew, as I will show, about all the framing organs in which the film is interested, and perhaps all organs) is the relation between the heart understood as a frame (an operation of slicing the principle of non-totality that we can understand in this case as a giving of rhythm to time, or perhaps giving birth to time as rhythm, thus delimiting it) and that which exceeds it, which can be glimpsed at the moments of the frame's disturbance, the disruption to the rhythmic order it has constituted. The heart is the relation between this rhythm and the phantomlike arrhythmia disturbing its beat, always threatening it with attack, and that by which we are addressed, that which connects us unwillingly to the film (and to any other heart, by implication) is this phantomlike side of the heart, the Other to its beat. 37 This phantomlike outside I inside of another heart, strangely, becomes also our inside, what is most intimate to us, our heart. Its irregularly rhythmic beat somehow becomes the external I internal side of our "organic" heart, disturbing its beat, making it beat faster or slower, changing its rhythm, opening it to another. The heart is the mysterious organ opening us to another, 38 and the Other's (and the film's) haunted heart thus becomes the exterior interiority of our heart, connecting the two (strangely joining and separating them at the same time) through a counter-rhythmic interaction. 39

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If De Palma is one of the greatest directors of horror, it is because he conceives true horror as consisting in forging this strange relation between the film's phantomlike outside/ inside and our external inside whereby the film literally infiltrates our organs, becomes part of us, our phantom limb, creating between the film and us, a new heart. We can now therefore define the metaphysical operation of separating the literal and the metaphorical heart as the body's rejection of this newfound real heart transplanted into it from an externality it cannot identify, separating the organic, biological heart from its haunting double, a rejection that, from the point of view of our leading concepts, is the attempt of the frame to be self-sufficient, to cancel its haunting outside and to establish a logic of limits whereby the outside is relegated from its internal haunting position-which keeps the frame a frame, that is, relative to an excess from which it comes and which it cannot exhaust-to being that which exists on the other side of the frame, an external place. This metaphysical operation of separation is thus simultaneously a medical operation trying to save a supposed integrity and wholeness of the organic body and a spiritual exorcism trying to cast away the phantom, a doublesided operation that at the same time actually creates, or brings about, a scientific realm of medicine (taking care of the biological body) and a world of spirits and alternative healing. 40 Blow Outs opening scene, then, starts with a vertiginously complex multiple introduction of phantoms, of absolute outsides, into the heart of the cinematic frames, yet it will continue with a no less complex manner of showing how these multiple phantoms will be increasingly exorcised to attempt to restore a certain organic integrity that the opening fragmented. We may define the whole of Blow Outs progress as a series, on the one hand, of various cinematic strategies of interrupting and haunting the frame (and the simultaneous move of creating new types of frames), of trying to introduce the outside to the inside, and, on the other hand, as a series of various (metaphysical) strategies of defense, "medical" operations, and exorcisms, trying to methodically erase any trace of opening to the Other's haunting that the film has effected. 41 If the film starts with a dizzying discovery of multiple openings to the outside, it will end, astonishingly, with a horrifyingly rigorous and suffocating multiple closing and exorcism of its founding ghosts. If the film opens with the opening of a heart, an ear, a breath, a mouth, an eye, it will end, literally, with

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murderous suffocation, the failure of love, and, in the great final image, with Terry's closing of the mouth, the ears, and the eyes, as if trying to return to a primal, fetal closure, refusing the birth scene that the opening attempted. 42

Can there still be a trace of opening after all that? This will be the film's final, great question, and its interrogation will depend on the figure of the scream, a figure signaling at the same time an absolute closure and a trace of opening.

The Mirror and Its Phantom We left the opening scene some pages ago, just after discovering the various initial strategies of disturbing the frame effected by the film, as the young couple is about to enter the college dorm secretly, avoiding the cop circling its premises. We can now return to this scene and start elaborating the various ways in which the film's initial haunting starts to be exorcised and erased. Continuing with this opening scene, we see the cop circling the dorm whose windows we can see through. Not noticing the man and woman in the first room, he continues to the second window through which he spies on two scantily dressed girls dancing. Suddenly, from outside the limits of the frame comes a hand holding a knife, as if marking a strange stain in the visual image. Getting closer to the cop, the hand holding the knife stabs him, and he drops, probably dead, as if his very transgression, through peeping, of his duty as a guardian of borders marks the very elimination of his role. In this moment, in the flickering between the stain in the image, which marks the interruption of the frame, and the recognition

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of a knife as the embodiment of the stain, the exorcising of the phantom's haunting commences. For if the stain (the trace of an outside in the inside) announces an excess beyond the figure of the law's enforcement, the figure that attempts to separate the inside from the outside and establish borders, it is immediately interpreted (from the point of view of the legal side of the frame that attempts to erase the frame's excess) through the figure of the knife as involving a murderous intent. 43 The law's excess has to become a figure recognized from the point of view of the law itself, thus from within the confines of the frame attempting to isolate itself from its absolute outside. By thus receiving a content, becoming a recognizable object within the terms of the frame-a knife-the stain, which enigmatically traced within the frame its opening to the Other, starts to be erased, so that the frame can forget its haunting. With this appearance of the knife, the power of interruption of the heavy breathing and the heartbeat, which haunted the image, starts to diminish, the blank nothingness of the absolute outside, this hole in the world I frame, becomes something inside the world I frame, an actualized figure taking a place, filling in for the non-place that the outside in the inside was (a potentiality essentially in excess of any actuality)-and it seems to belong to a stalker haunting the dorm's grounds. We have been watching this scene, then, from the point of view of the stalker, who is not seen. A first identity is assigned, the power of the dislocating and uncanny haunting is diminished, or, in the vocabulary of the previous chapter, starts to be sutured. There is finally somebody to whom we can assign the breathing and the heartbeat, and the stalker is thus the figure that can give a meaningful answer within the world of the film to a strange haunting that was the very opening of the filmic image as such. Yet this identity is still highly unstable, for we don't know who the stalker is, and as such cannot yet separate ourselves completely from our passivity to, or passion of, the Other that addresses us from the heart of the image, and master the image's meaning. This discovery of an identity-the stalker, or at least a knife that has to belong to someone-which nevertheless isn't complete, because we cannot assign him or her any place-has as its strange effect a double process of identification or suturing ofthe subject. That is, this partial identity seems to promise us a possibility to answer the question of who we are in relation to the image, a question to which we could not respond, or not respond in the legal terms recognized by the

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frame, as long as we were simply haunted by the complete lack of identity and place of the breathing and beat. What are the two responses to who we are? On the one hand, we seem able to merge with the stalker from whose point of view we have been watching the scene; our face completes the lack of his or her face, his or her breathing and heartbeats merge with our own increasingly horrified and aroused state and with him or her (we cannot yet determine the stalker as a man, although we soon discover that he is), we watch the girls through the open windows. On the other hand, because the non-identity of the stalker and thus our non-mastery of the image threaten our identity and identification of and with the image, it is we who are being stalked and watched, exposed to a strange and wounding presence whose position we can't determine and that is not in our control. "There is someone out there," says one of the girls being stalked, speaking also for us. We are thus no less "inside" the dorm's windows than "outside" them. Our position at this stage is thus double, a division has been instituted at the very heart of the viewers, bringing us to occupy simultaneously two positions; two positions, one of a stalked inside and the other of a stalking outside, which are the limit cases, the signs of the disintegration, of what we can call the law-enforcing side of the frame, its attempt to establish limits between inside and outside, but limit cases, as such, still very much belonging to this law-enforcing logic of the frame and that in fact attempt to uphold it because they occupy the limit positions recognizable from the point of view of the (legal) frame. Simultaneously, we are watchers and are being watched by someone; we are at once masters and slaves, those who desire to occupy a position ideally completely external to the situation and to survey it from an unseen place and those who are supposedly completely internal to the situation, a situation in which they feel trapped and suffocating, exposed to a menacing gaze they cannot see but that they nevertheless believe is part of a reality out there unavailable to them. 44 Thus, the disjunction between soundtrack and visual track we have seen operating and that haunted the viewers has been momentarily resolved through a double identification, with the perpetrator and with the victim, two relatively stable positions, yet not completely stabilized, both because, more simply, it seems to be impossible to occupy two positions at the same time, but also, and more profoundly, because these two positions leave as a remainder a haunting dimension operating in the split itself, in

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the unbridgeable gap, a center of restless horror, in between them. 45 This means that neither the haunted nor the haunter can ever achieve their position as a stable one and thus constantly have to alternate, the haunter to some extent always remaining exposed to being haunted and vice versa. fu the scene continues, we find ourselves inside the dorm's corridors. We have penetrated its borders, and we are invisibly watching the various activities of the girls from the inside while we are being watched by the menacing and unseen dimension of the film. The stalker (we?) advances to and enters the shower of which we are also the exposed, and menaced, occupants. Getting closer to the mirrors in the room, the stalker's face (our own?) is reflected and finally revealed (though with a disturbing trace of the outside still active, for we don't as yet see the source of the reflection, which remains out of frame), and it is an almost comical face of a strange-looking and overweight middle-aged man wearing glasses. Is this the presence that horrified us so, this, the menacing intruder? What is the effect and significance of this event of identification of the haunting presence? How does the mirror, giving us a reflection without source, function here? To understand the complex functioning of the mirror here, let us look briefly at the general logic of the mirror. The mirror is that which gives us an actual image, an object of perception, but it gives it to us, as we usually say, as a reflection, that is, in a mediated way, in relation to something else. The mirrored image itself, then, is something that we do not simply see directly, but rather, obliquely, in a mediated fashion, as if it had to pass through another dimension to be what it is. The enigma of the mirror is to be located precisely here, for if the mirror is a mediated image, there are two ways of understanding the logic of its mediation, that is, the logic of an outside the mirror through which the mirrored image (the inside of the mirror) had to pass before becoming what it is, and this logic parallels to the two ways of understanding the frame. On the one hand, we can say, what is outside the mirror is an object existing in a continuous dimension (space, time) to the mirror itself, and it is an object that the mirrored reflection then simply resembles, or copies; on the other hand, the mirrored image seems to relate to an absolute outside, an Other, through which it passes and creatively slices to be what it is, an outside that is not an object, which it does not resemble, which always remains in excess of it, and which is itself not some thing that is reflected but a phantom haunting every reflection.

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If we take self-reflection as the primary model of reflection, the discovery of one's self understood as one's sameness in an image, then we can say that one can have a relation to one's self only in a mediated way, via a passage through an Other that remains always in excess of the reflected image, which haunts the self-image, remaining at its heart but without ever itself becoming actualized. The self, though, in a strategy of exorcism we witnessed earlier with the heart, will want to erase the phantom lurking in the mirrored image and identify itself only with the actualized image. Precisely this dimension of the excessive haunting of the absolute outside at the heart of any reflection is powerfully released in a scene such as the one we are examining, when the stalker enters the shower, in which we perceive within the frame only the mirrored image but not its actual source, which remains off screen. The haunting power of the mirror is revealed when the frame itself becomes the decontextualizing power isolating the reflected image from its actual object (the first outside) exposing the mirror to the Other that always haunts it. We can then say that in the experience of the mirror we experience simultaneously two relations to vision: One we can call a direct vision, an immediate relation to things simply out there (in Lacanian terminology, often associated with the theoretical discussion of the mirror, we can call this imaginary vision) and the other we can call an oblique vision, the opening of vision through a mediation that leaves a trace of the excessive outside at the heart of vision (in Lacanian terminology, a vision haunted by the gaze). This internal split in vision, in which vision is different from itself, more than itself (direct and oblique), is very disturbing in the experience of the mirror. When one sees only the mirrored image while the source remains out of frame, the passage through the absolute outside, through the Other, is most markedly felt. What this conjunction between the frame and the mirror without source also illuminates for us is that the framed image itself, any framed image, can be understood as a "reflection'' without source, a reflection not resembling or copying anything actual outside it. It is a "reflection" if we understand this concept now as an oblique image created through mediation, that is, a passage through the Other that exceeds it to be what it is and that keeps haunting its heart. Thus, if Platonic metaphysics has conceived the immanent world (the inside of the frame) to be a mere reflection, sensing the mediated

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nature of every thing, it has understood this mediation according to the first model of the mirror I frame-as a reflection of an outside already out there that it resembles as a pale copy resembling its model-rather than according to the second, phantomlike, dimension of the mirror, reflecting an absolute outside (the no-thing that is the principle of non-totality and incompletion of existence) that it does not resemble because it is not a thing at all, and that remains in excess of it. 46 What immediately changes its status, once we change the understanding of reflection dominating the immanent world, understood henceforth as that which is mediated through the no-thing of the Other that it slices, is the work of art itself. If for Plato the work of art takes as its model the (first side of the) mirror and is understood as a reflection twice removed, a reflection of reflection, of an original model, we can say that the model for the work of art understood anew can again be the mirror itself, yet not its side of reflecting an object that it resembles but its phantomlike side, the ghost operating inside the reflected immanent world. The work of art is not a reflective mirror imitating a copy but the release of the phantom haunting the mediated ("reflected") inside, the release of the outside in the inside that the inside doesn't resemble. Or otherwise put, the work of art reflects, yet it reflects precisely what cannot be reflected, the phantomlike side of the mirror. 47 It shows or exposes the ghost of the outside within the immanent world. These dimensions of the question of the mirror enter into the reflected image of the pathetic man holding a knife in the scene under discussion. We can describe this image as a primary or originary image of the reflected human. 48 In what way is it such an originary image of the human? Mainly in two aspects: First, we might say that because the mirror is a mediated image coming out of the Other that it doesn't resemble, the actual reflected image itself is always a betrayal, a disappointment and a failure to be equal to the grandeur of the outside from which it comes. It always misses that which it reflects, is less than it, less than its haunting power. Any actual reflected image, before any narcissistic satisfaction one might find in the reflection, disappoints and betrays the nothing of the Other from which it comes, which it reduces, which continues to haunt it, and to the grandeur of which it doesn't live up. The narcissistic satisfaction or jubilation in the image is always secondary, a defensive move against the originary haunting of the reflected image, a successful exorcising of the

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phantom that is as if for a moment consumed in the actual image, finds an answer in it, its traces erased. The second dimension of this primordial image is the knife. The knife is that which attempts to take the place of the excess of the outside that keeps haunting the reflected image, and the place it takes is double. On the one hand, as we saw in the image of the knife coming out of the stain in the image, it is a paranoid interpretation of the menacing outside, turning the no-thing of its excess beyond the frame into something recognizable within the terms of the frame itself, a menace to its law and to the bodily integrity it attempts to establish. On the other hand, the knife is already a principle of revenge and violence, as well as the need to compensate for the haunting discovered in the mirror by finding within the world of the frame someone that can be blamed for or accused of this haunting that the self wants to erase. Another major aspect of the knife appearing as if out of the mirrored image can be called its technical aspect-that it is a technological or creative human invention. The knife, which takes the place of the excessive Other haunting the reflection as if coming from this principle of openness that is the Other, comes from it as a creative dimension, made possible by the principle of non-closure and non-totality that is the potential outside. The knife is made possible as a coming of the unanticipated new out of the non-totality that is the Other. We will see in the next scene how the technological aspect of the human is related to this discovery of the absolute outside, but already in this scene, the knife, in all its aspects, is brought as a primordial technological invention, both compensating for the Other, trying to take its place, exorcising its ghost and seeking for revenge, and revealing the possibility of the coming of the new. As for our relation as viewers to the pathetic man discovered in the mirror, its complexity and ambiguity derive from the logic of this reflected image. Being haunted, the viewers search for an identity, we said, that can drive away the menace of this phantom discovered at their heart, and the man in the mirror seems to supply just such an identity. There finally seems an answer to the enigmatic question by which the viewers were initially addressed. However, the viewers' relation to this answer seems at least to have a double nature. On the one hand, the discovery of the identity in the mirror would imply that the one we discover is ourselves-the identity on the screen would seem to answer our own anxious questioning in relation

