Here is an onlined mini-lecture by Giorgio Agamben on the profane and the sacred.

I am just posting this to say that even if you read the series of posts on the movie Bound before (when each post had a “part x” in its title), they are very different now and worth re-reading.

However, I am not done updating them yet, and so if it still has a “part x” in its title, then it is the same post from before.

Thanks

I would like to propose a possible reading of the movie Whale Rider, in particular the fact that Paikea must, to make her grandfather respect her, go out to sea and (almost) drown. I want to compare this with Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the king’s two bodies in Homo Sacer. My basic thesis is that Paikea has two lives – the life of a girl and the life of her ancient ancestor – and that the life of the girl must die to make the relations with their ancestors proper once again, and therefore gain her grandfather’s respect. I then advance a slightly more nuanced conclusion that the girl (as homo sacer) gets effaced, but does not (completely) die, arguing that the movie actually makes a slight emendation to Agamben’s analysis.

In his examination of sovereign power, Agamben examines Ernst Kantorowicz’s thesis that the king has two bodies, the body of the individual person who is the king and the body of the perpetual, uninterrupted, sovereign. It is precisely “the perpetual nature of sovereignty” that Kantorowicz uses to justify this doctrine, dating it back to Christian theology (92). Agamben challenges the Christian legacy, instead claiming that the practice can be dated to the Roman pagans, and asserting that this pagan legacy reveals “the other, darker mystery of sovereign power”, its absolute nature (as opposed to its perpetual nature) (93). His initial thesis is that this darker zone, revealed through an examination of ancient Roman practices, shows that “the political body of the king seemed to approximate – and even to become indistinguishable from – the body of homo sacer, which can be killed but not sacrificed” (94).

Apparently, the pagan ritual involved not merely substituting an imago or wax effigy for the emperor’s body, but – and here Agamben is quoting Elias Bickermann’s arguments – “in the case of the imperial ceremony, it appears instead beside the corpse, doubling the dead body without substituting for it” (Elias Bickermann, “Roman Imperial Apotheosis”, 6-7; cited in Agamben, 95; I cannot find anything online that is relevant either about the author or the work). This doubling is what, for Agamben, constitutes the zone of indistinction between the body of homo sacer and the sovereign.

To understand why this is a zone of indistinction, Agamben examines the figure of the devotus. That discussion is only important for my purposes to the extent that, in it, he explains the function of “the funeral rites” (98). Death releases a “vague and threatening being”, which is both “uncomfortable and uncertain”, uncertain in the specific sense that the being’s relation to the world of the living is murky (ibid.). The funeral rites transform that being “into a friendly and powerful ancestor, who clearly belongs to the world of the dead” (ibid.). With that new being, one can “maintain properly ritual relations” (ibid.). Homo sacer – the sacred man who can be killed (being human) but cannot be sacrificed (being sacred) – is, in this light, the living equivalent of what death releases, but one for which there can be no funeral rites. [Footnote: Agamben, as I mentioned earlier, does not make the direct argument from outlining the funeral rites to homo sacer. He has an intermediate step, the surviving devotus, for whom a colossus – or a kind of replacement corpse – can be found, and thus proper funeral rights enacted. But, again, for my purposes such an explanation is irrelevant.] The figure of homo sacer is one which is in “an intimate symbiosis with death, without, nevertheless, belonging to the world of the deceased” (100).

This, Agamben argues, is effectively what is revealed in the death of the emperor. The funeral ceremony for the emperor requires a ritual burial of his corpse, and yet still requires the presence of a colossus, or a double [Footnote: Not being much of a classicist, I can only wonder if there was ever a situation in which the emperor’s body was not able to be ritually buried.] This indicates that at his death, the emperor “frees a supplement of sacred life” that “must be neutralized by means of a colossus”, despite proper funeral rites (ibid.). And here Agamben changes Kantorowicz’s formula, claiming that instead of two bodies the sovereign has “two lives inside one single body: a natural life and a sacred life” (ibid.). The remains constitute a “bare life that has been separated from its context and that, so to speak surviving its death, is for this very reason incompatible with the human world” (ibid.). That excess, for the emperor, is gathered up through the funus imaginarium and “divinized in the apotheosis”, whereas for homo sacer, no such ceremony is possible (100).

But why, if he has just elaborated this very clear difference between homo sacer and the emperor, can Agamben claim that the emperor’s body contains within it homo sacer? I think that his claim here is less that there is an identity between the sovereign and homo sacer, and more that those two enter into a zone of indistinction – as revealed precisely through the emperor’s death. And while it may (or may not) be compelling to argue that he is overstating the case, I think the main point – that it becomes impossible to distinguish between homo sacer and the sovereign because they both are constituted by an inhuman excess – is very convincing.

In light of this reading of Agamben, I think Paikea’s brush with death takes on a much more sinister light (parallel to the way that Agamben reveals the sinister side of Kantorowicz’s formula). Instead of attempting an exhaustive analysis of the movie in light of Agamben’s theory, I merely want to explain (in general terms) how I think that could be done (taking time to examine one or two scenes in depth) and why I think it is more illuminating than other readings.

The movie begins with Paikea narrating her history, while her mother is in labor with her twin brother. The ancient Paikea was a man, who came on the back of the whale. The girl-Paikea’s brother was supposed to be the new leader, but he and his mother died during his birthing. The movie, then, starts out with ritual gone awry, and with two deaths bringing Paikea’s culture to a point dangerously near extinction. When her father names her Paikea, her grandfather becomes angry. She cannot possibly be the leader they are waiting for, because she is a she; naming her Paikea is an insult to his culture and history.

Paikea, then, bears the name of a dead child meant to lead her culture. My point, without appropriating the out-of-context Roman ritual and its history, is that this represents an untenable relationship with the ancestors. She is a woman, and it is culturally unintelligible for her to be Paikea. But I think from the beginning she – insofar as she is a she – represents the excess which is constitutive of sovereignty. She bears the name of the one who is supposed to lead her people. As such, I do not think it is too much of a stretch to argue that she is living a life of that name. It would not even be that much of a stretch to contend that she is homo sacer. She is not in the paradigm case for the modern version of homo sacer – the concentration camp – but it is important to remember that Agamben thinks the virtual presence of the camp is created every time the presence of atrocities “depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign” (174). In this sense, Paikea’s life is entirely dependent upon her grandfather (who is the sovereign and not merely the sovereign’s police) and his will. Even though she has the opportunity to go with her father, to do so she would be forced to abandon her culture and thus suffer a kind of persecution. Likewise, questions “concerning the legality or illegality of what” happens to Paikea make no sense: the sovereign (her grandfather) has declared a (permanent) state of exception (justified by his need to find a new leader, or for the survival and health of his people – a very biopolitical power indeed) (170).

But she is obviously much more than homo sacer – and this addition, to which her homo sacer nature is an excess, is borne by her name, cultural knowledge, skill with the Tiia (which is almost certainly misspelled), and her mystical ability to call the whales. She is clearly not simply homo sacer. So, I think she fits into Agamben’s idea of the sovereign.

However, there is a complication. She is a she, for her grandfather, before she is Paikea. Thus, he does learn to like her, but he originally hated her. Thus, also, when it comes time to start his school, he leaves her waiting at her school. She is of no consequence when it comes to the training of a leader, because for her grandfather she remains a she.

He does, however, change his attitude in the final scene, when his wife brings him the tooth that Paikea had gotten (which was the final test to determine who the next leader would be – a test none of the boys in his school passed) and when she is riding on the back of the whale, he has the sudden realization that he had always been wrong. At her bedside, after she has gone through her brush with death, he asks for forgiveness. His formulation is striking: “I am just a fledgling new to flight”. Paikea is no longer, can no longer be, a girl: (s?)he is much older than he is, and thus (I would argue) she has died. Her life is over when she brushes with death: she becomes the whale rider, and ceases to be a she. Of course, then it becomes possible for Paikea to be a leader in the grandfather’s eyes – not because she has ceased being primarily a she (although that would, I think, be awful as well) but because she has ceased being recognized as a she at all.

