Peter Schwenger-Phenomenology of The Scream

Phenomenology of the Scream
Author(s): Peter Schwenger

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 382-395
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Phenomenology of the Scream

Peter Schwenger
We will begin with a single remarkable scream or, at any rate, with the
literary description of one. This scream is emitted in the second canto of
Comte de Lautreamonts Maldoror. The narrator, like a perverse St. John,
has a vision of an anthropophagic god, his feet immersed in a vast pool of
boiling blood, to whose surface two or three cautious heads would suddenly rise like tapeworms from a full chamberpot, in reserve for the gods
next course. Maldoror is paralyzed with horror until, my tight chest unable to exhale the lifegiving air quickly enough, my lips parted and I cried
out . . . a cry so earsplitting . . . that I heard it!1a fact remarkable only
because the narrator has been deaf from birth. Now this medical miracle is
of less interest to me than what is said about this scream, and screams in
general, by Douglas Kahn in his history of sound in the arts, Noise, Water,
Meat. He writes of Maldoror:
His scream neither addressed the Creator nor reached the ears of his
creations. It merely announced the presence of himself as a subjugated creature. . . . He was empathetic to his fellow creatures plight,
but most immediately as a means to constituting his own identity. He
had become aware of the presence of his voice.2
I am going to resist this analysis, not out of pickiness or crankiness but
because it implicitly raises a number of questions that may lead us to
answers regarding the nature of the scream. And first I must point out that
1. Comte de Lautreamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works, trans. Alexis Lykiard
(Cambridge, 1994), p. 77.
2. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.,
1999), p. 6.
Critical Inquiry 40 (Winter 2014)
2014 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/14/4002-0007$10.00. All rights reserved.
382

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014
Kahn seems to resist his own formulations. Having dismissed the notion
that Maldorors scream is meant to communicate with either the Creator
or his unhappy victimsobviously unlikely auditorsKahn later writes
this about screams: That they are resolutely communicative and meant
for others is demonstrated by the fact that people who have been in a
life-threatening situation often must be told by others that they were
screaming.3 Of course this factoid demonstrates no such thing; in fact it
indicates the exact opposite. That people are unaware of their own screaming means that the scream is not a conscious call for help to another but an
unconscious reflex, one that would have taken place whether or not there
was anybody there to hear it. It arises, then, from reasons other than communication. In the passage I first quoted, Kahn suggests another reason:
self-presence, the constitution of ones own identity. I will be arguing later
that what is at stake here is not the constitution of identity but an attempt
to escape it.
First, though, I would like to stress that Kahn is not alone in his reading
of the scream as communication. Mladen Dolar has argued that the
scream, unaffected . . . by phonological constraints, is nevertheless speech
in its minimal function: an address and an enunciation. This is so, he says,
because the moment the other hears it . . . , the moment it responds to it,
scream retroactively turns into appeal, it is interpreted, endowed with
meaning, it is transformed into a speech addressed to the other.4 No
doubt this is true, but all this is a transformation of something that need
not have had this function, a function that, as Dolar himself says, is assigned retroactively and externally by one who is other than the one who
is screaming.
Approaching the scream through the auditor rather than the one who
emits it does make it possible to apply paradigms of interpretation, of
meaning making and so of communication. But it is moving in the wrong
direction. We must reverse this directionmust follow the scream back
into the mouth to find out what impels it, beyond any particular horror,
3. Ibid., p. 345.
4. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), pp. 28, 27.
P E T E R S C H W E N G E R is professor of English emeritus, Mount St. Vincent

University, and resident fellow in the Centre for the Study of Theory and
Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His recent books include The
Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (2006) and At the Borders of
Sleep: On Liminal Literature (2012). He is now at work on a book about the
theoretical implications of asemic writing. Email: pschweng@uwo.ca

