My Skin is Cold

As children in blank darkness tremble and start at everything, so we in broad daylight are oppressed at times by fears baseless as those horrors which children imagine coming upon them in the dark. This dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shinning shafts of day, but only by an understanding of the outward form and inner workings of nature. (Lucretius, Book II, De Rerum Natura)

Neither asleep nor fully awake, I am lying in bed and no longer know where I am. There is a darkness and the sensation of my body lying flat. My body is still and my eyes are half-closed. When I seek orientation, then an impasse seizes me: in these brief but dense moments that unfold when I am partly wake, things have lost their place. My skin turns cold and I feel myself grow anxious. This is a vertigo without movement, a dizziness with no spatial depth. A searching takes place in the dark, and I think of hotels in Pittsburgh, my childhood home, a guesthouse in Montana, a cottage in London, transit terminal in far-off lands. Grey light from the streetlamps can be seen under the crack beneath the door, but things with names have lost their resonance, and cues from the external world eschew all familiarity.

A woman is lying next to me, and I turn to her. Truly, her face is familiar but I cannot name her despite knowing in objective terms that I slept beside her for the last year. She is flesh, she is space, but she is also pure anonymity, a void set alight by my perception. To be clear, this omission is not a fault in my memory. I remember the features on this face and the different rooms that I have inhabited. This face is a feature of my lifeworld, its appearance is an indication of my own being. But in these privileged moments - perhaps no more than 6 or 7 seconds - when I am not fully awake but neither fully asleep, something else is interceding: it is the space between worlds, lurking between the living and the dead.


This is the world of prepersonal life: anonymous, cold, deserted, a plenitude of nothingness, both vast and colossal. Before my body has come to its senses, before I slowly begin to realise where and when I am, then the glimmer of this chthonic realm briefly materialises. Only by becoming habitualized through waking life does anxiety quieten. But the reprisal of familiarity is illusive, and at all times, I am aware that beneath me, the other side of things—mute, silent, nameless—stares back into the living, breathing world, affecting its presence in the very materiality of my skin.

Metakosmia

When things break down, then sometimes we have to remind ourselves that there are things in the first instance. This is a movement of consolation, of turning toward the sombre fact that in this world: things are purported to exist. Assuaged by the very fact of being, even the most perilous state of ruin reaps the reward of matter. When the world falls into emptiness, then only I outlive that emptiness, and I do this by maintaining my position in the world, of occupying the space-world.

Yet things of this world often evade their own being, precluding the very desire to assign a name to their identity. Things break down. And what transpires when they do? The Nothing? The Void? A Calling? Does empty space colonise atoms that are left too long in the lurking shadows? And when I sleep, does the vacuum of being surround me on all sides, only receding into the distance when I’m awoken from a dream that gives me a physical start? My atomic structure recomposes itself, pushes the void further into the darkness, and draws a limit on the boundless horizon of a world, in which the gods are no longer present.


This is the Metakosmia, the space between worlds, the draft unleashed when two things are prised apart. What dwells in this liminal sphere? How does this realm prevent itself from falling apart? The Epicureans thought that access to the Metakosmia was only possible via dreams. There, the immateriality of the spirit realm escaped the paradox of being neither visible nor invisible, neither thing nor no-thing. It is a world, into which dreams assume a level of felt reality, as Tennyson’s poem Lucretius exemplifies:

The Gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of mow
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm!

Calm is that absence of pain, the space between worlds, the interspace in which being is both denied and affirmed. The “harsh frost” of the winter’s day reveals itself as nothing more than a reverberation of a spirit that dwells far from the limits of this Earth. Far from Earth, and also far from the phenomenon of touch. On the incompatibility of the Earth and the Metakosmia, Lucretius has the following to say: “For the flimsy nature of the gods, far removed from our senses, is scarcely visible even to the perception of the mind. Since it eludes the touch and pressure of our hands, it can have no contact with anything that is tangible to us. For what cannot be touched cannot touch.” (Chapter III, 146 my italics).

