Conversations on Cinema

Opening Horizons Over what Is Denied

A Conversation with Roberto Esposito

edited by

Roberto De Gaetano, Daniele Dottorini, Bruno Roberti

Fata Morgana, Bíos, No. 0, 2006

How about starting with an introduction on the notion of bíos. Why do you think this concept has become central to current debates and what is its centrality due to?

The notion of bíos is in itself a very old Aristotelian notion. The culminating moment of the relationship between bíos and knowledge started at the beginning of the 19th century when biology was born. Later, in the 20th century, the connection between the theme of life and new forms of expression became more evident, particularly in political language. Today a strong bio-ethical component has emerged; some of the new terms being used are bio-law and bio-technology. Life, the notion of life and the experience of biological life now lie in the heart of knowledge and contemporary experience. Why did this happen? Why are we experiencing this phenomenon today? Because the great mediators – institutional, cultural, sectorial – which constituted the structure of modern knowledge and power such as law and political representation, have fallen; at first slowly then they came crashing down. When all this exploded, thanks to globalization and, therefore, the crisis of sovereign states and sovereign rights, politics and life, as it were, came into contact. The great modern mediators have lost ground, even with regard to technology which is another important theme.

The theme of your book, Bíos, may be categorized in relation to the concept of the cinematic apparatus as the machine of knowledge and power of the 20th century. You discuss how the category of immunity and its inversion towards autoimmunity are becoming extreme. The more life is protected the more this protection mechanism – immunity – becomes extreme; it capsizes. It becomes auto-immune. A relationship exists between the work of death and cinema. This notion was first highlighted by Bazin when he said that cinema is an apparatus which cannot film death. It was then summarized by Cocteau when he said that cinema is The work of death twenty-four frames per second. At the same time, cinema continues to be the apparatus that conserves life, preserves life, and somehow, makes the appearance of life immortal, and, at the same time, it makes a vampire out of it; it sucks life. Thus, it is an apparatus that preserves life and, at the same time, it destroys it. As I read the last two chapters, it occurred to me that the cinematic apparatus is analogous to a totalitarian system. I mean that it is an apparatus that saves life and at the same time it destroys it. I would like to know your opinion on this.

I am very interested in this theme even though I am not an expert on cinema and I was struck by what you said about the twenty-four frames per second. A few things come to mind. We could say, for example, that another apparatus which renders immortal and at the same time renders vampires is the museum, in the sense that it preserves, but, at the same time, it blocks, fixes, and immobilizes. Another thing we could say is that the internal eye of human beings is incapable of seeing death, and even less so its own death. It is a great philosophical theme; although humans, as Heidegger said, are beings-toward-death they cannot see and cannot even think about their own death. There is a strong connection between subject and death, the subject goes toward death but it also has a screen which blocks its visibility…

Among other things, Bazin insists on the eye which cannot see death when he talks about the ontology of cinema.

The third element, which is probably more external and more of a sociological reference, is the fact that totalitarianism – and I am using this term so that we can understand each other; I do not really like using the word totalitarianism, it assimilates experiences such as Nazism and Communism which are, actually, very different from each other – all totalitarianisms have given particular relevance to cinema within their publicity and propaganda apparatus. There is a link between cinema and totalitarianism, both at an external sociological level and at an internal level. The last reference I can think of – to complete this constellation – is the panopticon. After all, the camera is like a panopticon that watches without being watched. It is a control mechanism, and, in the final analysis, a mechanism of death, because it blocks and fixes.

Your statement The way life can protect itself from death is not by preserving the way it is (immunity paradigm) but by being born again in a different guise (generative paradigm) reminds me of a 1950s essay by Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, where Morin attributes two capacities to cinema, in other words, two ways of challenging death. One way is by creating doubles, just like what we were referring to when we talked about Bazin: I duplicate reality. I preserve it, and, at the same time, I immobilize it, and by preserving it, I kill it. The other way, instead, sees cinema not only built on the concept of the double, as the immobilization of a reality given as pre-existing, but rather, on the principle of metamorphosis, because images alternate on the screen, they overlap, they follow one another. From this point of view, it is a generative principle: an image dies and another one is born. It is a mechanism of death and rebirth. This reminds me that the cinematic apparatus can impose this model. The immunity paradigm you are referring to, however, also presents this sort of generative paradigm because of the constant alternation of images on the screen. One dies and another is reborn.