This, at least, is how I want to read that scene. I think this reading is confirmed in her last soliloquy, where she fully identifies with her name. There is also a curious “our” there, when she says, “I know that our people will keep on going forward all together, with all of our strength”. She effaces herself in an “our” that ambiguously refers to her and her grandfather, or perhaps her and ancient Paikea (while the second our more clearly refers to her people). Either way, she has effaced herself, her I, by the end of that sentence. It is that effacement, I think, that affirms sovereign power’s inhumanity, and it is that I that emerges only to be submerged, that exists only to be dispensed with, that gives the hint of homo sacer still included through its exclusion.

In this reading, the sovereign’s death ritual does not fully capture homo sacer; it still leaves a remainder (I am tempted to say, hastily, a remnant) of homo sacer. The movie shows this not only through that “I” that turns into an “our”, but also through the lack of actual death – she does not die. Also, too, the last soliloquy is in English, as opposed to her cultural tongue. So there is still a remainder of her left, but it is a remainder that is even more radically homo sacer: incapable of being sacrificed (for the dual reasons that its presence is unacknowledged and it has already been sacrificed) and yet capable of being killed (while her grandfather looks at her lovingly, with his arm wrapped around her, she is still very clearly in his power, and at his mercy).

Thus, this reading subtly modifies Agamben’s thesis about the sovereign and homo sacer. The sovereign in this case is always constituted by homo sacer, and there is no ritual to put that excess into a proper relation with humanity (suggesting an even greater zone of indistinction than the one that he justifies).

This, I think, more closely captures the problematic aspects of her sacrifice than a simpler reading that has her as a straightforward heroine. She does have to sacrifice herself – her grandfather and her culture are sexist – and it is hard to imagine that even so profound an act as the one she undertakes would be able to escape those problems. I think, also, it is more supported by the movie itself (for the reasons I have suggested, as well as for others which I will not go into).

When I figure out how to insert clips, I will put the three scenes most relevant to my reading here:

            I will start with the scene that ends in Caesar’s death. He has just knocked Corky out when Violet comes in with a gun. Violet tells Caesar that it is all over, that she has called Micky, and that he had better run. Caesar protests that Violet still does not know him after all of the years they had spent together. Caesar begins to go for the gun that’s lying on the floor. Violet tells him to stop, but Caesar does not believe that Violet can shoot him. Violet says, “Caesar, you don’t know shit” and then we see her fire the gun again and again at him, as blood starts hitting the paint and he falls down.

            The scene obviously recalls certain other scenes in the movie. First, it recalls the scene in the bar, when Violet tells Corky that she knows Caesar and that Shelly never did. It turns out, as we already knew since she had underestimated Caesar’s intelligence from the beginning, that Violet is the same as Shelly, making the same mistakes that he did. Then it parallels that idea in reverse, where Caesar turns out to underestimate (or at least not to know) Violet after all of those years, because he cannot comprehend her shooting him. Thus, when Violet claims that Caesar doesn’t know shit, she is denying her link to Shelly (since Caesar knew that Violet did not know him) and reaffirming herself against the bisexuality that he represented. She also kills Caesar, thus reaffirming once again her distance from a representation of bisexuality. But this is problematic, because she shoots him with a gun when guns have already been coded as signifying bisexual desire.

            This scene also recalls Caesar’s shooting of Johnny (and, to a lesser extent, of Gino). When Caesar shoots Johnny, he is out of control. While Violet also pulls the trigger again and again, she always fires a bullet (whereas Caesar ran out of bullets and continued firing). She is methodical, and while there is certainly a great deal of anger in her, and perhaps even an opening of the floodgates that had previously blocked her anger, it is all under her smooth control. She does not dirty herself by rushing at Caesar afterwards and hitting him, or by abdicating her agency. She is responsible, and she knows it.

            So it seems like, with the possible exception of the gun representing bisexual desire, Violet has finally ended her fight with bisexuality and emerged victorious. After all, to jump ahead a little, Corky ends up affirming (in the final scene) that she does not know the difference between the two of them (which was the very first displacement away from bisexuality). And everything seems wonderful as they kiss and drive off at the end, leaving both the mafia and bisexuality behind.

            However, there is another, less happy way of reading the end scene. Violet and Corky run away, yes, and they do leave the mafia behind. But the mafia (or at least its official side, which is the only side left alive) represents a group that is focused on eliminating bisexuality. So they are running away from a group that fights bisexuality, which would seem to at least hint at their bisexuality (or at least their fight with bisexuality being incomplete). And their running away is rather abrupt: the tires squeal as they leave. So, they are still running. What could they possibly have left to run from? Yes, they need to start a new life, and they need to get away from the mafia so that they will not be found out. But what would they be caught for? Stealing the money that represents the product of bisexuality. And why would they need to drive off that quickly? Perhaps they are still running from bisexuality. And Corky does not actually say there is no difference between them; she just claims not to know what it is. So, recalling the scene with Caesar, it seems that Caesar’s lack of knowledge (about Violet and about Violet’s knowledge of him) returns: they do not know what the difference between them is. They cannot know what that difference is, because it involves bisexuality and they have always run away from acknowledging bisexuality’s existence. They are running from bisexuality. They cannot name it; they cannot even recognize it is what they are fighting. But they cannot successfully defeat it if they do not recognize it. Maybe – although I am hesitant about this – they have successfully resolved the initial displacement about difference. But that does not solve the actual problem, which they must still run from.

            Caesar does not know Violet, because Violet has taken on the signification (once again) of the bisexual. She assumes it with more control and more authority than Caesar did, because her set of displacements makes killing him unambiguously good (whereas his made killing Gino at best an ambiguous good, clearly shown by the untenable position he had been in). But she still assumes it. Both Violet and Corky have on sunglasses at the end of the movie because they cannot see clearly: they do not understand that they are not finished with bisexuality, because they never even understood that bisexuality was what they were dealing with.

            So, against the happy-go-lucky ending that seems obvious, I want to read a continued lack of acknowledgment of bisexuality that drives them to once again flee. The next post (or possibly series of posts) will be devoted to understanding Agamben’s theory of sovereignty and the zone of indistinction in the light of this fear of bisexuality. The basic thesis that I will advance is that bisexuality creates a zone of indistinction, which is intolerable to all parties in the movie, and yet nevertheless founds the various normative worlds encountered in the movie. I think bisexuality is intolerable because it creates this zone of indistinction that does not allow for a clear elaboration of difference that Violet and Corky, as well as the official side of the mafia, desire. After that I have the option of assembling all of these posts into one long post, where I would make substantial edits and attempt to account for what I understand to be the weaknesses of this reading. I had intended to do that from the start, but I am no longer certain that it will be worth it (so, if anyone is looking forward to it, they should comment and tell me why it would be a good thing).

            This time I want to examine Andy and Larry Wachowski’s film “Bound” without using a particular theorist as a guide. Specifically, I want to ask why Caesar has a look of what I understand to be calm right before killing Gino. Is this moment of peace just an eye at the center of the storm? Or is there something more behind it?

            I will try to argue that there is something more behind it. I think the peace is the result of an inner dialectic within Caesar that results in the victory of Caesar’s inner Johnny.

            One obvious interpretation of this scene suggests itself immediately. It runs something like this: Caesar closes his eyes because he cannot face what he is about to do, and, once he does not have to face it anymore, he grows calm and at peace. This interpretation locates Gino’s power in his physical person and appearance, which obviously goes away (and, in a superficially Arendtian sense, becomes unreal) once Caesar’s eyes are closed.

            Another interpretation that readily lends itself to the scene is that Caesar – in the face of actually making a decision, of permanently committing himself to an act – gains calm. In a pseudo-existential vein, this interpretation claims an authenticity in his act that lets him escape from the bad consciousness that had plagued him until then. He had always hated Johnny; he had always resisted the official side of the mafia by joining business and desire. This moment he is at peace with himself because he is following through with who he is.

            I would suggest that both of these interpretations miss the point. Caesar is calm both because he is abdicating responsibility (by not seeing his decision, as the first interpretation suggests) and because he is finally taking responsibility (by being true, though perhaps not to “himself”, as the second interpretation has it). But because they are both true, they both miss the point (since their truths, from the perspective of the two readings, are in tension). Caesar is, by closing his eyes and abdicating responsibility for what is right in front of him (even clearer when he denies his agency by claiming that Johnny made him do it), assuming responsibility not for the act of killing Johnny but for becoming Johnny.