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to our identity that the enigmatic address troubled us with. The mirror seems a calming answer to the enigma. We are the one on the screen. However, the identity discovered, the stalker's identity, we said, is disappointing. It is a pathetic identity of a weak and non-menacing presence, someone just like us, or even worse off, a betrayal of the grandeur of the menace to which we have been exposed. 49 This sense of the completeness of the identity revealed joined with the discrepancy between this identity and the previously sensed power of menace actually brings us to completely dissociate and separate ourselves from the identity on the screen, a separation that immediately brings about the dissolution of our double identification with the stalker and with the victims. We are just watching a movie, we finally realize; this has nothing to do with us, has no bearing on our identity and on who we are. This is not us, on the screen, this is not our image reflected in the mirror, nor can this be an image reflecting our desires. Thus, the strange effect of haunting with which we started, in which we were exposed to a dimension not completely external yet not totally internalized, is resolved either as a complete identification or a total distance. Either I or non-I, but not the strange rhythm or flickering of the I as non-I. But paradoxically, the most complete unification occurs at this moment of our extreme separation from the stalker. We can finally achieve the position of stalkers ourselves, safe from any surveillance, by the film, and thus of any involvement with it, which the stalker's unreflected presence implied. The split opened at the viewers' heart is finally covered over. Here another function of the mirror in this scene is revealed, the negative function allowing us to release ourselves from the mirror altogether, because strangely, by allowing us not to be reflected in it, the mirror allows for the elimination of the phantomlike side always involved in reflection. The mirror thus functions here as the very elimination of mirroring and the haunting it always seems to imply. But perhaps even more complexly, we can say that what the mirror image in this scene allows us to do, through the negation of our reflection, is to disavow that which we see as having anything to do with us, and by thus allowing us to disavow the effect of our reflection, it can actually institute us, paradoxically, as the perfect reflection (in the first sense of reflection) of the image projected, the image of the stalker, that is, institute us as stalkers with no haunting remainder to disturb us, pure masters of the image. This game of reflec-

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tions and its denials actually results in what we can call a perfect mirror, a mirror that can eliminate reflection's phantom. If the screen is not even a mirror in which we are reflected, we can fully master ourselves and master the screen at the same time. We are thus completely liberated from any trace of being stalked ourselves. But as a consequence of this strange logic of reflection, the moment of our utmost sense of non-involvement in that which we see, 5° the moment of the pure transparency of the image's meaning, its naked truth, so to speak, the moment of our absolute mastery, is actually also the moment when we become nothing but the perfect reflection of what we see, fully instituted and manipulated, with no gaps left, by the film. 51 By allowing our hauntedness to be resolved through a false negation of our mirror image, the film has actually managed to control our identity in the most powerful manner, managing to institute it without any remainder of questioning its nature. The Scream and the Pornographic

What does this finally completely (or almost completely) safe and liberated viewer see? What does the hidden, framing, master-who is actually at the same time the supremely manipulated, thus subjected, framed, and controlled viewer-desire to watch above all else? We see the stalker with his knife approaching a shower with a menace we can now sit and safely enjoy. In the shower, there is a naked girl soaping herself, and our intruder, getting closer, lifts the transparent shower screen, gets his knife ready, and is about to stab. The girl notices him and utters a scream. The hidden (male 52 ) master desires to watch and enjoy, above all else, from a safe distance, an absolutely exposed, helpless, and naked girl screaming and being stabbed, a desire that seems to come as a defensive and vindictive response to the horrifYing heartbeat to which the viewer has been initially exposed and which instituted him or her as haunted, and a desire perhaps wishing, more than anything, to eliminate the very trace of the viewer's exposure (to film), which is as if persisting in (an unconscious) memory and restlessly still working. But the master is disappointed, his or her pleasure interrupted, for the scream in the scene we are watching is not right, its sound entirely ridiculous. It is thus, as the knife is about to enter the screaming girl's naked body, that the movie we are watching is interrupted by the face of

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the soundman Terry sitting in an entirely red, enclosed, and windowless screening and editing room, watching what we now see is indeed only a movie, and bursting into laughter, a laughter released by the sound uttered by the girl. "The scream is terrible," he says, and the judgment and laughter stands for our own reaction. We are implicated again, exposed to the address of the Other, discovering a dimension whose unfulfillment opens our identity to a new questioning, a new suspense; the perfect mirror starts to crack. For the scream, the culminating figure of the opening scene, around which all the other figures are orchestrated, isn't right; it is not what we wanted, and needed, to hear. Though it is indeed the actress' voice recorded on the soundtrack, as the director present in this scene confirms, it somehow does not fit in the very mouth that uttered it, and by not fitting, somehow fails to satisfY something we desire, something supposed to happen in between the opening of the mouth and our, and Terry's, ear. 53 It is as if what we have been waiting for, that would have assured our complete liberation from the phantom haunting us since the film's opening, doesn't happen, and the dimension of haunting is opened up again very forcefully, in the gap between this strange and menacing opening in the organic body that is the mouth and the no less strange opening with no organic mechanism for closing that is the ear. It is as if only the right scream, when made to fit in the opened mouth of the naked girl whose image we master, can close our mouth and ears (and eyes, and heart) and exorcise the phantom discovered in their openness (to the absolute outside). But if it is the scream that we want to make fit, more than anything else, into a mouth that we can master, that would seem to indicate that the scream is somehow that which is most unmasterable, that most resists fitting in, or having a place. The scream seems to be the utmost occurrence of placelessness and painful haunting, a strange event of human utterance that occupies the atopic and haunting abyss that the absolute outside marks in the inside. This also seems to indicate that what is at stake in a film taking as its point of departure the relations between a scream discovered in between the senses and the attempt to make it fit into a mouth is nothing but the question of the constitutive tensions of human speech as such. Therefore, because of this quality of the scream as marking the placelessness of the abyssal outside in the inside we need to make it fit into a mouth, this most dangerous of openings. It is as if by this making the

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placeless fit, a paradoxical making of a place for that which is not of the order of the place, that we can achieve the paradoxical desire of mastering our own unmasterable dimension, but as unmasterable. That is, the unmasterable is not simply that which we want to overcome but, rather, that which we desire to remain intact as unmasterable, yet in our possession, as if we wanted to live death, be present at our own funeral, see the night in the day. When using the terms of the mirror, we can say that we want to have reflected (in the first sense, as a doubling of an object) in the mirror the very dimension of haunting that opens the mirror and remains, by definition, unreflected in it. The drama of the work of art as the first brief scene (and the whole film) rehearses it thus seems to involve an essential ambiguity and struggle between its unparalleled and profound quality of releasing the phantomlike dimension of existence, showing or exposing the outside in the inside, and its unparalleled strategy of trapping this dimension (the essentially pornographic side of the work of art 54), fitting the "outside in the inside" in the inside, capturing the scream in the shower. 55 Is there a way out? Is there a way to traverse this paradoxical mirror dreaming of reflecting the nonreflexive phantom? This, I would say, is the essential problem and task haunting De Palma's work. It is crucial, therefore, to stress here that there is an essential, subtle yet infinite, difference, and it is a difference on which the whole gamble of De Palma's work depends and on the abyss of which it vertiginously plays, between, on the one hand, what I call showing or exposing the phantom, showing the outside in the inside, and, on the other hand, reflecting (in the first, more common, sense of the term) the phantom, making it an object of perception we can possess, trapping the "outside in the inside" in the inside, leaving no outside. The task of the work of art would be to show the phantom without reflecting it, and what I called the gamble of De Palma's films, the horrible risk they are willing to take, has to do with De Palma's implicit argument that only by taking the risk of pornography to its utmost logical (not representational) limit, acknowledging and activating its power and its inevitable and essential implication in the work of art, can there be a chance to traverse it, crossing its reflective desire and achieving a real showing and witnessing of the Other. Coming back to the film, and to the point when Terry is sent to capture a scream for the shower scene, we can say, based on the earlier discussion, that as the film-within-the-film is interrupted and Blow Outs

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narrative "proper" begins, the viewers are positioned as the desirers of the captivation of the scream, the ones who need somebody's scream for their peace of mind and elimination of their hauntedness, and need it in a place they can controU6 Let us move then to Blow Ouls main narrative, and to the introduction ofJack Terry-the soundman who, as his ears seem especially attuned to this mysterious place between the scream and the mouth, is thus the perfect instrument to find the perfect scream. How, then, does Terry make an appearance, how is he introduced into our film, what logic dictates his coming on screen? He appears, precisely, through his mouth, through an uncontrollable laughter forcing his mouth open in response to the ridiculous scream on the screen. Immediately trying to stop his laughter, Terry says, "The scream is terrible," as if attempting to transform or translate the uncontrollable linguistic event of the laughter-the event that separated his voice from his mouth, caught him by surprise, and as if unintentionally transmitted to him from the screen the disjunctive and implicating address discovered between the senses and the organs-into a linguistic, grammatical form he can control, the linguistic form, precisely, of an aesthetic judgment. 57 But the judgment seems unable to quiet down the laughter, which seems to contain something that exceeds it, which is in essential contention with it. Thus, Terry immediately laughs again. 58 Terry's first appearance, then, seems to dramatize a fundamental tension of human speech between scream and laughter on the one hand and judgment on the other. Yet, I've suggested, we are dealing here with a special kind of judgment: aesthetic judgment. If we take Terry's laughter to be the strange expression within the order of speech of the excess beyond the frame, the irruption of the phantom, entering through the opening between the mouth and the ear as revealed in the shower scene, and if we take, as I do, his judgment, "It's a terrible scream," to be a certain version of aesthetic judgment, whose role seems to involve here a defense, an attempt at closure, directed against the haunting Terry alarmingly discovers in himself,5 9 then we can say that aesthetic judgment is a strange kind of judgment, the task of which is to introduce into the legal order of the frame that which is not of this order, the excess beyond it, or in other words to legislate an event that seems not subsumed under any law. 60 The frame, we have seen, is also a legal concept, in that it is the origin of a limit, of a separation between inside and outside. But the law I frame, I have also

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said, immediately wants to forget its origins in an excess that continues to haunt it, and thus tries to interpret everything from the point of view of the frame, forgetting its internal outside, and reducing all conceptuality to legality. The paradoxical concept of the aesthetic judgment performs precisely this operation, reducing to a logic of judgment, to that which has to be related to a form of law and which decides what fits inside the frame and what doesn't, that which is not of the order of judgment. We can therefore also see, surprisingly perhaps, how the notion of aesthetic judgment is to be thought together with the notion of pornography, both trying to achieve the impossible reflection of that which is not of the order of reflection, and to establish a law without excess. In short, as Kant argued, yet not for the same reasons and with a slightly different logic, aesthetic judgment is a reflective judgment, the restoration of the (first side of the) mirror. Pornography and aesthetic judgment thus attempt to keep the law I frame intact and whole, protecting it from the absolute outside. 61 From the perspective of these issues, we can understand another use, directly opposed to the one discussed earlier, that De Palma makes of the dimension of the pornographic in his films, and that makes them (for many of his American critics, at least) so hard to accept as great works of art. The sleazy dimension of the pornographic prevents aesthetic reflection-paradoxically, because conventional pornography is not pornographic enough, failing to attract desire in trapping the unreflected phantom, as if a stick has been thrown in the wheels of the machine of aesthetic judgment. It is as if De Palma, by introducing traces of pornographic sleaze, attempts to resist the damning (and truly pornographic) label of work of art (understood aesthetically). The pornographic in this second use thus actually seems to be an attempt to resist aesthetic pornography understood as the capturing of the phantom or the scream, and its base dimension seems to open a horrifYing abyss within the altitudes of the lofty work of art by interrupting its reflective working and by thus perhaps exposing it to its phantomlike abyss. If I have said earlier that pornography is not pornographic enough, not managing to reflect that which we want reflected above all else and show the naked truth, we can now say that art is not pornographic ("dirty" and "low") enough, submitting too much to its pornographic desire of reflection. Let us continue to examine the logic dictating the appearance of Terry. He appears, we said, very soon after the ridiculous scream is heard,

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a mere moment after the viewers sense, without having time even to bring it into consciousness, the misfit nature of the scream. We might thus say he appears-in a way parallel to the logic we already examined regarding the first appearances of Carrie and Gillian in The Fu~as responsible in our eyes (and in the eyes of the director character, who soon accuses Terry of not taking care that the scream was "good") for the misfit of the scream. But Terry also appears as our hope for resolution, as the one who can take care of this fault of the scream, can close the horrifying opening revealed in the scream's failure, and he can thus be said to be inserted (perhaps in a logic close to what I designated as the one governing the "technological" device of the cigarette) as a protective shield against our own exposure to the horrifying dimension between the mouth and scream. Terry thus becomes our messenger, our envoy into the no-land of screams, who is responsible for bringing back the good scream, led by no indication of what that might mean. But he is a special kind of messenger, an emissary of our unconscious desires who is supposed to bring us that which we don't know (in our conscious knowledge, that is) that we want, for we don't even know, cannot give a name to our apprehension, that it is the scream that we desire. 62

* Before moving on with the interrogation of the logic dictating Terry's trajectory, I would like to introduce briefly another major aspect operating in it and in the thought of the film in general, an aspect revealed as well in this first scene of Blow Ouis narrative "proper," and that is the aspect of technology. How is the question of the technological introduced into the film and what is the logic dictating its functioning? The technological is introduced, we might say, through the cracks discovered in the opening scene, through the various horrifying and haunting nonplaces, these nonorganic outsides discovered in between the organs and in between the senses. If in the opening scene, the organs and the senses were disjoined, liberated to an extent from each other and fragmented, disturbing an organic whole, then in this next scene, we are introduced to an editing machine with several aural and visual channels, each controllable on its own and in charge of the activity in the recording of a certain organ or sound. We see the director of Co-Ed Frenzy, finding the scream ridiculous and attempting to verify Terry's claim that it is the actress' own

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voice that was used, ordering his technician to isolate the channel of the scream, shutting all the various other sound channels in charge of music, footsteps, heartbeat, and so on. After verifYing that it is indeed the actress' own scream that we hear, the director orders Terry to find a good scream to be inserted into her mouth. The technological device thus appears immediately to have several functions and to participate in a complex way in the problem of haunting with which the film opened. On the one hand, this technological apparatus seems to be an invention enabled by the disruption of the organic discovered in the blank outsides. Since it is a machine that separates organs and senses, it seems that it is a new creation, a new thing arising as if out of this nothing, the non-totality of the outside to which we are exposed through the disruption of the organs and through the haunting gaps opened in the a-rhythmic heartbeat, and out of the disjunction between the ear and the eye. But it is not only that out of this absolute outside in-between the fragmented organs and senses that something new arrives. This technological machine actually made it possible for this fragmentation of the organism to fully manifest itself as a haunted film. The technological apparatus here is itself a device of fragmentation, isolating the various organs from each other by assigning them to different sound channels, as well as isolating the voice from the eye. 63 Thus film, as a technological art, is something new, a creation made possible by a disruption discovered in the haunting of organic totality, but it is also that which can effect such a disruption, release the phantom, and bring it into view through its technological devices, a bringing into view that the other arts are perhaps less successful in effecting. Beyond fragmenting the organism, the technological machine is also in charge of inserting a scream, achieved through nonorganic methods because the actor's own voice will not be used, into the mouth, closing the horrifYing abyss that opened with the scream's failure. The technological thus becomes here a prosthesis, a mechanism of compensation for the haunting of the Other, for the disruption of the organic, trying to fill the hole and close the horror, to exorcise the ghost and to create a new totality, a new organism achieved by nonorganic means. It is as if an organic, totalizing, vision of the human can only be effected technologically, via a nonorganic invention. The technological apparatus thus appears to participate in the two sides of the work of art discussed earlier. On the one hand, the apparatus offers a powerful machinery for the release of ghosts, for introducing fragmentation, but

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on the other hand, the apparatus participates, and most powerfully, in the pornographic desire to trap the unreflected and to close the haunting by technological means, to capture the ghost in the machine. The technological apparatus functions here in another way as a compensatory device for the horror discovered in the opening scene, and this within the order of the narrative, by means of effecting a paranoid suturing of the type discussed in the previous chapter. If in the opening segment, we are exposed to a haunting we want to exorcise, then in this segment, we immediately receive a narrative answer to our horror, for the blank holes that addressed us are now paranoically sutured and explained away through our exposure to a machinery operating behind the scenes. If there is something behind the scenes, a figure of a master pulling the strings and a machine that can explain the fragmentation, then our anxieties are resolved; there is an answer to our haunting.

* Let us now continue to examine Terry's trajectory, the trajectory of he who is both our emissary, the double in charge of getting us that which we don't know that we want, and our stand-in, the one who activates, within the world of the movie, a trajectory in many ways parallel to our own, a trajectory of those discovering at their heart a blank haunting.

