A REMARK ON ALAIN BADIOU

In an essay on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, Stanley Cavell raises the question of what rule-following is for Wittgenstein. He notes, amongst other things, that in those activities which could be said to proceed according to rules the activity is not (could not be) ‘everywhere circumscribed by rules’ (PI, sec 68). As Espen Hammer puts the point, rules do not circumscribe every aspect of a meaningful activity or speech act. There must always be projections of words to which it is not clear whether rules apply or not. (Consider here, for example, Wittgenstein’s discussion of secondary sense and aspect seeing.) again, every rule-following activity takes place against the background of innumerable other activities. These include taking and giving directions, obeying orders, and so on. As Cavell makes clear, these considerations suffice to show that the concept of a rule does not exhaust the concepts of correctness or justification: indeed, the concept of a rule would have no meaning unless these other concepts were already in place, and were possessed of meaning.

More significantly, no specification of rules can ever explain what playing a game amounts to. Playing a game is ‘a part of our natural history’ (PI, sec 31), and until one has become an initiate of this form of life, this human form of activity, the citing of a rule can mean nothing. Many of our games can be learnt without ever learning or formulating rules, so that linguistic normativity does not involve the strong conception of inference and implication one finds in logical and mathematical systems. Again, language has no essence. There is nothing common to all games: they exhibit rather what Wittgenstein called family resemblances. For Wittgenstein, following a rule is just as much a practice as playing a game. Now, Cavell asks, what are its rules? There is typically no rule for following a rule. And yet following a rule can be done correctly or incorrectly. And that means that it can be done or not done. To follow a rule correctly is just to do it. To be an initiate of these practices is to be an initiate of a form of life. For Cavell, human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less than this. (Similar views may be found in such readers of Wittgenstein as Rush Rhees, Cora Diamond, James Conant, Rupert Read, James Guetti, Michael Kremer and Denis McManus, amongst a number of others.)

These considerations are of little significance to Badiou. He lists Wittgenstein high amongst the ‘sophists’ of the modern period, and in his fairly extensive writings on Wittgenstein he does not consider the kinds of question I raise here. (It is noteworthy that he does not refer to the work of Anglophone commentators on Wittgenstein; for instance, in his reading TLP he adheres to the traditional ‘ineffabilist’ account, and is oblivious to what may be called the ‘resolute’ reading of that text.) Badiou’s fundamental claim, that mathematics is ontology, aims precisely at the elimination of language from philosophy and at the overcoming of the ‘linguistic turn’. However, Cavell’s remarks on rule-following are not so easily dismissed, and any assessment of Badiou’s position (an assessment external to Badiou's own assessment of his achievement, that is) would need to consider them. The pertinence of Cavell's remarks may be seen when they are placed in relation to one of Zizek’s most telling criticisms of Badiou: ‘Against Badiou, one should insist that only to a mortal/finite being does the act (or Event) appear as a traumatic intrusion of the Real….Badiou remains blind to how the very space for the specific “immortality” in which human beings can participate in the Truth-Event is opened up by man’s unique relationship to his finitude and the possibility of death’. The implications of this last comment accord with what is already evident in Cavell's account of rule-following: the notion of a transcendent/ideal position such as that from which Badiou seeks to lay out an ontology is highly problematic. The elaboration of such a position is not to be characterised as an elaboration of the 'impossible': the idea is in fact nonsensical. (This, obviously enough, does not commit Cavell, or Wittgenstein, to relativism, post-modernism, or any of the other sins Badiou discerns in contemporary thought.) Hilary Putnam has written: 'There is always a cut between the observer's language and the totality of languages he generalizes over. The "God's-Eye View"--the view from which absolutely all languages are equally part of the totality being scrutinized--is forever inaccessible'.

Part of what I am saying can be placed in relation to what in Jean-Toussaint Desanti’s ‘remark’ on Badiou’s ‘intrinsic ontology’ touches on the question of the margin. Inasmuch as Badiou’s ontology is intrinsic, that is, concerned with being as being, it articulates itself in terms of ZF set theory. The margin is that which intrinsic ontology excludes by definition, and which it cannot recuperate. Desanti sees the margin as never silent. It is that which inscribes itself upon itself (marks itself), and is organised into a series of ‘writings’. The term has considerable resonance in French thought after Derrida, and Desanti draws on those connotations here: ‘I call writing anything which, as it is produced, leaves a trace’. He gives what he calls a ‘baroque’ list of examples, such as a falling leaf, a natural catastrophe, an utterance, an assassination, theft by a pickpocket, and so on. The obvious example he does not mention, that of a continuous line drawn between two points, but this is in effect the example that colours his discussion. Such a line is, obviously enough, the continuum, which cannot ultimately be defined by set theory.

The point of all this is to make it clear what Desanti means by a margin. He sees it as the writing of an excess (he italicises the word) which, he says, is not necessarily coordinated, though it is ‘susceptible to a localized coordination in the fragile wake left by some of its assemblages’. He gives no further clarification as to what he means, but perhaps one might think of the wreckage left behind in the wake of a hurricane. The fragile wreckage may be said to coordinate what has passed, in the sense that one can gauge the force of the passing of the storm from the detritus it has left behind. To draw on another idiom, though one not without relevance here, the margin is comparable, one might think, to the enunciation of the enounced, the uttering of the utterance. However, in set theory, which is itself a writing, the excess engendered by it must be recuperated back into the theory or else be excluded. Desanti concludes that ontological thought is therefore caught in the tension that binds these two writings together. Its task consists, he says, in trying to rewrite what is written in the margin and in capturing its excesses (an example being Cohen’s work on the continuum hypothesis). The margin can neither be abolished not excluded.

What this amounts to, I suggest, is a reworking in terms of ontology of what is given in Cavell’s account of rule-following. In other words, Cavell’s recognition of the relations between judgement and definition in the following of a rule, with its explicit recognition of what can only be called excess, is transposed here from what in Cavell’s case is a series of grammatical remarks into metaphysical statements, statements that purport to be true. A relevant example of this from Wittgenstein is the following: ‘The dangerous, deceptive thing about the idea: “the real numbers cannot be arranged in a series, or again “The set … is not denumerable” is that it makes the determination of a concept – concept formation – look like a fact of nature’ (RFM, II, sec 19, p.131). In a well-known study, Giorgio Agamben has gone to great lengths to recast the ontological/ontic distinction in terms of Benveniste’s distinction between enunciation and the enounced. The procedure there is the same: to recast what are distinctions in grammar as statements of fact, of a kind of hyper-fact.

Badiou does not seem to have escaped language. Mathematics—in his use of it—does not reach beyond language into a context free universe determined only by the offerings of ZF set theory (or now, under the influence of Desanti’s article, topos theory). What it would seem he has done is to transcode into the deliverances of set theory the structure of certain forms of language. So far from set theory escaping the toils of language, it would seem that it is to language that set theory has been brought to correspond. Language wears the trousers. Badiou would not of course deign to address any consideration of his position couched in these terms. But problems undoubtedly remain with the assumptions underpinning ontology as he presents it. (In this connection, an essay by Peter Osborne, in Radical Philosophy, 142 (March/April 2007), is to the point. I should note that objections to Osborne's position have been put by Oliver Feltham, especially in chapter 4 of his Alain Badiou: Live Theory (London, New York: Continuum, 2008). Feltham is critical of Osborne's suggestion that Badiou has transcoded certain linguistic concepts into set theory. He considers that this 'simply ignores the differences between mathematical and philosophical ideas' (p. 124). The point may rather be, however, that Badiou has simply blurred them.)

References:
Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota, 1991).
Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Desanti, Jean-Toussaint. 'Some Remarks on the Intrinsic Ontology of Alain Badiou', in Peter Hallward, ed., Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (London, New York: Continuum, 2007).
Hammer, Espen. Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

SOME REMARKS ON LOGIC AND LANGUAGE

I have suggested (on this site) that in TLP, so far as language and logic taken together are concerned, we are dealing with something that can be seen in terms of the Lacanian ‘il n’y a pas de rapport…’: what leads Lacan to the assertion that there is no sexual relation can also be taken to support the assertion that there is no relationship between language and logic. There is no meta-language enabling us to grasp the two levels of language and logic from the same neutral standpoint. They are inextricably intertwined. If the structure of such a relationship, of such an ‘impossible’ relationship, one might say, is to be represented, it is imperative that we look at a form favoured by Lacan, that of the Moebius strip: first, we move from language to its logical form, its logical infrastructure; then, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of language at the heart of logic itself. We derive the logical form of the proposition by means of what is called in TLP an operation, only to find that what constitutes an operation returns us, by virtue of what Lacan determines as the logic of the ‘not-all’ (pas-tout), to the context of significant use, to the specific occasion of an actual utterance. The attempt to step outside language, in order to say what it is that constitutes meaning as such, results in nonsense.

In The Parallax View (pp.37-40), Zizek has some comments that bear on the matter. He raises the question of how Lacan’s binary signifier, S1-S2, manifests itself in the context of the symbolic order. ‘What the symbolic order precludes is the full harmonious presence of the couple of Master-Signifiers, S1-S2 as yin-yang, or any other two symmetrical “fundamental principles”. The fact that “there is no sexual relationship” means precisely that the secondary signifier (that of the Woman) is “primordially repressed,” and what we get in place of this repression, what fills in its gap, is the multitude of “returns of the repressed,” the series of “ordinary” signifiers’. Zizek illustrates this by reference to Woody Allen, but so far as TLP is concerned we can see how the general form of the proposition marks the place of S1, inasmuch as it functions as the quilting point of the ‘multitude’ of empirical propositions (T/F).

