Subjectivity, Difference, and Proximity in Transnational Film and Literature
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Errancies of Desire: Subjectivity, Difference, and Proximity in Transnational Film and Literature A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Vartan Patrick Messier March 2011 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Marguerite Waller, Co-Chairperson Dr. Marcel Hénaff, Co-Chairperson Dr. Sabine Doran Dr. Jennifer Doyle Copyright by Vartan Patrick Messier 2011 The Dissertation of Vartan P. Messier is approved: _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson _________________________________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has benefited considerably from the guidance and suggestions of professors and colleagues. First and foremost, Margie Waller deserves my utmost gratitude for her unwavering support and constructive criticism throughout the duration of the project. Likewise, I would like to thank Sabine Doran for her commitment and dedication, as well as her excellent mentoring, especially in the earlier stages of the process. My thanks go to Marcel Hénaff who graciously accepted to co-chair the dissertation, and whose unique insights on intellectual history proved invaluable. As well, revisions were facilitated by Jennifer Doyle’s refined critique on the ideas permeating the structure and direction of the manuscript. Faculty members in the Departments of Comparative Literature, English, Philosophy, and Media and Cultural Studies contributed thoughtfully to my endeavor. I would like to thank Pierre Keller, Henk Maier, Ken Rodgers, and James Tobias, in particular, for sharing their knowledge and reflections on various aspects of my work. A special mention goes to Theda Shapiro, whose intellectual generosity is without equal. Tom Scanlon, chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, offered his guidance and assistance throughout my graduate career, and Bonnie Anketell, Administrative Assitant, helped me navigate through the formal steps of degree completion. Interactions with former colleagues and classmates at the University of California and the University of Puerto Rico provided me with an adequate forum to discuss various idea and concepts pertaining to the nature of my project; Nandita Batra, Nicoletta Da Ros, José Jiménez, Immanuel Kim, Jonathan Lee, Michael Nau, and Regina Yung all contributed enthusiastically to shaping these conversations. I would also like to thank my students in the World Literature courses I taught at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), iv whose thoughtful contributions to class discussion assisted me in revisiting certain aspects of my textual inquiries. I am very grateful to my parents, Mitch and Peggy, whose support was priceless, and without whom I would not have been able to finish this project. Finally, I thank Jessica Behm for her love and assistance, as well as for her sharp critical insights into the philosophical fabric of my life and work. v ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Errancies of Desire: Subjectivity, Difference, and Proximity in Transnational Film and Literature by Vartan Patrick Messier Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, March 2011 Dr. Marguerite Waller, Co-Chairperson Dr. Marcel Hénaff, Co-Chairperson This dissertation is concerned with the role of desire in the aesthetic experience; more specifically, it focuses on the ways in which we project and respond affectively to a work of art as formative processes of subjectivity. Inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s “The Gaze of Orpheus,” which links desire to errancy and “errance” (the French for wandering) and situates them as constitutive artistic forces, the guiding hypothesis is that the aesthetic experience is channeled via the mechanics of language and the gaze by the “errancies of desire”—the wanderings and errs of the desiring subject. Consequently, because desire is fluid and unpredictable, it produces heterogeneous and nomadic forms of subjectivity that undermine essentialist notions of cultural difference and specificity. Adopting a transnational perspective, this dissertation examines a culturally diverse corpus of contemporary works, including postmodern American fiction, vi postcolonial African novels, and Taiwanese Second Wave cinema. Methodologically, it first highlights the functions of the errancies of desire in each work as a twofold process of affective projection and response, and second, it analyzes how instances of transnational intertextuality position contextual experiences of subjectivity in proximity to one another by bridging differences inscribed within geo-political time and space. Two interconnected thematic lenses structure my approach, each corresponding to a section of the dissertation: the first section investigates the errancies of the viewer’s desire in films by Michael Haneke, Spike Jonze, and Tsai Ming-Liang by focusing on the aesthetical and ethical dimensions of subjectivization in film spectatorship; the second analyzes the errancies of male desire in novels by Bret Easton Ellis, Michel Houellebecq, and Alain Mabanckou as it pertains to hegemonic constructs of masculinity and culturally-sanctioned forms of imperial violence. By utilizing a comparative methodology to highlight the role of affect and desire and the effect of cross-cultural intertextuality on apperception, this dissertation demonstrates how each text unsettles perceptions of cultural difference by producing new transnational subjectivities. Therefore, the aesthetical inquiries of this project further contribute to the poststructuralist critique of metaphysics by investigating ethical issues of difference and subjectivity in specific instances wherein we bare witness to the virtual dissolution of national boundaries. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 Desire and the “Deconstructionist”: Adaptation as Writerly Praxis.......................................20 The Lover’s Infidelity: Adaptation as Assemblage...................................................................21 Narrative Errancy and the Errancy of Fidelity ..........................................................................27 The Glass of the Window: Towards a Cinematics of Modernity ..............................................34 Fragments of a Mirror: Hollywood, the Screenwriter, and the Dialogics of Desire .................37 Cutting into Adaptation: Adaptation as “The Deconstructionist” .............................................44 CHAPTER 2 The Nomadic Transtextualities of Desire: Errance and Errancy in Tsai Ming- Liang’s What Time is it There? and Goodbye, Dragon Inn.......................................................49 From Intertextuality to Transtextuality......................................................................................53 Transtextuality and Self-Reflexivity: From Spectator to Spectacle ..........................................58 Metatextual Errancies: Realism, Haunting, Lingering, and Fusion...........................................66 From Transtextual Errancies to Metatextual Departures: Hiroshima, Nevers, Paris, Taipei .........................................................................................................................................72 CHAPTER 3 The Play of Horror: Affect and Desire in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games..........................77 The Pleasures of Horror.............................................................................................................82 Between Terror and Horror .......................................................................................................93 The Realities of Horror............................................................................................................106 Difference and Repetition, or, The Politics of Reproduction ..................................................116 viii CHAPTER 4 The Eschatology of Desire in Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires ................125 Les particules élémentaires Reactionary Historicism: A Contested History of Sexuality......129 The Disciplinary Society and La Société de Consommation: Effectuating the Transition towards a “Society of Control” ..............................................................................138 The Determinist Experiment: Oedipal Desire and the Male Prototype...................................142 CHAPTER 5 Extreme Desires in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho........................................................153 Shock and Scandal: American Psycho as Postmodern Pastiche..............................................156 Pornography and Horror: The Politics of Sexual Violence.....................................................161 Postmodern Spectacle: Simulacra and Schizophrenia.............................................................171 From Pastiche to Parody, or, an “I” for an “Eye”....................................................................181 The American Nightmare ........................................................................................................195 CHAPTER 6 The Self, the Other, its Doubles, and its Shadows: The Dialectics of Desire in Alain