Cinesexuality

by Patricia MacCormack

Cinesexuality explores the queerness of cinema spectatorship, arguing that cinema spectatorship represents a unique encounter of desire, pleasure and perversion beyond dialectics of subject/object and image/meaning; an extraordinary 'cinesexual' relationship, that encompasses each event of cinema spectatorship in excess of gender, hetero- or homosexuality, encouraging all spectators to challenge traditional notions of what elicits pleasure and constitutes desiring subjectivity. Through a variety of cinematic examples, including abstract film, extreme films and films which present perverse sexuality and corporeal reconfiguration, Cinesexuality encourages a radical shift to spectatorship as itself inherently queer beyond what is watched and who watches. Film as its own form of philosophy invokes spectatorship thought as an ethics of desire. Original, exciting and theoretically sophisticated - focusing on continental philosophy, particularly Guattari, Deleuze, Blanchot, Foucault, Lyotard, Irigaray and Serres - the book will be of interest to scholars and students of queer, gender and feminist studies, film and aesthetics theory, cultural studies, media and communication, post-structural theory and contemporary philosophical thought.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Queer Studies, Sexuality

184 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Patricia is a researcher who has published in the areas of continental philosophy (especially Deleuze, Guattari, Serres, Irigaray, Lyotard, Kristeva, Blanchot, Ranciere), feminism, queer theory, posthuman theory, horror film, body modification, animal rights/abolitionism, cinesexuality and ethics.

Reviews

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Underneath the thick glaze of post-structuralist rhetoric, MacCormack develops the promising concept of cinemasochism, which aptly describes an interpassive structure of enjoyment. MacCormack insists that for cinemasochists the fact of cinema is more important than its content, leading her to the extreme claim that any judgment of the content of a work ruins its potential enjoyment. MacCormack's notion of the grace that accompanies the active submission of spectatorship is beautiful, if a bit light on argument. It would be interesting to compare MacCormack's masochism to the masochism Deleuze detects in dialectical thought in Coldness and Cruelty*, going beyond the sterile opposition between dialectics and post-structural thought.

*Deleuze suggests that "Masoch is animated by a dialectical spirit" where "the dialectical element is in the relation between the narcissistic ego and the ideal ego, this relation itself being conditioned by the image of the mother, which introduces the mythical dimension."

***

Take two. This work has grown on me. The chapter on Alien is pretty memorable, and the slimy feminist angels turn out to not just be ornamentation. Jumping from theorist to theorist can sometimes feel distracting, like a hunt for the next shiny thing. I initially suspected this text could be dismissed on these grounds; I now think that MacCormack's defense of the monster needs its neologisms. The words she drops from Serres, Irigaray and the rest of the French left-Nietzschean tradition serve a conceptual purpose. What may appear to be opaque or obscure terminology is better understood as hard won delicacy. MacCormack's lesson, in the final analysis, is that the etiquette of the concept matters. The cinemasochist succeeds in sublimating their taboo desires into a social dream-work, transforming the unsayable into the uncanny. This is progress. Now that the uncanny is externalized we can get real about solving the problem of what is to be done with it. In a conclusion that would have made Deleuze smile, cinema is vindicated as a form of thought, a medium for the re-engineering of our dogmatic image of thought. It's natural to wonder whether cinema needs philosophy to elaborate it. If MacCormack is right, and I increasingly think she is, the answer is "no, but the two can fruitfully work together". Cinema can't be reduced to a mere example of philosophical concepts, a simplification that psychoanalytic film criticism often falls into. The thought of cinema is autonomous. Having acknowledged this, MacCormack invites us to draw a radical conclusion: cinema thinks representationally, and non-representational modes of thought play a regulative rather than constitutive role in understanding them. Using Johanna Seibt's felicitous terminology, we could say that what MacCormack provides is an account of the working of picture-makers, how a representation is constructed to produce a specific effect. In this case, the effect in question is inferential: the Nietzscheans help us understand the strangely perverse nature of cinema. Perhaps Zizek wasn't entirely wrong to say that cinema is the ultimate pervert art, but he forgot to add that sometimes the perversion is rational on its own terms.

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cinesexuality by Patricia MacCormack opens with an intriguing promise on a new theoretical conception of desire and spectatorship (not to be confused with the theories found in spectatorship studies). Cinesexuality is posited as an “affective” way of reorienting the spectator’s understanding of their bodies and the cinematic image. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s “inter-kingdom” of becomings postulation made in What is Philosophy?, MacCormack suggests that through “horror” images (2008, 10) viewers can enter a process of becoming and relate to the images on asignifying level. One humorous description she gives while discussing zombie films is that a spleen has not gender or what gender is a zombie (100)? Thus, suggesting that viewers relate to organs as organs alone. For MacCormack, asignifying images are key to instigating a cinesexual response to the cinematic image. I note here that cinesexual is more akin to desire than sexuality or sex. The cinesexual is someone who freely desires and who “submits” to the image on the screen. I refer back to the asignifying image as MacCormack argues that visual (bodily) representations of zombies, death, horror, etc., are not weighed in signifying properties (she never defines what she means by signifying properties but I assume she is referring to the semiotic use of what is means to infer meaning from an object/subject’s utterances and appearance. I.e., this person is this or that object is that because it speaks or does this thing). MacCormack suggests that such (horrific) images pull their representation from the Baroque and are thus the liminal ground of portraying the possibilities of darkness without actually enacting the darkness (66). The Baroque instead represents the folds of the planes of desire that we can engage with without having to enact it

With all of that said, I found Cinesexuality did not capture my interest with its contents. This book is nearly impossible to read for those who are not well versed in Deleuze and Guarttari’s work. I may be wrong or underestimating readers here, but it is certainly not a text I would recommend for someone who has just started to read Deleuze. I find this to be problematic because Deleuze is a tricky scholar to engage with, not because of his rigor, but rather because of his open and multi-variable philosophy. Because of MacCormack’s detailed use of Deleuze, I can imagine that readers may feel lost or flustered by the shifting nature of her discourse and theories. Thus, one asks who is this book for? Deleuzians? I’m not so sure. If you are familiar with Deleuze’s work, MacCormack treads familiar territory.

Additionally, in “Chapter Six: Zombies without Organs,” MacCormack praises the figure of the zombie for its asignifying attributes, “Zombies are supernatural ‘too-much-organ’, necrophilia shows desire and pleasure in the secular use of the everyday organ-bodies. The inside of the body, the internal organs, lose their metaphoric signification when the thorax is opened, in autopsy or medical imaging, because they become the property of medicine not desire.” (130). While this is certainly a provocative approach to take, it loses its valor when MacCormack acknowledges the Afro-Caribbean origin of the zombie only to subsequently dismiss its inception as unrelated because the appearance is not evident in the films chosen for analysis. She writes, “Because the films discussed in this chapter do not refer to the genesis of the living dead as they are in other zombie films.” (104). I understand this passage acknowledging the debt zombie films owe to the Afro-Caribbean site but arguing that it is only relevant when bringing films of that context into the analysis. I disagree. I find it difficult to theorize around the figure of the zombie (or any topic for that matter) while dismissing its origins and frequent relationship to the figure of the enslaved individual. Unfortunately, it’s a common symptom in Western Philosophy to pick and choose when Black or Indigenous thought is relevant to your study or to only include it when it convenient to do so.

From reading her material, MacCormack is an intelligent and rigorous philosopher and in that way, her work is not for the faint of heart. I just wish she would have applied more caution on the socio-cultural implications that her concepts engage with, as oppose to writing them off as irrelevant to her analysis.