We do not see him pull the trigger because he is not truly taking responsibility for the killing. He is, instead, allowing another agency to work within him. He is letting that agency take control, and it is not the act of killing but the act of releasing himself into that agency that gives him a moment of peace. My perspective is that that agency is really bisexuality’s presence. [Footnote: I would read the gun, or the wielding of the gun, as a bisexual act. While traditionally a masculine weapon (with the shaft, or penis, and the bullet, or sperm) the movie focuses on the hole in the gun (with the hole, or vagina, and the chamber, womb). To wield it, to use it, or to desire it, is to have a bisexual desire. But, again, my main point is not to push this reading, but to show that some agency must be at work within Caesar.] However, even if that is not accepted, there must be something at work within Caesar to cause him to be at peace. And when he claims that he did not do it, he blames Johnny (claiming that Johnny made him do it).

Thus, I think that it is possible to read this scene as Caesar ceding control to the part of him that is like Johnny. [Footnote: And, since Johnny signifies bisexuality in my reading, of bisexuality.] He exercises so much control through the previous scenes in the movie, but really – underneath it all – he is someone exactly like Johnny. That is why the scene where he is beating Johnny’s dead body is reminiscent of Johnny’s beating of Shelly (which Caesar detested). This view would also be able to explain Caesar’s animosity towards Johnny – a constant reminder of what lurks within him, being in his presence has to be torturous for the Caesar that wants to be in control. That’s why he hits Johnny, when Johnny splatters everything with blood – because lurking within him is another Johnny. And that is why, finally, he is suspicious of Violet colluding with Johnny, because if Caesar is ultimately like Johnny, and Violet likes Caesar, then there is no reason not for her not to like Johnny.

Finally, this explains why Caesar kills Gino. While Johnny is very ostensibly upset with Gino at reprimanding him, Caesar looks relatively unaffected when Gino passes judgment on him. Johnny can let out his feelings, but Caesar cannot. Caesar has to let out his disapproval, and that happens more disastrously because he cannot slowly let off his steam like Johnny. When Gino tries to claim that Caesar is family that is only half right. Yes, Caesar is Gino’s family in the sense of the mafia, but Johnny is both that and his son by right of blood. And Caesar cannot possibly deal well with being unfavorably compared with Johnny – who is at best Caesar’s worst half. Thus, Caesar takes out his anger, or rather gives his inner Johnny free reign, by killing Gino: after all, if Johnny is more favorable in his eyes, than Caesar – by releasing his Johnny – should also be more favorable to him.

To briefly summarize, then, Caesar looks calm because he has released all of his inner tension, his inner conflict, and ceded control to his inner Johnny. Whether that inner Johnny signifies bisexuality is another matter, but at the very least the inner Johnny is a plausible explanation of the scene. He kills Gino because he is mad at being reprimanded (without being able to cool off less disastrously, as Johnny was doing), because in favoring Johnny Gino is implicitly telling Caesar to let go and become Johnny, and, finally, because he cannot stand Gino favoring Johnny over him. There are thus two dialectics going on in the scene – the dialectic internal to Caesar (which culminates in his peaceful expression and the inner Johnny’s victory), and the dialectic between Johnny and Caesar. Because of the success of the inner Johnny within Caesar, the outward dialectic can no longer resolve in the synthesis that Gino represents. Instead, that synthesis must be destroyed, as the – now destructive – dialectic between Johnny and Caesar plays itself out. And that dialectic’s result is the schizophrenic, constantly moving, Caesar that we see for the remainder of the movie.

In this post I seek to examine Andy and Larry Wachowski’s film “Bound” from the perspective (once again) of Giorgio Agamben. This time I want to go over the scene where Caesar kills Gino (played by Richard Sarafian). I suggest that Caesar’s ability to kill Gino is a good illustration of the figure of homo sacer within the sovereign. I want to then consider  William Connolly’s criticism of Agamben, and relate that back to the film – showing how there is no one true sovereign in the scene but also how Connolly is being unfair in his characterization of Agamben’s argument.

Agamben’s argument (which I also examine here) is that “for the sovereign, death reveals the excess that seems to be as such inherent in supreme power, as if supreme power were, in the last analysis, nothing other than the capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed” ( Homo Sacer, 101). He finds the figure of homo sacer – the one who can be killed but not sacrificed – within the sovereign. He finds this figure within sovereignty by tracing Ernst Kantorowicz’s argument about the king’s two bodies back to pagan ritual. That derivation will, for this post, be relatively unimportant. Instead I want to consider what should be true if Agamben’s thesis is correct, namely that “we ought to be able to find analogies and correspondences in the juridico-political status of these two apparently distant bodies” (102). Now, the two analogies that he finds are that the “killing of the sovereign,” like the killing of homo sacer, is never “classified simply as an act of homicide” (ibid.) and that (as Michael Walzer pointed out about the death of Louis XVI) neither the homo sacer nor the sovereign can be ritually sacrificed (by which he means put through the ritual of a trial). However, since “Bound” does not have a properly juridico-political sovereign (and since, as Agamben points out, “sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept” or “an exclusively political category”) these two analogies do not apply to Gino’s death (28).

What, then, are the analogies to be found? Can we find any at all? What impact would it have if this sovereign death bore no analogies to the death of homo sacer? William Connolly (in his book Pluralism) effectively argues that precisely because we cannot find strict analogies in every situation of sovereignty, we must reject Agamben’s tight theory of paradoxes (cf. Connolly, 140). His argument is precisely that we cannot find homo sacer everywhere, that we cannot find a relatively singular model of sovereignty everywhere, and that trying to generalize the two (in a tight logic) is unacceptable. Thus he claims that it is the sacralization of sovereignty, the process of generalizing homo sacer, that prevents a renegotiation of sovereignty (“To renegotiate the ethos of sovereignty in the contemporary context requires an audacious pluralization of the sacred and a corollary realization of what it takes to defile the sense of the sacred embraced by you, me, or others”) (Connolly, 147). Thus also he divides sovereignty into a “positional sovereignty” (an institutional position, like the Supreme Court, which reigns supreme) and the sovereignty of power (the group or individual with an irresistible amount of power at their disposal) (ibid.). “The finality of sovereignty circulates uncertainly between authoritative sites of enunciation and irresistible forces of power. This is not a confusion in the idea of sovereignty – a misunderstanding to be eliminated by a sharper definition of the term. It is, rather, the zone of instability that sovereignty inhabits.” (Connolly, 141).

The two theorists are engaging in an interesting and profound debate. I want to halt their discussion for a moment to interject a text on which to debate about it (namely, the movie “Bound”, and specifically the scene of Gino’s death).

The position of the positional sovereign is completely clear in this scene. Gino sits down between the two disputants and dispenses judgment (not unlike Connolly’s example of the Supreme Court). When he walks towards Caesar, he imperiously declares: “You point the gun at me? You know who I am? I am Gino Marzoni! Capeesh?”. Nor is there any doubt in his mind that Caesar will give the gun to him. His is clearly the positional sovereignty.

And it would indeed seem that there is another sovereignty, a sovereignty of power. Thus I think it is significant that, when Caesar pours Gino’s drink, we see him split into many distorted images and we hear an echo. Clearly this is supposed to initiate the schizophrenia that consumes Caesar for the rest of the movie, but I also think it serves another purpose: it makes Caesar stand in for the multitude, for the many, who are in a position to challenge Gino. Caesar seems to clearly possess the irresistible force of power in this scene.

I would argue, however, that the true holders of irresistible power are Violet and Corky, who hold the money. The money, in this case, represents the power to challenge the positional sovereign. Violet and Corky hold it, and they are the ones who are truly behind this killing (it is possible to understand Caesar’s abdication of responsibility towards the end of the scene in this light). Of course, it is also possible to see fissures of Gino’s authority in Johnny’s insistence that they stay instead of go. And Connolly’s point, that this is not wrapped up in a tight logic of paradox because there was a way to check and change the result, of course makes sense (cf. Connolly, 142). If Gino had asserted his positional sovereignty here (and it would have made sense to do so), then the scene could have gone completely differently. But instead he allowed the fight between Johnny and Caesar to escalate, which led to the pulling of a gun, which led to Gino’s death. So it truly does seem like there is a split sovereignty here.