This is not a binary logic, divided between the polar couple Masculine/Feminine (or logic/language). The split is not between the One and the Other, it is inherent in the One itself: the split comes between the One and its empty place of inscription (a theme made explicit by Wittgenstein in his presentation of the ‘operation’). In what looks like a critical aside aimed at Badiou, Zizek insists that the multiple is not ‘the primordial ontological fact’—an assumption that underpins Badiou’s system as a whole. The ‘transcendental’ genesis of the multiple, he argues, resides in the lack of the binary signifier: ‘the multiple emerges as the series of attempts to fill in the gap of the missing binary signifier’. What we are dealing with here is the minimal difference between a signifier and its place of inscription, between one and zero.

On the one hand, we have S1 as the empty signifier, together with S2 as the signifying chain in its incompleteness. It is in order to fill in this incompleteness that S1 intervenes, as the quilting point. This is the ‘masculine’ side, in which a multitude is organised into a totality, into an All, through the exception, S1, which fills in its void. On the other hand, the binary signifier, the symmetric counterpart of S1, is ‘primordially repressed’. It is in order to supplement the void of this repression that the chain of S2 emerges. Here, as Zizek has it, ‘the original fact is the couple of S1 and the Void at the place of its counterpart, and the chain of S2 is secondary’. It is in these terms that we may understand the ‘feminine’ non-All. It is the logic operative here that accounts for the emergence of the inconsistent multitude characteristic of the non-All: the emergence of the multitude must be seen in relation to the void or lack of the binary signifier.

In his later work, Wittgenstein elaborates his notion of ‘grammar’, and it becomes clear—from the perspective opened by Lacan—that such an idea can be seen in relation to the non-All. Wittgenstein writes, in Philosophical Remarks, as follows:

If I could describe the point of grammatical conventions by saying they are made necessary by certain properties of the colours (say), then that would make the conventions superfluous, since in that case I would be able to say precisely that which the conventions exclude my saying. Conversely, if the conventions were necessary, i.e. if certain combinations of words had to be excluded as nonsensical, then for that very reason I cannot cite a property of colours that makes the convention necessary, since it would then be conceivable that the colours should not have this property, and I could only express that by violating the conventions. [PR 53]

I do not call a rule of representation a convention if it can be justified in propositions: propositions describing what is represented and showing that the representation is adequate. Grammatical conventions cannot be justified by describing what is represented. Any such description already presupposes the grammatical rules. That is to say, if anything is to count as nonsense in the grammar which is to be justified, then it cannot at the same time pass for sense in the grammar of the propositions that justify it (etc.). [PR 55]

Rules of grammar, which he also calls grammatical conventions, cannot be justified by appeal to the supposed fact that they enable us to represent reality correctly. If it makes sense to say that an object cannot be reddish-green all over, then it must also make sense to say that it can be reddish-green all over. But then the grammatical convention is superfluous. Further, if one supposes that the colour word conventions are necessary, one could not say what property it is that makes them necessary, for then it would be conceivable that the colours might not have this property, and one could only express this fact by violating the very convention one was trying to justify. In effect, one has to say that there is no such thing as reddish-green, which means that the phrase ‘reddish-green’ is nonsensical, i.e. we have no use for it in making intelligible statements about how the colours are. (Analogously, there is no such thing as a double fault in chess, which is just to say that in chess there is no use for the phrase ‘double-fault’.) The nature of propositions of very many kinds can be elucidated by reference to the grammar they exhibit, but any attempt to impose a limit on grammar as such results in nonsense. This is part of the significance of the notion of a language-game: by means of it, language is exhibited in all its inconsistent and contingent multiplicity, and this in turn means that there is no point from which it can be surveyed in its totality. Language use is without justification, and language is without essence—a statement that is itself nonsensical.

One consequence of this view of grammar may seem paradoxical: it is that language is non-normative. Grammar is non-normative (a remark that flies in the face of most commentary on Wittgenstein). This is, however, a position that has been argued for by Stanley Cavell, and others, such as Steven Affeldt, James Guetti and Rupert Read. To see grammar in terms of the non-All is to see meaning in terms of the future. In this connection, Zizek cites a phrase of Brian Rotman’s: meaning is something which is always ‘borrowed from the future’, relying on its ever-postponed fulfilment to come [The Parallax View, p.51]. As Cavell has put it, ‘Is the issue one of a leap [not of faith, but, let us say, of reason] from a ground that is implied or defined by the leap? Or is the leap from grounds as such, to escape the wish for such definition [as if reason itself were a kind of faith]?’ Steven Affeldt glosses this by saying: ‘The idea is that to speak intelligibly is to define the ground from which you speak, it is to articulate the position that you are assuming and from which you speak’. To cite Zizek again: ‘subjects cut the impasse of the endless probing into “do we all mean the same thing by ‘bird’?” by simply taking for granted, presupposing, acting as if they do mean the same thing. There is no language without this “leap of faith”’ [p.54]. Guetti and Read have examined in close detail the operation of an example very similar to this—the use of the word ‘waxwing’ [I have discussed this elsewhere on this site].

Wittgenstein remarks: ‘If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments’ [PI sec.242]. Affeldt glosses the force of this remark by saying that our intelligibility for one another depends continuously, from moment to moment, and in each act of speech, upon precisely our agreement in judgment. ‘It is not that our shared language is the ground of our intelligibility. Our language is the vehicle through which, or the medium within which, we continuously undertake to make ourselves intelligible to one another by projecting the ground that we individually, at a given moment, occupy.’ One might reposition Zizek in these terms by saying that, for him, it is the status of such an agreement in judgment that it is not normative, nor could it be. It cuts across ‘the debilitating deadlock of language, its ultimate lack of guarantee, by presenting what we should strive for as already accomplished’ [p.52]. Language is a system that lives on credit it can never pay off.

NOTES:
Steven Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell”, European Journal of Philosophy 6:1 (April 1998): 1-31.

Stanley Cavell, “The Division of Talent”, Critical Inquiry 11:4 (1985).

James Guetti and Rupert Read, "Acting from Rules", International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996): 43-62.

ON THE QUESTION OF THE HORROR FILM

The temptation to seek for a systematic explanation of how it is that horror films affect their viewers seems irresistible. Not only does Psycho, for example, combine to enduring effect the visceral destruction of the human body with a comedy of errors, it also succeeds in producing a sense of enigma such that the film may be found endlessly elusive and yet almost within reach. The paradoxical condition that is Norman’s self—Norman is the son of a mother he has both destroyed and become, a self created anew out of an origin he has himself engendered—seems to embody the dynamics of artistic creation as such. It is as though Hitchcock had found in him a figure through whom he could elaborate a dialectics of conflict which so shapes time that we can live—can participate in—the passage of the film’s elapsing, its duration, with unusual attention to the elaborate interweaving of its end and its beginning. Earl Wasserman has noted how, since the end of the eighteenth century, ‘the poet has been required to conceive his own structure of order, his own more-than-linguistic syntax, and so to engage that structure that the poetic act is creative both of a cosmic system and of the poems made possible by that system’ [Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p.172]. On this view, poetry is addressed to the construction of the syntax that makes it possible, a process seen at its extreme in Mallarmé and T.S. Eliot. One might say that, whatever else may appear to engage the poem’s interest, its fundamental concern is with its own processes of coming into being. The crucial analogy is, of course, with music, a condition to which Psycho unquestionably aspires, an aspiration emphatically reinforced by Herrmann’s score. In other words, Psycho invites over-determination. Both its openness to a complex of literary traditions, and the obvious invitation posed by its title, encourage the search for some more abstract and unifying act of interpretation within which the film may be comprehended. However, such an act of interpretation is incorporated within the film itself, only to be dismissed in the moment of our encounter with the reality of what Mrs Bates actually is—an impossible being, whose mode of existence is that, not of a human psychology, but of cinema. It is as though Hitchcock were reminding us that the meaning of what takes place in Psycho is inherent within the totality of the film, and is not separable from it. It is the film itself which is constitutive of the myth that gives rise to it, and not an externally given system or a set of explanatory paradigms.

Given this order of subtlety, it is hardly surprising that Psycho should have drawn so forcibly to it writers whose conceptual structures were built on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The complex of attraction and repulsion embodied in Norman can be mapped onto the dialectic arising out of the nightmare’s expression of incestuous desire. Similarly, Norman’s mode of being, that of the ‘ne-uter’, his being neither woman ‘nor man’, can be re-described in terms of the objet petit a and the algorithms of fantasy, or the function of lack engendering desire. Norman, one might say, is differánce incarnate. Or, in another idiom, he just is the divided subject. A recent example of the assimilation of Psycho to psychoanalysis is Laura Mulvey’s attempt to locate it in relation to the death drive. She speaks of how the film moves towards death, as it ‘reaches towards stillness and then towards the dead: Mother’s skull appears superimposed briefly on Norman’s features and they merge’ [“Death Drives: Hitchcock’s Psycho”, Film Studies 2 (Spring 2002): 8]. There is, according to Mulvey, a homology connecting terms like ‘stillness’, ‘death’ and ‘ending’, as applied to cinematic narrative, which takes the cinema back to its own secret stillness and the death inherent within it. She would seem to be saying that the achievement of Psycho is to have made this ‘homology’ explicit, inasmuch as it has found for it what Eliot called ‘an objective correlative’—the Bates’ mansion, reverberating with archaic and gothic echoes of the House of Usher and other unheimlich dwellings of the Romantic imagination. However, if one responds in this way to the aesthetic achievement of the film, the claims of the psychoanalytic reading to explain that achievement dissolve. This emerges in relation to the Freudian account of the uncanny. Here, the persuasiveness of the notion, as Freud describes it, derives, not from Freud’s account of incest or the theory of castration, but from the power invested in the tearing out of eyes and sexual ambivalence by the achievement of Hoffmann’s story, ‘The Sandman’. If conviction does result from Freud’s analysis, it arises out of the effective and compelling realisation of the horror of the Sandman in the story itself, a power Freud appropriates as evidence for his explanation of it. In other words, it is Hoffmann’s story which constitutes the imaginative potency of the notion of the uncanny, and so the meaning of its psychic reality, not the Freudian exegesis. So with Mulvey’s essay: the theoretical body of her reading is parasitic on the film, and it is Psycho itself that gives life and illumination to her concepts. It would seem, then, that so far as aesthetic appreciation is concerned, psychoanalytic explanation cannot give us what we are looking for—what we need. This is not only a matter of reductionism, or of confusing a causal explanation with giving reasons for responding as one does. The point is that only for someone who has responded to the aesthetic life of the work do psychoanalytic explanations of that life have pertinence. Psychoanalytic readings presuppose what it is they seek to explain, and they do so by projecting their methods of explanation onto the objects they address. Just as Freud projects onto ‘The Sandman’ a reading whose plausibility the story has already established, a manoeuvre he achieves by re-describing the actions of the Sandman as those of the ‘castrating father’, so Mulvey projects onto Psycho a dynamic that is already internal to the film’s organisation—a drive towards death. The result is not in any sense an explanation of the film, but an attempt to construct what might be called an immanent experience of it. The idiom of psychoanalysis is deployed in a ‘creative’ recounting of the film that seems intended to suggest an empathic fusion between the director’s consciousness and that of the critic.

