Madness and Cinema Psychoanalysis, Spectatorship and Culture

by Fuery, Patrick

• ISBN13: 9780333948255
• ISBN10: 0333948254
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-08
• Publisher: Red Globe Pr

Summary

Madness and Cinema offers a radical approach to the issue of what happens when we watch films. By exploring cinema's relationship to meaning and proposing new ways to read cinema through psychoanalysis, this book develops the idea that the spectator engages in what has previously been described as an act of madness. By considering some of the key concepts from Freud and Lacan, as well as ideas from Derrida and Foucault, we are shown the common features that cinema and madness share. The film spectator is shown as the psychotic, neurotic and hysteric, as the book examines the ways in which the foundations of culture and meaning are challenged when we become the spectator of a film.

Author Biography

Patrick Fuery is Director of Research in the Division of Humanities, Curtin University, Australia.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables	ix
Acknowledgements	x
Preface	xi
1 Madness and Cinematisation	1	(12)
A certain type of contextualising	1	(3)
Some notes on the structure of the book	4	(4)
The impossibility of madness	8	(5)
2 Representing the Impossible	13	(37)
Representation: cultural paranoia, wanderers, and social transgression	15	(11)
Cinema alongside madness	26	(5)
The prestige of the image: the transpositionality of madness	31	(3)
Animality, passion and fear	34	(9)
Resistances	43	(7)
3 The Neurotic Spectator who Eroticises	50	(23)
The erotics between pleasure and anxiety	53	(4)
Angst, pleasure and the cinema	57	(1)
Realistic Angst and the film/spectator	58	(1)
Neurotic Angst and the film/spectator	59	(4)
The rupturingg effect of cinema	63	(2)
'Preserving error in the heart of reality'	65	(6)
A visit to the butchers	71	(2)
4 The Psychotic Spectator who Transgresses	73	(33)
On the bed: the language of the psychotic	74	(4)
Soul murder and calibene: Schreber and Rivière	78	(4)
Psychotic disturbances of the cinematic language	82	(8)
A note on foreclosure and the spectator	90	(1)
Hallucination, delusion, and phantasy	91	(15)
5 The Hysterical Spectator against the Good	106	(27)
On the Good	107	(2)
Hysterical flesh and the function of the beautiful	109	(3)
The intimidation of desire by the beautiful	112	(7)
Hysterical flesh and the substance of fantasy	119	(10)
The spectator's hysterical body	129	(4)
6 The Limits of Knowledge	133	(27)
The dog over us	133	(1)
The challenge to interpretation	134	(6)
Cinema, knowledge and exceeding pleasure	140	(5)
Cinematic knowledge and madness	145	(5)
Truth and knowledge out of madness	150	(3)
The limits to meaning	153	(7)
Notes	160	(12)
Bibliography	172	(3)
Index	175