Yes. This reminds me, going back to the founding categories of my work in the last ten to fifteen years, of the idea of immunitas and the idea of communitas, which are each other’s reverse side. Probably, if the immunity paradigm is that of division and of overlapping, the paradigm of community is the one of exposure. Community exposes each one to alterity, therefore, it is a mechanism of externalization because of its capacity to expropriate and remove. It is a mechanism of externalization. We could say that cinema places itself right on the boundary between these two paradigms because, on the one hand, it kills, splits and it presupposes, on the other, however, it exposes through this continuous movement of metamorphosis. I deduced the theme of birth by capsizing the Nazi killing apparatus which aimed at killing life at its start (sterilization and other actions taken aimed at preventing birth). Nazi law said that it would not allow certain people to be born. Naturally, I am interested in the issue of birth in contrast to the Nazi prohibition also because it is a biological phenomenon. In fact, it is a biological phenomenon which confirms the protective wall-like character of the immunity paradigm. At birth the immunity mechanism of the mother opens up to the external presence of the child. This event is an element of complication and of community-opening; it is a complete whole which becomes two.

Keeping to this subject, in the chapter on thanato-politics you explicitly quote three literary texts written around the same time: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula. I was surprised because these books, and I think we could add a fourth one, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which you did not include, have been interpreted in film theory as aesthetic figures which are precursors to cinema. You recognize the precursory character of these books with regard to a later political practice which instead developed in the 20th century. Staying within this matter, I think that, for example, the German cinema of the 20s, the decade preceding Hitler, was full of figures which directly recall the books I mentioned earlier. I would like to ask you if this parallelism of themes and figures could be related to what was later called an aesthetization of politics, using Benjamin’s words. I am wondering whether Nazism drew from a series of images which already existed in order to somehow create a system, or whether a common situation, which at the time was deeply rooted in society and culture, was somehow adopted, transformed and reutilized by Nazism.

Yes, let us say that the aesthetization of politics and the politicization of art have been the two great key words on which the relationship between power and imagery, Nazism on the one hand and Stalinist Communism on the other, were built on. There certainly is a link between despotic power, totalitarian power and image. There is an essay by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (The Nazi Myth), which interprets Nazism from the point of view of aesthetical politics, looking for its roots in the first Romanticism. Nazism is produced by creating figures; it is a figuration and an auto-figuration. I find all this very important. In my interpretation of the theme of the image, I superimposed the theme of the body because an interpretation only founded on image could lose the element of the body, which was very strong in Nazism. This is what I try to express in chapter four. I see Nazism as the doubling of the body. According to Nazism the soul is what keeps the body together, the soul is blood. Thus, certainly, the theme of the image, but without neglecting the theme of zoé, meaning the relationship between body, blood and organism. So much so that when Deleuze talks about the body without organs he wants to de-structure and reconstruct this corporeal machine. I find that the reverse of all this is the theme of the flesh. I want to reflect on the theme of the image because I really have not reflected enough on it. From this point of view, Dracula is extraordinary, because Dracula is the Jew, meaning he who contaminates; he who allows impure blood to circulate; he comes from Transylvania to the cities. He is the Jew who is later crucified. It is about an obvious relationship, a powerful one with the cinema you were referring to.

André S. Labarthe said, Reversals, transfusions, editing: cinema will either be vampire-like or it will not be at all.

And it goes back to what we were saying about doubling and cinema…

The reflection on the three novels is born out of another reflection on the concept of degeneration. You say that the concept of degeneration can be reversed in its transformative data becoming, therefore, germinative. You say that degeneration, something Nietzsche had also reflected upon, has a capacity of positive and vital transformation and also of mutation. Degeneration – you say – has an aesthetic nervation, meaning that the process of degeneration is innervated…

So much so, that the typical degenerate, for Nordau, is the artist, the genius.