Splitting the Screen Following the opening scene, in which the director dispatches Terry to find a good scream, as well as to record some other sound effects, we see Terry in his sound lab, busy editing. Leaving his editing desk, where he is working standing up, for a short break, Terry goes to another part of the room (geometrically occupying precisely another half of the screen, closer to the viewers), where he sits down for a moment as if fatigued, turns on a TV set, takes a smoke, and watches the evening news, the subject of which happens to be the upcoming presidential election. A certain governor is so popular that he seems likely to beat the president. Sitting as he does watching the TV; the film screen is no longer divided into two equal halves but is now mainly occupied by the part of the room dominated by the TV; which seems to draw Terry's full attention. However, in a small space on the left

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hand of the screen, the editing area is still visible, as ifTerry, while trying to focus his attention on one thing, is nevertheless exposed to another activity, which, though occupying only a peripheral status at the moment, is nevertheless constantly present. 64 The president's campaign manager is interviewed and is asked about the likelihood of the president's defeat. He mentions the improvements the president is about to introduce and feels assured of a quick economic recovery, which gives him the confidence in the president's reelection. As he watches the interview, Terry suddenly hears the beeping sound of his editing machines from the other side of the room, only a small section of which is still shown, indicating that he needs to get back to work. As he looks into the space off screen, having to change the center of his focus and lose sight of the TY, he hears the voice of the campaign manager, whom he no longer sees: "A lot can happen between now and then'' (that is, Election Day). As Terry gets back to work, the screen is again symmetrically divided, and he is occupying the left half of the screen while the right half shows the TV as the news continues. As the news anchorman speculates that the governor will soon announce his candidacy and "throw his hat into the ring"using a signifier with an auditory (and romantic) dimension-the screen is split in two, and following this split, the anchorman immediately addresses a question to, and opens a dialogue with, an anchorwoman, who wasn't seen before and with whom he now shares (half of) the screen. The screen itself, following the split, is occupied henceforth by two half screens separated by a small dark gap between them, the one following Terry's actions, the other occupied with the news report. The left half screen shows Terry operating the tape recording machine and cataloguing various soundsfootsteps, glass, shot, body fall-while the right half screen shows a report of the governor's ball. The main interpretative problem of the scene, what mainly calls for our attention, is the problem of the logic dictating the device of splitting the screen, first in the context of this scene, but also more generally. What is it that calls for this device, used so frequently in De Palma's films, constituting one of his paradigmatic cinematic gestures, 65 a gesture marking his most succinct demonstration of the birth of the cinematic image, his most elegant presentation of the structure of human subjectivity, and standing perhaps, in its simple and precise economy, for everything he is trying to

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do in cinema? 66 Starting with a somewhat formal analysis of this device, we can say that it basically involves three moments: (1) an act or event of splitting, a fragmentation or breaking, of the whole image; (2) the simultaneous and autonomous existence of two framed surfaces between which there is a (practically invisible) gap, thus a breaking of the screen constitutes a complete single frame; and yet (3) a breaking in two that nevertheless maintains an essential tension with, perhaps under the domination of, and as an inescapable desire for, the one screen (or more precisely for the unification of the screen) shared by the two framesY Going slightly beyond this formal analysis, but remaining for the moment focused on structure, and trying to inquire into the conceptual and logical significance of the split screen for our context, we may ask: Is there a more remarkable cinematic device for introducing, quite "literally," the outside into the inside? Probably not. For what is the split introduced into the frame, into the heart of the cinematic image, if not the cutting separation that usually takes place between successive images or frames, in an edit for example, and that is thus understood as external to each of the frames, limiting them but not affecting their interiors? We may thus view the split, to begin with, as an interior or internal edit I limit, and it marks that which usually separates one frame from the next as operating at the heart of the frame and separating now the framed image from itself rather than from simply another frame. 68 Through the blank gap traced by the split in its interior, the framed image becomes other than itself, and the split thus transforms the question of the Other to the frame to become the very question of the frame's relation to itself, for the frame now has to relate to itself through its alienation, its becoming other, and does so through the mediation of this outside that intervenes in it, this Other to the frame that becomes part of it, that is folded into its heart, marking a hole in it. The split is thus neither exactly internal to (in the sense of part of) the cinematic frame, nor exactly external (in the sense of separate from) but is an external interior, or what we called a haunting. The split-interior edit is the haunting of the image by the absolute outside, making it differ from itself and relate to itsel£ This interior edit, which effects a relating of the frame to itself through the mediation of an Other by which it is haunted, is a non- (fully) reflective relation of the self (the frame) to itself and is equivalent, from the point of view of our discussion of the mirror, to a self relating to itself without eliminating the haunting phantom that is the mirror's condition, that is, relat-

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ing to itself obliquely, by passing through the Other or phantom of which it becomes a slice, and on which it becomes a perspective. The split screen thus resembles a mirrored reflection with the blank gap of the split marking the trace of the nonreflective haunting of the Other, and the frame I self becomes a self-relation through an Other, which incorporates the Other as an excess it cannot completely internalize and that cannot be reflected, bur nevertheless constitutes the possibility of its interiority and self-relation or reflection. Thus, if we consider the frame as standing for an image, or a model, of subjectivity, we might say that the split screen is the cinematic equivalent to Arthur Rimbaud's famous formula" 'I' is an other." Through this haunting traced by the split at its heart, the frame thus discovers an excessive, absolute outside through which it has to pass in order to relate to itself and thus become itself ("become who you are"), that is, to become a frame, a fragmentary perspective on an Other, and not a totality or a whole. 69 But this discovery of its own being as a frame exposed to an Other that exceeds it, this discovery of its split from itself, involves a simultaneous discovery-that there is and must by definition be more than one frame, more than one perspective. There are at least two frames or perspectives. The moment the frame relates to itself as an Other is thus also the moment that it must relate to another frame, and the split screen is therefore both a self-relation of the frame as well as of the simultaneity of two distinct frames. But because there are at least two fragments or perspectives, meaning two perspectives on an Other, it follows that the basic unit of articulation (in cinematic and in general terms), the basic unit defining the split screen involves three terms-two frames and an Other between them that exceeds them both, and makes them relate to themselves and to each other through it. By the term basic unit ofarticulation, I mean the originary structure of that movement we call the movement of sense or meaning. It is shown by the split screen to be a movement between at least two simultaneous fragments that transmit to each other their own fragmentarity, that is, their own exposure to an Other that exceeds them, which signifies their incompleteness, and which they share in not having (as part of them). Transmitting to each other their incompleteness, they also transmit a certain experience of loss, a loss of wholeness (which never existed but is projected backward as having been70), and they look to each other for a solution to this loss revealed by their fragmentary nature, trying to exorcise the phantom of the Other that constitutes each of them, and

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make the other (the second fragment) cover up their originary hole, close the split in the screen, thus completing them and establishing them as a unity, or a totality with no outside. Their discovery of their own nature as a fragment/frame thus immediately produces the illusion that they are what we called the first type of frame, standing in relation to a preexisting totality of which they are a glimpse and which can be reconstituted through another frame/fragment with which they will unite to form a whole. The split screen as the basic unit of articulation thus corresponds to the original Greek concept of the sign, the Symbolon, or symbol, that object broken in two parts whose desire it is to reunite, and, we might add, not realizing that the two broken parts are broken parts with no unity preceding them. 71 We might therefore say that the activity of splitting the screen is already on its own a full cinematic statement and can be viewed as the minimal event of a complete film, for it is the discovery of the frame as frame, thus as a fragment relating to itself through a haunting Other, having essentially as well a second frame in relation to which it constitutes a signifYing event, which always leaves an excess of the abyssal Other, the absolute outside by which the viewers are addressed and haunted beyond their identification with any single frame. All these aspects of the split screen constituting, we might say, its structural matrix are always activated in the many split screens in De Palma's films, but each time this basic structure is illuminated in relation to a different set of conceptual and thematic concerns. Let us examine, then, the set of more specific issues raised by the split screen in the sound lab scene we are discussing, both from Terry's point of view as well as that of the viewers. The event of splitting in this scene involves four types: It is a splitting of attention, of the center of focus, Terry's as well as the viewers', because the screen is split precisely when Terry's attention is divided between the news report and his editing work; it is a splitting between the senses, between hearing and seeing, because the screen is split between what Terry sees and what he hears; it is a splitting (operating less importantly in this scene, but very importantly in the film in general) between the sexes, because the split is related to the moment when the single voice of the male reporter dominating the news suddenly loses its mastery and has to relate to another voice, that of the female reporter; and finally it is a split in meaning, or in the sense, of the situation, because the situation will be dominated by two

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centers of meaning that will vie for centrality, the sound editing on which Terry is working and the news report. The centers of focus, the centers of meaning and interpretation, the senses, and the sexes thus all split and fragment simultaneously in this virtuosic use of the split screen, revealing between them an Other, an internal outside traced in the blank gap of the split itsel£ Let us start with the question of attention. Most immediately, the split in this scene-this enigmatic intrusion of a disturbing dimension of invisibility, of the nonsensical nothing of a cut, into the previously unified visual field--occurs as a disturbance that splits Terry's (and our) attention, divided as it is henceforth between the television news he continues to hear but no longer sees and the editing of sounds he is working on (which are themselves split because they are sounds with titles written on the film material), a division of attention that becomes a division into two centers of focus, two units, as well as a division between what Terry sees and what he hears. But what does it mean to say that the attention is split, and why does it have to do with the device of splitting the screen into two simultaneous frames? 72 According to the main conceptual opposition dominating this chapter, the opposition between the two types of frame, one relating to a hierarchical logic of continuity and totality, the other to a fragmentary and creative logic of incompleteness, we can say that there are also two concepts of attention. The first, what we might call the metaphysical notion of attention, is related to the first conception of the frame. According to this conception, attention implies a stabilizing order of existence, a unifying rhythm (time to work and time to play, and so forth), a hierarchical distribution between a center of focus and expanding peripheries, as well as a framing mechanism of interpretation. That is, in paying attention, one has to isolate from a certain originary experience of multiplicity that vies for our attention a center of focus understood to be the most significant aspect of a certain situation, or of the whole world, of existence, a center that then hierarchically dominates all the other components of a situation that have to be understood in relation to it and are distributed according to their contribution to its prominence, that is, to its being able to maintain a position of centrality. 73 As such, this center becomes a center of meaning and sense, a center in relation to which everything else is oriented and in relation to which everything receives its significance, its place in a unified and hierarchically ordered whole. This center is essentially

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related to the concept of the frame in that its powers of centralizing, of establishing a hierarchy in an ordered totality, depend on two powers held by the frame, both relating to the frame as that which holds the power to order the division between inside and outside. Based on this power, the frame 74 embodies first the decision about what fits inside a situation (and the center uses this power to have inside only that which can enhance the center's prominence) and what remains outside (that which disturbs the center and does not fit with its powers, henceforth counted as insignificant or nonexistent). 75 Based on its power to create an inside and an irrelevant outside the frame also becomes a hierarchizing power marking the order of existence based on the distance from the center of the frame, marking a gradual decrease of power the more one is distanced from the center and brought closer to the peripheries, where one approaches being relegated to the complete insignificance of the (relative) outside. 76 Bur what happens when more than one center claims our attention, more than one focus, and thus more than one frame, for the "same" situation and at the "same" time? In other words, what happens when there is more than one frame for the "same" screen? An experience sets in of that which is not of the order of the frame and that is in excess of its powers, and thus it is discovered that the frame, being haunted by an Other externalinternal to it rather than completely possessing the power of decision upon an irrelevant outside from the position of an essential inside, involves an essential fragmentation, a split, as we saw, both from itself and from other fragments with which it cannot form a whole. This fragmentation also signifies that the frame I screen I time was never the "same," was never "one," but, as we saw, was from the beginning different from itself, or Other from itself. This discovery of the frame's Other and thus of an essential, nonorganic multiplicity also signifies the loss of the thought of the center and of metaphysical attention because it means that the frames cannot be unified again, haunted as they are by the Other discovered in the split that is in excess of them and cannot be covered over. 77 Attention will henceforth not be directed toward the location of a center dominating a given totality but the slicing of a perspective that, by definition, must always relate to other perspectives, other centers of attention challenging each other as a perspective on the Other and unable to be reunited around a single center. This loss of metaphysical attention and center occurring in the splitting of the screen introduces an anxiety: the horror of disorientation and of

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a disintegration of a certain experience of reality, the collapse of the experience of reality as it was classically defined as that which has, in principle, only one center, and is thus unified, or constitutes a unity of direction and meaning, be it even teleologically defined, in relation to a regulative idea, or a vanishing point in the future. In short, this loss implies the collapse of what has been termed the metaphysics of representation, which culminated with the birth of the Cartesian subject (the center) of representation, the one presupposed in advance in any decision about meaning and in relation to which, as a dependency on its powers, every event has to be thought?8 The splitting of the screen thus implies the pain of disintegration of this imperative for unity; a pain more forcefully felt standing as it does constantly under the imperative of, and the desire for, the one-screen-oneframe equation, thus the desire to constantly integrate again that which has split. 79 Terry, and we the viewers, are caught, through this act of splitting, not by any of the separate frames but rather, precisely by their disjunction, that is, by the blank and invisible gaping wound between the frames that signifies a "hole" (or a scarred trace of the haunting Other) in each of the frames' completeness (that is, in their ability to dictate or announce a whole order), thus signifies their fragmentarity, their exposure to, their secret and bleeding communication with, each other. Put another way, we are caught in this (invisible, non-) place, the border, where the impossible demand of translation between the frames---of bringing to each what the other says and means, that is usually reduced to the effort of relating them both to a single order of meaning, thus erasing the split and restoring the single frame I screen-is heard. 80 This gap, then, addresses Terry as well as the viewers, implicates them in the disintegration of their identity (identity being understood both as a demand for a unity and the preexistence of a center in relation to which everything that arrives receives its meaning), and exposes them, makes them passive to, a dimension of the Other as an excess ofsense (in all senses of the term), implied by the blank gap. 81

The Excess ofSense What is the significance here of the concept of excess, and what is its relation to the question of sense? Excess in this context should not be understood as a numerical or quantitative category but, rather, as a main

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category of what we are trying to elaborate as "new thinking," this thinking of an immanent outside. Excess designates, in the context of this thinking, the very being of the outside in the inside as a haunting it cannot contain (for the outside is a no-thing and therefore cannot be contained), which keeps it open, preventing it from closing in upon itself, and in relation to which it is passive; excess therefore, as we saw, immediately implies a thinking of fragments with no whole where each fragment both essentially differs from itself and is more and other than itself, in excess of itself, an internal difference that simultaneously implies a thinking of "more-thanoneness" or of an essential multiplicity of fragments. This thinking of excess immediately implies as well a new thinking of sense. If the senses were traditionally understood according to the metaphysical division of an inside world of the senses and a non-sensual, intelligible outside from which the world of the senses received its significance and in relation to which it was a pale copy, then in the new, fragmentary thinking of excess where the outside is introduced into the inside as a non-substantial haunting, we discover that we need to consider the senses in a completely different way. If the logic of excess, of the introduction of the outside into the inside, is to apply to the senses, this has to mean, we realize, two things: First, it means that each sense is its own difference from itself, in excess of itself, because of its haunting by the internal-external Other, and second, it means there are essentially, that there have to be, several senses or fragments. That is, if there is to be sense at all when the outside is introduced into the inside, into what used to be called the world of the senses, then there has to be an essential multiplicity of senses or fragments. It cannot make sense to talk about a unique sense, one sense encompassing all, once the outside is introduced into the inside. Here too an essential shift is introduced into the second significance of the term sense, that is, sense as meaning. For what is metaphysical meaning if not the attempt to reunite the multiplicity announced by the world of the senses under a single, non-sensual center? But once this center is lost because of the new discovery of an essential fragmentarity implied in the thought of the immanent outside, meaning itself cannot function as it did metaphysically, that is, as a power of oneness (the metaphysical outside) that dominates and gives justification for the (non-essential) plurality of the inside. Meaning now ceases to be this domination of the many by the one and becomes the bleeding communication happening in between the

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essential multiplicity of fragments/senses that cannot be unified. Meaning does not justifY or give meaning to the senses but is the non-sensual event happening in between them as a communication of their fragmentariness to each other, a communication of their hauntedness, and it is itself never one, but also essentially multiple, always different, in excess of itsel£ 82 This logic of the excess of sense is brilliantly worked out in the split screen we are discussing, and I would like to briefly show how its two main aspects, of the senses and of meaning, operate in this scene. Let us start with the question of meaning. The excess of sense as meaning activated by the split screen implies that it is constitutively impossible to assign a meaning to the situation by which we are confronted-meaning being understood as a unifYing identity or identification that gives every element in the situation a justification, a place in an ordered whole-an impossibility first experienced as the competition among several centers, or frames, of interpretation for the domination of the meaning of the situation. Thus, in our scene, the question is which frame will dominate the screen's meaning: Will it be the news report about the presidential race, or will it be the sound editing process? Deciding upon a dominant frame would mean that the two activities would stand in a comprehensible relation to each other, in which one would explain and justifY the other. Is the sound editing part of a vast political story or is the political story an element in a vast experiment of sound editing? This is one of the constitutive tensions dominating Blow Out. Making this decision will mean, precisely, that the painful blank gap will be closed, covered over so as to give the screen back its unity, covering it over with a single frame, the (dream of the) frame of all frames, which is therefore no frame at all. This desire-to close the gap and to unifY the frame I screen by deciding that one of its two frames is dominant and gives justification to the other-allows us to say that one possible reading of Blow Ouis narrative following the scene we are discussing-a scene that ends, precisely, with the dissolution of the split screen and a resumption of the storyline in which Terry goes to the bridge where he will record the accident-is as a phantasmic construction of a coherent narrative (narrative being a unifYing operation which gives events a causal order in a whole) that will make the two frames come together. 83 That is, Terry's ensuing adventure can be seen as his paranoid or phantasmic84 attempt to cohere the split-between