Doubling

My physical body, prepersonal and anonymous, folds into my personal sphere. Doing so, I experience a shudder at the very fact that I have body, with its own organs, most of which are concealed from my visual sight. Yet I feel them. My body is inside of me, its contours, ranges, and vistas visible beneath the surface of skin. My heart beats and I see its rhythm pulse in the upper area of my chest. But my body does not end with the materiality of my own flesh. When I remove my clothes, then a part of my body remains cocooned within the fabric of those clothes, my flesh interwoven with wool and and mohair. When I am walking, I see other people walking, too. These other people have bodies, the inside of which a similar landscape to my own exists. We are bound by our shared organs. Bound together through the human physiology, yet isolated by the very experience of those organs.

“Round about the perceived body a vortex forms, toward which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in” (Merleau-Ponty). At the heart of the vortex is the doubling of the body. I am not transparency. Rather, something takes place inside of me, such that I am alive. But this force-world is not me, as such: it is the “alien life” that inhabits the kernel of my being, diffusing a mysterious fog around the very facticity of existence. And how should I respond to this alien fog? After all, its presence is not coincidental with my visual experience of things. When asleep, my body remains animated even though my visual sight is diminished. Does my body "watch over me"? In this mode, things take over; the personal body draws into the background. Am I automated by this “alien life”? Am I the counterpart to my own double, of whom I only catch sight of in passing?

Abjection

“It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated” (Kristeva). Does the notion of abjection preclude experience? If not, then what is the aligning affect: fear, repulsion, horror? But don’t all these modes of embodiment and affect fall back into the abject? The more pressing question is: if we follow Kristeva in defining abjection as that which is “neither subject nor object,” then how do we gain a foothold in attempting to describe it? Yet, the nameless horror that the abject speaks of lacks a “definable object.” Experientially unsound, the abject contests the very being of phenomenology’s mode of intentional analysis. All that remains is an opposition to the “I,” as Kristeva says: “A ‘something’ that I do not recognise as a thing.”What remains after the “I” has been annihilated is the corpus of the body, the mute and nameless body. Nameless, but also visible.

There is a humming in my body: is that my body speaking to me? Am I of my body, or is my body of me? There is a sight of my body in the mirror: but a distance between my movement and that of the reflection. When I move, I lose sight of myself, and my reflection recedes into the distance. Merleau-Ponty would have us believe our movements “dovetail” into one another, but the movement also exposes itself to a lacuna, a black horizon. My movements are swallowed by my body. When I lie on my bed at night, my body still moves, and although I am flat on my back, I feel myself topple into the ground beneath.

A Fallen Log

Intermission

Hope to be back to more frequent blogging soon. Posts on Gerard de Nerval, Hitchcock's "Veritgo," and Merleau-Ponty pending. Perhaps I'll even get around to a report on this year's SPEP, which I'll be heading to next week. In the meantime, I am now on Twitter for readers who can't get enough. Thanks for tuning in.

Merleau-Ponty: The Edge of Being

In his paper on “Borders and Boundaries,” (in the excellent Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy collection by SUNY), Edward Casey makes the claim that “Merleau-Ponty did not concern himself much with borders and edges,” before outlining how his instinct was to look further afield, in the process continuing Husserl’s legacy of “continuism.” For Casey, Merleau-Ponty’s “divergences” (écart) are forever orientated toward eventual restoration, carried at all times by the “perceptual faith,” which ultimately arrives at the notion of the “flesh.” In Casey’s view, the reason for the omission of edges within Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is because they “conceal a scene of violence from our view or thought. They undermine what resides within the realm of comfortable or conventional thought. They disconnect and discomfort us.”

Casey’s alignment between edges and violence is absolutely right. Much could be said here on the relation here between phenomenology and place, and how phenomenology has tended to limit its access to certain places which are imbued with what Casey calls “a tempered edge, a mellow-out border.” Much could also be said for the Merleau-Ponty scholarship in general, which has also tended to limit its focus toward instances of bodily continuity and spatial unity (Casey goes so far to say that within his own “brilliant ontology,” Merleau-Ponty “represses” the edge). Yet it seems to me that there is an uncharted area at the core of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, in which an incipient edge carves its presence directly into the lived body—and that is the presence of the prepersonal body. Some prefatory points on this, then.