But, on the other hand, I also think it is possible to find analogies to homo sacer (a figure that I am not sure Connolly understands as Agamben does). Caesar is not punished for killing Gino (indeed, no matter how hard Micky looks for him, he will never be found, having been killed for something other than killing Gino). Nor is Gino sacrificed (he is killed not through some ritual process, not through some inter-mafia war as Caesar intends to contend). And the excess revealed through his death is what Caesar does to Johnny after he dies. The pathetic “don’t shoot” that Johnny says after he has been shot is sovereignty reduced to its inability to be sacrificed (here the analogy would be something like Johnny does not die in a dignified way, or in a way that would befit the supreme power – leaving what that way is vague) and yet its clear ability to be killed. So, on my reading, the homo sacer revealed through the death of the sovereign is Johnny. This is not the tightest reading of Agamben, since I am not talking about the sovereign’s homo sacer, but it is a genetic reading in the literal sense that Johnny is Gino’s son. He is what is left after when Gino dies. It is not a direct translation of Agamben’s argument about sovereignty, but I think it is fairly clear that Johnny is a figure akin to homo sacer.

Such a reading might seem to acknowledge that Connolly has the right of it in this debate. After all, did I not just claim that I was not tightly applying Agamben’s logic? Yes, I certainly did, but it is precisely because I do not see Agamben as articulating such a tight structure of sovereignty that I am more sympathetic to him. He does not find the literal ritual of a second death in today’s sovereigns as it was in ancient Rome. Instead he finds “a trace of the unsacrificeability of the sovereign’s life” in America’s law against trying the president in an ordinary legal trial (Agamben, 103). Clearly he is not simply saying that the President of the United States is homo sacer; instead he is advancing a very sophisticated comparison between the two that is fairly compelling. And it is a comparison that can also be adapted to fit the shooting in “Bound”. So I think Connolly’s points stand, but that they miss their target.

            This post I want to once again visit  Andy and Larry Wachowski’s film “Bound” – this time from the perspective of William Connolly’s Bergsonian idea of duration (as advanced in his book Pluralism). The specific scene that is of interest is the scene where Corky and Violet plan to steal the money. It is a scene that has a number of temporal oddities that well reflects the temporal politics of becoming. My thesis is that Bound, in this scene, gives a good representation “of the complexity of time in politics”, and shows the struggle of a group that is “below the field of recognition, justice, obligation, rights, or legitimacy” to rise “to a place on one or more of those registers” (Connolly, 111, 126).

            I have, in this post, advocated why I think Corky and Violet’s burgeoning relationship constitutes what Robert Cover calls a nomos, or normative universe. This post will take that for granted, and build on it to show how they use “emergent causation, a mode of temporal flow irreducible to the efficient causality of social science or the webs of interdefinition so dear to narrative theory” to struggle to rise to the politics of being (111).

            The relevant scene is here: (to be posted when I figure out how to do it)

            Connolly’s argument is that what he calls chrono-time (the time of the clock) reflects the politics of being, but that there is another kind of time, a durational time, that reflects the politics of becoming. [Footnote: To be sure, he also argues that the two temporal modes affect non-human life as well – from the formation of lava to the evolution of the universe, everything is affected by both kinds of times. I am only interested, however, in the human impacts of such temporal interactions, and thus can move directly to their political meanings.] His argument is that in every conversation, in every reaction to an event, someone’s “attention extends to past and future alike, not as the past was when experienced but as it arrives now in the interstices of this conversation” (100). Indeed, his argument is that the present is entirely dependent on this recalling of the past and anticipating of the future. “The present could not be without protraction. It would be an empty instance, like the flick of a second on a Timex.” (ibid.)

            However, durational time is not something that we can control. As a form of time that is irreducible to traditional notions of causality, what emerges from this conjunction of past and future is something unpredictable (though retroactively it might be explainable). Thus, he writes of durational time that: “We can usually endure it; we can often intervene in it; and we can periodically make this or that flow seem intelligible in retrospect. But we can’t know it, master it, or draw it into a linear trajectory rolling along without twists, turns, or backflows, because of limits in our capacities as actors in the world, the involuted course of the world, and the dissonant conjunctions between them. Duration is time as becoming” (111).

            Clearly, Violet and Corky are limited actors in the world. Just as clearly, they are forced below the registers of legitimacy, recognition, justice, obligation, or rights. This corresponds (I think) to Robert Cover’s description of persecuted nomoi (which you can see my description of here). And it is clear that Violet and Corky are persecuted (they have to stop what they are doing when Caesar comes in, and Caesar will not let Violet leave him). So, it makes sense that they would have to partake in durational time, in emergent causation that is not reducible to traditional notions of causality. If they were reduced to those notions of causality, they would never have a chance to succeed, true change would be impossible, and what is would forever be (the politics of being by itself).

            And so it makes a great deal of sense that, when they hatch their plan, the founding act of their nomos, they have to engage in a kind of time that is both unpredictable and non-linear.

            This involves an element (in this case) of projection. We thus learn that Caesar and Johnny have always hated each other (we project that emotion into the past). Corky and Violet’s plan revolves around harnessing that conflict, and turning it into something it was and was not: a homoerotic struggle for Violet’s affection. It always was that, of course, but we only learn of it in the planning session between Violet and Corky. [Footnote: I will not give up on the idea of bisexuality here. They are effectively having sex, with more trust, since thieving is sex for Corky. Why, then, do they constantly interrupt their sex with reference to men?] This projection is strictly speaking logically explainable. It makes sense of Caesar’s earlier reference that he hated when Johnny came over to his house. But I think it also gets at the inability of “ready-made” concepts to fit onto what happens (110). To be sure, those concepts are valuable (they are “relevant to life”), “[b]ut they do not entirely capture its [the things being talked about, in this case the movie “Time Code” (2000)] flow as it unfolds” (ibid).

The time sequence goes from the present (where Caesar informs Violet that he hit Johnny) forward briefly (where we see Violet and Corky, representative of their intervention into the situation which sparks the whole thing) and then forward to see Corky tied up. We misunderstand that scene, because we are predicting a certain kind of linear future onto the story. But Corky is not tied up because Violet betrays her, as the movie leads us to expect. The nomos, which – being persecuted – cannot exist in the politics of being, is obviously going to fail if we read it in chrono-time. But they are not using chrono-time, they are using durational time, and we cannot predict what is going to happen – we are surprised that they stay together time and time again. This particular part of the time sequence, I think, highlights both the unpredictable nature of durational time, and its relevance to the politics of becoming.

Violet’s narrative (which explains what Caesar does/did with the money) juxtaposes two different temporalities, but in such a way that we know what the present is: she is just illustrating events that happened in the past. In other words, that narration is not quite incompatible with chrono-time: it is linearly strange, it involves an odd temporal repetition and is thus disturbing to it, but there is a way to make sense of it. That makes a good deal of sense, since it is narrating Caesar’s actions, and thus takes place on the plane of the politics of being. It is mixed with the politics of becoming – it is an odd repetition – but in a way that is subservient to the politics of being.

Corky’s narrative (which explains what she is doing/has done/will do) signals the success, or dominance, of the politics of becoming. This time it is no longer the past and the present, which is roughly compatible with chrono-time, but a narration of the future, which deprives us of our temporal moorings since we cannot possibly know whether the narrator or the events are in the present (or whether neither are). This makes a great deal of sense, since it is narrating the challenge to the dominant nomos, a challenge to the politics of being. But, my argument is not only that it is a nifty technique to illustrate their politics of becoming. They absolutely needed that weird integration of past-present-future to succeed. That can be seen most clearly when Corky tells Violet to have already (by the time of the image) put the paper in the basket. This temporal sequencing is truly unpredictable, since the rules governing the situation of the image can be changed at any time by the narration governing the sound. Without that ability to change the situation, Corky’s plan would have no chance of success, since there would be nothing to put into the suitcase to make it the appropriate weight. Thus, not only is it useful for the persecuted nomos to have recourse to a durational time, but it is absolutely vital – or at least that is how I retroactively make sense of this scene in the movie. [Footnote: It should be painfully obvious that this cannot serve as a definitive reading, that this has to miss certain parts of what is going on – for instance the hidden bisexuality that I think also carries this scene, or (more obviously) the kind of thing they are striving for. Does the money get them legitimacy? Recognition? Rights? None of the categories I or Connolly present adequately represent what, exactly, they are striving for.]

