Beautiful Annoyance: Reading the Subject by Margaret A. Ozierski Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Hardt, Supervisor ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ David Bell ___________________________ Françoise Gaillard, External Member Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 iv ABSTRACT Beautiful Annoyance: Reading the Subject by Margaret A. Ozierski Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Hardt, Supervisor ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ David Bell ___________________________ Françoise Gaillard, External Member An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 Copyright by Margaret Alice Ozierski 2011 Abstract This dissertation examines the pair subject-subjectivity embedded in the problematic of the end of art, as it is figured in exemplary fashion by film and literature. The analysis examines critically the problem of the subject vis-à-vis subjectivity by opening a dialogue that allows the necessary double terms of this discussion to emerge in the first place from the encounter with selected filmic and literary texts: Jacques Rivette‟s La belle noiseuse and Samuel Beckett‟s Film, The Unnamable and The Lost Ones. These texts are analyzed on an equal footing with the thought of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who have written on both subjectivity and art. The study thus proposes a real movement – in terms and through art – that treats the metaphor of anamorphosis on the level of praxis: the image of subjectivity appears on the screen that is the filmic or literary text as the result of a passage in terms. The subject that emerges at the end of the analysis puts in perspective a certain practice of metonymic reading as renewed political potential of subjectivity. iv Dedication To Florian and Valentin, my two “unnamables” who name me v Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Chapter 1: “D’Un sujet l’autre” ......................................................................................... 1 0: The Frame ................................................................................................................. 1 Frame I: The Eye of the Other ...................................................................................... 4 Frame II: The “I” of the Other .................................................................................... 28 Frame III: Return: The Eye of the Other .................................................................... 31 Frame IV: Return: The “I” of the Other (The terms…and their doubles) .................. 35 Frame V: Timeliness of the Project ............................................................................ 41 Chapter Outlines ......................................................................................................... 47 Excursus Eye I: Un-framing the Reader ........................................................................... 54 Chapter Two: From Kitsch to the Split Subject ................................................................ 59 1. The Weak Origin of the Work of Art...................................................................... 59 2. Rivette and Agamben: Poiesis ................................................................................ 63 3. Rivette: The Beautiful Annoyance, a Scandal ........................................................ 70 4. Rivette: The Beautiful Annoyance, a Revolution ................................................... 71 5. Rivette: The Beautiful Annoyance, or the Split Subject Filmed ............................ 77 6. Rivettes‟s Auteur (action-image) and Subjectivity (time-image) ........................... 78 Chapter Three - From Silence to the Witness: The Authorial Subject ............................. 87 1. The Impossible Space of the Narrator .................................................................... 87 2. Beckett‟s The Unnamable: Toward a “Fabula” Rasa ............................................. 90 3. Michel Foucault: “What is an Author?” ............................................................... 105 vi 4. Beckett and Foucault: Chiasmic Scissioning ........................................................ 118 5. (Beckett‟s) “Return” to Foucault: a Critique of the Author-Function .................. 123 6. “I am Matthew and I am the Angel.” (Return to Beckett II) ................................ 132 7. “Profaning” the Subject: Agamben‟s Account of Foucault‟s Author-Function ... 137 8. If the Trousers Don‟t Fit….. Wear Them ............................................................. 168 Excursus Eye II: Framing Beckett .................................................................................. 170 IV: From Utopia to Dystopia: the Subject Remnant ....................................................... 178 0. If the Trousers Fit….. Don‟t Wear Them ............................................................. 178 1. The Lost Ones: Narrative Voice ........................................................................... 183 2. The Scriptor .......................................................................................................... 190 3. Barthes/Foucault: Neutral Scription ..................................................................... 196 4. The Lost Ones: the Scriptor-Witness .................................................................... 205 5. The Reader ............................................................................................................ 214 6. Agamben‟s Concept of the Witness ...................................................................... 217 7. Reading the Subject Remnant ............................................................................... 226 8. The Political Space of the Subject ........................................................................ 242 V. Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 259 1. The Remnant Reader............................................................................................. 259 2. The Political Subject ............................................................................................. 266 Works Cited and Consulted ............................................................................................ 270 Samuel Beckett works and criticism ....................................................................... 270 Jacques Rivette films and criticism ......................................................................... 273 Secondary Sources .................................................................................................. 274 vii Biography ........................................................................................................................ 278 viii Chapter 1: “D’Un sujet l’autre” 0: The Frame The aim of this dissertation is to examine the problem of the pair subject- subjectivity embedded in the problematic of the end of art and figured with it in an exemplary fashion by film and literature. Looking at subjectivity figured in art necessitates a focused and productive encounter with the work of philosophers who have written on both subjectivity and art, and who include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze. The proposed study examines critically the problem of the subject vis-à-vis subjectivity, not by proposing the terms of discussion of human subjectivity and then turning to art for verification or illustration, but rather by opening a dialogue that allows the necessary double terms of this discussion to emerge in the first place from the encounter with the films and literature under discussion. In particular, it is Samuel Beckett‟s Film (1965) that in a cogent and concrete manner displays the dying subject indissociable from the dying medium of the cinematic art, as I show in the next section (Frame I) of the introductory chapter. This initial analysis of Film becomes the occasion for the emergence of the terms of discussion of the subject – split subject, witness, dystopia – that are embedded in the problematic of the death of art. The latter discourse gives rise to its own terms proposed by Gianni Vattimo in his 1985 study The End of Modernity: kitsch, silence and utopia. It is therefore not only possible but necessary to consider the terms as resonating with one another, as double terms in a complex relation that resembles and unfolds the pair subject/subjectivity staged by Beckett‟s Film. 1 In other words, the passage through the filter or prism of art of the initial terms of discussion, those dealing with the death of art, puts us in a position not so much to „distill‟ new terms for opening a new perspective on subjectivity, as it allows us to unfold pairs of terms that emerge simultaneously in a relation that deserves careful analysis. The study thus proposes a real movement