Intimacy and the Anxieties of Cinematic Flesh: Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis

Description

In a "return" to Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud, Intimacy and the Anxieties of Cinematic Flesh explores how we can engage these foundational thinkers of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in an original approach to film. The idea of the intimate spectator caught up in anxiety is developed to investigate a range of topics central to these critical approaches and cinema, including: flesh as a disruptive state formed in the relationships of intimacy and anxiety; time and the formation of cinema’s enduring objects; space and things; the sensual, the "real" and the unconscious; wildness, disruption, and resistance; and the nightmare, reading "phantasy" across the critical fields. Along with Husserl and Freud, other key thinkers discussed include Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne in phenomenology; Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, Julia Kristeva, and Rosine Lefort in psychoanalysis. Framing these issues and critical approaches is the question: how might Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis, so often seen as contradistinctive, be explored through their potential commonalities rather than differences? In addressing such a question, this book postulates a new approach to film through this phenomenological/psychoanalytic reconceptualization. A wide range of films are examined not simply as exemplars, but to test the idea that cinema itself can be a version of critical thinking. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Where Intimacy-Anxiety Was, There (Cinematic) Flesh Shall Become: Toward an Introduction Chapter 1: The Intimate Spectator, the Cinematic Ego, and the Nothing (To Be Anxious About) The Spectator’s Othered Consciousness The Spectator and the Cinematic Ego The Enthymematic a) The Ego and Narcissism b) Enthymematic Lacunae and/as Consciousness Modifications Chapter 2: Cinema’s Enduring Object and Time Two Models of Time and the Now in Freud and Husserl Cinema’s Enduring Object; the Enduring Object of Cinema Flesh in Time—Condensing Presentification and the Struggle for the Now: Don’t Look Now Chapter 3: Four Modalities of Intimate and Anxious (Cinematic) Space A Psychoanalytic Secret A Phenomenological Paradox The Internal as Intimacy Projected into the External Space which Creates Anxiety (Projected Forfeiture) The Internal as Intimacy Projected into the External Space which Produces Intimacy (the Projected Familiar) The External as Intimacy Introjected into the Internal, Producing Intimacy (Introjected Familiarity); And the Inversion (External Intimacy Producing Anxiety) (Introjected Defamiliarization) The External as Anxiety Introjected into the Internal, Producing Anxiety (Introjected Crisis); And Its Inversion, External Anxiety Producing Intimacy (Introjected Masochism) Chapter 4: Shading the Real: Cinema’s Sensual Phantasms Lacan’s Real Husserl’s Irreal Phantasy of the Intimate ir-Real On Semblance Chapter 5: Passionate Abnormalities and the Disturbances of Wildness Wild Meaning and the Wolves Owness, Nature, and the Sensually Seen Body Wildness and the Corporeal Sublime Passionate Abnormalities Chapter 6: The Desire to Not Be Protected: Breathless Desires of the Nightmare Nightmares’ Aporiastic Howness Nullity: Nightmare As the Deceptive Object Belief (At the Point of Collapse) Phallocentric and Racist Nightmares at the Level of the Repressed Liquification of Flesh at the Level of the Double Ego The Mirroring Effect of the Nightmare at the Level of Desire Feminine Sexuality and Daughter-Mother Conflict Hysteria as Resistance; Flight as Sexual Act and Surplus Jouissance Bibliography Index