This temporal shifting culminates in a final re-integration into what becomes the present, when Violet comes to fulfill the most important part of the plan. But we can have no idea if it is actually the same present as what we were experiencing before, since it comes after an indeterminable amount of chrono-time. Thus, the present comes back, but in a way that is completely disconnected with the present from before, in a way that indicates the success of a politics of becoming.

I think, however, that Connolly’s theory, while helpful in explaining the temporal shifts, is unhelpful in telling us what the persecuted nomos should do to gain recognition, rights, legitimacy, etc. He tells us that we cannot predict what will happen to them, and he gives us guidelines for how to act if we are recognized, have rights and legitimacy, etc. (we must have agonistic respect to those who already are, and exercise a critical responsiveness to those emerging). But he never tells us exactly what a persecuted nomos should do. Obviously they must make use of durational time, and obviously that adds an element of unpredictability to what will happen, but what ought they do? Here, I think, Cover is more helpful as he claims that a persecuted nomos “must elaborate the hermeneutics of resistance or of withdrawal — the justificatory enterprises of institutional stances chosen by or forced upon those who would make a nomos other than that of the state” (to see my brief criticism of Cover’s reliance on state persecution to the exclusion of other kinds, go here, in the third section on comparisons to Louis Althusser). This is not very specific, but that lack of specificity opens the door to unpredictable results. In the case of “Bound”, Violet and Corky exercise a hermeneutics of resistance that they (until the end) make look like a hermeneutics of withdrawal – a resistance that makes ample use of durational time to attempt to emerge in the politics of being.

I want to revisit Andy and Larry Wachowski’s film “Bound”, this time from the perspective of Roland Barthes’ (in his Rhetoric of the Image). I want to specifically examine the character Shelly (played by Barry Kivel) and what he signifies.

For a brief plot summary that is pertinent to the scene I am examining, see here (I do not, agree with their characterization of the film, but their descriptions are fine).

One of Barthes’ arguments in Rhetoric of the Image is that “all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others” (Barthes, 37). This has significant cultural importance, since it “poses a question of meaning and this question always comes through as a dysfunction” which is occasionally recuperated through tragedy or poetry, but always there. In particular, “in the cinema itself, traumatic images are bound up with an uncertainty (an anxiety) concerning the meaning of objects or attitudes” (ibid.) Shelly clearly figures in what is arguably the most traumatic scene in the movie (where trauma is understood as, I think, not just a thing which is painful, but also one which is shocking, and, in a certain way, numbing): the torture scene. I want to propose a reading of that scene using Barthes’ ideas of anchorage (the “various techniques” that are “intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs”) and relay (the elements of an image or scene which “are fragments of a more general syntagm” allowing for “the unity of the message” to be “realized at a higher level, that of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis”) (Barthes, ibid., 38). My thesis is that the relay acts as an anchor for that scene, as it moves us away from the primary sense of trauma and ethical tragedy that properly characterizes all cinema, to the more comfortable role of non-obligated spectator. I also continue advancing my thesis (though more tentatively) that bisexuality is present as an undercurrent in the scene.

I want to bypass an analysis of the first scene where we see Shelly, and move to the second scene (which occurs immediately before Shelly gets tortured). Corky is moving a box on her truck, as a black car (the black coding a certain sleekness, a certain wealth, and a certain nefariousness) pulls into the parking lot. We see the person we later learn to be Johnny getting out of the back of the car in a red suit, silver tie, and wearing a white earring (the colors at odds with the more somber black and the earring at odds with the seriousness of the situation, already indicating that Johnny does not quite fit in), as well as black glasses (again, sleek, rich, nefarious). We pan to Corky again, making us aware that what they are doing is in the wide open, that they have no fear of being caught in illicit activities. We go back to Johnny (though we can now see two other figures, who are both wearing dark suits and glasses), who gestures for someone to come out of the car, and (all the while smiling) grabs that person (who we see to be Shelly) and pulls him out (while he’s pulling him out we are left to stare at Johnny’s expensive, but out of place and ostentatious, gold rings). Shelly looks, I suggest, shocked. This enables us to read him as already in a traumatic state, as having already given over to numbness: he does not come out of the car at first not because he is resisting, but because he is not really aware of what is happening. Johnny (who arrogantly brushes his nose, closely embraces Shelly, and continuously looks excited) exudes a presence of control and authority. Corky, only knowing Shelly and not even knowing his past, can clearly read the situation for what it is (and her facial expression, which we are once again privy to, helps confirm our reading of the situation, as does the music). Shelly, while walking with Johnny – or perhaps being walked by Johnny – looks back at Corky. His expression, I think, conveys a helplessness, a mute plea for aid, that – in its slack-jawed, numb and numbing way – is a striking instantiation of the other’s face (as elaborated by Emmanuel Levinas). Corky is obligated, or is compelled by the face to be obligated, to help him, and his mute appeal is (since the shot puts us in Corky’s place) a command for us to help him. But we, as outside of the movie, are absolutely incapable of stopping his impending demise. Thus, the audience is put into a situation of helplessness, a situation that already builds up in us the numbing trauma that infects Shelly. [Footnote: This puts us in a position that makes us aware of our distance from the film. We are always distant, but we are not usually forcefully reminded of such distance. Thus, it calls into question the ethics of the cinema, provoking a kind of watching which is ethically motivated and minded. It resists, in other words, both the identification with the camera that Walter Benjamin’s theories in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and challenges the scopophilliac attitude that Laura Mulvey discusses in her “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.]

To be absolutely clear, this ethical obligation does not happen because we empathize with Shelly. We are not, as it were, put into his shoes and we are not about to be brutally tortured. Instead, we are put into that place of trauma out of an inability to stop, to prevent, his torture; in other words, out of an inevitable ethical failure. It is, in this sense, tragic: the failure does not happen because we are somehow doing a wrong, through some fault of our own. It is an inevitable failure because of the separation created by the very nature of film. Thus, the scene makes vivid the trauma and tragedy that is implicit in all films. This makes sense, from Barthes’ position, because polysemy is constitutive of all images, and polysemy is traumatic. [Footnote: The slight reformulation of Barthes’ position, the slight criticism, that implicit in this argument is that all films are tragic, where his argument is that polysemy is not always recuperated through tragedy. I think my point still stands, however, because the distance created through film has to put us in a position of tragic helplessness. It is, however, possible to argue that we are indeed at fault, for having not been ethically motivated previously. In other words, we are forced to call into question our previous attitude of impartial spectating, and in so doing we realize that we are at fault. Even if this reading is compelling, I still think an element of the tragic remains in all films.]

Skipping ahead a little bit directly to the torture scene. First, we hear the noises (with Corky) through the toilet. The toilet is an ambiguous signifier. It recalls somewhat trivial terrorizations of schoolboy bullies dunking people in the toilet, which probably serves to indicate Johnny’s inability to fit in (and his bully-like pleasure at causing others pain). It also signifies the place where we get rid of our wastes. As such, it literally signifies an expelling of an unwanted and useless piece of ourselves, and the torture scene thus takes on a biological metaphor. The last signification that I want to point out is that the toilet is a hole. The uncleanness of it – and (at the same time) its perfect cleanness, since it is, in fact, clean, natural water – signifies (in a way that becomes more obvious when we see the blood dripping into the water) the woman (or, more specifically, the vagina). This signification is more controversial (I think) as well as more complicated. While it is fairly obvious how the other two significations work, this is fairly opaque at first.

My argument is that it makes sense only if Shelly is understood as signifying bisexuality. During the torture seen, Johnny beats up Shelly. He then throws Shelly against the toilet, so that (effectively) the toilet beats up Shelly as well. Shelly, then, stands in a relationship of identity to both men and women. This relationship is sexualized, I think. For instance, Johnny calls Shelly a “bitch”, and if he is Johnny’s bitch he is also the toilet’s bitch. The scene is also sexualized because the first thing that Caesar does when he leaves is kiss Violet, as if the torturing had aroused him.

