This is the text of a talk given in the context of Alan Read's 'Caves' week in the Anatomy Theatre, King's College London, in early 2011.
First of all, a translation of Duras' 'Les Mains negatives'
Marguerite Duras, Negative Hands
They call negative hands the paintings of hands found in the Magdalanean caves of southern Atlantic Europe. The edges of these hands – pressed outspread upon the rock – were soaked in colour. Most often in blue, and black. Sometimes red. No explanation has been found for this practice.
They call negative hands the paintings of hands found in the Magdalanean caves of southern Atlantic Europe. The edges of these hands – pressed outspread upon the rock – were soaked in colour. Most often in blue, and black. Sometimes red. No explanation has been found for this practice.
In front of the ocean / under the cliff / on the granite cave wall / these hands / wide open / blue / And black / blue like the water / black like the night / The man came alone into the grotto which faced the ocean / All the hands are the same size / he was alone
The man alone in the grotto looked into the noise / into the noise of the ocean / the immensity of it
The man alone in the grotto looked into the noise / into the noise of the ocean / the immensity of it
And he cried out
You who have a name who have identity I love you
These hands / the blue like the water / black like the sky / Flat / Pressed and spread on the grey granite
So that someone would see them
I am the one who calls / I am the one who called who cried out thirty thousand years ago
I love you
I cry out that I want to love you, I love you
I will love whoever will hear my cry
On the empty earth these hands will remain / on the granite surface against the fracas of the ocean
Unbearable
No-one will hear anything / see anything
Thirty thousand years / these hands, there, black
The refraction of the light of the sea makes the stone wall tremble
I am someone I am the one who called who called who cried out in this white light
Desire / the word has not yet been invented
He looked at the immensity of it in the fracas of the waves, the immensity of its force / and then he cried out
Above him the endless forests of Europe
He stands amidst the rock / corridors / paths of stone / everywhere
You who have a name who have been given identity I love you with an indefinite love
He had to climb down the cliff / conquer his fear / The wind blows from the continent pushing the waves back / The waves struggle against the wind / They advance, slowed by the force of the wind / and patiently reach the stone wall
Everything crashes
I love you more than you / I will love whoever hears that I cry out that I love you
Thirty thousand years
I call
I call for the one who will answer
I want to love you I love you
For thirty thousand years I have cried out in front of the sea the white spectre
I am the one who cried out that he loved you, you
The focus of the paper I am about to give has changed since I proposed to talk about Bataille, Lascaux and Duras, to become focused more exclusively on Duras, for a number of reasons. Predominantly, I was struck in reading Bataille’s text on Lascaux by the extent to which he does not attend to any significant degree to the phenomonology of the cave or the production and viewing of its images. Rather, Lascaux provides Bataille with ‘evidence’, albeit of an enigmatic status, in support of his anthropological theses, proposed in such texts as The Accursed Share and Eroticism, concerning the importance of taboos surrounding death and sexuality in the genesis of humanity, and the role of art in this evolution. However, in focusing more specifically on Duras I will also, I think, be speaking indirectly on Bataille, since I take her perspective to be fundamentally influenced by Bataille in ways which it is beyond the scope of this paper to formulate. What I want to do is to use Duras’s film to pose questions about the ‘negative hand’, specifically, about which Marie-Jose Mondzains’ text Homo spectator discussed earlier in the week has no doubt enlightened us.
Les mains negatives is an 18 minute colour film made by the French writer Marguerite Duras in 1979. It consists evidently of a sequence of images, travelling shots of Paris at 7 in the morning, and a voiceover, read by Duras herself from a script published separately as ‘Les mains négatives’, usually alongside the text of the film Le Navire Night. The images of Les Mains negatives are in fact out-takes from the shooting of Le Navire night, and the script was written on the basis of (‘à partir de’) these out-takes. This is an important point to underline; the script was written from the starting point of the images, the visual document. It will become clear why.
Show film.
I will summarise minimally some of the key elements of the film: Travelling shots of Paris, taken from a moving vehicle, mostly of the boulevards. Early morning. No synchronised sound. Voiceover. Little traffic. Street cleaners. A few lights. Advertisments. Shop signs. Café signs. Banks.
