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CHASTE CINEMATICS CHASTE CINEMATICS VICTOR J. VITANZA punctum books brooklyn, n.y. CHASTE CINEMATICS © 2015 Victor J. Vitanza http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or for- mat, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. First published in 2015 by punctum books Brooklyn, New York http://punctumbooks.com punctum books is an independent, open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humantities assemblage. We solicit and pimp quixotic, sagely mad engagements with textual thought-bodies. We provide shelters for intellectual vagabonds. ISBN-13: 978-0692541555 ISBN-10: 0692541551 Facing-page drawing: Heather Masciandaro. Cover and book designed by Chris Piuma. Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ http://punctumbooks.com/about/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490-1500) “Nothing is ever to be posited that is not also reversed and caught up again in the supplementarity of this reversal [reversement]. To put it another way: there would no longer be either a right side or a wrong side of discourse, or even of texts, but each passing from one to the other would make audible and comprehensible even what resists the recto-verso structure that shores up common sense. If this is to be practiced for every meaning posited—for every word, utterance, sentence, but also of course for every pho- neme, every letter—we need to proceed in such a way that linear reading is no longer possible.” Luce Irigaray, This Sex (79–80, Irigaray’s emphasis; Cf. “Invisible”) “Long ago I started putting to myself a question: Where are the beginning and the end of the novel? I have found some answers while writing my books. Long ago I came to understand that the arts are ‘reversible’ and ‘nonreversible.’ Some arts are reversible and enable the recipient to approach the work from various sides, or even to go around it and have a good look at it, changing the spot of the perspective, and the direction of his [more so, her] looking at it according to his [more so, her] own preference, as is the case with architecture, sculpture, or painting. Others, nonreversible arts, such as music and literature, look like one- way roads on which everything moves from the beginning to the end, from birth to death. I have always wished to make literature, which is a nonreversible art, a reversible one. Therefore, my novels have no end in the classical meaning of the word.” Milorad Pavić, “The Beginning and the End of Reading—The Beginning and the End of the Novel” (142) TABLE OF CONTENTS (OR, DVD MENU) Preamble · Behind the Ob-Scenes (or, Confronting the Preamble) page xiii Logos (λόγος) · The Obtuse Sense of the Scene · Methodos (μέθοδος) · A Background Check · A Program Without a Program · Dedication · Acknowledgments · Image Permissions Chaste Cinema I? page 1 Short Cuts: Cut to One. Cut to Two. Cut to Three · Scanning the Cuts: Installation 1, or Imagined Interviews, DVD One (Shaffer and Forman, Amadeus, Canonization). Installation 2, DVD Two (Hal Hartley, Henry Fool, Pedagogy). Installation 3, DVD Three+ (John Waters, Multiple Maniacs, Chaste Rape in Divine Places) · Cut To Paste: Writing flux aside flux on “a Riemann surface” Chaste Cinema II? page 69 Helke Sander’s Liberators Take Liberties: Research (Facts, Statistics, Testimony). Further Testimony (German and Russian). The Master Narrative (A Pre-meditation). Resistance. Counter-Resistance. Meditations · Pagan Meditations (Eros) · Aphrodite, The Shadow Narrative I · Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-Moi, The Shadow Narrative II · Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Mourning Narrative: Eros Redux. Exemplars of “A Life.” Sensation (or “Bicycle-less neo-realism”). Unmourning. Antimemory. xii CHASTE CINEMATICS Chaste Cinema III+? page 153 Reading and Writing Revenge Fantasies: Wendy Hesford (Margie Strosser’s Rape Stories) · At First Viewing · Subsequent Viewings · Interruptions as Other Viewings (Memento) · A Peculiar (Now Impertinent) Reading Excursus · The Assessment-Test Event page 187 Alternate Endings with Rebeginnings? page 199 Irreversibility (Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible) · Reversible Destiny · Multiply Principles, Fly towards Transversals Easter Eggs page 209 Dominique Laporte’s The Irreparable, as the object of loss. · Giorgio Agamben’s The Irreparable, as hope in what is without remedy. Deleted Scenes page 215 Works Cited page 219 PREAMBLE BEHIND THE OB-SCENES (OR, CONFRONTING THE PREAMBLE) Logos (λόγος) Ob scene: 1590s, “offensive to the senses, or to taste and refine- ment,” from M.Fr. obscène, from L. obscenus “offensive,” espe- cially to modesty, originally “boding ill, inauspicious,” perhaps from ob “onto” (see ob-) + caenum “filth.” Meaning “offensive to modesty or decency” is attested from 1590s. Online Etymology Dictionary When we read, it is not ours to absorb all that is written. Our thoughts are jealous and they constantly blank out the thoughts of others, for there is not room enough in us for two scents at one time. Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars As historians are well aware . the passage from promiscuity to modesty cannot occur without a refinement of the sense of smell that entails a lowering of the threshold of tolerance for certain odors. Dominique Laporte, Histoire de la merdre (Prologue) xiv CHASTE CINEMATICS The Obtuse Sense of the Scene (the writer’s attempts and expectations) This book—based on an imagined DVD list of extras (i.e., supplements) rather than a traditional book’s table of contents (i.e., discontents)—is composed of a series of beginnings.1 Transversally arranged. Both vertically and horizontally. But obtusely. At different angles. The general theme is cinema (cinematics) and sexual violence (rape).2 And yet, the theme—a general economy of a theme—is to 1 This work is a sequel, if not also a prequel, to Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape (Palgrave, 2011). 2 On the matter of “cinema (cinematics),” I have in mind a number of citations, but especially Weiss’ Cinematics. As Harry Rand points out, Weiss’s novelistic discussion with “virtual co-authors” makes the “conversation . strange” (349). Rand interrupts much of his discussion with statements made by five of his colleague-friends (at times as many as three on a page) without even bothering to counter-argue the charges against him. I admire this approach. Rand, however, writes: “One won- ders what pangs of intellectual integrity or masochism moved Weiss to include this remark, without acting to rectify the lacunae that prompted it” (349; cf. Berleant). Additionally, see Steigler, Technics and Time, 3; Doane; Shaviro, Cinematic Body. As for Post Cinematics (without or with a hyphen), I have in mind Shaviro’s Post Cinematic Affect. Also, see “Roundtable Discussion. The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2. With Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Sha- viro, and Therese Grisham (moderator)” at <http://www.lafuriaumana.it/ index.php/locchio-che-uccide/385-roundtable-discussion-about-post-cin- ematic>. Kittler, “Man as a Drunken Town-Musician,” discusses various national and methodical senses on the word “cinematics.” Also, there is its opposite: “acinematic” (Lyotard, “Acinema”; e.g., see James Cahill; Ramdas). On the matter of “sexual violence (rape),” I work, here, with Monique Plaza’s “Our Damages.” (Cf. Hengehold’s “Immodest” and Žižek’s Vio- lence 1–8; cf. Ann Cahill, 15–49.) My approach, therefore, is a wide scope, including harassment, assault, rape, and most assuredly torture. My understanding of rape and torture as sexual violence is informed not only by Plaza but even more so by Kate Millett’s thinking in The Basement, which I discuss at length in the introduction and in chapter two in Sexual Violence. PReamBLE xv begin again with a remix of such assemblages as Chaste Rape / Divine Filth, as well as Sacred / Profane.3 All folded and wrapped up in the name of Chaste Cinematics. These are paradoxes that are exceptionally perverse, when described in detail.4 Intermittently, I have imagined this book as a shooting script with voluminous production notes and imaginary storyboards toward a film that is, in fact, produced and yet 3 Which are not binaries. Alone. For they remix together. Yet, tradi- tional philosophy would keep these proximities widely separate. Simply recall the basic principles of traditional philosophy: identification, not-contradiction, and the excluded third. As Henry Miller writes, however, “I love everything that flows” together Tropic( 257-58). To begin again: Chaste Rape refers to a book by Stephanie Jed, titled Chaste Thinking, which is about Humanists and their Chaste Thinking about rape. (Chaste Thinking, consequently, becomes Chaste Rape as the subtitle of my most recent book Sexual Violence.) Divine Filth is the title of a book by Bataille (a collection of notes, introduced and translated by Mark Sptizer).

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