Figurations of the Real: locating the unconscious

1.1 Editing as Real, or death-drive in film theory

In Pasolini's La ricotta (1963) Orson Welles plays an intellectually lucid but supercilious leftist director; when asked what he thinks of death, his answer is: 'As a Marxist, it is a fact I do not take into consideration'. Although the Welles character is meant to voice many of Pasolini's own controversial views on modernity and religion, his categorical "ban on death" is exactly what the film sets out to refute, as by the end, after the tragicomic demise of the film's sub-proletarian hero Stracci (Mario Cipriani), the Welles character is forced to acknowledge: 'Poor Stracci, he had to die to show us that he was alive!' The idea of the constant interpenetration of life and death is perhaps the founding theme of Pasolini's cinema.

In 1967 Pasolini wrote a series of short essays in which he argued that a finished film is comparable to a finished life insofar as both are constituted by a series of significant facts retroactively selected by editing and death respectively. Only after editing and death, that is, can film and life be submitted to critical analysis and interpretation, for only then are they withdrawn from the contingency of time and arranged into a past that cannot be modified any further. The paradoxical point is that the encounter with meaning is correlative to the death of the subject and the editing of the film:

It is therefore absolutely necessary to die, for while we are alive we lack sense, and the language of our life (with which we express ourselves, and which we hold in the utmost importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, an endless search for relations and meanings. Death accomplishes an instantaneous montage of our life: that is, it chooses its truly significant moments (not modifiable anymore by other potentially contrary or incoherent moments), and puts them in succession, turning our infinite, unstable, uncertain (and thus linguistically undescribable) present, into a clear, stable, certain (and thus linguistically well describable) past [...]. Only through death does our life help us to express ourselves. Editing, therefore, does to the filmic material [...] what death does to life (Pasolini, 1995, p. 241).

Pasolini's fascination with death was certainly not as morbid as many critics have hastily intimated. As the above parallel with editing suggests, it should rather be taken with a degree of theoretical flexibility. My working hypothesis is that to fully appreciate the significance of Pasolini's argument we need to read it through a Lacanian lens: as an attempt to dialecticise the relationship between what we generally assume to be visible and teeming with meaning (film/life), and the dimension which, on the contrary, alludes by definition to an abyssal (non-)place outside space and time (editing/death) – if we think, that is, of editing as a series of spatio-temporal gaps between shots, and simultaneously if we perceive death, as Pasolini did (1995, p. 252), from a lay, completely immanent, perspective. The specific Lacanian issue at stake is that the opening of the space of meaning depends on a radically displaced kernel of absolute negativity, whose inaccessibility is guaranteed precisely by the editing procedure and, on an existential level, by the event of death. Slavoj Zizek makes this point forcefully apropos of any symbolic constellation:

One of the lessons of Lacanian psychoanalysis – and at the same time the point at which Lacan rejoins Hegel – is the radical discontinuity between the organic immediacy of "life" and the symbolic universe: the "symbolization of reality" implies the passage through the zero point of the "night of the world". What we forget, when we pursue our daily life, is that our human universe is nothing but an embodiment of the radically inhuman "abstract negativity", of the abyss we experience when we face the "night of the world" (Zizek, 2001b, p. 53).

In this section I intend to show that Pasolini's incursions into film theory were neither theoretically naive nor, as Joan Copjec (2002, pp. 200–01) has recently insinuated, incomprehensible. Instead, they intuitively anticipated what was to become (and still is, since its potential has not been fully exhausted) the debate on the most stimulating contributions that Lacanian psychoanalysis has made to film studies, namely the theories of suture and, indirectly, of the gaze, which will be discussed in the following sections of the book. More specifically, I shall argue that the notions of suture and gaze, once extremely popular theoretical references for film studies, both share with Pasolini's understanding of editing a decisive connection with what Lacan termed the Real, the traumatic domain inaccessible to meaning and yet inescapably related to it.

I begin by reading Pasolini's argument through the key psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious. The claim that what guarantees the consistency of film is the operation of editing qua death (i.e. qua inscription of the abyssal void of death) should indeed be taken as a Lacanian paradox, insofar as the Lacanian subject is, strictly speaking, a void (in the form of unconscious desires) that gives body to a being: 'Once the subject himself comes into being, he owes it to a certain nonbeing upon which he raises up his being' (Lacan, 1988, p. 192); 'everything exists only on a supposed background of absence. Nothing exists except insofar as it doesn't exist' (Lacan, 1966, p. 392). Put differently, Lacanian psychoanalysis, in its theoretical and analytic capacity, always deals with a subject that constitutes itself against the backdrop of the impossible relationship between conscious and unconscious self: between the ego as a place of fictional misrecognition generated by the interplay of fantasy and desires, and the "acephalous" (impossible to assume or subjectivise) unconscious.

Such radical division can perhaps be grasped more comfortably by considering the three orders of Lacanian theory, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Since his famous 1949 paper on the Stade du miroir (mirror stage), Lacan (1989, pp. 1–8) granted the Imaginary and the Symbolic dimensions a central role in the formation of subjectivity. If the Imaginary implies that the subject has a first insight into self-consciousness through narcissistic identification with the other, the formation of subjectivity proper can only be secured in the Symbolic, the realm of language and meaning, which we access through the Oedipus complex. The bottom line, which leads Lacan (1989, p. 1) to state that psychoanalysis opposes 'any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito' (i.e. from a self-transparent and autonomous understanding of subjectivity), is that entrance in the Symbolic is ontologically equivalent to the incision of a radical cut in the subject (which he calls fente or refente in French, and often Spaltung from Freud), a wound that the subject will never...