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Peter Schwenger / Phenomenology of the Scream
and to consider why it takes the form that it does. Let us begin, then, with
the mouththe open, screaming mouth.
In his short piece Mouth, Georges Bataille observes that one who is
screaming throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck so
that the mouth becomes, as far as possible, a prolongation of the spinal
column, in other words, it assumes the position it normally occupies in the
constitution of animals.5 Despite the emphasis Bataille places on this sentence, it can hardly be the last word on the subject. Though animals scream
in moments of extreme danger or pain, they are not in a constant state of
screaming for which their buccal orifice has adapted. And to say that there
is something animal about screaming is too vague to be useful. There may
be something inhuman, or beyond the human, but that is another matter.
And I will be suggesting later other reasons why this prolonged position
might be instinctively appropriate to the forces that impel the scream,
forces connected to a desired prolongation beyond the body.
Gilles Deleuze does better on the mouth in his study of the paintings of
Francis Bacon:
It is important [he says] to understand the affinity of the mouth, and
the interior of the mouth, with meat and to reach the point where the
open mouth becomes nothing more than the section of a severed artery. . . . The mouth then acquires this power of nonlocalization that
turns all meat into a head without a face.6
So long as a mouth is open and screaming, then, it is no longer the feature
belonging to someones individual face. Antonin Artaud speaks of a moment when all the air has passed into the scream and there is nothing left
for the face.7 Something beyond the personal is here revealed, something
as terrifyingly impersonal as the pain that is often the screams impetus. So,
Deleuze continues, in screaming the mouth is no longer a particular organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes, and from which
the flesh descends (LS, p. 26). There seems to be a contradiction here: if
the entire body escapes through this hole, there should be no flesh left to
descend from it. It is more accurate to say, as Deleuze has said earlier, that
the body attempts to do this (see LS, pp. xii, 16). There remains, though, the
5. Georges Bataille et al., Encyclopdica Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary
and Related Texts and The Encyclopaedia Da Costa, trans. Iain White et al., ed. Robert Lebel
and Isabelle Waldberg (London, 1996), p. 62.
6. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (1981;
London, 2003), p. 26; hereafter abbreviated LS.
7. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of the Seraphim (1936), Selected Writings, trans. Helen
Weaver, ed. Susan Sontag (New York, 1976), p. 274.

FIGURE
1.
Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquezs Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1963).
question of why the body should make this attempt, and make it in this
particular way. We can begin to formulate an answer in the same way that
Deleuze did: by examining a painting.
The painting is Francis Bacons well-known screaming pope (fig. 1). Its
proper title is Study after Velazquezs Portrait of Pope Innocent X, and we
can begin by comparing it to that original portrait (fig. 2). Clearly Bacon
has made something entirely different from it, and that difference is first
and foremost the scream. Deleuzes comment is as follows:

385
386
FIGURE
2.
Diego Velazquez, Portrait of Innocent X (1650).
Bacon creates the painting of the scream because he establishes a relationship between the visibility of the scream (the open mouth as a
shadowy abyss) and invisible forces, which are nothing other than the
forces of the future. It was Kafka who spoke of detecting the diabolical powers of the future knocking at the door. Every scream contains
them potentially. Innocent X screams, but he screams behind the curtain, not only as someone who can no longer be seen, but as someone
who cannot see, who has nothing left to see, whose only remaining
function is to render visible those invisible forces that are making him
scream, these powers of the future. [LS, pp. 6061]

These powers of the futurea vague phrase to be suremay as yet be

invisible, but they are also beyond the subject or sitter for the portrait
beyond not just in a temporal sense but in the sense that these powers of
the future arise from outside the subject, whereas I am going to argue that
the scream arises profoundly from within. Deleuzes analysis in fact applies
much more precisely to another terrifying portrait, El Grecos Portrait of a
Cardinal (fig. 3). The cardinals eyes have shifted to the left, and his left
hand has convulsively gripped the arm of the chair. On that side his robes
have risen, blown by who knows what wind from hell. The cardinal has just
become aware of a certain power of the future, one that has not yet revealed
itself in its full intensity. A terrifying image, but for reasons that are
different from Bacons, whose declared purposerepeatedly cited by
Deleuzeis to paint the scream more than the horror (LS, p. 38). If the
horror is not fully revealed in El Grecos version, it is implied; and the
scream that responds to it has not been painted, though it will come. In
Bacons image no external horror is depicted or even implied. The scream
is itself the horror, when read as Deleuze reads it: as a gaping hole through
which the body tries to escape itself but from which the flesh descends in all
the materiality of meat. If the function of this figure is, as Deleuze has
asserted, to render visible these invisible forces that are making him
scream, Bacon has rendered these visible in ways that we must now consider more closely (LS, p. 61). And first there is the matter of what Deleuze
calls a curtain, which is not a curtain, nor any material or even symbolic
object. Rather we have something like lines of force, descending like a
heavy rain. There are alsonot mentioned by Deleuzethose lines that
splay out from the chair in a most uncurtain-like way. The chair is, in a
sense, encased within itself through prolongations of the gilt arms and
back, now become a sort of brass geometry. Within this, the pope sits, his
white robes shading off into semitransparency, cut off from any contact
with the ground or chance to walk away on nonexistent feet. What we have
here is a horror of situatednessboth a relentless physical situatedness and
a situatedness in time. This is not the horror of a future time but of a
present time that descends continually and heavily upon one.
So it is that Bacon rejects certain of his paintings as too sensational
because, Deleuze reports, the figuration that subsists in them reconstitutes a scene of horror, even if only secondarily, thereby reintroducing a
story to be told: even the bullfights are too dramatic. As soon as there is
horror, a story is reintroduced, and the scream is botched (LS, p. 38).
There is horror, of course; in this canvas, we see it in the scream and in the
external forces that seem to impel the scream into being. But the scream is
ultimately a matter of the flesh, of situatedness, of being-there.