*

An approach I find exemplary for a clarification of what is involved in the critical appreciation of art is Wittgenstein’s response to the account in The Golden Bough of the Beltane fire festivals in eighteenth century Scotland. His comments come in the latter part of his Remarks on Frazer’s 'Golden Bough', and were probably written around 1948. The Remarks were not intended for publication, and they should not be read as though they made up a systematically revised body of work. Nonetheless, they are of great interest, especially for their treatment of a theme that is also crucial to Frazer, that of religion’s deep roots in human nature.

The pagan Celtic year was divided into two periods, with the new year celebrated at the beginning of November, at the festival of Samhain, or Hallowe’en. The second festival took place six months later, on May Day, or Beltane. They signal changes in the weather, Samhain preceding winter and Beltane the return of summer. Frazer was interested in the Beltane festivals in Scotland, particularly the lighting of huge fires, which took place on this day. He cites a description given by John Ramsey, laird of Ochtertyre, near Crieff, the patron of Burns and friend of Sir Walter Scott:

Towards the close of the entertainment, the person who officiated as master of the feast produced a large cake baked with eggs and scalloped round the edge, called am bonnach beal-tine—i.e. the Beltane cake. It was divided into a number of pieces, and distributed in great form to the company. There was one particular piece which whoever got was called cailleach beal-tine—i.e., the Beltane carline, a term of great reproach. Upon his being known, part of the company laid hold of him and made a show of putting him into the fire; but the majority interposing, he was rescued. And in some places they laid him flat on the ground, making as if they would quarter him. Afterwards, he was pelted with egg-shells, and retained the odious appellation during the whole year. And while the feast was fresh in people’s memory, they affected to speak of the cailleach beal-tine as dead. [J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 618]

Frazer sees the festivals as rituals of purification: the fires, he believes, were thought to burn up and destroy all malign influences, the chief evil being that of witches:

Again and again we are told that the fires are intended to burn up or repel the witches; and the intention is sometimes graphically expressed by the burning of an effigy of a witch in the fire. [Frazer, op. cit., p. 648]

Thus the pretence of throwing someone into the fire, or the burning of an effigy, are traces of something darker. As Brian Clack puts it, ‘previously human beings thought to be witches, or else representing evil forces, were really burned in the flames’ [Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 139]. For Frazer, what remained of the Beltane festival in the eighteenth century was a survival of an earlier practice of sacrificing human beings regarded as witches in the fires.

Wittgenstein does not dismiss Frazer’s views, nor does he dismiss the worth of historical enquiry. As he says: ‘It is now clear that what gives this practice depth is its connection with the burning of a man’ [Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambrdige: Hackett, 1993), p. 143]. Were it the custom at some festival for men to ride one another, we might see nothing in this but a harmless game reminding us of men riding horses. But if we were to be told that in the past it had been the custom to use slaves in this way, we should then see in the harmless practice of our own times something deeper and more sinister. In other words, historical investigation may reveal sinister antecedents for what survive as apparently simple and homely customs. These antecedents may in turn colour our sense of the customs and make them appear darker and more sinister in the present. However, while this is so, it is nonetheless the case that, as Brian Clack points out, ‘what is crucial for Wittgenstein is that no historical research is required to show that the Beltane festival is sinister’ [Clack, op. cit., p. 142]. For Wittgenstein, what is at stake is the impression made by one specific festival—the Beltane festival—and beyond that impression no further justification for seeing it as sinister is required:

The question is: does the sinister, as we may call it, attach to the practice of the Beltane Fire Festival in itself, as it was carried out one hundred years ago, or is the Festival sinister only if the hypothesis of its origin turns out to be true? I believe it is clearly the inner nature of the modern practice which seems sinister to us, and the familiar facts of human sacrifice only indicate the lines along which we should view the practice. [Philosophical Occasions, pp, 143-145]

The Beltane Festival is a practice exhibiting what Frank Cioffi has called ‘a physiognomy of terror’ [Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 87], and its meaning is revealed through that same physiognomy. Its ‘inner nature’ is such that the festival simply strikes us as having to do with human sacrifice, whether or not it actually originated there. Clack remarks: ‘the Highland custom strikes us as being like human sacrifice, and it is this which imbues it with its sinister atmosphere’ [Clack, p. cit., p. 144]. The aspect under which we see it just is that of human sacrifice. And this of itself impresses us, because what I see impresses me directly, without the intervention of a hypothesis: ‘If I see someone being killed,—is what makes an impression on me simply what I see, or is it only the hypothesis that here a man is being killed?’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 149]

Wittgenstein compares the enactment of the festival with a play, since the Beltane festivities have something in common with a piece of theatre. Yet, despite the similarities, the events of the festivals are infused with a mood or state of mind that differs from that of a theatrical performance. Even were the festival performed in the manner of a play, we would still want to ask: what is the meaning of this performance? And irrespective of any interpretation we might give of it, our unease would not be wholly assuaged. The impact of the Beltane festival is not expressible solely in terms of an aesthetic appreciation. There remains inherent in the proceedings a strange meaninglessness (Sinnlosigkeit)—a queer pointlessness. The festival seems to embody an excess or expenditure that eludes conceptual grasp, and to this extent it strikes us as being in some way uncanny (unheimlich) or weird. Cioffi seems to have this in mind when he speaks of how the festival brings about an ‘eruption of the demonic into the quotidian’ (Cioffi, op. cit., p. 92). Clack elucidates Cioffi’s point by reference to two facets of the Beltane rite: the use of a cake to select a victim, and the carnival atmosphere that pervades the event. Wittgenstein finds the manner of drawing lots especially chilling:

The fact that the lots are drawn by the use of a cake is particularly horrible (almost like betrayal by a kiss), and that it strikes us this way is again of fundamental importance for the investigation of such practices. [Philosophical Occasions p. 147]

Something that has homely and convivial characteristics is being used in a new and threatening context. It is not surprising that the familiar takes on a sinister aspect. Similarly, as Clack suggests, ‘the uneasy balance between violence and merriment’ is also what ‘impresses us here, and it comes to the fore in certain accounts of actual human sacrifice’ [Clack, op. cit., p. 146]. He notes, in this connection, accounts of the gaiety of the crowds attending the sacrifice of human beings in Mesopotamia and Mexico, a point reinforced by Wittgenstein:

The concept of a ‘festivity’. We connect it with merrymaking; in another age it may have been connected with fear and dread. [Clack, op. cit., p.147. Cited from Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 78]

Beyond these two points, there is a further aspect of the Highland festivals, having to do with the nature of those who participate in them. To get a sense of the horror of human sacrifice, one has to recognise the kind of creatures human beings are. Wittgenstein asserts that ‘what I see in these stories is nevertheless acquired through the evidence, including such evidence as does not appear to be directly connected with them,—through the thoughts of man and his past, through all the strange things I see, and have seen and heard about, in myself and others’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 151]. The rites of Beltane are not isolated or idiosyncratic actions of a remote group of people in a distant age. Those who performed them reveal tendencies within ourselves, and their propensities are ones we also share. Clack compares Wittgenstein’s perception here with that found in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel in which two men of high civilisation, Marlow and Kurtz, experience the awakening of brutal and forgotten instincts.

To give a more general characterisation of Wittgenstein’s discussion of Frazer and the fire festivals, one might say that what he is considering is the seeing or dawning of aspects. At one point, Frazer describes how the participants in the Beltane festival divide a cake into as many portions as there are people present. One of these portions is daubed in black, and all the bits of cake are placed in a bonnet. Everyone, now blindfold, draws out a portion, and whoever draws out the black piece is the devoted person, to be sacrificed to Baal. Wittgenstein remarks of this account that there is ‘something here that looks like the last vestige of drawing lots. And, through this aspect, it suddenly gains depth’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 145]. Again, after comparing the drawing of lots to betrayal by a kiss, he says:

When I see such a practice, or hear of it, it is like seeing a man speaking harshly to someone else over a trivial matter, and noticing from his tone of voice and facial expression that this man can on occasion be terrible. The impression I receive here can be very deep and extraordinarily serious. [Philosophical Occasions, p. 147]

Rush Rhees has noted a connection between remarks of this kind and Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspects in Philosophical Investigations II, xi, where he speaks of ways in which ‘thought’ and ‘seeing’ run together, ‘not as components of a complex have to be thought of together, but as concepts may “run together”, and what we should mean by “seeing” is also what we should mean by “thinking” here’ [Rush Rhees, “Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual”, in Wittgenstein and his Times, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 101-102]. The further significance of Wittgenstein’s position on aspect dawning has been drawn out by Avner Baz:

The most important thing about the aspect is that there is a sense in which it isn’t really there and a sense in which it is very much there; a sense in which to speak about ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with respect to it is to miss its point and yet another sense in which in seeing it and in giving it expression you are truer to the object than if you stick to objective terms – the terms, that is, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the language-game of reporting’, or ‘the language-game of information’. [Avner Baz, “What’s the point of seeing aspects?”, Philosophical Investigations 23:2 (April 2000): 106]

The seeing involved in aspect seeing is not seeing in general, but seeing (the emphasis is one Wittgenstein employs throughout his discussion). The ordinary sense of ‘seeing’ goes hand in hand with ‘knowing’ and is to be distinguished from aspect seeing. This is clear from the fact that aspects do not teach us anything about the external world, if ‘teaching about the external world’ is understood on the model of giving objective information. To see an aspect is not see a property of an object, and so the expression of a change of aspect (as in what is perhaps an over-worked example, from duck to rabbit or back again), while it may have the form of a report of a new perception, is not quite such a report. As Baz indicates, Wittgenstein also says that the criterion for what you see, when ‘seeing’ in the sense of seeing aspects is involved, is your representation of what is seen. Thus, when Wittgenstein tells us that he sees a resemblance between the drawing of lots by using pieces of cake and a harsh manner of speech he could be lying, but he could not be mistaken. In this respect, then, the expression of the seeing of an aspect is not a report on objective fact: it is an Äusserung, an avowal.