A question that I keep returning to: What is the body, this “mass of tactile, labyrinthine, and kinaesthetic data” (290)? Its modalities are inexhaustible—wild, natural, anonymous, perceiving, knowing, erotic, anxious and so forth. It is easy to get overwhelmed in this topology of embodiment, and thus beneficial to return to things more broadly. I will take the personal body as being identifiable with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “one’s own body.” Characteristic of this term is an account of the body as involving an “absolute here,” orientated, unified, constitutive of the “I,” and a “nexus of living meanings.” This is the body in its plenitude, taken primarily as a lived rather than biological/physical body. My body belongs to me, my body is me, “a strange mixture of being-in-itself and a being-for-itself,” in Gary Brent Madison’s cogent formula.

The upshot of this essential idea is that body-in-itself is itself a subject with an intentionality peculiar to its own materiality termed “motor intentionality.” The body knows, and it does so in an ontologically more primary way than mental intentionality. How is this possible? Because “beneath” (note the directionality of Merleau-Ponty’s word) “personal existence,” an…

“…almost impersonal existence” resides, “which can be practically taken for granted, and which I rely on to keep me alive….it can be said that my organism, as a prepersonal cleaving to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence, plays, beneath my personal life, the part of an inborn complex” (pp. 96–97).

Strikingly, Merleau-Ponty is effectively claiming that the unity of embodiment is made possible thanks to an anonymous subject existing “beneath” my personal existence, such that I am kept “alive” by this absent presence. Are we simply dealing with an instance of Merleau-Ponty’s “perceptual faith,” of which Casey thinks keeps the Merleau-Ponty’s spatio-temporal continuity intact? Merleau-Ponty speaks of when I am in danger, whereupon “my body lends itself without reserve to action” (97). The body retains, maintains, and envelops the world in, as he’ll go on to say later, its own flesh and that of the world’s flesh, too.

The critical (and underdeveloped) question is how, if at all, do the personal and prepersonal bodies encounter one another? Some of the germs of this discussion were distilled over at the Plastic Bodies blog. At stake in that discussion was the question of whether we “experience” the anonymous body as a symptomatic appearance. Here, however, we need to be careful not to conflate Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body with something primordial like Levinas’s il y a (more on this relation later). Again, how do these aspects relate to one another?

Merleau-Ponty will speak of a “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it” (296). My own body is also a body that precedes my personal existence, my existence is only the “resumption of a prepersonal tradition.” If this prepersonal tradition is persistently tacit, even when faced with moments of danger, then does it ever come to light? Despite Merleau-Ponty’s avowed philosophy of ambiguity, nowhere, as Casey indicates, is the edge of the body thematized a concern for the embodied subject. At no place does a void open, into which “one’s own body” becomes overpowered by the “impersonal zones” that surrounded me on all sides.

How to reach the edge of the personal body? Does the world cease to be once the personal body reaches its own end? What is the world for the personal body, this “pre-world, in which as yet no men existed” that Merleau-Ponty alludes to (376)? It is enough to problematize this issue without seeking to resolve it (that demand is the task of a bigger project, and not a blog post). But however this problem is raised, then I think it must be done so via temporality. The body’s ontogenesis, from anonymous to personal and then back to anonymous, is a narrative defined by each stage. Ultimately the focus concerns liminal experiences, in which the “alien civilization” that I have been born into comes to the foreground, effected in part from a dislocation from “the other body,” this “alien life” (412). Only in this retrospective, temporal analysis can the cracks and edges in the flesh be discerned.

Beneath the Mississippi

Here I am, in a small plane flying into Mississippi. The plane is empty save for one or two businessmen, inserted erratically into the cabin. We are flying at what feels like an unusually high altitude, the plane’s lithe body shivering in the world above the clouds.

Jackson airport is small, and unlike the interstitial movement of other airports, there is no committee of customs officers to meet me. I am greeted; we wait at the baggage claim until I am the last man standing. But nothing is emerging from this slowly moving baggage belt.


The loss of the baggage is more than physical, however, and more temporal. Connecting me from one place to another, I have to ask: can I be sure I have even travelled? This small, black bit of materiality is the only external proof that I originated in one world and arrived in another. We need to know what realm the luggage submitted to when it was carried along the waiting track. No answers are given, other than the baggage has a claim to reality independent of my sensory perception of it. We must leave this airport. Along the way to Starkville, I am told of the pine trees which do not cease in their presence, but rather form one continuous act of duration. I like this smell of pine with an intense passion. For me, it has an overpoweringly seductive texture to it.


