Cohen, T., Beyond the Gaze Zizek, Hitchcock, And the American Sublime

Beyond "The Gaze": Žižek, Hitchcock, and the American Sublime

Tom Cohen

American Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 2. (Summer, 1995), pp. 350-378.

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For They Know Not What They Do--Enjoy- ment as a Political Factor By Slavoj ~ i i e k Verso. 1991

Looking Awry: An Intro- duction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture By Slavoj ~ i i e k MZT Press. 1991

Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Holly- wood and Out By Slavoj ~ i i e k Rout ledge, I992

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan. . . But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock Edited by Slavoj ~ i i e k Verso. 1992

Beyond "The Gaze": ., ~ i i e k ,Hitchcock, and the American Sublime Tom Cohen

It may not at first seem clear why Slavoj ~ i i e k ' s work should appeal to Americanists, since the Slovenian Lacanian is steeped in a post-Marxist Hegelian discourse saturated with the sort of high Euro-theory formulae (the big Other, extimate, the "gaze") that neopragmatism, for instance, often shies from. Yet aside from ~ i i e k ' s utilization of American film and popular culture to map out a populist Lacan in works like Looking Awry and Enjoy Your Symptom!, this "postmodern" theorist appears something of an American phenomenon avant la lettre. I will explore this prospect by examining ~ i i e k ' s reading of that most problemati- cally iconic of "American" film-texts, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and his use of Hitchcock in general. In this examination I will have two aims. The first will be to determine where ~ i i e k ' s deployment of late Lacan-for instance, his focus on the concept of the Real or "the Thing" (das Ding) to mark a radical exteriority that structures ideology and the subject-impacts on a rhetoric of the self that has long seemed endemic to Ameri- canists. To raise this question is to acknowledge a parallel between American cultural logic and so-called postmodern aesthetics marked by ~ i i e k ' s use of (American) popular culture ("In postmodernism, this 'apparition' of the phallus is universalized" [Enjoy 1291). Once we allow, however, that Hitchcock functions as a partial index to postmodern aesthetics (the theoretical " 'postmodern' phenomenon par excellence" [Everything 2]), the question arises as to whether ~ i i e k indeed lies "beyond" the models of identification, intersubjectivity, and narrative that he critiques in Hitchcock's name, or whether Hitchcock's text does not exceed, in the end, the Lacanian hermeneutic that ~ i i e k de-ploys. For if one of the fascinations of ~ i i e k ' s work in popular culture is his use of Hitchcock as a master text, by using Hitch- cock mostly to exemplify late Lacan a certain violation to that text occurs that I want to address. In pursuing this second aim I will return to the problem that ~ i i e k seems to occlude when

American Literary History 351

addressing Hitchcock: that of language itself and whether Hitch- cock ultimately deploys a model of reading that precedes any metaphorics of "the gaze." To do this I will turn to another text of Hitchcock's to juxtapose to Psycho, one that could be called, if anything, more postmodern or poised at the point at which that term itself seems canceled, To Catch a Thief:

If we ask where an Americanist ideology of the self stands to be impacted by ~ i i e k ' s critique, two sites come to mind at once: American neopragmatism (as represented, however differ- ently, by Richard Rorty and Cornel West) and the question of the American "sublime" itself. Like ~ i i e k ' s project, neopragmatism sees itself as a critical move "beyond" poststructuralism- or what it sometimes calls "theory." Yet unlike neopragmatism, which does this in a sense by expelling "theory" as the continen- tal other in order to reconfigure a domain of specifically Ameri- can interiority, ~ i i e k insists that all such interiors are ideological fictions busy effacing the radical exteriority that forms their "kernel."

For ~ i i e k a great deal rests on the distinction between a Lacan of the middle period (represented by the Seminar on the "Purloined Letter") and the late Lacan, since the latter shifts from addressing the play of the signifier and intersubjectivity- the parallel of modernism and poststructuralism-to addressing the protopsychotic relation to the Real that lies beyond the interpretive machinery of cultural narrative. The middle Lacan concerned with the role of the Symbolic order (cultural rules, the name of the father, the circulation of the signifier, intersubjectivity, and the law) is for ~ i i e k supplanted by this late Lacan whose focus on a Real addresses an absolute otherness which, as ~ i i e k quotes from Lacan's Seminar 11,is "beyond the wall of language" (Everything 245). On the one hand, ~ i i e k ' s focus on late Lacan involves a discrete revision of "the gaze" as the term has been used in American film theory and gender politics. Revising a ten- dency to subjectivize this term, as occurred in Laura Mulvey's influential indictment of a "male gaze," ~ i i e k reminds us that "the gaze" in Lacan is, in the first instance, nonhuman, a site of personification of the inanimate Thing (das Ding): ' 'What lies beyond is not the Symbolic order but a real kernel, a traumatic core. To designate it, Lacan uses a Freudian term: das Ding, the Thing as an incarnation of the impossible jouissance (the term Thing is to be taken here with all the connotation it possesses

352 Beyond "The Gaze"

in the domain of horror science fiction: the 'alien' from the film of the same name is a pre-symbolic, maternal Thing par excel-lence)" (Sublime 132). The Thing as a nonhistoricizable site or protrusion is what the discourse of the Symbolic attempts to "gentrify." Since film theory or Hitchcock interpretation had come to rely on habits of identification and authorial surrogacy, ~ i i e k ' s claim to an otherness beyond this discursive field paral- lels the prospective move from poststructuralism to his own more radically grounded post-Marxist ideology critique and discourse of "the Thing." ( ~ i i e k links limitless "interpretation" as such to the Symbolic.) Thus the distinction between middle and late La- can becomes paradigmatic: if the "beyond" of the pleasure principle represented for middle Lacan the assimilation of the subject to the Symbolic order and the law, for the late Lacan the Sym- bolic turns out to be that pleasure principle for which any "beyond" is now the unassimilable effect of Thing, around which (absence) the subject organizes an enjoyment (jouissance) in which heishe alone appears ontologically grounded.

Tracking the epiphanies of the Thing entails discarding the techniques of historicism and focusing on the role of "ideology" in trying to master (or evade) the irruptions of a Real beyond representation.' In ~ i i e k ' s text, "middle Lacan" can now be sub- sumed, since it represents everything addicted to the signifier, which now involves the endless metonymic displacements of poststructuralism or, more precisely, deconstruction. Of interest is where this deployment of late Lacan differs from the retro- humanist return to meaning that this gesture frequently implies, as occurs in American neopragmatism's abjection of "theory." If middle Lacan is the site of sheer metonymic displacement that is representative of the Symbolic as the already dead order of language and the law, and hence of poststructuralism, and late La- can supersedes this phase by a (re)turn to a Real beyond subjectivization, then rather than returning to a model of humanist meaning or the subject, it ostensibly exceeds both. One example of this move that is interesting for us will be the "subject beyond subjectivity" (Everything 255) that ~ i i e k locates at the core of Hitchcock's Psycho: "The ultimate socio-ideological lesson of Psycho is therefore the collapse of the very field of intersubjectivity as medium of Truth in late capitalism" (Everything 262). If in the Lacanian allegory the Symbolic entails an initial "death" by being the domain of automatonlike formula and narrative, "life" itself is an effect of the (dead) automata of the Symbolic that would undergo a second death with the irruption of the Thing- the "obliteration" of an entire signifying order. The analyses of the "sublime object" involves a politics less of ideological demys-


tification than of aesthetic disinvestment ("whereby the ideological anamorphosis loses its power of fascination and changes into a disgusting protuberance" [Enjoy 1401). It is not surprising, as we will see, that Hitchcock is so useful at this juncture.