387
FIGURE
3.
El Greco, Portrait of a Cardinal (ca. 1600).

We may be able to understand this better if we turn now to another

version of the horror of being-there, Emmanuel Levinass notion of the
il y a, developed in his treatise Existence and Existents. Resisting Martin
Heidegger, Levinas asks, Is not anxiety over Beinghorror of Being
just as primal as anxiety over death?8 This primal anxiety manifests itself
when the continually changing agendas of our self-defined existence in
relation to the world are stilled, and we become aware of Existence as such.
For to say we exist is only to say we participate in existence; but existence as
such is something altogether other. We are beings by virtue of Being, but
that Being is indifferent to our self-defined status as individual beings.
Being is rather a continual imposition, an insistence that we fill the time
that unremittingly descends upon us and that we occupy a certain space as
a fleshly body. This vision of existence, and the horror that accompanies it,
emerges at certain moments when, Levinas says, the continual play of our
relations with the world is interrupted (EE, p. 8); Levinass case studies are
insomnia, indolence, and fatigue. At such moments our relations with the
world are suspended, and what is there is only there iswhat Levinas
calls the il y a. The case of fatigue may be sufficient to give an idea of what
is involved in the il y a before I move on to connect this concept to the
scream. Levinas is not speaking of physical fatiguethough physical
fatigue may often detach one from the sense of being an individual
existentbut of a psychological fatigue; for that reason he soon switches
to the term weariness (lassitude).
There exists a weariness [he writes] which is a weariness of everything
and everyone, and above all a weariness of oneself. What wearies then
is not a particular form of our lifeour surroundings, because they
are dull and ordinary, our circle of friends, because they are vulgar
and cruel; the weariness concerns existence itself. . . . In weariness
existence is like the reminder of a commitment to exist, with all the
seriousness and harshness of an irrevocable contract. [EE, pp. 1112]
That contract, foisted upon us, in a sense is us; it is the fact that as beings in
the world we are hostages to Being, to the reiterated insistence of the present moment that we continue to be. And to our flesh, that meat insisting
that we inhabit a certain position in spaceour too too solid flesh, as
Hamlet calls it. In weariness we find ourselves detached from our state as
existents and are made over to the sense of anonymous and relentless
8. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1978; Pittsburgh,
2001), p. 5; hereafter abbreviated EE.

389
390
existence. And in this there is a horror, a horror that is related to the

scream.
Fernando Pessoa makes the connection in No, Its Not Fatigue:
No. Fatigue, why?
Its an abstract sensation
Of concrete life
something like a scream
to be screamed,
something like anxiety
to be suffered.
To be suffered completely
Or to be suffered as . . .
Yes, to be suffered as . . .
Thats it: as . . .
As what?
If I knew I wouldnt have this false fatigue within me.9
This is a poem of rich ignorance, which opens up in all sorts of directions,
some of which we have already taken. Its not fatigue, because it is nothing
so simple as physical tiredness. Instead it is a Levinasian weariness, weariness of the concrete life of flesh and time. Yet this is not weariness of any of
the specifics of life rather, an abstract sensation, a sensation of the great
abstraction that is Existence. If that sensation is something like a scream, it
is because the sensation is described in a parallel construction as something like anxiety to be suffered. This is not an anxiety for the body and its
continued existence but an anxiety of the body, the body that insists on
existence, and whose insistence can only be suffered passively.
The notion of anxiety brings us to another painting, which it is impossible to avoid: Edvard Munchs The Scream (fig. 4). People often assume
that this work portrays an actual scream, even to the point of finding lines
depicting sound vibrations around the figure, lines that do not in fact exist.
An entry from Munchs diary, recomposed with variations, is repeatedly
cited by him in regard to this image and is even at times incorporated into
artistic variations on the theme by being written around the pictures margins. The diary entry clarifies just what this theme is:
I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a
tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red.
I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired and I looked at the
9. Fernando Pessoa, No, Its Not Fatigue, epigraph to Roberto Harari, Lacans Seminar on
Anxiety: An Introduction, trans. Jane C. Lamb-Ruiz, ed. Rico Franses (New York, 2001), p. v.

