Taking the animal and the machine as two ontological others of the human, this paper looks into how they “are added to” and “replace” the humanist others based on race, gender, class, etc. in contemporary cinema. This “supplement” urges us to reframe identity politics and cultural studies in a larger “polis” emerging between and encompassing both the human world, which becomes ever more globally homogenized, and its radical environment, natural or technological. The topic is a global cinematic phenomenon that even (...) local films directly embody. The animal is captured on the boundaries between “the symbolic” and “the real,” between “the actual” and “the virtual” in the artistic works of Werner Herzog, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Peter Greenaway. The machine convolutes the issues of informatics, embodiment, and cyborgism, often through SF fantasy that pervades Hollywood blockbusters and Japanimation. The rare amalgam of animal–machine receives further attention in David Cronenberg's films, and becoming-animal/-machine in Avatar empowers the human in the posthuman sense of biopower that transforms the body and registers it on a larger network. From this perspective, discourses on the animal (zooesis) and technology (technesis) work together to bring a new political potential. Animality and technology no longer form a naïve dichotomy of nature vs. civilization but combine in ways of making more visible the new condition of life. It unfolds in a cinematic “zone,” an ephemeral “clearing” for “bare life” within the globalized world. This zone exists in the exceptional state of temporary potential to de-/repoliticize any humanistic politics. (shrink)

This book is a critical attempt to approach world cinema in a new global frame that updates the national frame of territorial cinemas and the transnational frame of their interplay. The global frame implies the reintegration of border-crossing forces onto the postpolitical plane of troubled globalization with two ethical facets: the soft ethical inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their hard ethical symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both, global cinema is formulated as staging crucial challenges that (...) today's globalism and its antinomies bring to the notions of subjectivity and community. Many films indeed depict the antagonism between the inclusive global system and its excluded remnants, allegorizing the impossible political change in various modes of catastrophe and nihilism. A global community often takes on a totalized network of sovereign violence and (counter)terror stuck in the impasse of utopian imagination. Yet some films suggest alternative ethics irreducible to collective politics when abject figures, deprived of social subjectivity and rights, become contingent agents of existential 'gift-giving' by fostering commonality without community, solidarity without unity. The psychoanalytic notion of abjection is redefined here as both the biopolitical mode of bare life and its potential for the ethical agency that opens atopian, if not utopian, networking on the edge of the global regime beyond the problematic 'soft/hard' ethics of tolerance/violence or pity/hate. This precarious yet precious abject agency is explored through a vast net of globally circulating contemporary films and a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies. (shrink)

Introduction -- the medium-interface -- The body-interface -- The surface of the object -- The face of the subject -- Image and subjectivity -- Conclusion.

La subcultura sadomasochistica della “dominazione femminile” (femdom) ha dato vita a una modalità rilevante di carnalità digitale, prevalente nelle interfacce dei nuovi media e capace al contempo di radicalizzarne l’interattività. La relazione dell’uomo sottomesso con la donna dominante non è mai semplice in questo caso: non meramente pornografica, bensì sintomatica di fenomeni complessi. Essi riguardano il potere e la società, i media e la vita che danno forma alla nostra epoca tecno-libidinale. L’articolo getta luce sulle implicazioni sessuali, psicologiche, psicoanalitiche e (...) socio-etiche di tale relazione, delineando e ricontestualizzando le teorie su masochismo, abiezione, biopolitica, nichilismo e così via. Pieno di paradossi, il femdom incarna un governo, formalmente strutturato, della sensazione e della determinazione: una legge eccezionale oltre la legge normale, secondo cui la sottomissione a un sovrano sessuale conduce contemporaneamente alla autoprivazione e al recupero della libertà dello schiavo. Il suo desiderio frustrato di un oggetto irraggiungibile si orienta allora verso una pulsione di tipo lacaniano: la soddisfazione istantanea di circolare intorno al vuoto, come se ci si “avvicinasse” continuamente, senza fine, così com’è esemplificato nel loop digitale delle immagini GIF. Più precisamente, desiderio e deriva si confondono, al punto di essere indistinguibili, nella disintegrazione del Simbolico e del Reale, del privato e del pubblico, che caratterizza la cultura dell’assuefazione autodistruttiva, tipica dell’edonismo capitalistico. In tale contesto il mondo di sogno del femdom si rivela essere una rete permeabile di numerose comunità fondatrici di forme di vita di dominatrici e sottomessi: un cielo interattivo, capace di automodularsi, di desiderio-impulso senza una fine, senza un fuori, senza un nirvana. (shrink)

This paper aims at a semio-epistemological revisit of Peircean/Bazinian indexicality. On the level of diegesis, an image takes on indexicality as physical causality, the succession of causes and effects. What matters in our cinematic experience is then less medium-specificity than reference-recognition, i.e. whether or not we know what a visual sign refers to within diegesis. The problematic case is that in which an image is not a clear index to something visually given, but it appears and functions like a “para-index” (...) that only partially, impossibly indicates the unthinkable, a sort of “digit” that fingers what Lacan or Deleuze calls the absent but immanent Real or Virtual. In fact Bazin’s interest in adventure films facing this unrepresentable realm especially inspires us to revamp indexicality as para-indexicality. The paper elaborates on this notion through George Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière, as well as films by Michael Haneke, Ingrid Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard etc. (shrink)