Anustup Basu, University of Pittsburgh The Afterlife of Louis XIV: Towards a Genealogical Cinema

In the next few scenes that switch between chamber intrigues in the house of the dying archbishop, the royal palace and the abode of the queen mother, the film presents the ancien régime of France witnessing a new phenomenon: the body politic is simultaneously enduring the death of the archbishop, one of its fountain sources of power, and the curative maneuvers of a young monarch, who, unlike many of his predecessors, desires to 'govern'. The figure of the king, for that, is to be inserted into a Caesarist¹ position in the catastrophic balance of forces - between the people and the crown, the financiers and the mercantile class, the secular/clerical bureaucracy and the nobility. This protracted War of Position², in the historical narrative 'housed' inside Rossellini's film, emerges as a particularly Machiavellian phenomenon. That is, as we shall see more elaborately, the participating entities here are neither 'human' subjects and their intentions, nor masses and their 'forethoughts' prior to coming into a state of 'consciousness', but historical forces, bodies and objects ruled by animalistic attributes, energies and humors --- all rendered immanent by a 'different' time that does not form the digital architecture of historicism, but one that is come 'alive' and one which 'subjects' the field of forces at its disposal.

Here the state needs to be viewed as a corpus of anarchic impulses that generate anxiety for the reasonable soul. In the particular case of Louis XIV, the head, in order to rule the heart and the body, needs a series of neurological affects to be dispersed throughout the limbs and secret chambers. This should lead to a transformed situation in which all metabolisms center themselves into, and burst forth from the fountainhead of monarchical power, as nature derives from the sun. The curative project calls for a different economy of humors - an altered culture of love and hate, whereby, as Machiavelli says, "Men should either be caressed or eliminated". In this radically different political anatomy of the mind and the body, one would see new principles of affect, different correspondences between thought and feeling, altered performatics of the soul and the flesh. By borrowing metaphors from the speech of the physician who visits the ailing archbishop, one can provide a couple of aphoristic examples: 'bleeding helps clear the corpse, just as water drawn from a well purifies the well' or 'the more the mother nurses, the better the milk'. But the Machiavellian twist is a more intricate one here: one could actually suffice with a conjured illusion or a premonition of bleeding than the actual act - just as Machiavelli says that it is not necessary for the Prince to have all good qualities, but only to appear to have them. The prince must know how to color his nature, and be a great pretender and dissembler. In his magnificent figure, he must gather signs of forbidding health. He must conjure up a fox to recognize the snares and a lion to frighten the wolves. Looking at him through mortal eyes should in itself be an animalistic phenomenon - the terror inspired by the royal self should cut through a hierarchical arrangement of mind over body and collapse high thought together with base feelings.

In the case of Louis XIV, the invention of the body of the modern prince begins with a visit to the master tailor, the donning of a wig and the growing of a mustache, and is continued by the construction of a magnificent palace that casts its aura over the entire land. Also, from henceforth, the culture of affective engagements between forces that make the content of Rossellini's film becomes indistinguishable from the formal act of cinematic enunciation. That is, the re-presentation of the animal exchanges on screen evades the mediating category of the 'human' even in its 'present' engagement with 'us'. The film sets up a circuit of 'looks', where looks are affective, beastly impulses. We will forward a Deleuzian argument here, that 'looking', as conceived in this case, involves sensory bodies as much as it does discerning minds and critical eyes. In other words, we deny any essential dualism or hierarchical order between the mind and the body, our formulation, on the other hand, is predicated on a Spinozist parallelism between the two. Again, the circuit of the 'look' invests within itself both the pastness inside the screen and the presentness of the cinematic moment. This is best exemplified in the prolonged sequence in which the king sits down to dinner in front of the entire royal court. The subjects look at the stately king within the diegetic space of the film. Outside it, we look at the king and also look at the subjects looking at the king. The remarkable feature in the circuit of looks is that time here becomes direct in its presence through a collapsing of the diegetic and the real. That is, cinematic time ceases to be an indirect expression of the historical. It appears in a durational intensity that inflects all bodies - both of the past and the present, they on the screen and us outside it. The king, the subjects and we, are all bodies that endure the subjection of the same time. The king continues the elaborate and prolonged ritual of eating. The subjects look at the king. We look at the king. We look at the subjects looking at the king. Time of the past does not arrive in our present cinematic experience as indirect expression through the signifying scheme of cinematic narration. Time here is not a concrete, metrical arrangement that endures, maps and measures events, monuments and great personages that are planted on it in the triumphal march of a dominant narrative of historicism. As we shall see gradually, it is a liquid incarnation³ that does not deliver the past as bygone 'chunks of the present'⁴, but imbues the present fatally with the past.