As Baz notes, there are connections with the Kantian account of aesthetic judgement, and, more specifically, with Cavell’s reworking of that account: ‘Aspects, like beauty, hang somewhere between the object and the subject, and that position is constituted by the expectation, the demand, from our partner to see what we see, in spite of the fact that we have no way of making him realize that he should’ [Baz, art. cit.: 107. The reference to Cavell is: Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy”, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1969), p. 89, footnote]. Though the expression we give to the seeing or dawning of aspects may look like giving a report, it is not used for that purpose. Rather, its aim is the seeking of intimacy. This is not the intimacy in which one reveals something about one’s heart or inner feelings; in giving expression to the seeing of aspects we seek intimacy with someone else by trying to reveal, to bring out, something about the object [Baz, art. cit.: 108]. When we say ‘It’s running!’ in front of a painting of a running horse we are not doing so in order to inform other people: it is a reaction in which people are in touch with one another. It is intimacy in this sense that characterises the predominant tone of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer, many of which are cast in the form of avowals. The idea of intimacy hangs together with two further points, both of which have relevance to Wittgenstein’s discussion. The first is that aspects are subject to the will. The second is that an aspect is something that strikes us. Dependency on the will means that it makes sense to say: ‘Now see the figure like this’. In real life situations, it makes sense for me to ask you to see, or at least try to see, the resemblance between two faces that has struck me, and it makes sense for Wittgenstein to ask his readers to see the resemblance between the drawing of lots and a manner of speaking. Thus, if there is an air of paradox attaching to the dawning of an aspect, it derives from the fact that the aspect ‘appears over there, in the object, and yet we know we must have had something to do with that appearance’ [Baz, art. cit.: 110]. We know that what has so radically changed, now that we have seen or been struck by the aspect, has in another sense not changed at all. It is as though we were bringing a concept to bear on the object, which is why, as Baz points out, ‘the aspect cannot be our (or the) usual, obvious way of seeing the object, but rather has to be new to us’ [Baz, art. cit.: 111]. The aspect is not obviously there, as a property might be, but neither have we placed it there by a pure act of the imagination. Baz writes:

It is this peculiarity of the aspect – its being something that fits the object, and at the same time something that we bring to the object; its being a way of seeing something anew while remaining faithful to it – that gives expressing it its point in ordinary contexts. [Baz, art. cit.: 111]

It is precisely this dynamic that Wittgenstein respects in his account how he stands towards the fire festivals. His consideration of them is subtly balanced, between the ‘inner nature’ or physiognomy of the rites themselves, and the character of the people who celebrated them. It is for this reason that the festivals can only be understood in a certain spirit, one which we impute to those who performed them from an experience in ourselves.

*

The pertinence of the discussion thus far to the manner of our response to horror cinema may, I think, be established by reference to the work of Jean Louis Schefer. Schefer writes:

It’s true that we – all of us – go to the cinema to see simulations that are terrible to one degree or another, and we don’t go to partake of a dream. Rather for a share of terror, for a share of the unknown, things like that. . . . . Which is to say that, at bottom, the cinema is an abattoir. People go to the abattoir, not to see images coming one after the other. Something else happens inside them: a structure that is otherwise acquired, otherwise possible, painful in other ways, and which is perhaps tied inside us to the necessity of producing meaning and language. [The Enigmatic Body, ed. and trans. Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 120]

Cinema appears, for Schefer, to be less an art-form than a kind of public spectacle of death and deformation—an abattoir, or perhaps a freak-show, or even an execution. An instance of his approach is his discussion of Tod Browning’s Freaks. It is a film that puts before us the tantrums, pain and anger of dwarfs, their emotions expressed in high pitched voices, and reduced, as Schefer puts it, to tiny clenched fists and minuscule tears. And because of the reduction in scale of the persons who suffer, there is invoked in us a sense of revulsion. Our bodies are not like theirs, and the pain of their unrequited love ‘is for us nothing more than the fate of painfully small dolls’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 121]. This he condemns as frightening—the worst kind of butchery. In the cruelty of our sarcasm, we look down on them, and it seems that there is no way for the small protagonist, a being in the process of discovering the world’s bitterness, to escape his fate, when he can’t even reach the door handle. The meaning of the scene dawns on us only later, ‘in the wake of the emotional instability of such tiny bodies. It arrives when we begin to ask, “Why is our hell so small?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 121].

These comments read like a gloss on a remark Schefer makes elsewhere: ‘The image can only be seen by way of what it lacks’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 120], in which he seems to be giving voice to an idea not unlike Wittgenstein’s, concerning what it is to be struck by an image. For Wittgenstein, there is a kind of double movement, whereby we bring a concept to what we see, so that seeing an aspect might be likened to an echo of a thought in sight or a palpable reverberation of such a thought. And so it is in the case of Freaks, where, according to Schefer, we come to see the film later, as though our thought were echoing from it back towards us. In a subtle and intricate passage, Schefer develops this idea, suggesting that there is a mystery attaching to the meaning we add to an image, which is linked to something we can never be sure about: what we are adding to the image may simply be ‘ourselves’. There is meaning in what in what’s projected, a meaning that is not simply an extension of ourselves, and yet we recognise ourselves in it. Schefer wants to say that words like ‘guilty’, ‘criminal’ and ‘sin’ attach themselves to our involvement in this spectacle:

Crime isn’t the act of extortion in the world. It designates a man tied by signs to the limits of his universe, and this man, guilty even before infringing any laws, is guilty because he reveals himself as a subject in this universe, and because within him there is the consciousness of this world without freedom to which he himself is the link. [The Enigmatic Body, p. 130]

The guilt here is that of an ‘original sin’, arising from the primordial separation that makes meaning possible: guilt is inherent in the very fact of signification. It is this truth that the monsters and freaks of cinema embody. They exist frequently as impossible figures outside conventional meaning who return us to what Schefer calls ‘the interior body’, the enigmatic uniqueness of the individual existence of each one of us that is essentially paradoxical, a grounding of our being outside the law in what is ungraspable. It is this, the being of my being, that the freaks Schefer discusses make me aware of. Dudley Andrew has argued that Schefer ‘lodges the dialectic at the very heart of this primary fact of viewing: at the cinema we are both ourselves and the representation built for us’ [Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 189]. We are, so to speak, subject to the representation and yet at the same time have dominion over it. Hence, the viewing experience is, as Schefer presents it, an interminable repetition of the dawning of aspects, inasmuch as it involves a developing interplay between the confined and the excessive, the doxical and the paradoxical. It is to explore this that he turns to concrete instances, in the manner of the later Barthes, eschewing the systematic structures of explanation to be found in Metz and other film theorists of a similar psychoanalytic persuasion. Again like Barthes, he is prepared to give himself over to the fascination of the image, a memorable example of which is the section entitled The Sausage, another consideration of a moment from Freaks.

A white man, in medium shot, on the right of the frame, stands casually, addressing a black man lying on a table. His right hand is extended, having just placed a cigarette in the black man’s mouth. The figure on the table lacks arms and legs, and is dressed in a white woollen sweater, with a darker woollen strip like a cummerbund around his waist. The sausage man has just lit the cigarette, using only his mouth to strike a match from a box placed on a small plinth in front of him. Schefer asks: ‘Is this still a man, or a monster? Is it a man other than in the face, where he can seem indifferently sublime or horrible?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 123] Then something strikes him. The figure, reduced to a single swaddled member, suddenly evokes the idea of the Husserlian reduction, or bracketing, of phenomena, that allows us to get at essences. This avowal is then developed further, into a series of more disquieting questions. ‘What does such a sausage do, not about his desires or about sleeping, but what does he do with his excrement?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 123] Do we not feel our own arms stuck to our sides as his are? Could it be that we too are that larva, without arms or legs? Could it be that maybe what we see here in this primordial form is a being that is also profoundly ours? Perhaps the cigarette stuck in his mouth is meant to prevent him speaking to that part of ourselves that is indeed that. Did this man ever know the pangs of love? It may be, says Schefer, that a monster is nothing other than a perpetual suffering of love, and its animal lament.

This account of The Sausage corresponds very precisely to Dudley Andrew’s description of how Schefer’s writing ‘answers to the call expressed by the text in the aspirations and gutturals of its voice. To utter an expression is more than to designate a meaning; it is to respond to a situation with a certain cry’ [Concepts in Film Theory, p. 190]. There is evident in Schefer’s avowals an expressive and unhesitating response which is inseparable from being struck by an aspect of something, and it is equally clear that his basic response is one of horror. According to the tradition within which Schefer situates himself, a tradition deriving from Hegel, and whose literary exemplars include Mallarmé, Valéry and Ponge, the act of writing is inseparable from death—the death of things as things. The act of naming, of substituting a word for a thing or sensation, delivers things to us, but only at the cost of subordinating them to concepts and so depriving them of their being. To write is therefore to murder, and every poem is—as T.S. Eliot has it—an epitaph. Maurice Blanchot has made the position clear:

For me to be able to say, “This woman” I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost its being─the very fact that it does not exist. [Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1981), p. 2]

Tzvetan Todorov takes a similar view. He argues that literature cannot be simply a tracing or image of reality, of what is not itself. Words do not have their life in relation to the things to which they refer; for writing to be possible it must be born out of the death of what it is speaking about. And yet this death makes writing impossible, since there is no longer anything for writing to engage with.