Somehow, if, on the one hand, cinema can be an apparatus, a concentrative and lethal machine, it can, therefore, be the answer to the will of subjugation of life and, even more so, to the specific will of Nazism to graft a sort of bio-spirituality in life. In other words, making sure that the coincidence of life and death can become a sort of zero degree, that which the Nazi called, in the title of a book you quote, existence without life, Dasein ohne Leben. On the other hand, degeneration as transformation, dissolution as mutation, the idea of undoing, on which Deleuze reflects on with regard to Visconti’s films, and the idea of cinema as a degenerative and transformative process can be related to the possibility of a positive reversal. A positive reversal where, today, cinema reveals itself as an area of elaboration of aesthetic and political practices, and where a positive reversal of bio-politics can take place. Do you agree? After all, the relationship between birth and body, and the relationship between body and flesh are surely two themes which are very present in today’s cinema. I am thinking about Lynch, Cronenberg and Sokurov.

Yes. As soon as you started talking about it, I thought about the relationship between art, degeneration and innovation in a film such as Visconti’s Death in Venice. Degeneration is the disease which, on the one hand, attracts the artist, and, on the other, it cannot be inscribed in only one cycle of death because, inevitably, from that death, life will be reborn. In a double sense degeneration has an element of re-launching towards the future. The fact is that degeneration is innovation, in other words, it opposes conservation. Thus, it degenerates that which it does not conserve and instead it innovates (maybe even in a deadly way) because in terms of organic phenomena, decomposition is part of the life cycle. Cinema can be another reversal apparatus, aside from the flesh and birth one, which I had not thought about when I wrote the book. At one point in the book, I refer to Bacon as a contemporary artist, however, Cronenberg is also included in my discussion even though I did not say it specifically, because I think that Cronenberg is Bacon’s equivalent. In the structure of the bones the flesh comes out, and this is one of Cronenberg’s characteristics. From this point of view, I agree with you. However, I am wondering about some other more problematic things. The contents and figures of some contemporary films, cinema, and directors are certainly included in this discussion. However, I do not know up to what point we can include, in this discussion, cinema as a cinematographic machine, as an economic-productive apparatus. We have to think about this; I would hesitate to accept an immediate comparison, from this point of view. However, as far as film content is concerned – the content of the film is their form – I do see the relationship, and I ask you the same question.

I will use a phrase which you yourself use in Bíos the effects of bio-politics, subjectivation or death. Cinema as a practice has influenced the processes of subjectivation; mass-subjectivity has been transformed in spectatorial subjectivity, in an audience. Benjamin in his book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, says that cinema allowed the masses who lived in big cities during those years to crowd theatres and halls instead of staying in the their dark houses. By doing this, they were able to acknowledge themselves, and adopt a sort of spectatorial collective identity. This was a process of subjectivation. After crowding the cinemas, those same people started crowding trenches, they started wars and totalitarianisms, no longer producing subjectivity in a Foucaultian sense but producing death. During the time of totalitarianisms and war, the relationship between cinema and the masses falls apart. The great utopia of cinema capable of representing thought and educating the masses collapses together with totalitarianisms and propaganda cinema. From the ruins of totalitarianism another cinema is born, and as a result the bond of power, technology and the masses is broken forever.

I would like to start with Foucault, whom you recalled. Foucault’s discourse follows two separate and diverging directions, on the one hand, there is subjectivation, on the other, there is death. Power produces subjects (care for oneself, technology of the self, conscience of the subjects) or the death of subjectivity, reification. I tried to keep these two elements together whereas Foucault spreads them apart. I tried doing so through the category of immunization, because immunization, by producing and protecting subjectivity, denies it. Beyond a certain limit, when the immune system is too strong, it capsizes and produces death. I think cinema is more similar to this second categorization than to Foucault’s because cinema is, in fact, an ambivalent apparatus, where these two elements are one within the other and are not separated. This in relation to the structure of cinema. You then add a diachronic variable; you say that up to a certain point cinema held these two elements together then it became something else and the apparatus broke. I do not know, I am doubtful that such a diachronic limit can be established in the sense that, after all, even propagandist cinema produces subjectivity and death. In a way, under the profile of historical evaluation, regimes like Nazism, Fascism or even Stalinism (the latter to a lesser degree) have been regimes with a high subjective participation. It is not true that it was the police that blocked every form of reaction; the forms of reaction were few because people were subjectively involved. Cinema had a fundamental role, just as radio did, just as all the media, in the process of subjectivation. I think that subjectivation and death are a structural constant; they may vary in form but, nonetheless, they are part of the history of cinema. Why, I ask you, is there a common element, something unpleasant and excessive, between Riefenstahl’s propagandist cinema and today’s cinema, like the one by Michael Moore, which, rightly, does propaganda against Bush?