The devastation of the ordering of time of course also devastates the integration of space. The riverside, the palace, the royal bedchamber, the garden or the hunting ground, the visuals spaces limited by the frames or gently unfolded by Rossellini's use of the Pancinor zoom lens do not emerge as regular parts of a composite and whole landscape of history. The frames are adrift in liquid time where it is possible to read them relationally, but not to link them in a secure, sequential chain of causality in terms of arrival, habitation and transference. The loss of time-space integrity hence deviates from two fundamental features of classical cinematic narration, by which the world and its time becomes discursive, and hence objects of disciplinary history - editing and the shot sequence. In Rise to Power, the durational economy imposed through 'shots' and 'cutting' is not geared towards an indirect, 'significant' expression of historicist time. That is to say, event A in shot 1 (king leaves palace) is not always necessarily and causally linked by a governing imagination of time and space to event B (king reaches garden) in shot 2. The path and movement from A to that of B cannot be presumed to be an interval of 'empty' time in the linear track of history that is implied but minimized in its expression by the 'cut'. The effective duration of shots here is impelled neither by the teleological thrust of a rational narrative, nor by considerations of cinematic capital. The motions of the king may 'devalue' cinematic time, by 'wasting' it, or may disrupt the chain of reasonable moves altogether by moving from event A to event C without the expressed or symbolic representation of a mediating event B.

The question to be asked at this point is, what constitutes the 'present' status of the cinematic moment? As in classical cinematic narration of the historical (one could consider the epics of DeMille, or even, in a different way, the works of Abel Gance in this regard), does it still imply that the screen is a site of the cinematic recreation of events gone by - a site where the visual images of the past are actualized in memory, and the human brain, in consort with the apparatus that facilitates such an indirect expression of historical time, is a perpetual sensory motor interval between the fleeting past and the unfolding present that actualizes a serial perception as situations beget affections, affections beget action and actions beget a new situation - all comprising a narrative unit that is a part of the whole animus of history? That is what we see in the 'historical film' in a certain institutional sense, where the image on the screen is actual only as a consolidation of present 'humanistic'⁵ memory - it gives a 'real' and transcendental phenomenon of the past, with all its possibilities and forces, hurling itself towards the present, but in perfect synchrony with the rhythm and trajectory of historicist time. We propose that these disciplinary models of history and of cinema involve simultaneous operations of memory and amnesia. The monuments of the present are construed with the disordered debris of the past, but while that is achieved, the rest is buried and unremembered; traces of a time gone by are registered and acknowledged only as marks of decadence or embellishment on the architecture of the present. The present, in such cases, as Gilles Deleuze would have put it, is seen as a constitutive hodological actualization, through resolving of the fields of forces by the way of goals, obstacles, means and detours, of the forces and oppositions that characterize the abstract Euclidean landscape of the past⁶. Hence, whether it is considered to be a movement of progress or decadence, the present always seems to move with the conceit of a continuous disclosure of a past gone by, caught in the ephemeral vanishings of dying mortals and decaying matter. The past, at every moment, seems to have already receded to the realm of the virtual, having been replaced by the present's objective realiztion, and in that, has become a trope of recollection and nostalgia. Such a conception of history is thus premised on a narrative of 'becoming'. The cinema - historical complex that follows this coda, proceeds with the light of Reason, and claims to project the virtual past into the screen of consciousness as an actual recollection image. The brain of the human subject, which is to be located in the time-space interregnum of this shift, is the mirror on which the virtual past is imprinted as memory. A Deleuzian reading of this phenomenon would suggest that the human brain in this context is a filament to register and process the affection of remembrance into subsequent action in the future. It is able to perform this historic function since it is also the nervous and reflexological terminal of being that apparently, is in full communion with a tactile and objective present-nature. In that, the brain is always coterminous with the now. It has no existence prior to or after it. It should also express itself as a part of a whole - its recollections, affections and thought as integral to the overall vitality of the world spirit. It is such a brain that the 'historical film' often presumes for itself and the world it faithfully represents.