But we must stop at Walmart. Until my baggage is return, claimed, or reclaimed, then I will need to fortify my well-being. I have not slept for over 48 hours—I am immune to all but the most exotic sleeping aid—but already I feel eased by this oceanic lighting in Walmart. I seek out a $12 shirt, some supplies, and make my way for the exit. The parking lot is humid and the air is balmy.


The Hotel Chester has been expecting me. Stairs have been stacked in one corner, and breakfast prepared in another. Starkville itself is glorious, a dream of America come alive.


At the conference venue. I dream of a different mode of presentation, other than this informal but efficient style that is so pervasive. In my schedule, I have written: “Standing with poise, thinking while slumped.” Many people have hands in their pockets, and casually approach the lectern and then walk around it, reaching out to the naked space between the lectern and the audience. One professor even has an officious graduate student follow him wherever he goes. In truth, my favourite conference moments happen when one delegate complains about the noise outside. A brief interval occurs and the window is closed. Those are magical moments, in which the waiting and delay constitute the real thought. It does not happen today, but there is warm rain outside that has trapped us inside the venue, which is some consolation.


Today is the 8th anniversary of September 11th, and a few papers make gentle, oblique allusions to this fact. Despite this, there is a danger of over saturation and I leave for some air. I descend upon the vacated football stadium. The sprinkler system has been left on but the team is nowhere to be found, and the place is empty.


Shortly after, having got lost in a cemetery, I am drinking a diet Pepsi in a nearby strip mall. These are great moments, moments of freedom, busting with a felicitous and genuinely memorable joy.


I leave for Alabama. Today, I am getting an Amtrak from Tousclassa to Baltimore. There is no reason for me to take this 24 hour train journey other than the pleasure of seeing this great country from the behind the screen of a window in the private room 007 of coach 2010. Myself and the other travellers wait keenly for the silver fox to appear on the horizon.


It is hard for me to conceptualise in formal terms the melancholy pleasure of being aboard the Amtrak Crescent, which travels from New Orleans to New York. As each anonymous, unknown place rapidly flashes before me as soon it then vanishes, I experience what Proust calls “the miracle of transport.”


When I made my way to the dining table at lunch, I was seated with Charles, a retired newspaper printer from San Francisco. Charles did not like the way the economy or politics was going. He had grave doubts about contemporary media, but was reassured by the impartiality of public radio. Charles had a British wife, from London. They were married in 1971, but soon after she began feeling a sense of nostalgia for her homeland. Such was the extent of her nostalgia, that Charles’ wife decided to return to Britain, leaving Charles in her wake. Several years ago, Charles tells me over catfish, she died of cancer. And now he travels alone, a “free agent,” catching up on all the reading he was unable to complete as working, married man.


Later that evening, I met Kathleen, an aspiring actress making her way to New York from Texas. Over fried chicken and rice, our conversation leapt from the phallic orientation of architecture to the tree lined streets of Brooklyn. When we stopped at Atlanta, the power went down, an indication that the Amtrak staff were changing the engine for the long journey ahead. So, Kathleen and I sat in the darkness of the dining car, she was finishing her ice tea and I was pushing my plate of fried chicken toward the upper left section of the table, as the rancorous smell was beginning to have an adverse effect on my cogency. Once the passengers from Atlanta began boarding and the lights came back on, the dining staff prompted us to leave, with Kathleen entering her cabin and me entering mine.


In the darkness of night, somewhere in South Carolina, I am sleeping with the curtains wide open. The thought of being asleep, while beyond the surface of the glass a stranger peers in to this room in motion, is enough to ensure I receive the first decent night of sleep in a long time. Here I am, lit by the reading lamp of room 007, sound asleep on my makeshift bed, an exhibition of intimacy for the American landscape to experience on this September night.


I woke in Orange, Virginia, a small town flanked by rolling hills and open fields. Breakfast, and I’m back in the dinning cart. Charles is seated about two rows away from me but is in discussion with someone else, though I sense he knows my presence is behind him. Later that morning, as I change trains, Charles emerges from his cabin. And here something strange happens. Although he makes his entrance appear to be an accident, my sense is that he was waiting, knowing I’d be getting off at Washington D.C. We exchange farewells in the tight space of the hallway, and I tell him that perhaps we’d see one another again on the Amtrak. He likes the thought, and reminds me that he’s a “free agent,” able to go where he wants.