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the TV news and the sound editing, between eye and ear, and more profoundly, he seeks to eliminate the very horror of separation discovered in this split-to make the political story cohere with the sounds of bodies falling, wind blowing, and so on. 85 I must now stress, by way of repeating some of our previous points, two things in relation to this notion of excess discovered through the vying with each other of several interpretative frames for the "same" situation. And both these points have to do with the nonquantitative nature of the notion of excess: First, excess does not have to do simply with the fact that there is a plurality of meanings or frames, a plurality of ways to unifY (the operation of the metaphysical concept of meaning) a situation but, rather, with an essential multiplicity offragments Iframes, discovered as an essential failure of meaning understood as unification, and its transformation into that which communicates in between fragments that cannot form a whole. A second point, implied by the demands of the first, is that the relations between the multiplicity of frames of interpretation cannot be grasped as a numerical accumulation, as if saying, this frame is valid, and this frame is valid as well, and so forth. Trying to achieve this conciliatory stance of seeing together many interpretations and points of view as equally valid and even as simply enriching, through numerical variety, the accumulated meaning of a situation or of a work, would mean following again the dream of the frame of all frames, a richer, plural frame. It would mean that there is a sense of talking about the same situation to which all these various frames refer, a situation as if external to them, existing on its own. Rather, the feeling of excess here has to do with the experience of a constitutive and irreducible heterogeneity and multiplicity of the various frames I fragments I perspectives on the excessive Other. It is the discovery of an essential, unbridgeable, and unconciliatory difference between an irreducible multiplicity of positions exposed to, that is contested by (and inevitably so because having another center means, by definition, being exposed to that which undermines the center's unifying authority) each other, and the threat of annihilation of one center I frame I point of view by another, discovered through the exposure to the gap, experienced as address in between the frames. The second main dimension of the excess of sense in our split screen scene in the sound lab, as I mentioned, has to do with the raising of the question of the senses, with the way in which the splitting into

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two frames involves a disjunction between two senses, the sense of sight and that of sound. The logic of an originary splitting or multiplicity of meanings I frames I points of view discovered in the blank gap in between the frames turns out at the same time to involve, this scene seems to suggest, an essential demand to think the question of the senses under the problematics of a no less originary splitting between them (hearing and seeing, in our case). It is as if the very notion of a bodily sense is truly discovered for the first time once the metaphysical thought of the center collapses and the logic of a nonorganic fragmentation or essential multiplicity of frames implied by the introduction of the concept of an immanent outside comes to the fore. It would now seem that each of the senses is to be thought of as constituting a particular framing or perspective that is not simply complemented by the other senses participating, but is actually contested by them. It is as if the existence of each additional sense, such as hearing in addition to seeing the situation, contests the other sense's claim to give us the whole, unified picture, and thus the accumulation of senses in the "same" situation does not (simply) give us a fuller experience of it, but, strangely, introduces a hole at its heart, indicating to us that there is no whole picture, and that a situation is the communication between fragments that cannot form a whole. Each additional sense incompletes the others, we might say, destroys the illusion of unity that each wants to give, rather than completes them into a fuller picture. 86 But it is precisely this quality of the senses that opens them up to each other (because they are exposed to each other, discover something that does not originate in them); that is, that makes them communicate with each other, and teach each other, for communication can occur only between a multiplicity in between which an essential, and irreducible, contestation is discovered. If the eye listens, as Paul Claudel famously said, it is not because the two senses somehow complement each other but, rather, because the disjunction from the ear signals a hole in the eye, destroying its autonomy, a hole that makes the eye turn to the ear, or touch the ear, in the vocabulary I used in my discussion of The Fury. 87 In between the senses, a blank gap opens, 88 a gap that means, to repeat what I argued earlier, both that each sense is different from itself, contains a haunting limiting it from the inside, 89 and that, in an essential manner, there has to be more than one sense for there to be sense at all 90because the demand of sense, the demand of a thought of excess beyond

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the unifying center, seems to indicate that sense never be complete, that it never be one, and this is only possible, logically, if there is an originary dimension comprising a multiplicity of points of view on the "same" situation contesting each other. 91 Therefore we can say that what De Palma shows us in a scene such as this one, a scene of the splitting of the screen, is that if cinema, the art of film, is the art that so essentially has to be thought in relation to the old dream of the total work of art, a work bringing together, unifying all the various arts and senses into one work, then film arrives not as the fulfillment of this dream but as its most devastating critique. The various artsand senses-come together in film not to achieve one complete work but to expose the irreducible and essential tension among the arts, the essential and irreducible contestation of one art or sense by another, as well as to bring about their touching communication with each other over an abyss. 92

The Bridge and the Abyss Jack Terry, the man in charge of bringing the scream that will fit the film-within-the-film, is thus a man, as this scene elucidates, caught in the split (between the senses, the sexes, and frames of interpretation), exposed to the horror opening in between fragments. He is also the man desiring the closure of this horror and the covering over, the bridging of, the abyss of the split. Terry's next scene, the scene on the bridge where he goes to record the wind and ends up witnessing an accident, expands the thematic and conceptual problematic opened in the sound lab scene, but also constitutes its repetition. 93 Immediately following Terry's exit from the sound lab, the next scene opens with a view of a forest at night; it is almost completely dark and strong winds are blowing. Into this natural environment, free from human traces (with the possible exception of some flickering electric lights in the background, although it isn't clear whether there are indeed lights there), a strange, metallic, elongated object, unrecognized and out of focus, enters from the bottom of the screen. Slowly penetrating the "virginal" natural setting (the only such setting in Blow Out and one of very few in De Palma's work) from outside the frame, in a gesture echoing the famous pen-

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etration of the spaceship into the frame in Kubrick's 200I, this metallic and elongated object, which finally traverses the whole screen and comes into focus, appears to be a microphone. After a brief moment, the microphone exits the screen, leaving it completely dark for a few seconds until the next human intervention. Slowly entering from the bottom right of the screen, a human face appears, at first unrecognizable and slowly, and then because of the eyes that enter the frame we start seeing Terry, whose face finally occupies most of the screen. As the face turns a bit, we notice the ears covered with headphones. Looking a bit to the left and right, Terry lowers his head, and as the camera moves down, we see his hand laid over a large recording machine now occupying most of the screen. A first cut, from the close-up of the recorder to a medium shot ofTerry standing with one hand in the air holding the microphone (which we don't see). He looks up and then, in a series of three more violent and noticeable editing cuts, each giving us a long shot of Terry from vantage points of greater distance whose justification isn't clear (for we don't know who is looking, but we know that he is exposed to some view), we see a tinier and tinier Terry (and the camera watches him from behind, not from the side of his face) standing on a bridge with his recording machine and microphone-a fragile human exposed to a menacing gaze standing on a bridge and recording. Yet when we see Terry's face again, occupied as he is in recording, manipulating the microphone that again occupies much of the screen, he seems to be secure, master of his environment, standing firmly on the bridge and surveying the scene like an owner, with the ruling scepter that is his microphone, the property at his disposal. Suddenly we hear voices (articulating recognizable words) whose source is unseen: a couple (a man and woman) are talking. In a repeated series of cuts, now four of them, we once again are placed farther and farther away from Terry, whose fragility seems to grow. In the first two cuts, we see Terry without seeing the source of the voices. In the next two cuts, we do see the source of the voices, the last cut bringing us to a close-up of the couple, as the woman (repeating the gesture of the woman in the opening scene complaining about somebody out there) notices Terry looking at them and is troubled while the man calms her down, saying, "Who cares." As if finally mastering the source of the voice, visually conveyed by the close-up we have of the couple, the film cuts back to Terry, smiling condescendingly, once more the master, superior again to his environment, looking amused at the helpless

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people under the control of his microphone. He hears them and knows what they're doing; they are exposed to him and (at least the woman) are anxious about his power. Three parallel incidents of exposure to sounds whose source is unseen-followed by several quick edits until (in two of them) the source of the sound is recognized through the pointing of the microphone in its direction-follow this trapping of the people's voices in the recording machine. In the first, a strange sound (not recognizable, as the people's voices were) is discovered, after a few cuts, to be the sound of a toad. A second strange sound is then heard, which draws Terry's attention away from the toad, some editing cuts follow, yet the sound's source isn't recognized, and it leaves Terry wondering for a second before he is distracted by another sound. This time, after a few edits, the sound's source is discovered to be another natural sound, the sound of an owl, whose eyes turn toward us in a remarkable close-up. Before long, another sound draws Terry's attention, yet this time, it is not discovered in the same method, its disturbance is not solved by a scene of recognition. After hearing the sound, Terry seems to be somehow absorbed by it, disturbed by it in such a way that he needs, it seems, to find an answer to its disturbance not in any object of recognition but in the recording machine itself, as if it holds the sound's secret. The camera thus first gives us a close-up of the modulmeter in the recording machine registering the impact of the sound, then, a close-up of the microphone, followed by a zooming in, as the sound's intensity increases, to Terry's covered ear. The camera moves back to the modulmeter showing the registering of a sudden explosive sound, an explosion that is followed by a view ofTerry's stunned eyes, turning away from the machine and finally looking for the sound's source. Turning his attention to the nearby road, Terry sees an out-of-control car sliding off the road (again, it is a bridge) and into the river. Following the accident, Terry takes off his recording equipment, jumps into the river after the car, and saves the drowning Sally, who was imperiled there. It is too late for the governor in the car, for he is already dead. The logic dictating Terry's trajectory, I have started to suggest, has to do with a repetitive series of haunting and abyssal splits by which he is fragmented, and ensuing attempts to cover over these abyssal openings, to bridge them, and to exorcise the haunting. If in the sound lab scene, an abyss was discovered in between the senses and in between the frames,

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an abyss that had to be bridged by narrativizing the relation between the two fragments, then this scene on the bridge inaugurates a narrative that will indeed attempt to close the split. This narrative itself, though, creates new abysses and new forms of haunting that will in turn need to be covered over, and so on. What, then, is the logic in this scene dictating the relations between the opening of an abyss and its covering and how is it a continuation of the sound lab scene? In the relations between the operation of the senses, the operation of the technological apparatus of the recording machine, and the event of the accident, an answer to this question will be found.

Toward a New Conception ofthe Senses Let us first examine how the question of the senses is raised. In four consecutive occurrences, we have seen, Terry hears a sound or a voice whose source and location are unknown, that he cannot see, which are thus neither inside the frame nor outside it. A certain anxiety, raised by their lack of place, is relieved by finding an object for three of these sounds and introducing them into the frame. The adventure of the senses is worked out in this scene in the relations between the hearing of an unrecognized and unlocatable sound, disjoined from the eye, and the eventual location of that sound by way of assigning it an object within the frame and within the realm of vision. We thus seem to be dealing, to begin with, with two relations to hearing, the one we might call an objective hearing, a hearing with a precise object understood as its source, and a nonobjective hearing of an unlocatable sound neither inside nor outside the frame. Yet these two kinds of hearing seem to involve as well two relations to vision. The objective hearing needs, it seems, an objective vision; it needs to be synthesized, we might say, with sight, and to be established within the order of a visual-audio frame. The nonobjective hearing, on the other hand, seems to effect a disruption of objective vision, a disruption conveyed in the film by the violent editing cuts, which, by giving us each consecutive frame on a completely different scale, introduce a blank, abyssal, dimension of discontinuity into the field of vision (the discontinuous outside irrupting in the inside). 94 And this abyssal cut signifies what we might call a moment of blindness in the eye, a blindness through which Terry loses momentarily his visual mastery as the one occupying the center of vision.

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But the editing cut does not just indicate and effect a moment ofblindness (for Terry and the viewers), but also effects the opening of a new vision, a nonobjective vision, a vision from elsewhere, opening from the blinding of the objective eye. For through this cut, Terry (and the viewers) become exposed to a haunting otherness as if it is "looking" at him (them), casting a look that might also be described as the momentary birth in Terry (and the viewers) of a vision from elsewhere, from the outside that is the cut itsel£ It is like a strange, oblique-that is to say, mediated vision-opening of the cut, the frame's interruption by the Other, through which Terry becomes exposed to a phantom eye and perhaps simultaneously becomes a seer with a phantom eye (and perhaps also a seer of phantoms), the eye without an objective source, the eye of the frame's absolute outside, opening at his heart as a second eye and revealing his fragility. 95 We might thus say that the senses themselves are revealed as split in this scene, because they seem to function in two different ways, one interrupting the other. On the one hand, they seem to function jointly as a synthesized relation to objects located within the frame, but on the other hand, a nonobjective functioning is discovered that disrupts this synthesis. Let us notice that the nonobjective functioning of the senses occurs in this scene precisely at the moment the frame is exposed to an unlocatable outside and thus occurs as the intervention of the frame's outside, the excessive and haunting Other, in the question of the senses. It is as if the dimension of the outside (in the procedure familiar to us by now) is introduced into the senses and as if, as a consequence, the outside becomes part of the very activity ofthe senses themselves, which now change their significance and functioning, change their very definition. Through this "integration" of the outside in their very interiority, the senses' synthetic unity, their working in unison to give an object, is broken, and the senses are fragmented and dissociated. No longer relating to each other as functioning in the common project of giving an object, the senses now seem to relate to each other through a disruption, as if each now marks the other's haunting, that is, each seems to relate to the other only through the intermediary of the cut, by introducing into it the dimension of the frame's absolute outside. 96 In their nonobjective functioning, the senses can therefore be said to communicate over an abyss, transmitting to each other an external haunting that signifies their fragmentation and the discovery of their essential, irreducible plurality, the impossibility of their unification. Each

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sense thus appears to be double; it is as if we have two eyes and two ears (or three eyes and three ears if you prefer), the objective eye/ ear and the haunted eye/ ear (the eye/ ear happening as the intervention of the frame's outside in the question of the senses), a haunted ear I eye that implies both a moment of blindness and deafness in the senses' objective functioning but also points, as I will soon attempt to elaborate, to the birth of a new understanding of vision and a new understanding of listening, where the blinding and deafening phantomlike Other becomes part of what seeing and hearing now means. Let us designate this nonobjective functioning of the senses with the term sensation and distinguish it from objective perception and let us notice that this distinction operates according to the logic of the mirror we examined earlier. 97 If the relation to objects, perception, can be understood as the relation to the actual image in the mirror, then sensation occurs when the phantomlike Other, the slicing of which the object-image depends on and which continues to operate at its heart as an invisible I inaudible excess external-internal to it, becomes somehow part of the mirrored image itself and is not exorcised. Sensation happens as the oblique intervention of the dimension of the phantom (the frame's outside) at the heart of the actual image. Now, this intervention of the phantom that we call sensation marks a transformation in the meaning that we can now give to the activity of the senses, a transformation in the way we are to understand such verbs as "to see" or "to hear." To see and to hear no longer designate-once the dimension of the phantom, the haunting of the inside by the outside, isn't exorcised-the relation to actual objects already out there but, rather, designate the whole life of the drama of the frame's creative opening coming from the slicing of the destructive and infinite Other that continues to haunt it as its excessive internal exteriority, traced in it simply as the invisible and inaudible disruption of its possibility of closing in on itself and eliminating the outside. Following the logic I developed earlier to describe the creation of the real heart, the heart consisting of the actual beatings plus the externalinternal haunting of the Other, we might now say that the same goes for the creation of the real eye and the real ear, these other major organs of opening and closing, the birth of real senses. The real eye or the real ear are precisely the relation to objectivities (perception) plus the haunting of the Other that itself isn't perceivable, the actual mirrored image plus the