Seen in this light, the problem with Rossellini's film is that it offers us neither the 'truth' nor any 'knowledge' about history. We propose that in the case of Rise to Power of Louis XIV, cinema is not an 'art of presence' that simulates the real through a dialectic of sights and sounds. It bears its own reality of inscriptions on celluloid. In that, we could say that the film announces its own 'falseness' of simulation. It invites a textural reading, instead of a 'textual' one in the normative sense. The strange texture of the image is a result of a certain 'emptying out' of the cinematic apparatus, by which monumental happenings and great personages are flattened into perverse dys-spectacles on the screen. To return to an earlier moment, we do look at the king and look at the subjects while they look at their king, but these exchanges do not follow a normative, phenomenological pattern. They, on the other hand, affect an epistemological disjunction - that between any 'culture of seeing' that the characters might share in the diegesis and 'our' mode of engagement with its cinematic reproduction in sights and sounds. Our ancestors on screen and the modes of our present beings do not seem to respire in the same bioanthropological sphere of history. The people look at the king, we look at the king and also look at the people looking at the king, but these encounters seem to take place in different zones of affect, and not in a common, eternal ground of 'human perception'. It is here that the easy, symbiotic relationship between the historic past and the cinematic present is profoundly disturbed. The 'animal' bodies that we see on the screen do not belong to the species being called 'human' that western enlightenment creates for us. They seem to bear different bodies, different pathologies and different minds. A single, transhistorical coda of spectacles and of affects that should bind the modern human to them, even by some evolutionary principle, seems to be strangely absent. Our 'ancestors' and the human in us seem to be different neurological categories.

Originary Worlds and Elemental Impulses.

An important moment in the diegetic unfolding of Rossellini's film is of course when the young king first appears in the realm of cinematic narration. The frame opens into a dark ambiguous space where we see two dogs. The beasts move across the frame to where a woman is seen to be lying, on what is the uncertain ground/floor of an 'any' space that could be either a parlor or a street. The dogs lick the face of the sleeping woman and wake her up. She gets up and moves diagonally towards the left of the frame, the camera panning across to follow her. She opens a window in the dark background. The sunlight comes in and draws up soft outlines of paraphernalia that marks the space as 'indoors', although it has not yet been endowed by an exact status. The woman then walks to a chair that is made apparent by the incoming light and arranges some clothes kept on it. Then the sound of a knocking is heard from out of field and the camera pans across to the left this time as the woman enters the erstwhile out of field to open the door. Men in noble attire who are waiting outside enter and follow the woman as she walks to a bed covered by curtains. The curtains are opened to reveal the bed and the couple on it. A series of sound 'informatics'⁷ further establish the space as the royal bedchamber and the couple as the king and the queen. The 'empty', elemental impulses of the woman are now momentarily endowed with meaning, fixed as the behavioral protocols of the royal chambermaid. But by then, the arrival of the nobles has already transformed the semiotic universe in the bedchamber. The public has already perversely invaded what should be the private space of the couple. The alien bodies of the nobles bring with them a dense assemblage of 'alien' signs that exhaust, evacuate and open up those of the bedchamber. The collapsing together of such semiotic arrangements scatter determined milieus of the court and of the royal bedroom into originary worlds, where communication and gestures assume any form, and oscillate perilously from the profane to the profound. The screen, consequently, is saturated with what Deleuze calls opsigns and sonsigns, attributes that disperse the propulsive energy of the historical narrative into pure optical and sound situations ⁸. The queen claps her hand - an act that is, with the aid of a 'strange' grammar of plausibility, interpreted by one of the nobles as an indication of royal conjugation the previous night. The bedchamber subsequently becomes a space of prayer, of washing, of inquiries regarding grave matters of the state and also a dressing room for the king.

