4 PARTES DE LA PRUEBA DE CERTIFICACIÓN
4.1 COMPRENSIÓN DE TEXTOS ESCRITOS
18 Ibid, p. 92.
19 See Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema, translated by Jansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
20 Papapetros, “Malicious Houses,” p. 30.
“Where and how did we get the idea that the Germans are a stolid, phlegmatic race? In truth, they are widely removed from that. They are warm-hearted, emotional, impulsive, enthusiastic, their tears come at the mildest touch, and it is not hard to move them to laughter.”—Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad.
Perhaps the best place to start for re-articulating and re-thinking modern animation is with the central concept of Weimar cinema itself: Freud’s uncanny. Aside from being a central frame of reference for film scholars, the uncanny is itself a product of its period, a document of the immediate post-war experience, what Freud calls at his essay’s beginning “the times in which we live,” as well as an indirect reflection of expressionist cinema itself.21 Indeed, in analyzing the figure of the double and its associated mirrors, shadows and “guardian spirits,” Freud explicitly follows Otto Rank’s 1914 study, which takes as its point of departure Ewers’ The Student of Prague.22 Even more relevant for our purposes is another early text that Freud discusses, Ernst Jentsch’s “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” where one of the key examples of uncanniness is
“doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.”23 Re-reading this passage, Freud will summon up a list of familiar images and motifs from gothic and Romantic fiction, but which are also all too familiar from the most well-known German films of his time: dolls, automata, waxworks, epileptics or grotesque animal-human hybrids, who, in Totem and Taboo (published one year before Rank’s study) are likewise connected to that repressed stage when there is no “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and- “hard-and-
21 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” Writings on Art and Literature, translated by Strachey (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 194. The key section of Elsaesser’s text, from which I have quoted extensively, is titled
“The uncanny, or the powerless power of the gaze” (91). Paul Coates’ book begins with a discussion of the uncanny on its very first page while Heidi Schlüpmann’s seminal study of Wilhelmine cinema is entitled The Uncanny Gaze (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). Finally, Kaes references the uncanny several times throughout his Shellshock Cinema, identifying cinema itself as the most uncanny of modern powers, a point he also raises on the first page of his essay “Modernity and its Discontents: Notes on Alterity in Weimar Cinema.” See Paul Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and the Image of Horror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 1.
22 “The Uncanny,” p. 210 and Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, translated by Tucker (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1971), p. 4-7.
23 Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” translated by Sellars, Angelaki 2:1 (1996), p. 11. Not cited by Freud, but equally relevant for our purposes is this passage: “The horror which a dead body (especially a human one), a deaths’ head, skeletons, and similar things cause can also be explained to a great extent by the fact that thoughts of latent animatedness always lie so close to these things” (15).
fast line between [children’s] own nature and that of all other animals.”24 In moments when such animism recurs, the animal can only appear as uncanny, becoming, as in Freud’s two famous animal-related case studies, an “anxiety-animal.”25 If anxiety and animation are structurally linked within Weimar film, then it is only due to a feeling of uncanniness. Indeed, in that most creaturely of films—Nosferatu—the narrator explicitly describes the sped up, reversed image of Orlak in his carriage as an “uncanny vision.”
Taking this insight at his starting point for a seminar devoted entirely to the originary affect of anxiety, Jacques Lacan explains precisely how the recursive return and repression by which Freud defines “this class of frightening things” makes the subject anxious: “Imagine that you are dealing with the most relaxing of desirable things, in its most pacifying form, the divine statue which is only divine. What would be more unheimlich than to see it coming to life, namely to see it showing itself as desiring!”26 In Lacan’s “return” to Freud, a return that has itself guided so many psychoanalytic readings of Weimar cinema, the animated desire of the object effectively turns the tables on the subject, whose own desire “is supported by the ideal of an inanimate object,” a freezing, fetishizing enjoyment that Lacan explicitly connects to cinema: “Think of a fast-rolling cinematographic movement stopping all of a sudden, freezing all of the characters at one point. This snapshot is characteristic of the reduction of the full, signifying scene…to what is immobilized in the phantasm.”27 Fantasy turns into nightmare when the statue or scene starts moving, animated by a desire beyond the viewing subject’s narcissistic pleasure. The uncanny occurs when the fundamental fantasy of the subject’s self-image, secured in that famous mirror
24 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, translated by Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), p. 157.