It is ~ i i e k ' s construction of late Lacan that brings the figures of neopragmatism and Americanism into play, particularly where the former also sees itself as superseding "theory" (~ i i ek ' s "post-structuralism"). We can now address why ~ i i e k ' s analysis solicits an American response, particularly if American popular and film culture seems the field in which this Lacan is best exemplified. Since for ~ i i e k the radical grounding of historically con- tingent truth occurs through the machinations of a prefigural "Thing," we might ask where this radical sense of contingency differs from Rortyan relativism (see ~ i i e k , For They Know 196), but this is not ~ i i e k ' s primary intervention, which instead takes place at the very construction of the subject itself. Rather, what might be called the ideology of neopragmatism suggests where Americanism both manifests and evades that protopsychotic encounter with radical exteriority-the extimate-which ~ i i e k tracks. Certainly, it is interesting that the word thing is itself one translation of the Greek word pragma that we find at the root of pragmatism, and it suggests a curious inversion in the current Americanist use of the term. Specifically, it suggests that if a certain classical pragmatism concerned itself with a type of radical materiality not dissociable from that of language-a premise that is obvious from Protagoras through Peirce-then neoprag-matism may in fact involve less a reclamation than a subtle evasion of that tradition. This prospect makes a work like Cornel West's American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragma- tism (1989), which returns to a theological self as the basis for a communitarian ethics of multiculturalism, the more curious. A project like West's, which certainly sees itself as a move from Ror- ty's faux interiority or irony into the exteriority of the world and multiculturalist politics, has an irony of its own. It is curious not only for attempting an all too classical "genealogy" that usurps for left academic multiculturalism the legitimating pedigree of the (white) fathers but also for involving, despite its appeal to the political, a regressive return to subjective interiority (see Cohen, Anti-Mimesis ch. 4). What emerges is that the neopragmatism of Rorty and West, in seemingly opposite ways, represents a monu- mental regression within and in the name of the American agenda. If, as ~ i i e k implies, a certain Americanism is manifest in postmodern popular culture and Psycho in particular, it supersedes the domain of the Symbolic in a kind of psychotic or anti- Oedipal poetics long ago remarked by D. H. Lawrence. If so,


Rorty and West may represent the attempt to return to a defensive posture in this regard, inscribing themselves in an Ameri- canist rhetoric of the self that is the classic evasion, not only of "philosophy" (West's trope for epistemology and linguistic mate- rialism) but of what ~ i i e k calls the "destitution subjective" (La- can's phrase for the emptying of the subject as well as for a certain model of intersubjectivity)-a destitution, precisely, that echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson's original refusal of History and that empowers American aesthetics.

Thus Psycho's move beyond what ~ i i e k calls the "pragmatic-hermeneutic inter-subjective model" represents a political intervention, insofar as it dislocates an entire tradition of interpretation that could be called (academic) "America's" defense against its own inner history and logic. It would seem that ~ i i e k exploits an implicit opposition between humanism's rhetoric of interiority (on the right and left) and a rhetoric of exteriority that bars any return to models of expression, meaning, or intersubjectivity. Among other things, the subject rewritten as "the gaze" of the Thing as exemplified in Psycho "is what the pragrnatic- hermeneutic inter-subjective approach endeavors to neutralize at any price, since it impedes the subjectivization/narrativisation, the subject's full integration into the Symbolic universe" (Every- thing 258). It is not accidental that Rorty's attempt to preserve the private space of the pragmatist takes the form of abjecting the Euro-theoretical other (Nietzsche, the French, "theory") and does so in order to recreate as "American" a space of affirmed interiority or that West, in appearing to reverse Rorty's faux interiority by linking the subject to political communities, does so by restituting a communitarian theological self under the aus- pices of the political-that is, by affirming a model even more rooted in a faux interiority, one that invokes, moreover, an imper- sonally voiced and strangely autocratic political program (West's "prophetic pragmati~m").~

In contrast to neopragrnatism, we might pun, ~ i i e k ' s Thing- ism retains Lacan's focus on a radical exteriority that exceeds the recuperative intersubjective model and remains a counter to it. Much in ~ i i e k ' s analyses of ideology (or "ideological ana-morphosis") gives the promise of a new politics, yet the psychoanalytic model can only be said to do this in a covertly aesthetic way. That is, by altering the manner in which we read epistemological investment and desire, we alter the options for dissolving ideological formations. ~ i i e k ' s analysis of the "sublime object" projects intervention less by demystification than aesthetic disinvestment ("whereby the ideological anamorphosis loses its power of fascination and changes into a disgusting protuberance" [En-


joy 1401). 1f ziiek's analysis of the "Nation thing" raises the prospect of political intervention (nationalism viewed as "the privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field" [Looking 165]), it partakes of the ironic fatalism of specular psychoanaly~is.~Instead of pointing toward a new politics available in the mode of a new mimetic agenda, ~ i i e k ' s project appears rather staked in the transformation of interpretation itself-a site that reweds politics to epistemology, that is, the very model of "philosophy" purportedly evaded by the "pragmatism" of West's title.

Another site in which ~ i i e k impacts Americanist cultural semiotics is, thus, the question of the sublime itself. It is particularly relevant when a text like Hitchcock's is pressed into service, where a certain sublime is posited in the movement to a "subject beyond subjectivity. "

One sophisticated review of the American sublime occurs in recent work by Rob Wilson, though we find a similar blind spot to that noted above in Rorty, and the pattern remains in- structive. Wilson seeks to escape the subjectivizing model of the sublime present in theorists of (American) romanticism (the example of Harold Bloom is mentioned), and he does so by turning to the "technological sublime." Yet in this he reads the concept of the technos in a strictly historicist or mimetic way, that is, the American technological sublime refers exclusively to social spectacles staged by very literal machines. While Wilson invokes ~ i i e k ' s "sublime object of ideology," his examples occur within historicized narratives in which the technological sublime serves as a clearly seductive spectacle that perpetuates oppression (for example, George Bush's patriot missile). Such an exclusively mimetic, New Americanist neopragmatism covertly links the concept of the sublime to a recuperative system of subjectivized (Symbolic) meaning, particularly when we consider that technos can itself be defined as that machinelike space of material language that forecloses a certain notion of the subject as interiority to begin with. We may recall that Lacan's definition of the "sublime object" is that it is any banal object which becomes momen- tarily invested with the import of the Thing ("according to La- can, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object that, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire" [Sublime 1941). Leav- ing aside the multiple implications of such ordinariness, what for ~ i i e krepresents a site of radical alterity that inhabits the familiar ("the gaze") is translated by Wilson as a form of descriptive historicism. In ~ i i e k ' s treatment of Psycho, the sublime will appear irretrievably other, a "subject beyond subjectivity" not nar-

356

~ i i e kappears to represent a limit logic implicit in the subtext of '2merica" itselj before which the Americanist's ideo194y ofinarioriiy or seljhood always recoils.

Beyond "The Gaze"

rateable, as Wilson desires, as a historical allegory of routine power to which the analyst is the privileged spectator. What would be a figure of sublime exteriority becomes another covert ruse to retain subjective, historicizing control over mimetic meaning. Thus when ~ i i e k is invoked, it is only to distance or disown his approach as negative, dialectical, European-in- sufficiently buoyed by an American excess of selfhood and opti- mism-and we see the same system by which Rorty abjects his European other^.^ Yet while ~ i i e k approaches the vast samples of American pop culture with vampirelike urgency, eager to assume the particular unrecovelability of American psychosis as his example, the Americanists busily abject that same American logic under the guise of the European-theoretical other.

What ~ i i e k has in common with the neopragmatist-an attempt to narrate a step "beyond" poststructuralism ("theory") and the endless metonymy of the signifier-may be conceived either as a return to an enclosure of a self (Rorty, West) or, more interestingly, as the appeal to a nonhistoricizable exterior (the Thing). ~ i i e k appears to represent a limit logic implicit in the subtext of "America" itself, before which the Americanist's ideology of interiority or selfhood always recoils. If one privileged text for undoing this ideology is Hitchcock's Psycho, there remains a less visible aspect of ~ i i e k ' s text that should be addressed.

When ~ i i e k reads late Lacan as superseding middle Lacan, he narrates a move "beyond" the realm of the Symbolic and toward the Real. This movement beyond the play of the signifier, metonymy, poststructuralism, and modernism, however, takes an odd or quasi-ironic form, since the latter site itself insists on the suspension of narrativization-the Symbolic's renowned tech- nique of "gentrification" or recuperation. Accordingly, throughout ~ i i e k a narrative is structured by repeated invocations of the Hegelian trope of the "negation of (a) negation" ("the whole point is just that we come to experience how this negative, dis- ruptive power menacing our identity is simultaneously a positive condition of it" [Sublime 1761). Time and again, a given first term-middle Lacan, modernism, metonymy, the signifier, the Symbolic, the intersubjective, desire, the symptom-will be su- perseded by a putative second-late Lacan, postmodernism, metaphor, the sign (which, unlike the signifier, produces the "answer of the real" [Looking 34]), the Real, the "subject beyond subjectivity," the drive, the sinthome. The "negation of negation" becomes ~ i i e k ' s means of controlling a representational economy, and it has its rhetorical dangers. We can see its logic work-ing, for example, when ~ i i e k notes that Lacan's vacated and depthless subject is not a postmodern subversion of the subject


of the Enlightenment but that it all along defined the very logic of that familiar topos. That is, the reader may think that the La- canian subject (as the second term) involved a negation of the Enlightenment subject (first term), but this is a false narrative since the former really precedes and constituted the latter in its forgetfulness.