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oblique phantom pulsating in it. To hear and to see now involve the resonance of the phantomlike other within the actuality of sound and visual objects, an invisible and inaudible dimension that is part of the real ear and eye, a silence and blindness internal to vision and hearing. We might want to distinguish this internal haunting of the senses by a non-actual dimension from the metaphysical transcendent and intelligible realm that is a separate, non-sensual outside. For although the internal outside that now haunts the senses as a destruction of their perceptive nature, their relation to objectivity, is precisely a non-place that is part of what the senses are, internal to them, the metaphysical intelligible realm is a separate and external, non-sensible realm or place. When we really hear or see, we see or hear obliquely, from (a nonmetaphysical) elsewhere, through the phantom integral to the senses, their heart. We can furthermore say that, in a way, we see I hear I sense with a phantom ear or eye, an eye and ear relating us not just to objectivities, but more primordially to the drama of the Other. Moreover, because this drama includes, as I've mentioned, an essential fragmentation of the senses transmitting between them the Other that exceeds them and that they share in not having, a transmission I earlier called touch, once we enter into phantomlike sensing, we can say that we do not just see or hear phantomlike but feel the vibration happening between the senses as touch. This drama of the fragmentation of the sensible and the opening of a phantom ear and a phantom eye is one that Terry lives, momentarily, on the bridge, but he immediately resists this opening of the phantom, trying to reduce his hearing and seeing to perception. But because Terry, the hunter of the scream, is precisely the one resisting and defending against phantomlike sensing, it is important in this context to return to the staircase scene we discussed in The Fury and to examine a De Palmian moment where phantomlike vision actually happens without its immediate repression. For although Terry's reaction to this eye of the phantom discovered as a moment of imbalance on the bridge is, as I said, a defensive one, attempting immediately to exorcise this eye and to restore objective vision, we might say that De Palma works out the question of a nondefensive relation to this phantom eye in The Fury, through the examination of the kind of seeing that characterizes Gillian. We might say that Gillian sees, in her moment of imbalance on the stairs we examined earlier, with the phantom

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eye, the eye opening from the objective eye's blindness, from the haunting Other transmitted to her when she touched the doctor's bleeding cut, and she thus becomes the one seeing with a nonobjective vision, with the eye of the touching cut. In short, she becomes a visionary, seeing that which happens in between fragments transmitting to each other their woundedness and exposure to the haunting Other that they share in not having. She can thus say at a moment in the film, ''I'm afraid to close my eyes, afraid of what I'll see." Vision is seen to be the adventure of a struggle between the two eyes, the objective eye and the visionary eye, the eye of the loss of balance on the stairs. It is Blow Ouls tragedy, at least partly, that there is no assumption in it of a visionary moment, that is nevertheless glimpsed at, no assumption of the phantom eye by Terry-the eye that film, through its cutting interruption and exposure to the frame's Other, can give us-who thus remains, despite his sensitivity and potential for phantomlike vision, caught (the more strongly, perhaps, because of his great sensitivity) in the desire for objective vision. What I'm referring to here as a phantom eye can be related to what Lacan famously called the gaze, in distinction from the look. Whereas the look is the objective moment of vision, the vision whose source is the seeing subject as a center of the field of vision, the gaze is the marking within objective vision of the possibility of the objective eye's destruction and blindness, and its exposure to a look that comes from elsewhere. Now, what is this gaze that comes, as Lacan says, from the side of the object (yet not the object of the objective look) and not, in distinction from the look, from the side of the subject (understood here as the objective center of representation) if not, to use the terms of this essay, the discovery of being haunted, in my terms, or being exposed to the phantomlike side of the mirror? While the look is the relation to the actual image given in the mirror, the gaze marks the moment of the necessary passage through the Other that has to be sliced in order for the actual image to arise (as well as to remain objective, that is, valid also from the point of view of others), an Other exceeding the image and continuing to haunt it as its internal outside. The gaze thus marks within objective vision, or the look of perception, the non-place of the external inside, or of the excessive phantom, an excessive phantom that means, as we saw earlier, that any immediate relation to the actual object (the mirrored image) depends on an oblique look, the passage through the phantomlike Other.

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The Lacanian gaze, we can therefore say, is a major concept of new thinking, or of the thought of the immanent outside, in that it signifies the inscription of the question of vision in a logic of haunting rather than in a logic of transcendence, of an intelligible beyond to which sensual vision would be opposed. 98 Yet, what particularly interests me in this context, trying to contrast Gillian's visionary eye to Terry's defensive eye, the eye that tries to erase the trace of the phantomlike gaze, the haunting of the mirror, is how the discovery of the gaze or of the phantomlike trace of the excessive Other becomes the origin of a new definition of vision, of the birth of a new eye. This visionary eye is born of the gaze, or, in the vocabulary of the previous chapter, a passionate eye, the eye incorporating within itself this passivity to the haunting Other. If Lacan perhaps did not really develop this aspect, I think we can nevertheless say that the gaze is not only the interruption of seeing, understood as the look, but is itself the origin of a new seeing. Gillian sees, we can say, with the eye ofthe gaze, the eye of the phantom, she sees the absolute outside haunting the inside as its blind spot, sees it not as an object, to be sure, but as the sensation of the essential fragmentation and touching transmission announced by the Other, and it is thus not only a seeing with the eye of the phantom, but a seeing ofphantoms, of that blankness traced in the inside by the outside. It is crucial to contrast here this understanding of the visionary gaze, which I see as a major concept of new thinking, with the metaphysical understanding of a non-sensual or non-perceptive vision. Metaphysical thinking has also theorized a split within vision (a split that I've here tried to theorize between objective perception and the visionary gaze of sensation) for it has opposed, in many different configurations from Plato to Descartes, a seeing within the realm of the senses, empirical seeing, to an intellectual vision, the eye of the mind, or the vision of Ideas, of the outside of the world. Now, although metaphysics has indeed worked out this split, it has thought of the relation between the sensible and the intelligible, as we saw, according to a logic of limits between realms and of the continuous inside and outside. It has, as a consequence, regarded nonsensible vision according to the model of sensible vision, thus an objective model, which was then applied to a non-sensible world. The vision of ideas was thought according to the model of perception. Now, it is only with the new topology of non-metaphysical thinking, where the outside is

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folded into the inside, operating in it as an excessive haunting, that a truly nonobjective eye (and ear) can be theorized, an eye no longer the objective vision of another realm or place but, rather, the sensing of the haunting of the excessive non-realm and non-place immanent to this realm as its external inside. The visionary, in distinction from the metaphysician, is the

one who sees or senses the outside in the inside rather than ascending from the inside to the outside. Perhaps film-the art capable of disjoining the senses and introducing the essential dimension of the absolute outside of the frame into their very heart-can most rigorously effect, can give birth to, this new, visionary gaze, and a new (oracular?) ear.

A Technological Recording Terry's endeavor, then, in this scene, is to immediately exorcise the phantom discovered in between the senses by finding an object responsible for their operation, an object within the frame viewed as responsible for the disturbance of the frame. Yet, as I've mentioned, of the four disturbing sounds Terry hears on the bridge, only three find their object, whereas a fourth remains unanswered, and enigmatically still disturbs. By not finding an object to resolve it, this fourth sound will be etched in Terry as a traumatic memory trace, a continuous, unresolved haunting and open wound. In between the senses' disjunction opens the question of memory. The excess discovered in between the senses, the excess of the outside traced in the inside as a blankness preventing the frame from closing, is revealed to be, from this point of view, the very dimension of memory. Not a memory of this or that, of any object within the frame, but the memory ofthe outside (in both senses of the "of"), the reminder that "there is" an Other to the frame beating at its heart. And we can say that the outside is a memory because it is never any actual thing, it is that which never was actual, never was any thing within the frame, a primordial memory, an absolute past, before and in excess of any actuality. 99 And if the ear, as has often been noticed, is the organ most associated with memory, it is because it is somehow privileged as a corporeal opening in creating this disjunction of the senses through which memory enters. This haunting memory enveloped in the unrecognized sound needs to be most intensely exorcised, and it is again possible to read, according to a procedure I suggested earlier, the very continuation of Blow Ouis

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narrative as the phantasmic and paranoid attempt to find an answer, to fill this abyss opened by memory, to give the enigmatic sound an object that will eliminate its haunting. Therefore we discover, as the film progresses, that the menacing sound that could not be resolved comes from the murderer's watch, out of which he pulls a string to suffocate his victims. It is the sound of this watch-string that finally resolves the enigma of the troubling sound on the bridge. In one of De Palma's most ingenious allegorical inventions, the memory trace (which opened a dimension of absolute past and future) is thus revealed to be the very sound of time itself (the watch)-a haunting, unactualized time needing to be erased The watch becomes an instrument of suffocation, taking revenge against time's "It was." 100 Yet, it is not only the dimension of the murderer's revenge as if arising from this haunting of memory by an unrecognized sound, but, no less remarkably, it is the dimension of the accident itsel£ It is as if the accident happens because of this haunting, and the car falling off the bridge is like a falling into the abyss opened by the enigmatic sound. This relation between the enigmatic sound and the accident is made both on the narrative level, because the sound belongs, as we find out, to the murderer who shoots at the car and causes it to fall off the bridge, but it is made, more importantly, on the conceptual level, in that the accident, this unpredictable and incalculable event, is precisely a concept depending on the creative logic of the infinite Other in which every actualization, every slicing of a frame, is discontinuous, by definition, with the outside, and thus comes out of it as a surprise, or an accident. 101 It follows that Terry will want most of all to eliminate the accidental, freakish nature of that which he witnessed, and will attempt to paranoically suture it by explaining its causes, thus, by explaining it according to the logic of the frame's inside. 102 The discovery of the question of the memory trace as keeping the scene open for further elaborations allows us to describe the whole narrative progression of the film from scene to scene as the etching of a trace that the characters immediately want to erase, yet there is never really complete closure, the memory never completely dies. Thus, from the opening heartbeats and the (bad) scream, to the split screen, to the unrecognizable sound on the bridge, and so forth until the final, horrifying scream, every scene will perform a closure as well as an opening through this memory of the absolute outside, a memory that won't die. 103

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As mentioned, the scene on the bridge is intricately involved with the question of the technological apparatus, and especially with the question of the relations between the natural and the technological. Without developing at length here the highly complex question of the technological, I would like to mention all too briefly a few of its striking manifestations. 104 First, we can say that the technological apparatus, the microphone, which enigmatically allows the forest to intrude from an offscreen space at the scene's opening, is immediately related through this gesture to the question of the enigma that the outside marks the inside. It is as if the microphone, this apparatus located between the opening of a mouth and of the ear, announces the enigmatic intrusion of the outside; its very being, the being of technology, depends on and is enabled by the logic of the excessive Other. The technological arises from the logic of excess. We have seen that this logic of excess is an essentially creative logic in which the internal outside is a potentiality that cannot be exhausted, and as such, the being of technology itself involves this essential coming of the new announced by this logic. And this dimension of the new, we can say, is one in excess of any natural order, made possible by the "nonnatural"-that is, not controlled by a law governing an order of existence-outside in its infinite excess beyond the inside, at the heart of which it beats as a freakish, nonnatural potential for creation. But the technological is not only a nonnatural creation of the new but also that which immediately wants to occupy, precisely, the trace of the infinite enigma, this non-place marked by the Other in the inside, and as such, it wants to take the Other's place, or to mark a place for this essential non-place. The technological thus aims to represent the Other, so to speak, in the inside, to mark it as an actuality. It also aims to compensate for the haunting that disturbs the inside, to exorcise it by interpreting it as a failure, which can be corrected. All these issues are at stake in the paradigmatic technological apparatus occupying this scene, the recorder. How does the recorder operate? Being the creative invention that allows the human to intervene in nature in a nonnatural way, that is, out of any order, it is as if the recorder allows for the possibility to take nature from itself, to separate it from itself by taking away its sounds, detaching them from their natural context and taking them elsewhere, inserting them into other contexts, thus making nature Other to itself, introducing into it a haunting strangeness. But the recording device is at the same time that which is supposed to compensate for and

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protect against a nonnatural haunting involved in the very presence of the human. Covering Terry's ears, the headphones, as if supposed to protect this dangerous opening, are meant to compensate for its haunting, that is for an essential deafness that forms part of their very sensitivity, as we saw, by making Terry master of the surrounding sound. The deafness involved in the ear's opening as a sense is supposed to be eliminated by the trapping of a wider variety of sounds, by the increasing sensitivity to (object) sounds enabled by the microphone, a "sensitivity'' as if eliminating the ear's phantomlike deafness by finding more and more object sounds to occupy its place. But on the other hand, this apparatus of headphones and microphone is not only that which is supposed to compensate for the haunting but actually that which, by its nonnatural quality, its intervention and disruption of any organic functioning, effects a haunting, making Terry more vulnerable to the outside. Isolating the ear from the eye, causing their disjunction, and introducing more forcefully this nonorganic excess between them that announces their essential fragmentary nature, the technological apparatus exposes them as actually incompleting each other rather than as functioning in unison as part of an organic whole. Yet, we have seen that the dimension of haunting can also be viewed as an essential dimension of memory, the memory of the absolute past of the outside. And what is a recording machine but the paradigmatic apparatus of technological memory? 105 Technology immediately opens up, as this scene shows, as an instrument of memory. But again, this instrument of memory will operate in opposite directions. On the one hand, it is as if the recorder is an instrument supposed to compensate for this dimension of a memory of the outside, thus a dimension of an immemorial memory of that which never happened in actuality, by capturing all the possible actualities that did happen, preserving them and thus, as if erasing the memory that itself can never be recorded (as an actuality) by filling it with a memory of actualities. Yet, on the other hand, being an instrument creating a haunting by separating the senses and not only compensating for the haunting, the recording machine can itself be said to be the very origin of a new wound, of a new enigmatic intrusion of the immemorial memory of the outside haunting the subject. The recorder thus becomes the instrument that by compensating for the immemorial actually creates a new wound, which will call for a new recording, and so on. A simultaneous opening and closing of the outside, which marks every gesture in this movie, thus also

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characterizes the recorder. This essential ambiguity of the recorder is most beautifully and figuratively exemplified in the traumatic memory scene in which Terry recounts to Sally the story of how he wired the undercover cop who was eventually caught and executed. Wiring the cop to record his conversations with members of the mob, the recording machine, not having been properly handled by Terry, burns a wound in the cop's body. This wound, the origin of the cop's exposure and horrible execution, is the origin ofTerry's haunting memory of the incident. The recorder, intended to capture (actual) memory, became the wounding instrument that effected the immemorial and wounding outside. To compensate for this immemorial memory, Terry will wire Sally at the end of the film, thinking that through this wiring he will both protect her and successfully erase his immemorial trauma, but of course this new wiring becomes the instrument of a new death rather than the exorcism of the absolute past. Film, as a technology of recording, is therefore itself this double event, both attempting to cover over an immemorial memory and at the same time introducing a new haunting disruption of the outside. The question remaining is, can film open a different relation to this outside, to this wound that it traces in the viewers, other than the immediate desire for exorcism, even in its most complex form, that of capturing the outside in the inside, as an outside, a form we called pornography? The film's ending scream, and all De Palma's films, pose this question. It is important to stress here that the term wound as I use it in this book is not an organic or biological category, but precisely a major category of new thinking in that it marks the places of interruption, or cutting, of the organic body, and its exposure to the haunting of the external-internal outside. The wound marks the excess beyond the organic revealed within the organic body as the enigmatic memory of the outside, and it signifies the moment of the discovery of the real body, that body that is the organic body plus the excessive outside haunting its heart as an open wound. This interruption of natural and organic order that characterizes the intervention of technology is worked out as well in the very sounds to which Terry is exposed. For it is between the two natural sounds, from the toad and the owl, that the enigmatic and irresolvable sound, revealed later to belong to a watch-string, is discovered. It is as if this wounding sound of time is the very opening of the nonorganic in nature. Two more remarkable scenes elaborate on Terry's defensive strategies,

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attempting as he does to erase the accidental, freakish nature of the accident and to exorcise the haunting memory created by the scene on the bridge. 106 Both have to do with Terry's reconstructive efforts to understand what happened on the bridge, and to decipher, to give a meaning and thus to erase the event, the accident. In the first scene, on the very night of the accident while he is with the traumatized Sally in a hotel room, Terry listens again and again to his recorded tape, accompanying the sound track with his own visualization, to reconstruct the night on the bridge. In a remarkable manner, in thus visualizing the events, trying to repeat them in his memory, Terry erases the editing cuts that haunted him on the bridge. If earlier, as we saw, a series of cuts introdl)ced each new sound to which Terry was exposed, and thus an abyss opened between each of the sounds, then now, in his reconstruction, Terry smoothes over these cuts and creates a continuous event. The toad's sound, the owl's cry, and the accident are now all shown continuously, and in moving the camera from one to the other without introducing any cuts, those abysses of the outside that had opened with the arrival of every sound are bridged. Terry manages to make the event cohere. Nevertheless, a strange sound fills Terry with anxiety for a moment, an anxiety that cannot immediately be smoothed over. This is the disturbing sound of the watch's string, for which Terry didn't find an object on the bridge. This sound continues to haunt's Terry's memory and, as if calling for further reconstructions, perhaps will finally be able to give it a place and exorcise its horror. Thus we soon get a further, more elaborate and remarkable reconstruction of the event on the bridge. Having obtained photos of the accident taken by a photographer, Manny Carp, who was also there on the bridge, Terry decides to edit his own film of the event synthesizing his own soundtrack with a film he has assembled from Manny's photos. We see Terry sitting in his editing lab, laboring over this activity of synthesis. At first he examines the visual track he managed to get. Moving the visual track back and forth, Terry attempts to arrest the visual image at the precise moment when he figures the tire has been shot out, a shooting he must prove existed if he is to dispel the accidental nature of the accident. By thus attempting to arrest the image of the moving car, through moving the film backward and forward, Terry exposes a logic of defense against the accidental event operating in any editing and recording activity of this nature. For the accidental event, we have said, by