Literature can become possible only insofar as it makes itself impossible. Either what we say is actually here, in which case there is no room for literature; or else there is room for literature, in which case there is no longer anything to say. [The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 175]

The conclusion is inescapable: for writing to be literature it must be literature, and, at the same time and in the same sense, not literature. It seems obvious enough that a statement of this kind amounts to a violation of the law of non-contradiction, that is, that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true. Todorov would thus seem to have committed himself to a genuine contradiction, saying of the same thing that it exists and does not exist. It is, however, a contradiction that is more apparent than real. The position derives from an identification of a Kantian concern for the possibility of meaning with the ‘transcendence’ of meaning, with that which is taken to lie beyond meaning. It is an identification—or slippage—that serves to locate the possibility of meaning in its impossibility, and the resulting equivocation, while important for Todorov’s critical endeavour concerning the modern fantastic, is no less fundamental to Blanchot, especially in relation to his exploration of romantic, symbolist and post-symbolist poetry, a poetry he encounters crucially in the work of Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Rilke. What contradiction amounts to here is the proposal that within the actual practice of specific poets a set of conflicting assertions is put into play, and the resulting self-conscious juxtaposition of different perspectives on what is represented calls the status of literature into question. Hence, the modern fantastic does not induce hesitation concerning what it represents; it stands in a hesitant relation to itself. It is an art based on equivocation and ambivalence, and like the poetry of symbolism it attends above all to the process of its own coming into being. In this sense, it may be said to articulate its own impossibility. As Rosemary Jackson has noted, the fantastic understood in this way is based on a split between things that have no names (It, The Thing, and so on) and empty signs, which are devoid of meaning (names such as Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu’ or ‘Nyarlathotep’, or Poe’s ‘bobok’), and whose only reality derives from their own palpability as words [Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy:The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 38-40]. Jackson quotes Sartre, who considers the modern fantastic, as exemplified by Blanchot’s Kafka-like récit, Aminadab, to be a language of non-signifying signs, which lead nowhere. They are means without ends, which appear full and yet are capable of achieving only a terrible emptiness. In Sartre's words:

The law of the fantastic condemns it to encounter instruments only. These instruments are not…meant to serve men, but rather to manifest unremittingly an evasive, preposterous finality. This accounts for the labyrinth of corridors, doors and staircases that lead to nothing, the innumerable signs that line the road and that mean nothing. In the ‘topsy-turvy’ world, the means is isolated and is posed for its own sake. [[Jackson, op. cit., p. 41. Cited from Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 130]

As with the Beltane Fire Festivals, we experience a mode of uncanny meaninglessness, an experience part of whose horror lies in its lack of purpose.

*

I will seek to bring the themes of this essay together by reference to two films, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece of 1943, Day of Wrath. Hooper’s film contains in its last reel a scene of extraordinary ferocity and madness, in which Sally Hardesty, the one person left alive after the depredations of Leatherface, is subjected to a horrifying ordeal by the crazed family whose captive she is. The living members of the family would seem made up of a grandfather and three grandsons, the old man having worked in his younger days killing cattle in the slaughterhouses of Texas. The grandsons urge him on to repeat his exploits by killing Sally in the same fashion, by hitting her on the head so hard that she drops dead. The old man is too feeble, however, and the hammer falls nervelessly from his withered hand, clattering into a tin bucket, above which Sally is held by the brothers. Her screams are piercing and interminable, driven as she is to unmitigated dementia by fear and horror. The power of the scene derives in part from its combination of the domestic—the brothers are sitting down to a dinner of meat cooked by Leatherface, who takes on the role of mother—and utter derangement. It is quite possible see the film against the background of the Western, and to contrast the heroics of Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking with the abject degeneration of Leatherface. [Compare Horror, ed. Phil Hardy (London: Aurum Press, 1985), p. 298.] One might also contrast the themes of wilderness and civilisation, in order to suggest how the degeneracy of the family involves a confusion of that opposition. Degenerate descendants of the pioneers though they may be, they also represent the values of business (the older brother complains bitterly about the power of big government and the burdens of taxation) which have destroyed the wilderness the pioneers opened up. Nonetheless, the film reaches beyond these possibilities of interpretation and meaning, into a weird carnival of human destruction. The scene is protracted beyond the needs of the narrative, until the exuberance and jubilation of the family and the monotonous screaming of the girl combine to create an effect of suspension. The film seems to fold back on itself, as its kinetic energy slows down in response to the repeated actions of the family and the unvarying agony of the girl. An uncanny meaninglessness attaches to what takes place, and the viewer is brought—as in Schefer’s tableau of the abattoir—not to see images following one after the other, in narrative order, but to share in the unknown, and to sense something of what exists there. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre creates a parodic vision of tribal transgression, in which, for the duration of the festivities, the forbidden becomes the norm and the appeasement of the divine urge to ruin and destroy becomes the ground of action. The sublimity of so outrageous a pretension is acknowledged in the film’s final image, as Leatherface swings his chainsaw in great sweeping arcs above his head in salutation to the rising sun.

Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, is set in 1623. Witchcraft and the burning of witches are central to it, an issue that ultimately focuses on the figure of Anne. She is the young wife of an elderly priest, Absalon, living in his house with him and his mother, Merete. The first part of the film lays out the indictment for witchcraft of an old woman, Herlofs Marte, and her subsequent capture, trial by torture and burning. Absalon plays a crucial role in this, authorising the indictment, overseeing her trial and signing her death warrant. Following the old woman’s death, the second section of the film centres on the love between Anne and Martin, Absalon’s son, concluding with Absalon’s death. In the final sequence of the film, Anne, Martin, Merete and the elders of the church are gathered around Absalon’s coffin. It is here that Anne is accused of the murder of her husband by witchcraft, and the bewitchment of Martin. The accuser is Merete, the priest’s mother. On hearing the denunciation, Martin abandons Anne, moving around his father’s coffin to stand alongside his grandmother. Anne herself has been a figure of ambivalence throughout the film: there has been a consistent hesitation in the manner of her presentation, and we are never certain as to whether or not she is possessed of demonic powers. In effect, the film offers in Anne a clear focus for what Todorov defines as the classic dynamic of the fantastic—we hesitate between a natural explanation for her actions and a supernatural one. This same hesitation continues now, as she confesses to the crime, a confession that must send her to the stake. The motivation for the confession remains unclear and Dreyer does nothing to establish it more certainly. At the very end, Anne raises her eyes from her dead husband, lying before her, and looks off-screen, an act David Bordwell reads as follows: ‘The look, at nothing, breaking once and for all from the gazes of the social and natural worlds, defines her entry into a new realm’ [The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of califormia Press, 1981), p. 139]. Bordwell takes this view to be supported by the film’s transition at this point to the Dies Irae scroll, which intervenes finally to break off the narrative in a moment of abrupt intervention, as the words of the scroll move up the screen, accompanied by images and music. Bordwell contends that the image supplementing the first verse, showing souls being transported to heaven, and that supplementing the second verse, of men and women kneeling at the foot of the cross, is an implicit act of absolution. Anne is absolved in this way of whatever she has done, and the film’s hesitations about her motives are negated by fiat [The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, p. 140]. However, the final image of the film is of the black cross superimposed over the scroll. The cross remains after the scroll has left the screen, placed on a white ground (in a manner reminiscent of the ending of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest). As we watch this final image, two diagonal pieces appear at its top, pointing downward, a witch emblem, evoking the cross present at the immolation of Herlofs Marte. The cross signals to us that Anne has similarly been burnt alive in the name of the cross. The question of absolution remains as uncertain as the question of Anne’s spiritual powers, and the juxtaposition of these images in no way resolves it.

Day of Wrath points in exactly the same direction as do the descriptions of the Beltane Fire Festivals. What is deep and sinister in Dreyer’s film arises from the eruption of the demonic into a world that is recognisable in its stability or order, while in the people themselves there is something that induces an impression of terror and sense of dread. The awfulness of the solemnity with which the torture of an old woman is conducted, the fact that when she is burnt her immolation is accompanied by a choir of young boys, the grave hypocrisy of Absalon’s piety, the implacable hatred visible in Merete’s face whenever she sees or speaks to Anne, the failure of Martin to support the woman whom he has assured of his love when confronted by Merete’s denunciation—these confirm one’s sense of how human beings are, ‘of what I have seen and heard about, in myself and others’. The meaninglessness of what we see, and the lack of redemptive significance in it, return us to the darkness within ourselves. In other words, Day of Wrath betrays itself to its own undoing. The film is split from itself, in a movement of double negation that turns it towards the outside, the exterior, beyond language and concept, where there is no intimacy, no place to rest. The work says the nothing that is the condition of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility. And this nothing is made palpable in the final image of the cross. Here, too, we may be struck by the pertinence of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny: das Unheimliche, in art as in life, is the occurrence of a consciousness that is attenuated, incapable of mastery over its own negativity. Like the narrator of Poe’s 'The Premature Burial' or the protagonist of Dreyer’s Vampyr, it is as though in certain horror films we were solicited by images from which we cannot escape, and which condemn us to the ultimate horror—that of the impossibility of dying.

JEAN LOUIS SCHEFER AND CARL THEODOR DREYER

SCHEFER AND THE REALITY OF THE PERSON


Concepts such as the unconscious, the ungraspable, the undecidable, the unsayable, the enigmatic and the paradoxical are nowadays part of the contemporary intellectual’s stock-in-trade. They are commonly deployed to characterise and justify certain kinds of obscurity in thought, and they have been touchstones in accounts of the work of Jean Louis Schefer. Vincent Descombes has discriminated amongst the issues at stake in the use of concepts such as these:

Reason is only effective within the bounds of the reasonable; it cannot but fail to grasp the irrational.

