<<TRANSMATHOME

3.0

“... Our existence, of its own nature, projects itself, with all its forces, unto its death... ” – Alphonso Lingis. [1]

In this section I wish to discuss the multiple incarnations and affects of the idea of death. The viewing body in this chapter is no longer simply watching horror films but any and all forms of visual death - in textbooks, in news footage, in mondo films among other visual representations of both real and fake death. Death conflates visually diverse genres into the horror genre because death is always about horror. For this reason, the following chapter does not include an in depth analysis of one film but will refer instead to the particularities of different visual forms of death and their affect-ive potential. A brief outline of the traditional psychoanalytic theorization of the death drive through those ‘nihilistic’ theorists of death who see death as aggressive and/or annihilative, will move towards my own aim: a hopeful positing of death as a means or force for an other consciousness - an other consciousness which uses death as a trajectory next to the other terms important to this book; perversion and pleasure.

Death is the climax of what I have earlier discussed as the body in states of alteration, through watching, through pleasure and through perverse desire. Death is the ultimate change of the body but of course can only be experienced in emphatically ‘un-real’ ways; through the death drive, through the desire to annihilate the self, through representation. Despite their annihilative signification, in many ways these concepts are a positive useful series for my aim. They are potentially useful in an affirmative and progressive way despite themselves and because their affect differs from their definition. I choose to alter their intended application because of their very grave potential to become tools of regression rather than progression. I do not mean progressive in a capital, developmental and therefore value-increased way. ‘Progressive’ here is intended to be a force for alteration of the traditional subject, progression as rhizomatic transformation rather than arboreal value-increase. Regression insinuates a backward trail toward infantilism, which of course is overwritten with an adult subject, that is not so much an infant but an infant-driven subject, or a subject driving to return rather than become different. Or it could mean an annihilative drive towards nothingness, from the anorexic drive for non-being, to the male hysteric drive for the mourning of his subjectivity or a drug addict’s drive for becoming something self-destructive [2] . I include also as a regressive term the aggressive drive that seeks not only to stand for the subject but stand also directed specifically toward others. The act of death incorporated into subjectivity (aggression) is manifest outwardly to include violence towards others, a forcing of the death drive upon others. Implicit in all these so-called regressive incarnations of death however is the affirmation of life as not polar to death but a force, which compels death, or covertly the death drive evolves because of the very being of life. Life is not a thing or an element that is constituted in any material or ontological way. Life is, rather, force and that force is compelled by the death drive, by the presence of death itself as a force and so the circle repeats where life drives death and death makes clear the force of life. This convoluted idea will become clearer in the next section, sufficient to say here that death is not the opposite of life in terms of force, drive or transformative effects. [3] Life and death define each other through their virtual relation with the self. My aim of transforming the subject towards other consciousness utilizes these forces within the subject. Because the context of my book is limited to the subject and a singular relationship it has with the television one version of death is too limited. Any version of the term ‘death’ will indicate a particular catalogue of definitions and in this section I will force a viewing, desiring subject into those situations which refer to death, sometimes contextually expected, such as death film, and also unexpected, such as viewing forensics with a non-‘scientific eye’.

How does this section relate to the entire work? It is easy to fathom a subject in or with pleasure, and a subject perverting, but where do we locate a subject in death? The reason death is so valuable here is because it is so volatile and ethically problematic. Ethics demands we consider a specific other, not simply an anything outside ourselves, while justifying all claims we as subjects make. [4] Death is a demand to consider both self and others as one collective - because death is one experience that escapes no one. One death and mass death become collective signifiers for action or re-action at the least. Death is what indicates world permeating news and the most intimate and emphatic personal loss. It is a term that both conflates and emphasizes individual lives at once by being considerable as a rupturing social event (genocide) or as a micro tragedy (the death of one life) or both at once (as is evident in many news reports of one death among many during war). Death always demands a consideration of the Other even in its most insipid form as a reflection of the fears of death embodied in the self. The form and the time death takes are often what forces us into consideration of an ethnic or sexed other through violence. Death is the final call to action for the self when it effects an other; death is what makes the self listen to an other only after the other is deceased. Death is what unifies every individual while also being the catalyst for individuals to consider each other after a lifetime of ignorance. It is the most emphatic signifier to take notice of, whether in film or in politics or in consideration of ‘real lives’. All discourses that argue disparate theories of pleasure and perversion, while arguing differing incarnations of death, agree to its inevitability, its finality and its terrible, irrefutable affect. So the only means by which I can utilize death for transforming subjectivity is not through theorizing a subject-in-death but a subject in the affect-of-death. This term means a subject effected and irrefutably changed, hence affected totally as a corporeal subject, by a consideration of death. Such a consideration may be of images of death, but due to the volatility of the term it must also include any consideration of the concept itself and what it may mean to subjectivity.

This chapter also involves excavating the concept of the death of subjectivity when a subject of value (white, male etc) is not the subject referred to. Subjectivity figured as embodied being is also necessarily different to the death-of-man idea because the corpse is one of the most abject yet simultaneously pure-body states of human-ness, if not being. So before a consideration of death is utilized for transformative subjectivity, these versions of non-dominant subjectivity must engage with ‘death’, an engagement that until now has not been commonly described. Positing the subject without overvalued subjectivity-to-lose, in front of images of death, will hopefully create a simultaneous affect on the embodied viewer. The relationship between subject and death-image will mimic or become the catalyst for the ‘death’ of the static and stagnant subject through its affects of horror, disgust, fear, sorrow and a demand for (ethical) consideration. It will change the subject from the moment before, due to the abrasive nature of its imagery and the response it elicits. Death imagery traverses the real and the fake in a way that images, which confound the boundaries of perversion/normalcy and pleasure/unpleasure also, perform. But death imagery includes the demand for a grave, ethical consideration alongside its rupturing affect. These required implications ask why these particular images make such demands. Through a discussion of positive versus annihilative and other unethical versions of death (both unethical to the subject in transformation and unethical through ignoring any concept of an other), as well as the ‘real’ versus the fake, the propulsive affects of death imagery will begin to emerge, alongside urgent questions the horror of these images force us to ask.

My theorization of death contrasts strongly with the concept of the Other, which is never attainable, and which Lacan sees as constitutive of the death drive. [5] At the same time it fits with Deleuze & Guattari’s becoming. Although my idea confounds the barrier between self and outside, it begins from the self (though not willfully), instigating transformation rather than assimilation, incorporation or satisfaction. A transformative death has implications for theorizing the corpse in death. Death is usually constituted as a capital end, a cessation where the flesh becomes product, but to see death in this way does not work for my argument for two reasons. First, the corpse can never be theorized sufficiently as a conscious subject who is transforming, for obvious reasons. Only its potential for affect can be utilized. Following on from this, when the corpse is used toward transformation its status as the extreme of abject and used-up waste material is denied. Rather than using phantasmatic drive for death as psychoanalysis does, I am using material, immanent death, the abject dead that is detrimental to the psychoanalytic subject. Death’s traditionally nihilistic, regressive, ‘dead’ aim or drive will be replaced by a permutative, vitalistic (albeit horrifying) aim. The corpse as capital waste product is replaced, through the use of divergent epistemes, to theorize the viscerality of death in the flesh. This approach is necessary to elucidate the difficulty any one discourse has in agreeing with an other as to the definition of, not only death, but also the seemingly symbolically reduced and basic entity of the dead body.

The fissure between empirical discourse on the ‘truth’ of the grave finality of death, and the playfulness with which the unreal world of aesthetics and representation, specifically the filmic, treats the subject of death, is a chasm which seems un-spannable. These disparate discourses were probably never meant to become referents to each other. [6] Where the filmic concerns itself with the impossible represented through celluloid as possible and visualizable, like most sciences “The search for truth is the essence of forensic pathology. This truth forms an essential link between the enforcement of law and the protection of the public…” [7] Although film and forensics often address the same ideas, they certainly appear, both visually and discursively, somewhat opposed. Both (forensic) medicine and films, specifically horror films, deal with death and the corpse. In many ways, the signifier ‘death’ common to both is their only commonality. Death to the forensic pathologist is something to read, to investigate and to unravel. The corpse is textbook, the palimpsest of clues and solutions, the topography or map of narrative events. The corpse in horror film is the object of the personal horror of death - subjective, immediate and visual without the clinical definitions or significations of science. The corpse in film is materially and spectacularly horrifying, which the clinical language of forensics never seems to read it as being. The corpse in film is also horrific due to its relationship with explicitly embodied subjectivity, with self, with mortality and with life. Death in horror film is the fear of dying, the terror of being killed and the horror of the body’s fragility. In forensics death is universality and the shadowy lives which inhabit the forensics texts of flesh are subjects of fading relevance. Death comes first in forensics and last in film. That is, within a narrative system, the death of the flesh is the inaugural moment of forensics while the compulsion towards the horrification or annihilation of the body, specifically as container for the self, is the ultimate spectacle of film.

Where is there a place in-between the opposed medical and filmic discourses of death? The most obvious place is the in-between technological object of desire, the Internet. The Internet may be treated as a facility by which one can read forensic textbooks or have some gratuitous fun with curiosity. On the Internet, and in few books (the ‘Polysexuality’ issue of Semiotext(e)), we find the uncommon fusion of forensic pictures posted alongside a teenager’s wise-ass comments, or high philosophy, or both. [8] In these examples the discourses of forensics and aesthetic representation are made strange bedfellows in much the same way as I am attempting to merge and compare them. The result is unpredictable, but the merger may be useful in examining the shock that often occurs when a fan of hard-core horror films, such as myself, becomes frightened, nauseous and jaded towards the fragility of life upon investigating the equally hard-core world of forensics.

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