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definition, is that which comes unpredictably and surprisingly from the nothing of the outside or the Other that it sliced in its actualization. This accident is thus, most rigorously, a movement, if we define movement, as we earlier did, as that actualization coming from nothing that is not given in advance. A real movement, we said, always has the quality of exposing the character of not being given in advance, thus not operating within an already given whole, of any actualization, or creation of a frame. As such a movement, the coming from nothing, the accident, we can say, is also irreversible, both in actuality, for once it happened, it can never be undone, but even more profoundly perhaps, in thought, for being the result of an essentially unforeseeable actualization, its principle of genesis cannot be reconstructed, cannot be understood. It comes from a nothing whose principles can never be reduced to a law that can be calculated. These two characteristics of the freakish accident, its movement and its irreversibility, are precisely what Terry's recording-technology and editing methods try to erase by going back and forth with the visual track and attempting to arrest the image on a precise moment. What Terry thus seeks to do is to reduce the quality of the accident as a movement, that is, an unpredictable coming from nothing, to a series of arrested images. Being the metaphysician that he is, Terry, like Zeno, attempts to understand movement as a series of arrested actualities, or a series of actualized moments, to erase its horror, the horror of the outside inscribed in its character as movement. This refusal of movement is also Terry's refusal of time, if time has precisely to do with this irreversible event of actualization coming from nothing. He is trying to turn time into a series of static, actualized moments. 107 By thus making time and movement into a composition of successive actualized moments Terry can indeed reverse time, go back and forth in the visual track; for in a series of actualized moments, which has made time irreversible, the coming out of an inexhaustible potentiality to an actuality not resembling this potentiality, is precisely erased. We can also see how the technology of recording, by managing to isolate the actual side of the event from the absolute outside in its inside haunting it, is a technology of erasing the evenemental nature of the event, its coming out of nothing and its irreversibility. But Terry has to do more than arrest the visual track, he also has to synchronize it precisely with a sound track, which he also has to arrest. In synchronizing the accident's sound with the accident's vision, Terry again

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manages to precisely erase the disjunctive abyss that opened in between the senses. The scene on the bridge has thus led to a series of reconstructions attempting more and more forcefully to erase its haunting. But again, the haunting sound of time, of the watch's string, hasn't been resolved, and the accident still leaves a memory trace, the trace of time, haunting Terry.

Scream,

~ennory

The scene on the bridge is a key scene because it structurally marks the essential event-the accident-that functions in the film's narrative as the memory trace of the haunting of the internal outside around which a whole network of attempts to erase this haunting, to exorcise the memory of outside, is orchestrated. The accident, we have said, is such a memory trace in being a reminder of the Other as an essential principle of incalculable creation coming from nowhere. Three narrative trajectories split in different ways from this accident, all of which are parallel in that their ultimate desire is to exorcise the outside. These trajectories are guided by different, though complicit, logics, two of which (the main ones) are reunited in the end over Sally's dead body, a consequence of their desire. These three trajectories are occupied by the following: (1) Terry, the soundman, whose guiding desire from the time of the accident on will be to prove that there was no accident, that the incident was part of a political conspiracy and can be explained as such, acquiring a meaning. Since the logic of the political conspiracy in the film involves a desire to hide the intentionality behind the accident, to keep its motivation in the dark, unseen and unexposed to the world, and to shut Terry's mouth so he won't reveal what he saw, then the logic guiding Terry's trajectory and its desire to dispel the idea of the accident will involve a desire to talk, to open his mouth and to bring everything into the open, to shed absolute light on the affair, to exorcise any menacing darkness and expose the truth, the whole naked truth about the affair. (2) The second trajectory is that of the murderer, who shot at the car on the bridge. The murderer's task is to prove that the event of the car's falling was only an accident. Being only an accident means that the event on the bridge had nothing essential to do with the question of sense, that there was no discovery of an outside, that is, of a dimension haunting sense (and the senses) and becoming part of their very definition, their internal exteriority. Therefore,

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there would be no real trace of memory, and no point of inquiring further into what happened. 108 As such, the murderer will desire absolute darkness, complete disappearance, and will attempt to erase any trace and any witnessing of the not merely accidental nature of what happened. Thus, he will even transform himself into a serial killer and target Sally as one of his victims to create the illusion that her murder is not related to the accident, but part of a different narrative altogether. (3) And finally, the most devious trajectory, that of the sleazy extortionist Manny Carp, Sally's partner in the attempt to frame the governor, who was present on the bridge when the accident happened and photographed it. This photographer's desire is neither for pure light and truth nor for total darkness and oblivion but for economic profit. This is a third strategy aimed at erasing the memory trace, neither finding a reason and meaning for it, nor erasing its very happening, but transforming its scandal into economical profit. 109 For the photographer Manny (sounds like money), whose motto is "money is money," will start a series of exchanges in which the accident loses its singularity as a trace and starts to function as a commodity, an exchangeable value. This photographer's absence from the scene with Sally's corpse, in which the other two witnesses to the accident are reunited, seems to suggest that he is actually none other than the director of the pornographic movie into which Sally's "excellent" scream of death will be inserted. He is the one who will actually gain from the accident, because the film, having such a good scream, is sure to be a financial success. 110 A desire for truth and meaningful light, a desire for concealment and darkness, and an economic desire to translate everything into the logic of exchange are thus exposed as complicit. All three strategies seek to dose that horrifying exposure to the haunting outside revealed by the accident-all three strategies attempt to forget the scream. In elucidating the logical parallel of these three desires, the horrifying nature ofTerry's trajectory becomes dear. A primary desire to expose the truth of the accident and cancel its accidental nature, and a seemingly secondary task to find a good scream for the sleazy film he is working on, are actually shown to be complicit. Thus we can also see how the murderer is not only the one following a strange parallel trajectory to Terry's, both opening on the bridge and ending at the dead girl's body, but that the murderer is actually, as I mentioned before, the secret, phantasmal double for Terry, the one who is supposed to bring him (and us) that which he doesn't know that he wants but is actually

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his deepest desire. The phantasmatic double of the searcher for the whole, naked truth is the murderous captivator of the scream. 111 The profundity ofNietzsche's call to philosophers to no longer simply accept truth as a presupposed given directing it but, rather, to ask what is it that motivates the philosophical desire for truth is here illuminated from an essential perspective. For the search for truth (according only to a certain configuration of this concept that, as someone like Heidegger would say, is a forgetting of its essence) can be understood as involving the desire to bring everything that might be hidden into the light of the open, meaning that everything is made available in the mode of an actual object showing itself as it actually is and that we can know, thus recognize, within the realm and the logic dominating the inside of the frame. As a consequence, it would seem that the ultimate desire for truth involves making available within the mode of actual objects that which is not of the order of actual objectivity or of the inside, that is, the phantomlike trace of the outside, a desire that might also be the desire to make light itself into an illuminated object. 112 What the truth wants most of all, the whole truth, is to have available as an illuminated object of the inside the (darkly blinding and brightly luminous 113) phantom of the outside, or to make a place, in the terms used previously, for that which is not of the order of the place, to have reflected in the mirror its haunting phantom. In short, the ultimate desire of (a certain configuration of) truth is pornographic. It is thus that in the film's final image of the dark screening roomwhose three hidden occupants (men) are watching a semi-pornographic film (of naked women), that is, a film where everything can be seen and nothing is hidden, into which a scream is inserted that establishes its economic value-that the three desires (for truth, for hiddenness, for economic exchange) join, and they join, precisely, in the effort to avoid the scream thus trapped by them in their midst, a scream being the term that conceptually articulates the logic connecting all three desires but also exceeds them and gives a trace of hope for their collapse.

Cinema, the Cave, and the Question ofa New Political Life Once again, by resorting to a fundamental image in the history of philosophy, we can illuminate what is at stake in this final projection in the dark room. For what is this final image of the dark and hidden inhabitants

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of the screening room watching the murderous image of absolute exposure and non-concealment that is the pornographic film if not an interpretation of one dominant structure of desire (out of several) working at the heart of the Platonic allegory of the cave and dictating the relations operating in it between darkness and light? 114 And isn't Terry, the man sent out of the cave I projection-room at the beginning of the film, desperately searching for the whole truth outside the cave, only to come back to it with a captivated scream, that horrifYingly ambiguous trace of the outside, a certain incarnation of the metaphysical philosopher? It is not that watching the pornographic film here is equivalent to the cave's inhabitants watching the shadows they take to be the truth, an image that has often been compared to the act of watching a film. Rather, more complexly, the philosophical desire for absolute light, the light of the cave's outside that will dispel the shadows haunting its earthly inhabitants, is here shown to be complicit with a certain pornographic fantasy. The pornographic film, which the hidden occupants are watching, is not the shadowed wall, but the pure light of the cave's outside as an objective spectacle. What would this mean? We might say that the philosophical members of the cave are those inhabitants sensitive to shadows, the ones who have discovered the shadows as shadows, thus not as simply given actual objects, but as mediated objects, haunted by the phantom of an Other external-internal to them. 115 They are thus the ones sensitive to the dangerous opening in the cave that makes it a cave I frame, that is, a relation to an outside operating in the inside as its haunting, an internal outside we can call, following the metaphysical configuration of the cave, yet folding it inside, light. It is a painfully blinding, invisible, and illuminating light; blinding from the point of view of objective vision because it marks the oblique point of its haunting, and illuminating because it is the trace of the outside that is the condition for the opening of real vision itsel£ But if this blinding glimpse of an illuminating light is what those haunted and visionary members of the community of the cave we might still call philosophers have experienced, they also immediately desire to exorcise this painful blindness, turning from philosophers to metaphysicians. For what is it that these metaphysicians now want if not, precisely like Terry, on the bridge and beyond, to find a nonblinding light, to go beyond the initial pains it inflicts and to experience a full light, a light without shadows, thus without haunting, the whole light, a complete vision of truth beyond a shadow of a doubt. They refuse

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this visionary and blinding light existing only as the violent interruption of the inside by the haunting external-internal outside; they want to possess it, in itself, as an object of the inside, but in a separate realm, the outside now transformed into a non-sensual place. But what would it mean to possess this light if not to make oneself completely hidden, that is, completely safe from its blinding effect, not hurt by its violent illumination, only to be able to possess it? A complete darkness, a total non-exposure to this light (the murderer) is the very condition of having it completely as an illuminated possession (Terry). The Platonic cave, this initial visionary discovery of a logic of shadows-that is, a logic of a blinding and illuminating light haunting the cave and making it a cave/ frame, that is a figure of (a dangerous) openness to an internal outside-has turned into a pornographic screening room, a dream of a completely luminous outside that actually closes, like a scream fit into a mouth, the dangerous opening in the cave. By thus dreaming of a completely illuminated outside and a full vision of truth, the metaphysicians have actually created the most horrible inside, absolutely closed (or almost so), a forgetting of the blinding light of the outside. The supposed illuminated and intelligible realm of the outside dominating the metaphysical image is actually a murderous pornographic film that the now completely hidden metaphysicians of the inside, those seekers of a complete truth beyond a shadow of a doubt, are watching in their darker-than-dark cave, not realizing that the door (like the heart, the mouth, the ear, and so on, at the end of the film) is now completely sealed and there is (almost) no more way out. What the philosopher has thus brought back to the cave from his voyage to the dream-realm of pure illumination and truth turns out to be a piercing scream, captivated by a suffocating and murderous act. And why a scream, we may ask, why bring an auditory figure, if we have been talking recently about light? Because of the logic of the senses I have been developing, in which an essential fragmentation is discovered wherein the senses transmit to each other their exposure to an immanent haunting, we can say that the ear itself is one of the most horrifying disruptions of the objective eye, one of the major figures for the event of its blindness. What the eye cannot see, and which haunts it, is the ear, transmitting to it an externality and a logic it wants to exorcise. The scream, perhaps, is thus itself the most powerful figure for the eye's blindness, and thus also perhaps one of the most powerful figures for a non-sensual-yet-internal-to-

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the-senses light. This light/ scream (both viewed henceforth not as merely auditory or visual but as that excess of the outside passing in between the fragmented senses) is what the cave's hidden inhabitants desire to possess most of all, a possession that will dispel the shadows, thus the haunting, and will restore to the objective eye its mastery. But because the scream I light is itself a figure of the trace of the outside, even in its trapping, we might say, it can never be fully exorcised. It remains nevertheless a trace of memory of the outside, a certain crack in the completely shut door, which seems to give a glimpse of a possibility for a life beyond metaphysical pornography. The philosopher turned metaphysician, this human sensitive to the light I scream, has nevertheless brought some trace of the outside into the cave he has tried to seal, something that bears witness to an excess beyond metaphysics announcing the possibility of a new beginning. It is with this ambiguity, between an absolute closure and a certain memorial trace of the outside, that Blow Out seems to end, a memorial trace that might announce a new configuration of the cave-not a cave separated from an external realm of pure light, but a cave of which the external light becomes an immanent part, placed in its inside. The sun of the outside becomes the blinding and haunting "part" of the inside, turning the cave into a frame that is open to an internal-external excess, a realm of shadows haunted by an internal-external phantom, that has to constitute the new philosophical image of the human. This is the image that De Palma, as we will see in this book's conclusion, will attempt to give us in his Femme Fatale. 116 But the scream that the philosopher I metaphysician (Terry) attempts both to trap and exorcise but nevertheless also brings back as a memorial, witnessing trace is not only an (oral) figure of the internal-external excess beyond the objective aspect of the senses. It is also the excessive haunting at the very heart of human speech, the trace, within speech, of the absolute outside, the nothing, from which it arises, and which calls, through the transformation of the image of the cave implied in it, for a reconfiguration of what speaking now means. We might say that guided by the Platonic image of the cave, speech has been understood under the sign of judgment, both in the sense that it has to consume itself in a final light (meaning) that is the tribunal presiding over its pronouncements, giving justification and authorization, a teleological reason for its occurrence, and in the sense that its function is to create an object that can show itself in the light as it is, that is, can answer to the court of truth or falsity.

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Being thus understood under the imperative of judgment, speech, we have seen, will want to bring everything into the realm of judgment and objectivity, including that which does not have the form of objectivity, the light I scream of the internal outside. As such, when understood according to no logic other than that of judgment, of an absolute light understood as an ideal objectivity, speech will want to turn everything into judgment, a desire I have tried to show operating in aesthetic-reflective judgment, that which tries to give a form of judgment to that which seems to exceed it. The pornographic dimension of the cave, this attempt to turn everything into (objective) light, thus including light itself, which is not of the order of objectivity, finds its limit dimension in aesthetic judgment, the attempt to turn light/ scream itself into an object appearing in the light. As such, it is not surprising that the final utterance of the metaphysical philosopher, Terry, the one who has inserted the scream into this realm of pure light as objectivity that is the pornographic image, is "It's a good scream"-bringing the scream under the linguistic jurisdiction of an aesthetic judgment, turning it into an object that can be judged according to its truth or falsity. But the scream, we have said, functions here not only as the trapped object of a judgment, but also as a memory trace of the outside, and as such, announces a dimension in excess of judgment internal to judgment itself. In the same way that the outside became part of the senses' definition, marking a blinding and a deafening dimension internal to them that is actually the "condition" of their opening, we might say that speech as meaningful objectivity discovers an outside internal to its very definition and marking in it a dimension of haunting non-sense, an internal "blindness" and "deafness," an internal blinding light of speech that actually marks it as that which surprisingly, creatively, and obliquely opens from the internal-external nothing of the outside rather than being a form directed to an ideal judgment in which it consumes itself. The scream marks this external-internal dimension of non-sense haunting speech as a trace or wound within speech's meaningful (objectif}ring) functioning, and keeps it open. The scream thus reminds speech of the nothing from which it creatively arises and which always exceeds it, and by which it is therefore exhausted. We might thus conceive speech, that strange creation coming out of the horrifYing open cave I frame that is the mouth, to be this strange mechanism of a creative slicing of the outside that constantly makes the outside part of the body's inside, separating the body from itself (a separa-

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tion we call voice), fragmenting it, and through this fragmentation-that creates a series of frames I sounds, which thus are exposed to an internal outside following each other, each looking for a resolution in the following fragment I frame-opens up a world. The scream is the memorial witness to this originary dimension of internal opening to the outside, from which speech, and judgment, is born.