FIGURE
4.
Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893).
flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black
fjord and city.
My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I
felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.10
10. Quoted in Reinhold Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream (London, 1973), p. 107. This
description is reproduced by Munch in close association with numerous artworksnot only
variations on The Scream but also a related work, Despairsometimes even forming part of

391
392
Clearly, the scream is not emitted by the human figure. It is rather nature
that is screaming, as indicated by its convulsive shapes. These press in
upon the human figure rather than emitting from it, so the face seems
convulsed as well by a pressure upon it, becoming unnaturally elongated
and bulbous. The movement is thus an inward one rather than that of the
outward thrusting scream. And the hands of this figure are raised to its
earsor rather over the place where its ears would be if it had any. To be
sure, the figures mouth is open and there is some possibility that the
pressure upon the body could be released through that opening in the way
described by Deleuze; but we do not get the sense of an outward thrusting,
not yet. For iek, indeed, the crucial feature of the painting is the fact
that the scream is not heard. . . . since the anxiety is too stringent for it to
find an outlet in vocalization.11 What this expressionist painting expresses, then, isin the words of Pessoas poemsomething like anxiety
to be suffered. It is even, perhaps, something like a scream / to be
screamed. But it is not a scream, for the scream has not yet found its
outlet. Munch has painted the horror more than the scream; and his painting serves us best as a way of defining what the scream is almost, but what
it ultimately is not.
What it is, is depicted best by Bacon, who does indeed paint the scream
more than the horror. There is horror in his screaming pope, but it does
not emerge from nature. It is rather innate in the pope himself, in what I
have described as his relentless situatedness within time and space, the sheer
fact of his existence. The trappings of his officehis thronelike chair, his luxurious dress, everything that might lend him a sense of his identitythese
lose definition and solidity under dense and relentless lines of force. And
out of a face that has now become meat, an entirely involuntary scream is
torn; this is someone who probably does not even know he is screaming. In
this, Bacons pope is very different from Munchs homunculus, as iek
calls it, whose eyes are aware of his surroundings and whose open mouth
seems only to be saying, Oh my, what is going on here?12 The paintings
undoubted power comes from what is going on around the figurecomes
from a state of anxiety projected onto its surroundings and described metaphorically as a scream. The only metaphor in Bacons painting might be
paint itself, which translates an audial stimulus into a visual one. But if we
those works. A comprehensive collection of the textual variants of the diary entry can be found
in the Appendix, pp. 1039.
11. Slavoj iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York,
1992), pp. 11617.
12. Ibid., p. 117.

cannot hear the scream, we can sense it through this image. It does not
arise from an external horror but from the trap of existence.
Let us leave the painting now to see how this hypothesis might play out
in more familiar cases of screaming. Despite Bacons desire to avoid portraying an external horror that might explain the screams origin, the
fact remains that people do scream when they are confronted with a scene
of horror, even if that scene leaves them technically intactIm thinking,
for instance, of people who witness other peoples violent and messy death
or the even more messy aftermath of a decomposed body. The other circumstance under which people scream is of course when their own bodily
security is jeopardized in life-threatening situations or when their bodies
are invaded by pain. As with other bodily manifestations of affect, such as
laughter, there is doubtless a range of false, semifalse, or strategically deployed versions. But these two basic impulses to screamat witnessing
anothers horror and experiencing or anticipating ones ownprobably
cover the matter. Of course both could be explained by the fear of death,
either experienced firsthand or extrapolated from what one witnesses. I am
arguing, though, that the physical mode of the scream lends credence to the
idea that the horror of existence is involved as well. For behind both screamgenerating scenarios is a desperate and forceful NO. And this negation is not
just a desire that things be otherwise in the world; it is, quite unconsciously
perhaps, a desire not to be in the world: not to have to see this unendurable
scene of horror, not to have to suffer this unendurable pain in ones own body,
a body that one cannot escape, a vision that one cannot shut out by simply
closing ones eyes. One is condemned to experience this. As the skidding car
crosses the line and heads straight for your car, no doubt you and your
passengers are experiencing many things; nor will all of you necessarily
scream. But all of you will have an intense sense of your situatedness in
time and space. The fact that this body, this body that is you, is located here
rather than in the car ahead, which is moving away, oblivious to your
plightthis fact comes over you with the horror of an entrapment. Your
body is about two feet wide, and now two feet either way could make all the
difference. And Now comes over you with an equal sense of entrapment;
all the other nows that you have lived through are as nothing, for this
present moment is your presence itself. What we have at such moments is
a version of Levinass il y a: an awareness, an abstract sensation we might
call it, of what it means to be condemned to the primal conditions of
existence as suchwhich are precisely, at such moments, what threaten
our existence as self. These take us by surprise, interrupting our being-inthe world with the anonymous indifference of Being. It is often a sudden
interruption and, in this regard, is very different from the slow descent into