A representation is always that of something representable, and so it cannot but fail to grasp the unrepresentable.

Consciousness is conscious only of that which is conscious; therefore it cannot but fail to grasp the unconscious. [Vincent Descombes, “An essay in philosophical observation”, in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 78.

What these formulae, or, rather, tautologies, evoke is the idea of an ungraspable object, resistant to any form of ordered discourse. It is this object that the ‘obscure’ conception of philosophy takes to be the philosophical object par excellence. But how is such an object to be understood? Clearly, formal discourse has already been ruled out, since it is form which is held to be responsible for the object’s exclusion: as a result, ‘this form will have to be modified so as to bring to awareness that which by its exclusion has enabled discourse in due and proper form to exist as such’ [Descombes, art. cit., p. 78.] Understanding, then, will necessitate a change of style, and change of style is indeed what we find. As Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut remark, ‘since the real is the impossible, since the truth is not adequation but split difference, only broken discourse can be adequate to it’ [Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties, trans. Mary Schnackenberg Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 190), p. 201.

The result is an idiom in which negativity is taken to operate only on its own behalf, without limit or circumscription. Deconstruction and linguistic Freudianism, for example, lay out a series of mediations whose indefinite transgression aims to reach the one thing—the real—which, simply by virtue of its being aimed at, is forever inaccessible. The doctrine of the primacy of the signifier is thus a reworking of the Hegelian teaching, ‘the word is the murderer of the thing’, and from the doctrine of the signifier to the theory of the subject the way is short, and almost inevitable. It is to this tradition that Schefer’s commentators typically assimilate him; and yet, whatever the pertinence may be of theory of this order for the characterisation of contemporary thought, I find it has little or nothing to say about a matter I believe crucial to his work, namely, the reality of the person, the living human being.

*

Schefer begins his discussion of Dreyer’s Vampyr with a citation of a well-known passage from Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). On the face of it, this looks rather odd, given his alleged indebtedness to the very different set of ideas just referred to. Hobbes was, after all, a thoroughgoing empiricist, for whom all knowledge derives in some way or other from sense experience, and Leviathan opens with a programmatic (not to say, dogmatic) assertion of this view:

[T]here is no conception in a mans mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of Sense. [Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 13.]

We experience the world because the objects in the world impinge on us; that is, energy is transferred from the external world into the nervous system of the individual for whom the object is external:

All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object which causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly. [14]

Each object that we perceive affects our sense organs in such a way as to produce images in the mind:

Which Object worketh on the Eyes, Eares, and other parts of mans body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of Apparences. [13]

These images remain stored (as traces?) in the memory when the object itself is no longer before us. Hobbes argues (in the passage cited by Schefer) that when the object is removed from us, or the eye is closed, we still retain an image of the thing seen, ‘though’, as he says, ‘more obscure than when we see it’.

And this it is, the Latines call Imagination, from the image made in seeing; and apply the same, though improperly, to all the other senses. But the Greeks call it Fancy; which signifies apparence, and is as proper to one sense, as to another. IMAGINATION therefore is nothing but decaying sense, and is found in men, and many other living Creatures, aswell sleeping, as waking. [15]

In spelling out what is in effect a causal theory of perception, Hobbes may be thought of as a progenitor of modern cognitive science. However, it is not this aspect of him that is relevant here, but rather his insistence on the decay which is the very condition of experience, a decay of which memory is both the consequence and embodiment. In touching on this, Schefer is showing himself responsive to features that Hobbes’s thought has in common with the contemporary theory of the subject, a fact which serves to indicate something of the difficulties by which that theory is beset. As with modern presentations of mental operation, such as the Lacanian ‘algorithm’ of fantasy, Hobbes’s acccount of memory is based on the idea that when we remember something we undergo a present experience or mental process from which the past is read off. When I remember having acted in such and such a way, or what it was that I did, something takes place in my mind—and it is this event or process which is the remembering. There is an inner event which constitutes the remembering, and it is an event that differs in specific ways from other inner events, such as the events that constitute thinking or expecting or intending or fearing. It is on this basis that the imagist theory of memory gets off the ground, despite the fact that the notion of the identification of private, ‘inner’ mental events or objects can be given no intelligible expression.

It should be recognised that the imagist account of memory screens out a great deal of what we would ordinarily call ‘remembering’. As P.M.S. Hacker has noted, memory is more than a matter of experiences enjoyed or undergone, and the objects of those experiences. He writes: ‘We remember a multitude of facts learnt or objects encountered in the past, without necessarily remembering when or how we learnt or encountered them’ [P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Will (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 487]. We remember that things took place in this way or that, we remember that things are or will be thus and so, without remembering the occasions when we came by this information. We remember how to perform such and such an action without remembering how or when we learnt to do it. It is, therefore, misguided to think that memory ‘must’ involve an image, accompanied by certain feelings of familiarity or ‘pastness’. Having an image is neither necessary nor sufficient for remembering. To recognise this is to undermine the idea (or prejudice) that remembering must be based on a faithful image picture of what happened. We do not, in remembering, read off from a memory image, as we would from a photograph or picture of the past event, what it was that happened. It is not the case that memory shows us the past by showing us a representation of it, a picture somehow stored in the mind or brain, ‘which is brought to consciousness in the act or process of remembering’ [p. 488]. Though an image may accompany my memory of what happened, what I remember is not the image of what happened, but what happened.

As Hacker indicates, the analogy between remembering and a picture or photograph is profoundly misleading. If a picture is to inform me about how it was in the past, I must remember that this is how it was, that this is the Eiffel Tower in the background, and so on. I do the remembering, and the picture serves to remind me that this is how things looked. The use of a picture, therefore, presupposes that I remember what it is a picture of. It does no good to argue that in the case of memory images there is a special feeling, of familiarity or pastness, or a belief-feeling, that connects it with the past. Again, I must recognise such a feeling and I can only do so if I remember it. Furthermore, the use of past tense verbs, a use which is bound up with the very concept of the past, is itself learnt in remembering.

The analogy misleads in another way also. It suggests that one does not remember the past event one is in fact recalling. If we remember what we remember by way of a memory-image, to be understood as a photograph is to be understood, then, like the photograph, the image operates by providing evidence for what took place. We do not remember, we learn what happened in the past by reading it off the memory-image. This is to think of memory as supplying a store of information about the past. But this is ‘precisely not to remember what occurred, but to learn, as from a long-forgotten diary, what occurred’. Finally, ‘if what one remembers is the memory-image, which is a likeness of, but not identical with, the past experience, then one can never remember the experience itself’ [Hacker, op. cit., p. 489. For an account of the Augustinian view of memory, see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. For a critique of Augustine’s imagist theory of memory, see Norman Malcolm, Memory and Mind (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 19-22].

Given these arguments, my contention is that the theory of the subject, and ideas of memory derived from it, can cast no light on Schefer’s text. First, the theory itself is inadequate, based as it is on ideas of mental imagery and inner representation. Second, Schefer’s is a writing of the present, and its central concern is not reconstructive but creative. Despite his powerful evocations of memory and the passing of time (as in, for example, his discussion of La Jetée), his writing does not construct itself around a series of images, under whose suggestive or nostalgic potency a past may be subsumed. The effect of his style is not to return to or summon up what has been, but to intertwine itself, in the manner of a chiasmus, with what is—the reality to which it is turned, whether of art, cinema or writing as such, and in which it participates. Writing of The Deluge, Schefer has this to say:

[T]he period fascinates me because the status of figuration cannot be solved by analogically expressive functions (according to the reduction in view of a specifically figurative practice that, later, iconology attempts to perform); the figurative system being set in play is also that of a nonfiguring mass that remains blind, without name or destiny, and whose “ideal” structure, the sum of the figurative field, does not add up. [The Deluge, The Plague: Paolo Uccello, trans. Tom Conley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998), p. 30.]

The site of this nonfiguring mass, whose ‘ideal’ structure does not add up, is the body. Schefer contends that ‘Uccello’s fresco presents, or, rather, rules over, a state of the body in disaggregation, (unclothed, blurred, sunken, set in a liquid magma, truncated; in one resepect, these states of the body can be attributed to a fiction of positions and conditions of Uccello’s vision), submitted to various degrees of erasure, of rubbing’ [p. 26]. Similarly, the sequence late in Vampyr, during which the doctor (the vampire’s assistant) is stifled in flour, may also be seen as nonfiguring, inasmuch as the suffocation enacted in the mill enacts at the same time the disappearance from the film of the film image itself.

And that assault, projected as a white coating, by such a wearing down of marble, causes the falling away of all the years to the moment when the world was hidden beneath a crust of snow. And the silhouette slowly stifling in the flour arouses in us (like the image of a cooked insect found in a loaf of bread) an inexplicable relief at seeing this body simply disappear without the shadow of an actual murder. [The Enigmatic Body, trans. Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 137.]

One can hardly fail to compare and contrast this image with the final image of Diary of a Country Priest or the image of the crucifix with diagonal top-pieces which succeeds Anne’s confession at the end of Day of Wrath, or indeed the consuming light at the end of Gertrud. The first two films impose a shadow of a crucifix on a white ground as a notation of narrative closure, while in Gertrud Gertrud is herself gathered into a transfiguring whiteness, a whiteness which is also emanating from her. In Vampyr, the body of the doctor is dispersed—disaggregated—by the flour, subsumed into it like a cockroach into a loaf, or dispersed like the body of a vampire confronted by the consuming fire of the bread of the Sacred Host. What we have here, in these diverse presentations of light, is a complex passage through the theology of the transfiguration, the eucharist and the body. The word, I would like to say, is here made flesh, but a flesh that escapes representation—becoming without confusion one with the very logos which has become incarnate within it. In all four films, the theological significance of the image derives from the fact that it exists in order to deny itself, negating itself in act of apophatic self-opening or kenosis. As Vladimir Lossky has written, man created ‘in the image’ of God is capable of manifesting God only to the degree that his nature allows itself to be penetrated by and so transfigured by deifying grace.