* The Platonic allegory of the cave, describing man's philosophical ascent from a state of being shackled, destined to watching a procession of shadows, toward a realm of pure light, is also one of the philosophical West's main images for a thinking of freedom, of the philosophical liberation of the human. Presented in the context of a thinking of the nature of the ideal republic, this thinking of freedom is immediately also a call for a certain philosophical conception of the political, a conception that will do justice to this ideal of freedom. If the very conception of the image of the cave has to be transformed, folding the light of the outside into the realm of shadows of which it becomes an immanent externality, then it would also seem that the conception of freedom, and of the political, will have to be transformed as well. It would thus seem that the (cinematic) discovery of a new, non-metaphysicallight, a light belonging not to vision alone but that can only happen as a light I scream happening in the fragmentation of an essential multiplicity of senses, will therefore constitute a call for a new thinking of freedom and of the political. Indeed, such a call is implicitly uttered in Blow Out, that film trying to mark a screaming trace of a memory of the outside at the heart of the metaphysical pornographic image, releasing this image to the possibility of a new, visionary life and thinking. Taking place in the days preceding Independence Day and producing its culminating moment at the very instant when the ringing of the Liberty Bell coincides with the dying screams of the murdered Sally (which the bell's sound silences), the film points, on the one hand, to the horrifying constellation of a completely enclosed pornographic political life whose sound of (metaphysical) freedom, the desire for pure light I for pure hiddenness, that is, whose forgetting of the haunting outside actually equals a murderous act of human sacrifice and the silencing of a scream, 117 but on the other hand, by juxtaposing the ring of the bell with the sound of the

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scream, it points to a certain possible crack (the crack of the Liberty Bell) in this political life constructed around a metaphysical idea of freedom, a crack where the ring and the (woman's) scream, both calling the ear in excess of the objective eye and calling for the discovery of the woman in excess of metaphysical man, mark the memorial trace, the witnessing, of the outside, which promises a new conception of freedom and of political life, thus of human relations. 118 Freedom now no longer equals a liberation from shadows to the pure light of truth but, rather, the opening into the phantom of the internal outside, to this haunting dimension of excess which, by marking within the cave I frame a trace of the infinite Other, this dimension of a nothing and of a potentiality always in excess of the actual inside of the frame, this dimension we can also call time, leaves the cave I frame open to transformation, never allowing it to close in upon itsel£ Cinema, by becoming that technology fragmenting the senses, introducing the cut of the outside into their very heart, liberating a blindness and a deafness, a scream I light at the heart of the senses, can become-in excess of its pornographic dimension and of the technological suturing of the abyss that is also part of its essence-the memorial witness to this outside of freedom, as well as the technological activity of creation out of the nothing which is the outside, and thus constitute the promise for a new conception of liberty and of the political. It is perhaps around the opposition between two major figures in American history-one highly present in the film, the other seemingly marked only by an allusive memory trace-that the opposition is made between these two conceptions of the political: the metaphysicalpornographic, culminating in a community of the sacrificial crowd, and the creative I memorial, calling for a fragmented community of touch. These two figures are Benjamin Franldin and Martin Luther King, Jr. Franklin, the founding father (frame), Philadelphia's superegoic judge, is constantly present in the film, as if watching over the events from a giant wall mural often shown; King is never mentioned, but seems to obliquely and enigmatically intrude through the memory of his famous speech of freedom, and even more remarkably, through the Liberty Bell's ring and the famous line, that motto of the civil-rights movement King adopted for his speech, "Let freedom ring." If King's motto, presiding obliquely, I suggest, over Blow Out, is "let freedom ring," which also means let free speech arise from the ring/ scream, then Franklin's motto, presiding more darkly

Film and the Memory ofthe Outside

I

55

and explicitly over the film, is "Time is money." And what is this motto, time is money, if not the ultimate metaphysical covering up of this opening of the outside in the inside we called time? If time, as the excessive internal-external outside, is a principle of creation from nothing and from an immemorial past never actualized and a future unforeseen in advance, is the ultimate concept of that which cannot be calculated, then its reduction to economy (which, as we saw, was the main strategy of the photographer Manny) is one of the main strategies for its covering up. If time and freedom are beyond, or in excess of any economical thinking, then Benjamin Franklin and Manny Carp join in silencing this excess, turning it into calculable profit. 119 Thus, we might say that Franklin and King stand as well for two aspects of the bell, on the one hand the aspect of its objectification, its transformation into a valuable metal, a commercial symbol that can be replicated and infinitely reproduced to make profit (and in a brilliant short remark, it comes to our attention that schoolchildren are preparing for Liberty Day a bell completely made of pennies), and, on the other hand, the aspect that comes as if from the crack in the bell's objectification, the aspect of its ring, that call and address to the ear equated by the film, as we saw, with Sally's scream. A screaming ring, a memory trace of the outside that, perhaps-in excess of the horrifying suffocation produced by the film's ending in a pornographic spectacle, yet marked nowhere else but at the heart of this spectacle, a scream that remains the only trace of Sally's memory-can awaken us to a dream of a new life.

* "And when we let this happen, when we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, Free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.' " 120

For a New Enlightenment Femme Fatale, A Paradoxical Happy Ending;

or, The Idea ofa Future

How to end? How do we end our book? Can our analysis be terminated? Is there a way out? And furthermore, what does it mean to end, what is the sense of an ending, what is the sense that the ending makes or gives? In a way, from this book's beginning, we have been dealing with the question of ending, and more specifically with the relations between the question of ending and the question of the image; this from two main interrelated perspectives, the first conceptual, the second more affective, though the separation is somewhat artificial. From the conceptual

perspective, I have said that the image, and most remarkably perhaps the cinematic image, when understood in a new way, marks the possibility or the promise for an ending, or for a way out, of a whole tradition: a Platonist, metaphysical tradition, a tragic-prophetic tradition that has, I argued, resisted the image. The significance of the question of the cinematic image should thus find its place, I suggest, within the general context of what has been called, by philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger and Derrida, the question of the ending, or the closure, of metaphysics. How do we end, or manage to close, metaphysics? What is the way out of this conceptual world, or this logic of meaning, that has shaped our world and our vision of ourselves for the last couple of millennia? 1 The second perspective that guided our discussions is an affective one. The image, I have said, and perhaps particularly and profoundly the cinematic image, that strange inscription of a blinding and enigmatic excess, marks a horror, announces an essential haunting at the heart of the human. At the center of the De Palmian reuvre, we have seen, is a fundamental engagement with this horrifYing and nightmarish dimension of the image, and we have associated this haunting horror cinematically with the discovery of the ungrounding movement of the camera, of the editing cut, of a multiplicity of perspectives with no unifYing center, and with the discovery of the interrupted frame haunted by an internal outside/ of the disjunction between sound and sight, and of the strangeness of the human voice, particularly in its limit condition as scream. 3 Against this destabilizing horror announced and effected by the image, I have argued again and again, attempts to exorcise the image and to eliminate its haunting power have brought forth a variety of violent strategies, such as paranoid framings, synthesizing of sound and sight, reifications of the arrest of the image, and so forth. The logic driving these strategies, I suggested, is the logic driving the creation of the main metaphysical categories and divisions, a logic rejecting the dimension of horror, a dimension I have also called enigmatic. Simply and perhaps somewhat simplistically put, the enigmatic haunting revealed by the cinematic image is a horror whose avoidance is at the heart of the institution of our conceptual history. If the metaphysical tradition can be defined as that which instituted itself on a repression of horror, then we might say that this tradition was also interested in the question of ending, the ending of horror. Metaphys-

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ics, we might thus say, desired the ending of horror, tried to be a solution to an originary horror at the heart of humanity. Yet the metaphysical ending of and solution to horror, our most recent history has increasingly showed us, has been a failed and a false one, increasingly detaching us from who we are and what our life could be. This detachment has also increasingly manifested itself in terror and unprecedented violence. 4 Horror, we might thus say, is an affect in excess of, showing through the cracks of, our conceptual tradition. To be able to dose the door on our metaphysical heritage, 5 this seems to suggest, we need to reopen ourselves to this primary affect that is horror. Yet opening ourselves up to horror, as we saw in Carrie, and to an extent in The Fury, involves, besides the disturbance of the metaphysical categories, a destruction of the world. It is thus not in vain that metaphysics looked for a way out of this horrifying principle of destruction at the heart of the human, yet its strategies were false. Can there be a different way out of this primary horror, a way out that does not repress horror and attempt to eliminate it but, rather, keeps it somehow working yet managing to transform it? Can there be a happy ending to horror (an ending that opens us up to happiness), which, at the same time, will be a happy closure of the metaphysical conceptual world? If we have been orchestrating this set of questions around the question of the image, then we need to ask: Does the last word on the image have to do with the discovery of its horrifying dimension? Is the only relation possible to the experience of the image the opening up to a haunting horror, to a horror involving, as I argued in the introduction, the infliction of blindness and deafness-or is there another, happy, way, to relate to the dimension of the image? In other words, can there be a happy relation to the image, can there be a happy ending to our theoretical journey? This, I suggest, is the great question occupying De Palma's film Femme Fatale, a neo-jilm noir, one of his most sustained and profound theoretical meditations on the essence of the cinematic image, of the horror it invokes, of its blinding force, and of the promise it holds, a promise of happiness.

* The film's narrative is simple. Laure, the heroine of the film, is a jewel thief, who in the opening of the film takes part in a robbery. Following the heist, she betrays her partners and escapes with the jewels. Because of her

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Coda

betrayal, she fears her image being taken: an image, a double ofherself, that has the power of circulation beyond her control, which will expose her to the eyes of the world and might reveal her location to her partners. As she escapes, she ends up in an apartment of a woman, who herself is away, a woman who happens to be her exact double, thus a literalization of the being of the image. As she is taking a bath, Laure falls asleep, although we are not supposed to know this, and she dreams her foture. In the dream, the double arrives, kills herself, and Laure steals her identity, only to end up being exposed in this new identity through a photograph taken by a paparazzi journalist, a photograph that reveals her whereabouts to her expartners who locate her and kill her. At this moment, she wakes up from her nightmare only to see the double enter the apartment in a similar way to the dream that showed her the future. She decides to change her destiny, prevents the double from killing herself, and disappears. At the film's end, because of an extraordinary accident triggered by a gift of a jewel in the shape of a crystal ball, a gift her double gave to a passing truck driver, Laure's partners are killed, and she is released from the fear of the image. The possibility of a new life opens up. I will not be looking at this film closely, but would like to mention, as we reach the end of our journey, three stages involved in the adventure of the image as this film narrates it, from the discovery of a horror involved in it, the horror of exposure to the world as image, to the final "miracle" of opening to a new life. Immediately following the robbery and her betrayal of her partners, Laure needs a new identity, a new passport, and a new photo to match. Coming to a hotel to have her picture taken, she is met by one of her expartners who pretends to be the photographer. Because of a painful blinding illumination at the moment of her entrance (a blinding not unlike that experienced by Plato's philosophers in their way out of the cave), Laure has to close her eyes and so does not realize the fake photographer's identity. He soon attacks her, as if out of the activity of taking her picture, and throws her down the enormous space at the hotel's center. Read allegorically, this scene shows Laure's relation to the experience of the image, the experience of being exposed to the image's blinding force, as the discovery of a horror and a fall, the fall into the abyss of her blindness. The first exposure to the camera, or to the possibility of one's image

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or double being taken, is thus the discovery of one's own blinding by the image, the horror of an exposure to one's own blindness inscribed in the photographic image, a horror that is, I suggested, at the origin of the Platonist tradition's defensive attempt, an attempt I discussed in the book's introduction, to turn this blindness into the perfect vision of a nonsensuous gaze. Having escaped and assumed a new identity, and having maintained this identity by methodically preventing her picture being taken, Laure lives safely for years, until the crucial moment where a paparazzi photographer manages to photograph her and expose her to the world. In the brilliant scene of her being exposed, to her horror, to the image-taking of the paparazzi photographer, we see the photographer pretending to be blind, his eyes covered with dark glasses, and, through this ruse, he manages to get dose to Laure. In a beautiful allegorical moment, he takes off his dark glasses, replacing them with the eye of the camera, and finally captures her image. It is not only the subject of the photograph who is blinded, this scene shows; the photographer himself is shown, allegorically here, to create the image from a blindness. The eye of the photographer is a blind eye, one that creates the image from a blindness that it activates, and the fear of the image is also the fear of encountering the other's blindness, the other as a blindness, or, to use the terms of our introduction, as unanticipated futurity. Yet, the final scene of this film is the most enigmatic and encapsulates the possibility explored by the film for a new relation to the image and its horrifYing and blinding force. After her dream, deciding to change her future, Laure manages to save the life of her double (Lily). As the double, instead of Laure, is about to set out in her new life, a life Laure lived in her dream, she encounters a truck driver to whom she gives as a gift a small jewel in the shape of a crystal ball. As the film ends, we witness the truck driver coming down the road where Laure's ex-partners are waiting, about to discover her identity and take their revenge on her. Yet because of a strange miracle, their plan fails: they die instead of Laure, and she can begin a new life, a life without a fear of the image, without the fear of her being caught in the image as signaling her destruction. In the miracle, in a rare moment of the sun shining brightly, one of the sun's rays is caught in the crystal ball, and blinds the truck driver, who thus changes his course.

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At the moment of being refracted in the crystal ball, and because of the way that it is projected out of it, the sun's ray gets caught in the eye of the camera of the paparazzi photographer who, busily working on some mysterious photo that has occupied him for years, is standing on an adjacent balcony taking photos. The photographer is blinded for a moment by the transmission of the ray into the eye of his camera, a transmission that inscribes itself in the image taken by the camera at this miraculous moment. What is it that happens in this great moment of cinema, a moment that in my opinion marks the ending of Femme Fatale as one of the paradigmatic endings in the history of film? 6 The gift of the double-the crystal ball in the truck-has turned into a blinding light, a blinding miracle that, mediated by the camera lens where this light is trapped and which it communicates as an emissary ofthe beyond, becomes the blinding origin of the possibility of a new life and the liberation from what seemed to be fate (the fate in the dream). The blinding light gives or opens a time of futurity, not of a future, as the future revealed in the dream as a content, but of futurity as such, that blank and blinding openness beyond the world that is part of the world. Thus, the beyond, what we also called in this book (following Deleuze) the absolute outside, the blinding light that opens vision and the world, is inscribed in the photographic work of art with which the movie ends, a work of art, a real image, that the paparazzi photographer, who has retired from his profession, was working on for years, an unknown masterpiece that was waiting for this trace of blinding light to become an image, an inscription of the world's dimension of futurity as a blind spot at its heart, thus incorporating the absolute horror that the blinding sun marked through a refraction of a single ray, managing to turn the absolute blinding implied by the sign into a blind spot at the heart of an image. The image is thus not fully consumed by the horror of the sun, not overexposed, but rather is that which manages-to use an Orson Welles' quotation that De Palma mentions over and over again in interviews and which the photographer in Femme Fatale mentions as well-"to catch lightning in a bottle," to somehow transform the sun's horror by creative incorporation of one of its rays as a blind spot, but not as absolute burning. The inscription of this blind spot is at the heart of the work of art, the mysterious photograph on which the paparazzi worked for years,

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with which the movie ends, and in the background we see the name of a cafe, Cafe Paradise. Thus, the film, happily, ends with a vision of paradise, not as a transcendent realm elsewhere, but as the beyond opening at the heart of this world. It is thus also that the film achieves what can be called "a new enlightenment," not the enlightenment that is the metaphysical project par excellence of turning all the obscurities of the world into an absolute illumination, a total perception without shadows but, rather, enlightenment as the transformation of the blinding horror of the sun into a blind spot at the heart of an image, a blind spot that allows the eyes to open. If light has always been understood as that which gives to see, then in the configuration of a new enlightenment it would not be a question, as in metaphysics, of finally seeing the source of absolute light, the sun, seeing, or more precisely perceiving, that which gives us to see; rather, it would be a question of receiving a blind spot that illuminates for us a world, a blind spot (our futurity) out of which we see, bur which itself can never be an object of perception. The stroke of genius of De Palma's film is to have shown that this enlightening gift of the beyond, which redeems and saves for a new life, is the very gift of the double or the image, a gift that opens the world by activating a blank blindness, a futurity, at its heart. For even if the artistic tradition has always dedicated itself to the creation of the image/ it has also always to an extent seen the image as pronouncing doom. From Oedipus' blindness-the essential tragic image that shows the discovery of the image to be the discovery of one as doomed and trapped in a destiny to which one is blind-to the nightmarish visions of the double in E. T. A. Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe and the fatal visions of the doomed heroes and heroines of film noir, the discovery of the dimension of the image was often understood by art as revealing the dimension of man's fate to which the person is blind. Yet Femme Fatale shows that we need to liberate ourselves from this understanding of the image as an announcement of a destiny. We need to liberate ourselves for a dimension of futurity without content, specifically the content that the concept of destiny gave it, which is a defense against the blank and blinding nothingness inscribed in the image. We need to liberate ourselves from the view of fate and fatality inscribed in the image understood as a femme fatale (and from the view of the femme as a fatal image), as a double-crossing

creature exposing us to our own blindness in the manner of an inescapable destiny. The Image blinds, but it is not a blinding that shows our entrapment in a destiny, but a blindness activating the possibility of a new, visionary power, and of a new life.