Even if, however, my argument about the toilet as forcing Shelly to signify bisexuality is wrong, I think I can easily maintain that the toilet is an ambiguous signifier. It (and the music as well) terrorizes us (and Corky, who in these scenes is oftentimes put in a situation that is roughly identical with ours); it expresses an uncertainty. We may, in fact, know that Shelly is being tortured, that something evil is happening, but we cannot really be certain about the nature of that torture, about what it means, about how we should receive it. Indeed, for the first bit of the scene we can only hear the torture. Thus, our ethical helplessness is amplified, we have no idea what to do because we do not even really understand what is happening. Indeed, we are even denied the face towards which we could have an ethical obligation. In this sense, the toilet signifies a fourth thing (at least initially): it becomes Shelly’s face. This bigenders Shelly, turns him into both a man and a woman. It is but a short step from there to bisexuality.

But, again, even if you do not accept my link to bisexuality, it should be very clear that the lack of a face – or the image of a face in an object that bears it no resemblance – once again puts us into a place of extreme uncertainty, and once again reveals the polysemy underwriting this scene.

Thus, there is a clear trauma – so clear that it numbs our ethical responsiveness not only through our helplessness but also through our inevitable insecurity as to whether or not we are even supposed to understand Shelly as having a face. There thus, for Barthes argument to hold up, needs to be elements of anchorage that prevent our terror, but that does so in a way that lends “the text… a repressive value” (Barthes, 38). It has to repress certain kind of meanings that we can attribute to the scene, certain interpretations we can grasp from it.

The most interesting thing about this case is that I think it anchors the scene through a relay, thus problematizing Barthes’ contention of the firm separation of the two (and, indeed, of the dominance of one over the other) (cf. Barthes, 38). We move fairly quickly from the actual torture scene to the room outside of it, and we are quickly shifted from Corky’s view (for whom the polysemy and trauma is near identical with ours) to Violet’s. The reality of the torture scene gets bound up in Violet’s desire to leave, and a dispute between Caesar and Violet. It also gets bound up in Caesar and Johnny’s dispute, and the power structure of the mafia (Micky giving Caesar orders). It finally gets wrapped up in Micky’s father-like protection of Violet. The trauma, in other words, gets relayed into a series of different relationships, all of which are problematic, but none of which expose us to the trauma of the primary ethical relationship of the face. All of them, in other words, obscure our fundamental helplessness, and thus ease our sense of trauma.

When we go back to the torture scene, we go in with baggage that prevents us from truly encountering Shelly’s face in a primary way. We go in with the baggage of mafia authority, the baggage of Caesar’s hatred of Johnny, the curiosity over what Violet is doing. We do, I think, encounter trauma once more, through the cutting off of the finger, but we do not see that cutting off, we miss the act itself. Thus, the trauma we experience is significantly decreased. That is why, when we go back to Corky, we very quickly move away from her as she was (when she was in a situation very similar to ours) and move to the discussion between Violet and Corky (reminded, once again, of their relationship). We are being directed, we are being relayed, past a troubling moment that exposed the traumatic, tragic nature of all cinema, to the more comfortable, less helpless role of the spectator who does not feel an obligation towards the characters.

I think, also, that the relay clearly moves us away from that bisexual reading (as well as from the biological reading, which – I think – gets integrated into the bisexual reading later). It is, moreover, a relay: it interprets the scene in a way that propels us forward (since Shelly’s death is now coded as a catalyst for Violet’s attempt to leave, as well as a catalyst for the hatred between Johnny and Caesar).

Thus, the film encounters a moment of ethicality, a moment that problematizes cinema in general, but instead of staying true to that moment, it betrays and abandons it, attempting to cover it over (in a way that leads it to be fused with bisexuality).

I think that the Andy and Larry Wachowski’s film “Bound” is an interesting case for examining the exclusions that found what Robert Cover calls nomoi. This article is an attempt to analyze two scenes from the movie in light of the idea that every normative universe is founded on an exclusion. I then advance the further argument, drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s work in Homo Sacer, that the nature of that exclusion is such that what is excluded is, in the very fact of exclusion, simultaneously included in the nomos. The basic thesis that I will advance here is that bisexuality is excluded in the constitution of Violet (played by Jennifer Tilly) and Corky’s (played by Gina Gershon) nomos.

I am doing quite a bit of summary of the two scenes that I am talking about. However, I only summarize those elements of the scene that I need for my argument. For an okay general plot summary, you can go here. For all of the dialogue of the second scene that I discuss, you can go here.

The relationship between Corky and Violet starts from the time they see each other in the elevator. It moves on to an attempt at sex that gets halted by the intrusion of Caesar (played by Joe Pantoliano). [Footnote: The phrase give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s needs to be examined alongside the movie, since God seems to be present, or present in absence, throughout the movie.] After that, Violet visits Corky in her car and apologizes [Footnote: That dialogue goes: Corky: “If there’s one thing that I can’t stand it’s women apologizing for wanting sex.” Violet: “I’m not apologizing for what I did, I’m apologizing for what I didn’t do.”] and then they have sex. The next thing that gets talked about is Caesar being part of the mafia (after Violet says that she “needed that”). That segues into how Violet met Caesar (at a club that he took over) and how long they’ve been together (5 years, the same amount of time Corky has been in jail). That then leads to Corky explaining why she was in jail, and the scene ends with both of them being satisfied with Corky’s confession.

Clearly, then, there is the implicit equation of Corky’s time in jail with Violet’s time with Caesar. I would contend that this parallel removes Caesar from being an internal threat to Violet and Corky’s relationship. Robert Cover’s argument in his article Nomos and Narrative is that certain nomoi are constituted as persecutory, and those groups must elaborate either a “hermeneutics of resistance or of withdrawal”. Caesar clearly forces (throughout the movie) Violet and Corky to either withdraw the rules of their normative universe, or resist the dominant nomos (Caesar’s). Indeed, the film is at least partially an account for the various ways that one can negotiate between those two responses (from seeming to withdraw, but actually resisting to very visibly resisting). So Corky and Violet’s nomos is clearly persecuted by Caesar. He is the first (and the last) to interrupt the relationship. And he certainly constitutes a threat, time and again, for their relationship.

But that threat is not one internal Violet and Corky’s nomos. Indeed, part of what constitutes the threat of persecution in Cover’s terminology is that it must come from outside. Corky never really sees Caesar as a threat for Violet’s affection. The external nature of this threat is amply demonstrated by Violet’s contention that she “needed that”, referring to the sex, and again later when Violet affirms that Corky has given her what Caesar was never able to. His perceived impotence is perhaps best seen by the assumption that Violet (and, through her, Corky) makes about his inability to think when faced with the crisis of the stolen money (they expect him to simply panic and run). This is clearly premised on dismissing Caesar as a threat (both internally and externally, and it is the latter assumption that proves to be a mistake).

The first (and, I think, only) internal threat present for their nomos in the movie, which results in their only argument, revolves around bisexuality. Shelly comes in and has sex (at least from Corky’s perspective, and possibly from Shelly’s) with Violet. We (by which I mean the audience) hear Violet making pleasure noises, and then it fades into a scene right after Corky and Violet have had sex (for the second time). Corky finds the idea of Violet having sex with Shelly to be unacceptable. Then she repeats the beginning of a line she had used earlier: “if there’s one thing I can’t stand…”. She finished it last time with “it’s women apologizing for wanting sex”. It is significant that she has to reformulate her idea here.

She is not simply criticizing Violet for having sex, since she knows what happens between her and Caesar. Instead, the scene makes it explicitly clear that it is a desire to have sex that she is criticizing. So, she has to find a new “one” thing she cannot stand (since the previous line is now invalid). What she cannot stand (and here she localizes the claim more) “about sleeping with women” is “all the fucking mind reading”.

The conversation then turns to Violet sticking to her “mind reading” – by inquiring about Corky’s mood – and Corky taking up a different track, by speaking about a fundamental difference between the two. Violet follows her down that path, saying she did not have sex but instead was working, and equating her act with Corky’s thievery to show a fundamental sameness between the two. At which Corky makes the very compelling response that Violet’s argument about work does not explain Shelly, to which Violet responds that Shelly knew what she was. Corky then makes an angry retort about Shelly just wanting to watch, and Violet asks her to leave.