If the "negation of negationV's economic and recuperative role as a managing trope exacts its price, that becomes visible when one finds dispersed throughout ~ i i e k a series of apparent binaries that are managed similarly as the very premise of this discourse. In each case mentioned-modernismlpostmod-ernism, post structural ism^' (or middle Lacan)/late Lacan, symptomlsinthome, signifierlsign, desireldrive, the Enlighten- ment subject1Lacan's subject-the result is a spatial or anamor- phic logic staged as a temporal narrative. That is, again, the second term (postmodernism as the focus on the kernel of the Real) supersedes the earlier (modernism, in which the disruption of the marginal is experienced as a subversion); yet, as with Jean- Franqois Lyotard, the latter term always preceded its predecessor (the kernel of the Real was only impossibly "gentrified" by the Symbolic). The result is a sort of double effacement, which resit- uates ~ i i ek ' s positions at the limit of-if still within-the terms they dramatically invert and empty. This is how the Symbolic or language itself can appear to be surpassed, moved "beyond," while the description of such movement may involve regressions to seemingly precritical terms (identification, subject, metaphor). This seems the case, for instance, when ~ i i e k reinstitutes terms of immediacy or even identification to point to this site (in Psy- cho, for instance, we are said to "identify with the abyss beyond identijication" [Everything 2261). We witness this again when "the gaze" becomes the absolute limit term of a personified otherness of "the Thing" beyond subjectivity, yet uncannily turns out to have structured the subject-the Enlightenment subject was all along a cyborg, a vampire, a monster. This movement seems con- nected to the often traditional nature of many of ~ i i ek ' s remarks on Hitchcock, moments when we seem to see the vampire (a figure with whom the Slovenian clearly identifies) forgetfully stoop- ing to take his jouissance, draining the cultural corpse of its representational pleasure^.^

While ~ i i e k is precise in indicating the special place "gaze" and "voice" occupy for the late Lacan ("the exactly opposite way" of Derrida [Looking 125]), a place in which "the eye and the gaze are constitutively assymetrical," it is the clash between the promising rhetoric of "the gaze" and the place of language in Psycho that returns us to the American sublime. Not only does


~ i i e knever concern himself with language or dialogue in a Hitchcock text, but his evasion of language marks a blindness and reidealization of sorts. For if the encounter with the "impossible Thing" lies beyond language, subjectivity, or interpretation, it still manifests itself in figures that materially signify in some form. ~ i i e k accounts for this space that both is and is not a signifier by way of the Lacanian term sinthome. In psychoanalytic terms, it supplants and transposes the symptom. Rather than being, like "symptom," a term of the Symbolic generating endless interpretation, the late Lacanian sinthome emerges as the unin- terpretable and thinglike effect one cannot interpret but only identify with or "enjoy." This is the postmodern effect as ~ i i e k sees it. Among other things, the movement from the signifier (or metonymy) to what is called by Lacan the "sign"-or metaphor, what promises the "answer of the Realm-is portrayed as a move from "language" to a certain beyond. This ontological rooting of the subject through identiJication with his or her impenetrable "enjoyment" Cjouissance) is an identification with the sinthome: "symptom, conceived as sinthome, is literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject," and "the final Lacanian definition of the end of the psychoanalytic process is identification with the symptom" (Sublime 75).6Yet this Kierkegaardian leap out of the aesthetic domain has several interesting by-products, including the fact that the identification of the subject with his or her sinthome as the new end of analysis topographically overlaps with a site of (reconciled?) psychosis-and here a reading of Psycho with Norman Bates as anti-Oedipal hero emerges. When we move from metonymy only to return to metaphor, or from the symptom to the Lacanian neologism sinthome (sin, synthetic; St. Thomas, "man"), we have in fact moved not "beyond" language but back (again), at least as simulacrum, to a precritical understanding of language itself: metaphor requires identification, the sinthome operates like an inert symbol. If Hitchcock inaugurates a posthumanist discourse that has yet to be addressed, what emerges as an American sublime "beyond" the models of identification and narrativization might properly occupy an anti-Oedipal or protopsychotic representational space. Yet in re-turning to a figure of "the gaze" that is a personification of the (dead) Thing, ~ i i e k overlooks where Hitchcock may have other ways of accounting for the generation of his text-ways that are material, linguistic, and prefigural. Before we explore, however, where Hitchcock exceeds any rhetoric of "the gaze" by inserting a model of reading in his text (as memory, machine, mother, or marking) that exceeds both the subjectivizing trends of Ameri-


canists and the postmodern epiphanies of ~ i i e k , we must exam- ine how the reading itself is constructed.

In framing his reading of Psycho ~ i i e k situates himself first both within Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer's discussion ("the theological dimension of Hitchcock's oeuvre" [Everything 21 11) and William Rothman's equally auteur-identified rhetorical approach. These are, after all, positions rooted in subjective identification that will be threatened by "the gaze" in Psycho's embodi- ment of the subject's depthlessness itself. i i i ek discretely sets these models up for a radical conversion, knowing that the domi- nant traditions of interpretation that he would go "beyond" are situated precisely in such terms of authorial s~rrogacy.~ Thus Psycho is seen as a text in which we "identify with the abyss beyond identification" (Everything 226). To this degree, we might distinguish between ~ i i e k ' s regressive notion of Hitchcock's rhetorical relation to the spectator ("one is even tempted to say that Hitchcock's films ultimately contain only two subject positions, that of the director and that of the viewer" [218]) and the pene- trating concept of allegory in a Benjaminian (or even de Manian) sense that contains "the strongest 'ideologico-critical' potential of Hitchcock's films" (219). With ~ i i e k , for whom the birds in that film appear pure representatives of the invading Thing, what is at stake in "the psychotic core of Hitchcock's universe" (241) is a text oriented by the move "beyond the wall of language" (256). As such, Hitchcock's rampant theorization of language- to date all but ignored, not surprisingly, since it resists both the subjectivist and this appropriation-tends to get no attention.

The at times rote rendition of Lacanian dogma ("'reality' is the field of symbolically structured representations, the out- come of the 'gentrification' of the Real" [239]) or the stage direc- tions for the uncanny itself ("this very coincidence of our view with the thing's gaze intensifies its radical Otherness to an almost unbearable degree" [252]) seldom interfere with ~ i i e k ' s efforts. One of the pleasures of exploring Hitchcock at this stage, however, is the way in which a penetration into the detail of the text itself seems to emerge, so that some odd moment in one film or another leaps out to generate webs of commentary, and it is here that ~ i i e k will seek to redeploy the trope of the sinthome. When this happens in sanctioned Lacanian terms-the location of the blot in the ship hulks at the ending scene in Marnie, or Doris Day's disembodied voice pursuing the son up the stairs in the


second Man Who Knew Too Much-the analysis itself is dra- matic, yet so wedded to the economy of an example that we get only short darting commentaries. In fact, ~ i i e k is so wedded to the subject's "impossible point of absolute strangeness" (254) that he ends up remaining quite mimetic or traditional in many respects. Yet it is within language as Hitchcock conceives it (as a dismembering scene of material figures, sounds, graphic puns, and repetitions that precede any subject position) that the Cartesian subject may be already vacated, much as Hannay opens The Thirty-Nine Steps as a body already headless, that is, with the viewer's penchant for identification also already barred.

A tension in ~ i i e k ' s theorizing becomes apparent when he tries to import the concept of sinthome into Hitchcock. We recall, again, that the sinthome is a "symptom" transposed beyond interpretation or the chain of signifiers. While it operates as a sheer manifestation or protrusion, it is also theorized as a kind of master sign that nonetheless grounds or ruptures all signifying chains. One might say that, being opposed to metonymy, it subtly operates as a sort of radical or imploded metaphor without being called such.8 Thus ~ i i e k offers a chapter in the middle of his collection called "Hitchcockian Sinthoms." Here he begins to identify motifs that every connoisseur of Hitchcock has been en- tranced and hermeneutically violated by-figures that traverse various films, breaking context, abrupting narrative interpretation, generating parallel universes of sense ("The postmodernist pleasure in interpreting Hitchcock is procured precisely by such self-imposed trials" 11271). ~ i i e k ' s list seems, for that reason, un- accountably modest (the glass of milk in Suspicion that re-emerges in Spellbound, the woman with glasses, the person sus- pended by another hand); indeed, so much so as to indicate a blockage. It represents the irreducible heart of Hitchcock's poetics and yet, for ~ i i e k , denotes a site that must also be contained. For a pursuit of such transtextual figures by ~ i i e k could entail replacing the rhetoric of "the gaze" together with its implicit ac- cent on immediacy with a dismembering but irreducibly material model of reading. What is bizarre, in fact, is that this chapter, announced by its very position as the central theoretical contri- bution of the book, breaks off after three pages-indeed, trails off in parenthetical murmurs about the first Man Who Knew Too Much that are almost unconnected to the thesis mentioned and, if anything, return to traditional interpretive patter about the family and so on. Why, indeed, does the sinthome, so central to ~ i i e k ' s system, seem to betray him in the reading of Hitchcock? The answer perhaps rests in the fact that the "symbolic" value of this emblem (advertised as the end and "limit of interpretation"