The voiceover, the written text, speaks of the images of hands found in the Magdalanean caves of South Atlantic Europe, presumably indicating those caves found in the region of the Pyrenees, north of there in France, and south, in Spain. Duras mentions the cave of Altamira in an interview. She says the images of the hands were blue or black, and sometimes red, and that no explanation has been found for this practice. I do not know if Duras’ anthropological or geological information is accurate, although images of blue, black and red negative hands can be seen in these sites. The title of the film being ‘Les mains négatives’ Duras is in error in supposing that the edges of the hands were soaked in colour, as she says in the brief preamble. Marie-José Mondzain, in her text Homo spectator, which draws on material concerning the grotto of Chauvet, gives an explanation of the process by which the image of the negative hand was printed on the cave wall: the hand was pressed against the wall and colour-dyed water was blown out from the mouth onto the hand. Duras’ error may prove significant further on. Her voiceover also tells us that the man who made these images came into the cave alone, that the cave opened onto the ocean, that the noise of the ocean was deafening, that the images date from 30, 000 years back. Beyond that, Duras’ text, nor the film, evidently, do not provide information or interpretation of the image of the negative hand. Neither does the film hint at its relation to the image. The enigmatic status of the image of the hand is repeated in the enigma which the spectator of this film faces, a spectator also alone in the dark, potentially facing a smooth surface on which images make their appearance. Or not alone. One of the questions I want to open here without providing any answer, is that of solitude of the spectator, their potential sociality, and the possibility of an engagement with the neighbour. The cave provides a space of retreat and potential solitude, but the reproduction of the cave in the chamber of the cinema, or whatever other space is exploited for means of this strange practice, seems problematically to populate and socialise this space of isolation, to bring the ipsocentric subject into relation with others.
Duras’s film, as I said, is an enigma. It does not give us information about the caves nor the negative hands. It is not a document. Its effect, its affect, is elsewhere.
These hands / the blue like the water / black like the sky / Flat / Pressed and spread on the grey granite
So that someone would see them
I am the one who calls / I am the one who called who cried out thirty thousand years ago
I love you
I cry out that I want to love you, I love you
I will love whoever will hear my cry
On the empty earth these hands will remain / on the granite surface against the fracas of the ocean
Unbearable
No-one will hear anything / see anything
Thirty thousand years / these hands, there, black
The refraction of the light of the sea makes the stone wall tremble
I am someone I am the one who called who called who cried out in this white light
Desire / the word has not yet been invented
He looked at the immensity of it in the fracas of the waves, the immensity of its force / and then he cried out
Above him the endless forests of Europe
He stands amidst the rock / corridors / paths of stone / everywhere
You who have a name who have been given identity I love you with an indefinite love
He had to climb down the cliff / conquer his fear / The wind blows from the continent pushing the waves back / The waves struggle against the wind / They advance, slowed by the force of the wind / and patiently reach the stone wall
Everything crashes
I love you more than you / I will love whoever hears that I cry out that I love you
Thirty thousand years
I call
I call for the one who will answer
I want to love you I love you
For thirty thousand years I have cried out in front of the sea the white spectre
I am the one who cried out that he loved you, you
The focus of the paper I am about to give has changed since I proposed to talk about Bataille, Lascaux and Duras, to become focused more exclusively on Duras, for a number of reasons. Predominantly, I was struck in reading Bataille’s text on Lascaux by the extent to which he does not attend to any significant degree to the phenomonology of the cave or the production and viewing of its images. Rather, Lascaux provides Bataille with ‘evidence’, albeit of an enigmatic status, in support of his anthropological theses, proposed in such texts as The Accursed Share and Eroticism, concerning the importance of taboos surrounding death and sexuality in the genesis of humanity, and the role of art in this evolution. However, in focusing more specifically on Duras I will also, I think, be speaking indirectly on Bataille, since I take her perspective to be fundamentally influenced by Bataille in ways which it is beyond the scope of this paper to formulate. What I want to do is to use Duras’s film to pose questions about the ‘negative hand’, specifically, about which Marie-Jose Mondzains’ text Homo spectator discussed earlier in the week has no doubt enlightened us.