Such a gross effacement of sanctified boundaries between the 'public' and the 'private' needless to say, violates a presently dominant moral vision. Indeed, when the magnificent king of one of the seats of Western civilization never thinks twice about submitting the dirty linen of his bed to the full public gaze of the court, the act is disturbingly sacrilegious to a gentile sensibility. Just as when later in the film, the monarch decides to interrupt a royal hunting expedition in order to go behind the bushes with one of his mistresses, in full view and knowledge of his retinue. The genealogical question to be asked here is whether such happenings disrupt the sexual, moral and scopic economies that bind and define the constitutive order of his royal figure. To put it blandly, whether such gestures on part of the king can be placed in a normative theater of historical inquiry and discerned, judged and interpreted with the same political-moral apparatus used for the 'indiscretions' of the president of a modern state.

It would be pertinent to invoke Alain Grosrichard here. In his book Structure du Serail: La Fiction du Despotisme Asiatique ddans l'Occident Classique ⁹, Grosrichard speaks of the political invention of the couple by Rousseau, who like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Bernier and other French writers of his time, was preoccupied with the specter of despotism. As an essential part of a larger project of self-definition, this assiduous intellectual quest of Enlightenment Europe almost inevitably involved identifying the specter as a fundamentally Asiatic phenomenon¹⁰. But what we are more interested in for our present purpose is that this 'fiction' of the Asiatic despot served as a referential grid in such discursive formulations tending towards a critique of 'degenerate' European monarchies. The architecture of power that Grosrichard charts out here is one in which a chain of command runs from God down to the last position of power in local communities. The absolute power of the monarch harbors no dissent, but at the same time the system is rife with subterranean transgressions - a proliferation of 'perversions' that survive through elaborate secret codes of communication. While Grosrichard reads it as a situation of absolute power begetting absolute 'decadence', we would like to propose that here, both 'perversions' and 'decadence', as normative categories, have only a retrospective moral effect. That is, they project and impart an 'afterlife' to the sovereignty of past that makes it vulnerable and relenting to the diagram of power that replaces it in the present. This moral principle thereby authenticates the modern incarnation of the state as a securing of the microsocial against the recurrence of despotic regimes. A despotic regime, according to Grosrichard, is founded on the 'psychoanalytic assertion' that 'there is no sexual relation', the relation of the phallic authority to the members of the harem being mediated by the eunuch as the sexual 'in between' and polygamy being one of its necessary consequences. Our 'misreading' of Grosrichard, in terms of this formulation suggests that the absence of sexual relation is an epistemological non-event in a diagram of feudal power, and not a still to be filled 'lack' in the consciousness of the evolving, revolutionary bourgeois subject. Subjectivities, capable of 'psychoanalytic assertions' for us are discursive formations in themselves, ephemeral 'positionalities' that do not emerge from the depths of a transhistorical human psyche, but are instances in discourse, in the field of diffuse power. This is essentially a Foucauldian formulation, one that he draws from Blanchot, as Deleuze has shown, one in which the different positions of the speaking subject are located within a "deep anonymous murmur"¹¹ that characterizes an epoch. The 'lack' thus is a misnomer; it is an articulable statement that characterizes the 'murmur' and not one that remains 'unstated' due to the repression of a consciousness. The figure of the eunuch is thus one that is foreclosed ¹² in discursive formations of the feudal. It is in this context that one can read the works of Rousseau and Diderot as discourse events that inaugurate the couple as an accomplishment of the impossible phenomenon of sexual relation. The notion of the 'couple' and the accompanying one of the 'private' are epistemological-moral categories that apparently guarantee a state that is free from the risk of despotism. In his discussion on the couple in the non-European context of Hindi cinema, Madhava M Prasad¹³ links Grosrichard's argument with Carol Pateman's in The Sexual Contract, which proposes the dependence of the social contract on a (logically) prior sexual contract. The sexual contract, however, is not between the man and the woman who form the couple, but a 'fictional' intercourse between the men, who all agree to recognize each other's allotted space of despotic sovereignty: the proprietorship of the family and the woman in it. Prasad writes, It is this dual contract that alone produces the conditions of possibility of a modern state, where the phallic power is not incarnated in the living body of a despotic king but instead is distributed among the male contracting members of society, the fraternite that formed the third element of the slogan of the French Revolution.¹⁴ Thus it is only the post-despotic state that can guarantee the stability of a post-despotic family. The fiction of contract marks a transition from the rule of fathers to the rule of brothers. Seen in this genealogical sense, the apparent 'immoralities' of the young king in Rise to Power appear as not a compromise of power, but on the contrary as affirmations of a territorial organization of it that bears a totalized nature; one that harbors no bourgeois distinctions between the public and the private. It is only in the bourgeois public sphere, in a particular historical strata, that the public vice has to 'house' itself in the construed domain of the 'private' and appear as procreative, social and moral virtue in the sexual relation of 'coupling'. It would hence be an epistemological 'mistake' to view the royal bedchamber as a 'private' domain of the sexual relation.

