‘For Irigaray, sexual difference is not a topic to be introduced into metaphysics, but determines metaphysics as such.’ And the Deleuzian interpretations of sexual difference (by feminist theorists) have articulated it as transcendental philosophy, of how the subject relates to the given. How does Marie (Caroline Ducey) relate herself to the men in the film, how does she treat her own sexual difference? The sexual act for her is something given- bodies are made to have sex, so they should. She is angry that even though Paul (Sagamore Stévenin) can have sex he won’t, that he won’t fulfil his subject-role as her sexual partner. So what is Marie, then? Her continual comments that she should cheat on Paul suggest that it is through sex that she makes herself a woman. Becomes a woman by and in union with man.
In the later part of her discussion, Colebrook then calls on us to ‘dispense with a notion of ‘the given’ (or being, or the body) and think of various distributions, various modes of thought’ (125). Think not of the sexual body in relation to its space, but of the specific body in terms of its metaphysical constitution and response. Marie’s girlfriend-body is different from her sexual-body, which is different from her raped-body, different again from her body-at-birth. Her response to her raped-body is to attempt to constitute herself as sexual again, and it is this failure that provokes her next actions. The formation of the subject, according to Colebrook, will always involve thought, and activity/action in response to thought, perhaps thought oppositional to standard society expectations. So to self-represent, one puts a ‘challenge to standard notions of thought [which] will concern the self which thinks’ ( 110).
Colebrook finally writes, ‘One response might not be to think of the mind-body relation, but to see as many relations as there are bodily questions’. So, she decides, perhaps it is not the state of mind that is altered when the body is affected, but the body’s sense itself becomes something new.
Someone mentioned in the tute this week that Briellat’s films, instead of having the happy ending that we expect, draw shock from the viewer with violent and uncomfortable scenes. This is mentioned a lot at university, and in a lot of film theory as well (although I’m not sure how much of it is recent), but I just don’t know that this is the case any longer. Do we really expect a happy ending? I often don’t- so many films do defy Classical Narrative closure that this is not a model on which I base my reception of all films. Rather than being passive receivers of film who will happily expect and accept a fully completed ending, and be shocked if we are not given one, my subjective position as viewer changes with every film I see. The intersection of the film itself, my state at the time, and the space in which i am viewing it are all influences. Reading fragments of Frampton’s article ‘Film Phenomenology’, I am interested not so much in how film is a body, and is a form of world-making, but I am interested in us: ‘Human bodily existence, material flesh, is the first premise of sense and signification – our human body should no longer be seen as a passive machine registering and decoding reality, but as actively engaged in processes of world-making (world-thinking)’ (42). We are always-already constituted and continually affected by our corporeality.
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