I’m in Washington D.C, and the mood is very subdued. I cannot tell if this is the mood of Washington generally or just a blip in its atmosphere, as this is my first time. There are a few protest placards, some discarded in specially designed bins. They are written with a uniform vibrancy, which remind me less of political activism and more of a family day out.

From Baltimore, I must fly back to Charlotte, doubling over my train journey in the process. The return reinforces the gracelessness of flying, the sheer absurdity, and narcissism of human desire—and yet, a return that I will repeat next month.

What is Phenomenology?

One of the questions that emerged at the Merleau-Ponty Circle events in Mississippi (glossy travelogue to follow upon my return) concerned the orientation of phenomenology. The question arose from the paper that I gave, which was divisive at best, “inflammatory” at worst (the latter term, not mine but another delegate’s). Either way, part of the resistance to the paper was due to the fact that its conclusions are unpalatable. Here, there is a tension far broader than that of the initial resistance to the paper. On the one hand, I was fully aware that the conclusion I had arrived at in this paper was unsatisfactory in terms of both being congenial to “humanist values” and contributing a unified account of experience. Indeed, the paper is flawed in its lack of resolution but successful in engineering a sense of awkwardness in its reception. To some extent this is deliberate, though not in a post-modernist sense of theory as ironic play, but in the sense of not discussing the pernicious aspects of the paper in advance, and instead allowing those tensions to interweave with the talk.

On the other hand, despite being aware of these points of division, it never occurred to me to modify the findings in order to fulfil a pregiven mission of what phenomenology ought to conclude. This kind of thought of sculpting a conclusion in order to contribute to a generalised ethos is totally foreign to me, and it is also foreign to my sense of doing phenomenology. What I discern in a particular reading or experience as disagreeable to my “self” as a human person in the world, is neither here nor there. Honesty must underscore phenomenological work, and personal psychology must be put to one side. In short, pleasure and pain ought to be totally indifferent to the work of phenomenology, with only the experience of strangeness as a guarantor of the fruits of inquiry.

To this end, I do not see why phenomenology necessarily has an obligation to construct a set of ethical values in light of its research. This is not to say that ethics is not desirable, of course. But privileging ethical discourse as a point of departure risks engineering a direction in advance, and it seems to me that there is some value in the idea of the phenomenological epoché, even if it is not that of Husserl’s.

Why do I point this out? Because after the talk, I was talking to an eminent scholar, and I was surprised that he more or less asserted a manifesto for how he conducts phenomenology at this particular event. For instance, I was told that this particular event was a “refugee” from the world, and the focus here is to reinforce and celebrate the unity of human life. I found this peculiar. At the same time, this same person gave a talk on the importance of resolving being “lost in space,” with some instances of architecture as un-ethical in their propensity to dislocate us from time (he also insisted he was right on “95%” of things). I also found such a claim very odd. To speak of either a “felicitous phenomenology” or a “dark phenomenology” seems absurd. Phenomenology has no obligation to appease the dignity/harmony/security/cultural values of the subject any more than the natural world does. Phenomenology is not the handmaid of our desire for a common humanity, even if a common humanity is found. As Merleau-Ponty points out, at the heart of lived experience is the anonymity of the body and an “inhuman nature,” which yields things that are “hostile and alien.” This side of Merleau-Ponty is overlooked in general.

Should phenomenology proceed irrespective of the nature of its findings? I realise that this presents the method as autonomous from the subject, which is certainly dubious. But this does not mean we have to fall back into the Nietzschean territory that all philosophy is side effect of one’s biography. After all, there is a world prior to ethics, prior to politics, and above all, prior to gender, in which, if phenomenology is to have an ethical duty, then it ought to be toward uncovering that prepersonal world.

[UPDATE: Tom Sparrow of Plastic Bodies has a thoughtful response to this post at his blog. As does Patrick Craig of Of the Event, each of whom are grad students at Duquesne, incidentally. Both good finds.]

An Invisible Trace

A place is marked, marked by the events that occurred there. Trauma, eroticism, desire, nausea, anxiety, ecstasy, death—we speak easily of these affects being in place. But how to formally grasp this relation between the affectivity of an event and the place in which that event is amplified? After Merleau-Ponty, the question can be phrased as a concern with how the visible and the invisible crossover. Even – especially – here, however, there is the worry of how we can truly give voice to that which is invisible without conferring a phenomenal visibility to it.