25 Freud, Three Case Studies, p. 197.
26 Jacques Lacan, unpublished seminar, “Anxiety.”
27 Quoted in Didi -Huberman, Images in Spite of All, translated by Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 77-78.
stage by which a foreign, specular image yokes itself to the ego, dissolves or distorts, revealing a repressed enjoyment connected to another subject, one defined by grotesque desire. In the text that has most inspired psychoanalytic film theory as well as many approaches to Weimar cinema, Lacan suggests that in the history of art there was a movement that followed Bosch in
successfully representing this disintegration: expressionism. If fantasy is founded on the subject’s viewing the tranquil scene with a mastering look, then expressionism depends on placing the gaze, that negative object or navel that structurally eludes scopic capture, within the image itself. Achieving a “satisfaction” connected to the Freudian death drive, “it is in a quite direct appeal to the gaze that expressionism is situated.”28 When the gaze appears, the film scene starts to uncannily move, the statue comes to life and the darkness starts squinting but, as with expressionist cinema, this statue is a Golem, a life death-driven, the inversion of the immortal “I”
of the mirror stage into its other, the insistent, compulsive and undead, that which embodies “a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people.”29
With Freud’s uncanny and its Lacanian re-reading, the psychoanalytic structure of modern animation becomes clear. Yet Freud’s text is far from consistently argued and contains a series of highly ambiguous moments, which undermine an anxiety-centered reading of the uncanny and its accompanied animation. As we have seen, the key feature of the uncanny is its repetitive structure, its haunting insistence of repressed and destructive desire. In a key paragraph Freud first describes a personal experience of such repetition in which he continually gets lost in an Italian town then going on to describe a typically romantic scene of someone losing their way
28 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 101. That section is entitled “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a.”
29 Freud, “The Uncanny,” p. 212.
in a misty mountain forest. Like a reversal of Polgar’s “Die Dinge,” Freud goes from this nocturnal forest to the interior of the room, yet it is precisely here where an affect beyond anxiety, dread or fear is cryptically suggested: “Or one may wander about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collide time after time with the same piece of furniture—though it is true that Mark Twain succeeded by wild exaggeration [groteske Übertreibung] in turning this latter situation into something irresistibly comic.”30 Later in the text, discussing “apparent death and the re-animation of the dead” Freud will apparently distinguish the example of Twain and its “feeling of the comic” (and with it the fairy-tale and Bible story) from the uncanny he finds far more directly in Hoffmann. It is at this point that an ambiguity creeps into the text, an ambiguity centered around the relationship between aesthetics, affect and a certain cultural approach to issues uncanny. Freud states, “We might say that these preliminary results have satisfied psychoanalytic interest in the uncanny, and that what remains probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry. But that would be to open the door to doubts about what exactly is the value of our German contention that the uncanny proceeds from something which has been repressed.”31 There is something very strange in this statement. Freud has at no point connected the uncanny or its theorization to a cultural lineage or tradition, except perhaps in his primary example, but here, at precisely the point where aesthetic experience threatens the scientific claims of psychoanalysis, such a claim suddenly becomes inexplicably necessary.32 Since the fairy-tale cannot be directly excluded from German culture, one is left to assume that it is the American example that requires this distinction.
30 Ibid, p. 213.
31 Ibid, p. 224-5.
32 The next paragraph will go on to distinguish the experience of fiction from the real experience of the uncanny, but this distinction has already been undone by Freud’s admission on the uncanny as a highly aesthetic phenomenon.
See Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche,” New Literary History 7;3 (Spring 1976), pp. 525-48.
Freud’s largely critical opinions of the United States and its repressive culture are well known, but Mark Twain was an exception to this rule of general suspicion.33 Following Nicholas Royle, the sole scholar to discuss this passage in “The Uncanny,” Freud had read Twain’s work fondly, imitated him in correspondence and even seen him speak in Vienna in 1898.34 If the United States largely served Freud as “principal exhibit in his indictment of bourgeois morality,”
then Twain seemed to be an exceptional and humorous outlet for critiquing, undermining or flat-out ignoring such repression.35 Not surprisingly, Freud’s most developed reference to Twain comes at the end of his Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, where the latter serves one of the key examples for the former’s concept of humor. In fact, humor is what allows us to resolve the ambiguity of Freud’s text, the ambiguity of an uncanny experience that produces a feeling of the comic in excess of a feeling of anxiety.
Humor is “the contribution made to the comic through the agency of the super-ego,” a
“rebellious” means of obtaining pleasure during threatening moments, especially those moments when “repression…has failed.”36 Yet if the comic tests Freud’s theory of the uncanny so too does the uncanny, in turn, test his theory of humor. For if humor is primarily a means for the pleasure principle, and with it the narcissistic ego, to remain triumphant in the face of some threat, the uncanny represents a kind of meta-threat that pulls the rug out from the ego itself, not simply a moment when repression fails, but when the return of what is repressed grotesquely repeats. The
33 See Peter Gay, “Freud’s America,” America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, pp. 303-314.
34 Nicholas Royle, “Hotel Psychoanalysis,” Angelaki 9:1 (April 2004), pp. 3-14.
35 There is some indication that Germany was always for Freud the preeminent site of repression. Writing in 1925, Freud would note with not a little irony “To negate something in a judgment is, at bottom, to say: ‘This is something which I should prefer to repress.’ A negative judgment is the intellectual substitute for repression: its ‘no’ is the hallmark of repression, a certificate of origin—like, let us say ‘Made in Germany.’” “Negation,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume 9 (London: Hogarth, 1976), p. 236.
36 Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud:
Volume 21, translated by Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1976), p. 165 and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 290.
uncanny therefore presents a hallucinatory moment in which the ego itself has no ground to stand on and thus, for a comic feeling to even be possible in such a situation, it must not aim for
pleasuring a conscious ego, but rather for satisfying the unconscious enjoyment of the superego.
According to Kojin Karatanji, “The superego in humor…functions with spontaneity and activeness, but not with consciousness. If it functioned consciously, it would not be humor but irony and simple repudiation.”37 It is important to note that this humorous super ego is not an agent of repression nor an obscene stand-in for the father of the primal horde—it is a distinctly death-driven super ego, one that “surmounts the automatism” of the neurotic or hysterical symptom and its broken gestures, by over-identifying with that automatism, exaggerating its already grotesque exaggeration. By doing so, it short-circuits the anxiety necessitated by the experience of the uncanny and generates an unconscious, “spectral affect”38 associated not with the pleasure principle but rather with those drives which “bear witness to active subjectivity on a level that [is] not consciousness.”39 The humor of the uncanny then is not an agency or a
program, but is rather an improvisatory means of short-circuiting the link between anxiety (and its various symptoms: projection of a threatening environment, gestural immobilization or a counteractive superego) and the return of the repressed.
It is here where Royle’s interpretation of the Twain passage falls short: inexplicably emphasizing the Latin etymology of the (English) word “exaggeration” throughout, Royle ignores the important conceptual and semantic associations of the German word Freud uses, Übertreibung. Both Übertreibung and Trieb (Freud’s word for drive, poorly translated by
Strachey as “instinct”) originate in the verb treiben, which connotes pushing, propelling, drifting
37 Kojin Karatani, “World Intercourse: A Transcritical Reading of Kant and Freud,” Umbr(a) (2007), p. 145.
38 Royle, “Hotel Psychoanalysis,” p. 11.
39 Karatanji, “World Intercourse,” p. 145.
or forcing. If the uncanny and its corresponding anxiety descends from the drive, like the anxious protagonists of Phantom or Nosferatu driven by the spectral, repressed Other of their desire, then we can say that a comic uncanny occurs when the protagonist and its projected environment accelerates this propulsion, exaggerates such driving into over (über)-drive.40 Such humor, the improvisatory and unconscious condition for this comic uncanny, is found precisely in the scene Freud references, a chapter from, not coincidentally, A Tramp Abroad, the 1880 account of Twain’s travels in Germany. This chapter reads at once like a lampoon of the gothic tales for which German authors were then so known as well as a repudiation of the uncanny modernism we have witnessed in writers like Vischer, Polgar and Hoffmanstahl or in those films most emblematic of Weimar cinema and its anxious historical imaginary. Twain stumbles about a German hotel room at night, confronted with seemingly alive objects and endless, alienating reflections of himself—what is funny here is not Twain’s hallucination of such animations but his own over-animated, highly destructive response. The implicitly un-German “contention” of the comic uncanny is thus that anxiety is only one affective side of the coin, that the spatial and subjective dislocation of the uncanny offers both a threat of unconscious automatism as much as a chance for unconscious improvisation.
40 This link between psychoanalysis, the uncanny and the modern technological imaginary was picked up on by Freud himself. After all, “psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason” (“The Uncanny,” p. 220) In his book on dreams, Freud would link the uncanniness of psychoanalysis to a particular, recurring image among his patients’ dreams: “It is not surprising that a person undergoing psycho-analytic treatment should often dream of it and be led to give expression in his dreams to the many thoughts and expectations to which the treatment gives rise. The imagery most frequently chosen to represent it is that of a journey, usually by motor-car, as being a modern and complicated vehicle.” See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 419.
Figure 3: Twain’s destructive over-drive in A Tramp Abroad.
There are thus two subjective sides to the death driven, one de-vivified by a threateningly animated projection of the repressed and the other brought to an exaggerated and over-driven humor, taking part in the projection’s animation rather than freezing in fear. For Freud, libido, as opposed to desire, is always too present, too alive and the image he suggests for this highly mobile Trieb points to the creaturely nature of an immortal life, too fully lived for repression to contain: “For complete health it is essential that the libido should not lose this full mobility. As an illustration of this state of things we may think of an amoeba [Protoplasmatierchen], whose viscous substance puts out pseudopodia, elongations into which the substance of the body extends but which can be retracted at any time so that the form of the protoplasmic mass is restored.”41 Perhaps building on this image of an amoeba-like libido, Lacan would construct an
41 Quoted in Catherine Malabou, ‘Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ diacritics, 37:4 (Winter 2007), p. 83.
entire “myth” through which libido could be both understood and graphically figured, a myth he called “lamella.” Although Lacan introduces this term in a highly humorous way, “stress[ing] its jokey side” by calling it a “manlet” [l’hommelett] most commentators have stressed a more disturbing bent.42 This is perhaps justified by Lacan’s own description:
This hommelette, as you will see, is easier to animate than primal man, in whose head one always had to place a homunculous to get it working. Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the
hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something…that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings,
immortal—because it survives any division, any scissiparous intervention. And it can run around.
Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep… I can’t see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties.
But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ…is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life.43
This passage comes from the very seminar that would emphasize the expressionist satisfaction of
This passage comes from the very seminar that would emphasize the expressionist satisfaction of