This scene is extremely complicated. On the one hand, Corky is maintaining that it is absolutely okay for women to want sex. On the other hand, what she really means by sex is sex with women (or possibly sex with women or sex with men, but not both). But instead of admitting that she had overstated her claim before, she resorts to reframing it in the form of a criticism of women generally, for an activity that she (being a woman) is also participating in (since she is criticizing Violet for a desire, or a mental state).

The original saying haunts the situation, and Corky cannot bring herself to confront it (she never brings herself to actually say what she thinks the difference between herself and Violet is). This haunting, then, takes the form of a denial, since Corky denies that she and Violet are similar, but a displaced denial, one which is deflected from the actual concern of Violet’s bisexuality. Another displacement is effected when the similarity/difference argument moves away from a judgment on Violet’s sex with a man, to a judgment of whether Violet had sex with a man (Violet redefining her act in the different register of work). But the whole scene does not respond to Corky’s actual concern since it is not an act that Corky has problems with, but a desire.

The conversation then enters another stage, when Corky quite rightly points out that simply classifying Violet’s actions as work does not explain why she slept with Shelly (since there is no payoff for it). Violet then asserts that Shelly knew her sexual identity (which, interestingly, is never stated; she never claims to be a lesbian, only that Shelly knew what she was, as if bisexuality was not even a possibility) so it was okay. Her claim seems crazy because the whole discussion takes place on a false premise: that Corky cares whether Violet has sex with men. She denies that false premise, but not in a way which brings them back to the actual concern of bisexuality; instead, her denial takes them even farther away from the original concern – first by displacing it from a judgment on the goodness/badness of an act to a judgment on the identity of an act and then by displacing it again onto Shelly’s awareness of the situation – so far away that bisexuality is not even a possible identity. From that triply displaced position, Shelly’s acknowledgment of Violet’s sexuality removes him from the possibility of having sex with her: his acknowledgment eliminates him as an internal threat, and nothing that Violet does can possibly change that (Violet, under this logic, cannot have sex with him). Corky’s retort that Violet is a workaholic is answerable by Shelly acknowledging Violet’s sexuality because that removes even the possibility of a threat (the only possible explanation of what occurred was as work, however unproductive). Corky, thoroughly unsatisfied with the answer not because it is illogical from the point of view of the conversation but because it does not answer her actual concern, cannot help but be frustrated, at which point she takes the next logical step in this conversation by asserting that the problem is Shelly’s desire (of wanting to watch). This makes sense because the conversation has been displaced onto Shelly’s knowledge/mental awareness and the specter of bisexuality sexualizes that awareness, by making it a question of Shelly’s desire (just as that specter effected all the other displacements: each one is propelled by a desire to escape bisexuality without ever actually acknowledging it). So, Violet’s desire to have sex with men (and women) is finally displaced onto Shelly’s desire to watch. That is regarded as an insult to Violet because it mixes her registers: it mixes Shelly’s pleasure with Violet’s pleasure (since Shelly takes pleasure in Violet’s pleasure with other women, or at least the appearance of that pleasure). In so doing, it comes unacceptably close to hitting on Violet’s actual pleasure (which is the only plausible explanation for Violet having sex with Shelly, since it makes no sense for her to be working at that time), and so Violet has to kick her out.

So, it is clear that bisexuality is being excluded in the relationship. In order to found a nomos between the two of them, they have to have trust in each other (a notion the film makes explores). What Violet and Corky are doing until they have sex (the first time) is just having fun. Cover is very explicit about this: fun cannot possibly constitute a nomos. [Footnote: He writes, “If the Amish lived as they do because it was fun to do so, they might still fight for their insularity. They would not, however, be disobedient to any articulable principle were they to capitulate. And they could not hold someone blameworthy -- lawless -- were he to give in.”] After that, though, and with the dialogue between the two about their personal histories, it becomes clear that they are both after more than just fun. They want a relationship, and a relationship in this sense is nothing other than a specific form of a normative universe (with certain rules of what is allowed and what is not, as well as narratives that validate those rules; e.g. Violet’s history with Caesar, and her act of communicating that history, founds the rule of disclosure that leads Corky to offer her history, which she had previously denied to Caesar). The second scene that I examined (after they have sex for the second time) happens after that initial grounding of their nomos, and shows the first threat to it (in the form of a dispute). The dispute, however, does not come from the outside, because their nomos is being persecuted, but rather from the inside, as Violet takes an action that Corky deems a violation of the laws of their nomos.

The second scene, then, undoes the normative universe founded in the first scene (or at least temporarily destroys it). It happens because Corky does not feel that Violet stayed true to the laws of their community (and, through her denials, Violet agrees with the rule: she is accepting the exclusion of bisexuality, but arguing for a reinterpretation of her action using a different register). Their nomos is founded, in other words, through an exclusion of a certain kind of activity, and it is threatened, internally, through a perceived inclusion of that exclusion.

My explanation up to this point has all been consistent with Cover’s theory. I want now to advance beyond that theory, and argue that a nomos is founded not only in exclusion, but in a particular kind of exclusion: namely, an inclusive exclusion that Giorgio Agamben theorizes in his book Homo Sacer. His claim is that the inclusive exclusion defines the structure of sovereignty, about which it is important to remember that it “is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law (Schmitt), or the supreme rule of the juridical order (Hans Kelsen): it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it” (Agamben, 28). Remember that Corky originally claimed that the one thing she could not stand is women apologizing for wanting sex. That is a law, and I think it is one which applies to their relationship (at least in its original formation). As such, it is subject to the structure of the sovereign, and the exception (which, Agamben argues, “is a kind of exclusion”) (Agamben, 17). The exception in this case is obvious: women cannot want to have sex with both women and men. But an exception is a kind of exclusion that “is not, on account of being excluded, absolutely without relation to the rule” (ibid.). “On the contrary,” Agamben argues, “what is excluded in the exception maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule’s suspension.” (Agamben, 17-8). This suspension, this abandonment, founds the law as a law (“the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule”) (Agamben, 18). His argument is, then, more than just that an inclusive exclusion founds every nomos. [Footnote: His argument is referring only to law, and a nomos is more than simply a set of laws – it is also a set of narratives. However, I will interrogate that aspect of the nomos, and the complications that ensue from it, in a later post.]. It is that that inclusive exclusion makes the law operational, that the law is not truly a law without it. To help understand this concept, I am going to interrogate it with respect to Corky’s law.

Corky creates an exception to the rule that she laid out – that much is clear enough. What is still unclear is why the exception founds the rule, why the exception’s operation is simultaneous with the law’s operation. All laws are laws not because they apply to an individual case, but rather because they can apply to a generality of cases (they are “valid independent of the individual case”) (Agamben, 20). Thus, the first instantiation of her law is not yet a law: it applies itself only to a particular case, and we have not yet seen its validity independent of that case (the case being the sanctioning of Violet’s desire to have sex with Corky). Indeed, we do not even really see it applied to a single situation because Violet is not apologizing for what Corky thinks she is (she is apologizing, instead, for her previous inability to follow through on her desire); thus the law is completely inoperative at the time of its first invocation. But, once the law would apply to a generality of cases, once it would truly become a law, it creates an exception.

If the law is valid independent of particular cases, it only gains the ability to apply to particular cases (which it is independent from) “because it is in force, in the sovereign exception, as pure potentiality in the suspension of every actual reference” (Agamben, ibid.) The law can only apply to a specific instance and remain a law (that is, remain independently valid) if it has the potential to suspend every reference and yet still be valid. Thus, the law must apply to every situation only through its possibility of applying to no situation, and to be operational it has to take into itself that possibility in the form of the sovereign exception. Corky’s law is not truly a law until it gains independent validity through a procedure that marks it (through the exception of bisexuality) with the possibility of suspending every particular reference and yet still being valid.

So, I think the situation in “Bound” is much more complicated than Cover would make it out to be. I want to affirm, instead, that bisexuality is present in its absence, that it is inscribed into the laws of the nomos, and that that presence – the acknowledgment of which is continuously deferred – threatens the internal unity of the nomos. Their refusal to acknowledge its presence, their refusal to acknowledge the exception, forces their nomos to break up, because without acknowledging it – without admitting its presence – they cannot found laws, and thus cannot found their nomos.

