Letter to A

A question, perhaps a series of questions, related to the question of ontology and nature in recent French film. My project on literary and filmic explorations of the moving body, which seems to have moved towards a Deleuzian ontology which foregrounds the capacities of the body to take on new, experimental affections, and on Bersani, who seems to eschew psychological, interiorising interpretative patterns for which identity is a primary focus, in favour of an ontologically oriented aesthetics of absorption into something akin to nature (cf. his argument in Forms of Being in relation to the final seascape of Godard’s Le Mépris), and my teaching of contemporary French films by Ozon and Denis among others, have led me towards questions related to the status of nature and the human. If film, for Deleuze, has an ontological project, carrying or expressing vectors of becoming through its moving images, and carrying the spectating body along with it, this ontology takes form in figures of monstrosity (I thought for some time about how to put this; monstrosity is a qualification of representation, ontology relates to what exists or becomes; the monster only exists as an excess in relation to the limits of representation, so it is as a form or a figure that we encounter it). In his writing on cinema, from which Deleuze draws significantly in Cinema 2, the French art historian or art critic Jean-Louis Schefer (though both of these designations are unsatisfactory) draws attention to the specific relation the cinema has with the monstrous (eg. in L’Homme ordinaire du cinema, untranslated). Film creates distorted, monstrous bodies which give visual and auditory form to the phantasmatic bodies that the psyche invents. And this idea resonates for me with Klein’s child psychoanalysis, and her writing on the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects the infant phantasmatically produces, thus moulding the mother’s body in response to the drives, compulsions to devour, to reject, to expel, to repair, to dismember. And as I think of it this also resonates with some elements of Lacan’s mirror stage essay, where the capture of the child’s gaze by the ‘orthopedic’ mirror image, and the resulting crossing of the ‘threshold of the visible world’, provokes fantasies of the dismembered body, as if as the vestiges of the compulsive, incoherent, body of the drives ‘returns’ in imaginary form to haunt the now established ego. Schefer’s critical gaze focuses on the distorted, mutant bodies of Freaks, the bandaged giant of the Mummy, on Frankenstein, suggesting that through these figures the cinema produces doubles of the prosthetic body it solicits as its spectator, even while such forms also express the corporeal mutations which visual art – ie. painting – has both provoked and revealed across its history, from Uccello to Francis Bacon. Another strand of this theoretical fiction, the imagining of the monstrous body produced by cinema, is found in Deleuze’s notion of the ‘spiritual automaton’, through which, with reference to the early film theories of Epstein, Elie Faure, but most significantly, Eisenstein and Artaud, through which he gives a form to the ‘puppet’ (ludion) in us, whose affective strings the cinema manipulates. If cinema and spectatorship is now to be thought in terms of embodiment, rather than theories of subjectivity and the apparatus (a shift in theory from the Marxist and psychoanalytic concerns inherited from Althusser & Lacan, via Tel Quel(Jean-Louis Baudry), towards Deleuze, via feminist , queer theory and cyber-theory), the body in question is here imagined as a strange, mutant body, a body ‘under the body’ called into being by the affect cinema induces in its spectators. I suppose this is what Deleuze (and Guattari) also mean by the ‘body without organs’, what Artaud means by ‘Le Momo’.


The ontology of film, thus viewed, appears ‘against nature’, as monstrous or perverted, but I think the relation to nature is more complex; it may be that the monstrous body in question is in effect an embodiment of a deeper nature, a ‘freak of nature’ only in the sense that nature’s becoming produces only freaks; the monstrous bodies which, I want to suggest, recent French film has brought to life, are in this light embodiments of a nature conceived as a viral, errant production of anomalies, in relation to which what we conceive of as ‘natural’ is now seen as a contingent and mendacious normative postulation.


It seems to me that in your work you have consistently refused to constrain what I am calling monstrous within the realm of the fantastic, and you have consistently addressed the potential transformation the monstrous body may provoke in normative social space and social relations. I wonder whether the concept of nature and the postulation of an element ‘against nature’, which, paradoxically, derives from nature, are useful here, and how you might either resist this account, or do something else with it.


Let me develop some thought about a few examples, in order to explain what I mean a little further.