Les mains negatives is an 18 minute colour film made by the French writer Marguerite Duras in 1979. It consists evidently of a sequence of images, travelling shots of Paris at 7 in the morning, and a voiceover, read by Duras herself from a script published separately as ‘Les mains négatives’, usually alongside the text of the film Le Navire Night. The images of Les Mains negatives are in fact out-takes from the shooting of Le Navire night, and the script was written on the basis of (‘à partir de’) these out-takes. This is an important point to underline; the script was written from the starting point of the images, the visual document. It will become clear why.
Show film.
I will summarise minimally some of the key elements of the film: Travelling shots of Paris, taken from a moving vehicle, mostly of the boulevards. Early morning. No synchronised sound. Voiceover. Little traffic. Street cleaners. A few lights. Advertisments. Shop signs. Café signs. Banks.
The voiceover, the written text, speaks of the images of hands found in the Magdalanean caves of South Atlantic Europe, presumably indicating those caves found in the region of the Pyrenees, north of there in France, and south, in Spain. Duras mentions the cave of Altamira in an interview. She says the images of the hands were blue or black, and sometimes red, and that no explanation has been found for this practice. I do not know if Duras’ anthropological or geological information is accurate, although images of blue, black and red negative hands can be seen in these sites. The title of the film being ‘Les mains négatives’ Duras is in error in supposing that the edges of the hands were soaked in colour, as she says in the brief preamble. Marie-José Mondzain, in her text Homo spectator, which draws on material concerning the grotto of Chauvet, gives an explanation of the process by which the image of the negative hand was printed on the cave wall: the hand was pressed against the wall and colour-dyed water was blown out from the mouth onto the hand. Duras’ error may prove significant further on. Her voiceover also tells us that the man who made these images came into the cave alone, that the cave opened onto the ocean, that the noise of the ocean was deafening, that the images date from 30, 000 years back. Beyond that, Duras’ text, nor the film, evidently, do not provide information or interpretation of the image of the negative hand. Neither does the film hint at its relation to the image. The enigmatic status of the image of the hand is repeated in the enigma which the spectator of this film faces, a spectator also alone in the dark, potentially facing a smooth surface on which images make their appearance. Or not alone. One of the questions I want to open here without providing any answer, is that of solitude of the spectator, their potential sociality, and the possibility of an engagement with the neighbour. The cave provides a space of retreat and potential solitude, but the reproduction of the cave in the chamber of the cinema, or whatever other space is exploited for means of this strange practice, seems problematically to populate and socialise this space of isolation, to bring the ipsocentric subject into relation with others.
Duras’s film, as I said, is an enigma. It does not give us information about the caves nor the negative hands. It is not a document. Its effect, its affect, is elsewhere.
Les mains negatives is an address. It construes the negative hand as an address. Duras makes present a man, alone, 30,000 years ago, who articulates a demand for love. The image of the hand is translated into a voice, a cry, which articulates a demand for love. The man cries out, and his cry is addressed to us, to you, ‘tu’, ‘toi’. The you, it is stipulated, is named, has an identity, is endowed with or has been given identity. The addressee, you, is identified, has identity, but the address goes beyond this immediate person; it is addressed to whoever will or can hear it (quiconque).
It is worth pausing to consider the status of this whoever; what kind of constituency is named or addressed by whoever. Whoever does not name a person or a group, but suggests the open and indefinite, necessarily plural nature of its addressee, who is singular, yet plural. If the communication that the negative hand opens or supposes seems, in Duras’s text, to postulate the intimacy of love, from within the withdrawn space of the cave, inviting the other within, it also necessarily and perhaps despite itself supposes the open sociality of whichever subjectivities. The subjectivity of whoever is the fundamental question here.
The negative hand thus addresses us (whoever are we?); we hear in it an appeal for communication. It is a phatic gesture, opening, establishing, verifying, perhaps, a channel of communication. Among the 7 functions of the message identified by Roman Jakobson one of the least prominent, the least commented, is the phatic, the element of a message related to the status of the channel of communication itself. The hand is addressed to us, offered to us as a gesture of appeal, perhaps of welcome, to whoever hears, to whoever will respond, and without predication of the form such a response might take. The addressee and the response are indefinite.