It is from the bedroom scene onwards that Rossellini's film seems to establish zones of affective exchange which only refer to each other, casting the diurnal against 'eternal' presumptions, continuously chiming the mundane with the monumental and thereby corroding the edifice of historicist meaning. The force of affect in this case, as we have noted earlier, comes from the flow of liquid time in cinema, one that empties out gestures, actions and spaces from the dead weight of historicism with its sheer durational intensity. The process of course must be linked to a departure from given codes of spectacular narration in dominant institutions of cinema. Rossellini 'burns' up money and 'significant time' on screen, perverting the political, economic and historical economy of such forms of narration. The evolutionary drives towards the human and the 'meaningfulness' of the human are disrupted with the introduction of mundane motions and 'blank events'. Such 'corrupt' and 'wasted' images are removed from a mechanism of creating 'value' in the cinematic - one that brings objects under the purvey of a human subjective vision, thereby creating consumable signs.

The perverse economy of expenditure is achieved through the dislocation of the narrative from the monumental landscape of historicism. The rise to power in Rise to Power is a non-process that abjures epic actions of an external cosmic order (battles, conquests and political theater) to a closed interior of commonplace sights and sounds that seem to refer only to each other. There is of course, an element of bathos in this: the king masters the universe by mastering his own household. The nobles are disempowered and inducted into a common realm of exchange in the interiors of the palace, where the monarch is the sole arbiter of a grammar of affects. In this play of signification, the grandeur of the palace assumes an equal status as that of the ribbons and laces of the royal attire. The arrest of the politically dangerous Monsieur Fouquet becomes as telling as the king's declining of a fork at the royal dinner table. In other words, such a 'play' inflicts a 'flattening' effect on the received scape of historicism, eroding a variegated topography of dramatic peaks and comic troughs into a prosaic, horizontal plane of immanence, saturated with informatics of sight and sound. The shift away from the monumental and the antiquarian is achieved by the presentation of a screen without any psychological 'depth' - a baroque facade on which only 'literal' speech acts are inscribed.