Notes

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION I. We can indeed see that for Plato the discovery that something is an image, rather than an original object, is described as the origin for philosophical thinking, as that which gives thought and sends one on the philosophical adventure, an adventure described most clearly perhaps in Plato's image of the divided line (Republic VI), where the ascent of thought toward its real object has to do with a repeated series of transitions from images to the objects of which they are images. 2. The Platonic understanding of the superior level of reality in terms of a model for the lower level is also a major conceptual decision with far-reaching consequences. 3· I am bringing together, perhaps too quickly, because of the introductory nature of this brief survey, several key moments of the Platonic understanding of the image as they are found in books VII and X of The Republic, two books dealing with the image from two rather different perspectives, the first ontological, the second aesthetic (dealing with the artistic image). The relations between the two are not fully articulated and are often ambiguous. 4· This might not be an entirely correct description, for it has been argued (for example, by John Sallis in his Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues, 3rd edition [Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1996]) that for Plato, at least in the specific case to which the scheme of object and image applies, the case of the relation between the Idea and the sensible object, with which I will soon deal, it is not a question of actually dealing with two types of objects but, rather, with one object's different ways of showing itself, either in its true being, as an Idea, or in a more partial form, as a sensible object. Nevertheless, taking this reservation into account, it seems to me that it does not change essentially the fact that we are dealing, at the very least, with two types of objectivity, and thus, that Plato understands both the image (in our case, the sensible thing) as well as the object of which it is the image (in our case, the Idea) according to one type of thing, an object, that can be encountered on two different levels, one superior and more real, the other inferior. It also seems to be the case, admitted by the most advanced readers of Plato from Martin Heidegger to Sarah Broadie, that despite many ambiguities

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about the issue, Plato does seem finally to believe in some kind of separate existence of non-sensible objects that are very different than the sensible objects that are their images, and thus, he seems to populate his universe with two types of objects, thinking of the relation between them according to the scheme of object (or model) and its image. 5· I am intentionally changing the Platonic order of presentation wherein the discussion of object and image is secondary to what seems to be the main issue, the attempt to think the difference between the Ideas and the sensible realm. I rather want to suggest that the decision regarding the essence of the image is at the heart, and is perhaps even the source, for the Platonic interpretation of reality. 6. Again, the question whether we can actually talk in Plato's case of the positing of a separate metaphysical realm beyond the worldly realm of the senses is a highly complex one; nevertheless, it seems that Plato finally does make this metaphysical decision. As Heidegger puts it in his essential essay, "Plato's Doctrine ofTruth'': "But the 'philosophy' that begins with Plato has, from that point on [the point of concentrating on the being of the Ideas in his allegory of the cave] the distinguishing mark of what is later called 'metaphysics.' Plato himself concretely illustrates the basic outline of metaphysics in the story recounted in the 'allegory of the cave.' In fact the coining of the word 'metaphysics' is already prefigured in Plato's presentation. In the passage (516) that depicts the adaptation of the gaze to the ideas, Plato says (516 c3): "Thinking goes j.l£'t' Kf:tvrtigo marks in relation to the thinking of the image? We can define Vt>rtigo's trajectory-to come back to the question of the relations between metaphysics and the image I have sketched in the introduction-as allegorically dramatizing for us the confrontation between the metaphysical Man, Scottie, and the being of the image as mimetic doubling with no original model (Madeleine; Carlotta, the actress), a doubling that marks a horror for metaphysics. The whole adventure of Vt>rtigo can be described as metaphysical Man's attempt to create a real, original, model Woman out of a luring double with no substance, and to create this real Woman, Scottie Qames Stewart), has to save her from her doubling, that is, at first, to save Madeleine from her doubling of the dead Carlotta, and to save her means, as I argued briefly in Chapter 2, to frame

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her, to eliminate the excessive abyss discovered in her doubling, the vertigo she produces, and delimit her in her proper place. Yet, of course, Scottie actually fell in love with a double, or even with the very enigmatic being of doubling, but with a doubling that can be saved into an origin. His complex love needed precisely these two aspects, the encounter with the exciting body double and the promise of the saving frame. His love, in short, took the shape of metaphysics, and exposes metaphysics, philosophy, as a work of love, as encounter with an abyssal double for which one can promise a framing, idealizing salvation. Thus, when he encounters the actress who was hired to play Madeleine, her only interest for him is in her resemblance, or doubling, of the dead Madeleine, and he wants to return her to the paradoxical shape of the original double (Madeleine I Carlotta), the double that is the origin of his love. Once the whole plot is exposed, and Scottie actually finds the original model for the doubling, discovers that the whole thing was a charade put on by an actress and a scheming husband, everything evaporates; he loses his being lured by the double as well as the possibility of becoming a savior, and remains with nothing but death. The image has revealed an uncrossable abyss, a vertigo from which-unlike Scottie's other vertigo-there is no recovery, no way out. There is no way to bring together the metaphysical frame and the being of the image as doubling, and if love is their impossible relation, then love is impossible. Once you have a frame you do not have the image as double, once you have the image as double you cannot have a metaphysical frame; you are thus either left with an empty frame (Vertigo) or consumed yourself by the being of the double, possessed by the double (Psycho). What is the way out? Can there be a different relation to the image as double that does not need to metaphysically save the image from its doubling, and neither is it consumed by the image, or by a certain excess the image releases, as destruction? This, I suggest, is the great question De Palma inherits from Hitchcock. This question guides all his attempts to further investigate the being of horror, the logic of the frame, the being of doubling, and the question of the image, and it seems to me that perhaps in Femme Fatale he has found his most successful solution to date (written in anticipation of The Black Dahlia), for Femme Fatale moves from a Vertigo-like adventure of the luring of doubles to a miraculous way out of Vertigo (and the way out has also to do with the fact that the film is not limited, as in Vertigo, to the lured man's perspective but privileges the luring woman's perspective), in the shape of the waking from a dream, a waking, which, as I will soon explain, turns the image from its being a luring and destructive double that needs to be saved into that which itself actually saves, saves and redeems into a new logic, a logic with a new understanding of the frame and thus with a different relation to the haunting outside that the double exposes. The image, the double, saves rather than needs saving, and love-the ending of Femme Fatale leaves this openbecomes, perhaps, possible. 7· See the introduction to this book.

Index

Accident, 27, 28, 29, 33, 64, 140, 144, 146 Agamben, Giorgio, 192, 218 Alien, Nancy, 24, 85, 170, 177 Altman, Robert, 205 Arendt, Hannah, 200 Astaire, Fred, 69 Attention, 122-125, 206-208 Austin, J .L., xi, xii, xvi Bacon, Francis, 208 Bataille, Georges, 47, 189 Benjamin, Waiter, 6 Bergson, Henri, 89 Birds, The, 219 Blanchot, Maurice, xii, 6 Black Dahlia, The, 220 Blankness, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 63, 68, 71, 73, 74, 75, 186. See also Whiteness Blindness, 11-17, 19, 36, 80, 133, 149, 158-164, 167, 172, 174 Blow Out, xv, 83-155, 168, 177 Blow-Up, 168 Body Double, 168 Bordwell, David, 52, 179 Bresson, Robert, 18, 182 Broadie, Sarah, 165 Buckley, Betty, 40 Bufiuel, Luis, 185 Camera movement, 30, 31, 36, 57, 65, 170, 187

Carlito's W'lly, 179,214,216 Caruth, Cathy, 184 Carnap, Rudolf, xii Carrie, 14,23-45, 159, 169-179 Cassavetes, John, 174 Casualties ofW'llr, 174, 177, 206 Cavell, Stanley, 53, 54, 179, 180, 192 Center, The, 123, 124, 130 Chion, Michel, 83 Cinematic Address, The, 26, 28, 32, 51, 52,57,88 Claudel, Paul, 129 Clement, Catherine, 190 Copjec, Joan, 59, 172, 183, 213 Crary, Jonathan, 206-208 Cruise, Tom, 173 Cry, The, 32, 33, 38, 42, 43. See also Scream Cut, The, 56, 70, 71, 133, 134, 144 Davidson, Donald, xii Da Vinci, Leonardo, 181 Dayan, Daniel, 59, 181, 182 Deleuze, Gilles, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 6, 15, 16,26,27,48,89-94, 162,171, 174, 179, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 197,208 De Man, Paul, 184 De Niro, Robert, 175 Derrida, Jacques, xii, 6, 47, 81, 96, 158, 180, 181, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194,

222

Index

205, 213 Descartes, Rene, 125, 138 Dickinson, Angie, 170 Dolar, Mladen, 202 Double, The, 168,202, 220 Douglas, Kirk, 179 Dressed to Kif~ 170, 177, 212 Dreyer, Car! Theodor, 18, 25, 189 Drives, The, 195 Edit, The, 70, 71, 72, 120, 133, 134; sound, 127 Education, 42-45. See also Pedagogy Eisenstein, Sergei, 18, 185 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xvi Enigmatic, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 81, 84, 158 Euripides, 203 Excess, xvi, 2, 10, 11, 14, 15, 37, 48, 52, 55,61,66, 71, 75,84,125-130,211 Falling, 26, 29, 33, 63, 74, 76, 77, 188 Father, The, 51-82, 168, 181, 183 Felman, Shoshana, 187 Femme Fatale, 151, 159-164, 168, 169, 218-220 Foucault, Michel, 192 Fox, Michael J., 174, 177 Fragment, The, 55, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 80, 89, 92, 94, 95, 99, 100, 117, 120, 186, 211 Frame, The, xvi, xvii, 30, 47-82, 84, 88, 89-106, 120, 121, 179, 180-184; in Hitchcock, 188 Franklin, Benjamin, 154, 155 Frenkenheimer, John, 205 Fried, Michael, xvii Freud, Sigmund, 10, 15, 78, 168, 176, 177,187,208 Fury, The, 1, 2, 14, 47-82, 116, 129, 136, 159, 169, 174, 191, 195,204 Gance, Abel, 203 Gaze, The, 15, 16, 137, 138, 171, 172, 175 Godard, Jean-Luc, 18, 182

Goux, Jean-Joseph, 217 Greetings, 175 Haunting, xvi, 54, 77, 82, 87, 88, 95, 96111, 126 Hawks, Howard, 185 Heart, The, 87-89, 100-102, 195, 196 Heath, Stephen, 59 Hegel, G.W.F., xv, xvi, 191 Heidegger, Martin, xv, xvi, 6, 76, 84, 148, 158, 165, 166, 168, 173, 187, 191, 192,193,194,206,217 Hitchcock, Alfred, xi, 18-20, 25, 29, 32, 70, 168, 182, 184, 187, 188, 189, 199, 203,218,219 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 163, 179 Horror, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 63, 68, 70, 72, 73, 102, 130, 158, 159, 162, 172, 173, 177, 217; and metaphysics, 219 Intentionality, 7 Image, The, 1-21, 84, 157-164 Immanence, 35, 91, 95, 107, 108, 192 Intelligible, The, 4, 5, 6, 90 lrigaray, Luce, 176, 177 lrving, Amy, 24, 174 Kant, lmmanuel, xv, 7, 99, 115, 199-201, 212, 213, 218 Kelly, Grace, 187 Kimhi, Irad, 191 King, Martin Luther, 154, 155 King, Stephen, 23 Kiss Me Deadly, 180 Kkleist, Heinrich Von, 184 Klevan, Andrew, xiii Kubrick, Stanley, 18, 25, 32, 131 Lacan, Jacques, xii, 6, 15, 35, 59, 107, 137, 138, 167, 168, 171, 173, 175, 176, 177, 182, 186, 194, 198 Laub, Dori, 187 Laurie, Piper, 24 Levinas, Emmanuel, 16, 174, 187

Index Lithgow, John, 85, 170 Lynch, David, 209 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, xii, 187, 200, 212, 213 Malevich, Kasimir, 14 Man Who Knew Too Much, The, 219 Manchurian Candidate, The, 180, 205 Marnie, 32, 219 Massumi, Brian, 36, 174 Meaning, the question of, 5, 10, 11, 17, 28, 74, 75, 185 Melville, Herman, 63, 214 Metaphysics, 49, 90, 91, 96, 102, 107, 125, 126, 139, 145, 151, 193, 217; the closure of, 158-159; and pornography, 216 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 59, 181 Minnelli, Vincente, 18 Mirror, The, 62, 82, 103-111, 113, 202 Mission: Impossible, 173 Mission to Mars, 76, 195 Movement, 26, 27, 28, 29, 36, 37, 145, 170 Murnau, F.W, 18, 25, 189 Nancy, Jean-Luc, xii, 6, 26, 27, 83, 169, 171, 193 Napoleon, 203 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 91, 148, 158, 192, 217 Navalis, 99

Obsession, 168 Oedipus, 12, 13, 20, 80, 163, 167, 169, 217,218,219 Ontology, 7, 11 Organism,The,99, 112,117,143 Organs, The, 96-103 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 59 Outside, The, 16, 89-96, 126, 162 Ozu, Yasujiro, 205 Pacino, Al, 179 Paranoia, 39, 47, 50, 55, 62, 180

223

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 18 Passivity, 37, 67, 68, 73, 88, 174 Passion, 37, 47, 59, 61, 174, 175 Pedagogy, 42-45. See also Education Perkins, Victor, xiii Perspective, 56, 95 Phantom ofthe Paradise, 169, 185, 190, 195,197,200 Phenomenology, 7 Photography, 159-164 Powell, Michael, 185 Putnam, Hillaty, xii Plato, xvi, 3-19, 21, 90, 91, 92, 107, 108, 138, 149-153, 165, 166, 192, 193, 197 Poe, Edgar Allan, 163, 179 Polanski, Roman, 25 Pornography, 38, 39, 115, 149, 175, 198, 215; and metaphysics, 216 Primal Scene, The, 15 Psycho, 70,168,199,219,220 Quine, Willard Van Orman, xii

l&.ising Cain, 170, 202 Reading, 48, 49 Rear Window, 168, 187 Representation, 34, 125, 173, 175, 183 Rimbaud, Arthur, 1, 121 Ronell, Avital, 212 Rosenzweig, Franz, 191 Sallis, John, 165 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 210 Scarface, 185 Schelling, F.W, 99 Schlegel, Friedrich, 99 Scream, The, 84, 86, 111-118, 148-151, 199,202,215,216 Screen, The, xvi, 2, 68, 73; splitting the screen, 118-125 Sensation, 135 Sensible, The, 4, 5, 90 Sense, 125-130, 211 Senses, The, 4-18, 96-103, 125-130, 133-139,210

224

Index

Shakespeare, William, xv Shining, The, 32 Silverman, Kaja, 59, 176, 177, 181 Sliur~ 168, 169, 175, 185, 190, 196, 197 Soundtrack, The, 89, 97, 98, 112, 195 Spacek, Sissy, 23 Stewart, James, 187, 188, 219 Suspense, 27,28 Suture, 59-62, 63, 65, 66, 181, 182, 185, 186 Technology, 100, 116-118, 141-143, 212, 213 Telepathy, 66, 67, 183 Time-Image, The, 15, 16 Touch, 50,68, 70, 72,129,130,210, 216; and the split screen, 204 Touch ofEvi~ 180 Tragedy, 13 Trauma, 15, 139 Transcendence, 35, 91, 192 Travolta, John, 85, 177

2001: A Space Odyssey, 131 Unconscious, The, 10 Untouchables, The, 185 Van Sant, Gus, 168 ~rtigo, 168, 187, 188, 218-220 Voice, The, 64, 65, 183, 200 Welles, Orson, 18, 162, 203, 205 Whiteness, 13, 14, 63. See also Blankness Wilder, Billy, 185 Williams, Linda, 189 Wise Guys, 179 Witness, The, 40, 41, 59, 61, 66, 67, 70, 77, 78,80,84,178 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xi, xii, xv, xvi World, The, xvi, 4-18, 53, 54, 71, 95, 96 Wounding,23-45,63, 72 Zeno, 145 Zizek, Slavoj, 59, 181

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