The address is an erotic address, both tactile, through the intermediary of the rock, and the image , and vocal. It is not intersubjective or interlocutionary in an obvious sense, at least not in terms of presence, in the present, despite Bataille’s insistence on the ‘clear and burning presence’ of prehistoric man as borne out in Lascaux. The response to the call or address will not in any case take place in a face to face dialogue. It is an erotic address, and here it will be pertinent to note that le Navire Night , the film from the remains of which Les mains negatives was woven, also concerns erotic communication, this time a relation via the telephone of two people separated by a distance of their own devising, who never meet, this distance seemingly calculated to intensify the erotic nature of their relation. Duras envisions an erotic relation characterised by distance, eroticism in this light appearing as something that problematises or displaces face to face communication. Erotic address, heeding here the work of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, particularly in their book Caravaggio’s Secrets, solicits us, but does so in an ambivalent manner; something is offered, but this offering is also a withdrawal. Erotic address solicits and retreats in the same gesture. Here, we are led to ask , what kind of solicitation is articulated from the withdrawn space of the cave, what kind of withdrawal solicits?
The man Duras imagines in the cave cries out to the addressee that he loves her, or him, who has a name. What does the name do here? The name singularises me, addresses me as an individual, yet the address goes further than me, towards the indefinite other, whichever other. He addresses Duras, perhaps, and beyond her her indefinite readers, men or women. Reading perhaps offers that indefinite space, the reader may occupy the site of the indefinite addressee, but reading is necessarily mediated, and the address that Duras’s text performs appeals to immediacy. The address is an appeal, a demand for love. The kind of communication that could take place over 30,000 years of temporal distance is named love, which is to say that love names, for Duras, a relation on the basis of an impossibility of communication, temporal or spatial, deliberately imposed or imposed by virtue of necessity. The kind of communication the address of Les Mains negatives demands is not that of exchange or of reciprocity; communication on the basis or on condition of the impossiblility of exchange describes what Georges Bataille theorised in his post-war work under the term major communication, as opposed to the minor communication which takes place in the restricted economy of worldly exchange. But by naming this kind of communication love Duras places herself in a distinct tradition; for French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan love is what makes up for the impossibility of establishing the sexual relation as such, of resolving sexual difference. Here a sexual relation is made impossible by virtue of temporal distance. Does Duras propose these 30,000 years of difference, and everything that separates the man of the caves from us, so as to imagine that, were it not for this distance, a relation would be possible? Not exactly, for the temporal distance is construed differently, deflected through its relation with the film image.
In an interview which accompanies the film on the French DVD, aptly enough titled ‘La caverne noire’ , Duras refers to Les Mains negatives as ‘un film terrifiante’. She points to the way the film captures the presence of a section of humanity in contemporary Paris who clean the streets, houses and offices, and who will ‘laisser la place’, withdraw from this space to leave it for those who will come later in the working day to populate and use these spaces. The image and the voiceover are linked through an implicit analogy between the humanity of pre-history, the man in the grotto, and those workers of the dawn, African street cleaners and Portuguese femmes de ménage. ‘We’, ‘you’ are as disconnected from these sections of humanity as the men of prehistory, we seem to be asked to think. The space of the day and of social, class division becomes the 30,000 years which separate the man of the caves from us. Like that man, we should understand, these human beings are not yet endowed with identity, not by us, anyway. Duras’s film is an appeal for the inclusion, in what we recognise as humanity, of these others, of this other, archaic scene, the archaic, in this instance indicating both the prehistorical origin, and the fundamental humanity who come before us to prepare the day for work and exchange, an archaic origin from which we are separated not by virtue of temporal distance but by virtue of social division.
The film is thus also a form of address, through the imprinting of an image, an address which is also an attempt to make contact, a phatic appeal.
Through the dialogue of image and text, a dialogue also established by virtue of a fundamental disconnection of image and text, Duras appeals for the possibility of a fundamental communication beyond social division; what she calls love names this primal need or demand for contact.
Con-tact – touching with – broaches the possibility of an inclusive community in tact, as if the capacity of the first man to press his hand against the rock and leave his trace should be remembered, repeated, in the different kinds of contact this other humanity has had with the surfaces, here the surfaces of the city, with which we come into contact in the space of the day, of work and exchange, a contact which is also in some sense negative, since it is in cleaning the surfaces, the removal of traces, that this other humanity leaves its trace. The negative hand is also the hand of whichever other has prepared the space and withdrawn from it to leave it free for our daily performances.