In Claire Denis’ L’Intrus the principal figure of the film, Louis Trebor, played by Michel Subor, undergoes an illegal heart transplant in order to travel to South Korea and then French Polynesia in search of a ‘son’ he may or may not have fathered there. This entails abandoning his other son, who lives near him in the Jura, near the Swiss border, with whom he has a strained and distant relationship. He seems to be pursued by a Russian woman, played by Katia Gobuleva, who he pays to arrange the heart transplant, and who takes a kind of ironic revenge on him, ostensibly for his non-payment of a debt which she says he will never be able to repay, by killing the French son and giving Louis the new heart of his own blood relation. The Russian woman seems to play the role of a vengeful nature, punishing the anomaly Louis has instigated and restoring the blood relation Louis has sought to re-invent. The monstrous body Louis has become is ‘against nature’ insofar as he has cheated death, and nature takes its revenge upon him, an interpretation suggested by a sequence around a funeral (that of Louis’ son?) in which the pastor (played by Alex Descas) reads from the New Testament, referring to the plight of those in hell who undergo ‘la seconde mort’. Counter-nature, here, as in Trouble Everyday, originates and is set by Denis in the context of medical or scientific work of a dubious legal status, which is to say that the sacred dimension to which such interventions might be related is displaced. I think there is more to say about the sacred, here, however, and about the relation of the monstrous body to the sacred. If Denis, as Martine Beugnet suggests, locates her monstrosities in the profane, banal world, rather than as interventions of the sacred, the spectre of the sacred is not fully exorcised, indeed the Christic (?) resonances of L’Intrus are explicit (as Jean-Luc Nancy, whose essay L’Intrus, about his own heart transplant and the implications for a contemporary consciousness (and conscience) of the stranger (the immigrant?), ‘inspired’ Denis’ film, as Nancy remarks in an essay he in turn wrote on L’Intrus). This suggests (and Nancy and Beugnet develop this) that L’Intrus can be read as a meditation on the relation between man and nature, where ‘man’ – here Louis Trebor - appears as the intruder. Visually, this is brought home by recurrent landscape images where the human presence is an isolated, single moving figure dwarfed by expansive stretches of water, forest or vegetation. Or landscapes, and seascapes, devoid of any human presence. We seem to be invited, here, to reflect on man’s intrusion into nature, on his finitude and contingency in relation to the indifferent, non-humanised being of the world. This echoes, I think, the general orientation of Bersani’s arguments in his recent work (Forms of Being, Caravaggio’s Secrets, his Cassal lecture on Michon’s La Grande Beune, published in Is the Rectum a Grave and other essays), in which human psychology and interiority, the paranoid structure of intersubjectivity and sexuality) are critically displaced in favour of the visual absorption of the spectator into ontological sameness with the world, into its ‘forms of being’. I think this tendency to contrast human relations with what one might call a natural ontology is also in play in Ozon’s work, in the injunction, for example, to ‘look at the sea’ (Regarde la mer), to seek ‘under the sand’ (Sous le sable). Both films, and Le temps qui reste (I think I am right) end with a wide shot looking out to the sea and the horizon, the camera having moved beyond the human bodies which have been their focus up to then.


I don’t think, though, that this implies an ecological ethics, that man should find a better way of being in the world, of being with or in nature. The relation between man and nature is not clear cut, not a clear opposition. Louis Trebor is first shown near naked in the forest, with his dogs, his skin in aesthetic continuity with the leaves and dappled light of his environment. Though an intruder in nature he has come to some kind of relation with it; it has accommodated him. The dogs occupy an intermediate position. They are on one hand extensions of him, of his subjectivity, which appears under threat, or vigilant to any potential intrusion; the dogs are there to give a ‘pressentiment de ‘l’intrusion’ (as Nancy notes). But he seems to abandon this uneasily negotiated accommodation in or with nature when he decides to undergo the illegal heart transplant (the ‘emergency process’), and is obliged to abandon his dogs, who are then pictured in rapid movement, running after his car. Trebor’s ultimate rejection by nature, the failure of the kind of truce he has negotiated with it, is suggested in his confrontation with his near neighbour the dog-breeder (played by Beatrice Dalle), who refuses to accept his dogs into her care, saying that they are as ‘lunatic’ as he is. If the female characters of the film seem allied to nature, and to function as its guardians, as figures able to control it and to be guided by it (as the dog-breeder is led on a sleigh by a group of dogs in the film’s final sequence, or as the Russian woman rides her horse, dragging Trebor on the ground behind them), Trebor appears to renounce his provisional accommodation by it, in search of a ‘new life’ (a new heart, and a new family, at least a new son).


