Abstract

In 2004 Bernard Stiegler posed “the tragic question of cinema” as that of the germ of regres-­‐‑ sion to television and pornography it has always contained, just as in 1944 Adorno and Hork-­‐‑ heimer argued that Enlightenment reason has always contained a germ of regression making possible a prostitution of theory leading only to the threat of fascism. If comparable threats attend Stiegler’s cinematic question, then this implies the need for an account of this potential for regression, that is, an account of the relationship between desire, technology and knowledge. Tracing the aporias of the origin of desire and trauma in psychoanalysis is one crucial way to pursue this account. Exiting these aporias depends on recognizing that the origin of desire has for human beings always been technical, and hence that the instruments of desire form its conditions and condition its forms. By thus analysing the staging of desire and the setting of fantasy it becomes possible to reflect, for example, on what it means that for Genet fascism was theatre, that for Syberberg Hitler was cinema, and that for Stiegler the new prostitution of the tele-­‐‑visual graphic is digital and algorithmic. Hence arises the potentially tragic question of the possibility or otherwise, in the age of the ubiquitous screen, of a new cinematic invention and a new cinematic practice.