One can consider the king's conversation with Colbert immediately after the arrest of Fouquet in this context. A vast inventory of political prescriptions are compiled in the scene: people must be given work and bread so that they are not driven into the hands of the fronde; taxes must be lightened, the nobility must be separated the merchants and parliament and made dependent on the king; manufacture and trade must be encouraged with conquests of new worlds; France must get a powerful fleet and an overseas empire; the Dutch monopoly in sea trade must be destroyed; new industries must be developed, wages must replace alms; canals must be dug; stud farms must be opened for the army; steps must be taken to avoid famine and to increase agriculture. All of this is conveyed in what Deleuze calls the 'Bressonian voice' - "the voice of the 'model' in opposition to the voice of the theater actor, where the character speaks as if he were listening to his own words reported by someone else, hence achieving a literalness of voice, cutting it off from any direct resonance, and making it produce a free indirect speech"¹⁵. This form of speech, along with the drained, mask-like facades of faces and figures - the textures of cinematic bodies - effect a hollowing out of a given culture of psychologistic encounters with the cinematic image. The voice now refers only to itself and other voices. The speech act "is no longer inserted into the linkages of actions and reactions, and does not reveal a web of interactions any more. It turns in on itself; it is no longer a dependent or something that is a part of the visual image; it becomes a completely separate sound image"¹⁶. The autonomy of the sound image as a source of informatics precludes the necessity of a spectacular visual corroboration of the thing stated. We do not get to see Louis translate these grand propositions into action. The ethics of the pure speech act, the "creative story-telling which is É the obverse side of dominant myths" carries with it a Nietszchean power of the 'false' - in it, the conquest of colonies can be granted no greater representational status in specular narration that a visit to the queen mother.