In this sense, I think that the equivalent, in respect to criticism of the American empire, is Lars von Trier’s detestable cinema – but not only in my opinion, even according to Godard. The type of reduction, aesthetization of politics we were talking about earlier…

All political cinema, we could say, is within this frame, in a way.

All political cinema in the sense of aesthetization of politics, not in the sense of the politicization of life or of the vitalization of politics as you intend it. When you identify the reversal in the vitalization of politics where politicization in its affirmative sense is implicit, then the political value of Godard’s cinema, for example, just like the political value of Sokurov’s cinema, probably lies in the possibility of reversing, within cinema itself, the apparatus which used to produce subjugation, reversing the nature of birth.

I completely agree. In what sense? In the sense that politics and life have an original link. Lethal bio-politics, firstly, breaks apart life and politics, and then it joins them in an immunity key. What does Godard’s political cinema, or Sokurov’s, actually do? It unveils the original connection of life and politics and, therefore, also of cinema and politics. The two things are connected, there is no implication, no superimposition. Instead, political propagandist cinema presents life and politics separately – and also cinema and life, cinema and politics – but then it forces unification, making it deadly.

Where zero degree is in a sort of aesthetization of politics that does not have residues…

Exactly. It is exactly like this.

I would like to talk again about the problem you identified earlier. If, from the point of view of content, it is easy enough to identify some directors and some films which deal with the themes and the forms we were talking about earlier, the problem that remains is of cinema itself as a dispositif, as an apparatus. We have often focused on the ambivalence of cinema and I thought about one of your interlocutors, Jean-Luc Nancy. The problem Nancy elaborates through the original partition of being – an original

being-with which opens the road to an ontological perspective – I think, could even be found in an apparently marginal essay by Nancy on the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. In this essay, which is actually connected to this discussion, among the things Nancy emphasizes, there is also the existence of this residue which is exactly in this exposition that the spectator and the gaze of cinema are linked. Evidence of cinema is also intended as evidence of another gaze, which, among other things, deals with bodies and which inevitably, produces something that cinema has probably produced since its birth: the idea of socialization or at least of the connection between gazes – by spectators, directors and actors – which is the aesthetic experience of the filmic fruition. Film seen not so much as a textual composition, and not so much as a compilation of symbolic and thematic elements, but as the aesthetic existence of the fruition of film which existed, in fact, during the period of classical cinema, especially in the movie theatre (meanwhile today the socialization has probably been substituted by different forms of cinematographic fruition, from video cassettes to DVDs, which are always more individualizing, always more homely, always less external). Instead, Nancy insists on the power of exposition – a dear term to him – which is also linked to the opposite idea of communitas, which belongs to the concept you started with. Then maybe, by keeping this ambivalence firm, the positive side of cinema lies in the experience of fruition, in the possibility of creating – I dare say – an idea or a practice of communitas.

I would like to add something to the theme of gaze, something I referred to earlier, something about the liberating function of cinema for the metropolitan crowds. Benjamin and Kracauer insist on the idea that cinema and entertainment machines exert a liberating function (a sort of transformation of the Aristotelian category of catharsis) on the life of those inhabitants of cities who would otherwise have to face an intolerable reality. Benjamin talks about cinema as something capable of making houses explode as if they were prisons.

It seems to me that in both cases the theme of ambivalence returns. With respect to the liberating function of cinema, the figure of compensatio lies within it: since this type of life is unbearable, cinema somehow creates some