The voice Duras gives to the man who left the image of his hand in the cave addresses us as Duras imagines the dawn workers might address us, with a demand for contact. But through the analogy with the negative hand in the prehistoric cave does not Duras presuppose the impossibility of such contact; the extremity of the distance seems intended to maximise the affective intensity of the call for love?
The negative hand which is supposed, never seen, in the film, is as I have proposed a phatic gesture, a demand for contact. As an erotic address, I suggested, it is both offered, and withdrawn, this dynamic being actualised in the movement of the body in the act of leaving the trace, the image, as Marie-José Mondzain ‘s phenomenological fiction has established. The body leaves its trace as something separated from it, an image, which thus bears within itself the erotic dynamic of solicitation and withdrawal. In giving voice to the man who left the image of his hand Duras, one might argue, misses the specific gesture of the negative hand. Her ‘mistake’ in supposing the contour of the hand to be soaked in pigment, and pressed against the surface of the rock, is symptomatic of her privileging of the vocative demand for love and for contact over the erotics of gesture. If the negative hand itself addresses us, appeals for contact, it is immediately withdrawn into an unfathomable distance, engaging us in a relation with the other which is enigmatic.
The impossibility of establishing a relation with the other is covered or masked by what Duras calls love. One interpretation of Duras’s film and text would have it that, if only social divisions could be overcome, we could get along with each other. The impossibility of unmediated contact in Duras’s film is double-edged; either it signifies that if the obstacles to contact were removed harmonious relations among human beings would become possible, or it signifies that this impossibility is endemic and integral to communication as such.
From the first point of view, Duras’s vision repeats the structure of courtly love according to Lacan; the Lady is positioned as inaccessible so as to suppose that it is only the obstacles she places between herself and the lover which prevent the realisation of the sexual relation as such, the sexual relation which is equivalent to the relation between human beings.
With the negative hand we are dealing with an enigmatic signifier to which Duras gives a voice as a demand for love, an appeal for contact. The enigmatic signifier is a concept proposed by French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to account for the way the infant is seduced by the mother through ‘messages’ the content of which he or she does not yet have the capacity to decode or ‘metabolise’. Literary critics Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit mobilise the concept of the enigmatic signifier to describe the way that in erotic or more generally interpersonal relationships sexuality is enmeshed with questions of knowledge; desire becomes an epistemological quest. The other seduces me through the proposition, or the supposition in my eyes, of a knowledge they hold about me which they do not divulge. Such a mode of desire narrows the gaze since I am now attentive only to the other who I suppose holds the secret of my being. In the paintings of Caravaggio, for example, Bersani and Dutoit draw attention to the way in which certain figures seem both to invite, to offer and to withdraw. Erotic address, for Bersani and Dutoit, proposes the figure as enigmatic signifier, both seducing and withdrawing at the same time, and as such locking desire into an epistemological structure in which my gaze is narrowed in its focus on the enigmatic signifier of the other. Such epistemophilia seems calculated to intensify when dealing with such phenomena as parietal images. But Bersani and Dutoit draw attention to the ways in which, in Caravaggio’s paintings, the dynamics of erotic address are framed in a wider structure, or counterpointed, so to speak, by other interpretative possibilities. The dynamics of desire are deflected and diffused, for example, through attention to issues of the proximity of bodies in space. The epistemological anxiety of desire is displaced into questions of physical nearness and connection.
If we think about Duras’s film and the negative hand in this light, we might see that the whole thrust of Duras’s work is to set the negative hand, and the dawn workers, in the framework of a demand for love, that is, a psychological structure in which one subject demands a response from the other in terms of its being. The demand for love is a demand for a resolution of the subject’s anxiety about being, a question for which they demand a response from an other who they suppose holds the secret, the knowledge that will resolve this anxiety, answer this question. In giving voice to the negative hand as a demand for love Duras psychologises its gesture, translates it into the framework of the enigmatic signifier, and the demand for love of what Bersani calls ‘crippling interiority’.
We can, on the other hand, and at various points through this paper I have hinted at this possibility, pay more attention to the dynamics of the gesture of the negative hand. Marie José Mondzain’s account of the phenomenology of the gesture, invites us to do this. We may also draw out of Duras’s film the difference between the way the text addresses us, and the way the image addresses us. For if the text singularises its address, ending with the second personal singular ‘toi’, albeit indefinite, the image, at least in its cinematic mode of presentation, addresses itself to a contingent collection of ‘whichever’ singularities happen to occupy the space of the chamber of the projection space. What I mean to say here is that the space of cinema is at the same time a space of subjective address, a space in which the viewing subject is addressed as a potential respondent to the psychological communication voiced by the other, to love, to respond to the other’s demand for love, it is also a space of physical proximity to others. The chamber is potentially populated by whichever others happen to occupy that space, near or next to you. The love demanded by the man to the image of whose hand Duras gives a voice can be deflected into contact with the other who is next to you. The cinema is as much a space of intersubjective address as it is of con-tact.
Now if we think of the negative hand as a prototypical form of cinema, the illuminated imprinting of an image on a surface, the potential of the hand’s address to the community of ‘whatever’ singularities may be brought to the fore. Is it possible, then, to conceive of the cinema as a space of mutual con-tact with those images which have been fabricated as the vestiges of human presence? What kind of collectivity might be imagined in the basis of such vestiges, not in terms of psychological identification with the subject who produced them as enigmatic signifiers of our desire, but in terms of constituencies of shared con-tact? If Duras’s film is an appeal for social inclusion, it displaces this appeal into a demand for love, into an intersubjective, psychological relation which narrows the gaze of the spectator, and ignores the potential for contact with the neighbour which exists in the theatre, the physical connectedness which we share as spectators, in the ‘anatomy theatre’.
It is worth pausing to consider the status of this whoever; what kind of constituency is named or addressed by whoever. Whoever does not name a person or a group, but suggests the open and indefinite, necessarily plural nature of its addressee, who is singular, yet plural. If the communication that the negative hand opens or supposes seems, in Duras’s text, to postulate the intimacy of love, from within the withdrawn space of the cave, inviting the other within, it also necessarily and perhaps despite itself supposes the open sociality of whichever subjectivities. The subjectivity of whoever is the fundamental question here.
The negative hand thus addresses us (whoever are we?); we hear in it an appeal for communication. It is a phatic gesture, opening, establishing, verifying, perhaps, a channel of communication. Among the 7 functions of the message identified by Roman Jakobson one of the least prominent, the least commented, is the phatic, the element of a message related to the status of the channel of communication itself. The hand is addressed to us, offered to us as a gesture of appeal, perhaps of welcome, to whoever hears, to whoever will respond, and without predication of the form such a response might take. The addressee and the response are indefinite.
The address is an erotic address, both tactile, through the intermediary of the rock, and the image , and vocal. It is not intersubjective or interlocutionary in an obvious sense, at least not in terms of presence, in the present, despite Bataille’s insistence on the ‘clear and burning presence’ of prehistoric man as borne out in Lascaux. The response to the call or address will not in any case take place in a face to face dialogue. It is an erotic address, and here it will be pertinent to note that le Navire Night , the film from the remains of which Les mains negatives was woven, also concerns erotic communication, this time a relation via the telephone of two people separated by a distance of their own devising, who never meet, this distance seemingly calculated to intensify the erotic nature of their relation. Duras envisions an erotic relation characterised by distance, eroticism in this light appearing as something that problematises or displaces face to face communication. Erotic address, heeding here the work of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, particularly in their book Caravaggio’s Secrets, solicits us, but does so in an ambivalent manner; something is offered, but this offering is also a withdrawal. Erotic address solicits and retreats in the same gesture. Here, we are led to ask , what kind of solicitation is articulated from the withdrawn space of the cave, what kind of withdrawal solicits?