Conclusion: Our Time

So far, we have used Rossellini's film Rise to Power of Louis XIV as an exemplary instance of the different, a ruse of an 'outside', in our critique of dominant historical and cinematic models of the west¹⁷. We have talked about how Rossellini's film makes a critical turn away from an institutional will to narrate that presumes the 'present' as the moment par excellance to launch historical retrospection and its punctual reproduction in the cinematic. Indeed, when it is the status of the now that is at stake, when it is the tactile transparency of 'our time' that is imperiled, the crisis is a grave one for historicism, since it is prone to use that as a singular instant to take a 'snapshot' of the past, arrest the forceful movement of an object in history, kill it and produce its corpse in a timeless theater of Hegelian inquiry¹⁸. The critical-epistemological problem here is akin to one Gramsci indicates towards, which becomes apparent when one extends the 'spirit' of the present as an unfailing, guiding beacon of light to illuminate the past and the future. As he notes, in the humanistic imagination of Benedetto Croce, the creation of the ethico-political domain of historicism commences after the fall of Napoleon - in a singular moment absolved of the dead weight of the past, when the eye of enlightenment history can be immaculately conceived to survey yesterday, today and tomorrow with an unfailing vision of 'truth'. But for Gramsci, it is questions like, "in modern conditions, is not 'fascism' precisely new 'liberalism'? Is not fascism precisely the form of 'passive revolution' proper to the twentieth century as liberalism was to the nineteenth?" that profoundly disturb the sanctity of the 'present'¹⁹. We of course, cannot concretely propose an alternative notion of history and of time within the limited scope of our discussion. But we can indicate towards a study of history that studies forces, events and movements in their relational aspects - one that is accompanied by a form of time that is not linear and digital, but is capable of forking and setting up multiple possibilities and conceptual universes at every instant. Deleuze signals towards a rigorous intellectual quest in that direction throughout his oeuvre, particularly in his books on cinema and on Leibniz. In order to exit from the dull inertia of our times, it is perhaps fruitful to think like him, if not exactly in his terms. That is, one can relentlessly search for a notion of history that makes a world where Caesar does not cross the Rubicon as much an object of study as it does the one in which he crosses it. That happens when one creates through meditations untimely, new images of worlds, communities and of time, outside the apparatus of historicist judgement that seeks to control thought through an ethical testing of human perception and metrical time. Of course, such images are 'false' in the Nietzschean sense and belong to 'utopian' worlds. They do not reach validation by registering their 'tactile' and 'empirical' presences in a given, Euro-normative civilizational sensory-motor schemata that judges, is affected by and acts upon a world that houses the 'human' as a singular and transcendental mode of species being. Such false utopias are affirmed in thought (where thinking is not prior to, but an essential part of political practice), in a space of possibilities outside the grand narratives that read all matter and phenomena as essentially geared towards the developmental evolution of homo economicus as the final product of historical becoming. They constitute a belief that is cast against the nature of the 'human' that champions capitalism as its only mode of existence. The notion of belief is important here, as Deleuze teaches us²⁰, since to think history in relational terms is not to immerse oneself in abject nihilism, turn towards a laissez faire relativism or to retire towards an ivory tower of angelic ironies. The trial here is not to build a universe as an object of 'knowledge' in the Foucauldian sense, but to relentlessly evaluate it and see it as an object of creation. For Deleuze it is a relentless, machinic generation of desires - an intellectual quest that tends towards the dynamic instead of the mathematical sublime of Kant. Belief thus is not a metrical computation of dead matter and past movement in metrical time. It is a calculus that needs to be continuously infused with critical energy. In as much, belief has no future. Its movement in history aspires that of Benjamin's Angel of History, one whose face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violent force that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.²¹ Much like the angel caught in a vortex of cosmic movement, who cannot 'stay' and survey, our belief too has no constitutive ground of the now. Like the angel, it is ailed by the then-ness of the now. Our belief cannot belong to an order of the present precisely because the present, at every instance, arrives too late. We could end this paper by broaching a general, even mundane question: how is one to locate Rossellini's perverse invention of history and cinema, history in cinema in Rise to Power, as an empty formalistic game, or, as a radical departure from available protocols of representation that stimulates political rethinking? The question of course has a ready 'historical' resonance when one considers that the filmmaker's 'politics' and 'spiritual orientation' placed him in what has been so often described as a 'paradoxical' position - that of an isolated figure vis-à-vis both, the left wing culture of post-war Italy as well as contemporary catholic circles. One way of answering this, one that we have tried to affirm in this discussion is that the bodies that we see in Rise to Power and Rossellini's later films, particularly the ones made for television, are animalistic reinventions of the cinematic/political body. They are bodies that are continuously objectified by a non-chronological time. They are bodies that refuse to be 'human'. Hence, they are antagonistic bodies in terms of cinematic capital - 'wasting' ones that alarmingly emerge as 'valueless' in terms of exchange in a certain dominant institution of cinema. The making of cinema in this case, seen in these terms, is a perverse expenditure, not a production. It is cinema that has transgressed the limits of honest representation; a 'falsification' of the role historicism has set for the apparatus. In creating a world in cinema instead of cinema in a given world, it has, as Godard would have put it, exposed the latter to be 'living a bad script'²².

Notes

¹ See Antonio Gramsci, An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, edited by David Forgacs, (New York: Shocken Books, 1988) p. 269 for an elaboration of the trope. It must be noted that according to Gramsci, there can be both progressive and regressive forms of Caesarism.

² See Gramsci, 225.

³ Of course, I borrow the term from Deleuze's working through of Bergson's duree in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.

⁴ I borrow this term from Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, in the sense she elaborates in chapter 1 of her book Critique of Postcolonial Reason. I think one of the useful aspects one can extrapolate from her deconstruction of the colonial-postcolonial interface in North Atlantic historiography is how even resistive models of history writing, while perhaps not being eurocentric, or even critical of such a position, can rest on an essentially euronormative notion of time. That is, capital time as the transcendental and only available model of historic time.

⁵ The term here of course refers to a mode of species being in the Marxian sense, that, according to Foucault, was inaugurated in the eighteenth century and is presently, in the 'post-industrial', globalized world, is in serious danger of dying or perhaps, in a dominant sense, is already dead.

⁶ See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, Trans. Tom Conley, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 128-129. Deleuze talks about the actual hodological space and its abstract Euclidean corollary as constitutive of the site in which one is to politically locate the movement image of classical cinematic narration. The narrative of this passage, from the Euclidean, virtual past to a concrete, actual present, is facilitated by the workings of a sensory motor schemata, by which characters react to situations or act in such a way as to disclose it.