The way I read Theodor Adorno’s Culture Industry Reconsidered was at least partially as a response to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. I also read Roland Barthes’ Rhetoric of the Image that way. So I am going to try to elaborate the three in relation to each other. These are all three difficult texts, so there is a good chance that I am completely missing the point. As such, any comments of a critical nature are welcome (non-critical comments, as I shall show, are either fascist or conformist).

Adorno argues that a critical attitude must be adopted towards the culture industry, precisely because of its importance (Adorno, 58). Benjamin articulates a specific kind of critical attitude as appropriate for art as technologically reproducible. [Footnote: I see Adorno and Benjamin as both talking about the same object, an art that they delineate in a variety of ways from what they understand to be traditional art. Thus, I understand the culture industry as the same object as the technologically reproducible age of art. Of course, that does not stop differences existing in what each theorist finds in that object. For example, Adorno sees the star system as being a defining element of this new kind of art, where Benjamin sees it as the last stage of the aura that is destined to disappear. But they are both discussing the same phenomena, despite their different perspectives on it.] The kind of criticism, with attendant “new tasks of apperception”, that Benjamin understands as belonging to the new art is a distracted one (Benjamin, 268). The constant disruption of the individual scenes by the ones following them in movies prevent us from being immersed into art, and instead force the art to be absorbed into us. Benjamin understands this art as fundamentally progressive, as helping to advance the revolution by inducing the masses to understand and accept the new things demanded of them. Adorno understands it as reaffirming the status quo. It seems like Benjamin’s distracted examiner does not achieve the critical consciousness sought after by Adorno.

But, at the same time, I do not think that Adorno is simply advocating the immersion of oneself into art. Benjamin’s argument is that that leads to fascism. He claims that the inevitable result of immersing oneself in art is self-alienation, a separation from the human meaning of art through a lifting-up of art for art’s sake. Aestheticized politics, the result of valuing art for art’s sake and not caring about the human impacts of it, leads to a fascist celebration of war, where people experience their “own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (Benjamin, 270). This viewpoint seems alien to Adorno (even more alien to Adorno, I would argue, then it is to Benjamin). And I think it is compelling as a predictive result of what will happen when people are contemplatively immersed in art. But, it seems to me, Benjamin is missing a third option that Adorno is beginning to elaborate, and that Barthes takes on more strongly. Adorno is indicting the new art for precisely the same reason that Benjamin was indicting the old art. Adorno’s point is that the culture industry leads to an order that “is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings” (Adorno, 59). He sees the culture industry as ultimately pacifying, preventing any revolution through the “empty harmony” which reconciles all discontents “with the general” (Adorno, 59). Adorno is arguing, I think, that though the audience might occupy the testing position of the camera, the empathy felt towards the camera actually denies the capacity for criticism (Benjamin, 260). [Footnote: I am probably putting words in Adorno’s mouth, or at least applying his argument in a way that he does not in this article, but I think it is a valid interpretation of his basic point.] While certainly the position of the camera is not “compatible with cult value”, understood as what makes immersing oneself in art as bad, it is still a horrifyingly bad position to occupy (Benjamin, 260).

Interestingly, however, Adorno does seem to affirm (at least relatively) the spiritual, cultic consciousness that Benjamin understands as grounding the traditional art and its fascism. Adorno claims that it is only the “last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual make-up of the masses” that “explains why they have not, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is construed for them by the culture industry” (Adorno, 60). I think that Benjamin would agree completely with this statement, but that they would each evaluate it in very different lights. Adorno sees this as being the last thing left that prevents the “stupefication” that seems to me to be identical with Benjamin’s distracted examination. But I do not think that Adorno is truly celebrating this spiritual remainder. I think he is contending it as better than the alternative of the culture industry, but I do not think he is contending that it is the solution, or the alternative to the problems posed by the new art. Instead, I think the critical consciousness that he advocates (though does not develop in this essay) is opposed to both a retrograde cultic spiritualism and the shameless conformism of the new art. The critical consciousness that he advocates is, I believe, locatable in the general themes which Barthes (and Hall, and possibly the entire enterprise of cultural studies) takes up in an examination of cultural artifacts. It is constituted by a resistance to the distraction that the culture industry depends on. [Footnote: I might be missing the point. Adorno seems to contend that people want to be deceived, and are even aware of it (Adorno, 58). But if that is the case, than a critical consciousness does not seem to be the answer desired, since the public apparently already has it. Instead, what seems called for is what he names elsewhere as “the we resist the call of practicality with all our might in order ruthlessly to follow through an idea and its logical implications", which would be imbued with a critical consciousness but goes one step further, I think, then what he outlines in this essay (Adorno, Problems of Mora Philosophy, 4). It would probably be constituted by both an awareness that it is impossible to live a good life in a bad world, and an advocacy of resistance defined by an unwillingness to participate in the bad world. Examining that would take me too far afield, I think, and so I will not pursue these speculations here.]

Now I want to elaborate just a little on the critical consciousness that I understand Barthes to be examining. It does not exist in distraction, although of course it is aware of the state of distraction that the audience welcomes the piece in. The critical consciousness does not absorb the image into itself or get absorbed into the image. Rather, it seems that there is an attempt at a permanent distance between the image and the self. [Footnote: Barthes denies that we are actually talking about images in the way that Benjamin is – and this is why I presume that Barthes was responding to Benjamin at least in part in his essay, although I do not actually know if that is true. Barthes claims that “it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image – we are still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing” (Barthes, 37). I am not sure that I accept this objection to Benjamin’s argument. Obviously we are still a writing culture, but I think we are becoming more and more the imagistic culture at least partially envisioned by Benjamin. It seems to me that writing has started to be more and more affixed to images, as opposed to the other way around, and that that is a step in the direction of an imagistic culture. This point, however, is not integral to the thesis of this essay, and I do not have time to develop it sufficiently.] The distance is garnered through a making conscious of the distracted information gathered naturally. Benjamin was not thinking about a world where someone could watch “Thelma and Louise” thirty times and become conscious of all of the complicated inner workings of the film which are designed to operate on an unconscious level for Benjamin’s audience.

Here, it gets even more interesting. Barthes ends up affirming something that looks suspiciously like the auratic existence of art condemned by both Benjamin and (I think) Adorno. The consciousness he sees as being articulated by the photograph is not “of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there” (Barthes, 40). The conjunction of the “here-now” and “there-then” is identical at least with Adorno’s reconstruction of Benjamin’s point (“the presence of that which is not present”) (Barthes, 40; Adorno 57). This is fascinating. I think the dilemma posed here is at least somewhat resolvable through the criticism I gave of Barthes’ view on the blog Girlpower2 (that the camera does radically transform reality). But I am not sure that that completely satisfies, since Benjamin’s point is also that reality becomes technologized, so that the only natural that we can accept in art becomes increasingly dependent upon technology. Thus, it would make sense for Barthes to say that people gradually grow to see the opposition of the cultural code and the natural non-code (or, as Stuart Hall points out in his essay “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates“, the naturalized code) in photography from Benjamin’s perspective. Perhaps the actual resolution has to do with the having-been-there that Barthes talks about as actually exhibiting the having-been-there. The original, after all, is truly lost with the camera, and thus the aura does atrophy; but I think Barthes is pointing out that it is a mistake to think that the aura disappears. Barthes’ having-been-there might be speaking about the auratic existence of the original object which is no longer present. But in so doing, he is not reducing art’s value to that aura (which would, after all, not be a new kind of consciousness at all, but rather making present the absence of that aura. This, I think, is closest to Adorno’s viewpoint: by this explanation, Barthes is arguing that the auratic existence haunts the photograph and is never completely eliminated, even though there is a celebration of a new kind of exhibitionary here-now).

He affirms this position with an attitude close to Adorno’s, because the opposition between the naturalized code and the cultural code risks masking the constructed nature of the cultural code, and thus denying critical consciousness. Thus, he does, in the end, seem to affirm a critical consciousness, an awareness of this masking, that Benjamin misses and that Adorno points to.

The Benjamin article was taken from the third version unpublished during his lifetime translated by Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott