<<TRANSMATHOME

ABSTRACT

Pleasure, Perversion and Death describes a new theory of the viewing subject and its relationship to contemporary visual culture. The work exists at the intersection of philosophy and film using extreme films to explore an ethics of spectatorship that thinks the viewing body beyond its relationship to the image. Extreme films, such as Suspiria, City of the Living Dead, mondo, so-called ‘snuff’ and educational autopsy films challenge the body’s traditional relationship with film, be it through the affect of images of horror or through renegotiating the visceral relationship between viewer and narrative. In a larger context the book describes viewing as a practice of desire. Three large philosophical and aesthetic issues make up Pleasure, Perversion and Death – pleasure, perversion and death. Beginning with the practice of viewing as a form of pleasure, I explore the nuances and challenges images pose to interdisciplinary representations of desire. Interdisciplinarity – the use of texts beyond film, such as clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, neurophysiology, genetics and forensic pathology – functions in the early parts of the book to challenge our own relationship to our desire. I use interdisciplinary texts to theorise how all desire, whether it be for knowledge or image, represents some form of corporeal perversion. In the final section of the book I consider the ethics of the arguments posed. The project advocates thinking the viewing body differently and posing a future for this body.

The book is broken into four large chapters with many smaller sections within them. The large chapters refer to three philosophical fields that may affect the viewing subject - pleasure, perversion and death. Extreme films give us a form pleasure, despite their visceral representations. They refer primarily to the viscerality of death, from the death of bodies to the death of dominant systems of representation or ideology. On-screen extremity may transform us, but the transformative affect found in such simple terms as pleasure, perversion and death in every genre of discourse are studied in order to posit moments and tactics of transformation everywhere.

Pleasure - Beginning the Becoming

The source, function and definition of pleasure are diverse, from psychoanalysis to neurophysiology and film theory. Feeling pleasure at viewed material that, in any other world, would be considered unpleasurable or impossible (such as the pleasure found in watching horror film) elucidates the power of pleasure as potentially transformative of the way we experience visual culture and eventually our own sense of predictable self. Culture’s desire to define and organize pleasure both scientifically and within visual culture is explored through Foucault, Irigaray and the films of Lucio Fulci, especially City of the Living Dead, as well as Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox.

Perversion - Becoming Filmic

Extreme films are the perverse side of visual culture, and non-normative sexualities are the perverse form of desire. Considering what is at stake in both strategic and dominant versions of defining perversion, from queer theory to genetics, this section claims that the act of viewing has come to represent a modern form of desire. If read into traditional discourses on sexuality, viewing as a practice could itself be a form of perversion. The implications of perversion as both oppressive and creative, suggested by queer theory, are measured against Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that desire is the primary axis through which the subject and the world may transform. Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Jorg Buttgereit’s NekRomantik and Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein are explored as representing forms of perversion in what they represent and the way in which they make us watch.

Death - Becoming Horror

Extreme films, especially horror films are primarily about death. Death refers to the death of hierarchically structured bodies of value and of no value, and the body itself as a structured material phenomenon. Images of death, both real and faked, can affect our sense of what a body is, what it feels like to be a body and the ways in which body stratification, both of itself and in society, exists to value and devalue certain bodies. This chapter reinterprets death through feminist readings of death films, from supposed snuff such as the Faces of Death series and the still film Death Scenes to news footage, forensic pathology texts and death as represented in traditionally male discourses such as psychoanalysis. My exploration of the mondo film phenomenon, explicit in Mondo Cane and the Shocking series (Shocking Africa, Shocking Asia) considers the relationship between race and death. Hence this chapter is the most interdisciplinary. The death of our subjectivity as complete and immobile through the transformative potential of considering images and texts dealing with death raise ethical questions resolved in the conclusion.

Becoming Otherwise - The Ethics of Becoming

The ethics of viewing horror have not been addressed before in film theory. The ethics of the historically oppressed other are considered in this chapter as a blind spot in post-modern philosophy and film theory. In this chapter real lived bodies are considered in relation to viewing practices, with Gilles Deleuze’s work ‘Mediators’ as a key text. This work has not been analyzed in depth in either philosophy or film theory. The widespread yet subjective nature of spectatorship makes transformation through images a domestic and radical practice. Cinema and television is relatively domestic and available to most Western subjects, and yet positing the viewing practice as a mode by which we can transform the way the embodied subjects are thought makes this transformation available to many persons. For this reason this chapter is the most important in the book.