[126]), is ruptured by the very mechanics of repetition that it is inscribed in or produced by ("details which persist and repeat themselves"):

How, then, are we to interpret such extended motifs? If we search in them for a common core of meaning . . . we enter the domain of Jungian archetypes which is utterly incom- patible with Hitchcock's universe; if, on the other hand, we reduce them to an empty signifier's hull filled out in each of the films by a specific content, we don't say enough: the force which makes them persist from one film to another eludes us. The right balance is attained when we conceived them as sinthoms in the Lacanian sense: as a signifier's constellation (formula) which fixes a certain core of enjoyment, like man- nerisms in painting. . . . So, paradoxically, these repeated motifs, which serve as a support of the Hitchcockian interpretive delirium, designate the limit of interpretation: they are what resists interpretation, the inscription into the texture of a specific visual enjoyment. (127)

Yet they do not end in the detail of "a visual enjoyment," or its myth, since they imply an active scene of reading between emblems, scenes, actors reappearing in different roles, sets of signifying configurations or their erasure that are utterly critical to the postmodern aspect of Hitchcock. They are turned aside from, I would suggest, because as secret agents of signification they dislocate the sort of rush to negative immediacy that is ~ i i ek ' s favored lure "beyond" subjectivity.

In the first Man Who Knew Too Much, the allegorical problem ~ i i e k is avoiding is not hard to find. If, as he notes, the "rhythm of the entire film is regulated by a succession of shots," he rightly mentions that scene in which Louis Bernard, shot on the dance floor, must look down beneath his lapel to see the bul- let hole before he proceeds to act out dying, "as if the detour through consciousness is necessary for the shot to become effec- tive" (127). The problem is that "knowing too much" does not primarily allude to knowing something about some element in the plot but to a cognitive excess that is also a deficiency and to a "knowledge" of simulacra itself that is also one of "my" death. Hence, not only is Louis Bernard's look one of deferred (re)cog- nition, later repeated in the blank and uncomprehending look of Abbott's nurse when shot and dying, it is also an excess or rupture between two rhetorical levels that leads to a recurrent loss of consciousness in the text: the fainting of Jill, Lawrence being knocked out, Clyde's being hypnotized with a black marble (in


which the phrase "black out" changes pronunciation to "blank out," attaching this loss of consciousness to the momentary con- junction of white and black, as on the whiskey sign at Piccadilly Square). All of this returns us to the first "shot" of the clay pi- geon that ~ i i e k mentions without grasping that this black disk is also a black sun, a trope of sheer simulation crossing the sky repeatedly. Accordingly, we see one allegory that inhabits the plot: to assassinate the ambassador Ropa (a name that evokes the Hitchcockian "rope," emblem of narrative time and the suspension of binaries, hanging or death) is to get out of linear or narrative time, to get out of the simulacrum-of-language that is also what the black sun represents. It is not for nothing, then, that the spies' hideout is the false Temple of the Sun Worshipers (that is, a movie theatre) or that this black sun migrates in the film through black marbles, feet, and even chocolate (or, in Secret Agent, through sheer material sound, black dogs, excrement, chocolate again, machines, and finally coded writing). This un- representable excess is a prefigural materiality that exceeds yet effects death as the erasing predicate (and barrier) of knowing. Similarly, it is not for nothing that the alpine scene at St. Moritz is one of conflicting languages, tongues which erase one another when simultaneously spoken at the same time: Italian, German, French, English, Swiss German-a scene of Babel in which voice is understood primarily or only as sound (as Hitchcock said to Frangois Truffaut of dialogue as such).

The purpose in going over these associations is to underline the site in Hitchcock's text that the rhetoric of "the gaze" must remain barred from or blind to-and, on the other hand, generated from as an effect itself. The sin of the sinthome, like that of symbol, lies in pretending to a synthesis that the cinematic text simply refuses. It is not accidental, then, that when Peter Lorre practices for the assassination it is against the technological backdrop of a record playing the "Storm Cloud Cantata" in order to intervene at just the right instant or repetition: it is, then, not only the doomed intervention at a moment designed to shoot down the black sun (destroy, impossibly, the simulacrum of language with the single camera shot) but repetition itself, memory itself as machine. This is also why this film's remake, the 1956 Man Who Knew Too Much, opens with an odd title-text evoking silent film, projecting how an "American family" will be rocked by a single "crash of Cymbals." That is, where the fact of sheer sound preceding any notation or music, a crash, is also the rupture of any conception of symbol. This is also why, when Louis Bernard is killed this time, it will be on his knees and in black face-that is, in a position that covertly cites A1 Jolson's "The


Jazzsinger" (what Doris Day is in the film), the first "talkie," a citation in which the agent's imparted excess of whispered knowing is that of the origin of "voice" marked as superimposed onto the muteness of silent film-knowledge of the voice's nonsituat- edness. What is interesting, then, is that as ~ i i e k moves into a theory of the sinthome, which should be the means of containing the problem of language, the whole operation jams. The very step he takes toward a theory of that which is beyond theory is con- verted, uncannily, into its other: a return to mere characters (the family), to familiar intersubjective categories and causal narrative, finally breaking off this chapter itself.

In refusing to function as symbols, even imploded ones that foreclose interpretation, sinthoms dislocate the function ~ i i e k as-signs them in Lacan's name, since in actuality such emblems- and one would have to include feet, hands, birds, syllabic repetitions, visual and aural puns, letters (M, 8 E R . . .), numbers (three, thirteen, four), numerous objects and gestures-totally rupture the mimetic surface of the film on which any logic of identification depends. This recalls what Robin Wood notes, that Hitchcock's cinema is closest of all to animation, sheer artifice, a mode of hyperbolic writing. It is suggestive, then, that ~ i i e k must here escape not only into mere (intersubjective) interpretation, the very approach he would foreclose, but into a positi- vely regressive mimetic reading at that-as occurs with the first Man Who Knew Too Much, the "film that most directly calls for such a reading," when we are told that the real story behind the "'official' spy plot" is about "family," about "the price mother has to pay for succumbing-albeit only in jest" to the charm of a foreigner (127). While I will return to the role of a language that is itself beyond and before the "wall of (symbolic) language" in Hitchcock, we must first ask why Psycho is such an exemplary text for ~ i i e k .

It is the ultimate hollowness and lack of interiority of the subject that will "summarize the ultimate lesson of Psycho" (257)-a final emptying out of every identificatory or intersubjective approach to Hitchcock presented in the name of an Amer- ican and postmodern sublime. When the "final dissolve of Nor- man's gaze into the mother's skull" (257) occurs, there is "not a relapse into subjectivity, but an entry into the dimension of the subject beyond subjectivity" (255). Maybe; but then, this "return to . . . the subject beyond subjectivity, (with) which. . . no identification" (253) is possible, is the quintessential "gaze of the Thing.'' It is this limit moment that ~ i i e k recurrently circles and that Psycho, above all, is supposed to be a master text of, the site not only of the "collapse of the field of inter-subjectivity as me-


dium of Truth in late capitalism" (262), but one free of "subjective identifications":

[Tlhe secret epitomized by Norman's gaze into the camera, does not amount to a new version of the platitude on the unfathomable, ineffable depth of a person beyond the wall of language, and so on. The ultimate secret is that this Be- yond is itself hollow, devoid of any positive content: there is no depth of 'soul' in it (Norman's gaze is utterly 'soulless', like the gaze of monsters and the living dead)-as such, this Beyond coincides with gaze itselJ: . . . Psycho indexes the status of a subject which precedes subjectivity-a depthless void of pure Gaze which is nothing but a topological reverse of the Thing. (257-58)

Unlike Fredric Jameson, who in a compelling reading of North by Northwest in the same volume still sees Hitchcock as attempting a "solution" of the transition from private to public space (which, for Jameson, may inversely be a nostalgic insistence on interiority), ~ i i e k addresses a Hitchcock for whom interiority is a defensive fiction.

To return to the problem posed about ~ i i e k ' s interest for Americanists, we can perversely locate one aspect of it precisely at this moment-one that delivers Psycho over to its paradigmatic role in the American signscape. Keeping in mind the translation of the Greek word pragma as "thing," for instance, we can situate here an implicit critique of neopragmatism. It is particularly acute since it also exposes that recurrent American ideology of the self which seems a classic instance of "ideological anamorphosis" and to which neopragmatism in the neohumanist re- visions of both Rorty and West seem to be regressions. Indeed, while ~ i i e k shares with this trend a polemic with poststructuralism, as noted, his insistence on a radical exteriority exceeds the evasive closure of any ideology of the self. Among other things, the subject when rewritten as "the gaze" of the Thing "is what the pragmatic-hermeneutic inter-subjective approach endeavors to neutralize at any price, since it impedes the subjectivization/ narrativisation, the subject's full integration into the Symbolic universe" (258). If Psycho critiques American neopragmatist ideology not as a turn from theory toward the concrete but, inversely, a regression from a material orientation toward the Thing (pragma) into a false interiority or subjectivity, ~ i i e k would seem at least closer to the radical materiality and posthu- manism, say, of more classic pragmatists concerned with the ex- ternal nature of the sign from Peirce to Protagoras. ~ i i e k ' s own


Americanism manque may lie in his ability to stage a materialist discourse that involves the same radical break with historicism that, despite today's critical trends, originally defined the Ameri- can and pragmatist turn. From the above reading of Hitchcock, however, it would seem that in doing so ~ i i e k inscribes himself in a vocabulary that he can invert and empty out but not fully relinquish or transform. And this limit emerges at the very moment that a "beyond" is most asserted, when the emptied terms of identification, metaphor, and subjectivization return like the undead.

What emerges is a Hitchcock that is still just becoming available; yet it may also be that the Symbolic cannot be neatly broken into two forms, such as signifier and sign or symptom and sinthome, of which the latter is the "beyond" of l ang~age .~ In any event, if the destitution subjective is, at least with Hitch- cock, less a gaze "beyond" language than the effect of the radical materiality of representation (or language) itself, then this machinal dispossession of all interiority precedes even the human face and can be identified at various points with graphics or even letters irreducible to any intersubjective model or the Symbolic au- tomaton (I am thinking of the printing press scene in The Lodger, after which there are a series of faces melded together talking on the wireless, followed by the newspaper truck with two eyes for windows: that is, the human head as itself filled with dead print, The Evening Standard). One might, accordingly, project a future for readings of Hitchcock that move "beyond" the metaphoric traps of "the gaze" (including those with fixed gender) and toward an understanding of how thoroughly the surface of his text is generated by networking chains of infratextual citations.

Before indicating where this leads, we should note how this materiality of language is marked and theorized in virtually every Hitchcock text. We might choose, for instance, the example of Spellbound, which has the advantage of caricaturing the psychoanalytic hermeneutic itself. In the film, we might say, the binding "spell" of the title refers not only to the totalizing hermeneutic of psychoanalysis (parodied in the opening scenes), but of what even precedes spelling on a linguistic level. If to be "spellbound" is to be bound to a certain narrative construction of language, this is virtually dispossessed and preceded by the central motif- itself recurrent throughout Hitchcock-that is associated at the same time with Gregory Peck's amnesia and putative psychosis, that of a series of bars, knocking, or parallel lines. It is this series which Rothman calls Hitchcock's "signature" (33). lo In fact, "it" denotes (or rather, presents, since it destroys all mimetic representation) what might be called the primal or even prefigural do-


main of semiotic differentiation, marks preceding words or even spelling. We might even call this series of "bars" (a term which recurs frequently in Hitchcock) a figure of radical exteriority out of which repetition in linguistic consciousness emerges. This seems demonstrated in pixieish fashion at the early supper scene in the asylum. Here Gregory Peck is viewed rubbing the table- cloth with his mock-phallic butter knife to efface the oval shape of parallel lines traced by the fork of Ingrid Bergman, parallel outlines obscenely resembling a vaginal opening-a too literal trope of origin. In fact, though, the parallel lines simultaneously supplant any vaginal trope with the hypnotic or psychotic emblem of a sheer semiosis or, for that matter, sheer anteriority, narration, castration, death, and so on. By repeatedly installing this nonfigure, Hitchcock notes where the visual is not mimeti- cally conceived as a reproduction (what he calls, dismissing other films, "pictures of people talking"). It will not be accidental, of course, that so many names in Hitchcock begin with the syllable Mar(k)-Marnie, Marvin, Margaret, Martin, and so on-which situate a field of marking previous to the eye. It is also not accidental that, in Spellbound, the salient image coming from the fa- mous Dali dream-sequence is that of the eye cut (that is, preceded) by scissors (the bar sequence), that of vision itself generated and cut in advance by differential signifying sequences of material signs.

If ~ i i e k goes beyond neopragmatist retro-humanism-or seems a corrective to it-he nonetheless repeats the gesture of desired transparency in his projection "beyond" language. In- stead, we must revise the site of the Thing, of materiality itself, as woven into a prefigural use of material language.

My argument that the destitution subjective is not to be traced to the import of "the gaze" of Norman as such-this pen-ultimate icon that remains, despite itself, inscribed in (and regen- erating) an older model of subjectivity in which ~ i i e k too is held-but to Hitchcock's dismemberment of the problem of language itself is best made by a brief allusion to an underread film that could nonetheless be deemed at once his postmodern text par excellence and a site where that term itself is canceled as irrelevant. I will restrict myself to unpacking a brief shot in To Catch a ThieJI which will require a slight detour-the opening car chase from John Robie's (Cary Grant's) villa on the Riviera. In pursuit of Robie for questioning in a rash of jewel thefts bear-


ing his signature, Inspector le Pic's car stops behind Robie's, which in turn stops because of a sheep crossing. Germaine, Ro- bie's servant, is driving, and the car turns out to be empty, at which point le Pic turns back again (to again miss Robie, who has entered a bus). It is rather weak vaudeville. Moreover, it is the least obviously Hitchcockian sequence, since to the background of a nauseatingly light romantic score the camera has been following this chase from high above with an aerial shot. Rarely, if ever, does Hitchcock relinquish his camera to such a seemingly open or chance pan and never in so sustained a way as this. It has none of the detail or choreography one delights in in Hitchcock and does not concern a character at all. On the contrary, it panoramically surveys the "gorgeous" Riviera landscape with such abandon that it seems divorced from the usual Hitchcockian control, immersed in mere "natural" beauty, an- swering the filmgoer's touristic yen for glamorous travel footage.

What I would suggest, though, is that this least interesting of shots presents, with a nearly invisible or "light touch" (a phrase from the text in which both terms resonate), a central Hitchcockian cipher. It is one of a number of encrypted scene- texts that lie littered across his films, clues and misleading plants that hint at what he is up to. It is also a scene that evacuates not only the subject position of the viewer but the mimetic or representational pretext of film-and with that, the pretext of nature, origin, the Real. The shot seems to say: here, look at the beautiful Riviera, at the reproduction of "nature" that will alone win an Oscar for the film in cinematography. Moreover, I will attempt to show that it undoes this promise by annotating the problem of language and memory, which both bars any natural representation and makes the metaphysics of "the gaze" anach- ronistic; the discourse of the sinthome itself an evasion of the problem of mechanical reproduction as Hitchcock understands it. I assume in this that the textual surface is scored and traversed with signifying chains that operate, as I mentioned, by systems of visual and aural puns, puns at once infratextual and nonsym- bolic in nature.

Let me begin a bit further on in the film at the second scene at Robie's villa, after his arrest at the Nice flower market (his sleeve hooked by an old hag clinging to a tree trunk). For if To Catch a Thief is routinely overlooked or patronized as a superficial or light text, it is here that even this very lightness is remarked and curiously transformed, as such, into a principle. It is a "lightness" such as that heard in Robie's speaking of Germaine's "light touch" that punningly absorbs the figure of overwhelming light (as inphotographesis) as well as the implications of lightness


as mere fluff, as what is superficial to the point of being without gravity-sheer excess-as when one ceases to know up from down (as Francie complains later: "Mother, the book you're reading is upside down"). Indeed, across the film we might note how everything flies to heights, rooftops or cliffs or balconies or aerial shots, as if without decisive moorings to hold down their insubstantiality (as Robie says in a later scene oddly invoking spelling itself: " 'Up-up-up-?' 'The funicular-' 'I can't even spell funicular'"). What we take for the light stuff of romantic comedy has, then, a different and perhaps darker source. To grasp this we might recall what the official plot of the film is, its decidedly reflexive or circular McGuffin. The scene is postwar France: John Robie, "the cat," a retired diamond thief and underground hero, must himself pursue his double, the "copycat" thief who imitates his style to cast suspicion on him, by anticipat- ing (copying) the moves the latter will base on his own method- that is, by copying the copy of a copy, essentially, if theft itself is also to be conceived as the act of representation or of language. (Theft, as the opening black cat suggests, will be potentially of everything: jewels, referentiality, Being, sex, origin.)

In the postwar or posthistorical world of the French Rivi- era-one of Baudrillardian seduction without production, of copies without originals, of obscene gendered performance without sex-signs do not seem to have natural referents (the typical Frenchman, Bertani, has an Italian name; Grace Kelly speaks of Cary Grant being an American in an English movie rather than the reverse). Indeed, the entirety occurs under the threat of what is called Robie "breaking" his parole, a broken word or logos, and the text scatters references to the very dismembered parts of language (as in Robie's giving Danielle language lessons and speaking of adjectives and nouns, in Francie's quip to Robie in the water about "conjugating irregular verbs" with Danielle and in her noting that her only difference from her mother is a few years and some grammar, and in spelling [Robie's "I can't even spell funicular"])." Accordingly, to return to my example, when the phrase "light touch" is used, it is marked, although it refers to the servant Germaine's cooking of pastry-to confection as film-which is said to be "as light as air." (This can be compared to the remark of the restaurateur Bertani, who turns out to be "behind" the thefts, telling Robie of his kitchen's working "like a machine," "cutting, ~[pllicing," where the kitchen is allied to film production.) Yet it is also a touch or touching, physical or epistemological, that is deadly: as Robie adds immediately, "she strangled a German General once, without a sound." And how do we hear this dismembered, material language killing or de-


spoiling without a sound? If we listen to the punning dismemberment of paroles, we hear the syllable in germinate (Germaine) remarked in "German," thereby isolating and cutting off the trope of origination repeated in "general," suggesting generation as well: the "light touch," Hitchcock's or Germaine's, kills before life or "generation" occurs and is the predicate of film, representation or consciousness. Thus we are initiated into a second punning sequence in which Robie (Grant) is called a "celebrity of the Underground," what now appears as a reference to his film- acting career as a scene of afterlife-which applies to the actor as thief (or mime) yet also to the site of any subject or consciousness as such. This in turn illuminates the intricate texture of one of the most bizarre of shots, that in the hotel room where Mrs. Stevens ("mother") puts a cigarette out in a sunny-side-up egg. The shot takes roughly a second yet shows "mother" extinguish- ing an egg as if before its advent, what is also presented as putting out the eye or the sun itself (a moment in turn echoed in a later reference by Robie to "fighting fire with fire," an image actually presented in the imploding bursts of a cold or artificial sun in the fireworks scene that, in burning out the screen, virtually puts the cigarette out in the Cyclops eye of the tourist-viewer).

Something in the film that is concerned with "copies" or simulacra has lost all gravity by occupying a site in which origin is systematically evacuated-indeed, in which "mother" (whatever she denotes) exterminates life before its advent and marks the life one encounters, as on film but not exclusively, as afterlife. This Heideggerian upward fall, or what Heinrich von Kleist would term antigrav in speaking of the Marionettentheatre, is echoed in the casino, where the lady gambling at roulette when Robie drops a mark in her front remarks: "il n'est pas grave." In this complex lies a logic that will return us, oddly, to the pan- oramic shot of the car chase with its rocky cliffs denuded of trees, much as Robie's later pseudonym in the film will be "Conrad Burns," a logger from Oregon-that is, one who clear-cuts all natural images (trees) at the origin (Oregon); who, recalling the sun-scorched landscape and like a negative sun, burns (them) in a circular system of copies (the German Rad) that replicate copies in turn, a system of consciousness or conning itself (Conrad).

Yet the phrase used at the villa scene that is most illuminat- ing is another. It is spoken by the British insurance agent who compliments Robie on the natural beauty of the place by calling it a sort of "travel folder heaven." It is, we may notice, not accidental that the film credit sequence opens with a "Travel Service" window-one advertising France, with a few props (a miniature Eiffel Tower and yacht)-or that terms of travel and transport


used for cinema (movement), as well as tourists, litter a dialogue generally vertiginous with double-talk, as when Francie says she was born "in a taxi halfway between the hotel and the hospital." (The reference, indeed, in the casino to the "swirling pickpocket" not only invokes Hitchcock's vertigo motif, then, but inscribes that as the film projector, which in turn becomes a thieving metaphor for the aleatory intersection of signifying chains.) Yet even the window of the credit sequence is not transparent: the glass that prevents real contact, like language, also reflects another scene, only here a street filled with sheer traffic without direction (that is, without narrative telos), unrelenting yet pointless transport, or meta-phor, (as, of course, opens North by Northwest), while there is a vaguely visible film marquee across the street. (Should we fail to notice, marquee-or mark-key, to break the parole into its aural parts-is a term briefly re-marked by the film as the name of the powerboat Robie and Danielle first escape from Bertani's in, "Marquis Mouse," in what is an odd allusion to "Steamboat Willy," the first animated feature, another self-canceling origin, here of film or its mimetic pretense.) "Heaven," then, suggests not only bliss, a sort of dead or touristic jouissance ghoulishly echoed in the firework's mock-orgasmic seduction scene (when the cold pyrotechnics, pretending to suggest orgasm, instead burn out the screen), but an afterlife again con- nected to a travel folder. What, though, is a travel folder? Even before we deduce that the tourist-viewers solicited by the Travel Service in the credits, ourselves, have already been despoiled, raped, or robbed (like the middle-aged, cold-cream-faced female tourist whose first shriek, "I've been robbed!" opens the film: the dowager here citing and supplanting the golden-haired models of The Lodger), we might recall another use of the word fold in the text. It is a term, moreover, that seems to go to the heart of barring ~ i i e k ' s resuscitation of "the gaze" and its veneer of faux immediacy. This occurs in Robie's brief account of his own origin as a jewel-thief-that of being a trapeze artist with an American "traveling circus" when it folded, that is, crashed. It is a begin- ning which is also that of the "real" Grant as an actor. If the fold, here, inscribes the "real" (actor) in the fiction (compare this to Jessie Royce Landis's "Nobody calls me Jessie anymore" or Grace Kelly's inability to escape from the film, even to the point of dying in a car crash where the picnic scene was filmed), "fold" also suggests a certain mechanics of re-presentation, only with the implication of a catastrophe at the site of origination.I2 Fold here means collapse, fall, or demise. And if "traveling circus" already names that movement as cinema, which the cars' acceler- ation and stops mime, we are better able to read the turning back


of le Pic's pursuing car as itself a kind of slapstick commentary on travel folding.

Travel or cinema folds, crashes or turns back, by virtue of its ceaseless act of reproduction and re-inscription. This occurs not only because the actual "shot" is itself never, like the glass that threads the film, transparent, mimetic or representational, but also because it is a surface of traces, a writing not unlike animation, and because it acts-that is, performs and constitutes an event-like (a) language, the very thing that, together with fire, is the original figure of Promethean theft. We now see the point of the models in the Travel Service window. Here the Eiffel Tower, as Roland Barthes might say, is not only an icon for France but, like the yacht, a miniature that raises the question of what comes first, the model or the thing itself, the copy or the original; or the chicken or the egg-both of which alternatingly run throughout the film (the egg tossed at Robie's face, quiche, the sunny-side-up eggs, the policeman's "poulet," references to Chicken Little). We also see that for the insurance agent, however unwittingly, "travel folder heaven" implies that whatever he was looking at and thought beautiful or stunning, like our own supposed pleasure in the Riviera landscape in the aerial sequence, is straight out of a travel folder picture-it is what we have already been lead to expect to see, as from a postcard, and then recognize mechanically as "beautiful" without really seeing. We are caught in a machinal system of simulacra that burns away any trace of the natural or real, evaporates it in a posthistorical site of sheer affluence where referenceless money is gambled and circulated in the absence of production. In the film's last scene we hear from Francie, embracing Robie at his mountaintop villa, that "Mother will love it up here"-that is, here "mother" is not a figure of origination but, precisely, a destroying machinal site that would "love" travel folder heaven and its destitutions.

It is also not accidental that le Pic's turning in his car, or folding back, occurs after Germaine has run into a sheep crossing-since the sheep here cite a scene from The Thirty-Nine Steps, that film in which Mr. Memory presents the pivotal allegorical cipher. It is memory that invariably triggers this incessant fold or folding, even when the referent is invariably not in the pursued vehicle. This mechanical folding-which is also, in advance, catastrophic, like a circus that folds-implicitly bars the figure of "the gaze" from ever instituting itself with authority. For we are now in a position to understand something further concerning our own inscription in this mechanism and the dubi- ous pleasure it produces. At the place we would least expect it, that of the pleasurable and passive aerial viewing of the car


chase, when we virtually imbibe the expanse of the "beautiful" Riviera landscape with the romantic score in the background, we are already constituting every devastating logic possible to read in the final "gaze" of Norman. We are already in the aerial shot from The Birds at the gas station, only "beyond" having them even as obvious markers of absolute otherness-since, most simply, and with a "light touch," we are that installed travel folder which actively scorches away the earth while projecting over that destitution the expected trope of "beauty."

Here we "see" a double text that seems also dependent upon our not seeing or reading, on our being tourists (Robie replies to Francie's question whether going to the Sanford Gala will be dangerous: "Not for tourists"): what appears to be a "beautiful" vision is not only a case of the eye blindly retro- projecting over a dead and treeless signscape what it was trained to look for from a previous photo, a travel folder, but something more problematic. For what the eye is simultaneously blind to is that the landscape is practically treeless and lifeless, burned dry by a scorching sun, a sun that, rather than being a light- and life- giving origin, is now a negative or black sun, a machine of active representation, copying, emptying, despoiling, or a simulacrum that is also our eye. (Of course, when Grant appears in the clos- ing gala scene as a black-faced eunuch following the two women, he assumes the iconic site of something defaced and preceding identity.) The evacuation of mimetic or natural referents (trees) is inscribed in the barren landscape that seems at first meant to represent mimesis at its most visually seductive, the earth or trees as origin and nature. (We see why Grace Kelly in the Carlton Hotel lobby throws out the witty line, "The Mediterraneann- that is, Middle-Earth-"used to be that way.") The destitution subjective that operates throughout this text does so by virtue of language, representation, and memory, and not because of a site "beyond the wall of language'' that, in fact, is intended to recu- perate a site of reference, immediacy, and identification in however negative a sense.

I would like, here, to give one last example of how Hitch- cock's citational apparatus functions and why it suggests a model of reading (which he clearly marks in his most extended early cameo, reading on an underground train in Blackmail) rather than the increasingly compromised metaphysics of "the gaze" alone. When Robie is trying to escape from the flower market in Nice he is caught on the sleeve by an old woman, a sleeve hooked on a tree trunk. Here we might say it is due to this jersey, to clothes as trope (the film opens with Robie offering to slip into something "more formal"), that the lack of gravity does not


wholly leave the earth. The sleeve is hooked on the tree (held by the old hag language), which represents a natural image as such-what one might call the mimetic pretext from which all film departs, the "facts" with which Mr. Memory works. At the same time, the shot actively cites the end of Saboteur, where the saboteur Fry is hanging from the Statue of Liberty as his sleeve unravels. For Fry falls from the torch whose (cold) stone flame is extended by Liberty, icon and gift of France, a stone or frozen flame that is interfaced not only with the depiction of the Ameri- can capitalists as virtual Nazis but with the dismantling of (cold) heat and light echoed in the abyssal fall of Fry. What also emerges, however, is that Lady Liberty's name itself echoes libre as "book" (which she holds, which the name Frylfrei also echoes), as much as the sheer gravityless "freedom" of the affluent west at the Riviera is echoed not only in the name France but in Francie Stevens, the American Grace Kelly. The postmodern Riviera, the domain of sheer excess down to the pyrotechnic fireworks and of a "time" whose errant circularity consumes "history" (Robie notes that "the biggest problem is time" and the "turn-of-the-century" architecture leads to a slippage in time, at the gala, back to the seventeenth-century France), is itself linked to the "origin" of the Stevens's fortune. This fortune, it turns out, is spawned without labor or production, a gift that equates diamonds (the real thing that only reflects light) with excrement. In the hotel veranda where Jessie Royce Landis, "mother," relays the origin of her fortune, we find out that her jewels come through oil. The black figure of sheer anteriority that yet allows machines to run was discovered, we gather, near the outhouse ("little place out back"). Oil-pure black anteriority- is thus analogized to excrement, or the black sun or stain itself. But the interface of excrement and pure anteriority, radical lack and sheer excess, also passes through a peculiar scene that sur- rounds the evocation of her husband, Jeremiah. That is, the world of travel folding and excess, of fortune and romance, of simulacra and the deadly "light touch," is situated by Hitchcock over an overwhelming site of foreclosed mourning-annotating the postwar world-which is also that, moreover, for a paternal figure, Jeremiah. This already dead father is one who we will later hear was himself a con man, the father as simulacrum or non- father but, even more so, one associated with the Bible-or "Booku-and with the book of "Lamentations" at that. The name Jeremiah thus includes this self-canceling loop that indicates the absence (presence) of a lamentation for exile (absence), which is also the lamentation for its own loss as book. What is lamented is the dark or blinding "light(ness)" of the loss of

374 Beyond "TheGaze"

In Hitchcock's case a certain "beyond the wall of language" occurs in an altered and altering conception of "language" itself; whereas ~ i 5 e k cannot but slide back to the often didactic, mimetic, and, at times, narrativized or subjectival rhetoric he would surpass.

lamentation itself, the loss of loss and gravity. This alters the entire scene's readability and also marks Hitchcock's cinema as the text that supersedes the Book or mere writing.13 When Francie is heard saying, "Mother, the book you're reading is upside-down," it is by Robie on the dark roof above. Similarly, the anti-Oedipal nature of the scenario-in which "mother" is already canceling machine-is stressed when Danielle, dangling from the roof at the end, says "I did it for my father," a confession that is dis- missed until she concedes that it was "Bertani's" (a name in which we hear the bar motif cited).

The entire Riviera mise-en-scene, in short, represents a site not of light romance (unless we call that the deadly black light of allegory) but of posthistorical mourning in the foreclosure of the Book-where the Hitchcockian text supplants mere (novel) writing with a hypertext (Hitchcock's cinema). This technological shift requires an accelerated technology of reading itself, and we can see why Hitchcock's cameo in Blackmail appears so eerie, since it turns on the (hyperbolic) interruption of his own reading by a bullying boy while on the transport (cinema) of a train (metonymy). In this sense, ~ i i e k ' s Lacanian "Hitchcock" involves a double gesture: the same drive that insists on pursuing the beyond of subjectivity in order to break the logic of identification cannot follow through on the transvaluation that this break implies and remains caught in repeating this move again and again. In Hitchcock's case a certain "beyond the wall of language" occurs in an altered and altering conception of "language" itself, whereas ~ i i e k cannot but slide back to the often didactic, mimetic, and, at times, narrativized or subjectival rhetoric he would surpass.

I should perhaps underline that my attempt to delimit the range of ~ i i e k ' s reading of Hitchcock-or show what lies "beyond" (and before) its "beyondn-begins in basic agreement with where it begins as an antidote to subjectivizing, historicist interpretation. But he does not go nearly far enough. Moreover, in announcing the collection as an explication of Lacan (the title is not: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Hitchcock . . . But Were Afraid to Ask Lacan), ~ i i e kand his fellow travelers potentially open a new phase in the literature in which Hitch- cock's text suddenly can have the iconic authority of Lacan or Hegel. What ~ i i e k calls Hitchcock "interpretation" remains also an ongoing contemporary scene of cultural transformation, a site where the Book (allowing almost Mallarmean echoes) is dis- solved into hypertext. Learning to "read" this text involves the continuing dispossession of contemporary discourses of gender, narrative, visibility, space, subjectivity, and so on. To a distinct


degree, this transformation, in which past models of interiority are remapped according to a materialist discursive space that presupposes a sheerly exterior framework, remains not simply a postmodern activity. Independent of either modernist or postmodernist markings (the opposition seems, increasingly, a dis- traction), Hitchcock's project pursues a posthumanist trajec- tory-one which, as such, is most in step with the original import of pragmatism itself. ~ i i e k ' s obsession with tracing the phenomenal irruptions of the Thing, the "grimaces of the Real" that obliterate the Symbolic contract, remains in relevant ways an American project-and this not in the sense in which that name stands today as the mocking label for a globalized mass culture itself but by a redemptive logic of "psychosis," a foreclosure of the historicist mode, that has always inhabited the "psychotic core" not (only) of Hitchcock but of the American di- lemma. One may say with a certain assurance that the materiality of this mode of analysis posits in its way a pragmatism (translate: Thing-ism) that remains today an antidote for those areas in the American critical project that most retreat from their own earlier tradition-as in the neopragmatist, subject-oriented humanisms that in numerous ways remain injurious to our own critical culture by nostalgically returning to a site that never was, or never was "American."

Notes

1. ~ i i ek ' s critique of historicism as such is otherwise ongoing (see, e.g., For They KnKnbw 101). See also ~ i i e k ' s discussion of Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" as probably the only text in Marxism "at which this non-historical 'ex-timate' kernel of history was touched" (Sublime 136).

2. Rorty's other pragmatism of Michel Foucault and Nietzsche is presented as a nonhuman other that effaces American selfhood ("it appears as a con- tempt for one's own finitude, as a search for some mighty, inhuman force to which one can yield up one's identity" [158]); the argument takes the classic ideological form of a we (humanists, Americans) versus a them (theorists, anti- humanists, "French"), an inside opposed to an outside.

3. Bellamy may miss the implications of a shift in the very definition ofpoliti- cal when she remarks that what "gets occluded (sublated?) in ~ i i e k ' s modula- tion from Laclau and Mouffe's 'impossible' object to his own 'sublime' object is the 'impossibility' of politics (that is, the very real antagonisms, shifting alli- ances, and negotiations of real political struggle)" (33). In a somewhat more complex picture of ~ i i ek ' s relation to the political, which is equally skeptical, Chow notes, somewhat misleadingly, that because ~ i i e k rebukes historicism, "[wle may say safely that ~ i i e k is, ultimately, not so much concerned with 'history' and 'politics' as with human nature" (18).

376 Beyond "TheGaze"

4. Unlike the neopragmatists examined above, Wilson wants to exceed the "romantic self-conceptions of identity" (210) and "ideology of the American sublime" (208) based on a rhetoric of interiority. He projects with this a notion of the sublime involving "an American emptiness [which] could be imagined as national ground" (213), one to be ideally "refigured, within a postmodern economy, to imagine forth and represent America as an entity of transnational cyberspace that 'knows no national boundaries'" (209). Yet Wilson pulls back from its implications, finding it impossible to forego another recuperation of that "romantic" ideology of the self he would exceed. In a gesture that invites comparison with Rorty's move, Wilson attempts to retain some positive interior American space by containing ~ i i e k ' s "more negative KantianIHegelian dy- namic,'' claiming that the American sublime "does not so much refuse as reify subjective enjoyment into hugely positive spectacles of national empowerment" (226). We must ask, finally, why an American sublime must be asserted as "positive" against the effects of the eschewed European-dialectical "negative" sublime-or if it is not the last fetish of a misread "American" sublime as such.

5 . ~ i i e k ' srecurrence to conventional interpretation is in evidence in his au- teurist rhetoric and investment in a "theological" reading. Examples would include his reading of the end of The Thirty-Nine Steps as following the routine "production-of-the-couple" narrative (Looking 100-Ol), or the recourse to intersubjective or Oedipal platitudes (his reading of the end of The Birds [Looking 1041) or to Lacanian didacticism (his remarks on Rope as lesson [Enjoy 371).

6. We also read here that the "symptom as sinrhor~le is a certain signifying formation penetrated with enjoyment," "a particular, 'pathological,' signifying formation, a binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social bond network, but is at the same time the positive condition of it." In- deed, the "sinthome's utter stupidity" (Looking 128), its material excess that can be likened to a "gift of shit," is a postmodern theology gone awry.

7. ~ i i e kimplies that the American appropriation of "the gaze" as a subjectivized category (or blank panopticon) has been a misreading-a fact that has drawn critical attention of late. For recent critiques of the deployment of "the gaze" in film studies, see Saper; and Copjec. Of course, the source for the classical adaptation of "the (male) gaze" for feminist theory remains Mulvey 14-26. ~ i i e kdislocates "the gaze" from any subjective position, turning it into the site of absolute strangeness that is precisely inaccessible to the eye in the field of otherness. "Gaze" is shifted from securing a general field of subjectivity to emptying and reinscribing that as the prosopopoeia of a radically exterior site (the Thing). Yet even when so revised, "gaze" retains the inevitable traces of transparency. immediacy, and power that adhere to metaphors of the visible going back to Plato or. for that matter, Emerson. I will suggest here that the entire trope is displaced in Hitchcock by viewing sightlperception as itself generated from material signs (or "reading").

8. ~ i i e kprivileges metaphor over metonymy in Lacan's name-the very function that the sinthome represents in pretending the end of all signifying chains. ~ i i e k ' s main modification is to posit "metaphor" as itself over an empty site: "The 'original metaphor' is not a substitution of 'something for something-else' but a substitution of something for nothing: . . . which is why metonymy is a species ofmetaphor" (For They Know 50).


9. Cf. Paul de Man's late focus on materiality, memory, and (aesthetic) ideology-a de Man that is, in ways currently unread, postdeconstructive and post- Marxist. See Cohen, "Reflections."

10. Rothman, however, only tries to convert this essentially presemiotic marker into some sort of psychological symbol: "I call this pattern of parallel vertical lines Hitchcock's I 1 1 I sign. . . . [I]t signifies the confinement of the camera's subject within the frame and within the world of the film. . . . It is also associated with sexual fear and the specific threat of loss of control or breakdown" (33). One could undertake an entire reading of Hitchcock in which this prefigural "signaturem-sometimes simply called a "bar" (Vertigo's "bar at the top of the Markn)-shifts interpretation from the identificatory, narrative, recuperative models in which even ~ i i ek ' s notion of "the gaze" seems to linger into one that interrogates Hitchcock's film as a form of writing.

11. That the Greek logos is explicitly cited is evident in the mediterranean setting and architecture, the alternate evocation of the four elements (earth, fire, water, and air), and the presence of demigods like Hephaestus in the limp- ing figure of Fussard.

12. We hear allusions, for instance, to the names of the actors, thus situating them in the text-world: one cannot "carry it off' or "get out of it gracefully."

13. This gesture occurs obliquely in The Thirty-Nine Steps as well, where Mr. Memory is meant to invoke Hesiod's Mnemosyne, and Hitchcock's cinema is situated not only as the heir of the popular novel (not to mention theater) but the classic tradition of the epic sublime itself. The sublime-the warplane's secret formula-is only a random series of banal "facts" (what Mr. Memory repeats), and here only numbers and letters, a desubjectivizing otherness prece- dent to any "gaze."

Works Cited

Bellamy, Elizabeth J. "Discourses of tion of Lacan." October 49 (1989): Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis Be 53-72. Political?" diacritics 23.1 (1993): 24-39. Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Psycho. Hitch-

cock/Paramount, 1960. Chow, Rey. "Ethics after Idealism." diacritics 23.1 (1993): 3-23. , dir. Saboteur. Universal,

1942. Cohen, Thomas D. Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock. Cambridge: , dir. Spellbound. Selznick In- Cambridge UP, 1994. ternational, 1945.

. "Reflections on Post Post- -, dir. To Catch a Thief Para-Mortem de Man." Minnesota Review, mount, 1955. forthcoming.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Copjec, Joan. "The Orthopsychic Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, Subject: Film Theory and the Recep- 1989.


Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cam-bridge UP, 1989.

Rothman, William. Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge: Har-vard UP, 1982.

Saper, Craig. "A Nervous Theory: The Troubling Gaze of Psychoanaly- sis in Media Studies." diacritics 21.4 (1991): 33-52.

West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Prag- matism. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.

Wilson, Rob. "Techno-euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sub- lime.'' boundary 2 19.1 (1992): 205-30.

~ i i e k , Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology New York: Verso, 1989.

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Beyond "The Gaze": Žižek, Hitchcock, and the American SublimeTom CohenAmerican Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 2. (Summer, 1995), pp. 350-378.Stable URL:


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Works Cited

Review: Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis Be Political?Reviewed Work(s):

Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud by Jean-Joseph Goux; Jennifer Curtiss GageHegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics by Ernesto Laclau;Chantal MouffeThe Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek

Elizabeth J. BellamyDiacritics, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Spring, 1993), pp. 23-38.Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0300-7162%28199321%2923%3A1%3C23%3ADOICPB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

Review: Ethics after IdealismReviewed Work(s):

The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak;Sarah Harasym"Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak"Speculations on Reading Marx: After Reading Derrida" by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; DerekAttridge; Geoff Bennington; Robert YoungThe Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek

Rey ChowDiacritics, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Spring, 1993), pp. 2-22.Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0300-7162%28199321%2923%3A1%3C2%3AEAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A

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The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of LacanJoan CopjecOctober, Vol. 49. (Summer, 1989), pp. 53-71.Stable URL:

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A Nervous Theory: The Troubling Gaze of Psychoanalysis in Media StudiesCraig SaperDiacritics, Vol. 21, No. 4. (Winter, 1991), pp. 32-52.Stable URL:

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Techno-Euphoria and the Discourse of the American SublimeRob Wilsonboundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 1, New Americanists 2: National Identities and Postnational Narratives.(Spring, 1992), pp. 205-229.Stable URL:

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Cohen, T., Beyond the Gaze Zizek, Hitchcock, And the American Sublime