The problem is a longstanding one. It comes up through the figure of death, trauma, and hauntings. To some extent, the question concerns how we can experience a thing precisely through not experiencing it. The indirection of this search attests to the need to capture the invisible at work before it becomes tied down by visual perception. The inclusion of “visible” is deliberate. Were we to speak of encountering a trace left in a place, then we would have to do so in a solely prepersonal way. Our bodies would have to speak on behalf of things that our eyes can no longer see.


Can we speak of the invisible as a murmur, or does the legacy of murmuring fall into a distinctly human mode of experience? This is a wide-ranging question, drawing into its abyss both the Levinasian il y a and Merleau-Ponty’s wild being in its stream of force. Let me rephrase the question: are any of the senses more ontologically prior to others? Does the murmur of the invisible strike our ears before it penetrates our nostrils? Yet another way: do the senses transcend themselves, with each dialectically outmanoeuvring the other. The hierarchy of the senses does not sit well with a phenomenological critique of ocularcentrism. As Marion has said (somewhere in Being Given), replacing one sense with another does not advance a richer understanding of things. The senses remain intact, with each contributing to an intersensory experience of the environment. Back to the murmur itself, then.

I single out this particular phenomenon, as I regard it has having special properties when held in place. We feel things in our bones, and that feeling is neither arbitrary nor coincidence. Rather, the rattling of the bones exists in direct correspondence with place. Places lives through the human body, just as I feel Millie’s eyes on me before I become aware that she’s lying by my side. Millie’s body, the sheer wonder of her being, is sensed before she is present in my field of perception. How is that contact felt? As a presence in the room, as an obligation to return the gaze of those who share the room with me.


Here, there is spirit – a vital spark no longer bound by the limits of materiality. After all, the materiality of Millie does not simply call to my attention her being. Rather, something emanates that confers a difference on the room: a spirit, a ghostly trace, the trace of a ghost. Yet the ghost of things present is paradoxical given the spatio-temporal presence of those things. Thus it can be said: Things of the present haunt the present. This statement is as far from the cult of hauntology as is possible. Nor is it a claim that refers to the Sebaldian landscape of repressed voices coming to the surface. By it, I speak on strictly phenomenological grounds, as that which evades and exceeds the threshold of appearances. For the moment, phenomenology reaches its limits, its language confined to a feeling in the body. In time, that moment may pass, but further phenomenological work is required.

[Photos of sightings in place from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo and Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on]

Daylight Horror

Two images are embedded in my childhood memory of horror, and they are both from the film The Golden Child. One is the image of blood coming to the surface of a bowl of porridge, which has always stayed with me for its grotesque combination of textures. The other is a scene, which last no longer than 30 seconds, in which a demon from hell pursues the protagonist from the depth of a cave into the blazing light of a Californian highway, the demon’s flapping wings swirling high above the brown car. Thankfully, my attachment to these two images is not the side-effect of some insidious 1980’s nostalgia, all scattered remnants of which are now consigned to the flames. Instead, what fascinates me about these scenes is the visual sight of horror within the banality of natural light. There is indeed something truly horrific about a dark entity—fictional or otherwise—that is caught in the cloudy rays of a Wednesday afternoon. When the demon ascends from the subterranean world of the caves, then we seem to be confronted with an accident in reality. It is as though a force of the unconscious has unlocked the invisible screen linking the night with the day.

This synthesis of the otherworldly and the banal was reignited last night, when watching Pascal Laugier’s truly disturbing but somehow captivating Martyrs. Amongst the library of recent French horror, this is surely yields the most artistic merit. There a coldness to this film that is matched only by frostiest region of repetitive, droning black metal. True, Frontier(s), Haute Tension, À l'intérieur were all unflinching in their brutality. But in all of these films, the standard horror gestures are simply augmented through the prism of gender reversal. Which however culturally interesting, often amounts to nothing more than a device. Incidentally, I have not seen Antichrist yet (I seldom go to the cinema due to an intolerance to other people making noise), but I sense that Martyrs will likely be a thematic counterpart. Alongside the visual and spatial aspect of Martyrs—which I’ll touch upon in a second—there is an overt presence of Bataille in this film.