Thus the image—which is inalienable—can become similar or dissimilar, to the extreme limits: that of union with God, when deified man shows in himself by grace what God is by nature, according to the expression of St. Maximus; or indeed that of the extremity of falling-away which Plotinus called ‘the place of dissimilarity’, placing it in the gloomy abyss of Hades. [Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God (London and Oxford: Mowbray’s, 1975), p. 139.]

Such a self-opening is undergone by Gray in the threefold division of his person in the second of his dreams. In the dream, he passes through ‘the gloomy abyss of Hades’ in an experience of a double extremity—of ‘dissimilarity’ and ‘similarity’. Through the extremity of death he is enabled to make ready the way for the judgement of the father, a judgement which eventually culminates in the death of the vampire, Marguerite Chopin, through the offices of the major-domo, and the death of the doctor, by way of the uncaused action of the cogs inside the mill. What Schefer is concerned with, then, is not the narrative unfolding of Vampyr, but the mode of existence of a film whose images are to be seen as hypostatic processions of cinema itself.

*

The question of human being and presence in Schefer is inseparable from what he calls the ‘grammatical gyration’ of the body, which in turn is closely bound up with the ‘grammar’ of the person. The term ‘grammar’ in this context admits of a certain slippage—or declension—as between Schefer’s use of it and a rather different sense of the word, used as Wittgenstein uses it. For Wittgenstein, the concept of grammar (or logic) differs from the usual one: it relates, not to language as a system of signs, but to the use of words, to our practice of using words in the complex and various manifestations of our forms of life. A grammatical or philosophical investigation is one in which ‘we remind ourselves’ of the place particular words and concepts occupy in the distinctive patterns of use that constitute our being in language. It involves having hitherto unnoticed aspects of things brought to our attention, so that we may see them differently, in what is a change of mind due to something more akin to a conversion than a conclusion based on argument. It is grammar in this sense that Wittgenstein is thinking of when he distinguishes between the role played by the notion of ‘having a body’ as opposed to that of ‘being a body’. As Hacker has noted, it is a grammatical distinction inasmuch as it serves to mark a qualitative and fundamental distinction between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate, the sensible and the insensate. [P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 247.]

One (grammatical) consequence of this distinction is that I may be proud of my body without being proud of myself, and ashamed of myself without being ashamed of my body. It makes sense to introduce myself by saying ‘I am N.N.’, but to say ‘I am a body’ is no introduction at all. Human beings, though they occupy space, are not human bodies. Indeed, what does it mean to say that I am my body? It can’t mean that I am identical with my body. First, it is not an identity statement to say ‘I am my body’, any more than it is an identity statement to say ‘I am N.N.’. The word ‘I’ in my mouth does not refer to me: in giving my name I am not picking myself out from others (though by so doing I am making it possible for others to do precisely that). Second, I will cease to exist before my body ceases to exist, for at death I will leave my remains behind. Third, though there are a few contexts in which ‘I’ and ‘my body’ can replace each other, the very expression ‘my body’ presupposes the difference between me and my body and commonly the two expressions cannot replace each other. The crucial point, for Hacker, as for Wittgenstein, is that only what is alive can be said to ‘have a body’. It is not said of machines, or of corpses. ‘Having a body, one might say, is a (formal) mark of sentient life’ [Hacker, op cit., p. 249]. Hanjo Glock and John Hyman have commented on Hacker’s (and Wittgenstein’s) arguments:

Suppose that Carter is ashamed of his body because it weighs 18 stone. Carter’s body weighs 18 stone if and only if Carter weighs 18 stone. Hence Carter is ashamed of the fact that he weights 18 stone; therefore Carter is ashamed of himself. However, suppose that Carter is ashamed of himself because he has offended Mary. It does not follow that he is ashamed of his body (of which he may well be proud, if it is beautiful and graceful). For those cases where the mutual implication holds are precisely those which concern bodily characteristics. For what is true of my body is true of me (for as long as I am alive); but what is true of me need not be true of my body (and indeed may make no sense when predicated of my body). [“Persons and their Bodies”, Philosophical Investigations 17:2 (April 1994): 378.]

Glock and Hyman go on to note that the substitution of ‘Carter’ for ‘Carter’s body’ does not preserve truth-value in some cases. From this they conclude that Carter is not identical with Carter’s body. In other cases, the substitution results in nonsense, which, they suggest, shows that Carter and his body belong to different categories of particular. Finally, the fact that substitution is permitted in some cases and preserves truth-value indicates that ‘Carter is not some other thing, over and above his body, which might survive its (final) destruction’[Glock and Hyman, art. cit.: 379]. The conclusion may seem paradoxical: how can Carter not be identical with his body, if Carter and his body are (and must be) in the same place at the same time? Does this not lead straight back to Cartesian dualism? The response is that, while no two material bodies can occupy exactly the same place at exactly the same time, a person is not a body, and therefore the objection gets no grip on the concepts of person and body.

As Schefer presents it, The Deluge would seem to amount to a profound repudiation of the grammar in question. He appears to see justification in the fresco for a ramifying violation of what meaning the concepts of body and person have for us in the weave of our lives. Thus, he dwells at length in many passages on bodily mutilation and destruction, concluding that the body in The Deluge is ‘The nontheatrical, nonscenic body: an obscene body, which floats in relation to a spatial organisation, for example, that would be one of its simple vision or of its rememoration. A forgotten—obscene—anatomy’ [The Deluge, The Plague, p. 99]. This is more than a passing notation. It is a vision of the first importance, concerning the significance of the fresco as a whole, and Schefer recalls the occasion on which the force of it was brought home to him. He had entered Santa Maria Novella to measure the size of Dante’s figure in the picture:

A dark lighting: a first film where a commotion appears, that hits me right in the face, with what had to be understood as the invention of the signifying body: something as barren as this meaningless, painful, embarrassing, stubborn comedy (Good Night Nurse). This double chin that in the movies unwinds Fatty’s face, dripping with rain, that reveals its cinematic absurdity; the crackle of wet matches that are supposed to light a soggy cigarette (a collusion of this pasty face of a fat ephebe with chubby fingers, cruller-like ladyfingers): the same thing: the invention of the signifier in cinema unwinds a violence: that of the absurd body, that of the exempted real. [The Deluge, The Plague, p. 100.]

What comes across from this moment of autobiographical recollection is that Schefer was forcibly struck by a resemblance, between the shapeless bodies surrounding the upright figure of Dante and the amorphous absurdity of Fatty Arbuckle. In theoretical terms, the real is ‘exempted’ by the irruption of a sense of absurdity that separates the body from the real—itself amorphous and undifferentiated. This, for Schefer, is nothing other than what the experience of ‘the invention of the signifier’ in cinema amounts to—the invention of the signifying body. However, I would contend that there is something opaque here, which the theoretically sanctioned dichotomy opposing discontinuity to the continuous (the symbolic to the semiotic, the symbolic to the real, and so on) is unable to grasp, namely, the sheer fact of Schefer’s having been struck in the way that he was—a living man in physical contact with the fresco. The event presupposes an unhesitating and spontaneous acceptance of a human reality that it would seem the fresco itself has uncompromisingly reduced—to ‘flotsam at low tide, shards of things, scattered objects’.

However, at this juncture, any conclusions on the matter would be premature. Schefer acknowledges as his own a relation to the fresco that is intermediary between fear and rapture:

Thus, a gaze exists that is enraptured with this painting. I am not entirely sure what I’m looking for: surely Vico’s colour, a kind of arc in the earth of Siena, or monsters? a syntax or other words. What kind of exchange in the writing? Nothing is to be given—other than the experience of my fear. The Deluge? That is what I am reading, but the order and the wording have been changed. Everything happens over a smell of elderberries. And still, the most brutal, naïve scene. Tailored to the denuding of things. A plate raised up by a pair of pliers! [The Deluge, The Plague, p. 102].

This is not a report on certain properties of the fresco. Schefer is not concerned to elucidate traditions of iconography, nor does he seek to offer an account of constructional techniques. Descriptions of this kind are given by John Pope-Hennessy, for example, in his book on Uccello, where, amongst other things, he demonstrates how The Deluge unites two dissociated episodes into a single visual scheme, and, by so doing, ‘objectifie[s] Alberti’s ideal of the copious composition’ [John Pope-Hennessy, Paolo Uccello (London and New York: Phaidon, 1969), p. 16. ]. The nature of Schefer’s passion is to be sought elsewhere, and the form of expression that embodies it is not easily to be characterised. What I believe can be said, however, is that there are certain features of his approach, whether in relation to art, writing or the cinema, that run parallel, for at least some of the way, with what Wittgenstein has discussed in Part II of Philosophical Investigations under the head of ‘seeing aspects’.

The most important thing about the aspect is that there is a sense in which it isn’t really there and a sense in which it is very much there; a sense in which to speak about ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with respect to it is to miss its point and yet another sense in which in seeing it and in giving it expression you are truer to the object than if you stick to objective terms – the terms, that is, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the language-game of reporting’, or ‘the language-game of information’. [Avner Baz, “What’s the point of seeing aspects?”, Philosophical Investigations 23:2 (April 2000): 106.]

In this summary, Avner Baz points to the main directions of Wittgenstein’s thought. The seeing involved in aspect seeing is not seeing in general, but seeing (the emphasis is one Wittgenstein employs throughout his discussion). The ordinary sense of ‘seeing’ goes hand in hand with ‘knowing’ and is to be distinguished from aspect seeing. This is clear from the fact that aspects do not teach us anything about the external world, if ‘teaching about the external world’ is understood on the model of giving objective information. To see an aspect is not see a property of an object, and so the expression of a change of aspect (as in what is perhaps an over-worked example, from duck to rabbit), while it may have the form of a report of a new perception, is not quite such a report. As Baz indicates, Wittgenstein also says that the criterion for what you see, when ‘seeing’ in the sense of seeing aspects is involved, is your representation of what is seen. Thus, when Schefer tells us that he sees a resemblance between bodies in the fresco and the amorphous body of Arbuckle he could be lying, but he could not be mistaken. In this respect, then, the expression of the seeing of an aspect is not a report on objective fact: it is an Äusserung, an avowal.