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a Levinasian weariness. When this slow horror is speeded up, we have no

time to be weary, to consider the interesting philosophical conclusions
that can be drawn from such a state. We instinctively want to escape from
the trap of our own existencewhich we suddenly sense is not our own,
never was our own. Our Bodies, Our Selves has become not an affirmation
but a condemnation. We wish to escape from the body, from its localization in space and time. And so we scream. Without even knowing it,
perhaps, we open our mouth, and it becomes, in Deleuzes formulation, the hole through which the entire body escapesor tries to
escape.
It is our only recourse, this projecting of oneself out of that hole in the
body through the power of the voice. To expel from the body breath alone
is not enough. In a rather peculiar formulation Maldoror tells us that he is
unable to exhale the lifegiving air quickly enough, and so he screams.
Because the scream is vocalized, it gives body to breath, makes of the
breath a body. To expel the breath alone is merely to collapse. A scream is
the opposite of this; it is a force. It forces its way, to begin with, through the
vocal chords; and it then fills the air, makes of the air a blunt instrument or
a sharp one. It is an embodiment of force, moreover, that projects itself
outside the body. This is why, in the martial arts, a blow becomes stronger
when accompanied by a cry; it is not a matter of scaring ones opponent
but of adding to the outward-directed force of the blow in a way that could
not be done by a soundless exhalation of the breath, however abrupt. The
scream is also a projection of the self out of the body, an alternative acoustic body. Michel Henry comes close to saying as much in an interview:
When I let out a scream [he says] it produces a phenomenon of redoubling in the sense that I hear the scream that I have formed because I am first the power that pronounces the sound. That is why
hearing is basically only a redoubling. There is something like a circuit that causes me to hear the sound that I have uttered. There is a
sonorous outpouring.13
This outpouring is both us and an elsewhere, an outside of us, the only way
that we can find an outside that takes us out of our too solid flesh. If this
attempt could succeed, existence would die away with the echoes of the
scream, and with it the primal horror that propelled the scream. But it
cannot succeed; the flesh unrelentingly persists.
And as for that alternative acoustic body, that redoubling, it is not the
13. Michel Henry, Art et phenomenologie de la vie, Phenomenologie de la vie tome III: De
lart et du politique (Paris, 2004), p. 306; my trans.

means to constituting his own identity that Kahn speaks of in regard to

Maldorors scream, treating it as if it were merely another version of communication. Im afraid that Henry too goes on to conflate the speaking
voice with the vocalized scream:
There is a sonorous outpouring, a sound that I hear, but to know that
it is me who is speaking and not you, this primordial, dynamic, pathetic power of phonation must be within me, the power with which
I coincide. That is because I know, there where I form the sound,
that I am the one who forms it, that there is an ipseity in this
power, that I can say, I am the one who said that, and not you.14
Nothing in this description fits with the actual experience of screaming
which, far from being a kind of self-congratulatory assertion of identity, is
so far beyond our proprietorship that we may not even know that we are
screaming. Nor is one scream particularly different from another, marked
by ones own identity. Bataille is right to this degree: that the scream returns us to a primal realm devoid of any characteristics that we might claim
as our own. There is then a final irony in the scream: if it is forced from us
as a response to the horror of pure existence, to being trapped by existence,
it belongs itself to the order of things that are wiped clean of personal
being. Essentially, every scream is like every other; and no scream can
reconstitute the I that emits it. And so the redoubling of the scream is not
an acoustic cloning of our personal selves; what it redoubles is the horror
of existence at degree zero.
14. Ibid.

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Author(s): Peter Schwenger

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Phenomenology of the Scream

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:32:13 AM

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014

P E T E R S C H W E N G E R is professor of English emeritus, Mount St. Vincent

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:32:13 AM