A summary of the plot can be found here (although if you plan on watching the film, then you’d be advised not to follow the link). The theme of martyrdom refers to the idea of bearing witness to the transcendental. Indeed, the basic theme of the film is the relation between suffering, eroticism, and testimony. The “disturbing” aspect of the film is less the visceral gore, but the lurching sadness at the heart of the film for a “lost continuity.” The presence of Bataille in this exploration is evident in several ways. Notably, in the transitional stage of the film, where Anna discovers the underground chamber, a wall of horror reveals itself. Various photographs of dying people with their eyes seemingly transfixed in ecstasy become the focus. One of these images is the famous “ling chi” photograph, which Bataille was purportedly obsessed with and would later feature in his Tears of Eros (cf. this probing analysis by Darren Jorgensen of the role the ling chi plays within Bataille’s thinking).

This scene is a portentous warning for the character. As the film’s core unfolds, it becomes clear that the “justification” for this glorification of suffering is an existential craving for a vision that sees beyond life. The onus on vision is central, as one of the central motifs of the film is the role of the eye in its expressive response to suffering and redemption. As one of the characters says when she sees this redemption embodied: “I’ve never seen an expression like that. She’s liberated. Completely liberated….She doesn’t see what’s happening around her. [But] she is still alive.” At this point, the character has been skinned alive save for her face.

Implicit in this thesis is the idea that sustained, systematic torture and suffering degrade the empirical ego, thus putting the lived body in contact with the transcendental realm beyond appearances. The link between Schopenhauer’s asceticism and Bataille’s eroticism is weirdly aligned here, inasmuch as both seek the reclamation of a lost continuity through the modification of the body. Only, Schopenhauer seeks redemption via dissolution whereas Bataille pursues a trajectory of excess. And the ambiguity of the word “dissolution” here is what binds them both, as Bataille says: “Dissolution—this expression corresponds with the dissolute life, the familiar phrase linked with erotic activity” (p. 17). The ecstasy of the film is thus very much orientated toward a Gnosticism, in which the self departs the flawed shell of the body, in the process sacrificing individuation for cosmic wisdom. “Here,” writes Bataille, “life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite” (p. 91). The Catholicism in Bataille’s thinking is crystallised in the final scenes of the film. The first, we find the Mademoiselle responsible for the project bearing to witness to the martyrdom of Anna: “Did you see it? The other world?” And then in a final scene, the victory of Anna’s martyrdom is announced to a gathering of like-minded people, dressed in expense suits and driving vintage cars: “Her ecstatic state lasted for 2 hours and 15 minutes. It was not a near death experience. What she experienced was an authentic martyrdom.” The civility of this meeting and of the clinical, cold feeling of the film more broadly reinforces Bataille’s point that: “We have to imagine a sacrifice as something beyond nausea” (p. 92).

This post-nausea violence returns me to the use of light in the film. Truly, this is a visually striking film. Like the seminal scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where we first see Leatherhead lurching from the darkness of a doorway into the light of the hallway before then Dionysiacally rampaging in the searing sun at the end of the film. Especially notable to Chainsaw Massacre is the literally haunting confrontation with the trucker at the very end of the film. At this point, the female victim has escaped and is on the threshold of escape. In order to stop her, Leatherface must pursue her beyond the house. Journeying through farmland, the scene reaches its apothesois on a neaby road. A truck, "Black Maria," emerges in the distance, running over one of the killers before stopping to assist the girl. Meanwhile, Leatherface has caught up and the three of them are frozen in this surreal meeting at the side of the truck. The scene no longer becomes about otherwordly horror, but the sublimity of placing disparate objects beside one another in the self-conscious glare of daylight.

Martyrs is an exemplary treatment of this liminal realm between domesticated light and the “dark entity of the house” (to quote Bachelard) which resists and refuses that domestication. The film persistently explores the genuinely nightmarish realm, in which the objects of our dreams long repressed to the basement return to haunt our waking life. The outbreak of violence in the film amplifies this violence by disjoining the domestic drama of breakfast with the murder of the family. Throughout this and other scenes, natural light is used in such a way to cast a banal, realist hue upon things. The result of this is the sense that the viewer has accidently stumbled behind the scenes of a nightmare being rehearsed. Yet the rehearsal proves to be a reality, and however much banality suffuses with reality, “the unconscious,” as Bachelard says, “cannot be civilised.”