As Baz notes, there are connections here with the Kantian account of aesthetic judgement, and, more specifically, with Cavell’s reworking of that account: ‘Aspects, like beauty, hang somewhere between the object and the subject, and that position is constituted by the expectation, the demand, from our partner to see what we see, in spite of the fact that we have no way of making him realize that he should’ [Baz, art. cit.: 107. The reference to Cavell is: Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1969), p. 89, footnote; cited by Baz: 107]. Though the expression we give to the seeing or dawning of aspects may look like giving a report, it is not used for that purpose. Rather, the aim of it is the seeking of intimacy. This is not the intimacy in which one reveals something about one’s heart or inner feelings; in giving expression to the seeing of aspects we seek intimacy with someone else by trying to reveal, to bring out, something about the object. [Baz, art. cit., p.108] As Wittgenstein insists, when we say ‘It’s running!’ in front of a painting of a running horse we are not doing so in order to inform other people: it is a reaction in which people are in touch with one another.

It is intimacy in this sense that characterises the tone of the last passage quoted from Schefer. It also characterises the account he gives of the end of Vampyr, where his attempt is to get the reader to see as he sees, and to feel as he feels, a transfiguring of the cinematic image as such. The idea of intimacy hangs together with two further points about seeing aspects, both of which have relevance to an understanding of Schefer’s writing. The first is that aspects are subject to the will. The second is that an aspect is something that strikes us. Dependency on the will means that it makes sense to say: ‘Now see the figure like this’. In real life situations, it makes sense for me to ask you to see, or at least try to see, the resemblance between two faces that has struck me, and it makes sense for Schefer to ask his readers to see the resemblance between Arbuckle and the bodies in Uccello’s fresco. (The implication is that, whether or not we see what the other person would have us see, there is nothing standing between us and what he sees apart from what we may have put there ourselves.) Thus, if there is an air of paradox attaching to the dawning of an aspect, it derives from the fact that the aspect ‘appears over there, in the object, and yet we know we must have had something to do with that appearance’ [Baz, art. City., p. 110]. We know that what has so radically changed, now that we have seen or been struck by the aspect, has in another sense not changed at all. It is as though we were bringing a concept to bear on the object, which is why, as Baz points out, ‘the aspect cannot be our (or the) usual, obvious way of seeing the object, but rather has to be new to us’ [Baz, art. cit., p.111]. The aspect is not obviously there, as a property might be, but neither have we placed it there by a pure act of the imagination.

It is this peculiarity of the aspect – its being something that fits the object, and at the same time something that we bring to the object; its being a way of seeing something anew while remaining faithful to it – that gives expressing it its point in ordinary contexts. [Baz, art. cit., p. 111]

The seeing of an aspect is, therefore, a temporal experience: when we see an aspect, we are thinking of the object, we are occupied by it, and the aspect lasts only for as long as we are occupied with the object in that particular way. We are paying attention, which is one reason for thinking we have something to do with it, and the fact that the aspect has dawned on us is a good enough reason for our so saying.

The pertinence of the dawning of aspects to aesthetic appreciation is manifest not only in Schefer’s writing but also in the later work of Roland Barthes, work that has features in common with Schefer’s. Thus, the distinction Barthes draws in Camera Lucida between the studium and the punctum may be construed in exactly these terms: the punctum ‘is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there’ [Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 55. Barthes’s emphasis]. Following some remarks of Bazin’s on cinema, Barthes insists that what constitutes a photograph that lives for him is what he calls ‘a blind field’: that is, there is a specific person in the photograph who in some way seems to emerge from it and continue living beyond it. Robert Wilson, photographed sitting with Philip Glass by Mapplethorpe, is endowed with an unlocatable punctum: ‘[he] is someone I want to meet’ [Camera Lucida, p. 57]. On account of her necklace, a black woman in her Sunday best takes on a whole life external to the portrait of her and her family. In a picture by William Klein of children in Little Italy in 1954 a single feature stands out: one child’s bad teeth. There is, however, a punctum (a ‘stigmatum’) other than the unexpected detail. This other punctum, which is not of form but intensity, is Time—what Barthes calls the ‘lacerating emphasis’ of that-has-been, its pure presentation. In 1865, Alexander Gardner photographed a young man, Lewis Payne, who had tried to assassinate the U.S. Secretary of State, W.H. Seward. The photograph was taken in Payne’s cell, when he was waiting to be hanged.

The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. [Camera Lucida, p. 96.]

This is particularly a feature of historical photographs: that is dead and that is going to die. Barthes sees two little girls looking at a primitive flying machine above their village: they are alive, with their whole lives before them. And yet they are dead (today) and they are then already dead (yesterday). In front of a photograph of his mother as a child, he shudders: she is going to die. What Barthes sees is something that fits the object and yet it is something he has brought to it: he sees the photograph anew, while remaining faithful to it.

As the intimacy of Barthes’s tone—the quality in it of avowal—makes evident, the idea of the punctum, like that of aspect seeing, makes sense only for the embodied person, the living human being. The same point can be made with reference to Merleau-Ponty, whose account of genuine or authentic perception also has many features in common with what Wittgenstein has had to say about the dawning of aspects. In genuine vision, Merleau-Ponty insists, ‘a strange adhesion between the seer and the visible’ is experienced [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 139. (Baz draws attention to a connection between seeing things anew and Heidegger’s discussion of authenticity in Being and Time.)]. The seer is caught up in what he sees in such a way that what he sees is still himself. At the same time, the vision that he exercises is something he also undergoes from the things, so that, ‘as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things’ [The Visible and the Invisible, p. 139]. In this situation, which is that, fundamentally, of aesthetic experience, ‘the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen’ [The Visible and the Invisible, p. 139. On this, see Michel de Certeau, “The Madness of Vision”, trans. Michael B. Smith, Enclitic 7:1 (1983): 24-31]. Schefer sums up his own position in a not dissimilar vein:

The image can be seen by way of what it lacks.

Something is missing that constitutes the image (permits it to conceal the world we live in, not by means of a screen with figures on it, but by means of time).

If what’s missing were within the image (of which we are a part – the virtual pole, or the phantom), the image would be invisible.

So the spectacle of visible man does exist: it’s the awareness of the darkness of our interior lives by which any spectacle is made possible. [The Enigmatic Body, p. 120.]

The last remark reads as though it were an acknowledgement of Wittgenstein’s ‘grammar’ of the person, while it would not be misconceived to take the first three remarks as summations of the foregoing account of aspect seeing, as well as of Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the chiasmus of seer and seen. When set against this background, certain of Schefer’s remarks achieve an especial intensity, exemplified particularly by those concerning an image from Dreyer’s The Master of the House (1925). A woman is standing centrally in the rear of the image, looking slightly up and off frame right, a basket of washing forward from her in the frame, to her right. In mid-ground is a slatted door or gate, open, while in the foreground is a rough, bare, wooden floor. The image as a whole is illuminated by a key-light behind the wall mid-ground in the image, into which the doorway has been cut. Hence the source of the light is not visible. Obscured by the wall, its light pours down from somewhere off and to the top right of the frame. It is to this source that the woman has raised her eyes. The edges of the frame in the foreground are in deep shadow. The woman is holding a sheet at chest height in front of her, which she appears to be about to hang up to dry. Other washing is visible on a line behind her, to her left. Schefer sees a contrast between the ancient poverty—the filth—of the woman’s house, and the sheet, the ‘shroud’, which she is offering up, ‘an imageless innocence and a light as if calming some savage beast’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 122]. The light—uncorrupted, since it is without visible source—is gathered by the sheet, even as it radiates it, a light that Schefer evokes as the ‘approach of a suffering from which I have to reconstruct, in the repetition of this arrested movement, a threshold within myself that’s still uncrossable’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 123]. There is here, as the woman holds the sheet as though she were holding a screen up to a projector, a falling of light in which may be seen re-enacted by analogy the imprinting on the shroud of the negative image of Christ. The image is created in what Schefer calls ‘an immaculate flash’, in the very moment of Resurrection, as the uncreated and divine energy—grace, the light of Mount Tabor—transforms the substance of the cloth, while leaving its accidents intact. The co-inherence in the Second Person of divine energy with the human nature is a co-inherence constitutive also of the human person, made in ‘the image and likeness of God’.

There is thus on the boundary between the uncreated and the created a threshold within each person and it is this threshold within himself that Schefer speaks of as ‘uncrossable’. Nonetheless, just as we may participate by grace in the suffering and resurrection of Christ, so analogously we may participate in the image in Dreyer’s film: the image ‘repays’ us for what we are, fallen into poverty of spirit, seated in the dark, with the ‘white shadow’ that makes of this place a place beyond the world. Typically, in the photographic image, the accidents, the colour, shape, and so on, of the real objects remain in existence, although the substance of those objects has long since departed. Here, in this instance of a cinematic, projected image, the substance, the light, is a real presence, subsuming the accidents of the image into itself. Clearly, however, Schefer is not concerned with this kind of explication. His writing suspends itself at the edge of the intelligible, and for the reader who would participate in it there is no alternative but to submit to that suspension, in which the image appears as nothing other than the approach of a suffering whose redemption is light, an experience the cinema offers only rarely, one such occasion being the end of Vampyr, another the end of The Diary of a Country Priest, or this image from The Master of the House. Schefer’s writing is the endeavour to effect an opening to that experience, and, in this regard, it is undoubtedly imbued with what Pater, citing Blake, called spiritual form.