The man Duras imagines in the cave cries out to the addressee that he loves her, or him, who has a name. What does the name do here? The name singularises me, addresses me as an individual, yet the address goes further than me, towards the indefinite other, whichever other. He addresses Duras, perhaps, and beyond her her indefinite readers, men or women. Reading perhaps offers that indefinite space, the reader may occupy the site of the indefinite addressee, but reading is necessarily mediated, and the address that Duras’s text performs appeals to immediacy. The address is an appeal, a demand for love. The kind of communication that could take place over 30,000 years of temporal distance is named love, which is to say that love names, for Duras, a relation on the basis of an impossibility of communication, temporal or spatial, deliberately imposed or imposed by virtue of necessity. The kind of communication the address of Les Mains negatives demands is not that of exchange or of reciprocity; communication on the basis or on condition of the impossiblility of exchange describes what Georges Bataille theorised in his post-war work under the term major communication, as opposed to the minor communication which takes place in the restricted economy of worldly exchange. But by naming this kind of communication love Duras places herself in a distinct tradition; for French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan love is what makes up for the impossibility of establishing the sexual relation as such, of resolving sexual difference. Here a sexual relation is made impossible by virtue of temporal distance. Does Duras propose these 30,000 years of difference, and everything that separates the man of the caves from us, so as to imagine that, were it not for this distance, a relation would be possible? Not exactly, for the temporal distance is construed differently, deflected through its relation with the film image.
In an interview which accompanies the film on the French DVD, aptly enough titled ‘La caverne noire’ , Duras refers to Les Mains negatives as ‘un film terrifiante’. She points to the way the film captures the presence of a section of humanity in contemporary Paris who clean the streets, houses and offices, and who will ‘laisser la place’, withdraw from this space to leave it for those who will come later in the working day to populate and use these spaces. The image and the voiceover are linked through an implicit analogy between the humanity of pre-history, the man in the grotto, and those workers of the dawn, African street cleaners and Portuguese femmes de ménage. ‘We’, ‘you’ are as disconnected from these sections of humanity as the men of prehistory, we seem to be asked to think. The space of the day and of social, class division becomes the 30,000 years which separate the man of the caves from us. Like that man, we should understand, these human beings are not yet endowed with identity, not by us, anyway. Duras’s film is an appeal for the inclusion, in what we recognise as humanity, of these others, of this other, archaic scene, the archaic, in this instance indicating both the prehistorical origin, and the fundamental humanity who come before us to prepare the day for work and exchange, an archaic origin from which we are separated not by virtue of temporal distance but by virtue of social division.
The film is thus also a form of address, through the imprinting of an image, an address which is also an attempt to make contact, a phatic appeal.
Through the dialogue of image and text, a dialogue also established by virtue of a fundamental disconnection of image and text, Duras appeals for the possibility of a fundamental communication beyond social division; what she calls love names this primal need or demand for contact.
Con-tact – touching with – broaches the possibility of an inclusive community in tact, as if the capacity of the first man to press his hand against the rock and leave his trace should be remembered, repeated, in the different kinds of contact this other humanity has had with the surfaces, here the surfaces of the city, with which we come into contact in the space of the day, of work and exchange, a contact which is also in some sense negative, since it is in cleaning the surfaces, the removal of traces, that this other humanity leaves its trace. The negative hand is also the hand of whichever other has prepared the space and withdrawn from it to leave it free for our daily performances.
The voice Duras gives to the man who left the image of his hand in the cave addresses us as Duras imagines the dawn workers might address us, with a demand for contact. But through the analogy with the negative hand in the prehistoric cave does not Duras presuppose the impossibility of such contact; the extremity of the distance seems intended to maximise the affective intensity of the call for love?
The negative hand which is supposed, never seen, in the film, is as I have proposed a phatic gesture, a demand for contact. As an erotic address, I suggested, it is both offered, and withdrawn, this dynamic being actualised in the movement of the body in the act of leaving the trace, the image, as Marie-José Mondzain ‘s phenomenological fiction has established. The body leaves its trace as something separated from it, an image, which thus bears within itself the erotic dynamic of solicitation and withdrawal. In giving voice to the man who left the image of his hand Duras, one might argue, misses the specific gesture of the negative hand. Her ‘mistake’ in supposing the contour of the hand to be soaked in pigment, and pressed against the surface of the rock, is symptomatic of her privileging of the vocative demand for love and for contact over the erotics of gesture. If the negative hand itself addresses us, appeals for contact, it is immediately withdrawn into an unfathomable distance, engaging us in a relation with the other which is enigmatic.
The impossibility of establishing a relation with the other is covered or masked by what Duras calls love. One interpretation of Duras’s film and text would have it that, if only social divisions could be overcome, we could get along with each other. The impossibility of unmediated contact in Duras’s film is double-edged; either it signifies that if the obstacles to contact were removed harmonious relations among human beings would become possible, or it signifies that this impossibility is endemic and integral to communication as such.