The question of nature and of counter-nature might thus be addressed to the theme of kinship and of forms of relation which I know interests you. In L’Intrus, Trebor seeks out a new son, ostensibly one he had abandoned in Polynesia. However the enigmatic ‘auditioning’ for a likely candidate among the males of a certain age, and the emergence of an itinerant young male who will sit by Trebor’s hospital bed, suggest that this new son is a symbolic relation, rather than a ‘real’ or ‘natural’ one, one to whom he is linked through a sanguinary relation, a blood tie. Trebor invents a symbolic family for himself, and abandons his own son, who is shown in contrast to have a close physical relation to his own male offspring, in a sequence in which he carries his young son in a sling, close to his body, while the mother walks with the older child. Trebor’s son’s intimate connection to his own children suggests that he also plays a maternal role; he cares for and feeds for them while their mother is at work. She is the border guard who we see in the second sequence of the film, and she also has an alliance with a police dog. The implication is that her role is to police the border, to guard against intrusions both real (the illegal trafficking of drugs as well as of immigrants across the Swiss-French border) and symbolic (transgressions of the structure of the family as the containment of errant desires).








I wonder then if Denis’ film cannot be seen to stage the tension between different kinds of movement in or across nature. The affirmative image of Beatrice Dalle jubilantly leading her dogs across the snow, or being pulled by them, resonates with the earlier image of Trebor on his bicycle moving at speed down the slopes of the Alpine roads. Trebor, despite the restrained, potentially menacing calm of his physical presence, is a figure in movement, a movement which becomes global (from France to Switzerland to South Korea to Polynesia). His passage moves through and against the policed borders, to which is associated his sanguinary family. Strange and unrepresented forms of kinship seem to be suggested around figures in movement and in passage.








This tension between the family as a containing structure and forms of movement and of desire we might call nomadic is, of course, an explicit focus in Ozon’s Regarde la mer. I won’t say a lot more about this here, because I want to send this to you before it gets too long, but Marina de Van’s impassive, monosyllabic hitchhiker, another figure of the intruder, evidently has a transformative effect on Sasha Hail’s sympathetic sedentary mother. What I think is striking here is that Sasha’s attempt to accommodate the nature of the intruder, and her appeals to the nomadic, transgressive desire she embodies (not only her recounting of the poignantly banal memory of her own adventure, but also her illicit anonymous sexual encounter in the woods), an attempt to accommodate within herself some version of asocial desire, is painfully helpless and ultimately annihilated by the violence of a nature with which no accommodation can be reached, which cannot be negotiated with. Marina de Van’s backpacker is evidently a progeny of de Sade’s Eugenie, in Philosophie dans le boudoir, who as we know also sews up the mother’s vagina, and of Lautréaumont’s Maldoror, who binds the adolescent Mervyn up in rope before slinging him across Paris as a signifier, both embodiments of an absolutely destructive nature which targets the family, and specifically the mother-child relation. I’d suggest that while we can read a psychology into Marina de Van’s character (see her as traumatised by the loss of her own child, her rageful melancholy leading to a murderous acting out, a substitution which symbolically restores what she has lost) it also makes sense to see her as beyond such interiority, a force of nature beyond kinship, which is terrifyingly, ironically able to play at maternity, to mimic moral utterance. The moral lesson of Ozon’s film seems to me to be that it is not possible to have one’s cake and eat it, in other words to come to an arrangement with the forms of desire that move outside social structures and beyond containment, while ultimately remaining bound to them. Transgression, as a human strategy, of intermittent and provisional excess, fails dramatically when pitted against the absolute power of nature.


So, I’ll stop there. I hope that there are things here you can latch on to.


Best wishes


Dominique