⁷ This is to be distinguished from narrative information supplied in the course of dramatic dialogue and situations. Deleuze posits the category as the operative unit of what he calls the Godardian pedagogy in cinema. Informatics have nothing to do with questions of source and addresee, since the source of information is not a piece of information anymore than is the person informed. "If there is no debasement of information, it is because information itself is a debasement. It is thus necessary to go beyond all the pieces of spoken information; to extract from them a speech act, creative story telling which is as it were the obverse side of dominant myths, of current words and their supporters; an act capable of creating the myth instead of drawing profit or business from it" (Deleuze, Cinema 2, 270)

⁸ These are terms that Deleuze uses to describe transmutations in the visual and aural economy of classical western cinema during the decades following the second World War. In this, a consolidated universe of historicism has been dispersed and fragmented into multiple and fragmented originary worlds. The synchronic and serial arrangement of perception-affection-action has yielded to a situation where elemental impulses have replaced determined actions, a given mechanism of signification has given way to the void of opsigns and sonsigns. Perception itself has emptied out into the registering of pure optical and sound situations.

⁹ I have used a summary of Grosrichard's thesis from Madhava M Prasad's book Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Reconstruction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) 94-95. Prasad discusses Grosrichard in a different context.

¹⁰ In the spirit of Edward Said, one could add here that just as Europe is more of an ethical rather than a territorial notion in this discursive formulation, the orient too is a mythical space rather than a geographical or a political one.

¹¹ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, translated and edited by Sean Hand, Foreword by Paul Bove, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) 7.

¹² I use the term in the sense Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses it in her book Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Spivak borrows the term from Lacanian psychoanalysis. Her reading of the discipline is as "a technique for reading the pre-emergence (Raymond Williams's term) of narrative as ethical instantiation. In that, foreclosure is what the "ego rejects [as an] incompatible idea together with the affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all." Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) 4. We continue the Foucauldian misreading here, suggesting that foreclosure is not a literal act of metalepsis that the ego performs, but a relation effect in the exchange between visible architectures and articulable statements that marks an epistemé. The relations between 'visibilities' and articulable statements are of course relations of power.

¹³ Prasad, ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Deleuze, Cinema 2, 242.

¹⁶ Ibid, 243.

¹⁷ Although one cannot launch a critical discussion of the subject here, I would like to indicate, amongst other things, the vast amount of critical literature about cinema that presumes the art form as one having an ineluctable relationship with North Atlantic modernity and also as having an emblematic quality that pre-orients it, through an already existing cultural necessity, towards realist representation. Prasad's elaboration and critique of this position in The Ideology Hindi Film is a very useful one.

¹⁸ In his brilliant foreword to Grundrisse, Martin Nicholas elaborates on the formative conditions of the Hegelian concept in the following manner: "To have a 'concept' (Begriff) in the Hegelian sense means to 'grasp' (Begreifen) or 'grip' the thing mentally, to get hold of it and render it still as appropriation. (Werke XVIII in Geschichte der Philosophie I, p. 305, 325). Lenin's comment in Philosophical Notebooks (Collected Works XXXVIII, p. 259-60) can also be cited in this regard: "We cannot imagine, express, measure, depict movement, without interrupting continuity, without simplifying, coarsening, dismembering, strangling that which is living. The representation of movement by means of thought always makes coarse, kills Ð and not only by means of thought, but also by sense perception, and not only of movement, but every concept. And in that lies the essence of dialectics."
Quoted from Martin Nicholas, Foreword to Grundrisse. Karl Marx, translation by Martin Nicholas (London: Penguin Books, 1973) 28-29.

¹⁹ Gramsci, Cinema 2, 264-265.

²⁰ See Deleuze, ibid, 171.

²¹ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1970) 249.

²² Quoted in Deleuze, Cinema 2, 171.