From the first point of view, Duras’s vision repeats the structure of courtly love according to Lacan; the Lady is positioned as inaccessible so as to suppose that it is only the obstacles she places between herself and the lover which prevent the realisation of the sexual relation as such, the sexual relation which is equivalent to the relation between human beings.
With the negative hand we are dealing with an enigmatic signifier to which Duras gives a voice as a demand for love, an appeal for contact. The enigmatic signifier is a concept proposed by French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to account for the way the infant is seduced by the mother through ‘messages’ the content of which he or she does not yet have the capacity to decode or ‘metabolise’. Literary critics Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit mobilise the concept of the enigmatic signifier to describe the way that in erotic or more generally interpersonal relationships sexuality is enmeshed with questions of knowledge; desire becomes an epistemological quest. The other seduces me through the proposition, or the supposition in my eyes, of a knowledge they hold about me which they do not divulge. Such a mode of desire narrows the gaze since I am now attentive only to the other who I suppose holds the secret of my being. In the paintings of Caravaggio, for example, Bersani and Dutoit draw attention to the way in which certain figures seem both to invite, to offer and to withdraw. Erotic address, for Bersani and Dutoit, proposes the figure as enigmatic signifier, both seducing and withdrawing at the same time, and as such locking desire into an epistemological structure in which my gaze is narrowed in its focus on the enigmatic signifier of the other. Such epistemophilia seems calculated to intensify when dealing with such phenomena as parietal images. But Bersani and Dutoit draw attention to the ways in which, in Caravaggio’s paintings, the dynamics of erotic address are framed in a wider structure, or counterpointed, so to speak, by other interpretative possibilities. The dynamics of desire are deflected and diffused, for example, through attention to issues of the proximity of bodies in space. The epistemological anxiety of desire is displaced into questions of physical nearness and connection.
If we think about Duras’s film and the negative hand in this light, we might see that the whole thrust of Duras’s work is to set the negative hand, and the dawn workers, in the framework of a demand for love, that is, a psychological structure in which one subject demands a response from the other in terms of its being. The demand for love is a demand for a resolution of the subject’s anxiety about being, a question for which they demand a response from an other who they suppose holds the secret, the knowledge that will resolve this anxiety, answer this question. In giving voice to the negative hand as a demand for love Duras psychologises its gesture, translates it into the framework of the enigmatic signifier, and the demand for love of what Bersani calls ‘crippling interiority’.
We can, on the other hand, and at various points through this paper I have hinted at this possibility, pay more attention to the dynamics of the gesture of the negative hand. Marie José Mondzain’s account of the phenomenology of the gesture, invites us to do this. We may also draw out of Duras’s film the difference between the way the text addresses us, and the way the image addresses us. For if the text singularises its address, ending with the second personal singular ‘toi’, albeit indefinite, the image, at least in its cinematic mode of presentation, addresses itself to a contingent collection of ‘whichever’ singularities happen to occupy the space of the chamber of the projection space. What I mean to say here is that the space of cinema is at the same time a space of subjective address, a space in which the viewing subject is addressed as a potential respondent to the psychological communication voiced by the other, to love, to respond to the other’s demand for love, it is also a space of physical proximity to others. The chamber is potentially populated by whichever others happen to occupy that space, near or next to you. The love demanded by the man to the image of whose hand Duras gives a voice can be deflected into contact with the other who is next to you. The cinema is as much a space of intersubjective address as it is of con-tact.
Now if we think of the negative hand as a prototypical form of cinema, the illuminated imprinting of an image on a surface, the potential of the hand’s address to the community of ‘whatever’ singularities may be brought to the fore. Is it possible, then, to conceive of the cinema as a space of mutual con-tact with those images which have been fabricated as the vestiges of human presence? What kind of collectivity might be imagined in the basis of such vestiges, not in terms of psychological identification with the subject who produced them as enigmatic signifiers of our desire, but in terms of constituencies of shared con-tact? If Duras’s film is an appeal for social inclusion, it displaces this appeal into a demand for love, into an intersubjective, psychological relation which narrows the gaze of the spectator, and ignores the potential for contact with the neighbour which exists in the theatre, the physical connectedness which we share as spectators, in the ‘anatomy theatre’.
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